Shifter Hunter

by Dante Steel

  “You know it.”

  “Will there be monsters like yetis and Baba Yaga? Or elves?”

  “Hmm,” Haru said. “No. We did not think of yetis when coming up with the shifters. There will be the traditional werewolves, of course, and the already mentioned sabre-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. Lions, tigers—”

  “And bears?” Elena cut in.

  “Oh, my,” Yuna added.

  Olivia burst out laughing.

  Gary sighed.

  Haru ignored them. “The portal is near the ocean. You can transfer at your leisure.”

  “Hey,” Olivia said, all pretenses of joking aside with a sudden appearance of wonder, anxiety, and fear in her green eyes. “Where’s Smaug? You guys didn’t bury him, did you?”

  “Not a chance,” Gary said glumly.

  Haru grimaced apologetically. “You can go to the new issue at your leisure, and allow me to reassure you that if Samuel August is alive, he will not be able to follow.”

  Chapter Four

  “If he’s alive,” Olivia said.

  “If who’s alive?” Nicoletta asked, approaching them. She made a point of not looking at Gary.

  Haru bowed. “I must go,” he said, and he walked away without another word.

  Nicoletta stared at his retreating backside. “If who’s alive?” she repeated through gritted teeth. “If someone says Smaug, I’m gonna—”

  “Get ready to do it, love,” Olivia said.

  Gary groaned.

  Nicoletta stiffened. “That’s impossible!”

  “There’s a new issue,” Elena said.

  Nicoletta’s eyes flashed, and she glowered at Elena then Gary, her gaze positively incensed.

  “Why do we need to go anywhere?” Nicoletta asked.

  “It might be fun,” Elena said.

  “We need to go home, not continue to play this stupid game!” Nicoletta shouted.

  Gary winced and carefully watched Olivia’s reaction.

  “You’re in the game,” she said quietly.

  Nicoletta nodded.

  “I am too,” Yuna said.

  “Who are you?” Nicoletta asked. “Why are you even here?”

  “I am Yuna. I am one of the developers. I am here to help from the inside.”

  "Maybe now that one of you is in here, your friends will actually start to try to get us out of here," Nicoletta griped.

  “Whatever happened to the hope that killing Smaug would get us out of here?” Elena asked.

  “We might not have killed him, remember?” Gary asked.

  Nicoletta held up her hand. "I know what we should do. We should all go to the bar and get trashed while Yuna here does her developer magic, and then we can all go home to our beds to sleep off our hangovers. Sound like a plan?"

  “I do not think that’s smart,” Elena argued.

  Nicoletta smirked. “You were pretty agreeable to things last night.”

  Elena’s face turned bright red.

  Olivia glanced from Nicoletta to Gary to Elena to Gary to Nicoletta to Elena.

  “You three—”

  “How are you feeling?” Gary blurted. “You drank a lot. You don’t have a headache, do you?”

  “Just a heartache,” she muttered.

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. Olivia reacting this way surprised him, but maybe it shouldn’t. Could his lack of being intimate with her yet start to cause an issue? He never intended to not have sex with her. He wanted to. He definitely wanted to. It just never worked out. Whenever they had been alone, it had been when villains or dragons and then vampires had been out and about and could attack at any second. Not exactly romantic. Didn’t exactly scream, “Rip off my clothes, throw me down, and ride me.”

  Nicoletta opened her mouth then shut it as if she thought better of it. Some of her anger faded, and she waved Olivia over. The curly-haired superhero grimaced and hesitated.

  The Hispanic sighed. “I just don’t understand why we have to jump through another hoop. Why another issue? Why are you people even worrying about that?” she asked, focusing on Yuna. “Are you guys just worried about making more money?”

  "It's not easy," Yuna said in her soft, lyrical voice. "We need higher tech equipment. We need to run tests. We need a lot of power. For all of that, we do need money. So, yes, we need to work on bringing you all and now me back, but we also need to generate revenue so that we can accomplish our goal." She nodded solemnly.

  “That makes sense,” Gary admitted.

