by J. K Harper
“What do you see, Mazz?” Jordan asked.
The wolf laughed from deep in her throat, it was a velvet sound, both earthy and ethereal. “Everything, I see everything. So much has happened here, in this home. I see bears and wolves, witches and secrets.”
“The thing? Do you see the thing?”
“I see you have a secret, my Alpha, but I shall not tell the others.” She smiled as she said it. Across the room, Duchess cocked an eyebrow in question while Little Katie raided the fridge.
The home was really quite lovely—very spacious and made to last. It wasn’t one of these disposable homes so many people seemed to live in these days. The wooden floors would last for centuries. The stone walls would never crack. The Alpha’s home was a castle disguised as mid-century modern and Jordan felt a brief stab of shame for robbing it.
And then she remembered the baby growing inside her.
If a pack was expensive to feed and clothe, how bad would a baby be?
And what if the child was a mortal? The father had been. Oh, she knew who he was and she could smell his scent all over the house. They’d had one night together and she’d left him spent and exhausted in the morning without any plans to return. She’d just been scratching an itch with him. He’d been a warm body—a plaything—nothing more.
She’d been trying to keep him from her thoughts—the baby was hers, after all. Not his. It had nothing to do with him. She’d made the choice to lay with him. She’d made the choice to forego protection as she had so many times before. Bear shifters, historically, found it very difficult to conceive unless they’d found their mates. And with her supernatural gifts, STDs were never an issue. Why wear a condom when skin on skin felt so damn good?
The house smelled too much like him, like Sebastian. She hadn’t realized at first, because the Alpha’s scent was so powerful, but now that she had picked it up she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Sebastian’s mouth on hers. The taste of his skin on her lips. The feel of him inside her. The warmth in his eyes. The dimples in his cheeks as he smiled. It all came back in a rush that made her knees tremble and her breath quicken in her chest.
“Hurry, Mazzy,” she begged.
“The Alpha’s out of town, yeah?” Duchess rumbled. “What’s the hurry?”
“Right? Like, no one at all is going to find us out here. We are in the middle of nowhere,” Little Katie laughed. “We can do whatever we want! In fact, I think I’m going to shower. It’s been so long since I had a proper scrub up.” And before Jordan could say anything, the fox shifter had shed her clothes and run off to the bathroom.
Mazzy spun still, her fingers plucking at the air like she was playing an invisible harp. She was inches above the ground, held aloft by whatever arcane forces she commanded. “I see threads of magic woven into the wood. There are traps and alarms. Old spells and new. Your Alpha knows a witch. A powerful witch.”
Jordan pinched her nose. This wasn’t part of the plan. Blaine hadn’t said anything about magic when he brought her the job.
Duchess grunted. “Don’t like magic.”
“Me neither,” Jordan agreed.
“I do,” Mazzy said with a breathy whisper.
“Where’s the job from, boss?” Duchess asked.
Jordan considered before answering. Blaine was her secret. Her sort-of boyfriend. He wasn’t exactly mortal and wasn’t exactly a witch. He was coy about what he was, which Jordan appreciated. Professionally he was a high-end fence, catering to the magical community. He found rare items for shifters and witches and other supernaturals, or for mortals who were in the know. The pack knew him, but she’d kept her steamier relations with him a secret.
“Blaine,” Mazzy said. “I hear his name on your lips. The shadow broker. The midnight salesman.”
“Blaine? That dude with the slicked black hair?” Duchess shook her head. “He’s a creep.”
“He’s not so bad, once you get used to him,” Jordan said. “And anyway, it’s a job. A high-paying job.”
“True.”
Mazzy reached out and plucked a thread only she could see and then fell to the floor. Her slow moving tornado of debris fell, too, hitting the ground in a clatter. “There,” she said. “There. There. There. I’ve pushed aside the magic, rerouted it into the walls and plumbing. The way to the vault is clear but not for long. The magic is strong and if it were to be disabled, it would alert the caster and she with sable wings and hungry eyes would fall upon us.”
