by Selena Scott
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jesse needed a break. This was… a lot of socializing for him. Usually he was pretty much a lone wolf. In a manner of speaking. Because in reality, he was actually a lone polar bear. Either way, he hadn’t done this much talking in years. It was overwhelming.
He closed his eyes for a second, raked a big hand over his face, and took a deep breath. Unfortunately, when he opened his eyes, the huge group of people all staring at him and awaiting his answer were still present and accounted for.
Why, oh, why had he opened his big mouth again? Oh. Yeah. Because there were lives on the line here. The girl’s, Dawn. And probably the guy’s, Quill.
It was apparently not a popular opinion to care about the fate of this dude, Quill, but Jesse couldn’t help himself. He didn’t turn his back on other shifters, no matter how shitty they were.
The world was a living warzone for shifters.
No man left behind.
“Um,” he started. “Where to begin?”
He looked up and locked eyes with Sasha for a second and was glad he did because Sasha seemed to read his plea for help pretty clearly.
“Why don’t we go sit down in the living room?” Sasha suggested. “I’ll order some food for everyone too. Jesse, if you wanna gather your thoughts, or take a break or whatever, there’s a nice backyard through that door.”
The group seemed reluctant to take a break, but Jesse didn’t hesitate. If he was about to publicly dredge up bits of his past, he needed a breather first.
He was out into the yard and swallowing the night air in deep, fortifying gulps.
Jesse was grateful for the dark. He was always grateful for the dark.
Not because he was a dark-souled person, or some sort of creature of the night, but because the world was softer at night. All the edges were dulled. To him, there was something sweet about nighttime. At night the scent of the earth intensified, the air cooled. Water was more refreshing, warm clothes were cozier. The light at night was like it was always being filtered through a layer of water.
The backyard was shadowy and tree-lined. A high privacy fence disappeared into a stand of trees at the back of the property. There was a lazy hammock tousling in a light breeze and patio furniture with a grill. A stray frisbee sat in the grass, already covered in a layer of dew.
He wondered if Sasha had grown up in this utopia.
Glancing behind him, Jesse saw that he was truly alone. He strode into the shadows and quickly stripped down. He needed to shift. If he shifted, he could be truly calm. He always knew the answers to life’s questions after he’d shifted. Well, some of them, at least.
Checking one more time to make sure he was alone, he shifted neatly down into his squirrel form, scampering immediately up a tree and onto a branch. His small, racing heart felt perfect in his chest. He could scent the sap in the tree he was perched on; the bark was both rough and smooth under his small paws. His tail instinctively curved around him and he was safe. This right here, this was the most right he ever felt. This was his safest place.
After about twenty minutes, he climbed quickly back down the tree and shifted back into his human form.
As he turned to the house, a shadow moved in one of the second-floor windows. He frowned. He hadn’t been able to see if it was a person or a drape or the wind. If it had been a person watching him shift out of his squirrel form, that was… not good news.
Because almost no one on this earth knew that he could shift into a squirrel form. Anyone who knew he was a shifter was well aware of his polar bear form. In fact, most of the people in that house had seen him shift into his bear just a few days ago. But basically no one living had any idea that he actually had two forms.
And they certainly didn’t know why.
It wasn’t like it was illegal to have two forms or anything. But it certainly wasn’t something he’d want broadcasted around. Being a polar bear shifter was enough of an anomaly in itself. And Jesse had only known one other person his whole life who had been able to assume two different forms. That person had guarded her secret until her death. And Jesse intended on following in her footsteps on that one.
He eyed the house as he pulled his clothes back on, hoping like hell that it had just been the wind moving the drapes.
When Jesse re-entered the house, he saw immediately that the rest of the group was eating in the living room. The spicy, welcome scent of Indian food greeted his nostrils and he walked in, fully intending to smash a plate of food or two.
But then he caught sight of the expressions on the faces of the two brothers. Orion and Phoenix looked utterly miserable. Phoenix was tucking into a bowl of food, his face pulled down at every corner, his eyes fierce but his mouth nervous. Orion wasn’t eating. His food sat untouched as he peered out the window next to him looking extremely… devastated.
There was no other word for it.
Jesse took a deep breath. Nothing else mattered now besides helping these people, helping them get their sister back. He had to fight through the shyness, through the anxiety, through the pain, and tell them everything that he knew.
“The Director is basically the head of a cult that targets shifters.”
All of their heads turned to look at Jesse and his breath caught in his chest at all those pairs of eyes on him.
“He recruited at the camp where I was held.” He stepped into the room and Sasha pointed out a free armchair for him to sit in. Jesse sank gratefully down. “His goal was to weaponize shifters. That much is very clear and pretty much general knowledge. When we were all in the camps, it didn’t seem so bad, to be weaponized. Because it was that or die… so.”
“Did he recruit you?” Diana asked quietly but firmly.
“No,” Jesse said with a shake of his head. “I was not, uh, reachable for him.”
“Why?” Wren asked and he couldn’t tell if it was curiosity or skepticism that tipped the edges of her tone.
