by Selena Scott
She kept her speed low, knowing that, though bears were very fast, they weren’t quite as agile as a wolf through the trees. This wasn’t about racing, this was about burning off their remaining energy. They’d been cooped up in that car for too many days.
She ran until she needed a break and when she collapsed on the ground in a heap, she was shifted back into her human form again. He collapsed on top of her, man not bear. They sweated and panted and breathed and eventually laughed as the light got long between the trees and the afternoon gave way to evening.
“Not much of a practice, huh?” she said after a while.
“How did you know I needed a run?” he asked, balancing his chin on top of two stacked fists.
“You were looking like your feelings for me were about to give you a panic attack,” she said, gently stroking one hand down his cheek. “I figured you could blow off some steam in your bear form. It would be good for you.”
He turned his head to catch her palm in a kiss. “I guess I should stop being surprised that you know everything. You’re the smartest, most intuitive person I’ve ever met.” He frowned. “How the hell are we going to make you look like a fuck-up to the Director?”
“What’s your plan?” She quirked an eyebrow at him. “I know you have a plan.”
He stood and tugged her to her feet alongside him. “Besides the obvious: you pretending that your sense of smell isn’t the most incredible thing any of us have ever seen. I think you have to fuck up your shift.”
“Fuck up my shift? What do you mean?”
“I mean that the Director isn’t going to want to deal with you if you… how should I put this? If you can’t access your shift very well.”
“You mean that you want me to stand there and strain and pretend I’m trying to shift and then be like, whoops, guess I can’t?”
He laughed and started heading back in the direction they’d come. “No, no. I mean… jeez, how to explain this to you. You’re so in tune with your shift, you’ve been effortlessly doing it for so long, never suppressed it or hid it, you probably don’t ever consciously think of the mechanics of a shift, do you?”
“The mechanics?” The idea of a shift having any sort of mechanism behind it was utterly foreign to her. For as long as she’d been shifting, to shift was simply to be. It was uncomplicated and simple.
“Let’s get back to the car. I’ll explain it there.”
CHAPTER NINE
Sasha drove an even nine miles per hour above the speed limit just like he’d done for the last three hundred miles. Everyone else slept in the back of the SUV besides Orion, who was awake and peering out the window, watching the country pass them by.
This was easily the strangest road trip Sasha had ever been on. It was a ragtag, argumentative group and he really only knew Orion and Phoenix, and even them not very well. But he didn’t care. He’d do anything to get Dawn back. To see her safe and well and whole.
Every thought of her was deeply painful, like a wound that someone was dousing with pepper spray. He would never forgive himself for just letting her go like that.
If any part of himself had even thought her a little bit in danger, he wouldn’t have let her leave without him.
But, of course, he hadn’t sensed a thing.
His last girlfriend had lovingly referred to him as a big, dumb animal. Apparently it was part of his sexual appeal. And thus, Sasha hadn’t exactly minded the character trait. But he certainly hated it now. What kind of shifter couldn’t sense danger or deception? Wasn’t he supposed to be more in tune with the natural world?
He’d roundly failed Dawn and her brothers in letting her go with this Quill guy. So, now, he figured the least he could do was drive. Honestly, he’d have carried each of them to Mississippi on his back if it had come to that. He was not going to fail them again.
Mississippi was where they were headed. To meet the woman who Jesse knew. The one who had more information on where Quill might be taking Dawn. Frankly, Sasha was confused about the whole thing. Were they looking for the Director or weren’t they? Was Quill working for the Director or wasn’t he? If he wasn’t, then how the hell would this woman be able to know where Quill and Dawn were headed? Was she related to Quill?
For that matter, why was everyone even so certain that Quill was leading Dawn somewhere dangerous? It could be that they’d realized they were in love and decided to leave town before her brothers could break them up, Sasha reflected glumly.
