The Island Of Bears: A BBW Paranormal Romance Read online

  I didn’t make it to the underground cellar that day. After my meeting with Holden, I just couldn’t continue on right then. I knew what my problem was. My conscience was nagging at me. I couldn’t stand the fact that I was going behind his back, but at the same time, I was doing it for us. I was doing it so that our new relationship had a chance to fully blossom without being interrupted by what I was pretty sure would be a lengthy separation.

  I knew I had to continue forward with my plan, and the next day, I did. The morning proceeded similar to the way it had the day before, with Cora, Amy, and I sharing breakfast together, then parting ways. I went back to my cabin from Amy’s and got my backpack, then set out along the border of the jungle. And this time, I wasn’t stopped by Holden, or anyone else for that matter. I was pretty sure no one even saw me.

  When I reached the underground cellar, which was maybe a hundred yards away from even the easternmost cabin in the village, which gave me a little privacy to do what I needed to do, I discovered that doing what I needed to do was going to be a little harder than I’d thought it would be. The steel door of the cellar, which laid almost flat against the ground on the slightest of angles, was much heavier than Cora had made it sound. When she’d said it was heavy enough to keep kids out, I’d guessed it was maybe eighty or ninety pounds. It definitely wasn’t. I wasn’t quite sure how much it did weigh, but it had to be two or three hundred. At least. Needless to say, I hadn’t planned for this. I hadn’t planned on having to lift a door that was possibly twice as heavy as my own body weight.

  After several minutes spent pulling, tugging, and yanking in different ways and from various positions around the door, I managed to lift it several inches open several times, pushing large rocks and sticks across the door frame with my foot each time. Getting the door propped open wide enough for me to slide my body inside the cellar was the only way I could see that I was going to be able to get inside. Clearly there was no way in hell I could muster the strength required to swing the door fully open on its hinges, no matter how hard I pulled. I was going to have to do this task little by little, especially since my ankle was still slightly sore. I certainly hadn’t sprained it very badly, but just enough that it was still tender if I moved my foot in a certain way.

  Eventually, after a dozen more times of lifting and propping with thick sticks and fallen branches from the jungle, kind of stacking them on top of each other in rows of four, I had the door propped open maybe a foot-and-a-half, and from what I could tell, fairly securely, too. Securely enough for me to get in and get out quickly, I hoped.

  Drenched in sweat from a combination of my efforts and the sun, I took a quick look around to make sure no one was watching me, and then I had a seat on the edge of the door frame and lowered myself into the cellar. Only about three feet deep, it certainly wasn’t much of a cellar, and I couldn’t even begin to stand up fully. I remained in a crouch while my eyes adjusted to the dimness, and once they did, I began duck-walking around to see what I could see. But, to my horror, what I could see wasn’t much.

  The cellar may have been shallow, but it was long, probably fifteen feet or so. And most of that space was completely empty. I’d expected it to be jam-packed full of crates of dynamite sticks, like Cora had sort of made it sound. But instead, literally the only thing in the dirt-floored cellar was a single wooden crate. That was it. Just one. And it wasn’t even a large crate. It was really more of a box about the size of a couple of lunchboxes stacked on top of each other maybe. Even if it were filled with dynamite sticks, they wouldn’t even be enough to fill half my large backpack.

  And, upon inspection, I saw that it wasn’t even full. Only four sticks of dynamite sat at the bottom of the un-lidded crate. I was screwed.

  However, I wasn’t yet ready to give up my plan. I’d just have to think of some other kind of weapon to go along with the dynamite or something. I figured I could think about that later. But at present, I knew I had to get back out of the cellar before anyone caught me.

  I hastily stuck the four dynamite sticks in my backpack, then hoisted myself up to my stomach on the cellar door frame, swung one leg over it, and crawled out. After that, I immediately reversed the process I’d done to prop the cellar door open. With perspiration snaking a line down the back of my neck, I lifted the door up a few inches, then kicked a few branches out of the way, over and over. When only the last one remained, I took a deep breath before heaving the door up, kicking the branch out of the way, and then yanking my hands back with all speed and care as I dropped the door to shut it. I was pretty sure the last thing I needed was a full set of badly broken fingers.

