The Shifter's Soul

by R. A. Boyd

  If that’s what she wanted, that’s what he would give her.

  Chapter 4

  “You want in on this pie when we finish eating dinner?” Charlie asked.

  Audra had sent them off with the food they’d ordered, crab cake bites and hush puppies just in case they got hungry later, and an entire chocolate cream pie. Audra was sweet in a somewhat scary kind of way. She kept saying that they were sisters now and that she would eat her father if he came within fifty yards of New Rose. How sweet was that?

  Simon dipped an onion ring in ketchup and held it up for her to bite. “Hell yeah, I want in on that pie. You plan on eating it by yourself?”

  The onion ring hovered in front of her, and she eyed it with disgust. “Fun fact about me,” she said as she waved the ring away. “I don’t like the texture of onions. The flavor is great, but the texture is gross. And yes, if I were so inclined, I would totally eat that pie. I’m an emotional eater. You’re the first person I told about my fucked up family.”

  It had been eight months since she left her home and moved from city to city. The first three months had been her time to heal. Her severance package from her job had been great, and it was enough to keep her going until she made a choice to go back to work. That was before she had to start moving.

  The day her father had first found her still sent chills of fear up her spine. His voice had broken her from her peaceful space in the library where she would go to read every day. She’d been sitting on the floor between stacks, reading a Stephen King novel she’d already read at least two times before when she heard her name and description. That deep and scratchy familiar tenor froze her blood within seconds. She leaned forward on her knees and looked over at the librarian’s desk. Her father had been standing there, talking to the attendant at the front desk. He knew she loved book stores and libraries, and he knew she’d always wanted to go to Maine. It must have been the first place he looked once he got it in his mind he wanted her dead before it was her time.

  Grabbing her bags and running for everything she was worth, Charlie crawled out of the bathroom window of the library, got her things from the extended stay motel she’d been living in, and left town within the hour.

  Seeing her father had been a shock. All she could picture was the pillow coming down onto her face as she scrambled to get away. What a great way to be reminded of your dad.

  “I gained thirty-two pounds in the first few months after my mom and brother died. I’ve always been a big girl, but that much weight on my short frame was just too much. My blood pressure rocketed sky high, and my lower back started to hurt.” She shrugged and took a piece of the steak Simon held on his fork, just as he was about to put it in his mouth. “I started walking and eating better. I’ve lost twenty-nine pounds since I started working out. Just a few more to go. Thanks for the steak.”

  She didn’t know Simon well enough yet, but she could read the emotions flickering in his eyes as if they were old friends who knew the world about each other. Sadness, rage, regret that this was her experience in life. Before Simon, someone looking at her like this would have driven her to shame. But not him. He was so different. He didn’t pity her in a way that belittled and made her want to cower inward and disappear. This man was here with her, facing this rollercoaster of crazy with her. It touched her heart and made her insides bubble with joy.

  Sitting on the floor with a blanket laid beneath them in her room at the New Rose Inn, they feasted on their indoor picnic. It was comfortable like this, just the two of them talking and sharing food like they’d been together for years. No man had ever made her feel like this. Despite everything Charlie had been through, she felt safe. It had been so long since the ease of safety had soaked into her bones.

  Simon promised to maim anyone who tried to do her harm. He meant it, and she believed him. She had to bite back a smile. He gave off a rude vibe, and he really was rude, but in the past few hours, he’d shown her that he could care and protect and laugh and have fun.

  Panic filled her middle as she thought of how he had changed so suddenly. Did he really like her, or was this just part of his bond? One touch had sealed the deal, and for some crazy reason, it had taken away from that wholesome yet dirty, wonderful feeling she had about them being together. This was whole and completely consuming. She adored this.

  “Question,” Simon muttered through a mouthful of steak and his dinner roll. “And don’t get mad. Why didn’t you dye your hair? It’s the third thing I noticed about you. Makes you stick out in a crowd. It’s beautiful, but it definitely makes someone remember you.”

  The priceless look of discomfort covered his face as he waited for her answer. She could tell he didn’t mean any harm from his question, and it probably had bothered him even to ask.

  “I thought about it.” Tugging on a few strands of hair from the top of her head, she pulled them down and looked at her tight curls. “It would have been a dishonor to my grandmother. She started greying at fifteen. She met my grandfather when she was twenty, and after they got married he asked her to dye it. She didn’t want to, but by then she was pregnant with my mom. He was a real son of a bitch and made her feel like shit until she finally did it. She said she dyed it for years and always hated it. But he was so mean that she did it just to shut him up.”

  Simon nodded, his lips drawing inward until they practically vanished from his handsome face. “It was a different time back then if I have my dates right. They were married in the forties or fifties, right?”

  “How’d you know?” she asked.

  He leaned forward and ran his finger along her jawline, touching a curl of her hair just before settling back in his spot. “You can’t be any more than twenty-five?”

  The soft touch did floaty things to her insides. God bless this wonderful man. “I’m thirty-one.”

  His heated gaze worked its way down her body. “You look like a college girl. If I got you a school-girl outfit would you—”

  “I sure would,” she said quickly. “Back to what you were saying.”

