Shifters 0f The Seventh Moon Complete Series Bks 1-4

by Selena Scott

  “Goodnight,” she whispered, and disappeared back into the darkness of her room.

  Arturo finally shifted back to his human form, picked up his folded clothes and headed down into his dank room.

  For the first time, the dim darkness wasn’t entirely welcome as he folded himself into his bed. He craned his neck to peer out the small strip of a window at the top of his ceiling. It was barely enough to even see a slice of the sky.

  Arturo fell asleep halfway wishing for a bigger window. For more light.

  ***

  The demon was in a dark place.

  A cave of pain and nothing. It wasn’t a ‘where’ as much as it was a ‘how’. He was nowhere that could ever be tracked or found or experienced by anyone who wasn’t a demon. He wasn’t far from the group. But he couldn’t get to them, either. He was between atoms, between dimensions, between worlds.

  And he hated it there.

  Without Arturo at his side, he had no life force to feed upon. He had nothing to keep his centuries-old hunger at bay. His hunger gnawed at his gut, weakened his limbs, seemed to scratch at him from every side. He wanted to eat.

  He wanted to kill. And he wasn’t going to settle for a single soul this time.

  No. First would be Arturo, of course, the ingrate. After all these centuries of mercifully keeping the little pet alive, this was how Arturo paid him back? By switching his allegiance? No. That couldn’t be tolerated. He’d finally tear Arturo’s soul from his chest and watch him squirm to death, a soulless beast.

  Next would be the idiot warrior who’d been sniffing at his heels for centuries. He couldn’t kill her, of course, because their life forces were linked. If he killed the demon hunter, he was killing himself. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t wound her beyond healing. Ever since Arturo had gone, the demon had wished for another pet. He imagined that the demon hunter would fulfill the role beautifully.

  When the humans were completely unprotected, with Arturo and the demon hunter out of the way, he’d feast on their souls. He’d glut himself. A demon could live for hundreds of years on a single soul. But he didn’t care. He wanted to be filled to bursting. He wanted to waste their souls. He wanted to kill just to kill. Never before had he been so deprived for so long, and he wanted to make them suffer. To make them pay.

  He wasn’t strong enough to materialize, though. The demon hunter had wounded him with her light-magic. It was taking him longer than ever to heal because he was so deprived of nutrients. He needed to eat. But he couldn’t eat if he was stuck there. In the nowhere.

  There was only one way to gain access to Earth when he couldn’t materialize. He’d done it before.

  The demon concentrated and reached out with his hateful mind. His mind raced by landscapes of lush green and white-tipped mountains. Over flat, gold, cracked land. His mind whipped through whorls of dust and over the top of a pack of roving animals that scattered as he cut through them all. He came upon a house. A strange house, like four houses mashed together. Human nonsense.

  Inside the house were so many sleeping souls his mouth watered. He didn’t dare go near where the demon hunter was sleeping. She’d sense him. So instead he wandered silently, invisibly, into the room of two sleeping people. The tattooed woman who’d been so fun to play with and her humongous man who was so faithfully, pathetically at her side. The demon never understood why humans paired up. How limiting.

  He graced over them, feeling their heartbeats and the rhythm of their breaths. No. Neither of them were right for this. They were too connected to one another. There was no way in through the armor.

  The next room, across the house, was the redheaded man and his innocent woman. He’d possessed the redheaded man before and he hadn’t liked it one bit. There’d been too much loyalty and bravery and love pumping through the man. Embodying him had been akin to laying down in hot wax. The demon had endured it as long as he could have, but he didn’t want to do it again. He attempted to gain entry into the mind of the woman in his arms, but the demon recoiled when he sensed an even purer heart than the man next to her.

  Good God, this woman was practically composed of generosity and good humor and kindness. The demon stole away. Besides. They wouldn’t have been an easy partnership to break up anyways. They were knit as tightly as the other couple.

