by Selena Scott
She saw that clear as day in the relationships that the three men she stretched her light over had created. These three men knew how to give to a partner, they knew how to take when they needed to, they knew how to fuckin’ be a human alongside another human.
And it was for the sheer miracle of that, the miracle of human-ness, that she became a protective shield of fiery gold over top of them. She was a blazingly bright scar across the bleak landscape. The demon, just a darkness in the air, slow-motion spiraled through the picture. She contracted in pain as he slammed into the shield of her gold.
But she held strong. He was a twisting arrow, dark and terrible, and he was determined. His failure to possess Arturo had made him vengeful and terrible. He would stop at almost nothing to gain the soul of one of the men that she shielded from him. She wouldn’t let him. She couldn’t let him.
Martine’s energy repelled the dark force of the demon and sent him catapulting backwards. She didn’t have time to check the others, or materialize before he was coming back, trying to go through her as she stretched out and protected them, protected the whole house.
Her energy was sparking and stretching, but slipping. He was dragging her shield to the center of his black magic, like a sword driving forward into a bed sheet. She was folding and crumpling around him and if he could get around her then there would be nothing in between him and the men, the house.
She twisted but was pinned in place by him. There were Tre and Jean Luc and Jack shifting, their bears squaring off, ready to fight the demon. There was nothing to protect them except for themselves.
And then there was a blue blur of light. It was a man. He was glowing. And then he was a bear, still glowing, his energy like a halo around him. He was filling in the gap between Martine and the men. He was protecting them just as she had.
The demon attempted to get around them, but he couldn’t. Everywhere he turned, there was more bright, horrible light and color, so much color.
The demon twisted away, released Martine, and was gone, back into his dimension of darkness.
Martine fell to the ground, a woman again. She was panting and naked and on her side.
There were hands on her shoulders. A familiar grip at her jaw. She was weightless as she was lifted off the ground and then there was only darkness.
***
Martine woke in a dark room with a firm hand at the back of her head.
“Drink,” a familiar voice said.
Martine blinked away her confusion as she accepted the cool water down her throat. She rolled her head and turned to look at the speaker. “Thea,” she croaked in surprise.
“Don’t talk,” Thea scolded. “Your throat sounds like it’s made of sandpaper.”
She let Martine fall back to the pillow and then set the water to the side.
“You really kicked some ass today,” Thea said, sitting back into the darkness.
Martine could tell from the quality of the dark that it was the middle of the night. She must have been knocked out for damn near half the day. Involuntarily, she looked around for Arturo. If it was the middle of the night, he should be there, right next to her. But it was just Thea and her in the room.
“What happened?” Martine rasped.
“The demon came for us,” Thea said. “You protected the men. Did your golden energy thing.”
“And then what?”
Thea paused for a second, as if she could barely believe what she was about to say. “And then Arturo protected you. He stormed out there like he had nothing left to live for. He blocked the demon and then laid himself over you to make sure he couldn’t harm you. Then he dragged you back in here, plunked you in a bath of warm water, tossed you in bed and—”
Thea snapped her fingers, as if that explained what happened to Arturo next.
“What does that mean?” Martine attempted to scramble up.
“Then he bounced out of here and I took over.”
Arturo stood in the dark hallway outside of Martine’s room and he listened to the two women talk. He felt an overwhelming, shoulder-dropping relief that Martine was awake. He couldn’t stop seeing the moment she’d flung herself in front of the men.
As he’d watched her, part of him had just thought, this is it.
He’d been sure that that was the moment that Martine was going to kill the demon. And then she would blink out of existence right along with him.
Arturo hadn’t been ready. He’d thought, ‘no’. He’d—God—wanted to stop it. How many centuries had he dreamed about destroying the demon and now he was stepping in to prolong the evil being’s life?
Arturo scraped a hand over his face. One makeout session with Martine and every single one of his priorities had been turned on its head.
Arturo was confused and frustrated and… angry. Yeah. He was good and truly pissed. How dare she come into his life now of all times?
“For the record,” a voice down the hall said to him, “it’s never the right time for the kind of feelings you’re dealing with right now.”
Arturo’s head snapped up and there was Jack, standing in the shadows at the end of the hall. His hands were in his pockets and his cap was pulled low on his head.
“What are you talking about?” Arturo rose up, quickly.
“I mean that you’re here sitting in a pile in the hallway and internally bitching about the timing of all this. And I’m here to tell you that the timing is never right to have your life completely flipped upside down by the love of a good woman.”
Arturo rolled his eyes and scowled as Jack ambled up the hall toward him. “I know you three fancy yourselves mind-readers because of our shifter connection, but trust me when I tell you that that is not what’s at stake here.”
Jack raised an eyebrow like he didn’t believe Arturo. “Then what’s at stake here, then?”
“I would think it would be obvious.” Arturo glared at Jack because there wasn’t a better place to put his anger at the moment. “There’s a reason Martine has been holding herself back from the group. There’s a reason that no one should feel close to her. There’s a reason why she threw herself in front of you all without so much as a second thought.”
