by Selena Scott
She pulled to a full stop, well off the road, and popped the hood. Thankfully it was just smoke and no fire.
Also thankfully, she had a cell signal.
She didn’t think twice about calling her sister.
***
“No,” Jackson shouted as he stood at the edge of a stand of trees. The sky was an eerie gray, snow was falling but not hitting the ground. Far away, all the way on the other side of the clearing, stood Kaya. She wore a blood-red coat.
In between Kaya and Jackson was a snow-white wolf, licking its chops. Jackson was too far away. The wolf was too close. The wolf growled at Kaya, lowered its head and started sprinting right toward her.
“No!” he shouted again, and this time, it was in real life. He sat up, shivering against his own cold sweat and dropping his head into his hands. His sheets pooled around his waist as he scrubbed his hands over his face and wished he could scrub the dream from his brain.
It had been two freaking years of this nightmare at least once a week. A white wolf about to attack Kaya.
Jackson knew he had no one to blame but himself.
“It didn’t happen,” he told himself. “Seth stopped you. Kaya is fine.”
He was a crazy man, talking to himself in the dim dawn light that filtered in between his curtains. But it was also helping a little bit, calming him down.
“She’s probably still asleep in her apartment across town. I bet she’s wearing a ridiculously ugly nightshirt down to her knees and knee socks. Two pairs of knee socks.” It was true that Kaya was an exceptionally frumpy dresser. Everything she wore seemed designed to downplay her natural gorgeousness, and for that, Jackson was immensely grateful. If she were actually trying to attract him, he wasn’t sure he could have withstood it.
Picturing Kaya sleeping peacefully in ugly clothes calmed him down just enough to be able to slide out of bed and into the shower. It wasn’t as early as he’d thought because he could smell his coffee automatically brewing downstairs, which meant it was dark outside for a different reason.
“Shit,” Jackson muttered as he looked out his bedroom window, his towel around his waist and his hair dripping wet. The snow had come early.
Which meant that he, his brothers, and Kaya would all be driving through it today. Just what he needed—another reason to worry about the people he loved.
Deciding to get on the road a few hours earlier than was strictly necessary, Jackson dressed and ate a quick bagel over the sink, washing the crumbs away immediately afterward. He put his coffee in a thermos and hit the road.
Against his better judgment, he flipped the local radio on. He almost never liked the opinions he heard there, but he found he had a compulsive need to tune in.
“In the last several years,” the newscaster intoned in a soothing, monotone voice, “there has been a rash of shifter-based violence in the Colorado area, largely spurred by the death of Lee Jones three years ago in October. Jones was believed to have been hiking around the Boulder reservoir when he was attacked and killed by what authorities expected to have been a mountain lion shifter. Amidst public outrage regarding unregistered shifters who are living free of the government-run shifter camps where they are legally required to live out their lives, many Shifter Resistance groups have cropped up.”
Jackson’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. None of this was new information to him, but still, hearing it jacked up his blood pressure.
“Recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center has officially declared many of these vigilante groups, largely made up of citizens, to be considered hate groups. One group in particular, called CTAARUS, is based in Boulder, Colorado. Two nights ago, four CTAARUS members were arrested in the midst of what appeared to be a vigilante raid on a group of suspected shifters outside of Aurora. The CTAARUS members, all of whom have been let out on bail, stormed an apartment building and attempted a citizen’s arrest on what could be as many as three unregistered shifters.”
Jackson felt his stomach swoop away and all the blood run out of his face. This part was definitely news to him.
“The alleged shifters were in their human forms when attacked. All three escaped but are currently wanted for questioning in the incident. The police have released the following identifying information: Mid-30s male, red hair, over six feet tall and slightly overweight. Mid-40s female, 5’4” and a very petite build, black hair. And a mid-20s male, approximately 5’8”, 140 pounds, brown hair, and one of his eyes was thought to be injured in the altercation. If you have any information or think you’ve sighted any of these alleged shifters, the police ask that you call the following tip line—”
Jackson slammed off the radio, shaking his head at himself and his foolish hope. Every day he tuned in to the news hoping for some sort of miraculous reversal of public opinion on shifters. Some sort of revolutionary change where the public suddenly believed that shifters deserved to live free, unregistered. Where public funds were used to provide training and support for shifters who were troubled and potentially dangerous. Where the stigma itself didn’t create an environment where shifters grappled with hate and self-hate for the entirety of their lives.
He took a deep breath and slowed down a bit. He’d been driving too fast in the bad weather. The last thing he needed the hours before a full moon was to get pulled over by the cops.
He was an hour north of Boulder when his cell rang.
“Raph, what’s up?” Jackson answered the phone, already tense at what he naturally assumed to be some kind of trouble on the way.
“Hey, man, are you driving? Where are you?”
“Got on the road early. I’m just passing Altona.”
“Thank God.” The relief was palpable in his brother’s voice.
“What’s going on?”
“Kaya was driving up to meet the girls at the resort and her car broke down about a half an hour north of you.”
