by Selena Scott
It was there that Tre first viewed Peter Clifton’s Facebook page. And then any Boston area news alerts about him. He was a rich man from a rich family. He’d met Caroline eight years ago and married her six years ago. Tre thumbed through an album of their wedding photos before a nauseated feeling overcame him and he clicked out of it. She’d looked thrilled. Impossibly young, but wildly happy and hold-your-breath beautiful. He viewed Peter Clifton’s life first as an outsider. His shitty food-porn Instagram page and his quasi-liberal Twitter account. It was then that Tre got impatient and he put his real skills to work.
He started by accessing his general email account. There were mostly work work work emails there. Apparently he was in some kind of lawyerly position at some financial firm that Tre forgot the name of as soon as he read it. He scrolled through those emails. Tre had hacked enough financial companies to know that if he looked hard enough, he’d be able to find something that would make Peter Clifton blush, or even make his knees knock. He’d even probably find something that could send him to jail. But he kept going, because who cared about this douche and that most likely wasn’t the secret Caroline Clifton was keeping anyways.
He hovered over some personal emails from Caroline, but couldn’t bring himself to snoop into them. The email browser showed the first line of every email and they were enough to make him feel like a royal asshole for doing this in the first place.
Hi, honey! I was wondering about having the McCall family over on…
Hi, sweetie! Do you know what time you’re coming home tonight…
Sweetie, I miss you! How’s Tokyo? Were your meetings what you hoped…
Tre felt sick just reading them. She was a sweet, kind woman and he was sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. But then something caught his eye as he did a few quick keyword searches that he’d learned to do throughout his years of professional hacking and snooping.
Dude had a Tinder account apparently.
Tre wasted zero time tracking it down and hacking into it. Actually, he barely even had to hack it, seeing as he had all of Peter Clifton’s login info at his fingertips. What he saw turned his stomach immediately.
There were dozens of message strands with dozens of different women.
The tone of Caroline’s emails echoed in Tre’s head.
Hi, honey!
Hi, sweetie!
It was all horribly juxtaposed against these sleazy messages to random women.
Hey, girl.
What are you up to tonight, sexy?
Tre swallowed down his disgust and exited Peter Clifton’s hook-up app. It hit him all at once what he was doing. He was messing around in someone’s marriage. Caroline Clifton’s life.
And he had no idea what was what. Maybe they had an open marriage. Or maybe Peter Clifton’s kink was to message random women and then head home and screw the heck out of his wife, no harm, no foul.
Tre closed his computer.
He didn’t think so. He didn’t think that was it.
Part of what made him a gifted hacker was not just his prodigious skill. It was his intuition. People didn’t leave neat little trails here and there. They left a hundred different threads to follow and somehow Tre always knew which one to pull.
He took a long, slow breath. He knew, deep down, that Caroline’s husband was cheating on her. And that it wasn’t something she would just magically be okay with.
He shoved his computer into his bag, feeling like a complete jerk for snooping on her life. So he’d sensed she wasn’t telling everyone everything. Who cared? That wasn’t his business. And now he’d gone and opened a can of worms that couldn’t be closed.
Would he tell her? He had no idea. He barely knew her. But even so, he knew, in his heart, that that perfect, happy, sweet woman didn’t deserve to be tricked or lied to.
Tre groaned.
God. He wished he could just turn off his annoying-ass conscience. Everything would be so much easier if he could.
His whole life would be different if he could.
***
Thea watched the men as the new moon got closer and closer. She was amazed that they weren’t losing their minds.
Jack said that beyond the bond between him and the boys, there weren’t really any noticeable differences. The pain that Arturo had inflicted on them that first night had taken a few days to heal, but then it was gone and they were all fairly comfortable after that.
They’d had to get used to their minor telepathic connections to one another, but beyond that, Jack insisted that he felt completely normal. Thea could only assume that the other men were in the same boat, though she didn’t know them nearly well enough to really ask.
She felt strangely on the outside of the group, except with Jack. She was the only one who’d left. Though no one seemed to hold that particular grudge, she was still sensitive about it. She was the only one who’d stood up from that kitchen table and walked out. Gotten halfway to the airport. She’d had a good reason to do it, and it was one she still stood by. This, here, in Northern Michigan, surrounded by burgeoning bear shifters, was not her real life. She had a real life back home. A good life. And none of these people were going to go back to it with her, so why bother getting close to them? Sticking her neck out for them?
Why bother? Well, the fact of the matter was that she was bothering and she couldn’t exactly explain why. She was sticking around until the new moon. And she would be there when they shifted for the first time.
But that still didn’t make her one of them. She had strange friction with Martine which Thea chalked up to them both having alpha personalities. And no small assortment of skills.
Thea knew she wasn’t the most sympathetic presence either. Martine had answers if the boys had questions. Caroline was funny and sweet and like a burst of sunshine when she came in the room. Celia was calm and rational. Thea, in contrast, clearly barely believed in any of this and was pretty much waiting for the new moon so that she could split and head back to her regularly scheduled programming.
