Reign: A Royal Military Romance (60 page)

T
he next morning
, Ariana woke with a start, her eyes flying open.

Did I oversleep?
she thought, searching for the bedside clock that she knew had to be somewhere, her hand flailing over the unfamiliar bedside table. She finally found it, yanking it toward her face, then relaxed. It was only seven, a perfectly acceptable wake-up time.

Whenever she stayed in hotels, which was most of the time, she felt like she overslept even when she didn’t. It was the unfamiliar surroundings, she guessed.

For a few more seconds, she dragged the other pillow across her face, giving herself just a few more moments of quiet peace, before she forced herself out of bed.

She shed her pajamas on the floor, rubbing her eyes and yawning, and stepped into the shower. She’d tried nearly every system for becoming a morning person, but the only one she’d ever come across that worked was the
just get the fuck out of bed already
system. There was something to be said for simplicity.

When she stepped into the bathroom she noted the full-length mirror on the back of the door, but didn’t mind that it had fogged over once she was out. It wasn’t that she didn’t like seeing herself naked in the mirror, it was just that... well, it wasn’t her favorite.

She’d always been a little uncomfortable in her own skin, too good at finding her own imperfections, and then college had come, with a pizza place open until 2am and Oreos anytime she wanted them at the 24-hour convenience store, and she’d gained thirty pounds. Ariana knew she was still fairly attractive, and she could hold her own almost anywhere — backpacking, swimming — but she just didn’t want to see herself naked.

Downstairs, Theresa was eating Froot Loops already, chugging down coffee and reading the USA Today provided free to all Lodge guests. Ariana surveyed her options and grabbed instant oatmeal, a banana, and a cup of watery hotel coffee.

“News?” she asked.

“Nah,” said Theresa. “Someone wore something scandalous to the Oscars, I guess.” She shrugged, and then slurped at her flavored milk.

“All right,” said Ariana, getting down to business. “Three people had Bigfoot sightings in the past week. First up in Sam Croner, who was fishing on,” — she stopped to check her notes — “Diablo Lake, and said that near sunset, he saw a large figure crouch at the edge of the lake, and then run away when he thought Sam was watching.”

“That’s a lot of interpretation by Sam,” Theresa said.

“The second was a woman backpacking with two friends. She was off alone — uh, the exact phrase she used was ‘answering the call of nature,’ so I think she was peeing — and across a small valley, she saw a humanlike figure ambling along a ridge, opposite her. Also not far from sunset.”

“Bigfoot’s a creeper?”

“The third is an older guy, Dustin something, who was drinking at his favorite establishment a little ways north of town when he claims that he saw Bigfoot come out of the forest, shake himself a little, and then drive away in a dark green Ford pickup truck.”

“That’s specific.”

“It is.”

Theresa sipped her coffee for a few moments, looking at some point behind Ariana. “Where’d Bigfoot keep his keys?”

“This says he reached into the truck’s wheel well before driving off, so presumably they were hidden there.”

“Anybody report a green truck missing, or was that Bigfoot’s own vehicle?”

“We’ll check,” said Ariana, and she started making a note.

On the table next to her notepad, her phone buzzed.

Cool
, Graham had said.

“That him?” Theresa asked.

“Yeah.”

Before Ariana could do anything about it, Theresa grabbed her phone and was scrolling through the texts.

“Those are not entirely representative of my relationship,” Ariana said, making a lame attempt to fend off what she knew was coming. “Also, they’re none of your damn business.”

Theresa just sighed and put Ariana’s phone back on the table.

“Stop making that face,” Ariana said.

“I’m not making a face.”

“You’re making your ‘Graham sucks’ face.”

“I don’t have that face. That’s not the face I’m making. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Ariana laughed a little. “Which is it?”

“I have no opinion on your relationship with Graham, and that includes no opinion on whether you could do fifty times better than him.”

“Good, because I’d hate to hear that opinion for the five hundredth time already.”

Theresa said nothing and drained her coffee cup. She’d gotten better recently, Ariana had to admit. When they first became friends she’d brought up her belief that Ariana deserved better almost constantly. Now it was more of a low background hum, disapproving faces and slight scowls whenever the subject of Graham came up. Ariana had made the mistake of telling her about how he’d chosen a new video game over sex once. Theresa hadn’t bothered to hide her shock and disbelief at that.

“Really, you could do so much better, though,” Theresa said.

“You keep saying that,” Ariana said. “He’s really sweet.”

“What’s the last nice thing he did for you?”

