The Shifter's Embrace

by Selena Scott

  “Gator,” Jean Luc said, almost lazily, nodding twenty feet down the canal with a point of his chin.

  “What?” Celia whispered, completely freezing. It was like her once-warm body had been dunked into the Arctic Ocean. Not even penguins got this cold. Only her eyes followed his finger as he pointed at what looked to her like an innocuous log floating on its own.

  “Just a little one. Maybe four feet—oof!”

  Jean Luc’s breath came out in a heavy whoosh as, in one smooth motion, Celia launched herself into his lap, her fingers clawing at his back, her legs locked around his hips, her head swiveling to keep an eye on the alligator floating in the canal.

  “Up! Up!” she hissed at him, gripping his shirt and whipping it up and down, like he was a horse whose reins she held. “Jesus fuck for the love of Christ, UP!!!”

  “Uhhhhh.”

  She buried her head in his shoulder and clung even tighter. Was this chick serious? The gator was, like, a preteen, and not interested in them at all. Plus it was twenty feet away in a canal that was ten feet deep. Jean Luc felt a tremor between them, where she was pressed so tightly to him, and at first he didn’t realize what it was. Then it happened again. And this time it had a sound. It was coming from him. An ancient and familiar feeling. One he thought he might never feel again.

  He observed almost in detached amazement as laughter rumbled up and out of him. He’d so rarely laughed since his brother had died. Almost never. Maybe once or twice with Jack and Tre. But this laughter was something else entirely. This was because something was funny. Celia, of course, clinging to him like a koala and commanding him to do her bidding like he was her steed. But also, it came from a place of deep joy. Just having her there, clinging so tight to him, pressing all that soft warmth all over him. It caused a real, bursting happiness in the core of him. He realized, with a bit of a jolt, that whatever factory inside of him that was in charge of manufacturing happiness hadn’t burned to the ground the day his brother died. In fact, it had just closed up shop for a while. Because here he was, and this gorgeous, insane, little punk in his arms was giving him a few moments of real happiness.

  “Up!” she commanded again.

  This time, even through the laughter, he followed her directions and hauled both of them up. He stood, with her koala’ed around him, and marveled at how she was both so little and so flipping soft. She was like nothing in his arms, yet she was so dang juicy at the same time. How’d she do that? It was like some sort of magic trick or something.

  “Jean Luc!” Celia lifted her head from his shoulder and her dark brown eyes blazed into his caramel brown ones. She lifted her hands from his back and gripped his cheeks, intensity in every line of her face. “Go! Run! It’s gonna get us!”

  And that really did it for him. He straight up burst out laughing, two hands planted firmly at her luscious ass, holding her up, her body straitjacketed around him. Something about the very real panic in her eyes only made this funnier.

  “Stop laughing!”

  That made him laugh harder.

  “We’re in danger, you…”

  He waited while she searched for a bad word appropriate for this situation.

  “Lunatic!” was what she settled on and that only made it funnier to him.

  “I,” he gasped out, “am not the lunatic in this scenario.”

  “You’re choosing to face down a wild animal, I think that makes you a lunatic!”

  Another wave of laughter overtook him. “I’m not facing it down. It’s over there minding its own business while you’re doing… whatever the hell this is.”

  Her face iced into utter intensity. “Get. Me. Out. Of. Here.”

  Still laughing, he complied, walking both of them across the backyard and the pool deck. It was only when the screen door of the porch slammed behind them that he let himself really feel what was going on here. The lush warmth of her, the press and tightness. He was pretty sure she’d hooked her feet at his back, that she was holding each of her elbows around his neck. Her cheek was pressed to his. Her ass was overflowing his hands. You couldn’t get much closer than this. Well. You could. But, uh, he probably shouldn’t be thinking about that right now.

  “You’re safe,” he told her and it took a second, but she unstiffened and unclamped, allowing herself to slither down his body until she came to a stand.

  Her hands still gripping his shirt, just in a different place than before, she let herself lean back, her head tipping up. Finally, her eyes snagged on his and she bit her lip, fighting the curl of a smile that he could just tell was fighting to get out.

  “Upon reflection,” she said carefully, “that may have been a bit of an overreaction.”

  He broke, laughing hard, his hands on her shoulders and hers bunched in his shirt. They sagged against one another, wiping tears and letting rolls of laughter from the other set them off all over again. It wasn’t until she finally tore away and had to sit down to catch her breath that he calmed down at all.

  “Wow,” she murmured, wiping a finger under her eye. “I really needed that.”

  “Which part?” he asked. “The laughter or the battle royale with an alligator?”

  She laughed again, and if he could have swallowed it whole he would have. “The whole shebang.”

  “Yeah.” He knew exactly what she meant. “I needed that, too.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Caroline sat at a table under a window in the room that Jean Luc had called the parlor when he’d given them the tour. Coming from money and then marrying into even more money, she’d sat in a lot of parlors in her life, but never one quite like this. There was a large, musty bear skin rug in the middle, and two enormous, red, crushed velvet chairs with what looked like animal paws for feet. Spread across the middle of the room was a sagging, upholstered couch with a pattern of foxes and hounds dancing from arm to arm. Oh yeah, and the wallpaper, which obviously used to be white but was now faded to a rather grisly tooth-colored yellow, had a pattern of vegetables lining it every few inches. Tiny vegetables, only an inch or so high. Eggplant, cabbage, lettuce, pepper, artichoke. That was the pattern. Eggplant, cabbage, lettuce, pepper, artichoke. Racing itself around the room.