She had it figured in her head that whatever mystical pull had roped her back in when she’d first tried to leave would dissolve at the new moon. Why? Well, Martine had told her so. Besides, she figured that Jack was still transforming. And that while that was true he was more vulnerable. But after he was able to do this bear shifter thing, whatever it was, he wasn’t going to need her anymore.
He’d have Jean Luc and Tre, but even Martine had admitted that once they’d fully transformed they’d be free to separate from one another. They’d always have a bond but they wouldn’t be quite so connected.
Thea thought that whatever her connection was, that was likely to similarly dry up at the new moon. And then she’d be on the first plane back to Montana. This place would be in her proverbial rearview mirror.
The thought of that filled her up with both relief and an unexpected melancholy.
Melancholy was a new feeling for Thea. And in fact, she’d had to ask Celia about it to even be able to properly identify it.
“What’s wrong?” Celia had asked, watching Thea pace around the room, her hands in the front pockets of her jeans.
“What? Oh. Nothing,” Thea had replied. “I think I’m just bored. At home I’m used to always having a million things on my to-do list. It’s strange to just have a whole lot of nothing to do.”
“Well, except for Jack, that is.”
Thea turned at the dry tone in Celia’s voice that she’d come to expect. Celia dropped her Kindle from in front of her face and revealed a little quirked smile.
“Sorry,” Celia had apologized. “Low-hanging fruit.”
Thea shrugged. She didn’t care that everyone knew that she and Jack were hooking up. It wasn’t like they were hiding it. They were banging like bunnies every chance they got and sleeping in the same room. They were all adults here, no one was scandalized at the idea that they’d found company in one another.
She started pacing again. She was glad, actually, that
everyone knew about her and Jack. Because Thea wasn’t sure if all of them were planning on staying together after the new moon. She hadn’t asked either way if the boys were going to stay on with each other while they figured out the shift, and if the other girls would stay, too. But if they were staying together, and Jack was maybe… disappointed… that Thea had left to go back home, then the others would understand his predicament and offer some comfort to him. Comfort that she herself wouldn’t be able to offer, seeing as she planned to be halfway across the country in a few days’ time.
“If you don’t mind me saying,” Celia started slowly, “you don’t seem bored.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, you actually seem really bummed. And kind of anxious.”
Bummed and anxious? Those were two words that Thea had rarely, if ever, heard applied to herself. She opened her mouth to deny it immediately, but caught Celia’s sharp eye. She sighed. What was the use in lying?
“I definitely feel weird. I don’t like all this waiting.”
“I hear that,” Celia agreed. “I feel like there’s gonna be some sort of big show on the new moon and none of us have known what the hell to do to prepare for it. Not that I haven’t tried my hand at a little research.”
“Research? On demons and bear shifters?”
Celia shrugged. “It’s not an altogether uncommon myth. There’s plenty of background reading to do. Legends, conspiracy theories. Hell, there’s a shit-ton of fan-fic.”
“Fan-fic? Do I even want to know what that is?”
“Motherfudger, Thea, is the entire state of Montana under a rock? How do you miss this stuff? You’re a millennial, for God’s sake!”
Thea leaned her back against the cool panes of the window and faced Celia. “Better things to do, I suppose.”
Celia leaned back too, her eyes bright and sharp on Thea’s face. She spoke slowly, and when she did, Thea had the distinct impression that she wasn’t really asking a question. No, more like she was conducting an experiment.
“Thea… Caroline mentioned the other day that she wanted to see your homestead. She’s never been to Montana. She wanted to visit.”
This was news to Thea. And pretty surprising. It wasn’t like her neck of the woods was exactly a tourist hot spot. Thea shrugged. “It’s beautiful there. And it would definitely be a change of pace from Boston, if she came.”
Celia’s eyes narrowed. “What if both of us came? Caroline and I. To visit you and see your home.”
Thea’s eyes traced back and forth between Celia’s. She wasn’t confused by the question, but she was definitely confused by the layers of subtext it rode in on. “What are you really asking me, Celia?” Well, she was nothing if not blunt.
Celia set her book aside. Thea had noticed that Celia had a rather straight-to-the-point way about her, as long as there were no men in the room. If there were men, well, she kind of retreated into her silver-haired, tattooed turtle shell. “Would we be invited?”
“Sure,” Thea shrugged. “Not much to see there, but sure. If you wanted to come, there’s room at the homestead.” Thea cocked her head. “Again, I gotta ask. Celia, what the hell are you really asking me?”
Thea threw her hands up in exasperation, but there was nothing hostile in the action. It was a motion that Thea herself made with her brothers all the time. “I’m trying to ask you if when you leave in a few days, if you’re really leaving us! Has any of this meant anything to you? Can I expect a Christmas card? Do you text?” She laughed at the affronted expression on Thea’s face.
“Of course I text, I’m not a caveperson.”
“Well, that may be, but you’re hard to read, Thea. None of us know if you even care about any of this. For some of us, this has been kind of an experience of a lifetime. And you act like it’s merely a pitstop between being here and getting back home.”
“None of you?” Thea asked. She wondered, for a moment, what Jack thought of it all.
Celia shrugged. “You’d have to ask him.”
