The Shifting Storm (Book 4)

by Jeff Hale

  The room on the other side was a bedroom, with a twin bed on either side of the room. There was singular small lamp on, but I could see just as good in the dark anyway. I just wasn’t quite sure what to make of what I was seeing.

  Katelyn was on her back on the bed to the right, her pale colored vest undone and her blouse pushed up around her throat. A young man knelt between her legs, his face buried in her naked breasts. He was shirtless, his jeans still on but unbuttoned. He was alternately fondling and suckling at her breasts, while his free hand was fumbling with the lacing on her pants, trying to pull them over her hips. She wasn’t fighting him off, in fact was almost encouraging him with little moans and movements, but her eyes weren’t looking at him; her head was turned to the side, toward me, her sight unfocused.

  Neither of them noticed me standing there in shock. The guy had finally managed to get some of the lacing undone, enough to slide his hand inside the front of her pants. Her back arched, a noise of pleasure coming from her throat, but still, what her body was feeling and what seemed to be happening in her head, in her eyes, was not the same thing. Something was wrong.

  I didn’t take time to think. I moved forward, grabbing the man by the arm attached to the hand down Katelyn’s pants, and pulled. Katelyn mumbled softly in protest, still not turning her head to see what had happened, and I pushed the man away from her. He stood, giving me a look of surprise to see someone almost a foot shorter than he was that had the strength to budge him.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked, confused, still too wrapped up in lust to be angry with me… yet.

  I jerked my head toward Katelyn.

  “She came up here with me, she’s willing, so you just run along so we can finish,” he said, belligerence finally starting to show. I could smell alcohol on him, but he didn’t appear drunk.

  “You’re not finishing anything, mate, not with her,” I told him, a bit of a growl in my voice.

  I didn’t know what was wrong with Katelyn, but for all I knew, he had been responsible. As for being willing, she had a boyfriend and I didn’t think she would cheat on Aerick when I knew how much she cared about him.

  I reached down and carefully pulled her bra and blouse back into place. She made murmuring noises, but didn’t really seem to see me. A hand on my shoulder spun me back to face the other man.

  “She’s mine, asshole, now get out!” He was angry now, towering over me.

  I wasn’t in the mood to mince too many words with him. “No, she’s not.” My fist connected with his chin, propelling him backwards and onto the other bed, where he lay, dazed.

  I turned back to Katelyn, scooping her up in my arms. Her eyes closed, then opened, finally focusing on me for a split second.

  “Alex?”

  I could smell the alcohol, incredibly strong on her breath, and it finally dawned on me that she was drunk. Beyond drunk, she was pissed.

  “I’ve got you, Katie,” I whispered, concerned as to how she could even have gotten drunk in the first place. Her shifter metabolism should have prevented it from happening, so the only conclusion I could come to was that the guy she was with must have used something to override it. “Gonna get you home and we can get this all sorted out.”

  “Mmmm,” she muttered, then her head lolled back as she passed out.

  I carried her out of the room and down both flights of stairs, passing Kris near the bottom of the lower ones. She stopped, staring at both of us in shock.

  “Alex? What the hell are you doing here?” Her voice was slightly slurred and her smile turned to one of concern when she saw Katelyn. “And what the hell is wrong with Kat?”

  “I’m not sure,” I told her, “but I need to get her home, your apartment anyway. Do either of you have a vehicle?”

  She nodded. “Kat does, her keys are in her purse. But she’s just drunk, Alex, I think.”

  She motioned for me to follow her into the next room, still full of people talking and drinking. I got a few curious looks from some of them, but after they had given me a cursory examination, all they saw was a bloke toting a drunken girl, something not uncommon at these kinds of parties. Kris leaned behind a chair, came up with a small black leather purse and set it on Katelyn’s stomach.

  “Car keys, house keys, cell phone, all in there,” she said, shrugging. “Don’t get overly worried, though, Alex, she’s just had too much to drink. Get her home, get some caffeine in her, she’ll be fine.”