“Well, that sounds bad so lets not do that, okay?” Jordan said with a smile. “No sable wings or hungry eyes tonight. We’ll just get the thing and get out.”
“Downstairs,” Mazzy said. “Always downstairs.”
Jordan took the lead, walking on the reinforced wood stairs down deeper into the home. What would it be like to have your own home? Not just some shack in the woods or squatting for a few weeks in some vacation house—but to have a real home that was all yours? It had never been on Jordan mind’s before and she was surprised to find the thought bubbling up now. She’d always been happy being a nomad, a vagabond. There was freedom in not being tied down to some windblown farm, scraping the soil a little more bare every year, like her parents did. That wasn’t living—it was just dying a little slower.
But now she saw the house—no, the home—and it made something inside her squirm with envy. She wanted this. Stability and predictability. Was it the pregnancy or was she just getting older?
The next floor was a wide open space, one of those living rooms with a sunken bit in the middle and a large sofa shaped like a C surrounding a positively enormous television. An unused bar clung to one wall and a pool table with deep scratches on the sides leaned against the other. The far wall was ground floor windows and glass doors, looking out over the deep dark woods. Jordan caught the scent of laundry, of a pantry, of dusty storage boxes hidden just out of sight. It was a basement like a thousand others, but it was exactly the kind of thing she’d never had.
“Can you imagine living in a place like this?” she said, pausing for a moment.
“Nope,” Duchess rumbled. “Need sky over my head. Not all this concrete and steel. It’s unnatural.”
Mazzy smiled widely. “I could live here. With some redecorating. I’d get rid of the pool table where blood was spilled and the bar haunted by memories of what could have been. I’d fill the room with pillows and golden drapes and take my lovers there,” she pointed to one very specific place at the edge of the sofa, “and also against that glass door there. I’d like to feel my breasts pressed against the cool glass while Daniel or Padraig or one of the others took me wantonly from behind.” A trembling sigh escaped from her lips and the scent of arousal burst from her like confetti at a party.
Duchess growled in annoyance.
“Focus, please,” Jordan said to the wolf. “Where’s the object? Blaine said you should be able to sense it. It’ll smell like—what did he say?—licorice and blood and ice.”
Mazzy frowned and closed her eyes again. “Those are not appealing sensations. I’d much rather think about the cool glass on my nipples and the hot cock in my—wait. Yes, yes. I feel it. It is dark. It is evil. Why does Blaine want this? Are we sure? So sure? That he should have this?”
Duchess snorted. “Five million dollars.”
My baby, Jordan silently added. I can’t raise her like this.
“Very well,” Mazzy continued. “Below us is another floor. Small and secret. Rarely opened. The door has been sealed. The way occluded. When is a room not a room?”
“When it has no door,” Jordan said. “He’s sealed it off. Duchess? Your turn. Mazzy? Show her where.”
The barefoot werewolf took dancing steps around the basement. Her skirts swirled. The bells on her ankle jingled. She looked wistfully at the glass door. And then abruptly, she stopped. She lifted one foot from the floor and shifted her toes, drawing forth the sharpened claws of the wolf and then with quick strokes she carved an X into the floor.
&nb
sp; “Here, dear bear sister. Bring your strength here.”
Duchess stomped over to the X, dropped to her knees and brought both of her fists down hard on the wooden floor. The entire house shook with the blow. The windows rattled. The TV fell over. And the floor splintered and fell inwards revealing a hidden room.
Jordan walked to the edge of the hole. Peering in she could see a jumble of broken wood from the crushed floorboards and a large iron-banded steamer trunk.
She was just about to call for Katie, when she heard the click of a gun’s hammer being drawn back.
Chapter 4
Sebastian and Lucky moved through the woods like shadows. They made no noise. They stirred no breeze. A strange van was parked behind the house, on one of the old fire trails, but it seemed to be empty. Whoever had been inside was now in his father’s house.
