by Selena Scott
“Damn right,” she repeated and rose up on her tiptoes to kiss him.
Caroline burst into tears. The group turned to her in shock. Seeing Caroline cry was like watching a kitten commit suicide. Celia rushed forward. “Caroline!”
Caroline let herself be hugged for a second before she wiped her eyes and stepped forward. “I can’t lie anymore. Not after that.” She pointed at Thea and Jack. “You’re so honest and brave and in love.” Caroline put her hands over her face and just cried.
Tre was caught between wanting to hug her and wanting to punch through a wall. He couldn’t stand to see her like this. It made him want to grind his teeth down to sand.
“What’ve you been lying about?” Celia asked. “I’m sure it’s not so bad.”
Caroline turned and sprinted out of the house. They heard her car door open and then slam.
“Uh,” Jean Luc said, utterly befuddled. “Should somebody go after her?”
But then she was jogging back into the kitchen, tears streaming down her face and a stack of papers in her hand. She tossed them on top of the maps and covered her face again.
Thea leaned down and peered at them. She looked up at the group. “Divorce papers.”
Caroline, face still covered, nodded miserably. “Peter wants to divorce me. He gave me the papers and I left. I went to my parents’ house in Jersey. And then I rented a car and came here.”
“That’s terrible for you, Caroline, and we’re so sorry,” Celia said, looking around at the group. “But it’s not really a lie. It’s not like you were obligated to tell us about your personal life.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Caroline finally let her hands drop. “I stole the map from him. I lied and told him that it had disappeared in our last move. He never did the research on it, so he didn’t know that it would lead him here. But it was passed down in his family. It was his. He should have been the person on this adventure with you all. But I wanted the adventure. I was selfish and I stole it and now if all seven of the right people aren’t together then one of you is going to die and it’s my fault because I tricked you all into thinking I deserved to be here.”
She covered her face again and cried and cried.
“Caroline,” Tre said finally, into the silence. “I stole my map, too. You think that means I’m not supposed to be here?”
She lowered her hands.
“Seriously, honey,” Celia tried. “You remember what Martine said. The maps had a way of finding the right people. Maybe you were supposed to find the map and steal it.”
“Hell,” Tre said. “Maybe you were supposed to marry that guy just so that you could find the map.”
He was instantly embarrassed for having said that. Like he’d shown a hand he didn’t realize he’d been trying to hide.
“You mean…” Caroline took a deep breath. “That if the map really is mine, even though I stole it, then Peter isn’t supposed to be here instead of me?”
“Definitely not,” Jack said. He didn’t know this Peter guy, but he couldn’t imagine wanting him there more than sunny Caroline.
“Then,” she stared down at the divorce papers, “I can sign the papers. Before I wouldn’t because then I wouldn’t have had any claim on the map.”
“The map is yours, Caroline,” Martine said, coming forward and laying a hand on her friend’s back. “The maps don’t make mistakes. They find their way to the right owners. It’s yours whether you’re married to Peter Clifton or not.”
Caroline wandered over to the living room and collapsed hard onto one of the couches. She was exhausted. Felt like she’d just run a race.
All of them did, actually.
“We need to go out for breakfast,” Jack decided.
“But we just made some!” Celia protested.
“I know,” he said. “We’ll save what we can and have it for lunch. But trust me. I’ve never seen a group more in need of a good diner breakfast.”
They did look a little blurry at the edges. He’d steered them in the right direction before. So, shrugging to one another, they all agreed.
Half an hour later, they sat at a big, round table in the Mooselodge diner. Tre poured coffees and passed them around, Caroline ordered one of everything on the menu for them all to share, Jean Luc finished his orange juice, and when Thea nudged hers forward for him, he finished that one, too.
Soon, they’d head out again, on a new leg of their journey. But that morning, they let the feeling of victory overwhelm them. They’d battled Arturo and won. They were all safe, and each of them realized on their own, one by one, they were each happier than they’d been in a very long time.
The End
The Shifter’s Embrace
CHAPTER ONE
Celia Lamplighter pressed her forehead to the cool glass and watched blindly as the highway whipped past. She could not believe, after everything that had happened, she was back in this familiar position. She felt as if, in many ways, she’d spent her entire childhood in the farthest back row of an airless van filled with people. She was one of eleven kids and though she’d been raised in Brooklyn, her parents had loved cross-country trips. Carsickness was life for her. Tough cookies, her father used to call back to her from the driver’s seat. That’s what barf bags are for!
She prayed, with every fiber of her being, that she wasn’t going to barf today. Because she wasn’t on a car ride with her family. No, she was on a car ride with six of the coolest people she’d ever met in her life and she really, really would have loved to metamorphose out of her younger sibling chrysalis. She was so freaking done being the forgettable one, the boring one, the carsick one who got stuck in the back seat.
Plus, she really, really didn’t want to puke because it just so happened that a famous, gorgeous, swoon-worthy, former NFL quarterback for the New York Empire was currently driving this van. And Celia would rather have gouged her eyeballs out with a rusty spoon than puke in front of him. As much as she’d fought it over the last few weeks, she had to admit the truth to herself. She had a crush on him.