Here he went down the rabbit hole. “Because, ah, I was grieving. For my brother. Who had just died. The Director targeted lots of people who were grieving. It’s a particularly vulnerable time for people. They tend to just want anything to take them away from their reality. I wonder if that’s what happened to this Quill guy.”
“His family was killed in the camps,” Ida said quietly and once again Jesse felt a surge of kinship with her. She was the softest member of the group. There was something sweet about her. Understanding.
“Yeah, if I had to put money on it, I’d say that’s probably when the Director made his move. Anyhow, that’s not how it was with me. After my brother died…” Jesse paused and cleared his throat. Yeah, this wasn’t going to work. He couldn’t casually discuss this with a bunch of strangers. He could barely discuss this within the confines of his own brain. He’d have to skip the hardest parts and tell them the bare bones of what they needed to know. Only as it pertained to the Director. “After my brother died, this guy came to get me from where I was being held. The cage.”
He could sense the recoil of the group as a whole. Because they’d probably been expecting him to refer to the place where he’d been held as a cell. But it truly hadn’t been a cell. It had been a cage in every sense of the word. Probably because he was a polar bear shifter, they’d secluded and confined him from the very beginning.
“He was a shifter, I’d seen him around the camp before that. Back when he’d still been weak and dying. But now he looked like a farm-fed Iowa boy. Strong and healthy. He came and told me that the Director would do the same for me. That there was no reason for me to die in a cage. He took me to the Director after that.”
No one was even breathing as he got to this part of the story.
“Anyway, I spoke with him for a while and he evidently didn’t think I was a candidate for his… program.”
“What was he like?” Orion asked quietly.
Jesse gathered his thoughts, the memories of that time so tinged with grief over the loss of his brother that even now it thr
eatened to steal his breath. “Dignified looking. Nice clothes and very put together. But there’s something off about him. He seems like he’s kind of impersonating how people interact instead of actually interacting. I knew right away that he’d have no problem killing me. Or anyone. He sends a chill down your back just to look at him.”
“And why weren’t you a candidate in his eyes?” Wren asked, that same look of curiosity/skepticism lining her features still.
Again, Jesse took a long moment to gather his thoughts. This was something that had always made sense to him intrinsically before, but he’d never had to put it into words. “I think because I wasn’t angry. In our conversation, he used my brother’s death. He tried to make me angry about it. He tried to convince me that I shouldn’t die in a cage. That there were people who needed to pay for how they’d treated me. Which, sure, I might have agreed with a lot of that. But then his reasoning was that I should come work with him and he could give me all of what I wanted. A version of freedom. My health back. But the thing is, I wasn’t angry. I was just sad. Really, really sad. And he couldn’t make me be angry. No matter what he said. Somebody like the Director, he can work with anger. He can mobilize it. But he couldn’t mobilize sadness. There’s no fuel to burn with sadness. It’s just a quicksand you get sucked further and further into.” One more deep breath. Yeah, he was just about out of gas on this conversation. “So, he left me to sink.”
There was silence in the room now.
“So, you’re saying that it sounds to you like our sister is about to get dragged into some cult?” Phoenix said in a low voice.
“I can’t say for sure, but it sounds to me like that is definitely not going to happen,” Jesse said. “Because it doesn’t sound like this Quill guy is drinking the Kool-Aid anymore. If he really tried to keep you all from getting abducted… and he did that by shifting and fighting? I mean, to me that says that he’s not working for the Director anymore. To me that says he’s more rogue than anything. Now, that doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous. I guess I’m just saying I don’t think we’re dealing with your average lackey here.”
Again, he was greeted with silence as the group absorbed his words.
“Look, that’s all good information,” Orion said after a minute. “But it doesn’t exactly help us find our sister.”
“I know.” Jesse fell quiet while he considered his next words. “I don’t think I can help you with that. But I know someone who can.”
***
Dawn and Quill woke up the next morning curled into one another. As she came awake, Dawn couldn’t help but snuggle in closer to his heat. There was just something so delicious about the heat of another person. It was the perfect temperature. Dawn felt herself dissolving away, almost like a cube of sugar in a cup of hot tea.
But Quill pulled away from her, breaking the spell. Without even opening her eyes, she swallowed down her disappointment. She listened to him go into the bathroom and close the door. She knew that he was an incredibly closed-off person. That he’d been through so much. It wasn’t plausible that he could endure the intimacies of last night without some kind of emotional hangover. He couldn’t snuggle in bed the way she could.
The morning light pressed in but Dawn kept her eyes closed. Quill wasn’t the only one feeling vulnerable that morning. Maybe if he’d stayed snuggled up with her and they’d woken up slowly, she wouldn’t feel quite so exposed.
She replayed snapshots of last night and shivered in the deliciousness of it all. Sex was a lot better when you were with someone who knew what they were doing. It was also better now that she was much more grown up than she’d once been. Her first experiences had been those of a curious girl. Last night she’d been a fully actualized woman.
