by Ava Benton
“But it might not have been enough,” Slate muttered.
I didn’t realize he was listening.
“What? We’re not enough for you?” I couldn’t help jerking his chain a little. It was reflex. I was always the smartass in the group and I took my role seriously.
He grimaced, but chuckled. “It was enough of a mind bender to find out about the clans, when Vincent told us about the treaty with the humans. But this? I don’t know how many revelations I can take over the course of a month.”
“Try finding out you’re going to have a kid,” Roan winked. “Come on. They’ll smell us as soon as we approach, so we might as well get to work. I don’t think they’ll believe we’re just passing through.”
“Good. I want to get my hands on this A.J.,” I growled.
It was all their damn fault. Journalists—more like leeches. Willing to turn anybody’s life upside down just to get a good story, just to get eyes on their work. It didn’t matter if they ended up throwing an entire group of people to the lions. So long as they had their byline.
I wondered what it was about A.J. that convinced the shifters to open up to him. He must’ve been a real fast talker, since the approach of a random human would’ve put their instincts on high alert. How long had he needed to hang out with them before they trusted him?
There was a wide, busy boardwalk between the parking lot and the beach. The scent of hundreds of humans walking back and forth, playing games and eating junk foods I never even knew existed before then, played havoc on me.
The sun warmed their human skin and made their scent even stronger—when mixed with sugar and grease and salty fries, it was almost enough to make me forget the scent of my own kind.
“I forgot what it was like to be around so many people at once,” Drew murmured as we walked in our little group.
We got plenty of attention from girls wearing bikini tops and short shorts, who didn’t bother hiding their interest.
I smiled at a few of them as we passed and wished I wasn’t there on business.
“This is nothing compared to when I was staking Maggie out,” Slate snorted. “You want to talk sensory overload? Try spending a day in the Magic Kingdom. And they don’t even have turkey legs here.”
The four of us laughed. It was good to laugh together—it made me feel like we were all united again. The flight had been a tense one, with the four of us sort of off in our own worlds. Simmering.
I couldn’t help but feel a little resentful during the flight. It wasn’t Roan’s or Slate’s fault for falling in love with their girls and wanting to have real lives, the way other people did. I couldn’t blame them for that.
What I blamed them for was letting their personal lives get in the way of the team.
Mary was right: nothing mattered more than keeping ourselves alive and unharmed, and to do that, we had to work together.
We couldn’t make selfish decisions or suddenly announce we were going to spend our weekends in Iowa. Iowa? Who the hell even lived in Iowa?
I couldn’t help but think Slate was kidding himself, too. He could never blend in with a bunch of farmers and hicks.
Even on a boardwalk full of shirtless, buff, tanned guys around our age, we stuck out like four sore thumbs with our massive builds.
I couldn’t help but like the looks from the girls, and I could tell Drew was loving it. I wondered what would happen if some chick’s boyfriend decided he didn’t like us looking at his girl. Not that I had to wonder for long.
It was sort of a relief when we left the boardwalk and stepped down onto the beach. It was a beautiful night, just nearing sunset. I had always loved the ocean, even though I had only seen it in person a handful of times. Life in Montana didn’t exactly lend itself to beach vacations.
“They picked a nice spot,” I observed as the waves crashed to my left.
Big, huge waves, the kind that could pull the legs out from under a person if they were stupid enough to go out there.
I wanted to, obviously, but I wasn’t just an ordinary person.
“Yeah, I can see why they wanted to settle down here for a little while,” Roan agreed. “It’s easy to forget what’s worrying you when something so much bigger is right in your face.”
“You sound a lot like most of the girls I’ve slept with,” I grinned.
He burst out laughing.
“God, you never miss a chance.” He scanned the beach. “The scent is stronger.”
We all nodded—there was no missing it. They were close by.
“There.” Drew pointed to a rocky overhang, like a cliff or cave, jutting out about a half-mile down the beach.
I couldn’t believe we could smell them so clearly at this distance, but then again, there were a lot of them. It made sense when I thought about it that way. And it made sense that they found a place to shelter from the elements—and prying eyes.
A group of them were building a bonfire, stacking logs in a pyramid shape just beyond the overhang. They smiled and called out to each other, and their laughter rang out even in spite of the crashing waves and the noise from the boardwalk.
They were a family. It was obvious. How long had they been together? As long as my team? Longer? How did they even find each other?
I had more questions than I could’ve imagined, all of them popping up in my head after seeing how… happy they looked. How could they be happy? They lived on the run. They couldn’t settle down anywhere.
I guessed I would find out, if they would talk to us.
We were a quarter mile away before they noticed us.
The half-dozen guys building the fire stopped dead in their tracks, and I caught the way those holding a log shifted it in their hands—like clubs.
The hair stood up on the back of my neck when I sensed the hostility flowing from them in waves, like the ones crashing into the shore. If it came to a fight, we were outnumbered.
Roan held up his hands as we approached. “Everybody, keep your hands visible,” he muttered to us under his breath.