  She loved it. Utterly loved it. Every home she’d ever lived in had been professionally decorated and had always looked immaculate. Crisp whites and perfectly upholstered butter suede. There were the lamps that cost more than a lease on a car and vases filled with two dozen roses that were trashed the very second they began to wilt.

  Just like her.

  It wasn’t like her to have such sad, self-defeating thoughts. But this one couldn’t be denied. She’d been wanted when she’d been a fresh, young flower, but her petals had begun to wilt and… hello, trashcan.

  She stared down at the papers in front of her, at the ugly, simple pen that lay across them.

  She picked up the pen.

  It wasn’t that she’d been thrown away because she’d aged. She wasn’t even thirty yet. No, it wasn’t age that had wilted her. It had been the marriage itself. And that’s what she had so much trouble accepting. The marriage had chewed her up and spat her out and then blamed her for being a little worse for wear.

  Peter hadn’t wanted a wife, in the end. A bride, he’d been over the moon about. But all that bride energy and luster and magic fades eventually. And all he had been left with was a loopy wife with no skills and no friends and nowhere else to be but always at home. In their immaculately decorated house. With all those rooms that weren’t meant for lounging or eating or hide and seek. No, those rooms were meant for nothing more than admiring.

  The rooms in Jean Luc’s house were not meant for admiring. Sure, they were sights to behold. With their strange furniture and stranger wallpaper. With their funky smells and flooring bleached by the pattern of the sun through the windows. And Caroline had loved admiring each and every room over the last few days. Something about the house called to her. The land, too.

  She let her eyes dr
ift out the window, to all that rioting, untamed green, and the periwinkle sky laid out over top. She’d always loved the Everglades. She’d been here a few times. Trailing Peter around the country while he was on business. He’d stayed in whatever high-rise hotel his company was paying for in Miami. But Caroline would always rent a car and drive south, drive west. The Everglades called to her, more than the ocean even.

  She had plenty of experience with the ocean. She and Peter had a house on the steely, gray Atlantic just north of Boston, in Swampscott. Of course, he had his condo in the city as well. So he wouldn’t have to commute every day. But she’d stayed in the gorgeous, wide-windowed Swampscott house. Where every room had a view of the slate-gray ocean.

  So, no. When she came down here on Peter’s business trips, she didn’t spend time at the beach, even though she was well aware that the ocean down here was much closer to a tropical experience than anything else. She didn’t care. She wanted the inland. She wanted the strange. She wanted the spooky, melodious quiet of the swamps.

  Suddenly, a thought hit her like a bolt of lightning. She put two pieces together that had been floating vaguely around in the soup of her thoughts. She stood straight up and glanced at her watch. It was time to start on dinner anyways. She could ask Jean Luc then. Electricity zipped through her veins. If it was true then it would mean that she was really supposed to be here. That all of this was meant.

  She shoved back her chair and raced from the parlor.

  A few minutes later, Tre peeked his head into the parlor and frowned when he didn’t see Caroline sitting at that table under the window the way she had for most of the afternoon. At first he’d thought she’d been playing solitaire or something, but no, he’d seen that she’d simply been lost in thought. For hours. And then, the third time he’d checked on her, he’d realized that she’d had those papers spread out in front of her, and a pen dancing in her nervous fingers. He’d understood then and resolved not to disturb her in the least.

  Now, though, it was almost dinnertime, the papers were spread out in a wheel on the table, and no Caroline in sight. It was not his business, he told himself. In no world was this anything even remotely resembling his business.

  He lingered in the doorway, his knuckles knocking in an old nervous habit against the doorjamb of the room. He was a curious person. Always had been. That was no small part of the reason he made such a gifted hacker. Tre enjoyed solving mysteries, following threads, having his questions answered. But Caroline was a person. Not a question. And he’d already snooped in her life enough.

  He’d taken the liberty of hacking her husband’s email and personal accounts back when the group had been in Northern Michigan. That’s how he’d found out about the cheating. He had been beating himself up about whether or not to say anything to her when she’d revealed that they were getting a divorce. He figured, maybe she knew about the cheating and maybe she didn’t. Either way, it wasn’t his to tell. Did it really matter? Seeing as how they were getting a divorce anyways? Wouldn’t it just hurt her more if he told her now? Hurt her unnecessarily?

  Tre heard Caroline humming to herself in the kitchen as she opened the fridge and the cabinets here and there. He lingered in the doorway of the parlor, his eyes on the table where she’d been sitting for hours.

  Almost without telling them to, his legs strode forward. His fingers twitched at his sides as he looked down at the table, the papers, the pen. He sighed, figuring he was already in for a penny, in for a pound. Tre planted his hand on the divorce papers and skewed them a little further so he could see the signature page.