Ariana thought, fast. They didn’t actually spend too much time together, and a lot of that time was spent just hanging out, playing video games or watching movies. She’d lightly brought up moving in together, once — they’d been together for almost two years, after all — but Graham had not been in favor. Sometimes Ariana wondered where he got off, a chubby guy who played lots of video games and most of whose friends seemed to live on the internet, but then again, she was a chubby girl who did play her fair share of video games, and who hunted cryptids for a living, so it wasn’t like she had a lot of room to talk.

“You can’t think of anything, can you?” asked Theresa.

“Last time I was home he picked up pizza and came to my place instead of me going to his,” Ariana finally said.

“So he paid for the pizza?”

“We split it.”

“He got you the toppings you wanted?”

“It was just cheese. Everybody likes that.”

“He picked up a bottle of wine as a surprise?”

“I had some already.”

“Did he even order the pizza?”

“I did it online, it was no big deal.”

“So the nicest thing you can think of, in recent memory, that your boyfriend did for you, is literally carry an okay pizza for about a mile.”

Ariana poked at her oatmeal. When Theresa put it like that, sure, Graham sounded like kind of a dirtbag, but he was sweet and funny, sometimes. He had lots of positive qualities, she was sure of it.

“What if you texted him something dirty?” Theresa asked.

Ariana looked at the other girl. She was wearing thick-framed glasses, had a blue streak in her hair, and was wearing an Adventure Time t-shirt. Yet she got three times as much action as Ariana did, and didn’t even have a steady boyfriend.

“I’m not dirty-texting him,” she said.

“Why?”

Ariana squirmed, and she could feel her cheeks heating up. “Because that’s... I dunno. It’s weird.”

“Is the real reason that he wouldn’t text you back, and you’d just be left hanging with a dirty text and no response?”

Ariana chose not to answer. Instead, she scooped the last of her instant oatmeal into her mouth, drained her coffee, and stood.

“We’re wasting time here,” she said. “We’ve gotta meet our hiking guide at noon. Let’s go find us a Bigfoot.”

E
ven though it
was almost summer, Jake put a long-sleeved flannel shirt on that morning. He knew how long it took him to shift back — he’d been doing this most of his life, after all — but lately he’d been putting off turning human again off longer and longer, and now, the morning after, he still had the slightly-too-hairy arms to show for it. That would be gone by midday, though, and he could roll his sleeves up and it wouldn’t be so hot.

Besides, today was an office day, so he’d be in the air conditioning.

In his twenties, Jake had been a lumberjack, and he’d loved that job. He got to be outside, in the forest, he got to work with his hands, and he was naturally huge — almost 6’4” and built like a brick wall. Using heavy equipment and doing physical labor had come naturally to him, and half the time, he’d shifted right after work and walked home in his grizzly bear form. In fact, a few of the other guys had been bears too, and sometimes, when all the humans went home, they’d shift and wrestle each other as the sun went down. It had been a wonderful life.

Then, everything around him had become a National Forest, literally overnight, protected from logging. His company, Cedar Pine International, had fought a little but they were shifting production overseas anyway, and didn’t try too hard. When the Forest Service offered Jake and most of the other lumberjacks a job, it was a no-brainer. Of course he’d work in the field office, doing very nearly the same job he’d had before, and even adding a couple of skills: clearing brush from trails, monitoring controlled burns, backpacking into remote areas, searching for lost hikers.

In fact, Jake had quickly become known for his keen sense of direction and place, and his uncanny ability to locate people who were lost in the forest. He
did
have much sharper sense than most people, after all.

He ate a leisurely breakfast of bacon and eggs in his little kitchen in his cabin in the woods. He’d built it with his own hands before he was twenty-seven. Even though he had a vague sense that kids his age were supposed to move to the city and live their wild years or something, he’d been totally content working on his own house every night, then camping out beside it, at least until he moved in. People too close by tended to bother him, probably because, even as a human, his senses were a little sharper than theirs. They were noisy, they smelled a little odd all the time, like perfume and soap. No, Jake preferred the solitude of the woods.

All he needed, he thought sometimes, was a mate to share it with.

H
e saw
the new poster on the forest office as soon as he pulled his truck into the gravel parking lot, the last in a line of trucks.

B
elow the words was a picture
, pixelated and obviously from a Google image search, of a roaring grizzly bear.

Jake felt himself go cold, all the same, and his stomach leaped into his throat.
Had someone seen him
?

He was so
careful
though. Miles and miles and miles of pure, beautiful forest without a soul in sight, and he tended to stay there, only going to close to civilization as he was shifting in and out.

It could be one of the others, of course. They’d have to talk, and soon.

“Morning,” said Shelly as Jake walked in the door. She was wearing what was very nearly their uniform: jeans and a flannel shirt, carrying a cup of coffee back from their break room.