  With the prongs of his fork, he toyed with his food as he spoke. “I’m just saying that back in those days once a woman was married, her husband was law. You couldn’t just get a divorce or leave your husband and be as happy as you can now. Most families shunned a woman who did that. No matter what happened in a marriage, the woman was blamed for its demise.”

  Charlie nodded and smiled. “But she did leave. After a while. And she didn’t have anything. She tried to get custody of my mother, but the courts said that until she held a job for a year and got a suitable place of residence, she would only have visiting rights.” Anger warmed her cheeks and brought heat to the backs of her eyes. “It took a year and a half but that was enough time to make my mother who she was. An alcoholic who blamed all her problems on my grandmother. He taught my mom to hate my grandmother. Hell, he even tried to get me to hate her.”

  Simon used his fork to poke Charlie on the hand. “She sounds fucking awesome.”

  “She was. Anyway, she never got full custody of my mom. Only partial. But after she left my grandfather, she wore her gray hair like a banner of independence. She kept it so pretty. It was tightly curled like mine, but sometimes she would pin it up or straighten it, or cut it. She’s the one who taught me to accept it for what it was. It was a gift I’d been born with that made me stand out from any other woman my age unless their hair was like mine too, which is a rarity,” she giggled.

  Grandma Minnie was a hurricane of beauty and love. Charlie always wished she could have lived with her instead of just spending summers with her. That woman was a gift from God.

  After about four pokes from Simon, she grabbed his plastic fork and broke it in half. “So, I can’t dye my hair. She’s the reason I love my hair, my curves, and everything about myself. Hell, if it weren’t for her, I would have believed my father. I would have believed that it was my fault that my mom and Benjamin are gone, but she trained me better than that. I think she d
id it on purpose. Not just to accept myself despite this world, but to use it as a shield from my parents and grandfather.” Shaking her head and laughing, she took her fork from near her box and gave it to Simon. “I wish you could have met her. She would have loved your mean ass, and she probably would have smacked you upside your head for being snarky.” She took a sip of chocolate milk and then cleared her throat. “You said my hair was the third thing you noticed. What were the first two?”

  A devilish grin took over Simon’s face. He held up his hand and ticked off the first four things he’d noticed about her. “Your thick thighs, your tits, your hair, and the fourth was the way you attacked a crazy angel with no thought of yourself. It’s like you came out of nowhere.”

  Charlie didn’t know what came over her when she’d grabbed the trophy that toted that New Rose was the second friendliest town in Maryland. It looked heavy like it could do some damage, and it was the closest thing to her that could be used as a weapon. Watching them get hurt without being able to defend themselves broke something in her chest. She knew she wasn’t as strong as a shifter or a witch or an angel with witch powers, but she had to try. Besides, she’d had her eye on Simon.

  He’d been sitting there frowning like someone had taken his favorite teddy bear. He was cute, and the idea to drag him to a back room and have her way with him had been heavy on her mind until hell broke loose.

  And now, here they were. In her room.

  She took the last bite of her burger, and despite the unsure feelings that were now raining down on her, she forced herself to look at him. As if daring her to hold his gaze, his soft lips curved up at the corners, and his grey eyes sparkled in the lamplight.

  “Enough about me. Tell me about you, Simon. Fallen angel, shifter. What the hell is a Ghost shifter?”

  Ghost shifters had been a thing of myth up until a few months ago. Humans hadn’t known about them, and most still didn’t believe, but here they were. The idea that fallen angels were living among them, especially with freaking saber-tooth cats hiding beneath their shell, was a concept that most humans decided was complete and total bullshit. Hell, she hadn’t believed until last week.

  Yet, now she was mated to one. And here he was before her, tongue searching out a drop of steak sauce that fell from his steak, and man-oh-man she wanted to be that sauce on his face. She was jealous of the sauce. The tip of his tongue finally found it, and every heat and pleasure receptor her body housed went on red alert. When he noticed her watching him, he ran his tongue along his top lip and looked down at the apex of her thighs.

  Holy balls. Simon was all kinds of hot. If he wasn’t careful, she would shoot her no sex rule straight to hell and jump on the gorgeous man that laid down on the floor in front of her.

  “Talk before I go against my words, Simon,” she insisted.

  All playfulness dropped from his face as he considered her words. Had he been trying to get her to forget? Sneaky, sexy man.

  He wiped his mouth with a paper towel, pushed his plate away from him, and then rested his cheek in his hand. His elbow braced his upper body on the floor, and the muscles in his arm flexed as he moved. Simon looked as lovely and statuesque as some beautifully carved marble statue from hundreds of years ago. He was breath-taking. And he was hers. Her palms itched to touch him as he talked, but instead, she listened as he’d done for her.

  “My brethren and I were angels— wings, flying through the skies, all that shit. Except we didn’t look like this,” he said, motioning toward his muscular body. “We were beings of light. Bigger than anything you could imagine. I mean, we looked like this when we took human form, but other than that we were just energy. We could shift into whatever we wanted. When the Great War broke out in Heaven, we decided to change into saber-tooth cats to roam the Earth.”

  Great War in Heaven?

