by Selena Scott
Arturo pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Sometimes he exhausted himself.
“Right,” Thea continued on, as close to ignoring Arturo’s toxic presence as she was humanly capable of doing. “So, that means that Utah must have some connection to Jack and Martine?”
Jack peered at Martine for a minute before he just squinted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders. “Not particularly. I mean, I’ve been through this country a time or two. Camped over at Bryce Canyon when I was a kid…” he trailed off for a second, lost in a memory. “But yeah. Nothing particularly important about Utah for me.”
“Me neither,” Martine chimed in. As a celestial being who was primarily made of light and who also had the ability to shift into a hawk, Martine wasn’t generally earthbound. She’d traveled to almost every corner of this blue earth. She’d been to Utah before as well, but couldn’t think of any reason why she’d be particularly summoned here. It touched her, though, that they still thought of her as part of the group.
Especially when it had been recently revealed that she wasn’t actually part of the original seven. Nope. They’d detached Arturo from his demon master and boom! He was the seventh soul now. And Martine was… basically a hitchhiker.
The demon was after the group of seven, she was after the demon. It made sense, in a logistical way, that she’d stay with them. She worried though that it wasn’t logic that had her lingering on the side of the blistering hot highway, watching their van overheat. She worried it was emotion. She knew she couldn’t afford to get any more emotionally involved with this group. If anything happened to them it would inevitably weaken her. Which would weaken her ability to destroy the demon, which would put more innocent lives in danger.
Ugh. Sometimes she exhausted herself.
“I’ll shift and see if I can’t find our destination.” Martine tossed her small pack onto the red dirt road and stepped behind the van as she started slicking her clothes off her body. The group was very comfortable with male nudity, considering each and every one of the males was a shifter. They had to get naked all the time. But Martine was the only female shifter and it seemed that the group still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of nonchalance when she was skinning out of her skivvies.
She noted, as she peeled out of her black spandex attire, that every set of male eyes averted from her—Jean Luc staring hard at a blank phone, Jack squinting into the distance, Tre whistling and pretending to study a loose pebble at his feet—except for one. Arturo. He lazed against the car, his arms crossed over his chest, and watched her with those dark eyes. His expression gave absolutely nothing away. She stared right back. Unashamed and unabashed at her nakedness.
She kept that eye contact when, in one heated breath, she’d shifted into her hawk form and swooped into the air. She easily rode the thermal air pockets, rising up from the baked ground and off into the direction they were headed.
The star on their maps was actually further into the park, somewhere within Bryce Canyon and its strange, Dr. Seuss-like pillars of red rocks, but they’d rented an Airbnb as close as they could get without having to camp. So they were staying along the edge of the park, on private land.
The group watched the sky swallow up Martine’s hawk with an uncomfortable tension zinging between them all. They didn’t like to be separated. Even for the time it took to travel to the grocery store, or for one of them to go for a solitary run or walk. They knew that this whole mess was meant for all of them as a group. Watching one of them fly off into heaven was a distinctly worrisome feeling.
They didn’t have to wait long, though. She swooped back over the ridge, her brown feathers a million shades of amber as she banked hard and shifted on the descent. She landed, naked as a jaybird, and breathless from the flight. She immediately wiggled into her underwear and cami.
“Decent,” she called and the men turned back around. “We’re not far, actually. Ten-minute walk around that ridge. Our place is huge. It has… a lot of character.”
“Great. Just what you want from an Airbnb,” Celia said dryly. “Character.”
“I say we hoof it,” Thea chimed in. “We’ll call Triple A from the house and have them tow the van. I’d rather walk toward shade and water than go full on bacon out here in the sun.”
“Seconded,” Tre agreed, hitching his bag onto his back and taking Caroline’s rolling suitcase from her hand. He knew she could drag it all the way there. He just didn’t want her to have to. Call him old fashioned or whatever, he got a kick out of being chivalrous, considering he’d never imagined he’d love somebody enough to wanna be chivalrous.
The group made the trek. It was ten of the most blindingly hot, sweaty, and thirsty moments of any of their existences.
“Believe it or not,” Jack called to the group, “come sundown, it’ll be dead cold out here.”
“Really?” Caroline asked, wonder in her voice.
“Yeah. The rocks’ll hold heat for a few hours, but the air will have a real bite. We won’t even have to turn the air conditioning on.”
The group turned the final corner toward their house and came to a full halt.
“Yeah,” Celia said. “Somehow I don’t think air conditioning is gonna be the thing we have to worry about.”
They all gaped at the ‘mansion’ they’d rented to stay in for the next month. It seriously looked like four different houses all stapled together. One side was an adobe style ranch house painted a burnt orange. The other side was a sort of bungalow style with a big porch, painted bright New Orleans style colors. Then, as if they’d been plunked there from the heavens, in the back of the house rose two separate two-story additions. One was all glass and modern metal and the other was, inexplicably, in the style of a real-life gingerbread house. It was a Pepto-Bismol pink with trim like frosting on a cupcake.