It had hands-down been the best sex of her life. Funny how a good experience could make a person feel so mixed up. She wanted Quill to come back and snuggle her. She wanted to get naked with him again. She wanted to go jump in the car and pretend that none of that had ever happened. She wanted to hear him say how much he cared about her. She also really wished that he hadn’t just completely betrayed her family just a few days ago. Ugh.
It was all so messy.
Last night had fulfilled her on a deep, almost cellular level. But it wasn’t exactly like she could bring Quill home for Christmas. Her brothers would skin him alive. He could never be her boyfriend. And she was pretty sure she was feeling pretty darn girlfriend-y for the guy.
Double ugh.
More images flashed. His body, golden light and shadows. The give of his flesh under her teeth. The taste of his tongue. The face he’d made when he’d finally, finally given in to how much he’d wanted her… nnng.
She heard the bathroom door open but she continued to lie on the bed, not moving, eyes closed. Dawn had no idea what was going to happen when they finally spoke to one another in the morning light and if it was going to be bad, she’d rather delay the whole experience.
The bed depressed next to her and then, unexpectedly, a warm hand combed through her hair.
Her eyes popped open.
“Morning,” he rasped, leaning over her.
For a moment, she just took him in, sitting there on the bed, twisted toward her. His torso was tanned and shadowed and gorgeous. His hair fell in an unruly tumble over his forehead.
Those icy eyes were guarded, but not closed off. They were… nervous.
“Morning.”
“We should probably get going,” he muttered, his fingers playing lightly in her hair.
“Right.”
She sat up and stretched, letting the blanket fall down to her waist. His eyes got caught on her chest and then quickly skittered away.
Right. Though she’d pulled her underwear back on last night, she was still topless.
“How, um, are you?” he asked. He grimaced and face-palmed. “God, that was lame,” he muttered to himself. “I swear I’m usually a little smoother than this.”
Dawn pulled her knees up to cover her bare chest and grinned. “Oh, good. I’m glad you’re being awkward this morning. I was worried that I was gonna be the awkward one.”
He glanced sideways at her, his cheeks slightly pink, his expression a little abashed. “Why does one of us have to be awkward?”
“I’m not sure. That’s just usually the way it is in the romance novels that I read.”
He laughed, looking at her head-on now, his body twisted to face her. His expression went serious. “It’s pretty amazing, you know. How fast you took to reading. I mean, you only learned this year, yet here you are devouring four books a week.”
Four books a week was actually a modest estimate, but she didn’t bother to correct him. “I think my brain was just made for it. As soon as you taught me how, I just felt like I’d been doing it for a hundred years already. It was natural.”
His eyes traveled over the expanse of her bare legs. “I know the feeling.”
“What do you mean?”
He cleared his throat but his expression was smooth and fierce all at once.
“I mean that’s what sex with you felt like for me. Like I was coming home or something. Finally in the right place at the right time.” He looked away from her. “Can’t really explain it.”
She studied his profile for a moment and then leaned forward, planting her hands on the bed and kissing his cheek. “To be honest, I kind of thought you’d wake up and tell me we could never do that again. I thought you’d freeze up on me. I didn’t really expect you to say sweet stuff and blush.”
He laughed and scratched at the back of his neck. “I didn’t really expect that myself. Usually sex is just sex for me. Nothing special. Or, at best, it’s something to do if I feel lonely. But…”
“But…?” she prompted after he’d trailed off.
He turned to look at her, his icy eyes shy.
Three loud knocks sounded on the door. Dawn jumped to cover herself with the blanket and Quill stood, immediately striding to the window and inching back the
curtains just a touch to see who was there.
“It’s the guy from last night,” he said in a low voice.
“He owns the B and B,” Dawn whispered back, tugging on clothes as fast as she could.
Quill waited until she was decent and then pulled open the door.
“Morning!” the owner said, his eyebrows raised. “It’s nice to see you on your feet. I thought you two might be getting an early start this morning, so I brought you some breakfast. Wouldn’t want to delay your departure at all.”
“Uh,” Quill said. “Right. Yeah. We’ll be out of here in twenty minutes or so. Thank you so much for your hospitality.”
Dawn bit her lip in disappointment as she watched the man set the tray of food down, shoot her a fairly censorious look, and then scurry out of the room. She didn’t want to get back on the road. She wanted to stay in this bed in this lovely room with Quill forever. She didn’t want to face the world and she definitely didn’t want to step into the unknown. Not when Quill hadn’t even finished his thought from before. Not when the unknown might completely ruin this blissful bubble they’d managed to create last night.
“Is it just me or is he kind of giving us the boot?” Quill asked.
“No, he definitely wants us to leave,” Dawn confirmed. “I mean, they only thought we were staying for one night and…” she trailed off, suddenly embarrassed about this part. “I think they’re kind of conservative. When I found them and asked for help, they were really uneasy that we weren’t married. They had me confirm like nine times that we weren’t romantically involved before they gave us a room. I even considered telling them that we were related.”
Quill laughed and ran his hand through his hair. “Well, that would have made walking in on us even more traumatic.”
“Yeah.”