And that, there it was, the part that infuriated Arturo more than anything. She’d tossed herself headlong into a potentially deadly fight with the demon. And she hadn’t hesitated. She hadn’t looked around for him. She’d just… done what she was here to do. She was here to fight the demon, not to make out with Arturo when the sun went down and didn’t that just piss him off?
“You mean because…” Jack couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“Because when she wipes the demon from the face of the planet, she’s wiping herself from the face of the planet.” Arturo spat the words into the dark hallway and made Jack wince. “I’m not reeling from having feelings, I’m reeling because those feelings are for the wrong fucking person. Because I’ve waited four fucking centuries to stab the demon through his fucking heart and I’m not pulling back now. Not even for—”
Arturo cut himself off and grabbed at his hair like a crazy man. It didn’t matter tonight. She wasn’t dying tonight and neither was the demon, so why was he tying himself into knots like this? He turned from Jack and disappeared down the hallway. He needed dark and quiet and alone.
Jack watched him go and he didn’t envy Arturo, not for one single second.
***
Martine wasn’t always good at understanding humans and their human choices, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Arturo was avoiding her. Distancing himself from her.
She was smart enough to understand his reasons if she really tried, but she suspected that clarity on this issue would only bring more pain. So Martine simply tried to put Arturo out of her head. She was healed up by the next day after the demon attack and resumed business as usual.
She did shifter training with the men in the mornings and afternoon, studiously pretending as if Arturo were just like the other men. She ate dinner
with the group, her eyes on her plate. She watched the occasional movie in the evenings, never looking away from the television screen.
And every night, she took a pillow and a blanket and curled up outside of Arturo’s door.
He wasn’t coming to her room anymore, and he still needed protection, so this was the way it had to be.
Arturo knew he was a bastard of a royal degree to continue letting Martine sleep on the floor outside of his dingy room. But he also knew that there were more important things at play here than his own self-image.
If he crawled into Martine’s bed one more time, there was no telling what would happen. Arturo had to acknowledge that there were feelings in his chest for her. It was like a flowering tree in springtime. He could see the yellow-green buds on all the branches weathering the weak sun and forty-degree weather. But give that tree one good blast of springtime, one good day, sixty degrees and sunny, and those flowers were going to bloom. He could not afford to let his feelings for her grow.
What he really needed was to kill the demon. The end. Hard stop. That’s all she wrote.
Roughly translated, that meant that Martine slept on a hard floor every night and everyone else in the group looked at Arturo like he was pond scum.
So be it.
He’d figured it was only a matter of time before the rest of the group figured out that something had happened between him and Martine. And that something was now very, very over. And now she was sleeping outside his door like a puppy kicked off the bed.
Needless to say, Arturo hated the nights.
Not as much as he hated the days, but still.
He spent his time grinding his teeth, letting his blue energy swirl angrily inside of him, and praying for the demon to come and end this, once and for all.
CHAPTER NINE
Martine accepted her fate. Lonely, but lonely wasn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things. She, too, was praying for the demon to come. Her last two encounters with him had left her confident.
For the first time in all her existence, she was positive that the demon was not stronger than she was. They might be evenly matched, but she wanted this more. She could never let the demon take another human soul.
In another world, Arturo loved her. In another world, she kissed his lips goodnight. In another world, she would grow old and die gently.
In this world, she waited for the demon. She sharpened her knives, slept soundly, ate well, and waited for the end.
It was four nights later that Jack spoke up at the dinner table. Thea had been concerned about him for a few days. There was something on his mind.
“I’ve been thinking… about your golden energy.”
Martine looked up from her pasta, vaguely surprised that he was talking to her. She was so quiet and so removed at these meals that they rarely directed their conversation toward her. She didn’t blame the mortals, it was all by design.
“Oh?”
Jack fiddled with his food and the brim of his cap. “I understand why you have it, because you’re a born demon hunter, right?”
She carefully considered her answer, very conscious of every set of eyes that had turned to her. Arturo was, of course, looking anywhere but at her, but she knew he was hanging on their every word.
“That’s right. It’s simply the type of creature that I am. My species.”
Jack scraped his hand over his stubbled chin. “But why, then, does Arturo have his blue energy?”
There was a long pause. Arturo took it upon himself to answer. “The blue energy came to me when I sacrificed myself to the demon. The energy and the shifter power. It was all part of sacrificing myself.”
Jack’s eyes lit, like that was the answer he’d expected, but not the one that made sense. “All right. I understand the timing of everything, but why would the demon imbue you with a weapon that could get it killed by you?”
“What?” Tre looked confused.