  I nodded at her, not bothering to tell her that caffeine would have little effect on a shifter either, although her apparent lack of real worry seemed odd to me. “Which car?”

  “Same one she had in Washington, the blue Civic.”

  “You coming with us?” I asked.

  “Nah, she’ll be fine, she will, Alex. I’ll stay here, I can get a ride home from Celeste later.”

  I nodded at her. If she wanted to stay that was all right; I could take care of Katelyn just fine once I figured out what was wrong with her. It just still seemed odd that Kris shouldn’t be worried that Katelyn was drunk when she shouldn’t be. I headed for the door.

  “Oh, and Alex? Check under her bracelet,” Kris called out as I headed outside.

  What does that mean?

  I spotted Katelyn’s car, parked not too far away, and got her set in the passenger seat and belted in. It took a few moments of digging through her purse to find the key ring that held her car keys and what looked like a front door key, presumably to their apartment. I found her cell phone, checked it and saw that there were a couple of missed calls, one of them from me.

  Luckily, a shifter’s sense of direction is usually pretty good, or I would never have found my way back to her apartment. She stirred a couple of times on the way, murmuring incoherently, a name I thought at one point that sounded like ‘Arthur’ but I had no clue who that might be.

  Their apartment was on the ground floor, so at least I didn’t have to negotiate stairs again with her. I gave her neighbor, who stuck his head out the door while I fumbled with the lock, a genial nod, gesturing that Katelyn had had too much to drink and I was helping her home. He gave me a conspiratorial wink, before disappearing back into his own apartment. I finally got the door open and got us both inside, shoving it shut behind me. I was greeted by a friendly meowrp.

  Her cat, Angel, was sitting on the arm of the couch, staring at me. I had gotten along with the cat quite well when we had been staying with Katelyn’s mother after the Barrier had fallen, and it looked like she remembered me.

  Straight past the living room I could see the kitchen, with a dining room to the right of that. There was a door on the right wall, near the dining room, that might have been a bedroom, and an alcove to the left that led to what might have been a bathroom and another bedroom. I took a gamble and headed for the door on the right, opening it and taking a breath, smelling Katelyn all throughout the room and realizing that I had guessed correctly.

  I laid her on the bed and pulled her boots off. She still wasn’t moving much. I looked her over, trying to find something that would explain to me what was going on, and my eyes lit on the bracelet around her right wrist, the wide copper and turquoise one that Darien had bought her not long after they had met. It surprised me that she was wearing it, and a quick peek saw that she was wearing the matching necklace as well. My eyes went back to the bracelet.

  Check under her bracelet.

  I slid it from her wrist, my brows furrowing in bewilderment as I saw the silver band beneath, a sick feeling creeping into my stomach. I undid the latch, pulling the narrow width of metal free, saw the blood oozing from two tiny punctures on the inside of her wrist where two tiny spikes had been embedded. In ages past, similar items in collar form had been used to keep shifters in captivity.

  But she had done this to herself.

  I supposed that it could be seen as an ingenious way for a shifter to get drunk, or otherwise suppress their natural abilities, easily removable by the wearer, but it still seemed a cruel
torture device in my eyes.

  I flung it away from me and wiped the two little dots of blood from her wrist with my thumb. Wounds from silver healed at normal human rates, but her body could deal with the toxins now. I sat on the edge of the bed, eyes on Katelyn, waiting for her system to metabolize the alcohol. It didn’t take long. After about ten minutes or so, she stirred, her hand going to her wrist, noting the absence of the band.

  “What the hell?” she mumbled, her eyes fluttering open to stare at the ceiling. She turned her head, looking at the room. “How did I get home?” Her eyes finally lit on me. “Alex?” And then something went through them, a sort of pain, sadness. She sat up and leaned back against the headboard. “What are you doing here?”

  “Apparently keeping you from getting date raped,” I said, looking pointedly at her wrist. “What the hell were you thinking, crippling yourself like that?”