But what did he know? Once again, he was apparently the worst at sensing danger or deception and thus should not be trusted further than he could be thrown. Which was not far at all. He was a big guy.
Not as big as Jesse, though, who took up nearly the entire back seat on his own.
A polar bear shifter, they’d told him, though Sasha hadn’t seen him shift into a bear yet.
They were nearing their destination, pulling off the highway toward Biloxi, and he’d have to wake Jesse soon because he didn’t know where to go once they got to the Gulf-side city.
He hated to wake Jesse, though, who’d been sleeping for the last eight hours and looked like he could sleep for about twenty more. Sasha felt like a break from driving and a nice long nap was probably the least he could give Jesse.
He thought about Jesse’s hardships, all that loss and grief and torture, and Sasha’s stomach hardened into a peach pit. Besides losing Dawn, and her rejection of him, Sasha hadn’t experienced much heartbreak in his life. All his family members were alive and well. And even growing up as a shifter, he hadn’t had a very hard time of it. He was sure that his parents had been very scared of their kids getting found out and dragged away to the camps. But they’d shielded him from those anxieties. Growing up in his small corner of Salt Lake City, taking camping trips to shift, Sasha had never felt in danger.
He’d been happy.
It was a little hard not to feel guilty about that happiness in this group. Between Jesse and Quill, it seemed like Sasha had gotten off exceptionally easily in life.
The group roused as they got off the highway and Jesse called from the back seat, “Take a right here. And then a sharp left. It’s a half mile down, red house on stilts.”
The house wasn’t hard to find, though it was more of a faded mauve than red and it wasn’t on stilts so much as fifteen feet of brick pillars. Most of the houses around here were raised up in some manner or another, due to hurricane season. The two-story house looked dumpy in the way that anything that had ever been battered by weather that much looked dumpy. It had a terra cotta roof missing a few shingles and wind chimes that played an unholy tune in the light wind. The windows were black eyes.
It faced the bay. When they got out of the SUV, Sasha felt something like trepidation zip upwards, from the base of his spine to the back of his head, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the wind off the water.
Stretching and looking around, the group went up the rickety porch stairs and assembled in front of the door. Jesse raised his hand to knock but suddenly Wren’s hand shot out and stilled his fist. “Hold on,” she said, pointing to an old, peeling paint sign next to the door. “This is who you brought us to see?”
Sasha leaned in, deciphering the sign. It read Madame Celestine: Divination, Tea Leaves, Tarot, and Palm Reading.
Jesse had brought them to a psychic?
“Yup,” Jesse said tonelessly.
“Hold on,” Ida said. “When you said you knew someone who knew where Quill had taken Dawn, you meant that you knew a psychic who could figure it out for us?”
“What’s a psychic?” Phoenix asked. Orion also looked clueless. Which made sense to Sasha, considering they’d grown up completely away from humankind.
Diana and Ida had a quick aside with their partners, explaining what they needed to know, and when the two brothers came back, there was real anger in their eyes.
“We just drove from Utah all the way to Mississippi to talk to a crazy woman?” Phoenix demanded.
&nb
sp; Jesse, for his part, looked undisturbed. “She’s not crazy. She’s the real deal. And if you don’t insult her, she’ll probably help us. She has a soft spot for shifters.”
Sasha was looking back and forth at all the faces in front of him. There were confusing mixtures of despair, hope, skepticism, anger, and exhaustion everywhere he looked. He didn’t know where exactly he fell on this matter except to think that Jesse must have balls the size of Canada to pull a stunt like this.
Unbidden, the front door swung open and there stood a very tall woman with long brown hair, sunglasses, and a long, worn flannel robe. She balanced one foot against her knee and pressed a knuckle into her temple like she had a splitting headache. “Can I help y’all?”
Her voice had a distinct midwestern lilt to it, the “y’all” obviously something she’d picked up later in her life.
“Celeste.”
The woman peered through the group, her mouth dropping open. “Jesse?”