  There was one signature there.

  And it wasn’t Caroline’s.

  Tre eased himself into the chair where she’d sat and frowned down at that empty signature line. She’d sat for hours and hours and still hadn’t brought herself to sign them?

  He heard a sound from the kitchen and stood up quickly from the chair, striding out from the parlor, not wanting to be caught looking at the divorce papers.

  He’d really, really hoped that his snooping in Northern Michigan could just be put to rest, that he’d never have to admit it and she’d never have to know.

  But if she was still holding on to this Peter guy this hard, then there was a good chance she didn’t know just how badly he’d been betraying her.

  Ugh. Tre stopped in one of the muggy, dark hallways, the wood paneling warped from the constant humidity. He gently banged his forehead against the wall. He was going to have to tell her.

  ***

  Martine spent the day on foot, picking around the land surrounding Jean Luc’s childhood home. She’d never been to the Everglades before, but she’d done some research and she knew what to look out for. She wasn’t worried about the alligators. She’d wrestled far worse than that. She was a demon hunter after all.

  A familiar, unwelcome feeling washed over her as she picked her way through a field filled with tall grass. She could see Jean Luc’s house in the distance.

  She knew this feeling. And she was so ungodly ashamed of it. Martine swiped at wetness under her eyes. Sometimes she didn’t even really believe that she was feeling this way. That she was jealous of these mortals. There was no reason to be jealous. Their problems were so mundane. Their lives, painfully short. Glory, for them, was rare and fleeting.

  But they have families.

  They can have children.

  They have love.

  She hissed at her own thoughts. It barely mattered what they had. What she had was infinitely more meaningful. She was a fighter for justice. She kept the dark from the edges of the world. She protected mortals. She was revered and respected by other demon hunters. That was enough for her.

  It didn’t matter that she was becoming more and more lonely as the decades slowly passed. It didn’t matter that her last experience with this particular demon had left her as nothing more than a wrecked failure. It didn’t matter that she was terrified that what had happened then would happen again.

  That mission had happened, it had been a failure, and now it was over. She couldn’t destroy herself over it for the rest of her existence.

  It was not the reason that she wanted to capture Arturo instead of killing him.

  Even though killing him would be considerably easier.

  Even though he was particularly dangerous.

  No! No. She was right. Capturing him made much more sense. If they captured him, then they could use him as a tool just as the demon had been. Arturo was to be viewed as a weapon and nothing more.

  It was the most logical way of getting what she wanted. And what she wanted was to protect these humans at all costs. She turned and looked back at Jean Luc’s house. Where she knew they all were.

  Probably talking and laughing with one another. And she was out here, on the outside, as usual. She knew she was the outlier. The odd man out. It had never bothered her before.

  And she hated that it bothered her now.

  ***

  “Sit down!” Caroline urged everyone, a huge smile on her face. “Thea and I made dinner.”

  The group sat down then, a bit more eager for the food now that they knew that Caroline had had help. It wasn’t that she was a bad cook. It was that she was a very unusual cook. Thea, however, stuck to the basics and did them well. There was baked mac and cheese, a gorgeous salad and pan of roasted vegetables, and some grilled chicken.

  They sat in the dining room, which was strange for Jean Luc, considering he and Hugo and Claude used to sit around the kitchen counter to eat. He could count the number of times he’d sat at this dining room table on one hand. It didn’t bother him to do so now, it was just a bit strange.

  “Okay,” Caroline said, a little sparkle in her eye. “This is family dinner. We’re having it tonight, obviously. But we’re also going to have it every night. All of us eating together, okay?” She looked around at all of them, her happiness so palpable it was almost fierce. “And two people who aren’t me and Thea are going to clean up.�
��

  The group turned to the food.

  “And!” Caroline held up a finger and the group pulled their hands back from the silverware and looked back at her. “We’re all going to do something together after dinner. A movie or a board game or something.” She looked around at the bemused faces of her friends. “We’ll start easy with a movie tonight.”

  “You’re seeming awfully…” Jack searched for the right word, “…gung ho this evening, Caroline. Any particular reason?”

  “Yes!” she nodded that head of tumbling chestnut hair and treated all of them to a particularly sparkling smile. Tre choked on the beer he’d just been attempting to swallow and coughed it out. For the most part, he was used to that sparkle of hers, but tonight it was particularly potent. “I realized something today.”

  “What’s that?” Thea asked her, serving salad onto her plate and then Jack’s and then, just because, onto Martine’s plate as well. Martine looked up at her in surprise.

  “I realized that I am definitely, absolutely, supposed to be here.”

  They all looked at her for a minute, lots of eyebrows raised.

  “I thought we already went through that, Caroline, darlin’,” Jack said softly. Caroline had stolen her copy of the map from her husband’s family. She’d broken down and revealed their impending divorce as if it were a betrayal to the group as a whole. She’d felt that it meant that she wasn’t supposed to be here at all. That she was endangering the group by having deprived Peter of the right to be there.

  They’d all reassured her that they wouldn’t have preferred Peter. That the map had a way of choosing the right person. That it was destiny for her to be there.