Slow Shift

by Nazarea Andrews

  He always knows what to do, but staring at this tiny girl with shadows under her eyes and wonder in her gaze—he’s completely lost.

  Chase twists and murmurs, “Aurora, tell him about your dreams.”

  Color blooms in her cheeks, but she tightens her grip on her purse and nods.

  ~*~

  Chase, this impossible, brilliant boy—the boy who cared for him, inexplicable and unlooked for but fierce in his devotion, the boy neither of them had ever expected or thought to want but who slipped into their lives and refused to leave.

  His brilliant, impossible boy.

  Only Chase would befriend a goddamn Medusa, a daughter of death and vengeance, so rare that Lucas is a little surprised to find one sitting in his fucking living room.

  ~*~

  Once, when Chase has resumed classes and Tyler is distracted drafting blueprints for a new building downtown—when he knows his absence will be noticed but not worried over—Lucas quietly flies to New York.

  It’s a large city. There’s an anonymity about it that appeals to him—it would be easy to lose himself, to step away from his alpha-less pack and his pack-less alpha, to leave and become an omega.

  Standing in the throngs of humanity that brush past him, unaware of who and what he is, he wants to, for a heartbeat.

  His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he glances at it.

  >>I’m making pierogies at Dad’s on Saturday.

  >>Be home by then.

  Of course. Chase would notice his absence, even when it was carefully planned so that he didn’t.

  Smart, infuriating pup.

  << I will be.

  It’s a promise, and he means it. He turns his attention to the task at hand.

  It isn’t hard to find Chelsea. He knows that she was asked to join a pack. Rumor spreads through their packs faster than scandal through LA, so it wasn’t hard to find the truth—Chelsea was invited to be the Alpha-mate to the Cahil’s Alpha heir. She’s a pretty, powerless figurehead. She chose that insult over a Pack that wanted her, over a rich territory that belonged to her family.

  Lucas hates her.

  His lips curl into a snarl as he scents them, the rich, dirty, rotten scent of Cahil on his sister as she leaves her apartment, as she falters just for a moment, her eyes—Sarah’s eyes—searching, like she can feel something, scent something, but can’t figure out what.

  His claws itch and his fangs lengthen. He wants, so goddamn badly, to shred her to pieces—for abandoning him, for hurting Tyler, for refusing to be the Alpha they need, for her dismissal of Chase.

  He wants to howl, scream his rage and bury his claws in her soft belly, rip her throat out.

  He doesn’t.

  He watches her leave, watches the Cahil wolves slip behind her as she steps into a silver town car, watches her be whisked away without thought or concern for the scent teasing the air and her senses with packhomemine.

  He waits for the hate to be overcome by longing, but it never does.

  Lucas only feels very tired, and very angry.

  << i’m coming home.

  He doesn’t know why he tells Chase—except that Chase has told him every secret, has cared for him when there was no reason for him to, has proven that he can be trusted.

  >> good. See you soon, big bad.

  ~*~

  Sometimes, when he watches Chase standing before the Standing Stones in nothing but a pair of leather pants low on his waist, he thinks—this boy is fae, the dark Unseelie, the court of nightmares and beauty and unimaginable power.

  Sometimes, when he watches Chase, and he’s crowing with laughter, wrestling with Tyler and throwing harmless balls of witchlight, he thinks—this boy is fae, the bright Seelie, the court of dreams and splendor and power that could make a man weep.

  But mostly, when he watches Chase, cursing in the kitchen, giggling on the couch, drooling in Tyler’s bed, bickering with his father, he thinks—this boy is magic, because magic is the only thing that could heal him, bring him from the wrecked shell of what he was, what the accident left him, and Chase did that. Chase brought him back.

  He thinks, for all of Chase’s power and tricks and charms, that is the strongest magic Chase works. He creates family and worth from charred remains and shattered devastation.

  Lucas would die to protect him, and he will kill, to keep him safe.

  ~*~

  Aurora sits on his bed, and Lucas gives her a curious look. The little Medusa avoids him as much as she can, something that amuses and infuriates him.

  To see her now, here, while his reports and research is spread out—

  She studies it for a moment, then she blinks at him and says, “You’re going to kill them.”

