by Selena Scott
Tre howled in pain, and so did the demon as Jean Luc, in bear form, barreled into their side, rolling the demon bear off of Caroline and onto the gravel driveway.
Tre grimaced in pain but saw, with immense relief, that Caroline was skittering away. Horrifyingly, though, he felt that relief burn into rage that wasn’t his. The demon was back, grappling for control and Tre felt a strange irate energy explode inside him as his eyes focused on Jean Luc. He wanted to destroy. To fight. To take his soul.
No! That was the demon, not him. Tre would never hurt his friend.
And it was with that thought firmly in his heart that Tre forced himself not to fight back when Jean Luc came at him again, plastering him to the ground. Tre felt pain explode on his back as he skidded against the gravel, his fur tearing away in some places, his skin opening. The demon raged within him and the pain intensified it.
Tre’s bear wheeled on Jean Luc and, fueled by the power of the demon, backhanded Jean Luc’s bear ten feet back. Tre saw, in horror, the unnatural hinge of Jean Luc’s jaw, and he knew without a doubt that he’d just broken his friend’s face.
“No!” Tre screamed in his own mind.
“Tre!” A voice screamed behind him and he knew it was Caroline, screaming for him to come back to himself. “Fight it, Tre!”
Tre fell forward onto all four paws and slammed his eyes closed. He could feel the demon everywhere, but he had no idea how to fight something that was within him.
“Of course you can’t,” an evil voice whispered, as if in his ear. “You can’t fight what you are, you fool. You’ve never been any good. You’re worthless. The best thing you could do is give yourself over to me. You’ll never be able to fight me. You’re not good enough to win.”
Tre felt the truth of those words to his bones. It was as if everything he’d ever feared about himself was being horribly confirmed in that moment. Adrenaline screamed through his bloodstream and every bad feeling that existed was piling up in his chest. He was worthless. Unlovable. Bad at love. Nothing good ever stayed with him. Even if he survived this, his life would be defined by loneliness.
Everything went blurry within him. He couldn’t feel his paws anymore. He was fading away, giving everything over to the demon.
“Tre!” A firm voice sounded in his head. “You aren’t really buying into this, are you?”
Dimly, Tre registered the voice as Arturo’s. He fought to bring his awareness back into focus.
“Come on, Tre. I already tried this trick on you,” Arturo continued speaking in his head. “You can’t tell me you’re going to let the demon do the same thing.”
Tre grimaced in pain at trying to hold the demon away. “Help me,” he gritted out toward Arturo.
He could practically hear Arturo sigh. “You are not what anyone says you are. Least of all me or a fucking demon. Okay?”
The demon, sensing Arturo’s intrusion, overpowered Tre and lunged toward Arturo. The two bears, both hideous and terrifying and augmented by evil, clashed at one another. Tre was point-blank up against Arturo’s snapping jaws. He saw hatred there and knew it wasn’t for him, it was for the demon. This demon that was trying to make him fight. Who would have made him capture Caroline. Who wanted to leave him for dead, to strip him of his soul.
Tre gritted his great teeth and flung himself back from Arturo.
“Don’t hurt him!” Jack yelled in their heads.
“We have to,” Arturo replied grimly.
Arturo’s bear slammed Tre and the demon into the ground, knocking his head hard enough to see stars.
“Tre!” Arturo screamed into Tre’s mind to catch his attention. And then there was a strange pushing in his brain, as if Arturo were cramming something in there. Tre heard the demon scream in anger, but he was too busy concentrating on what Arturo was showing him. It was his own memories. Somehow, Arturo was showing him Tre’s own memories. And they were all of Caroline. Meeting her for the first time. Signing her divorce papers. Riding with her in the car. Grocery shopping. Laughing. Kissing. Sleeping. Looking at one another. Talking. Their conversation earlier that day.
“You’re going to let him tell you who you are?” Arturo raged at Tre, his bear jaws inches from Tre’s face. “You’re going to let him take it all away?”