  He had been upset when they came out with Vampire War. In fact, he had given Haru a lot of flak for that. Initially, Gary thought the issue was just so he and Elena and the other girls could get away from Smaug and be safe. Haru had been convinced Smaug couldn't cross over. Well, Gary had been wrong because other gamers had shown up, and Haru had been wrong because Smaug had shown up, too.

  “Still, why do we have to cross over?” Nicoletta demanded. “We’re superheroes here. The vampires are gone. We defeated the boss—”

  “More vampires are being generated for the other gamers,” Yuna explained patiently. “Also, with the possibility of Samuel August being alive, after all, I do not know if we can risk staying here. It is not safe for you, either.”

  Nicoletta wrinkled her nose. “And face new dangers there. Start all over again. What’s the point?” she grumbled.

  “I understand your frustration,” Yuna said. “I am sorry you feel this way. How can I help?”

  Nicoletta opened her mouth.

  “Besides the obvious.” Yuna smiled.

  “Nicoletta, can we talk?” Elena asked.

  Nicoletta grimaced. “I’m not in a good mood,” she said.

  “Come on.” Elena hooked her arm through Nicoletta, and they stepped to the side.

  Gary felt hopeless. He hated that Nicoletta was hurting so badly. Honestly, he still wasn’t sure how exactly he had screwed things up.

  “So…” Olivia said, closing the distance between them and forming a tight triangle. “What can you tell us about these tests?”

  Yuna blinked. “I can try to explain, but it’s a lot of technical jargon. We have to be careful about displacement and—”

  “Why can’t you just reverse whatever it is that you did to get yourself in the game?” Gary asked.

  “It is more complicated,” she said.

  “How so?” He was doing his best not to sound demanding, but shouldn’t it just be the opposite? Why did it have to be so complicated?

  “The game is in a fixed location,” she started.

  “In a game console,” Olivia said.

  “In a framework,” Yuna corrected. “Everyone who plays the game all comes here to this place. In their avatars, not their bodies, but you understand me, yes?”

  Gary nodded. “Can’t we just come out to one fixed location on Earth?”

  “Ideally, yes, but we have to factor in so many things. The rotation of the Earth, its relationship to the moon, the sun, the other planets. We can’t risk having us come back at the bottom of the ocean or far up high in the stratosphere.”

  “Wait. Why do you need to worry about all of that?” Elena asked. “I thought that would only have to be a factor if you were time traveling.”

  “In a sense, we are time traveling. I was hoping to bring each of us back to the moment or thereabouts to when we first entered the game to minimize the time we were gone. Plus, time in the game does not directly correspond to time in the real world.”

  Gary shook his head. “Just worry about bringing us back home,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t you have fancy mathematical equations for figuring all of that stuff out?” Olivia asked. “Either to go back in time or to just come back to the present? And if you did go back in time, how would that affect me?”

  “That… isn’t something I took into account…” Yuna lowered her head, dejected. She rubbed her throat and then between her boobs before catching Olivia’s gaze. “We are working with other scientists, yes.
It is a team effort. We are most curious about how Samuel August has been able to elude us. How he entered the game willingly. Gary, you came through by accident?”

  “Yep. I got struck by lightning while playing the game. Not something I recommend, by the way.”

  “No?” Yuna smiled.

  “Getting struck by lightning or getting sucked into the game?” Olivia asked. She sounded slightly bitter.

  Uh oh. Trap question.

  “Both?” His response came out a question.

  Olivia tilted her head to the side, considering his answer, and then nodded. “I guess, yeah.” She turned to the woman. “So, Yuna, while you’ve been working, you’ve been keeping tabs on Gary, right? On all of us?”

  “Ah… yes…” Yuna said. Her porcelain skin blushed deeply with her embarrassment.

  “You know all about Gary’s harem, then, huh?” Olivia pressed.

  Gary’s stomach tightened. Oh, man. This wasn’t good.

  “Yes,” Yuna admitted. “I didn’t mean to watch, but last night…” Her blush was even darker now.

  “What happened last night?” Olivia asked. She glanced at Gary before focusing solely on the Japanese woman.