“There… are no words,” Jean Luc finally said, the first one of them to speak as they gaped at the architectural monstrosity.
“The address is right,” Celia said in confusion. “But this is not what the pictures looked like on the website.”
“You think the architect was a schizophrenic?” Thea asked, utterly bemused.
“Either that, or he had four houses handy that he could just, you know, slap together.” Tre sandwiched his hands together.
“Well, I love it!” Caroline enthused, taking her bag from Tre’s hand and venturing up the driveway. “It’s so whimsical! And we’ll definitely never forget it.”
***
Arturo, though technically a human, had never felt less human than when he was wandering through the rental house an hour later. He could hear the delighted, outrageous laughter from down the hallways. The group was roaring with laughter and disbelief at every new room they discovered in the strange house.
“Dibs on NOT having this room,” Tre called from somewhere in the house. “Too much… kitten stuff.”
Indeed, Arturo had already passed up that room himself. He’d also passed up the room that was exclusively decorated in orange velvet and the room that had seemed to have some sort of Candyland theme. Twenty-first century humans were weird. Arturo felt an unexpected stab of nostalgia for his life of several centuries ago. It had been a different continent, a different time. He supposed that antibiotics was a reasonable trade for the fact that the bedroom he’d chosen was plastered in posters of some sort of boys’ singing group.
He didn’t particularly care. He’d chosen the room because it was dark and half submerged underground, part of the sub-basement. There was only a single, thin window at the top of the ceiling and the pervasive, comforting scent of soil.
Arturo tossed his small rucksack of things on the bed and turned to explore the house. He veered away from where the humans were hooting and making noise down a more quiet hallway. Instantly, he was in the glass section of the house. The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass and the sweeping landscape was a burnished red in almost every direction. He turned to head back the way he had come when
the ceiling creaked above him.
Arturo found the stairs and turned the corner at the top of them to step into a wide bedroom. The walls, the ceiling, everything was glass. It was like a bedroom set inside a greenhouse. In fact, there were plants scattered in the corners and on a set of shelves lining one window. Against the only real wall in the whole room was a large white bed. Across the bed was a punishingly bright shaft of sunlight. And in that shaft of sunlight was Martine. Her strawberry hair was spilled across the white comforter, her eyes closed, and her hands palm up.
Arturo had to squint to see through the brightness, but, for a moment, he almost couldn’t make out the line where her skin ended and the sunshine began. It almost looked as if she were dissolving away into the brightness.
“Figures you would choose this room,” Arturo said from where he leaned against the doorjamb. He had the strangest desire to destroy her peaceful, beautiful moment. And he couldn’t exactly have said why.
She cracked one of those celery-green eyes at him and just stared for a moment. “Let me guess. You chose the darkest, most depressing room this place has to offer?”
He shrugged and strolled into the room, inspecting one plant and the next. “Dark and depressing is a good look for me.”
She snorted. “If you say so.”
“You don’t think so?” He turned his back to the view of the landscape toward the view of Martine sprawled across her bed.
“You forget. I knew you before you were working for the devil. I know what actually looks good on you. And it sure wasn’t this.”
Her words irked him. And disturbed him. He didn’t like remembering who he’d been as a mortal. What his personality had been like. It didn’t matter either way. He’d been this dark and twisted version of himself for centuries. There was no going back. And there was no reason to waste time remembering that he used to have a sense of humor. A passionate side. A heart.
“I remember what you were like then as well,” he told her. He wasn’t sure if he was wanting to get the spotlight off of himself, or if he was trying to wound her. He wasn’t proud of either alternative.
She was quiet. She didn’t take the bait. It irritated him.
“You were exactly the same as you are now,” he told her caustically. “Lonely. Just skilled enough to keep this game going on and on. But never skilled enough to actually slay the demon.”
Martine did nothing but watch him with those steady green eyes of hers. She said nothing. Eventually, she sat up, and her hair sparkled in the sunlight. There was much more gold than he ever would have guessed.
Looking at her stirred something in Arturo’s gut and it hurt. It was an old feeling. Ancient. And it was painful to experience it.
He strode toward the door of her room but paused there, his chin over his shoulder. “Why haven’t you shown them what you can really do?”
In a rare show of temper, she lifted her hand in a slice across the air. A ball of glowing golden energy flung across the room toward Arturo. He barely had time to manifest his own blue energy to deflect the golden ball. Their mixed energy turned a spring green and was gone.
“Be gone, devil,” she said to him.
And he disappeared through the door.
CHAPTER TWO
“Jesus!” Tre hollered as, for the tenth time, he tripped on another threshold between two rooms. “Would it be too much to ask that there aren’t booby traps in this damn Airbnb?”
“I wouldn’t call them booby traps,” Celia said, stooping to help her friend up from the floor. “But yeah, I can’t imagine this place is up to code.”
