by Selena Scott
He couldn’t miss her, he told himself. She was standing right there, for fuck’s sake! He couldn’t miss someone who was shimmying into her jeans an arm’s length away.
“You gonna do something about that?” she asked, nodding toward the taut, angrily hard cock nearly bursting out of his briefs.
He looked down at it philosophically then back up at her. “Figured I should wait until you were done wiggling into your jeans or else I was just going to have to start all over again.”
She pursed her lips and nodded, as if what he was saying was logical enough. She grabbed her flannel and slid into it, buttoning it up and sliding her boots on at the same time. “Alright then, I’ll get out of your hair.”
“Hey!” He reached forward and grabbed her by the back of her jeans. “Hold on a minute. I don’t want you going out there without me.” He jumped off the bed and grabbed his own jeans from his bag. He tucked himself into them with a little wince and hopped into one sock and then the other.
“Why?” she asked him, once again looking like he was crazy.
“Because you heard me. I don’t know what those guys felt when I was feeling on you.”
“And that’s a problem because….”
“Because I don’t want you waltzing out there without me if they just got their jollies from perving on us!”
Thea looked at him very calmly, maddeningly so. “I can take care of myself, Jack. And I don’t get the impression that either of those guys are the take-without-asking type. I think the chances are, they’re probably more embarrassed than they are turned on.”
He heard the sense in her words, knew she was most likely right. But he wasn’t risking it. The idea of her walking out there and being the recipient of some kind of knowing stare from one of those two stooges, well, it filled Jack up with a rising protectiveness that he could never have predicted.
Jack glanced at her face as he yanked his shirt over his head. He wasn’t an idiot, though. “Let’s just go out together, alright? Not because you can’t handle yourself, but for my sanity.” He reached for her again, but instead of tugging, waited until she’d stepped toward him. “All of this is pretty new for me.”
She nodded, understanding coming into her eyes. The man had just been transformed into a bear shifter, for God’s sake. He was linked to two friends in a strange feelings-exchange. And now his whole life was different. She supposed she could indulge him a bit. She had no idea that the ‘this’ he’d been referring to had had more to do with her than with the bear shifter thing.
They went out together to find everyone eating breakfast at the big table.
“Morning!” Caroline chirped. “There’s bagels and coffee in the kitchen if you’re hungry. How’re you feeling, Jack?”
“Just fine. Thanks for asking, Caroline, darlin’.” He responded kindly, but his eyes were on Jean Luc and Tre. Both of whom were a little pink in the cheek. Actually, Tre was about as red as his hair. “Gentlemen? Maybe we could speak out on the porch?”
The three men ignored the curious looks from the ladies and found themselves on the porch, standing in a triangle. Jean Luc scratched the back of his neck, Tre studied the sky, and Jack looked back and forth between them.
At once, they all looked at one another and burst out laughing.
“Oh Lord,” Jack said through a rolling chuckle. “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into, boys?”
Jean Luc scrubbed a hand over his face and just kept laughing. This had to be just about the most awkward thing that he’d ever been through in his life.
“Nothing to be embarrassed about,” Tre said, taking his glasses off to wipe his eyes. “It’s perfectly natural. You see, Jack. When a man loves a woman very much, and he wants to be close with her—”
They all burst out laughing again.
“Well, so what the hell are we gonna do about it?” Jack wondered aloud, one hand clamped onto Jean Luc’s shoulder for support as he straightened back out from laughing so hard. “I’m not trying to have an audience every time I’m trying to get a taste.”
Jean Luc winced at Jack’s wording. “Jesus.”
And that just set them all off again.
Finally, after a few hysterical—admittedly juvenile—moments, they all found themselves sitting on the porch steps and looking out to the dark lake in front of them. Houses and lawns winked at them from the other shore.
“It wasn’t like we were in the room with you,” Tre finally said. “We didn’t even know who you were with.” Tre cleared his throat. “I mean, I assumed it was Thea, considering the way she slammed the door in our faces last night, but there wasn’t any… other information I was getting to back that up.”
