Triplets For The Bear Read online

  Cheyenne offered a very heartfelt, “thank you,” before she pulled out her phone to call a taxi.

  There was an old chair in the corner of the shop, tucked out of the way of the crowds that went in and out, and the woman running the shop ushered Cheyenne into it as soon as she was done calling the cab company. Cheyenne took it gratefully, her shopping bags sitting at her feet beside her. She could still see out the front window from there, and she watched the opposite side of the street, waiting to see if Lorraine would make another appearance. Every time she caught a glimpse of blond hair, her chest felt tight, and she swore she was going to vomit. It didn’t happen, though, and for that she was grateful.

  Lorraine made no further appearances after that, evidently not willing to try her luck after she had already been spotted. As if Cheyenne could actually do anything to her.

  She was almost willing to consider that she had been imagining things, considering she had been fairly stressed out, but she knew what she saw. It helped that Daphne had been there the last time Lorraine tried it, just to offer validation and proof that Lorraine was, indeed, willing to resort to following Cheyenne down the street.

  What did she even want to do? What was she hoping to accomplish? Did she think she could just grab Cheyenne off the street and she wouldn’t make any sort of fuss about it? That wasn’t going to happen.

  (Then again, whether or not she made a fuss was possibly irrelevant, if Lorraine managed to drag her somewhere secluded and then eat her before she was discovered. But Cheyenne didn’t want to think about that while she was completely surrounded by the smell of fish, or else she was absolutely going to throw up. So, she stomped that thought back down into the depths it emerged from, at least for the time being. No, thank you.)

  Cheyenne was so lost in her thoughts she didn’t even realize when the cab showed up, pulling to a halt at the curb outside the shop. The woman behind the counter tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention, and with a sheepish smile, Cheyenne gathered up her bags and hurried out the door, and she could feel the woman watching her like an overprotective hawk the entire time.

  She offered the address to the cabbie as she climbed into the backseat, and the ride passed in a distracted haze as she stared out the window. The cabbie tried to make conversation a few times, but he gave up when Cheyenne answered him with monosyllables and nothing else. She wasn’t feeling particularly chatty just then, and more than anything she just wanted to be back at the house, where she knew she was safe.

  When the cab pulled to a halt outside Harry’s house, the cabbie offered to carry her bags to the door for her, and Cheyenne figured she really must have looked miserable if he was offering that. She pasted a smile into place and handed him his payment. With a polite, “thanks, but I’m fine,” she picked up her bags and made her way back to the house.

  Once she was inside, the house felt no less enormous and empty and quiet as it ever did, but in that moment, it was like a balm, and Cheyenne sagged back against the door as soon as she was standing in the entryway. She let her head thump back against it and closed her eyes, and for a moment she just breathed, before she pushed herself away from the door and headed towards the kitchen. She would tell Harry about what happened once he was back from work. In the meantime, she needed to keep herself distracted, so it seemed like a good time to start preparing dinner.

  Almost as an afterthought, she locked the front door.

  *

  By the time Daphne got back, the kitchen and much of the ground floor smelled like cooking food, and most of the kitchen and a solid portion of the living room had been cleaned. Cheyenne hadn’t touched Harry’s office—that seemed like too much of a breach of privacy—but the difference elsewhere was still striking.

  Daphne looked around slowly as she moseyed into the kitchen. and pointed out, “You’ve been busy,” rather than actually asking what was wrong.

  Cheyenne was sitting at the kitchen table by then, scrolling listlessly on her laptop. The remaining steps for dinner were finicky enough that she should stay in the room, but that didn’t mean she was suddenly perfectly comfortable.

  “I had to keep myself busy,” she grumbled, closing her laptop with a bit more force than was strictly necessary. It was failing at keeping her distracted, and it seemed like Daphne would probably do a better job.

  “Uh oh,” Daphne sighed, and she sat down on the table. “What’s up?”

  “I went to the strip today, and Lorraine was stalking me. Again.” Cheyenne groaned and folded her arms on the table to let her head thump down against them. “This is getting ridiculous. At this point, I’m about ready to see what it would cost to get her shipped to the moon. I doubt she would be able to find her way back from there any time soon.”

  “What are you going to do?” Daphne wondered, patting Cheyenne’s shoulder.

  Cheyenne shrugged helplessly without lifting her head off of her arms. “I need to tell Harry, I guess,” she replied. “Though I’m pretty sure once I do, I’ve doomed myself to never being able to step out the front door without an escort.”

  Daphne snorted. “Chey, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you doomed yourself to that as soon as you told me. I mean, once when she’s upset, sure, but if she’s going to make a habit of stalking you, then like hell am I just going to twiddle my thumbs and pretend I don’t know about it.”

  Cheyenne sighed slowly, shoulders slumping until it seemed as if she was going to melt right there on top of the table. She didn’t move until a timer went off, and she hoisted herself back to her feet to go tend to the food.