  Once back at my cabin, I stashed my backpack containing the dynamite sticks in the very back of the walk-in pantry in the kitchen, behind several large bags of potatoes and various cereals.

  Task now completed, I went for a swim by myself, cursing my luck to have only found four single sticks of dynamite. All I could figure was that at one time, there may have been crates and crates full, but much of the dynamite must have been used for whatever reason or reasons since then. But, at any rate, it didn’t even matter. I needed to set my focus on how I was going to make do and make my plan work with only the four sticks that I had.

  By that evening, I still hadn’t thought of anything, despite wracking my brain for ideas about any other weapons I could use, and specifically, any other weapons that weren’t guns. I was just at a complete loss, and the more I thought about it, it seemed as if I might be forced to abandon my plan. With this realization, my mood plummeted. I cried against Holden’s chest that night, and he didn’t even know the real reason why. He thought I was just upset about having to go back to New York City, which, I supposed was a great part of my tears.

  We shared breakfast the next morning before making love and showering together, but then he was off again. Of the five Forms that remained in the lake, only one, a wolf, had not been giving Holden and his men constant daily troubles.

  I barely saw Holden at all over the next couple of days. When I did see him, I just cried most of the time, feeling hopeless. He kept reassuring me that we would be together again, but it didn’t make me feel any better. However, things were soon to improve.

  Friday, the day before my clambake send-off, Holden killed one of the Forms, the dragon one. He called and told me himself, thrilling me. My excitement was pretty short-lived, though. Once I’d gotten off the phone, I overheard Amy happily telling Cora what good news the killing of the dragon Form was, because now with only four left, having them all dead within a year or two was a fairly realistic.

  “And then maybe we’ll finally get to see our husbands for longer than an hour here and there. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  Cora laughed in the kitchen, her voice reaching me out in the hallway. “We can hope. I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to spend more than an hour or so at a time with Conner. I hope he isn’t annoying at a long stretch.”

  I knew she was just kidding. Even after twenty-some-odd years of marriage, she and Conner still acted like newlyweds around each other and seemed like they couldn’t get enough of each other’s company.

  After her joking comment, Cora and Amy burst into laughter, and I slumped against the wall, thinking about what an awfully long time a year or two could feel like when a person was parted from someone they were in love with.

  But soon, the next good thing of the day happened. Noticing how down I was, Cora insisted on taking me out for a walk, first to my cabin to get one of my jars of shells for some strange reason that she wouldn’t explain, then to one of the small outbuildings at the edge of the village. This particular building was usually just used for storage of various odds-and-ends, most of them related to the village’s chocolate-making enterprise, but when we stepped inside, I saw that one half of the building had been cleared out and outfitted with a long worktable and two chairs. On top of the worktable sat at least a dozen small, clear plastic bins filled with various items like glass beads, tiny s
craps of shiny metal in various shapes, and little curled lengths of thin wire. Next to these bins sat a few pairs of scissors, hole-punchers, and the like, for arts and crafts - or jewelry-making.

  I turned to Cora with a little lump in my throat. “What is this? Is this for me?”

  She grinned, making her big brown eyes sparkle. “Welcome to your workstation for your new jewelry-making business. Lord only knows you have enough shells to start with now. So, you can begin today, to help take your mind off of leaving in two days. Then, you can take all the shells and everything else with you, so you can keep making jewelry back in New York, to continue keeping your mind off of everything. Then, when Holden brings you back, you can bring everything back with you.”

  I smiled, sad, thankful, and filled with a rush of emotion for Cora all at the same time. “Thank you.”

  I immediately got to work, with Cora sitting at the table with me, just to keep me company. Using a tiny chisel-type tool and an equally small mallet to make tiny circular holes in the shells, I began trying to make a necklace with cream-colored shells and tiny clear glass beads, and I found the process a fun distraction from my troubles. But when the necklace was about half-done, I set it on the table, a little dissatisfied with it.

