by Selena Scott
Her hair was tangled and wild on one side and still slick and dark with water on the other. Her skin was pink from the hot shower and her passion for him. Her freckles stood out in high contrast across her nose and cheeks, her chest rose and fell like she’d run a race. Jack decided that she looked like the first woman there ever was. Fierce and gorgeous and primal. If he hadn’t been in love with her before, well, he damn sure was now.
“Say it again,” she demanded, those clear blue eyes shimmering with the threat of some sort of woman-wrath. “If you really mean it, then don’t you dare say it to me during sex. If you mean it, say it again right now.”
She was bristling and spoiling for a fight, so Jack figured he might as well do the opposite. He stretched out on the bed and tucked one arm behind his head. “You know I meant it,” he said casually, in a voice he knew ran the risk of really pissing her off.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Dead ass.”
“You’re truly saying that when all this is over, you’re going to pack up your things, change your entire lifestyle, and come be a farmhand in Montana?”
She was gonna pull a muscle if she raised those eyebrows any higher. Jack couldn’t help himself. He leaned up and planted two fingers on her forehead, worked her eyebrows back down toward their natural home.
“Wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”
That one got her. She opened her mouth to argue some more, but then that bottom lip of hers just ended up getting caught between her teeth. She cocked her head to one side and paced from one end of the room to the other. “You really know how to take the wind out of my sails, cowboy.”
Jack cleared his throat and tried to ignore the hot air balloon that had just started sinking in his chest. She was gonna say no. Not only did she not want to stay here with him, she didn’t want him to come to her.
“If you’d waited about five more minutes I was gonna tell you that I’m not leaving.”
Jack considered himself an adaptable man. With a hell of a poker face. It took a lot to surprise him. But he knew he looked like a royal dope right about now. She could probably count his molars with how far open his mouth was. He scraped a hand over his face. “You’re serious.”
“Dead ass.” She smirked at him.
“You’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that you weren’t just packing?”
She shook her head.
“That,” he continued, “you’re not just waiting for the new moon to pass so that you can blow dodge as soon as you can?”
She shook her head again.
“But you’ll be free tomorrow,” Jack said slowly. “Martine said that whatever this bond is, you’ll be free of it tomorrow.”
“And tomorrow you’re going to be going through your first real day as a bear shifter, Jack. You think I’m gonna bid you adieu and good luck through that? Are you nuts? What the hell kind of girlfriend would I be?”
“Are you telling me that you’re my girlfriend?”
She couldn’t help but laugh. Her hands came up and laced over top of her head. “I always hated that word. Sounds dumb as hell. But yeah. It’s the best we have, so yeah. I’m your girlfriend.”
“And you’re telling me—” he started.
“And you’re telling me,” she parroted his slow, dawning comprehension, “that when all this is over, you’re gonna come live with me.”
He nodded.
“Sounds like we might have been telling each other the same thing, cowboy.”
“You and me,” he croaked, his throat suddenly dry.
“You and me,” she agreed.
He gripped her around the waist and wrestled her back down to the bed. “I’ve never had a girlfriend before.”
“I’ve never had a boyfriend before.” She blinked off into the distance. “I just never imagined that when I got one he’d be middle-aged.”
She screamed with laughter as his fingers dug into her ribs, tickling the hell out of her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Night approached faster than any of them were prepared for. They ate dinner all together around the big dining room table. Jean Luc grilled and Celia made pasta salad. Caroline cut up fruit and scooped vanilla ice cream for dessert.
It was a beautiful, colorful meal that pretty much no one was in the mood for. Except for Jean Luc who ate like a horse.
“How can you possibly eat right now?” Tre asked, half in disgust and half in admiration.
Jean Luc shrugged. “I swam across the lake and back today.” He’d been loving swimming in the lake and was really going to miss it. He ordinarily jogged, which was really hard on his bad knee, but there hadn’t been a day in his natural life that he hadn’t worked up some sort of sweat. He wondered if, when this was all over, he shouldn’t buy a lake house. He owned a townhouse in the East Village and, of course, his uncle’s house in Florida had been left to him, so he’d never considered splurging on a new place. But there was definitely something about swimming in that murky, cold lake every day. Call him crazy, but he loved it.
“Did you get all the way to the other side?” Caroline asked in amazement.
He nodded and reached for another bowl of ice cream.
“Did you see Tre’s summer camp?” she asked.
Martine’s head snapped up. “What’s that?”
“Tre went to the summer camp that’s directly across the lake,” Caroline said conversationally, flourishing sliced strawberries over the last bowl of ice cream and licking some juice off her thumb.
“Really?” Celia asked him. “I’ve always been so curious about that camp. We used to watch them with binoculars every once in a while, when you guys would be out playing capture the flag and stuff.”
Tre laughed. “A bunch of kids knocking each other ass-first into the dirt. I’ll bet it made for riveting entertainment.”
Celia shrugged. “It was better than over here. No TV, no internet, three whole months every summer trapped here with all ten of my siblings. If it weren’t for the library in town not all of the Lamplighter children would have made it out of those summers alive.”