We did as he instructed.
One of the guys closest to us stepped forward. He was holding one of those makeshift clubs in his large hand.
I sensed anger coming from him, and maybe a little fear.
He knew who we were but not what we wanted.
“Hi,” Roan said in a loud, confident voice. “We’re not here to start trouble.”
“So leave,” the shifter spat. He looked a lot cleaner and better groomed than I had expected.
The idea of drifting nomads didn’t immediately bring to mind clean clothes, a fresh haircut and shave. The wind whipped light blond hair into his narrowed eyes, and even his hair was clean.
“You know who we are—or what we are,” Roan continued, like he hadn’t heard what the young man said. “And we know who you are. Why would we be here to cause trouble?”
The blond shifter frowned. “You’re like us?” The rest of the group relaxed, but only a little. The clubs lowered an inch or two.
“Yeah. We are. More than you know.” Roan looked around at the rest of us. “My brother, Slate, and my cousins. Carter and Drew.” We nodded. “I’m Roan. A friend of ours sent us out here—”
“A friend of yours,” one of the others snarled, raising his club a little higher.
“A friend of yours, too,” Roan added, raising his voice a little. “You’ve never met her, but she’s a friend. She saved our asses a few years ago, and she wants us to help you, too.”
Blond guy scoffed. “Help us. Yeah. I’ve heard that before.”
“Please. We just want to talk to you guys, try to figure out how we can help you.”
“We’ve always helped ourselves.” Blond guy looked around and his friends nodded. “We’re perfectly happy and safe the way we are.”
I wanted to tell him how wrong he was—delusional, even—but Roan spoke first.
“There’s potential trouble brewing for you all. That’s why our friend sent us out here. Nothing
concrete as of yet, but somebody around here has been talking to the wrong person.” Roan gestured to the cave, where there was a lot more movement.
Handfuls of people were walking out, shading their eyes against the setting sun. Dozens of them. All of them like us.
“We just want to speak with A.J.,” I said, holding my hands up the way Roan did. “He’s the one who started trouble for you all, even though I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”
“He?” Blond guy looked around. “Who’s A.J.?”
“Does he mean Alice?” one of the others asked.
“You mean Alice,” the blond confirmed. “Damn it to hell, I told him it wasn’t a good idea to let her hang out with us. I told him there would be problems!”
“Okay, okay, Alice. We assumed A.J. was a man’s name,” Slate said. “Where is she?”
“She went up to the boardwalk with a couple of the girls,” he replied. “Had a craving for pizza or something.”
“Can we wait around here until she comes back?” Drew asked.
Meanwhile, I disagreed with that idea. I wanted to look for her. It was one thing when I thought we were dealing with a guy, but a girl was a hundred times more likely to get herself into trouble.
“I’m going to go take a walk around up there,” I offered. “Maybe I’ll run into them. What’s she look like?”
“Tall redhead,” the blond said. “But she’s with three of ours, so you’ll probably pick up on them first.”
“Right, of course.” I glanced at Drew, who nodded.
He’d come with me. He always did. We tracked better together than we did apart.
A girl.
Shit.
If the government caught up with her before we could hide her someplace, they would probably break her like a bad habit.
Couldn’t we ever catch a break?
3
Alice
“Come on! You can do it!” I squealed and laughed when Nia hit one of the balloons with a dart.
The man working the game booth gave her a choice of stuffed animal, and she went with a big, fluffy dog.
“I have a thing for dogs,” she laughed.
Her friends, Layla and Daniela, laughed with her in that special way people laugh when they have an inside joke.
I wanted to laugh along, but there were so many things about them I still didn’t understand. Like the dog comment. Who didn’t like dogs?
But the three of them exchanged knowing looks, like there was a history there.
Just one more mystery to add to the long, long list of things I didn’t understand about them. None of it was enough for me to leave them alone and go back to my normal life, though.
I liked them.
They were friendly and welcoming and warm, not closed-off or exclusive the way I would expect a group like theirs to be. They needed to be careful of outsiders, they always said, but they drew me into their fold almost immediately.
Was there something about me that made me seem more trustworthy? I was glad for whatever it was, because it meant being able to walk around with them, get to know them, ask them questions about their lives that I wouldn’t ordinarily get to ask. And I wouldn’t ordinarily get honest answers, either.
But they seemed happy to talk to me. I wondered if they were really very lonely, even though they seemed to get along so well. The word “family” had come to mind when I first stumbled upon their cave, out on the beach, and after watching them from afar for a few days it had seemed pretty obvious that they took care of each other and even loved each other. That was when I got the courage to approach.
“Come on. Let’s get that pizza you’ve been obsessing over.” Nia slung an arm around my shoulders.
I was sure I practically glowed with happiness—I told myself to stop acting like the nerdy girl who finally found friends, but it wasn’t easy after spending most of my life feeling like I was on the outside. Far, far outside.
And they were so damn cool, too. The sort of cool I would never be in a million years. Effortlessly cool. Some people were just born that way.