She took two steps forward and tossed her arms around Jesse’s shoulders. “Hey,” he said simply.
“Come in! Come in!” She gestured for everyone to come inside after her.
“Awful lot of surprise for a psychic,” Wren whispered wryly as she stepped past Sasha. “You’d think that’d be bad for business.”
“Just because I’m psychic doesn’t mean I’m all-knowing,” the woman, Celeste, shouted back to Wren.
Wren looked distinctly uncomfortable at having been called out.
“She’s got ears like a bat,” Jesse said with a wink as he followed Celeste back into the bowels of her house.
The house was dark, the sunlight seeming to dissolve into dust the second it touched the windows. They passed two rooms with the furniture covered over in sheets, and a grand, sweeping staircase that led to a second-floor balcony. There were tilting stacks of books on almost every stair. She led them through an affectionately disordered kitchen and then finally onto a glassed-in sunporch on the back of the house. It was more of a greenhouse than anything and Sasha was immediately swamped with the scent of fresh herbs the second he stepped foot in the blindingly bright room. After having walked through her dark house, they were all blinking in the sunlight.
Celeste pointed out chairs that had been initially easy to miss amongst the rampant and wild green of her plants. They all took seats and took turns introducing themselves to her. When it came Sasha’s time to introduce himself, he almost stumbled over his own name. There was something about her face that was unnerving to him. Maybe it was because they hadn’t seen her eyes yet.
“I guess I understand why you’re wearing sunglasses indoors,” Sasha said, gesturing around to the glaring brightness of the sunroom.
“Huh? Oh, no.” Celeste pressed the heel of her hand to her temple. “I’m just hungover as shit.”
Wren scoffed. Ida looked uneasy. Orion and Phoenix exchanged glances. Diana merely looked weary. Jesse looked amused. And Sasha? He couldn’t for the life of him have guessed at the expression he was making.
“Sorry, but how do you two know each other?” he asked.
Celeste chuckled and Jesse raised his eyebrows.
“Let’s just say we used to… work together,” Celeste said.
Jesse’s eyebrows rose even further. “Very eloquent way of putting that.”
“I’m in the business of spin.”
“Is that what you call it?” Wren asked, her arms crossed over her chest. “You take facts and spin them and charge people for access to your ‘third eye’?”
“We get it, honey,” Celeste said, crossing one leg over the other, baring quite a lot of skin through the split in her ratty robe. “You’re a skeptic. You can relax now.”
Wren looked like she was about to spit railroad spikes, but Celeste had already dismissed her.
“So,” Celeste said, turning back to Jesse. “What brings you here, sweetheart?”
“Got some trouble,” he said simply. “These people need an answer or two.”
“Huh.” She leaned back in her chair and tried to look into the kitchen. “Dang, can’t see a thing from out here. Anyone know what time it is?”
“Two forty,” Sasha supplied helpfully. Because that’s the kind of helper he was right now. He was the big, dumb animal who drove everyone around and could read a clock. He frowned. He wasn’t exactly knocking his own socks off right now.
“All right, then.” Celeste sighed and crossed her legs the other way, revealing just as much skin on this side as she had on the other. “I’ve got a little time before my first client. Shoot.”
Jesse turned to Orion and Phoenix expectantly.
They stared blankly back at him.
“You want us to tell her the whole story?” Orion asked, a look of confused surprise on his face. “But we don’t even know who this woman is.”
“You already told one stranger,” Jesse said, gesturing to himself. “Might as well tell the story to the more useful stranger.”
Phoenix looked very much like her usefulness remained to be seen but Orion merely shrugged and launched into the story.
The psychic recrossed her legs a few times, her unbrushed hair hanging in tangles over her shoulders. The sunglasses were really creeping Sasha out because he couldn’t tell in which direction she was ever looking. Though he could have sworn by the spiders marching over his skin that she was looking at him a fair amount.