“We had stories about this house, over at camp. Because it looks so spooky from over there. Lopsided and huge and the lights in the top level would always flick on and off. We said it was ghosts.”
Celia leaned back in her chair and laughed, a real laugh, one that eased the tension in all their guts. “That’s hilarious. That’s the attic. I shared it with my sister, Lauren. She needs perfect darkness when falling asleep and I like to stay up and read. So every night was a war with the light switch.”
“Wow. I never expected that mystery to be so mundane.”
“Hold on,” Martine spoke up finally. “Are you saying that two of you have a connection to this place? This part of the world? From childhood?”
“Well, I obviously spent my summers here as a kid,” Celia said slowly, like she was wondering what the big deal was. “That was one of the reasons why the map was so interesting to me. I recognized the area immediately. I probably wouldn’t have taken—ah—borrowed it from the archives if it hadn’t been from a place I recognized.”
“Same as me,” Tre said. “I wouldn’t have stolen it if I didn’t know it was Northern Michigan. I just felt like it was mine when I saw it, maybe because of camp or not, I don’t know.”
Martine said nothing, just leaned back in her chair and eyed them all. The candles that Caroline had lit were turning Martine’s strawberry hair a nice deep gold, her arms crossed over her chest.
“What?” Thea asked, something crawling up her spine as she watched the expression on Martine’s face. The two women might not be friends, but she could still read the woman. And she didn’t like what she was reading.
“I’m not sure,” Martine said slowly. “It’s just that there’s more connections here than I had originally thought.” She rose from the table and drifted over to the window that overlooked the lake. It would be time soon to get the men outside. Moonri
se was to be in twenty minutes, even though it wouldn’t be visible. They were going to need to have plenty of space.
“At first,” Martine said, facing the group again, “I had thought it was just a connection between the three men, because of the curse from Arturo. But then Thea came back. Which proved that there was at least a connection between her and Jack. Now, though, you’re telling me that Tre and Celia have a connection. Which I assume isn’t of the same nature as Thea and Jack’s.”
She’d spoken the words absently, more thinking out loud than anything else. She barely noticed when both Tre and Celia instantly went bright red. Their connection was absolutely nothing like Thea and Jack’s. Celia liked Tre. She thought he was funny and smart, but she did not want to drag him upstairs and bang him, which was pretty much the majority of what Thea and Jack did.
Celia swallowed against the uncomfortable feeling that everyone was looking at her. She slowly passed her fingertips from one collarbone to the next, reminding herself what her tattoos were there for. Courage. “No, not the same type of connection.” She mustered up a wink for Tre. “Sorry to break your heart.”
He grinned back at her, relief written all over his face. Celia was really hot, sure, but the thought of her suddenly confessing feelings he hadn’t even guessed at felt terribly… wrong. “I’ll live.”
Caroline’s face bounced back and forth between the speakers, interested in all the details and drinking down every last word. It was better than reality TV.
Martine shifted, as if she was going to keep speaking, and all attention went back to her. Except for one face, which was still turned toward Celia, studying her. Jean Luc. She turned to him and raised an eyebrow, like what? He studied her for another second before shrugging and turning back to Martine as well.
“That just means,” Martine said, “that we have brotherhood connections in this group and romantic ones. And now, friendship ones. I just didn’t realize…” She took a deep breath. This was much more complicated than she’d envisioned before. How many times had she done this? Battled this particular demon as he attempted to steal a soul, but had she ever done it in a group like this before? Not even close. It was a good thing, a point in their favor for them all to be so very connected to one another. She knew exactly why it bothered her. Because there was so much to lose with this group. If they lost a single one of them, there was every chance that all of it would crumple in on itself. That was the flipside of loving, she supposed. Losing. “It just means that the demon has devised this even more intricately than I originally thought. It means that he won’t give up this time. He won’t lose interest. He’ll keep coming until I kill him.”
She sighed and turned back to the group. They were all looking at her with various stages of shock and remorse on their faces. They knew what that meant, that either the demon won and one of their souls was taken. Or Martine won, and she became mortal. Not exactly a win-win. But, she knew, it was the natural way of her world.
“We should head outside,” Celia said, checking her watch. She’d been carefully eyeing the moonrise timetables all week.
Tables and chairs scraped as everyone rose up. Jack reached out for Thea’s hand, tugged her forward and gave her a firm kiss on the mouth before he rounded the table and clapped Tre and Jean Luc on the shoulders. “Here we go, boys.”
***
They assembled themselves on the lawn. Martine was decked out in her full weapons arsenal and she stood to the side of the other women who sat on the porch steps. The men had walked down to the lake, were murmuring words to one another and kicking at rocks down by the water.
“Any minute,” Celia whispered, eyeing her watch.
“No countdown!” Caroline shivered. “I can’t stand countdowns. I get too excited. You should see me on New Year’s, I’m practically running circles around the house by the time the ball drops.”
Thea laughed. She wasn’t usually a fan of people like Caroline. All sweet and loose and marching to their own beat. But there was just something about this woman. If you didn’t love her you didn’t have a heartbeat. Her laugh ended on a sigh as she watched Jack down by the water. She wanted to be there, to be next to him. To go through this with him.