How pissed off was his dad going to be when he came home and found his house robbed? He would never leave Bearfield again, never let Sebastian be Alpha again. This was literally the last thing he’d expected to have to deal with and the last thing he wanted to see.
Lucky met his gaze and gestured with his hand and Sebastian understood. They’d split up, enter the house from opposite sides, and stop the thieves. The ease of communication was unreal to him. Lucky’s bear had spoken and somehow Sebastian had heard and understood in some primal way. He wasn’t a shifter in the way they were—he didn’t have an animal in his heart—but it didn’t matter. They were pack. He was Lucky’s Alpha. They were bound together in their souls.
Lucky went around to the back door, moving like the ghost of a shadow while Sebastian came from the front. He hadn’t been in many fights in his life, only one since becoming a skinchanger, but the thought of some jerks stealing from his dad was enough to make him crave the feeling of his knuckles dusting some fool’s jaw.
Scents hung in the air, rich and thick with meaning that was beyond Sebastian’s expertise. If his dad was here, or his uncles, they could have sniffed and told him everything about the thieves. “Four men, all of them shifters, and the smallest one had trout for breakfast,” his uncle Matt would have said. Michael would have told him what they all were wearing. And his father, big angry Marcus, would have told him the best possible way to break each of them. He could have called Matt or Michael. They would have been there in ten minutes. But Sebastian was the Alpha. He needed to do it himself. Well, with Lucky, too. But somehow that was okay because Lucky was already there. He didn’t call Lucky for help.
Masculinity was a funny thing. Help was okay, as long as you didn’t ask for it. A fight was okay, as long as you didn’t start it. As if making choices was itself stigmatized.
The door to his home had been shattered, smacked right off the hinges. It had been a new door, too. Replaced after the Winter Witch had messed up the old one last year. Sebastian almost walked right into his house—just trudged right in like he was a kid home from school—before he remembered he could shift and do it a bit more sneakily.
But what to be? His uncles never had to make that choice. They were man or they were bear. There was nothing else. The wolves in town could take on a form between man and wolf, but even still they were limited. For Sebastian, the only limit was his imagination. He could be a cobra and bite the robbers. He could be a chameleon and walk through the home unnoticed. He could charge in as an elephant, stomping and trumpeting. But no, until he knew who was inside he had to be quiet. No elephants. No polar bears. No great white sharks. Changing into a mosquito would work, but he found insect senses completely disorienting. It was like having his brain smushed into a kaleidoscope. No, thank you. He could turn into an ant, but getting anywhere would take forever. A squirrel? But no, the scent would immediately attract attention from the shifters inside.
He needed something small and quiet and so familiar that no one would question his presence. Not even for a second.
So that was how Sebastian decided to sneak into his own home, on Christmas Eve, in the form of a mouse.
The world grew huge around him and colors became vivid. One second he was a man regarding a doorway and the next he was a mouse, struggling to crawl out of his own now titanic underwear and to ignore the way it smelled.
He hadn’t practiced being a mouse at all. Wolf, yes. Bear? Oh yeah. He’d even spent some time as a bird, just because it seemed useful and because flying was tricky to get the hang of. But a mouse? First time.
The world smelled delicious. His little nose twitched and picked out every crumb and morsel on the floor. The kitchen called to him with a siren song, beckoning with promises of cheese crumbs, of peanut butter crackers, of grapes in a bowl. There were other mice nearby, too. He could sense them in the walls and floors. They were intensely curious about him and wanted him to come play with them. How much fun would that be? To play chase-the-tail under the floorboards? Or scurry-scurry-scaredypants up the plumbing in the walls? When the thieves were dealt with, he’d return and meet the mice of the floor and the mice of the wall and make peace between their clans. He’d bring them peanut butter and throw a little party. It’d be fun.
Sebastian shook his little brown fuzzy head. The problem with changing his skin was that his thoughts changed, too. They were bent and warped around the animal form. The day he’d spent being an ant had been particularly hard to shake off. Even after he’d returned to man form, he’d marched everywhere in straight lines, hoarded food, and tried lifting every heavy thing he’d seen.