“Morning,” he said, and then jerked his thumb back at the doorway he’d just come through. “A grizzly?”

“Isn’t it exciting?” she said. She blew on her coffee gently, and the liquid rippled slightly. “There haven’t been grizzly bears here since the early nineteen hundreds. Maybe the initiative is working.”

“I hope the people in town feel that way,” Jake said. “I’m not sure too many of them will be excited about the possibility of having grizzlies around again.”

“Oh, I doubt they’ll come anywhere near town,” she said. “They’re notorious loners. This one was only just spotted by a flyover helicopter that was looking for a marijuana farm way, way up by Mineral Mountain that got reported by some hikers.”

Jake felt the relief wash over him in a cold wave. That was in the middle of nowhere — exactly where the forest service wanted grizzly bears to be. “Oh, they only saw it from a helicopter?” he said. “They’re sure it was a grizzly?”

“Pretty sure,” Shelly said. “There’s always room for error, but it was Danny who saw it, and you know he’s seen his share of black bears.”

Danny had been a forest ranger for over twenty years. Jake was willing to concede the point that he knew his bears.

Jake walked to his desk. A small pile of papers awaited him, and he read through a few of them without really seeing them as his computer booted up. He answered emails for half an hour, until Herbert, another ranger, poked his head in.

“Hey,” Herb said.

“What’s up?”

“Can I ask you a big favor?”

“Sure.”

“I got these two girls I’m supposed to meet at lunch today,” Herb said. “Bigfoot hunters, apparently there’s been a lot of sightings lately, but I’m swamped.”

Jake laughed, spinning a little in his chair. “Swamped, or you hate the people who look for Bigfoot?”

Herb’s face broke into a grin. “Just completely, totally swamped,” he said. He winked. “I’m happy to do that soil report for you if you talk to these girls.”

“It’s a deal,” Jake said. Anything to get out of the office. Even though he liked his job, he liked getting out and stretching his legs even more.

“Perfect,” said Herb.

S
ince it was
a rare sunny day in northern Washington state, the two girls sat outside with Sam Croner, the first of their Bigfoot sighting interviewees. His wife, a very nice woman in her 40s, offered them iced tea as they sat on his patio, asking him detailed questions about the figure he’d seen at the lake while he was fishing.

“It
was
a little bit dark,” he admitted. “And I’d had a few, but when I looked over, there was this big, big thing that almost looked like a human but wasn’t, and I looked at it for a long time, and then it finally looks over at
me
and sees me lookin’, and it runs away.”

“Can you describe why you thought it saw you looking at it?” Theresa said.

Sam leaned back in his chair. The ice cubes in his glass knocked against each other. “You know how, say, when your dog sees you catch it do something it ain’t supposed to, it kinda freezes for a minute? It was like that. He was just lookin’ around, and then saw me, and made off right away.”

“Before it saw you, what was it doing?” Ariana asked. She was pretending to take notes, but mostly doodling in her notebook: this guy had seen something move in the dark, while he was drunk. It wasn’t good evidence for anybody.

“Just kinda crouching there, by the lake,” Sam said. “If I had to guess, I’d say he was appreciating the natural beauty of nature.”

The natural beauty of nature,
Ariana thought.
What a wordsmith
.

“What makes you call the unknown creature ‘he’?” asked Theresa.

Sam blinked. “Ain’t Bigfoot a he?”

It was one of those questions without an answer.

“When it moved away,” said Ariana, “how did it move?”

“It had these two long arms and they kinda swung like an elephant’s trunk,” Sam said. With the arm that wasn’t holding his iced tea, he swung in a long motion. Ariana had to fight the urge to giggle. “And he walked kinda hunched over, like a hunchback or something. Swinging these arms, hunching over. Though I didn’t see too much of him, he was gone real fast.”

Theresa nodded seriously, even though Ariana was having a hard time not rolling her eyes at the man.

“Okay,” Theresa said. “Is there anything else you can think of? Anything at all?”

Sam took a sip of his iced tea, and then leaned forward in his lawn chair. “This might sound crazy,” he began, a very serious look on his face for someone who’d recently had a Bigfoot sighting, “but right before he went back into the trees he kind of looked back over his shoulder at me, and it was so dark that all I could see was his eyes, and man, I just got this feeling like he
knew
, he
knew
something about me and I got this shudder run through my body for a second. Then, I blinked and he was gone, but for a minute there I really had the chills.”

Ariana nodded seriously.
Had the Bigfoot chills
, she wrote in her notepad.

A few minutes later they said goodbye to Sam and his wife, shutting the gate on their chain link fence and walking back to their rental car.