Jackson went completely silent. That was not good. That was not good on about fifty different levels. One, the snow was getting worse and the idea of Kaya being stranded and alone in the cold weather was enough to have Jackson’s blood pressure skyrocketing to the moon. But on the other hand, he was probably the last person on earth who should be going to get her right now and he was pretty sure that that was what Raphael was hoping would happen.
“Do you think you could pick her up?”
“And drive her all the way up to the resort?” He knew he sounded like an asshole, he should have just said yes, but the idea of four hours trapped in a car with Kaya Chalk sounded like a torturous mixture of heaven and hell that Jackson really didn’t want to find out whether or not he could withstand.
“No way! Dude, haven’t you seen the weather? We’re all stranded up here for sure. We’re going to weather the full moon here. You and Kaya need to get back to Boulder.”
“Shit, it’s that bad?”
“It’s that bad.”
Jackson knew it was bad if Raphael was saying so. He’d once seen his brother snowboard off their roof and into a snowdrift during a literal blizzard. Bad weather didn’t faze Raphael. Jackson’s stomach flipped as the snow hit his windshield with even more vigor. Kaya was out there somewhere.
“All right. I’ll get her and bring her home.” It would only end up being around two hours in the car and then he would drop her home and he would race home to weather the full moon in the safety of his own basement.
“Great. Thank God. Nat and Ma are gonna be so relieved.”
Raphael gave Jackson the exact location of where Kaya was and it wasn’t forty more minutes before Jackson was pulling his black Jeep up behind Kaya’s little turquoise Toyota Corolla.
The windows were covered over in snow already, her car drifted in. It looked like she’d been there for a while.
Jackson jumped out of the car and landed in knee-deep snow.
“Damn.”
Moving as fast as he could, he ran around to the driver’s side of the car.
“Kaya?” he
shouted, hoping she could hear him through the snow.
The door came open, blowing snow inside the car, and there was Kaya, peeking out from under a horrendous wool cap, a ginormous scarf around her neck, and her lips practically blue.
“Hi,” she said through chattering teeth. “S-s-sorry for making y-you c-come get me.”
“Jesus.”
He reached down and helped her out of the car, slamming the door behind her. She clutched her small overnight bag to her chest. She tried to say something else but it was lost in the wind. She was obviously freezing, but steady on her feet, and she was able to pull herself up into the passenger side of the Jeep. Glad he’d kept it running, Jackson slammed into the driver’s side and immediately cranked up the heat as high as it would go. He pulled back onto the road right away because he was scared that if the snow piled up any higher, he wouldn’t be able to get his Jeep out.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” she answered. “Just chilly. I wasn’t even there that long. This snow is intense.”
He had to agree. The Jeep was good in bad weather but this was something else. He frowned as they drove slowly over the bridge to merge back onto the highway going south again. His blood froze as he saw that the traffic on that side of the highway was at a standstill. There must have been an accident.
“Oh, no,” she muttered, realizing the same thing. “We’ll be sitting for hours.”
It was still early, not even afternoon, but fear suddenly clutched him. The dead-cold feeling that his nightmare always brought with it came in a sudden tidal wave. He couldn’t afford to be trapped somewhere for hours on the night of a full moon. It was an early moon tonight, too. He had to be somewhere way the hell away from Kaya by six p.m. sharp.
This was bad. This was really bad. Under no circumstances could he be sitting in a car with her when the full moon rose.
“Shit.”
“Is there anywhere around here where we could wait out the storm? It’s not supposed to last that long.”
“Nothing but farmland and mountains for at least another thirty miles in either direction.” He trailed off as something occurred to him. “Except for the cabin.”
The cabin where he’d been intending to meet up with his brothers was another twenty-five miles north, away from Boulder and away from any civilization. If that was where he took Kaya, they’d be completely and utterly alone. Together.
On a full moon.
Jackson pulled off to the side of the road and rested his forehead on the steering wheel of his Jeep. “Fuck me,” he muttered.
“What? What’s wrong? The cabin sounds like a perfect solution.”
“Kaya,” he said slowly, knowing that his tone was probably rude, “it’s a full moon tonight.”
“I’m aware,” she replied, in just as rude a tone as he’d used. “So what?”
“So what?” He wheeled on her and really looked at her for the first time since they’d climbed in his car. Her hands were pressed against the heating vents and there was color back in her lips and cheeks. He ruthlessly ignored those facts and tried to focus on being mad at her. “So what? Kaya, you of all people should know exactly how terrible an idea that is.”
“Why?”
“Have you developed amnesia over what happened two years ago?”
She furrowed her brow, like maybe she really was having trouble placing what he was talking about, which was insane to Jackson considering he still had regular nightmares about it.
“Jackson, is there more than one room in the cabin?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the issue? You’ll be one place, I’ll be in the other, and we both won’t freeze like popsicles. In my book that’s a pretty easy solution.”
He frowned, but what she said wasn’t false. A new idea occurred to him. There was no reason he had to stay inside during the full moon. He always did that at home in order to keep other people and animals safe from himself.