  “Kill who?” he asks, curious what conclusions she’s drawn.

  She smiles, tight and vicious, and he wonders what a smile like that tastes like. “Everyone who helped Mia Drake kill your family.”

  He smiles too then, pleased, sharp, and predatory.

  She nods. “I want to add a name to your list.”

  Lucas laughs and thinks this girl, this beautiful monster, is the perfect companion for his brilliant, magical boy.

  Chapter 17

  Sometimes Chase wonders what life would have been like if he hadn’t wandered, lost and lonely, into the woods after his mother’s death. It’s not often, but when Aurora leaves for her second semester at Berkeley, he wonders. When Ben and Brielle move to UCLA, he wonders. When he sits in a college classroom full of his high school peers, people he always knew would be stuck in this town, he wonders.

  When he stands in Harper’s basement and manipulates rowan ash, when he traps Lucas behind an ash circle and watches Tyler’s eyes gleam and his tattoos heat against his skin—he wonders.

  Of course he does. It was a choice he didn’t even realize he was making, and it changed his life. Naturally, he wonders.

  But he never regrets it.

  ~*~

  “I can’t teach you anything else,” Harper says, a few weeks before his semester ends.

  “I’m not done learning,” Chase huffs. He knew this was coming, but he’s still frustrated to find it here, staring him in the face and forcing him to make a decision.

  “Have you reconsidered going to the Druids?”

  “I’m not leaving Harrisburg,” he says, the same thing he’s been saying for over a year. He can feel the Standing Stone’s magic itching in his skin, tugging him, whispering stay, stay, stay.

  After ten months of living with the Stone circle’s magic just under his skin, he’s mostly used to the pushy demands, so it’s easy to filter it out and focus on Harper’s placid disapproval.

  “You can’t learn what you need by staying here.”

  He bites at a ragged edge of his thumb and nods. He knows that, too.

  ~*~

  “He wants me to go to the Druids,” Chase says.

  Lucas tilts his head, studying the boy resting his head in his lap. “You can, you know.”

  Chase rolls his eyes and sits up, and Lucas immediately misses the soothing feel of soft hair in his fingers. “I know I can. I just—I don’t like the idea of leaving you and Tyler, or the land. We’re not—” Complete, he wants to say. “We’re vulnerable,” Chase says instead, “And we don’t know what the Stones will do if I leave.”

  “We’ll never know that until you actually go,” Lucas says reasonably.

  Chase arches an eyebrow at the other man. “Trying to get rid of me, big bad?”

  “Never,” Lucas says lightly, but with an underlying seriousness that makes Chase still. “But we do need to finish your training.” He’s quiet and a smile spreads, slow as syrup, across his lips. “Would you trust me to solve this problem?”

  “Can you do it without dropping bodies?” Chase asks, and Lucas smirks, the only acknowledgment to the supernatural threats he’d neutralized that he’s willing to give.

  “I believe I can,” he says, pleased with himself, as he settles back against
the couch.

  ~*~

  Tyler slips into his bedroom and Chase shuffles over on the bed, tugging his notes closer to give Tyler room to sit next to him.

  They’ve done this often enough that it’s second nature to give him space, but Tyler is fidgeting tonight and it’s distracting. He does this occasionally, comes to Chase when he’s a mess of nerves and strung out on the waxing moon. Chase doesn’t think much about it anymore. He doesn’t let himself.

  “Want to talk about it?” Chase asks.

  Tyler shakes his head. “Lucas left,” he whispers. Chase hums and Tyler curls around him, pressing close in the way he always does when he’s feeling lonely and needy, not sure of his Pack. Chase doesn’t comment on it, just hands him a stack of flashcards.

  “Quiz me,” he orders and Tyler huffs, his breath disturbing Chase’s hair before he settles down and flicks through the cards.

  “He’ll come back?” Tyler asks, and for maybe the millionth time, Chase wants to skin Chelsea Reid alive—slowly, then give her goddamn fur coat to Tyler as a birthday present.

  He breathes out and nods. “He’ll come back. Lucas always comes back to us.”