  “You mean like the war with…” She pointed to the floor and then put her fingers to her temples to symbolize horns.

  Simon huffed a laugh, and his sexy as hell Adam’s apple dipped beneath the collar of his shirt. “Yeah. That one. Our brother was infuriated when he learned of the Creator’s new creation and what they would have. He waged a war that he could not win. We didn’t sit out because we were afraid.” His eyes looked at the wall behind her as if he couldn’t bear to look at her while he told his story, and she wouldn’t make him. “We didn’t want to hurt anyone. We’d never killed each other before. Our brethren were sacred to us, and to kill them made no sense. We just walked along with the creatures and experienced life on this planet. It was the first time any of us had made a choice. What the Creator said was always law.

  “But we weren’t made to have a choice. We were made to obey, to follow directives, and for us to go against that was unheard of. The time came when we decided to get involved, and when we tried to shift back into our normal forms, we were stuck.”

  So it was true. The curse. Charlie had heard of it.

  “How long were you like that?” Her voice was as soft as a whisper. To get comfortable and ease the tight ache in her lower back, she stretched out on the blanket and rested her cheek in her hand.

  His throat worked as he swallowed. “The war raged on for centuries. We waited for answers, but nothing came. When it was over, our brother Samael came and told us what had been done. Since we acted out of love and not fear, we were not cast into Hell but confined to the forms we chose. And we would stay in those forms until we loved them, and then we would be made human. Unable to shift until our mates returned our grace to us. We were in our saber-tooth forms for millennia. Until we exited the Ark.”

  “What?” Charlie barked out. She took in what he said, but some part of her couldn’t accept it. Couldn’t conceive of what he was saying. “This doesn’t… I don’t…” She covered her eyes and laid down on her back.

  Simon was an angel. A fallen angel who was around during the war in Heaven. He was a passenger on freaking Noah’s Ark. And now he was telling her that his grace was inside of her. Hell, her having his grace wasn’t even the unbelievable part.

  “How do I give you back your grace?” She’d felt Simon growing inside of her since they touched. He was part of her and her body, her soul, recognized him as hers. Not just hers, but something so much deeper she didn’t even have the words to explain it. Maybe it was the part of him that she could already feel, growing inside of her.

  “Well,” Simon began. He leaned forward as if looking at something on the blanket that was way more interesting than their current conversation. “I get it back by claiming you. You’d give me back my grace and my animal.”

  A hollow pit opened up in her chest. Claiming her would make her a shifter. Well, that would be one way to keep her father away. She could eat him.

  She shook her head to ward off the discomfort that was stirring in her. “Simon, I don’t know if I want to be a saber-tooth. At least, not right now. I like being me. I’m just getting used to being me again. Becoming something else might take me back to a place where I didn’t even feel comfortable in my own skin.”

  Simon looked up and gave her a lop-sided smile, his eyes timid and cautious. “It might sound bizarre to a human, but you could claim me. That’s what Audra and her mate did. Zeke is a witch and didn’t want to change. His bite brought back her missing pieces.”

  That was better, and it was something she could totally do. She’d bite his sexy ass right here and now if he wanted her to do it. “I can do that.” She clacked her teeth together and made a silly munching sound.

  Simon belted out a laugh and pressed his head against the floor. The genuine sound warmed her and made him seem more human. He may have been in human form, but he was still an angel.

  “That might be fun,” he said, wiping happy tears away from his eyes.

  They watched each other for a few heartbeats, and Charlie imagined she could feel Simon’s grace blooming inside her like a rare flower. It had been with her all along, but now that she’d met him, his grace was growi
ng and becoming more beautiful than anything. The grace of an angel, her angel, had been with her since the day she was born.

  She smiled at him, so big that she felt like a fool. And then his words came back to her. “Dude. You were on the Ark? Like the Ark? How big was it? Did it smell like a zoo?”

  He snickered. “You almost made me shoot steak bits out of my nose.”

  Still laying on the floor, she turned her head to the side and watched him take a sip of his drink. “Well?” She needed to know!

  “It did. But not where we were. The human’s on the Ark knew what we were and built an area to keep us separate from the animals. We may have been in animal form, but Noah was informed about our existence. They would come and talk to us.” He shook his head and a glint of appreciation filled his eyes. “It was the first time in so long that someone spoke to us. The first time someone wasn’t afraid of us. We were made human again right after the water receded.”

  That had to be a relief. Living all those years isolated and not being able to communicate with people. “That was better, right?” It had to be.

  “No. Not at first,” Simon murmured, moving the plates and cups from the blanket and onto the little table behind him. “You’d think we would have been happy. But we weren’t. We were used to what we were. We knew how to navigate the world. We loved it. We were isolated, but we learned to appreciate the quiet. It was freedom. Becoming human again, especially without being able to shift, was agonizing. The world was new again, and we were fucking lost. It took a long time to find ourselves. We had never been in human form before, but there we were. Trying to figure shit out.” He pulled at a loose string on the blanket. “But you know what was worse? Praying to the Creator to give us answers, calling out to our fellow angels and begging them to tell us what was next. And nothing. No answers. No relief. Just silence.”