“No!” Tre shoved Arturo off of him bodily. He was up and pulsing. For a moment, the demon got control and rushed the porch, toward the women, but Tre knew what to do.
Because Arturo was right. The demon didn’t get to take this from him.
Tre shifted quickly into his human form, fast enough that the demon got confused for a moment. He ran the other way, away from the porch. On the fly, he shifted into his bear form. And then back. Jack and Arturo came bounding after him and there was Martine, slicing the sky in two in her hawk form. She flew in tight circles around Tre and the demon. Tre saw a strange, golden electricity arrowing out from her wings, circling him.
Tre shifted back into human form and rolled across the ground. He felt the demon’s grip on him slip. Tre knew then that the demon couldn’t hold on if he kept up like this.
The golden whirlpool of Martine’s electricity swirled around him and Tre thought of the night he’d first slept with Caroline. He thought of the swirling want and warmth that had enveloped him. He knew then, instinctually, what to do.
He shifted to bear form, felt the demon’s rage, his anger, his hunger. And then Tre sprinted forward, toward Martine’s wall of light. He shifted into human form on one giant jump through the air, flinging himself through the golden electricity.
He knew, as he hit the ground, scraping the hell out of his naked body, that he was gone. The demon was gone. Tre was alone inside his body.
He thought of Caroline, and passed out cold.
***
“It wasn’t me, okay?” Tre said for the tenth time to Celia who scowled at him from across the van. She had her arms crossed and a dirty look on her face.
It was two days after the demon’s attack and the group had already said goodbye to Thea’s farm. The maps had given them another destination and they dutifully drove across country yet again.
“Yeah, yeah.” Celia faced front, a scowl on her face.
“Baby,” Jean Luc chuckled tightly, the huge bruise on his face looking dark and ugly. Their warm water trick had mostly healed him, but they’d had to get on the road before he could get pretty again. “You know it wasn’t Tre. It was the demon who did this to me.”
“Well, of course I know that in my heart. But it sure as hell looked like Tre’s bear backhanding you across the yard.”
“It wasn’t across the yard,” Jean Luc bristled, offended at the idea that he hadn’t held his own in a fight against the demon.
“It was pretty much across the yard,” Arturo said from the back of the car. Jack and Thea slept in the seat beside him.
Tre tried to hide his smile at Jean Luc’s annoyed glare through the rearview mirror.
Tre wasn’t trying to rile anyone up any further. After he’d come to in a bathtub of warm water, Caroline wrapped around him, he’d made it his business to deeply apologize to every single member of their group.
Everyone had understood. Even Celia. But it was going to take a while for them all to forget how it had felt to see their friend turn on them like that.
Caroline had forgiven him the fastest, of course. She’d said that she’d known almost right away that it wasn’t him. She knew how much he hated being without his glasses. And then by the blank way he’d looked at her.
“It wasn’t until then that I realized how much love you always look at me with,” she’d told him, snuggling him in bed the morning following the attack. They’d been breathing hard and were still sweaty from loving on one another so hard. They’d come together passionately, desperately, but it had given way to a sort of languid, grateful slide against one another. He’d kissed her for an hour before he started to feel some of his anxiety ebb away. She trusted him. He could feel it. She didn’t blame
him. He could feel that, too. She definitely loved him. He could totally feel that.
She’d gone on to explain that after Tre had passed out, the whirlpool of Martine’s energy had spun faster and faster, trapping something large and dark inside its web. None of them had seen what the demon actually looked like because Martine’s energy went as bright as the sun and seemed to sort of eclipse everything else.
When the light had faded, the demon was gone.
Arturo explained later that the light was damaging to the demon, but that he’d gotten away before Martine could really finish him off.
Arturo guessed that the demon would be down for the count for a while. Giving them a bit of time to get the hell out of Montana.
Tre tucked a sleeping Caroline into his shoulder as he watched the Badlands zip past them. He could feel the demon on their heels, but he also felt a deep sort of calm. He’d faced off with the demon and won. He’d battled and come out on the other side. He’d survived and come out stronger.