But she’d listened hard to what Martine had said. There were so many different kinds of connections floating around their group. This one, the bear one, that was Jack’s connection with the two men down there. It wasn’t her place.
Maybe a minute went by when the men started shedding their clothes.
“Holy guacamole,” Celia whispered under her breath, her eyes wide and unblinking. “Gawd.”
“We’ve seen them naked before,” Caroline said, but her eyes, as well, were glued to the silvery silhouettes of the men as they dropped their shirts in the grass and then their shoes and pants.
“Yeah, but…” Celia trailed off. Apparently that sentence wasn’t necessary to finish.
“I didn’t notice last time how cute Tre is,” Martine said, leaning on the newel post and watching just as much as the other women.
“Oh, he’s super cute!” Caroline insisted. “I love his tattoos, they’re like a hundred different stories all at once.”
“Are you attracted to humans?” Thea asked Martine, her eyebrow raised.
Martine shrugged. “I don’t think there’s a living creature alive who wouldn’t be attracted to that.” She pointed at Jean Luc’s incredibly huge and sculpted body.
“Fair enough,” Thea agreed, eyeing him critically. The man was like an Adonis.
“Hey!” Caroline insisted. “You can’t make eyes at two of them. That’s no fair. You already landed the cowboy.”
“Fair enough,” Thea said again. For the first time it crossed her mind that maybe her adventure-mates might be interested in one of those men the way she’d been interested in Jack. On a primal level, sure, but also on a that one, right there, sort of level. Like, she’d never even stood a chance.
“Do you—” she started, then cut herself off and stood up, staring at the men down by the water.
“We have liftoff,” Celia muttered under her breath.
Thea couldn’t take her eyes off Jack, who’d fallen to his hands and knees.
“It’s alright. He’s alright.”
Thea turned at the hand on her elbow, expecting Caroline, but it wasn’t. It was Martine.
“I know it’s unsettling to watch. And the first shift is always the hardest. But trust me, Thea, he’s alright.”
Thea nodded, her eyes pinned to the arch of Jack’s back, the tremble of his muscles. The other two men were the same, shaking and falling and looking for all the world like they were seconds from death.
And then, just like that, they weren’t three men writhing in pain. They were three grizzly bears, chuffing and growling into the cool night air.
***
Before that moment, Jack would never in a million years have said that he knew what it felt like to grow. He’d done it, of course, little by little until he was 25 or so. But he couldn’t have identified that feeling until now.
It was strange to him that turning into a grizzly bear would feel oddly familiar. But it did. He recognized the ache in his bones, the sting in his muscles. He felt the familiar and old feeling of teeth pushing up out of his gums, of growing hair in new places. It was like puberty in a way. The fastest, most intense puberty that anyone had ever gone through.
And, of course, at the end of it, he was a bear, not a man.
So were Tre and Jean Luc, he realized, moving his now-massive head to the side to see them. Tre was smaller and darker in color, though he looked fast. Jean Luc was enormous, larger than any naturally occurring bear to ever walk the earth and had browner hair. Jack was somewhere in between.
“You still have your scar,” Tre’s voice said in Jack’s head. Jack nearly jumped out of his skin, or his fur, as it were.
“We can talk to each other.”
Jean Luc nodded that huge head. “Looks like it.”
“So. What do you boys wanna do?” Jack asked. He was busy flexing those massive paws, rearing back and just looking at himself.
Tre tried a few steps and when he didn’t fall, looked back at the others. “I dunno.”
Jean Luc was already comfortable in his new body. He’d been certain that he’d hate it, because his body truly was his temple. He’d never wanted to be anywhere else, even when his leg had gotten smashed in the accident. He was who he was and he wasn’t interested in making trades. Finding out that he’d have to get used to an entirely new body of an entirely different species hadn’t sat well with him. But, he was intensely relieved to note, he still felt like himself. His bad leg was still worse than the other, his shoulders felt like his shoulders, he stretched his spine and that felt familiar too.
He took a few bounding steps toward the women and Caroline screamed before clapping her hands over her mouth and laughing. Jean Luc turned and gamboled back toward the men. He knew what he wanted to do. He hadn’t wanted to do it since Hugo died. But he didn’t think about that now. Jean Luc simply used his momentum and his weight and bowled Tre’s bear aside like a bowling pin. He kept on going toward Jack who anticipated him a little better and tackled him back. The two bears rolled over one another toward the lake.
They laughed hysterically in their heads and Tre was back and in the action in no time.
They wrestled and flipped over one another. Eventually, Tre and Jack teamed up, trying like hell to dunk Jean Luc’s bear into the lake.
No dice.
Martine had explained that on their very first new moon, the urge to shift would be too strong to ignore; they’d have to do it. And they most likely wouldn’t be able to shift back until the morning. Eventually, they’d be able to control it better. They would be able to shift back and forth as much as they wanted, no matter when it was, though the urge would always be strong on a new moon.