  “It’s pretty, but I almost think all the shells are too big or something...too clunky. I wonder if there’s anything I can use to just... I don’t know. Whittle the edges down a bit. Maybe even kind of reshape some of them completely. I wonder if just plain sandpaper would work.”

  Cora, who’d seemed to be thinking hard while I’d been speaking, suddenly gasped. “Oh my gosh. This is going to be amazing.”

  “What is?”

  “You’ll even be able to cut different precise shapes if you want. Things like hearts, or triangles, or whatever.”

  “But how? Using what?”

  Cora suppressed a giggle, clearly tickled about something. “You can’t tell Holden about this, okay? I’m about to dash out for a second and bring you back a very serious tool for jewelry-making. And it’s going to be amazing, but it is something kind of dangerous, so I’m going to grab a few pairs of safety goggles, too. Be right back.”

  With that, she got up from the worktable and jogged out of the little building, leaving me absolutely mystified.

  Several minutes later, she returned with two pairs of safety goggles and some sort of strange, futuristic-looking gun. It was made of some kind of shiny silver metal, and the barrel of it was long and slender, and about twice the length of any handgun I’d ever seen.

  Smiling, Cora held it up to me. “It’s a state-of-the-art laser gun. Or, at least it was back in the eighties when the scientists were here, but I’m sure it probably still is. They used it to do some kind of weird experiments involving diamond-cutting or something. It’s been stored in a little case in the medical center for decades now, but as far as I know, it’s still functional.”

  I stood up from the table to get a closer look at the gun. “Well, is it dangerous?”

  “Oh, definitely. One of the scientists accidentally shot himself in the hand with a laser beam from it once, and it caused some pretty serious damage. The hole it made was exactly like a gunshot. That’s why we’re going to be very careful with it, and wear our safety goggles, for whatever good they’d do, not that we’re going to be shooting ourselves in the eyeballs with it anyway.”

  “You really think we should try this on the shells? Won’t it just make them explode or something?”

  “No, because there’s several settings, depending on how thin and precise of a laser beam you want. Setting one is the thinnest beam, which I think is what we’d want to use for your shells, settings two, three, and four are thicker beams, and five is...well, five, I guess would be the ‘murder by laser gun’ setting. Oh, and there’s safety setting, too, kind of like the safety lock on a regular gun. I’ll teach you how to use it, so you don’t accidentally blow me away. Oh, and, yes, back to your first question, I think we should definitely give this a try on the shells. I think this is going to be all sorts of fun.”

  It was. Over the next couple of hours, Cora showed me how to operate the gun, and we each took turns lasering my shells into different beautiful shapes, lasering through the wooden surface of the table in the process, but Cora said that didn’t even matter.

  “It’s a work table. It’s meant to be a little beat up.”

  Soon, with my heart feeling like it might soar right out of my chest, I completed making a gorgeous necklace strung with pale pink shells carefully cut into tiny, delicate ovals of various sizes. But completing the necklace wasn’t the only reason my heart was soaring, and it definitely wasn’t the biggest.

  Cora didn’t know it, but she’d given me exactly what I’d been needing to go forward with my plan to destroy all the Forms myself. I’d do what damage I could do with the four sticks of dynamite that I had, then I’d take out any who survived the blast with the laser gun, which seemed like it would be a heck of a lot easier for me to use than a regular gun, considering that my aim wouldn’t have to be as precise, because instead of single bullets, I’d be able to shoot a continuous laser beam. It was perfect. I was now completely ready to go.

  *

  The following night, it was easy enough for me to slip away from the clambake. While several dozen of the adults in the village danced, laughed, and ate on the darkened beach, Holden held me close on the blanket near the bonfire, but after an hour or so, he let me up so I could take a little walk by myself. I told him that I just wanted to clear my head and have some time alone on the island I’d grown to love before I had to leave it the next day. I felt a pang of guilt while telling this lie, but I told myself that it was necessary. Once the remaining four Forms were dead, I figured Holden would be so happy he’d forgive me. Especially once he realized what great lengths I’d gone through so that we could stay together.