  Fuck. She had guessed already about the threesome, and now, she wanted confirmation.

  Gary opened his mouth, but Yuna beat him to it.

  “You drank too much. At least your avatar did. From what Gary said earlier, you were drinking back home?” At Olivia’s nod, Yuna continued, “Gary went back to his room, but he needed help. Elena and Nicoletta came to his rescue—”

  “I didn’t need to be rescued,” Gary muttered. “I was drunk, but I wasn’t incapable.”

  “You definitely weren’t incapable of performing,” Yuna said, her face entirely bright red now.

  “With Elena? Or Nicoletta?” Olivia asked.

  “Ah…” Yuna glanced at Gary. “I do not know if I should say.”

  Gary swallowed and rubbed his throat. He should man up. Own what he had done. He didn’t regret it, but he did wish Olivia had been there. All night long, he had asked the two girls if they had any regrets, and they hadn’t. Now, he did have one. Olivia.

  Considering that he did have a regret after all, did that mean that Nicoletta truly did regret their actions, too? Fuck, that would be terrible. He had been so careful to make sure neither did anything they didn’t want to. She must have said that to hurt him.

  “With both of them,” he finally admitted when it became obvious that Yuna wasn’t going to rat him out.

  Hurt flashed in Olivia’s eyes. It took a lot to quiet her, but she was pale and wan.

  “Olivia, if you weren’t—”

  “It’s my fault. I passed out. I lost out. I always do. You all are in the game. I’m not. You’ve slept—”

  Gary took her by the elbow and moved to the side, leaving Yuna an island unto herself and leading Olivia away from the other two girls.

  “—with both Elena and Nicoletta both separately and together,” she said. “Me, though? I’m the one out in the cold, and I’m the one who is most down for anything, anywhere, anytime, with anyone!”

  “With anyone?” Gary repeated a little coolly. “Does that include Yuna?”

  “Would that make you jealous?”

  “Damn straight it would!” he growled.

  "Hmm. Are you sure about that?" She tapped a finger to her chin. "Because maybe your issue isn't so much that you love all of us. Maybe you just love to shove your cock into any opening you can find."

  A muscle in Gary’s neck twitched, and he clamped down on his jaw, trying to keep his anger in check. “That’s not true, and you know it.”

  “Are you sure about that? How many other girls have you had sex with?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Oh, but if you asked me that question, you would want an answer. You would demand it, wouldn’t you?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t ask that because I don’t care about your past. Well, I do because I care about you, just not your sexual past. That I don’t need to know about.”

  She stiffened. “Is that so?”

  Immediately, shame washed over him. “You can tell me anything at all,” he offered. “I would never judge you.”

  “No?” She brushed her hair back. “I was forced to give head when I was seven. You knew that, right?”

  He nodded. She had eluded to that before. “You don’t have to tell me—”

  “The first time I gave a blowjob willingly, I was ten. I offered to do it to my teacher to get a better grade. He refused and told me if I wanted a better grade, that he would get me a tutor. So I got a tutor and blew him instead.”

  Gary’s eyes widened. “Please, Olivia—”

  “I had sex for the first time at thirteen. I didn’t like it with that guy, so I tried it with a few others that year. It wasn’t until a year later that I started to actually enjoy it some. That was mostly because I had discovered my own hands and fingers and my clit. I think I was trying to make sex enjoyable to erase the bad memories with my mom’s boyfriend, that she put me up for adoption because I bit a chunk out of his dick… She chose him over me. It’s amazing I still call her mom.”

  “Olivia.”

  “I’m not done. It’s rude to interrupt. I know some might consider me addicted to sex, but I’m not. I’ve made peace with the past. I’ve taken ownership of my body. I do what I want. Yes, that means I do who I want, too, girl or guy. I’ve never thought I would be happy in a monogamous relationship. So, when all of this happened…” She shrugged. “I thought I had met my people. I mean, I knew Elena was freaked out. Nicoletta seemed more willing to come around, but…”

  “I’m sorry we haven’t had… I’m sorry we haven’t made love,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, Gary.” Olivia rolled her eyes. “It’s not just about sex, dumbass.”