  ~*~

  He falls asleep in Tyler’s arms, tangled up watching a documentary together, and wakes up in the dark.

  Tyler’s arms tighten around him as he shuffles around a bit, and Chase looks up at him. This isn’t unusual, them sleeping together. After the Standing Stones took to pulling at his dreams, it became almost commonplace to find one of his werewolves in his bed, shifted or human. It never means anything. Even when he wants it to, Chase is careful to remember that it doesn’t. Lucas adores him, in a way that he can’t quite define but has never neared sexual, and Tyler—

  Tyler doesn’t want him.

  It’s been a constant refrain, and despite marking his skin with Tyler’s crest, despite binding himself to the DeWitt pack—he hasn’t forgotten. He knows the score.

  But sometimes he wakes up with Tyler watching him, just like he’s watching now, his fingers still sifting through Chase’s hair, his expression open, unguarded, and wanting.

  He feels his heart trip, the way it always does when he wakes up to this, to the expression in Tyler’s eyes that makes him hope.

  “Tyler?” Chase says, licking his lips.

  Bright eyes track the movement, then slowly lift back to meet his own.

  “Go to sleep, Chase,” Tyler murmurs, and Chase makes a low noise in his throat.

  Tyler’s eyes close, shuttering, and he starts to pull away. Chase whines, gripping him hard to hold him still, to press into his embrace. He whispers, “G’night, Ty.”

  There isn’t a response, but as his breathing evens out and he slips into dreams, he thinks he feels the press of lips against his forehead.

  ~*~

  Lucas returns as the sun is setting, two weeks after vanishing without a word. Chase and Tyler are wrestling, a sparring session having devolved into hands batting, scrambling for purchase against each other, and Chase’s high laughter.

  “Hello, brother,” Lucas says when Tyler finally catches sight of him, an easy smile on his lips as he watches them fondly.

  “You’re back!” Chase chirps from where Tyler has him pinned to the dirt. He rolls his hips to dislodge the werewolf and Tyler scrambles off him, falling back a few steps, flushed and flustered.

  “Where’ve you been?” Chase asks, standing and dusting off his hands.

  “Get dressed,” Lucas says, instead of answering. “I have a present for you.”

  Chase arches an eyebrow but he shrugs and trots inside to change out of his workout gear. Tyler hesitates a moment longer, and Lucas steps close, allowing Tyler to scent mark him.

  “Be careful, Tyler. I won’t allow you to hurt him any more than you’d allow anyone else to.”

  “Do you think I would?” Tyler asks, plaintive.

  “I think you could, even if it was unintentional,” Lucas answers gently.

  ~*~

  Chase always feels like an imposter when he wears his black skinny jeans and black t-shirt, when he drapes himself in Tyler’s leather jacket and stands as the formal Shaman for a Pack that’s so fractured it’s almost laughable.

  He always feels like a little kid playing dress up, like someone will call him on it, call him out for the fraud that he is.

  He’s almost pathetically grateful that he’s not required to play this part often, but he does like the way Tyler can’t seem to look away from him when he does.

  ~*~

  Lucas’s gift is Caitlyn, a young woman with a mischievous smile and power sparking in her fingertips. Tyler loathes her almost as much as Chase is enchanted with her. Lucas seems altogether too pleased with himself as he places a hand on her shoulder and says, “Caitlyn trained with a voodoo priestess in New Orleans and spent a summer with the Druids in Ireland. She’s agreed to stay and train you for as long as you need.”

  Chase isn’t sure who to stare at in open-mouthed awe—Lucas who arranged so that he wouldn’t have to leave, or Caitlyn, who has no reason to do this, no reason to be here—but she is, and she’s watching him, avid eyed, beautiful and curious.

  “Why?” he asks.

  Caitlyn shrugs and grins. “Because I’m curious about the little mage who stands for an Alpha-less Pack.”

  That ripples through Chase and Tyler both, but Chase nods and says brightly, “Where is she staying?”

  ~*~

  Lucas puts her in his apartment downtown, the one that isn’t home, isn’t den, isn’t pack. Even he has the good sense to know Tyler will never let her in the place he built with Chase.