  She made a face, somewhere between resignation and frustration. “I wasn’t crippling myself, I was getting drunk, trying to have a good time, let loose.”

  “Did that include having some guy take advantage of you?”

  “Warren?” Her eyes went wide. “Shit, you didn’t hurt him did you? And no, he wasn’t taking advantage of me, I fully intended to sleep with him. I just didn’t realize the booze was gonna hit quite that hard.” She narrowed her eyes at me.

  I was shocked. “I thought you weren’t intending to cheat?”

  A dry, mirthless laugh broke from her. “Cheat? On who?”

  “Aerick.”

  That fleeting look of sadness passed across her face again, followed by indifference. “For your information, Aerick and I haven’t been together for the past eight months.”

  That was news to me. Of course, I hadn’t actually seen her or spoken to her since June of last year. I had followed Darien to Sicily, then had finally gotten tired of his sullenness and tendency to disappear for days on his own and gone back to Florida.

  “What happened?” I knew that he had loved her, and she him, so couldn’t fathom why they had split up.

  “He had to leave, to go train with Merlin, for an unknown length of time. He didn’t want me waiting around for him, so he broke it off.” She sounded resentful.

  “But you did wait, didn’t you.”

  She laughed, not a happy laugh. “I sure did, then I got a message a few days ago that he was still going to be gone for however fucking long and that I needed to move on. So, tonight, I was moving on.” There was a shimmer of tears in her eyes.

  “I see.”

  “So why are you here, Alex? You kinda just showed up out of the blue.”

  “There’s a reason, but I’ll tell you in the morning, once you’re less grumpy. You probably need to get some sleep anyway, so I should probably call a cab and find myself a hotel room.”

  She frowned, a single tear sliding down her cheek. “A hotel? We’re pack. You can stay here, Alex, you’re welcome here, you know that.”

  “I just didn’t want to presume.” I stood, heading for the door. “I’ll just bed down on the couch out there then, if that’s okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.” She turned her head away from me, hugging her arms to her chest and drawing her knees up. She didn’t sound sure.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Katie?” I walked back over to the side of the bed.

  She ducked her head down, but I put a finger under her chin and lifted her face. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. I felt that tug on my heartstrings again, the one I hadn’t felt for so long, that I thought might go away if I wasn’t near her. But it was back, making me ache inside that she was hurting, and I didn’t know what to do.

  And maybe, if I was honest with myself, it was that part of me that loved her that had seen what I had wanted to at the party, and assumed she wasn’t a willing participant. I could handle her being with Darien, hell, I could handle her being with Aerick because there was an attachment between the two of them that was almost as strong as the one between her and Darien, and I actually liked Aerick. But I wasn’t sure if I could deal with her being with anyone else.

  “What’s wrong, Katie?”

  She leaned forward, resting her head against my chest, and started crying in earnest, loud noisy sobs that wracked through her body. “I had to let him go, Alex, I had to let him go,” she cried softly through her tears.

  I wrapped my arms around her, stroking her hair. “Ssh, Katie, ssh, it’s okay.”

  Her heart had been broken for the first time.

  I rocked her in my arms, waiting for the tears to calm. It seemed I was always there to pick up the pieces of whatever had gone wrong for her. I didn’t mind; it made me feel important to her, that I could do for her what those others couldn’t. Once she had gotten most of it out of her system, had calmed down, I pulled the blankets back and tucked her into them, pulling them up around her shoulders. I dropped a light kiss on her forehead and made to leave the room.

  “Stay with me, Alex, please?” she pleaded. “I just don’t want to be alone. I need to feel someone close.” Her huge blue eyes stared at me in desperation.

  I felt that yank on my heart again and I nodded at her, smiling. She scooted over and I lay down behind her, on top of the covers, stretching my arm so that it draped over her waist.

  She wrapped her fingers over my hand and a long, rattling sigh broke from her. “Thank you, Alex,” she whispered, “for being my stuffed animal again.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth of her back through the blanket, the scent of her strong in my nostrils, the sound of her heartbeat in the dark and thought to myself, She’s mine, at least in this small way, for this short moment, she’s mine.

