It felt like my brain kept having glitches or hallucinations, because every time I thought I might be seeing clearly and starting to understand what was reality and what was just impossible, something else impossible happened. Like a polar bear following the slow-moving truck like an obedient farm dog.
It still didn’t sit right that Hannah and Jen weren’t freaking out. I was the only one who seemed to care that there had been freaking wolves and bears fighting around us, and that there’d been a grizzly outside my window and then Max stood up and...
I shook my head, pressing my fingers against my eyes to try to drive the vision away. Nope. Nope. Couldn’t be. That had to be one of those hallucinations. Max hadn’t ended up naked and bleeding right outside my door. It just wasn’t possible. It had to be a mass hallucination that he was driving the truck and talking to me. It couldn’t be.
My teeth started to chatter, though not from the cold. I still felt overheated, sweating my ass off even without a coat and the windows broken out so snow swirled inside the truck, and I couldn’t focus on anything except the slowly escalating pain across my stomach and low in my back. My vision blurred.
“It’ll be okay,” Max said abruptly. He eased the truck off the road and onto what must have been a side road, because we headed toward a house in the distance. “Just stay calm. We’re almost there. Stay calm.”
“Stay calm?” I demanded. “Stay calm? Did you look outside? There are bears. Bears are following us.” My arm whipped out and I almost elbowed Hannah in the teeth. “A polar bear is outside. They eat people. Why is a polar bear in the middle of North Dakota? What is there to remain calm about? Who even are you?”
Max took a deep breath. “I know. I know it looks crazy, but there’s a—a reasonable explanation. I don’t want to start into a whole long conversation until we know that you’re okay. And that the baby is okay. Please just breathe. We’re almost there.”
“Just give her a second,” Jen said quietly. “She can be pissed off, Max, and it’s not—”
A low growl boiled up in his chest and my heart stuttered again. What the hell was that? He growled at her?
The image of the grizzly bear at my window, the one where Max stood a few seconds after I shot it, returned immediately to the front of my mind. Something about the eyes... The mournful, worried, furious eyes. A knot tied up my throat and I couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t swallow or breathe. What if—what if Max was the bear?