Tre cleared his throat and put his glasses back on. This was so awkward, but they had to clear it up, get it out of the way.
“You mean that you weren’t… experiencing what I was experiencing?” Jack asked them.
“Nah,” Jean Luc said, picking up a rock from the garden next to him and casually throwing it forty yards into the lake. Jack and Tre blinked at him, but he didn’t even seem to notice he’d done something particularly impressive. “It wasn’t like that. It was almost like when you overhear somebody getting busy. You know what’s going on, but it’s not happening to you.”
“Yeah,” Tre nodded. “Exactly. We knew what you were feeling, but we weren’t feeling it ourselves.”
“Huh.” Jack scraped a palm over his stubble. “I guess I can live with that. Long as Thea can.”
“Martine says that after our first, uh, shift thingy we’ll be able to control the connection a little better. Maybe give each other some more privacy,” Tre said, tossing a rock from one hand to the other, deciding not to throw it and thus directly compare himself with Jean Luc.
“In the meantime, boys,” Jack said, clapping the others on the shoulder, “we’re grown men amongst some very good-looking women and we might have to do what grown men are inclined to do, if given the signal from said good-looking women.”
Neither Jean Luc nor Tre considered that prospect with quite the swagger or certainty that Jack did, but they both nodded.
“Fair enough,” Jean Luc said, understanding that they were acknowledging the awkwardness and choosing to give one another a little space on the issue.
Jack paused. “Yeah, don’t think I probably need to say this but—”
“Understood,” Tre said immediately.
“She’s yours, man,” Jean Luc agreed.
The three men froze as someone cleared her throat from behind them. They all turned slowly to see Thea leaning against the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest and her eyebrows raised.
“I’m just gonna go… away,” mumbled Tre. “Forever.”
“Yup. Yeah. Bye.” Jean Luc was up and after Tre who scooted past Thea in the door.
She let them go without a glance and sidled up to Jack who stood a step down on the porch stairs. They were eye to eye.
“Got everything straightened out, did you?” she asked, deceptively casual.
“Sure did,” he answered, hands on his hips, trying to get a good read on her and failing.
“Jack,” she said, and something in her tone made his stomach drop. “If we’re gonna do this, there’s something you should know.”
“Alright.”
“I’m not interested in having a man,” she told him, point blank. “And I never will be.”
He raised his eyebrows and waited, figuring she most likely had more to say.
“In two weeks, when you three are all through your transformation, or whatever, I’m going back home. To Montana. To my homestead. Because that’s where my life is. Trust me. I would have gone yesterday if this curse of yours hadn’t kept me here. The second the new moon hits. I’m home. Are we clear?”
Her words weren’t a surprise to him. Not really. But that didn’t make it any easier to hear them. “I suppose the same could be said for me.”
It was true. He wasn’t interested i
n turning his life into a team sport. He had no business having a girlfriend. Not with the lifestyle he led. No real place to call home, no regular business hours. Any given moment he could be slogging through the La Digue Swamps in the Seychelles or climbing mountains in Japan. That was his life and that was how he liked it.
Her stance loosened a little bit, like she was relieved, and that irritated Jack, too. It was irritation that burned bright for a moment and then melted away when she swayed forward, into him. “Good.”
She pushed those unbelievably soft lips against his and he grunted, in that way of his.
She pulled away and stepped back and any of the residual irritation Jack might have felt dissolved when he saw the fuzzy look in her eyes. She was just as revving for him as he was for her. His feathers smoothed back into place, Jack kissed her one more time and jogged up the stairs, into the house for breakfast.
Thea stayed on the porch and looked at the lake for a while.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The moon shrank in the sky night after night over the next three days. The group was getting antsy. The house was opened up and cleaned, the chores all assigned and taken care of, the lawn mowed. There was nothing to do but sit around and wait for the new moon when they’d all be able to finally leave.