She hated herself for the cliché. The geek with a crush on the quarterback. Ugh. Gross. Predictable. Embarrassing.
And of course, being her, she didn’t just have a tragic crush on any old quarterback. No, it had to be on Jean Luc LaTour. Greatest of all time. National Treasure. Talent in spades and muscles on muscles. Women across the country had to change their panties at halftime whenever he was playing. The man was true blue H.O.T.
It would have been nice if he could have helped her out and at least been a dick about it. He would have been so much easier to get over if he was cocky. But she’d personally known him for a few weeks now and all signs pointed to him being a very private recluse who never used his fame or good looks to his advantage. She’d seen him flirt with a few women, enjoying their attention, sure. But she definitely wouldn’t have classified him as a ladies’ man.
It really pissed her off. Because that was exactly the kind of thing that made her think—in the back of her mind somewhere buried so deep it would see the light of hell before it ever saw the light of day—that she maybe, kinda, sorta had a chance with him. He obviously wasn’t out there chasing conventional tail.
…so maybe he’d want unconventional tail?
Celia Lamplighter definitely qualified as unconventional tail. She was just a hair over five feet tall, with a dyed-silver fade haircut, dark on the sides and at the root. She had a septum piercing and tattoos over her collarbones. Her face was fine, she supposed. If you didn’t mind a big nose and goldfish eyes.
She got hit on when she went out. But never by guys like Jean Luc. Never by All-American perfection.
No, Celia usually got hit on by guys like Tre, who was currently snoozing in the seat in front of her, mouth open and glasses askew. Tre Sullivan was kind of a nerdy hottie. A bad-ass hacker/computer geek with bright red hair and tattoos up the waz. He was exactly the kind of guy who’d approach her in a bar, trying to talk her ear off about w
hatever bands or tattoo artists he imagined she’d be into. And then he’d be inevitably disappointed when he found out that she was actually into classic Russian literature and took her job as a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library seriously enough to leave the bar at a reasonable hour for bed. Alone.
Of course, she wasn’t actually talking about Tre. Who’d never hit on her, and didn’t make assumptions about her based on her looks. But the point was that Johnny Apple Pie up there driving the van was not the kind of man whose head Celia turned.
It was so dumb to even be thinking about this, she reminded herself, knocking her head against the glass again. The sun had set an hour ago, leaving them drenched in that ethereal, underwater light of dusk. The trees on either side of the highway speared their arms into the night sky, looking beautiful and menacing all at once.
She had more pressing matters to think about than her unrequited crush on the football star in the driver’s seat.
Like, uh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that there is a literal demon out to eat one of our souls. She shook her head. Shouldn’t she be thinking about that right now? But the truth was, she wasn’t sure how much more thinking she could really do about it. She’d done nothing but think about it for the last few weeks. And even before this whole thing had started, she’d been pretty consumed by the map.
Oh, the map. Even though she’d done the exact same thing ten minutes before, Celia leaned forward and checked in the bag between her feet. Yup, there it was, still there, safe and sound.
Each one of the seven people in the car had a map identical to hers. Some of them had inherited theirs, some of them had stolen them. Celia had found hers pressed between the pages of a book on cartography in the rarely visited reference section at the Central branch of the library. And those maps had led these seven strangers to the same place at the same time where they’d all met. That had been about two and half weeks ago.
Part of her couldn’t believe she’d only known these people for, like, 18 days. In a way, she was already closer to them than she was to her own family. Sitting up front, next to Jean Luc, was Caroline Clifton. She was a pretty little rich thing from New England, and so sweet she could give you cavities if you weren’t careful. She slept curled in the shotgun seat, her chestnut hair catching the passing highway lights in a rhythmic pattern. Celia had felt envious of her effortless cheer and simple beauty when she’d first met her, but it didn’t take long for the envy to dissolve into genuine affection. Caroline was seriously the nicest person on the planet. Plus, she was going through a divorce that Celia didn’t know a lot about, but she knew enough to be firmly planted on Caroline’s side of the matter.
Behind Caroline, next to Tre, was the biggest question mark of the group. Martine West. She was fierce-looking, even in her sleep. Copper blonde hair like a Viking queen, knives lashed to her ankles and wrists, and that femme fatale black stretchy clothing. Yeah. She was literally a character that Celia would have pretended to be as a kid when she was trying not to get caught playing make-believe in the tiny backyard of her parents’ brownstone in Brooklyn.
And in the back seat, sandwiched in next to Celia, were Thea Redgrave and Jack Warren, sleeping against one another. They made one ridiculously cool couple, Celia had to admit. Thea was confident and freaking tall. Jack was confident and had major swag. He was a hustler, she was steady and hardworking. Celia didn’t know exactly why, but for some reason, they just fit together.
They were such a hodge-podge of people, brought together for no other reason than the maps they’d all had and followed.
The maps had had an intriguing message on the back of them that had led them right to one another.
On the seventh day
Of the seventh month
when the seventh moon
falls dark,
You, the seventh soul,
will find what you seek.
When Celia had followed her map to the marked star on July 7th, when there was a scheduled total lunar eclipse, she hadn’t been under the illusion that she was the actual seventh soul, considering she’d found the map completely out of the blue. But she’d followed the map to Northern Michigan anyways. For many reasons.