  The next room he slipped into he was nearly expelled from in a white-hot cloud of love and connection. The demon watched, irate and agitated, as the blond man and the black-haired woman moved against one another in rising passion. He was on his knees behind her and held her hips fast with one hand while he stroked down her spine with the other hand.

  The demon attempted to get close to them, to infiltrate their minds, but the couple was protected by a cloudy shield of love and passion. Their connection to one another was so strong, it lay around them, almost like a glass bowl.

  The demon left the room quickly, their whispered words of love and moaned passion like poison to him.

  It was in the last room he entered that he hit paydirt. His old friend Arturo, the swine, lay in a tangle of sheets. He was restless, but sleeping. And oh so vulnerable.

  The demon was practically licking his lips. If he could have taken his physical form, he would have ripped Arturo’s soul from his chest right then and there. And then he would have eaten his heart for good measure. But as it was, all he could do was possess him. Ah well, beggars couldn’t be choosers. The demon took an acute, sickening pleasure at the fact that he was going to infiltrate the group from the confines of Arturo’s mind.

  He was going to force Arturo to break up each one of the couples. He was going to weaken the love and camaraderie in this group until there was nothing left. Until there were seven tortured souls, ripe for the plucking and ready to die.

  He’d play Arturo like a puppet. The demon hovered over him and started to reach toward Arturo’s mind. Yes. He could even feel the familiarity of it. It was a mind he’d become very well acquainted with over the last four centuries. Arturo’s mind, so sharp, but so soft in unexpected places. With so many hidden reservoirs of emotion. What a human. But as the demon began to enter the sleeping man’s mind, there was something different about it than before. The demon felt as if a light, too hot and bright, was being shone on him from one corner of Arturo’s mind.

  There was something here that hadn’t been there before and the demon hated it. He’d have to snuff it out.

  He moved toward the bright, sweet thing hidden deep in Arturo’s mind and moved to kill it. But found he couldn’t move.

  He was stopped, stock still, as if he were water frozen in mid-drip. It was then that the demon looked down and saw it. A rope made of golden light, firmly wrapped around his middle. He was trapped. Unable to move forward or backward.

  Suddenly he was being yanked, bodily removed from Arturo’s mind. He raced backwards, out of the darkness and back into the dim light of Arturo’s room.

  The demon seethed at the indignity of it all, his anger and rage doubling by a hundredfold. But anger and rage weren’t enough to fight the demon hunter who stood over top of Arturo, glowing gold and vengeful. The demon zipped backwards, invisible and horrible. He was gone, back into nothing, and far away from the group.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Arturo sat straight up from sleep as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water over his head. His brain split with pain and he couldn’t stop the pained groan that escaped him if he’d wanted to.

  He could smell the horrid stench of death. It was familiar and disgusting. He’d know it anywhere. It was how the demon smelled.

  His eyes clamped shut and his hands tearing at the hair on his head, Arturo had a horrible realization. The scent seemed to be coming from him. Arturo writhed against the pain in his head. “No.”

  “Quiet. He’s gone.”

  Arturo gasped and opened his eyes to see Martine crouching over him. She glowed gold, knives glinting in her hands and a fierce expression on her face.

  “He’s gone,�
� she repeated.

  But Arturo could barely make sense of her words. He was shaking with the pain now, barely able to crack open his eyes.

  He hadn’t registered that Martine had been sitting on him until the weight of her eased up and she was standing beside the bed. She yanked off the sweaty sheets that had pooled at his hips and dragged him bodily from the bed. Arturo heard footsteps and a door slam.

  “What happened?” That was Jean Luc’s voice. But it was Jack who was suddenly under Arturo’s other arm, helping Martine support his weight.

  “The demon,” she said curtly. “Caroline, boil water, but don’t put anything in it. Jack, we need to get him to the shower.”

  Arturo tried to make himself walk but his feet just tangled and dragged on the ground. A few clumsy seconds later, he found himself standing under frigid shower water, boxer briefs and all. His shoulders fell three inches as the water began to warm.