It was on the fourth afternoon that it rained and had them all penned in the living room. It was just cool enough for a small fire in the hearth, as long as they kept the windows open. Jean Luc was stretching from a run he’d just taken, Tre and Caroline were playing cards, Celia was reading on her Kindle, Martine was sharpening a blade in the corner, and Thea and Jack were stretched out on a couch apiece.
They’d slept in the same twin bed each night since she came back, and there’d been plenty of tangling and melting and kissing since then. But they’d yet to take anything further. Jack was still wary of her shoulder injury and Thea was a slow-moving person anyways.
“So,” Thea broke the silence, tossing her long, coltish legs over the back of the couch. “How did this demon asshole lure us all so effectively? How did he know the maps would work?”
“What do you mean?” Martine asked from across the room. Celia looked up from the top of her Kindle and Jean Luc repositioned himself to hear better.
“I mean that it wasn’t like the demon sent me that map in the mail and piqued my interest. That map was my grandfather’s grandfather’s. Almost two centuries old. Why start the wild goose chase that long ago? Why run the risk that the map gets destroyed or that it ends up in the hands of an heir that just doesn’t give a crap about it, locks it in a drawer and forgets?”
“Is that how you got your copy?” Jack asked. “Interesting.”
“What about you?” Thea replied. “Still going with the whole won-it-in-a-poker-game bullshit?”
“Nawl.” He drawled, a little grin on his face, just for her. “Though I’ve won plenty of treasure maps in that exact scenario. But that particular map my dad gave me when I was a kid. Told me to keep it safe. It was what got me interested in treasure hunting in the first place. Had it stolen from me once. Took me two years and three times around the world to track it down again.” He pointed at his eyebrow. “The man who stole it gave me this, matter of fact.”
“Huh. You cared about it that much? So maybe that answers it then? He knew that if they were family heirlooms, then the heirs would treat them with care and reverence?” Thea guessed.
“Makes sense to me,” Jean Luc said, switching his stretch. “It was one of the only things my mother left to me and—to me when she died.” He assumed that most of the group knew that he and Hugo had been raised by his mother’s brother, who’d died just after he’d been drafted in the NFL. There was no reason to go into detail about how Jean Luc was the last living member of his family.
The remaining members of the group, Celia, Caroline, Tre and Martine all glanced at one another. That theory didn’t exactly make sense to them.
“Well,” Celia cleared her throat, deciding to come clean. “I didn’t inherit mine. I, uh, found it in a library book in the reference section of the library a few years ago.” She blushed a deep red and Jean Luc found himself tipping his head to one side as he studied her.
“Why does that embarrass you?” he asked her, which made her blush even deeper.
“I don’t know. It’s just that if you all inherited yours, then that makes me the odd man out. It’s like it’s a room filled with actual seventh souls and then there’s me. The nerd who read an old cartography reference guide and found the map. By accident.”
“You’re not the only seventh soul faker, Celia,” Tre assured her. He took a deep breath. “Might not be a surprise to anybody, considering my line of work, but I stole my copy.”
He ignored Caroline’s big, shocked eyes on the side of his face. She dropped her hands lower in her surprise and Tre looked away, pushing her hands back up so that he couldn’t see the cards in her hands. He might be a thief but he wasn’t a cheater.
“Really?” Thea sat up and studied him. “How?”
“Worked a big job in Vienna a few years ago. Cracked this digitally coded vault at some big shot’s house. He wasn’t a good guy, if that makes any of this land differently for all your moral compasses.” Tre shrugged. “Everything there he’d stolen from other people. Me and the group I was with, all of us chose different stuff. I chose the map.” And a few briefcases of gold bars, but he didn’t feel the need to mention that.
“I’m not a seventh soul either,” Caroline said, her voice quieter than usual, her eyes on the ground. “At least not by blood. It came down the line in my husband’s family.”