If I tried to braid beads and feathers into my hair the way Layla did with her black, waist-length waterfall, I’d look like a total loser.
Or Nia, with what she called mermaid hair—the top layer was ash blonde, but underneath it was every color of the rainbow. I’d look ridiculous if I tried something like that.
Daniela’s clothes always looked like something out of a magazine. Effortlessly chic.
Sometimes I wondered where they got the resources for salon visits and trips to the mall. It was one of the questions I hadn’t asked yet but planned to at some point. If only to satisfy my curiosity.
“I swear, you’ve got me addicted to this stuff!” Layla giggled as she sank her teeth into a slice of white pizza so big, she had to fold it over to fit it in her mouth.
“I don’t know how you eat so much of it and stay so thin.”
All of them had three slices apiece, compared to my single slice. And the thing was, I knew I wouldn’t feel hungry after eating it. The damned things were huge, from a shop trying to replicate the New York experience.
I was hardly dieting by sticking to only one. But the girls devoured the pizza like it was their last meal.
“We burn a lot of calories doing the sort of stuff you have machines do for you,” Nia explained.
“Like what?” I wished I had my notebook.
She shrugged. “We walk everywhere, for one thing.”
“That’s true. We do a lot of hiking.” Daniela started on her third slice with just as much gusto as she did the first.
“And I’ve been swimming every day,” Layla said. “And running on the beach.”
“So, I guess it just makes us hungry,” Nia finished as she finished her third slice.
I still didn’t get where they put it. Just another way for them to be so much cooler than me. It took a lot of work to keep from being the pudgy girl, like I was up until the end of high school. That old version of me would have happily buried herself in pizza—and did, much too often.
“You’re so lucky,” I said, shaking my head.
I tucked my shoulder-length red hair behind my ears and wished I had the nerve to ask them for tips. Any tips at all.
How did they look so flawless when they spend all their time moving from place to place?
We picked up more than a few looks from other people in the pizza shop, too. Guys, mostly, but a few girls mixed in. I knew they weren’t looking at me. Just another feeling I was familiar with, being passed over for girls a lot cuter than me.
“Come on, chicas.” Nia unfolded her long, lean body from her side of the plastic booth. “Lance’s probably wondering what took us so long to get a little pizza.”
“Lance’s a control freak,” Daniela groaned. “He thinks he’s hot shit because Jordan left him in charge for a little while. When Jordan comes back, it’ll be a whole other story. And he’ll go back to sniveling and groveling for attention.”
“Lance is not that bad,” Layla murmured.
“That’s because you want to get with him. Layla and Lance, sittin’ in a tree…”
Layla smacked Daniela’s arm with the back of her hand, cutting off the song.
“Please. Lance only wishes he could score ass as hot as yours,” Nia said with a wink. “And he thinks it makes him all, I don’t know, leaderly when he acts like a monk. Anybody with eyes and a sense of smell can tell how bad he wants you.”
“A sense of smell?” I asked, puzzled.
The three of them exchanged those knowing looks again.
Looks which told me I was on the outside and always would be, no matter how much fun we had together.
Nia shrugged, then shifted her enormous stuffed dog from one hip to the other. “He wears the worst cologne,” she explained. “And he always splashes more on when he’s horny.”
It sounded like a vague lie, but I didn’t want to pursue it. There was something they weren’t telling me, obv
iously. I reminded myself that they’d told me so much.
They had helped me earn a byline of my own—even if my editor made me publish under my initials rather than my first name.
Because a gender-neutral name would earn more respect or something like that. A.J. wasn’t exactly gender-neutral, but I knew better than to argue when he got an idea in his head.
At least he was letting me write stories, good stories, stories I would’ve felt compelled to read if I were the reader.
If it meant swallowing a few lies, I would deal with it.
“So, what’s the plan for tonight? The guys were going to build a bonfire, right?” I was looking forward to it, since bonfires usually inspired people to sit around and tell stories.
I reminded myself to record notes on my phone if I heard anything interesting. I was sure I would, too, since the group had been through plenty of adventures together.
When none of the girls answered, I stopped—then turned around.
They had all frozen maybe ten paces behind me. Daniela and Layla muttered to each other while Nia stared down the boardwalk.
I whirled around to see what she was looking at, but nothing stood out to me.
“Come on, let’s look at records,” she said, waving me into an old record and poster shop.
It wasn’t the invitation, but the thinly-veiled urgency in her voice got my feet moving.
Something bad was happening.
“What is it?” I whispered as we hurried into the store.
It was deceptively large, the size of two or maybe three of the other stores lining the boardwalk, with aisle after aisle of used vinyl records, posters, books and t-shirts.
The girls didn’t bother answering my question before motioning for me to follow them deep into the heart of the shop.
Nia looked over the top of my head. “Just saw somebody who gave me a bad feeling,” she murmured.
I could practically hear her heart beating.
“A bad feeling? How?” And did he give the other girls the same feeling? He must have, since they looked about as pale as ghosts.