“I’m asking,” Jack said slowly, “why the hell the demon would give Arturo the gift of this blue energy, when it’s the energy that could kill the demon? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Martine’s brow furrowed as she looked at Jack. She opened her mouth and clapped it closed. The room had turned to her, every set of eyes was on her, waiting for an answer that she wasn’t sure she should give. She’d never meant to go into this with them, though she should have realized that someone would eventually ask. “The demon did not give Arturo his blue energy. I did.”
Arturo’s fork clattered noisily down onto his plate. There were no words.
Thea looked back and forth between Arturo and Martine. “I take it you didn’t know that, cuz?” she asked him after a minute.
“You… gave this to me?” he asked hoarsely, his blue energy appearing at his fingertips.
She nodded slowly, as if she were scared of answering too many questions at once.
“Why?”
“Because you sacrificed yourself to the demon.” She laid down her fork as well. “I saw what was in his heart. He was not going to be merciful and kill you. I could see that he was going to torture you. Keep you alive for centuries. I could see that his goal was to enslave you. I needed to give you something that would keep him at bay, that would protect you from him.”
“Are you saying that things would have been worse for Arturo if you hadn’t given him his energy?” Jean Luc asked quietly.
She nodded eventually. “He would have had none of his spirit left. He would have completely succumbed to the demon. If the demon wanted to possess him, he would have done so completely, with no resistance. If the demon wanted Arturo to do his bidding, Arturo would have down so in the manner of a robot. With no regard for his own feelings. No personality. No—”
“Humanity,” Arturo cut in hoarsely.
Martine nodded. She would have given almost anything to know what he was thinking. Arturo’s eyes were closed, his hands praying against his face. He rose up all at once and she barely recognized him. He looked as if he’d just plugged himself into an electrical socket coursing with emotion. His eyes were wide and shining, his cheeks flushed with color, his lips pursed tightly. He strode around the table and held a hand out to Martine.
She stared at it. Apparently for a moment too long because he reached down and firmly stood her up from the table. She heard the people at the table saying something, but she had no idea what. She was stumbling after Arturo as he marched them out of the kitchen and to the other side of the house. She felt like a kite in a strong wind.
“Arturo!”
But he didn’t slow down. Not until they were in her quiet bedroom, blue with the evening light, her bed a glowing, unholy white.
He sat her on the bed and strode away from her. He went from the windows at one side of the room all the way to the other.
He turned and looked at her sitting on the bed, her hair a strawberry tangle, her eyes wide and confused, her lips pressed so sweetly together. He swore and kept pacing.
“Arturo,” she tried again, but he held up a palm, asking for silence.
When he turned toward her this time, he didn’t stop himself. He walked until he stood before her, and then he simply fell to his knees in front of her. Arturo bowed his head and pressed the heels of his hands into the sockets of his eyes.
“I was saving both of you,” he admitted. “Even then.”
“What?”
He felt the painfully gentle touch of her fingertips through his hair and he winced away from her. He was a live, exposed nerve and he couldn’t possibly be touched by her right then.
He crouched in front of her, his fists now planted on the ground. He spoke his words straight into the floor. “Something about that night has been haunting me, the night the demon took me. There was something there that I never really looked right at. I ignored it for centuries, because I thought it was… cruel to Amelia.”
“What are you getting at?” she asked gently. She was genuinely confused by his words, because the truth behind them
never occurred to her. And that was one of the many reasons he was kneeling here before her, why he had done what he did all those hundreds of years ago.
“I sacrificed myself to the demon not just because it was going to save Amelia, but because it was going to save you, too.”
He cocked backward and slotted his eyes against hers. He watched as comprehension dawned over her face. He searched for any emotion other than pure shock, but he read none.
“I knew that when the demon went,” he continued, “you went, too. And I couldn’t take it. I didn’t want the demon to take Amelia’s soul and I didn’t want this earth to exist without you. The only way that I could save both of you was to sacrifice myself for you. For both of you.”
Golden tears gathered in her eyes and tumbled clumsily down her cheeks. “You cared for me? That’s not possible. We barely even spoke. You were so wrapped up in Amelia.”
“I—” He dared to lean forward, to press the palms of his hands to her knees. “It’s hard to explain. But I felt a connection to you. I thought it was horrible, how lonely you were. I thought you were lovely. And interesting. And I just didn’t want you to die.”
Those green eyes of hers dropped down as she nodded. “I felt something for you,” she confessed. “That I didn’t feel about the others.”
He rocked back onto his heels. He felt as if his shirt was too tight around the collar. The room was too dark and too bright all at once. He squinted to see her and wished that she couldn’t see him. He wished for darkness and light all at once. He had no idea that that, more than anything, defined him now. “Really? What do you mean?”
“I suppose the humans would say I had a crush on you.”
“Uh.” Even his snark couldn’t save him from this one. He had literally nothing to say to that.
“Just a small one,” she shrugged.
“But you… never said anything.”
She eyed him, a little charmed by how young he suddenly seemed. She never would have guessed that she had the power to make 400-year-old immortal Arturo blush like a teenager. “Of course not. You were in love with Amelia, and she with you.”