  ~*~

  Caitlyn is nice. She’s almost painfully earnest in her desire to teach and help, and she’s good at it. She redirects Chase easily when he gets lost on a tangent, when his runes tip toward sloppy and dangerous, when he’s strung out on caffeine and his fingers shake while he grinds herbs and smears his blood on wards. She steadies him and teaches him how to channel the power the Standing Stones dumps into him, that he carries as his birthright.

  Lucas thinks it’s fascinating, watches them in the Chief’s backyard, lounges on the porch in his wolfskin, eyes lit with curiosity.

  Tyler hates her.

  He hates the way every sentence out of Chase’s mouth begins with “Caitlyn said”, hates the way he seems happy to leave the house in the woods to go to Lucas’s cramped apartment because Caitlyn is there, hates the way he smells of the girl always, subtle but there, lingering like a kiss under the sharp electric scent of his magic.

  He hates mostly that Caitlyn can—is—giving Chase something Tyler can’t.

  She isn’t as strong as Chase, and sometimes she laughs because his boy will propose something ridiculously outlandish—what if the wards were defensive instead? If they triggered the forest to grow so threats can’t pass through?—and Tyler will see the stiffness in Chase’s shoulders, the tightness in his lips, but even that is forgiven because she doesn’t understand him, doesn’t understand the scope of his power, and Chase adores her for everything she does teach him.

  To add insult to injury, John loves her.

  Tyler sulks and takes to long, exhausting runs, hoping like hell she’ll leave soon.

  ~*~

  Sometimes after his long runs, when he’s shaking with exhaustion, he curls up in Chase’s room in the small house, laying on his couch because he misses the boy so much it feels like a knife wound, perpetually bleeding.

  Sometimes he ignores Chase for days.

  The best nights, though, are the ones he goes to his room and finds Chase there, reading or sleeping, curled up in his bed with Lucas in his wolfskin nearby. Chase will draw him down, press against him sleepily, murmur, “Missed you,” against his throat, and Tyler will close his eyes and hold him through the night.

  Caitlyn can have his magic and his laughter in the preserve and his tired, research filled mornings.

  Tyler gets to have this.

  ~*
~

  “Chase,” John calls, and the tone brings Chase skidding to a halt. He stares at his Dad, his heart beating too hard. He only sounds like that when something is wrong.

  “What happened?” he demands.

  John glances up at him. “We found a body in the woods. Uh, two, actually. They were drinking, and got mauled.” Chase stares at him for a long moment and John sighs. “One was burned pretty bad, kid.”

  “Dad,” Chase starts.

  John nods, smile tight. “Just be careful out there, ok?”

  ~*~

  Chase has been walking the woods since he was twelve, in his dreams and in the flesh. He knows the predators that live in those woods.

  He calls them friend, holds them when he sleeps, cooks for them, protects them, but he’s never been under any delusions that they are tame.

  ~*~

  “Lucas?”

  “Chase.”

  There’s a long pause and Chase looks away first, his heartbeat tripping hard and uneven in his chest.

  “Be careful.”

  A smile follows, sharp and triumphant. “I’m always careful, pup.”

  ~*~

  Summer ends in a rush of magic, police investigations, and Tyler’s quiet distress over Caitlyn.

  Chase spends a long weekend with Aurora at her beach house, and when she drops him off, Lucas watches with bright, curious eyes and Tyler skulks from the shadows to curl around Chase, scenting him and whining.

  Another body falls in Harrisburg, an orderly from a local hospital killed in his home, and Chase watches the bags under his father’s eyes grow heavier.

  Then classes start and Ryan walks back into his life.

  ~*~

  Tyler remembers Ryan. It’s hard to forget anyone who made Chase so happy and so sad. It’s impossible to forget the soaked, shaking, shattered mess that Ryan had left in his wake.

  When Chase comes home smelling of new books, crowded classrooms, and Ryan—Tyler snarls.

  “He didn’t touch me,” Chase says, sounding hollowed out, broken.

  Tyler hates that Chase can sound like that.

  “It was a long time ago,” Chase says.

  “Not long enough,” Tyler snaps.

  Chase gives him a small, sad smile and shrugs. “He wanted to apologize.”