When he’d survived his mother’s death, Tre had come out weaker, missing a sense of his own self-worth. But this fight? This fight had proved to him who he really was.
Tre looked into the back seat where Arturo was also watching the countryside pass by. Arturo turned and looked at Tre and the two men held one another’s eyes for a moment. Communication passed between them and Arturo nodded his head before he turned back to the window.
They were alike, in so many ways. But Tre hadn’t allowed himself to lose what Arturo had. He’d fought and come out on the other side with himself and with the woman he loved.
The day gave way into evening and when the sky was a graying lavender out the window, Caroline stirred in Tre’s arms.
She blinked up at the man she loved.
“Thinking good thoughts?” she whispered to his stern, serious profile. Even in the dim light, he burned like a torch. A beacon of light and warmth.
“Mostly,” he answered honestly, whispering back to her. Her eyes tracked every expression on his face and she was suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to tell him everything. To be truthful and open and to ask for what she wanted, and know that she deserved it.
“I want a small house,” she told him. “A messy one. And I don’t want to cook anymore. Ever. I hate it. And I want a dog.”
Tre laughed. “All that sounds pretty do-able, love.” He turned thoughtful. “Maybe we’ll move down south. You really liked Jean Luc’s area in Florida, right? Would you wanna live there?”
Her heart swelled so hard and so fast that she felt it was a miracle she didn’t lift right out of the car.
She nodded her head vigorously enough to make him laugh again. “And I wanna get married,” she told him, flat out.
Tre’s eyes dilated and his breath got a little shallow. He banged his head back on the headrest. “You’re supposed to wait for me to ask, okay?”
“Why?” she demanded. That had never made any sense to her in the first place.
“Because I want to make it perfect. And I’m only gonna get to do it once in my life, love. If we get married, that’s it. None of this divorce nonsense.”
“None,” she agreed somberly.
“Then be patient, love. It’ll happen.”
She scowled. “I’m not good at being patient.”
He kissed the scowl off her face, a laugh on his lips.
“Then you’re in luck. Because neither am I.”
She smiled into his shoulder, understanding what he was saying. That they were on this path. That he wasn’t leaving it. He wasn’t leaving her. They were moving forward, wherever this road would take them, together.
The End
The Shifter’s Desire
PROLOGUE
Unlike almost every other living being on this Earth, Martine West could remember the exact moment she came into being.
It was many centuries ago. For a long time, she was simply light. Golden and bending, found on the edge of so many shadows. It took another century for pressure and heat to galvanize her into a real shape. One day, she opened her eyes and realized that she was, in fact, a red-blooded creature. She lay on the wet autumn leaves of a deciduous forest floor. The black branches of the trees above her were bare and seemed to almost scrape against the low, gray sky.
She shivered and knew she was naked. Little by little, she acquainted herself with her own body. She had hair the color of the gold-orange-pink leaves that she lay across. There were freckles along the backs of her hands and later she’d see that they were gently scattered across the bridge of her nose. She had silvery green eyes that were too sad to be a spring green. As she sat up, a fully grown, mature woman, as new to this world as a baby, she saw that certain parts of her body were a pale pink, parts were dusted gold.
She delighted in the discovery of her fingernails. So smooth! She winced when she rolled and a stick poked her bottom.
It wasn’t until she tremblingly made her way to her feet, like a fawn, that something amazing happened. Something gorgeous that she’d never forget as long as she lived. The thick mat of clouds that had seemed so impenetrable revealed that it was actually scuttling across the sky. Two overlapping layers pulled away from one another and the sun banded through, straight down to Earth. Martine found herself, miraculously, standing in a shaft of golden sunlight.
Her breath caught and she bathed in the warmth and the light. How gorgeous! She recognized this light as part of her. It was where she came from. The only real family she’d ever have.
The clouds tucked themselves back into bed and the world went muted again, still lovely, but muted. Martine gasped in dismay. Without the sunshine, she was suddenly, desperately lonely. It had just up and left her!
She pressed her palms to her gut and curled her body around the gnawing emptiness she felt there.