Focus.
Sebastian closed his eyes and remembered his father’s face. He remembered Marcus’s hug and the way his father smelled, like a mountain after a fresh rain. And when he opened his eyes he remembered what he had to do. On quick little feet, he zipped around the main floor, noting the smashed door, the refrigerator door standing open, and the sound of someone in the bath.
Someone was in the bath? Why would they break into his home and take a bath? Were they old friends with his father? No, none of Marcus’s friends would smash his door and eat all his food. So they must be so cocky and self-assured that the idea of a bath didn’t faze them.
There were four strange scents in the house. If one was in the bath, where were the other three? And what were they after in his father’s house anyway? Marcus had money, but it was in the bank. He didn’t have a huge suitcase of cash hidden in the house, aside from a few thousand stashed in their earthquake preparedness bag. Marcus didn’t have jewels or gold. They were bears, not ravens, they didn’t need shiny things or material wealth. Give them a fully belly and a warm place to sleep and they were pretty happy.
So either the thieves were complete loons who didn’t know what they wanted to steal, and just wanted food and baths and to smash things, or they wanted something very specific that his father had. Maybe a file? His computer?
Sebastian scurried past the bathroom door, where he caught the slightly panic-inducing scent of fox, and went under the door of his father’s office. No one had been inside. The computer was untouched. The filing cabinet stood still and strong.
It was something else. Something downstairs.
Sebastian hopped down the steps, one at a time, landing silently on his little mouse legs. And then he froze. Three women—three shifters—were in the room, not far from the couch where Sebastian had spent way too many afternoons playing video games and reading. The first he noticed was a wolf shifter—her scent was unmistakable—she was all earth mothery and covered in jewelry, spinning and mumbling and swirling with arcane energies that made Sebastian’s whiskers twitch awfully bad. The second was a huge bear of a woman with a shaved head and an acrid scent that spoke of violence. As he watched, the bear woman pounded the floor with her fists and ripped a huge hole in the floor.
Was there something under the floor? Some secret his father had never told him about? Marcus didn’t like to share information, not even with his own son. It wouldn’t have surprised Sebastian in the least to know there something secreted in the foundation.
Across
the room, outside the glass, Sebastian spied Lucky. The cowboy had his guns drawn and his face was twisted with anger. Lucky moved up near the glass door and then his body was smoke, for the briefest of moments. He flowed through the space between door and window and reformed into a man inside the room, guns still in hand.
The fourth shifter woman had a scent Sebastian couldn’t identify. It was bear and something else. It was familiar, like a song he’d once loved but had then forgotten. She was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a leather jacket over a black dress. Her skin was a dusky brown that made his heart race with familiarity. He’d seen that skin, he’d seen her. She’d looked different the last time, with a mohawk and leather pants, but as she turned to regard the gaping hole in the floor, he saw Jordan and recognized her as Lady Nothing and his little mousey heart jumped into his throat.
It was her. The last woman he’d been with. The one he hadn’t been able to shake. She looked different, softer somehow. Her face was a bit rounder, her hips had filled out more. She wasn’t the same woman who walked into the Growler and taken him to a cabin in the woods for one unforgettable night. How long had it been? Two months? Three? He’d looked for her after, asked around, but everyone had just told him to forget her. Like she was a holiday that happened once in your life and you didn’t know how amazing it was until it was over.
Here she was.
And she was robbing his father’s house.
What the hell was that about?
Had she slept with him as a prelude to this? They’d spoken, he was sure of it, in the small hours after they’d taken all they could from each other. Had he talked about anything important? Anything in the home? He didn’t think so, but the words had felt so immaterial, so fleeting after the realness of their flesh. What were words compared to kisses? To the feel of her ass in his hands? To the sweet earthy smell of their sex? Words were useless when her thighs squeezed him tight. The only words that mattered that night were yes and please and more and oh god, just like that.