  “I know.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry I haven’t made you feel more loved.”

  Her green eyes welled with tears, but she smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ll let you grovel and make it up to me twenty times over. Then I’ll forgive you.”

  Gary laughed, and she giggled, but he didn’t feel happy. He didn’t feel better. So far, he had failed Olivia. Somehow, he would make things right. By her, by Nicoletta, by Elena. And then, they would go home…

  And hopefully not back to their separate lives but to continue loving each other and being together back in the real world.

  That was Gary’s greatest fear. That he would one day lose the loves he had gained.

  Chapter Five

  Gary stared down at Olivia. Her cleavage was impressive, and her superhero attire showed more than a little of her ass cheeks. She was one hot woman. It didn’t matter if she was damaged some. So was he. To some extent, everyone was.

  “I’ll grovel,” he said hoarsely, “but first, can I have a kiss?”

  Olivia wasn't looking at him. She was waving over Nicoletta and Elena. The other two girls seemed a bit subdued, but the anger Nicoletta had previously shown seemed gone.

  “What are we going to do?” Gary asked once they came over.

  Nicoletta glanced over her shoulder at Yuna. “I guess we’ll go over to the new issue.”

  “Shifter War,” Elena said eagerly.

  “You aren’t a vampire fan?” Olivia asked.

  “Ugh, no. Who wants to have a monster be romanticized when it can only survive by drinking blood? That’s disgusting. And disturbing.”

  “Hey, I never said I was a fan. If I could, I would Buffy Edward’s ass so hard he’d be staked into Lestat.”

  “You didn’t like Lestat?” Nicoletta cut in. “I was more of a Louis fan myself.”

  “Ugh. Neither, thanks. The only vampire I might like was Dracula,” Elena explained. “He was terrifying.”

  “Not in the movies I saw,” Olivia remarked.

  “Read the book,” Elena said. “Or do you need me to read it to you?”

  “Oh, would
you!” Olivia clapped her hands and jumped up and down like an excited little girl. Her boobs bounced with the movement. “Bedtime story!”

  Elena laughed. “If you want nightmares.”

  “Then we can cuddle,” Olivia said with a wink.

  For a moment, Elena froze. Then, she nodded slowly. “Maybe. I guess that would only be fair if I’m the one who gave you the nightmares.” She beamed. “Or maybe Dracula should be the one to cuddle you.”

  “As long as he doesn’t suck my perfect neck.” Olivia stretched out her neck and ran her hand over it.

  “I’ll suck your neck,” Gary volunteered.

  “Down, boy,” Olivia said.

  Was she talking to him or his erection?

  Nicoletta rubbed her chin. “I always appreciated Damon Salvatore.”

  “Who was he?” Elena asked.

  “A hottie from The Vampire Diaries,” Olivia explained.

  “Can we not talk about hot guys?” Gary complained. “I thought we were going to cross over to the issue.”

  “Oh, is someone feeling underappreciated?” Olivia asked with a turnabout is fair play gleam in her eyes.

  “I’m confident enough in my masculinity that you girls can talk about any guy you think is hot,” Gary said.

  “So long as…” Elena said. “There’s gotta be a catch.”

  “So long as we go to Gary’s bed and not theirs,” Olivia answered for him.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “And it’s not fair for you to talk about pop culture so much. I haven’t seen any of the Dracula movies or The Vampire Diaries, and Louis and Les… What’s his name? What are they from?”

  “Interview with a Vampire,” Elena explained.

  Nicoletta smiled apologetically. “I forgot how sheltered of a life you lived.”

  “Just because I didn’t see a lot of movies or TV shows growing up doesn’t mean that I’m sheltered,” he protested.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s the definition of sheltered,” Olivia said.

  “He didn’t seem too sheltered…” Nicoletta cleared her throat.

  “Last night?” Olivia asked. She fluffed her hair. “It’s one thing to have a threesome. An orgy is a whole ‘other animal. Are you sure he’s up for it?”