  While I brushed some sand off my shorts, preparing to leave, he stood as well and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. “In light of what happened last week, I probably don’t even need to say this, but please remain strictly within the village on your walk.”

  Struggling not to visibly cringe from my guilt, I nodded. “Okay.”

  Holden pulled me close and brushed a lingering kiss against my lips. “I’ll be waiting right here.”

  I soon walked away from him and everyone else at the clambake, feeling like the biggest villain that had ever lived. But nonetheless, I was still determined to follow through with my plan.

  After walking to my cabin and grabbing my backpack, which now not only contained the dynamite and some matches but the laser gun as well, I hopped on a bike that I’d borrowed from Cora and very quietly set out down one of several bike trails that ran through the jungle. From what I’d heard, the particular trail I was on hadn’t been used in a year or so, ever since the Forms had begun often straying far from their lake. I’d chosen this specific trail because it led directly to the lake, or at least fairly close to it, though by way of cutting around to the west in a wide arc. In this way, I hoped to avoid the half-dozen or so guards who were on Form patrol at various points in a half-circle around the north of the village.

  As I pedaled Cora’s bike through the darkened jungle, which was dimly lit only by the silvery light from the half-full moon, I realized that surprisingly, I wasn’t nervous or scared at all. I’d imagined I would be. But now that my plan was really happening, I wasn’t. I was just eager to get things over with. I was ready to move on with my future with Holden.

  I pedaled down the trail hard for at least twenty minutes or so before glancing down at my wrist to check the time on my glow-in-the dark watch face. The watch, which had a curious habit of sometimes seeming to go backward by an hour or two at a time since I’d been on the island, though it hadn’t done this all week, now said midnight exactly. I knew the shadowy Forms were likely all buried deep beneath the murky gloom of their watery home by now. It was finally time. It was final
ly happening. And now, in the quiet darkness of the jungle, I was starting to get a little nervous, though just a bit. Just enough to make my palms slightly sweaty on the handlebars of Cora’s bike. Also, apparently, just enough to bring out my nervous habit of talking to myself.

  With my voice coming out in a whisper, I peered out onto the stretch of trail ahead. “Just relax, Haley. Just relax and do what you need to do.”

  Soon the trail ended, and fairly abruptly, becoming completely clogged with large rocks and fallen trees. I hopped off Cora’s bike and set it against a log, and that’s when I noticed the odor. It was like the smell of rotting garbage, but mixed with something even worse, something even more putrid. It filled my nostrils, and I struggled not to gag, realizing I’d have to make sure to breathe through my mouth only from this point on, unless I wanted to get sick.

  Being that I’d heard talk about how foul-smelling the area around the lake was, I knew I was very close. After taking the laser gun out of my bag, talking the safety off, and tucking it in the waistband of my shorts, I began creeping forward, stepping over branches and stones, trying not to make a sound. The last thing I wanted to do was alert the Forms to my presence before I had time to place the dynamite sticks and light them.

  I needn’t have worried. Almost immediately after reaching the lake/pond, I stumbled over a stick or a rock or something, causing a sharp pain in my still-healing ankle, and I couldn’t hold back from hissing a curse word. But even after several seconds had passed, the surface of the lake remained as smooth as glass. Cora had told me once that for a body of water so small, the lake was supposedly very deep, maybe even dozens of feet deep, though nobody even knew for sure. Apparently, it was at least deep enough to muffle sound well enough that an explosively uttered curse word couldn’t be heard by the creatures below the surface.

  Setting up the dynamite, which I placed at four different points around the lake, turned out to be just as easy as my exit from the clambake. It was lighting the four sticks that turned out to be difficult. Each of them had extremely long coiled wicks, that when stretched out were at least two feet in length, but even still, this wasn’t such a long length that I thought I’d have anything over two or three minutes to light them all one by one, speeding around the lake, and then get the hell away before the first explosion.