  He felt the demon’s reprehensible magic wash off his body and down the drain like dirt being flushed from a wound. Warm water was a simple remedy, but it worked. His muscles trembled as he planted his palms against the shower wall and dropped his head under the punishing stream of water.

  It was as painful as it was refreshing. An uncomfortable rebirth into the land of the living.

  “Drink. Now.”

  A mug was shoved into one of his hands and then impatiently tipped up to his lips. Arturo gulped down the burning hot water. He felt the heat race instantly into his bloodstream and with the second gulp, the pain in his head eased. The demon had left behind a disgusting handprint of dark magic within Arturo’s mind, but by the time he’d finished the mug of hot water, the final dregs of pain were gone.

  Weak as a baby, Arturo sank to the floor of the shower.

  It had been a long time since the demon had attempted to possess him. But it wasn’t a feeling he would ever forget. To rescind the control of one’s mind and body was the ultimate violation. And he’d undergone years of it as the demon’s trusty servant. Whenever the demon had desired the corporeal form of a human, Arturo had been all too handy. He thought that he’d grown hardened to it.

  But apparently not, considering he was crouched on the floor of a shower at five in the morning, breathing hard and trying not to throw up.

  He heard the door of the bathroom close and he looked up, expecting to be closed in there with Martine.

  He blinked when he realized there wasn’t a female in sight.

  It was the three bear shifters who were scattered around the bathroom in a tableau that might have been titled ‘freaked-out concern’.

  “Are you alright?” Jean Luc asked gruffly.

  Arturo said nothing, just scraped a hand over his face and continued to crouch.

  “Scared the hell out of us,” Tre said, leaning against the far wall of the bathroom and looking rather pale. “I thought—I thought he’d come back for me. I could feel him in your mind, Arturo. It was just like before. When he did that to me.”

  “You could feel it?” Arturo asked, squinting his eyes in the bright bathroom lights until Jack thoughtfully flicked them off and plunged all of them into the dim gloom, lit only by the hazy pre-dawn out the window.

  “Feel it?” Jack asked, a pained laugh on his lips. “Son, I was living it. Came at a hell of a time, too. I was just getting to the good parts with my girl.”

  Arturo winced sympathetically. It had been centuries since he’d had sex, but he imagined that suddenly feeling possessed by the demon mid-coitus would be a real boner killer.

  “I didn’t realize I was opening myself up to you three,” Arturo admitted and rose up to shut the shower off.

  Jean Luc tossed him a towel. “Well, I’m glad you did. Otherwise we might not have gotten to you in time.”

  “Nah, Martine beat us there,” Tre corrected Jean Luc. “How’d she know what was going on?”

  Arturo scrubbed the towel over his face with a hand that wanted to shake. He didn’t let it. “She can sense the demon’s presence in a lot of ways. His scent. What he does to the air, the way he makes other people feel. He leaves a hundred clues in his trail. Which is why he used to send me to do all his bidding. She has a harder time sensing my comings and goings than the demon’s. And she’s a sharper hunter than even the demon knows. She probably had him clocked the second he entered the house.”

  Jack shook his head. “I’ll never forget what she looked like crouching over top of you, tearing the demon out of your mind with that glowy thing she can do.”

  “Totally,” Tre agreed. “That shit was actually kind of hot. Like warrior Barbie or something.”

  Arturo’s eyes narrowed. He was about to say something rude in response to that comment, but Jean Luc beat him to it.

  “All right, all right. Let’s not get carried away here.” He turned back to Arturo. “I suppose you want to get back to sleep for a few hours.”

  “Actually,” Arturo said, stepping out of the tub, his briefs dripping water down his legs, “I need to shift. It’s the only way to get the rest of the adrenaline out.”

  Tre shrugged, and Jean Luc dipped his head in understanding.

  “Yeah, all right,” Jack said, pulling his T-shirt over his head and dropping trou.