She’d expected it to be a solitary journey, never suspecting that there would be six other people with six other maps and reasons of their own.
She’d never forget that night as long as she lived. Earth’s blood-red shadow pulling over the moon, a sudden chill in the air, and then the man who would change all of their lives. They hadn’t even all exchanged names yet when Arturo, dark and handsome and bone-chillingly creepy, had stepped from the shadows of the woods and attempted to steal one of their souls, apparently what the map had been luring them there for in the first place.
Stealing souls.
She shook her head again. Whose life was this?!
A wave of nausea made her palms sweat as Jean Luc smoothly switched lanes and eased the van off an exit.
“Gotta find a place to rest,” he grumbled in that gravel-deep voice of his. That was the kind of voice that could only be described as a panty-rumbler. She realized, looking around, that she was the only passenger awake in the car, and therefore, was probably the person he was speaking to.
“Yeah, okay!” she called back in a breathy, high voice that made her want to face-palm herself all the way under the covers of a very large bed that she’d never have to get out of. He caught her eyes in the rearview mirror in a moment of surprise. Oh. He’d been talking to himself. He hadn’t even realized she’d been awake. Cool. Yeah. No problem.
Without another word between them, Jean Luc pulled into the parking lot of a Radisson. The other members of the car stretched and yawned and started to come awake and file out of the car.
“Need a place to rest for the night,” Jean Luc told the group, stretching those giant arms of his over his head and exposing an inch or two of skin over the top of his jeans.
Celia quickly turned away from him. The idea of being caught ogling him was mortifying to the nth degree. Good thing her memory was near photogenic and she could ponder that inch of tan skin on her own time. Not to mention the V of muscle so defined she was pretty sure she was now pregnant with triplets just from looking at it. And that dusting of light brown hair below his navel and—breathe, Celia!
“No wonder you need a rest,” Tre said, checking the time on his phone. “You’ve been driving for twelve hours, with only, like, two ten-minute breaks.”
“I could drive for a while,” Jack offered.
“No,” Jean Luc said quickly enough for it to have been a little strange. “Ah, yeah, I prefer to drive. I know we’d get there faster if someone else drove while the rest of us slept in the car, but look, the hotel’s on me. We can get a good night’s sleep and start again in the morning.”
Most of the world knew about the car accident that had ended Jean Luc’s career and taken his brother’s life. He’d been in the passenger seat when it happened. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why he wasn’t exactly a huge fan of being driven around.
“I love sleeping in hotels!” Caroline said, by way of an answer. She clapped her hands together and ran to get her bag from the trunk of the van.
“Is there anything she doesn’t love?” Tre mused, shaking his head and going to retrieve his own bag.
Jean Luc got them checked in and everyone filed off to the two rooms he’d booked. Celia, realizing she’d forgotten her sweatshirt, ran back to the van and grabbed it. When she got up to their floor, she ducked her head in the first room.
Jack and Thea were lounging on one bed and Caroline was on the other, chattering and flipping through the television channels. Celia realized that Martine was in the bathroom. Which left no vacancy for her in that room.
“Goodnight, you guys,” she called and pulled the door closed behind her. She pushed into the next room and tossed her bag on the floor. It was dark in there, just the moonlight coming through a crack in the blinds, but the
re was enough light for her to see the long line of Jean Luc’s fantastically ripped back as he lay across the far bed. The sheets were around his hips and she saw, with no little admiration, that he’d already fallen asleep. Wow.
Gulping, Celia turned her back on Jean Luc and sat down on the other bed to take off her boots.
“Oh,” Tre said when he came out of the bathroom. “You’re sharing with us?”
“Seven people, four beds,” she replied.
“Right. Math.” Tre grinned at her but his smile dimmed. “I don’t suppose you would mind if I slept in the bed with you?”
Celia looked over at Jean Luc sprawled across the Queen-sized bed that was almost comically too small for him. He was 6’6” and both of his feet were a good foot off the end of the bed. He wasn’t sprawled out by any means, but even so, there was barely a foot of space on the far end for another body to go.
“What?” she asked Tre. “You don’t want to spend the night cuddling with Gigantus Maximus over there?”
They both laughed. “Is that his official species name, you think?”
“Either he’s not human or he ran afoul of some sort of radioactive waste as a kid.”
That made Tre laugh harder. “Actually, I wouldn’t mind cuddling with him, it’s just that I’m trying this new thing where I don’t directly compare myself to Hercules. It’s not good for my self-esteem.”
They were laughing still, but Tre’s words surprised Celia. She hadn’t really thought that Jean Luc would have been as intimidating to the guys as he’d been to her.
“Fair enough,” she said to Tre and nodded to the side of the bed closest to Jean Luc. “All yours.”
Being one of eleven kids, Celia was very used to sharing a bed with somebody or other. And Tre didn’t make her nervous in the least. He was a respectful guy. She changed into her pajamas in the bathroom and by the time she came out, Tre was already shirtless, in some green plaid pajama pants and crawling into bed. “Do you, uh, want me to put a shirt on?” he asked her.