  “I guess that’s fair,” she conceded eventually, though it seemed more like she was mumbling it to the stove. “I just can’t wait for all of this to be over with.”

  “All of this with Lorraine, or with the pregnancy?” Daphne wondered, leaning back against the counter beside the stove.

  Cheyenne scoffed, and it was followed by an emphatic, “Both. Both of them are making me miserable. And crazy. And I would like everything to go back to something at least passably resembling normal.”

  “Soon enough,” Daphne reminded her, glancing down to Cheyenne’s belly. “I mean, you’ve got, what, a couple weeks left?”

  “Something like that,” Cheyenne confirmed. “Time cannot pass quickly enough, I swear.”

  *

  If nothing else, dinner that night was incredible, and Cheyenne supposed she owed it to her anxiety. Granted, she would have happily eaten a bowl of dirt if it meant she wasn’t being stalked by a literal lioness who probably wanted to eat her.

  She didn’t speak much throughout dinner, which meant no one really spoke much, since Daphne and Harry still didn’t carry on any particularly in-depth conversations between each other and relied on Cheyenne to act as some kind of relay service. Normally, it was sort of entertaining to watch them try to act as if the other wasn’t there, but that evening Cheyenne just wasn’t in the mood to act like a carrier pigeon.

  Daphne seemed understanding enough, and she excused herself quickly once her plate was empty, mumbling something about just leaving the dishes to her afterwards because she would get to them before she went to bed.

  Cheyenne was going to assume that was Daphne’s way of taking away any sort of excuse she might have had to avoid having the conversation about Lorraine with Harry. And she could see why Daphne might think she would do that, but that night it wasn’t much of a concern. Cheyenne was thoroughly fed up with everything, and for once it was a conversation she wanted to have, if for no other reason than to say that she was trying everything she could to make the mess go away.

  So, she drew in a breath, sighed it out slowly, and suggested, “Let’s head into your office. I need to tell you about something.”

  Harry’s eyebrows rose as he got to his feet, but he didn’t protest and instead simply led the way to his office, where he made himself comfortable in his usual chair. He watched Cheyenne for a moment, maybe waiting for her to sit down, as his eyebro
ws rose again when she instead began pacing back and forth across the rug.

  “Something happened while I was shopping today,” she began finally, running a hand over her hair as she said it. Harry shifted in his seat as if he was bracing for impact, and Cheyenne began to explain the events of the day. She spared no details, making sure she mentioned the growing dread and distress, how even strangers on the street could see that there was something wrong, and how she had to rely on the kindness of a patient stranger to make sure she was safe while she waited for a cab.

  “And this isn’t the first time she’s done something like that,” she finished, her voice low. “You can ask Daphne if you want. She was with me the last time—well, the last time we caught Lorraine.” She had been close to saying ‘the last time it happened,’ but she had no proof that it hadn’t happened since then and she simply hadn’t noticed.

  Falling silent, she looked at Harry expectantly.

  Harry was calm, though something like muffled rage burned behind his eyes, and his hands were tight against the arms of his chair. But still, he was calm, which Cheyenne hadn’t quite expected. So, maybe she could get something like decent advice.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she admitted, shrugging helplessly. “Should I call the cops? I mean, I don’t want to confront her myself; that isn’t going to go well. And there are a billion different ways it could go wrong if you confront her.”

  “Calling the police might not go over well,” Harry pointed out reasonably, burying his anger for a time when it would be more productive. “She lives in the city, and the cops are going to know that. I don’t think you can really get her arrested for being in the same area as you in the city she lives in, even if we know something else is going on.”

  Cheyenne groaned and sat down on his lap, the side of her head thumping against his shoulder. “Why do you have to be right?” she grumbled. “It’s really annoying right now.”

  Harry ran a hand soothingly up and down her back. “That’s probably why it doesn’t happen that often,” he replied. “I’m really annoying when it does happen.”

  “Well then, thanks for taking one for the team,” Cheyenne sighed. After a moment, she tacked on, “I’m not getting up, by the way. I figured I should just let you know that.”

  “Yeah, I sort of figured,” Harry replied dryly. “You just make yourself comfortable.”

  It didn’t solve any of their problems, but even so, it wasn’t a bad way to end the evening. Cheyenne would just hold onto that feeling for a while. She figured the odds were pretty likely that something would come along soon enough to ruin everything all over again, so she would take advantage of every good feeling she could get.

  But really, how sad was it that she needed to ration the good feelings out like that? She couldn’t wait for everything to go back to normal.

  *

  Cheyenne adjusted surprisingly quickly to needing to have a babysitter everywhere she went, if only because she was unexpectedly grateful for it. It seemed like every time she even stepped off the porch, Lorraine was lurking somewhere nearby. Occasionally, Daphne or Harry, depending on who was with her at the time, spotted her as well, but they weren’t quite so paranoid about it as Cheyenne and so weren’t quite so eagle-eyed.