“That was a bust,” muttered Ariana.

“I don’t know,” said Theresa. “He might have actually seen something there.”

“I’m sure he saw
something
,” said Ariana. “Not Bigfoot, though.”

“You don’t know that.”

“It was dark. He was drunk. He makes it sound good, but you can tell he only barely saw something from the corner of his eye.” She shook her head and went through her pocket for the car keys, then unlocked the car doors and the two girls climbed in, dumping their stuff in the back seat.

“He only thought it was Bigfoot because of the other sightings,” said Ariana. She turned the car on. “Otherwise he’d have thought he saw a bear or a guy or something.”

Theresa sighed.

“People are so suggestible,” Ariana said, and pulled away from the curb.

* * *

T
he next witness
to Bigfoot was Jane, a fundraiser for an environmental nonprofit in town who wanted to meet them at the coffee shop across town from her office.

“No one needs to see me talking to the Bigfoot people,” she’d said, and on the phone, Ariana had pretended not to be slightly offended by that.

When they got there, a big space, wooden walls, comfortable couches, they could identify her immediately. She was the only one in business gear; everyone else looked like they were camping. Ariana and Theresa introduced themselves, and started going through the usual questions.

“Honestly, I don’t have a whole lot of information,” Jane said. She seemed very down-to-earth, and even though she claimed she’d seen a Bigfoot, Ariana liked her. “I was, you know,
tinkling
on this one side of a big ravine, and when I looked up, there was this humanoid walking along the top of the other side.”

“Was it looking at you?” Theresa asked.

Please don’t ask if Bigfoot’s a creeper,
thought Ariana.

“Not at all,” Jane said. “It seemed very focused. Moving at an impressive clip.”

“Could you describe its movements?” asked Ariana.

“It was walking upright, bipedally,” Jane said. “It had longer arms than a human does — almost to its knees, I want to say — and its neck was really thick. It definitely had fur, lots and lots of fur.”

“How much of its face could you see?” asked Theresa, leaning in.

Ariana frowned a tiny frown, just to herself. She could already envision the car ride to lunch, when Theresa told her all the reasons that Jane had really seen a Bigfoot. For a cryptid researcher, the other girl didn’t really have the necessary skepticism.

“I couldn’t really see its face, even in silhouette,” Jane said. She sipped her drink. “By the time I looked up, it was already facing away, though for a moment I did get the impression that I saw a snout.”

Ariana raised one eyebrow and wrote that down.

“Fascinating,” said Theresa, her eyes wide and shiny.

“I’ve gotta be honest, it scared the bejesus out of me,” said Jane. “I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was Bigfoot, but it could have also been some crazy axe-murdering mountain man.”

That’s more likely
, thought Ariana.

“Well, you seem fine now,” Ariana said. “Thanks for talking to us.”

“Did you get any feelings from the creature?” asked Theresa. “Any impressions?”

“What do you mean?”

Stop asking if she got the Bigfoot chills,
Ariana thought.

“When you saw it, how did you respond, emotionally?” Theresa asked.

“I panicked and peed a little on my hiking shoes,” Jane said.

Ariana couldn’t help but smile, and at that, Jane smiled too.

“Can’t say I’m not being honest with you,” the other woman said. “I know it sounds a little crazy. But I really did see something up there, and it really didn’t seem quite human.”

Ariana and Theresa finished up and thanked Jane, who had to get back to work.

“My coworkers think I’m meeting with a donor,” she said, smiling slyly. “I don’t need them thinking I’m a believer all of a sudden.”

“Are you?” asked Theresa, eyes wide.

Jane shrugged. “I saw something strange,” she said. “That’s all I really know.”

Not particularly a believer herself, Ariana smiled.

“
I
think she saw him
,” said Theresa as soon as they got into the car, before she even put on her seatbelt. “Bigfoot.”

Ariana sighed and started the car. She hoped the diner where they were meeting the forest ranger wasn’t too far away, because if it was, they’d be late. “Jumping to conclusions like that is bad science,” she said. “It’s not our job to confirm what the crackpots of the world think, it’s to check out their claims
scientifically
.”

Theresa snorted, a very unladylike sound. “You know the CRF wants us to find something real,” she said.

“Do they?” said Ariana. “Once we find an animal, it’s just an animal. It gets a genus and species and goes in the taxonomy somewhere, and then it gets boring.” She made a right out of the coffee shop parking lot. “They’re a lot more exciting when they’re legends.”

“There’s always more,” said Theresa, undeterred. “Besides, don’t you want to find just one?”

Ariana was quiet after a moment. “Think we could name it after ourselves?”