It surprised Thea that Celia had hit the nail on the head so firmly, but also, it didn’t surprise her at all. The woman was an observer.
“I’m starting to think,” Celia had said, “that you don’t understand it either, this constant insistence that you’re leaving. Because here you are, melancholy as hell, moping around and dreading the day you have to leave.”
Thea had sat up straight at that. But when she turned, Celia was holding her Kindle up again, scrolling through the pages of some book.
The word had taken up shop, so to speak.
Melancholy.
So she was sad that she had to leave. She was human after all.
Now, a day after that conversation and one day from the new moon, Thea found herself searching Jack out on the property. She found him in the woods. On the direct spot where he’d been lured by Arturo. Where she’d saved him.
He turned when he heard her coming through the woods. It didn’t surprise him that she’d found him. She seemed to have some sort of radar on his whereabouts.
“Why do you think he came for me?” Jack asked, his hands in his pockets and deep, balmy shadows over his face. “That night. He sent the light for me, lured me from the room, tried to take my soul. Why me? Why not one of the other two he’d transformed?”
Thea shrugged and stepped forward, light and shadow alternatingly dappling her face. “I don’t know.” But then, like a bucket of ice water over her head, she knew. She knew the answer. She knew exactly why Arturo had chosen Jack that night. And not one of the others. And why, after she’d returned, Arturo hadn’t tried again. He’d left them alone.
She felt as if a bomb had gone off inside her. She was hot and carved out, there were simply rocks sliding down the cliff face of her heart and there was no way of stopping it. She hated this feeling. This downward, sliding momentum. She was a solid person, for God’s sake! But with Jack, she was always holding on for dear life while that magnet he called a heart was just summoning her off the edge of some waterfall or another. Ever since she’d met him, she’d been knocked off her footing, sliding toward some inevitable outcome and she was sick of it. She was over it. There was only one person in control of her life and it was her. She pushed down the discovery inside of her, told herself it wasn’t true, brutally ignored it.
If Jack sensed the civil war happening inside of his girl, he didn’t outwardly show it. Maybe he’d missed it, as his eyes had been trained on the spot where that blue ball of soul-stealing light had glowed. When he turned back to Thea, she had a strangely blank look on her face, as if all of this sort of bored her. That benign, nothing look wasn’t a slap, but it was definitely a stiff flick to the forehead. It annoyed him, and hurt a little bit, that she wasn’t allowing herself to be swept away in all this. In the mystery of it, the unknown, and—yes, goddammit!—the fear of it.
She’d come back, he reminded himself. She’d come back that night and ended up saving his life. That was what had mattered in the end. Yeah, but she’s leaving again as soon as she can. And that mattered, too. When it was just the two of them, alone in their room, Jack felt a stronger connection to her than he did to anyone else in the history of his life. It was like she wasn’t even really a separate person. She was a part of him, walking around with those long legs and perfect face and all those freckles. Meeting her had been like meeting himself. And that was just the best he could explain it.
But standing in that forest, he realized, it wasn’t just the two of them. It was the two of them plus this mystery that they were all desperately trying to understand. Except for Thea. All six of them were trying to figure out what the hell to do next, now that he and Jean Luc and Tre were supposedly turning into bear shifters tomorrow. Except for Thea who didn’t chime in on the conversations, who didn’t speculate or offer theories. Who did nothing but warm his bed at night and count the days until she could blow dodge.
Silence stretched out between them as they looked at one another and so did the tension.
Perhaps only thirty seconds passed before he rocked back on his heels and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Packed up yet?”
“Sorry?”
“For your trip back to Montana, have you packed yet?”
She eyed him. She was a smart woman, she could see the silver glint of the trap he’d just laid. “No. I haven’t.”
“Well, I thought you’d want to get on that, considering how close to the new moon we are. That’s your plan, isn’t it? To leave after the shift is complete?”
“Martine said that she thought all of our bonds to the group would lessen at that point and we could go our separate ways.” She responded carefully and calmly. So calmly that it pissed the hell out of both of them.
“Not sure anyone else is thinking of leaving.”
She knew when she wasn’t having the argument she thought she was having. To her thinking, might as well throw the sheets off the matter, give it a little daylight. “Jack,” she asked carefully, cocking her head to one side, “what exactly do you think we’ve been doing here? You and me?”
There were those words again. Me and you. You and me. Something he’d loved so much during their sex suddenly seemed to mock him, here in the woods with Thea. In the place she’d come back for him. “You’re acting like I set this whole thing up to trap you, Thea. If you want me to apologize for getting myself turned into a bear shifter and somehow binding you to the group, I’m not going to do it.”
Thea’s eyes narrowed. “If you wanna fight, Jack, we can fight. But that’s not what I asked you. I asked you what you think is going on between us.”
He’d been on earth long enough to know that not answering wasn’t an option. And he’d been himself long enough to know that lying wasn’t an option. He was mad at her, pissed as hell, actually, but he wasn’t about to let anger spoil the gorgeous thing they’d built up between them over the last few weeks. He stepped forward, letting his anger show on his face. “I don’t know what it is, Thea. Because frankly I’ve never experienced anything like it.”