  If Daphne spotted her, then the look on her face was always one that could put a feral cat to shame, sneering like she intended to go right for the throat. Just long enough for Lorraine to duck into the nearest hiding spot or crowd, and then Daphne would hook one arm through Cheyenne’s and start towing her along.

  And Harry’s reactions were…gratifying.

  Harry would slip an arm around Cheyenne’s waist and pull her close, gaze skirting past Lorraine as if she wasn’t even there. The message was clear. As far as he was concerned, Cheyenne was the winner; Lorraine could cease to exist and maybe he would notice, but the odds were he wouldn’t.

  Every time, Lorraine would look stricken for a split second, before she would disappear again. If Harry noticed that side-effect, he never mentioned it, and Cheyenne was content to keep it to herself. Considering everything Lorraine had done, Cheyenne wasn’t ashamed to admit that those memories of Lorraine looking as if her heart had been ripped right out of her chest made Cheyenne happy.

  *

  Cheyenne woke up with a jolt when she heard a noise outside. She had been sleeping lightly, her dreams taking odd directions that prevented her from truly settling down, so she wasn’t immediately too concerned; it could have just been a raccoon or a bird. But once she made her way over to the window and peered outside, she swore the world stopped turning for a moment and the breath in her lungs went cold.

  A pair of reflective eyes were visible for just a moment, too high off of the ground to belong to any of the common but small wildlife that frequently roamed the street. It was too large to even be one of the rare coyotes that occasionally made its way into the city.

  Cheyenne knew exactly what it was—who it was.

  And she knew that there was still no way for her to report it. How was she supposed to explain that to the police? ‘This woman who can turn into a lion is stalking me.’ They would have her sent to the psychiatric ward within the hour.

  Cheyenne let the curtain fall closed again and simply stood there for a very long moment, staring blankly at the fabric. When she at last jerked herself into motion to go back to bed, she moved as if she was in a daze.

  She didn’t get any more sleep for the rest of the night.

  CHAPTER 12

  From the moment Cheyenne woke up, there was something strange about that day. Something was going to happen, though she wasn’t sure what. She just knew that everything felt wrong in a very subtle way, as if the sky was the wrong shade of blue or the house had switched to a different type of stone without anyone noticing. It was a quiet sort of strangeness, and she would have kept it to herself if not for the fact that she had no proof that it had nothing to do with her babies.

  She mentioned it to Harry as he got ready to leave for work that morning, not even waiting until he was out of his bedroom, not wanting to waste any time if there was actually something wrong.

  Harry was calm about it all, and that was comforting, as he recommended she stay in the house that day and keep her phone in her hand in case she needed to call anyone. “And I mean if you so much as sneeze too loudly, you call someone,” he clarified after a moment. “Me or Daphne, whichever, and we’ll come back. Got it?”

  Cheyenne held a hand up as if she was giving a scout’s oath. “I promise,” she offered, fondly exasperated.

  She was glad Daphne had a short shift that day, though, just in case. She didn’t want to be home alone, but she wasn’t going to demand that one of them take the day off just to humor her when she had no proof that anything was wrong and when she had been healthy as a horse for the entire pregnancy.

  (And it really was nearly the entire pregnancy. She was perilously close to the nine-month mark, though her doctor had estimated she still had another week and a half until her due date.)

  Throughout the day, not much happened, though it seemed to pass at an odd pace. Sometimes, Cheyenne would look at the clock, and then look at it again in what felt like just a few minutes later and find that she had spent almost two hours zoning out and staring blankly at a wall. And sometimes, she would look at the clock after what felt like centuries to see that only ten minutes had gone by.

  Relief fell over her like a wave when she heard Daphne’s car pull into the driveway, and she met Daphne at the door like an anxious golden retriever, hoping that if she had company, it would at least keep the world from entering a time warp again.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon watching incredibly awful action movies. The explosions and horrendous acting were enough to keep Cheyenne engaged, but didn’t have to keep track of a plot or anything important – she had no worries.

  The afternoon was at least more comfortable after that.

  *

&nbs
p; Cheyenne turned in early that evening, heading up to bed well before Harry got back from work, though she spent some time simply sitting in bed and browsing on her laptop, missing the sound of another car pulling into the driveway. She was in the middle of her mindless browsing when she heard Lorraine call her out into the hallway.

  It seemed as if every muscle in her body went stiff. By all rights, Lorraine should not have been in the house. Harry fired her.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Cheyenne called back, her patience already spent. She was fairly sure she could hear it snapping like a dry twig being stomped on in the woods. Granted, considering how she had felt all day, she was slightly convinced she was hallucinating the voice, and she was sort of hoping for that.

  She had no such luck.

  “Mr. Carmichael is busy in the garage for a moment,” Lorraine explained pleasantly, “and I don’t want to interrupt him. But I forgot something here on my last day of employment, and I only just realized it. I’m not sure where it went; it’s been quite some time since then.”