  Arturo looked at them in confusion. “I didn’t mean that you needed to come with me.”

  “Son,” Jack said in that voice of his, so lazy it was almost insulting, “you just almost got your brains sucked out with a straw. We’re going with you.”

  That was how four bears, one of them a twisted, evil-looking grizzly, watched the sunrise from the red ridge of rocks two miles behind the house.

  ***

  Martine was strangely charged that evening as she stood barefoot outside Arturo’s door. The sun had gone down a half an hour ago, bathing an entire half of the house in a blood-red light that slowly faded to lavender.

  The group had all hit the sack right after dinner, exhausted as everyone was by their early wake-up call that morning. Martine had thought that the demon’s unexpected surfacing would have put a strain or damper on the group, but when the men returned from having shifted in the late morning, they were quiet, but surprisingly relaxed.

  Martine sensed, not a kinship exactly, but perhaps a peaceful kind of accord between the men that hadn’t been there before.

  She understood why. It had shaken her, just as it had shaken the others, to have seen Arturo so weak and pained on the floor of the shower. When he’d first become a member of their group, he’d been unconscious and bedridden for days and days. They’d been able to sever him from the demon, but it had hurt him badly. He’d had to recover. And then it seemed as if his connection to the other bear shifters had also hurt him. They’d attempted to connect with him emotionally and telepathically, the way they could with one another, and it had caused him even more pain. It wasn’t until he’d begun to open himself up to them just a bit that his pain had eased.

  Needless to say, the group was used to seeing Arturo in pain. His normal response to pain, though, was anger. They were used to seeing him spitting mad and vitriolic and rude.

  They were not, however, used to seeing him in pain and scared. Which was exactly what he’d been last night. Whatever the demon had done to Arturo had deeply fucked with him, and anyone could see that. Watching the water sluice over his back, his head hanging down and his knees shaking, he’d looked so dang human. And these men had good hearts, kind hearts. Martine knew that they wouldn’t be able to keep Arturo blocked out forever.

  They’d come back from shifting, sat down at the table and eaten a humongous lunch in complete silence. Martine had watched quietly from the kitchen, trying to string together the clues.

  They weren’t laughing and joking, but they weren’t sniping at one another either. Arturo sat alongside Jean Luc and across the table from Tre and Jack, where he normally might have taken his food back to his bedroom or sat at the chair under the window. They sat in silence that was, dare she say it, companiona
ble.

  And then when lunch was over, they cleared their places and scattered, each going to find something new to do.

  Somehow, their experience with the demon last night had bonded them just enough to tolerate one another.

  She’d take it.

  If everyone was finally accepting Arturo into the fold, it only made her job of protecting them all that much easier.

  There was something else that was making Martine’s job easier as well. It was this adrenaline-pumping sense of rightness that was coursing through her.

  Last night, Martine had kicked ass, if she did say so herself. It had been a long time since she’d fully gone with her instinct and talent and hadn’t let any social misgivings get in her way.

  And she’d saved Arturo’s life because of it.

  She was good at this.

  And it wouldn’t kill her to remember that.

  A few nights ago, she might have talked herself out of what she was about to do. But not tonight. Tonight she, barefoot, night gown swirling around her ankles, knives lashed to her wrists and ankles, her hair in a braid down her back, knew exactly who she was.

  She was a warrior. A hunter. She had instincts like whoa. And someday she was going to kill this fucking demon.

  Convincing Arturo to let her protect him was, by comparison, a piece of cake, as Caroline liked to say. She knocked once on the door and pushed it open.

  Arturo’s head snapped up where he sat on the edge of the bed. He was shirtless and hunched over his knees, his hair all mussed from where he’d been gripping it.

  “My room or your room,” she told him, with that zinging energy rushing her from every side. She felt about ten inches taller than she normally did. If the demon showed up at that very second, she’d roundhouse kick him in the teeth.

  “What?”

  Arturo was looking at her like she hadn’t just spoken the king’s English.