  “I’m anything you want me to be, Katie, always,” I promised her softly.

  I must have lain there for a good fifteen minutes, just listening to her breathe as she fell into slumber, beginning to doze off myself, when she startled me back into wakefulness by drawing my hand up to her face.

  She pressed her nose and mouth into my palm, inhaling deeply against my skin, her lips brushing lightly and I caught my breath, feeling a stab of desire run through me. Something flared off her and I could suddenly sense her beast, close under her skin. My own woke up, the dingo inside me curious about the other creature it knew was near.

  “Katie?”

  She turned her cheek into my palm, rubbing against my hand and I felt my fingers cup her face, a ragged exhalation of breath coming from my lungs. Her own breathing sped up and I could hear her heart start to race. She suddenly rolled onto her back, looking up at me with eyes gone midnight dark. A soft smile curved her lips.

  “Anything, Alex?” she questioned me, vulnerability in her voice.

  I swallowed hard, feeling the dingo scratching impatiently under my skin. He knew what was happening, knew what that cat wanted, and he wanted it too. He wanted to let that creature twine herself around his legs, to feel her rub against him. He wanted to sink his teeth into her and watch her squirm.

  But Darien was my best friend, my Alpha, and he had claimed Katelyn as his mate. I knew she didn’t feel the same way about him, that she lusted after him, but she didn’t love him, at least not truly yet. She had a connection to him that she couldn’t understand, one that had drawn her to Darien even as she was falling in love with Aerick.

  Katelyn housed the soul of Darien’s long dead wife, even though she had no knowledge of it. Add that to the fact that it was Darien who had turned her into a shifter and that he was her Alpha, and she would never be out from under his influence.

  But I had loved her from the moment I had laid eyes on her, with no other metaphysical bonds, other than our shifter heritage, to manipulate it. And I had vowed to Darien that I would never start anything with her that she didn’t want first.

  But she wasn’t with Darien, or Aerick, and she was making the first move.

  “Anything,” I breathed.

  She reached up and ran her fingers down t
he side of my face then slowly rubbed her thumb against my lips. “Then be my lover, Alex,” she said, holding my gaze with her own, her mouth trembling. “Love me.”

  I nodded slowly, opening my mouth to catch her thumb between my lips, the tip of my tongue tasting that small bit of flesh. That little taste of her sent the dingo wild and I bit her thumb before I realized it. She shuddered through the blanket, a hiss escaping her and I could feel the unmistakable hum of the cat playing under her skin.

  I wanted more. I dropped my face down to her hers, only slowing my descent so that my lips were light on hers. I had wanted this for so long that I wanted to savor it, to take my time.

  I should have known better.

  The moment my lips met hers it was as though an electric jolt went through me, setting all my nerve endings aflame. Her tongue met mine halfway, and it was as though I couldn’t get close enough, couldn’t drink her in quick enough. I finally pulled back to look at her face, her eyes half closed, her lips kiss bruised.

  I placed a light kiss on her jaw, holding back the desire to mark her skin with my teeth, followed that kiss with another, until I was covering her face in light feathery kisses.

  Her hands found their way into my hair, holding my head toward hers, and every time my mouth touched her I could feel her shiver. I worked my way down to her neck, once again fighting back the urge to use my teeth, but giving in to using my tongue, kissing her, licking her skin, losing myself in the feel and taste of her.

  The blanket between us soon became a nuisance and I moved enough to push it aside. I kissed her on the lips again, giving in to that baser passion to grind my mouth against hers.

  She arched up against me, free from the blankets, small moans escaping her, her knees coming up to rest on either side of my hips. Her hands dropped to my t-shirt, tugging at it, and when I refused to lift my head from hers, not wanting to miss a moment, I heard cloth rip as she pulled it away. Then her hands were against the bare skin of my chest, her legs wrapping around my waist.