“I like it,” Caroline pronounced as she set a salad on the dinner table. She turned and grinned in Tre’s face, popping an olive into his mouth and, like magic, the scowl dissolved from his expression. He couldn’t help but drag her happy little self into his body and kiss her.
Arturo wanted to puke. Everywhere he turned there were two people staring into one another’s eyes, sitting on each other’s laps, copping feels left and right. Part of him couldn’t believe that he was beholden to this group of humans. They’d freed him from his connection to the demon, and yes, they were most likely Arturo’s only hope of slaying the demon, but still. Moments like this he wished he were anywhere else.
They passed the dinner with conversation about the house, and eventually, about their impending battle with the demon. Their theories and thoughts were painfully naive. Arturo waited for Martine to cut in, coach them into more intelligent lines of thought. But, he saw, she simply sat at the end of the table, methodically eating the food on her plate.
Something was off with her. For a moment, Arturo wondered if his words in her bedroom had truly wounded her. But no, she didn’t seem injured. She simply seemed… separate. Held even further away from the group than she usually was. As the two beings at the table that had the ability to summon and utilize internal energy, his blue and hers yellow, Arturo could always sense a sort of low-lying hum from Martine. But tonight, she was particularly muted. It was almost as if she were trying to slip away unnoticed.
Dinner wrapped up, the dishes were washed and the group paired off and disappeared into their house, into their separate rooms.
Arturo, unsettled for reasons he didn’t care to articulate, sat in the dark living room for a long time. The shadows turned silvery blue in the moonlight and all the pleather and mirrored decor looked even crappier.
Unsure of what he was even waiting for, Arturo descended into the sub-basement in a foul mood. Another night of sleeplessness or disturbing dreams awaited him. Oh, joy.
He closed his bedroom door behind him and the room was almost pitch black around him. He took one quiet step toward his bed and froze. In the room above him there were noises. Passionate ones. Rhythmic thumping and whispered words followed by non-whispered moans.
Arturo sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. Right. Love. There was no escaping it even in the dead of night.
He turned on his heel and headed back out into the dark house, mindful of the uneven floors and mirrored walls that confused the eye in the dark. He’d sleep on the couch in the living room if he had to.
He was just stepping through the kitchen when something on the other side of the window caught his eye. It was a movement more than a color. One shadow melting into the next. His eyes pinned on the unseeable thing, he slipped silently out a sliding glass door and padded across the grass in bare feet. The air was chilly but the ground was insanely warm, still holding the sun from the day.
Arturo melted into the shadows just as the thing in front of him did. He skirted quickly around it, headed it off and grinned rudely into Martine’s face even as she held a dagger to his throat.
“Where are you headed this late at night?”
“None of your business, Arturo,” she said, sheathing her knife and holding herself perfectly still. He knew she was doing her best not to be distracted by his presence. She was taking the temperature of the air, filing away every small noise and scent. Her entire body was ignoring him and searching for evidence of the demon, however small.
He found he didn’t want to be ignored.
“You’re doing rounds?” he asked, but frowned at the pack on her back. “No. You’re not.”
Arturo took a step into her space and plucked at the strap of her bag.
“What’s this?” he asked accusingly.
“My belongings,” she responded drily.
He took another step into her space. “You’re leaving,” he said, with a rude incredulousness in his tone.
“I’m not doing any good as a part of the group. I can’t afford to be distracted. I’m not willing to wait for the demon to show his face. I’m going hunting.”
“Fine. I think I’ll join you. I’ve had it with those morons back at the house anyways.”
Martine slammed a hand to his chest, holding him at bay, their energy crackling for a second in response to the other. Blue and yellow so bright and fleeting it slashed their night
vision. “You’ll do no such thing.”
“Watch me.” He took another step closer to her.
“Arturo, you’re one of the seven, you know this. If you abandon them, you’re breaking the only magic they have to protect themselves. They can’t fend off the demon without you.”
“I’m not staying and sitting in some clown house while you go off and hunt my mortal enemy. I’m coming.” He slapped her hand off his chest.
“You’re staying!” She shoved him back and he stumbled before he recovered his footing. “You and I are not the same!” she hissed into the night. “We don’t have the same roles in this journey. We aren’t even the same type of being! You cannot do what I do.”
“Is this about what I said earlier? That you were weak?” He breathed hard, his nostrils flaring.
“You were right. I failed to protect your first group of seven because I tried to be part of the group. I got distracted and sentimental and it won’t happen again! I refuse to let it happen again.” She moved to step around him.
He moved with her, blocking her way. “Either I’m coming with you or you’re not leaving.” Arturo crossed his arms across his lean, but wide, chest and held his strong stance. Pulled up to his full height, he was a foot taller than she was. Shadows cast across every feature of his face, and he looked as if he could draw a cloud across the moon if he so wished.