She didn’t know it then, but it was a feeling that would come to define her. For as long as she walked the earth as an otherworldly being, she would never be without that loneliness.
CHAPTER ONE
Present Day
“Utah, huh?” Tre Sullivan said thoughtfully as he turned a slow circle next to their stalled, smoking rental van.
The group of eight travelers had been standing in the Southwest heat for approximately twenty seconds and every single one of them had already sweated through their shirts. The sun was a bright-hot marble turning slowly in the sky. The landscape was burnished and alien, with white cliffs rising behind them, slashed through with rocks as red as Mars. Across the road was a clump of single-story homes. They were weather-beaten and pale from the sun, sitting atop grass as green and out of place as AstroTurf.
Even the blacktop of the highway had been bleached a defeated gray. There was not a tree in sight. As if to make up for the astonishing lack of leaves, the sky was a breathtaking periwinkle. And as flat as the land was, with the exception of the cliffs, there was a hell of a lot of sky.
“It’s a shame we broke down here. I think we’re only about a mile or two from our destination,” Celia said as she studied the map an inch from her nose. Celia was no ordinary-looking woman with her chest and shoulders covered with tattoos, her septum piercing glinting in the sun and her dark hair shaved into a pompadour fade that she’d recently bleached out to a white blonde. And it was no ordinary map that she studied. This map was a bit more… interactive.
The way it had done three times before, the map—just like its six identical versions owned by others in the group—had wiped itself clean, only to reveal a new destination that the group was then obliged to find. This month’s destination was officially Middle-Of-Nowhere, Utah.
“Maybe we should call Triple A?” Caroline wondered out loud, shading her eyes as she tracked a plane across the gorgeous, expansive sky. She lost her balance and accidentally stumbled into Tre’s arms. He didn’t mind one bit. Tre’s coppery hair glinted in the unforgiving sun as he wrapped his arms around her, relishing the heat and sweat of her. It had taken a lifetime to be able to cla
im her as his woman and Tre wasn’t wasting another second.
“Not a bad idea,” Jack agreed, squinting his eyes against the sun and adjusting his formerly blue baseball cap against his blond hair.
Thea, Jack’s woman, couldn’t help but notice that he strangely seemed to fit in here, amongst this rugged landscape. On the other side of things, her black hair and milk-white skin most decidedly did not fit in here. She was more at home in the grays and soft greens of Montana where she’d grown up. When all this was over, that’s where she and Jack would return together.
“Fuck, it’s hot,” Tre complained, unsticking his sweaty shirt from his chest. “I blame you for this. And you.” He pointed first to Jack and then to Martine, who stood stoically off to one side of the group, the way she always did. Her usual outfit of black spandex everything hid her sweat, but she couldn’t hide her surprise at Tre’s words.
“Why?” she asked, at the same time Jack said, “Me?”
“Well,” Jean Luc said, stepping up behind Celia and dropping a kiss on her blonde pompadour. He towered over her, his athletic frame roughly the width of two normal-sized earthlings. “I figure, just like Tre does, that this destination must be your fault. Process of elimination.” He nodded his head toward Martine and Jack.
“Ah,” Thea said, thinking out loud. “Michigan had a connection to Celia and Tre. Florida had a connection to Jean Luc and Caroline. Montana was me and…” she trailed off, her face suddenly looking as if she smelled something rotten on the wind.
“And me,” Arturo said dryly, stepping out of the shadow of the van and into the sun. Even with the bright light directly on him, his face had more shadow than not. It was his intense bone structure, his dark eyes and darker hair. He absorbed light like a strip of black velvet. He generally absorbed good humor as well. He lingered on the outskirts of the group just like Martine did. But who could blame him? This group of mortals was almost entirely a joke to him. Here they were, on their little adventure, just thinking that if they tried hard enough, they could go ahead and beat the demon. They had no idea what they were dealing with. And none of them were apparently smart enough to realize that the two people in the group who did know what the hell they were dealing with, he and Martine, were squarely pulled away from all the ghastly camaraderie they were all so determined to engage in.