Tre thought he saw something there, something worth asking about, but Martine cut in, and his attention turned to her.
“And I’m obviously not officially a seventh soul either. I tracked that map for a long time before I came to possess it.”
“How’d you know it existed in the first place?” Thea asked.
“This particular demon has a very particular style. You’re right when you said that it was strange, Thea, how long he prefers to lure his victims. And all I can say is that centuries wouldn’t feel nearly as long to him. And he likes to play with his food.”
“But there’s so much room for error!” Thea insisted. “I almost didn’t come, myself. There was bad weather headed our way and a field to be turned over and the roof had to be re-shingled. I almost talked myself out of it.”
“Sure,” Martine said. “But you didn’t talk yourself out of it. You came. And so did you and you and you,” Martine gestured to each person in turn. “All I can say is that the map doesn’t act like any old map. There’s a magnetism to it. A magic of sorts. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this group ended up here. Each map made its way to who it was supposed to.”
Those words set a strange mood for everyone.
“Hold on,” Thea tried again, wanting answers. “You still didn’t answer the question about how you found the map. If it didn’t come through your family then you must have stolen it or found it like everyone else did.”
Martine shifted. Of course it was Thea that was going to bring this issue to light. She was smart and skeptical, and though she expected Thea didn’t quite realize it yet, very protective of the group.
“The map I have never had an original owner. Nor was it meant for me.”
“Meaning…”
“I knew the demon was creating a new trap. His old one had resolved centuries before and he would be growing hungry. I tracked him and followed the signs and before that map made its way to an innocent, I intercepted it.”
“But,” Tre spoke up now, leaning forward. “You just told us that the maps were centuries old.”
Martine sighed. So the cat was out of the bag, as they say. “Right. I’m not, exactly, mortal. Like I said, I’m a demon hunter. That’s not a profession, it’s a kind of being.”
The room was completely quiet and still for a solid ten seconds before Thea flopped backward
s, the Kindle slipped out of Celia’s hands, and Tre went ahead and set his hand of cards down. Everyone else remained frozen.
“You’re not human?” Thea asked incredulously.
“No.”
“So, then what are you?”
She sighed. They deserved an explanation, but it was all so complicated. “I’m like a human in many ways…”
“But you’re also a hawk,” Jack cut in dryly.
“Yes, I’m also a shifter. And I have the power to create shifters as well. You three, being mortal, will never have the power to create.”
“What’s your lifespan?” Tre asked, leaning fully forward now.
“Much longer than yours, but delicate. I can be killed. I age. And in many ways, my life force is tied up with the particular demon which I am hunting. When he is killed, I’ll start to die. There will be no more need for my immortality.”
There was an even longer silence now.
“We’re gonna go to the bar,” Jack decided unilaterally. “I really think that’s what we all need right about now. An outing. And a drink for those of us who want one. Celia, you know any good watering holes around here?”
She looked surprised for a second, opening and closing her mouth. “Ah, there’s Doc’s. It’s just on the other side of 68 but it’s really just a dive bar.”
“Is there pool? Beer? A juke box?”
“Far as I know.”
“Alright,” Jack decided. He was still laying down and he didn’t do much more than just cross one ankle over the other, but he was suddenly at the helm of the group, guiding them much the way that Thea had the other night when she prepared dinner. “Let’s see. It’s four o’clock now? Good. Everybody do what you have to do, kill an hour, and then we’re heading out.”
“Fun!” Caroline seemed back to her happy self as she hopped up. “I’m gonna go change. Oh!” She turned back around to Tre. “Gin.” She set her cards down so he could see them and practically skipped away to her room.
Tre just shook his head after her. The woman was a trip.
Jean Luc rose and stepped into the back hallway, toward his bedroom. If they were going out, which he did not want to do, he needed to go take a shower. Away from the group, he was pulling his sweaty T-shirt off over his head when he felt a thump against his stomach and an ‘oof!’