But no other people or animals were going to be out in the blizzard. Kaya could be safely locked inside the cabin and he could be outside, far away from her.
Yeah. That actually might work.
Either way, he was going to have to decide fast because the snow was piling up and the day was slipping away.
“All right. Fine. We’ll go to the cabin.” He pulled the Jeep into a neat U-turn and tried very hard not to feel like he was driving toward his fate.
CHAPTER TWO
Though Kaya had known and loved the Durants since she was in elementary school, she’d never been to their cabin in the mountains before. Everything was very sparsely decorated, though there was running water and electricity from a generator that Jackson had started running as soon as they got there. He also immediately started a fire in the hearth. Kaya disapproved of his log cabin fire-making method. It was efficient and neat, but she could have gotten it started faster with her teepee style.
As he opened the cabin up for their use, Kaya took the time to look around. It was bigger than she’d expected, with two bedrooms downstairs and an attic room that had its own small hearth as well. There was a bathroom downstairs and a rudimentary kitchen. The living room had a couch, a throw blanket, and a wall of books. Actually, this was kind of perfect.
Now, if only she could erase Jackson from this equation and she would have a cherry on top of her sundae.
He’d been nothing but growly and slightly rude since he’d picked her up. Back in the day, she would have termed it smoldering and intense, but seeing as she didn’t have a crush on him anymore, she just found it irritating. Of course it had been kind of him not to let her freeze, but would it have killed him to smile at her once in the process? Would it have killed him to make her not feel like a dingus of the fourth degree?
“I’m not a dingus of the fourth degree,” she crisply informed him as she turned back from her perusal of the bookshelf. Unfortunately, her chunky, overlarge hat took that opportunity to flop down over her eyes. When she pulled it back up he was looking at her with something like wry amusement on his face.
“I would never call you a dingus of the fourth degree,” he promised solemnly.
“I just had the car serviced not three weeks ago. And I have AAA; they were just too busy to send someone for at least six hours.”
His expression sobered. “I’m not mad I had to get you, Kaya. I’m glad you’re safe.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Oh.”
“I want to talk about tonight, though.”
For one unexpected, stomach-catapulting second, Kaya thought he was talking about sleeping arrangements. And the two of them. And beds. And aloneness.
But then she promptly remembered that Jackson wouldn’t even be using a bed tonight and there was no way that was the kind of ‘tonight’ he was referencing.
She frowned at herself. It had been a very long time since she’d had those kinds of visuals where Jackson was concerned and she swiftly banished them back to whence they came.
“What about it?”
He seemed to look at every bit of her face, cataloguing her frown in particular. He frowned as well.
“I just want you to know that everything is going to be fine. I’m going to be… out of your hair at about 5:45 and then I’ll be back a bit before sunrise.”
“You’ll be away for the whole moon?” Her eyes skipped toward the basement door. She knew that Jackson spent his full moons chained in the basement. Either his own basement, his mother’s basement, or apparently the basement here. It was only his brothers and Bauer who allowed themselves the luxury of running free.
She hadn’t meant her question to be too forward or nosy or rude, but she could see from the immediate souring of his expression that she’d stumbled upon some territory she would have done better to steer clear of.
“My brothers can split the full moon whenever they want these days. But I can’t.”
With that, he turned on his heel.
“Here’s the kitchen, obvi
ously,” he said, irritation in every line of his face and every movement of his body.
As he started to show her where the pancake mix was, along with the SpaghettiOs and the ramen and the frozen cookies, she took a quick moment to just watch that irritated body move.
Because he really did have a nice body. His torso was almost triangular, wide shoulders and slim hips. His arms hung low at his sides and Kaya had watched the Durant brothers play enough basketball to know that Jackson had an unusually large wingspan. His legs were long, too. Sort of cowboy-ish, she’d always thought, with just the slightest bow of his knees to make him look like he had nowhere to go and all the time in the world to get there. Except for now, when annoyance with her made his movements jerky.
His large hands knocked over a box of cereal that he was taking out and putting on the counter for her and he immediately lined it back up, as if he were supremely annoyed with himself for the slip-up.
“Obviously, you’re welcome to eat any of this. Sorry we don’t have a television or internet. Your cell should get some service.”
“I’ll be fine with a book or two.” She nodded back to the shelf. He seemed so on edge that she figured it would be better if she got out of his hair, too. They still had three hours until 5:45. She couldn’t imagine passing them with this tightly wound bundle of irritability. She wondered how his blood pressure was. Probably insanely high; the man seemed to clench his way through life. “I’ll make a quick lunch and head upstairs. You mind if I start a fire up there?”
“I’ll do it. You make lunch.”
And then he was gone upstairs. Kaya sighed at the thought of another ruthlessly efficient log-cabin-style fire but figured that the less she argued with him today, the better. They just needed to not kill one another until the next sunrise and then everything could go back to normal, them ignoring one another again.
She popped two frozen meals into the microwave and heated up some hot chocolate on the stove.