Finally, Orion got to the end of his tale, the part where they arrived on her doorstep, and he stopped talking, looking at the psychic expectantly.
Half a minute of silence went past while the psychic studied her fingernails, one bare foot bopping in a pool of sunlight. Finally, she spoke. “Y’all gonna pass the night in Biloxi? My brother-in-law’s got a house he rents out a few blocks away. Should house all of you. That is, if the lovers stay in the same beds.”
“That’s… all you have to say?” Ida asked quietly, her eyes big.
The woman shrugged. “I’m sorry for your misfortunes, of course. Have y’all considered filing a missing persons report?”
Diana sucked her teeth. “You want us to file a missing persons report on two missing shifters? You think the cops would give a rat’s ass about that?”
“Oh,” Celeste said, looking at the ceiling now, seeming to study some ivy that crept along the glass. “You’d be surprised. There’s some good eggs in the police force. You might get lucky.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Phoenix griped, standing up so fast his chair scooted back. “We’re wasting time.”
Celeste shrugged. “I’ll call my brother-in-law so y’all have someplace to hang your hats tonight.”
Jesse stood, kissed Celeste’s cheek, and started leading the group out of the greenhouse. Celeste remained seated and all but Phoenix and Sasha headed back into the kitchen. Quick as a snake, Celeste’s hand snapped up Phoenix’s wrist, stilling him.
“I’d keep your phone on tonight if I were you,” she said in a low voice. “Loud enough to wake you. Oh, and don’t say no. To what he asks of you.”
Phoenix stared down at her for a long minute and then kept walking.
Sasha glanced at Celeste sitting askance in her chair, all that leg showing, those sunglasses revealing nothing. There was no reason why it should make him a little nervous to walk past her. No reason at all.
He nodded at her as he walked past. “Uh, thank you.” What exactly was he thanking her for? “For your time.”
She mumbled something and seemed to be smothering a cough.
He stopped in his tracks.
“Sorry?” he asked, jamming his hands in his pockets.
“Nothing!” she said, waving one hand in the air and looking for all the world like she was trying valiantly to choke down a laugh. Even her lips trembled.
“O…kay,” Sasha said, elongating the word into two distinct parts. Mostly because he had no idea what else to say.
He turned back around and was three steps further when she mumbled something agai
n. He faced her again. “What’s that?”
“Nothing, nothing.” She waved her hand again through the air.
At least this time she seemed to have controlled her laughter.
He turned halfway back toward the kitchen, his heart beating like crazy in his chest and he wasn’t exactly sure why. “Are you, uh, are you sure? It seemed like you were saying something.”
She rose up suddenly from her chair in one smooth motion, a chunk of her hair falling forward to cover one of the sunglass lenses. Sasha found himself sucking in a breath because in that moment she was no longer the kooky quasi-psychic that’d opened her house to them. No, she was grace and pride and kinda sexy. She was sort of doing this Jessica Rabbit in a ratty flannel robe thing and even more surprising, it was really kinda working for him.
But then she walked past him and laid a hand on his shoulder for just a second. “It’s okay, champ. Don’t worry. I won’t tell you.”
“What!?” Sasha followed her into her kitchen and suddenly felt like a toddler throwing a fit. He was half a second from stomping his foot. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Of course Sasha knew that curiosity killed the cat and all that. But he’d never been that fond of cats anyways.
“Of course I want to know now that you’ve laid it all out like that!” he insisted crossly. He honestly couldn’t remember if he’d ever been this openly frustrated with a near stranger before. He was generally the absolute picture of politeness. It was one of the things people liked the most about him. He was un-ruffle-able. Ever-affable. Sweet Sasha. Patient Sasha. Big, Dumb Animal Sasha.
She’d crossed through the kitchen and into a pantry. Sasha stood in the doorway and watched as she opened a few jars, sniffing their contents, recapping them, and putting them back on the shelves. Finally she found what she was looking for. She brushed past him.