Forever After (Post Apocalyptic Romance Boxed Set)

by Rose Francis

  “Do you smell something?” growled one of the shifters, a hideous hyena man. Drool hung in thick loops from his lower jaw. He wore armor on his shoulders and arms, on his legs and back. Specially crafted for his shifter battle form, the armor gleamed with a blood-red hue.

  The werebear sniffed at the air, his overly large head swinging this way and that. “I smell a wolf.” His voice was so deep it rattled the bars of the cages. “I smell an intruder.” The bear shifter hefted a silver-bladed axe that was larger than Lucia. The haft was badly notched.

  He marked his kills, carving a tick into the wooden handle for every shifter’s life taken by that blade. There were hundreds of meticulous scratches marring the shaft.

  “Gashly, Whiskeyfur, track the scent. There will be a reward for whoever brings him,” he sniffed again, “no—her—back alive.”

  They can smell me. They can smell my shadow.

  “Should we alert the witch?” the hyena—Gashly—asked.

  “We will tell Azra once we’ve captured the intruder. Glory will be on us today, brothers.”

  The bear sneered, showed a mouthful of sharp teeth. Lucia forced herself to wake, her shadow form dissipating like mist.

  Farid stood above her, shaking her.

  “What the hell was that?” he whispered harshly. “You just passed out and starting whining like a damn dog.”

  “I know where our friends are,” she said, getting to her feet. “But they know we’re coming now.”

  “You need to shift,” Farid said. “If these things are alphas, they’ll come at us hard. You need to shift now.”

  “But what if that attracts the attention of the witch? Or brings the alphas running?”

  “What choice do we have? Can you fight them?”

  Lucia didn’t know. But she was going to find out. She hadn’t fully shifted yet. Just the practice that Conwynne had walked her through. Shifting her eyes to see in the dark. Shifting her nose to follow the scents on the wind. Shifting her hands to form fighting claws.

  This was different. This was giving in to the beast that every shifter kept locked away tight within. The wolf stirred within her, begging to be let out. She recalled her uncle, his hands ragged daggers dripping with her aunt’s blood. The adrenaline taste of fear soured her tongue.

  “You can do this,” Farid said, holding her shoulders. “I believe in you.”

  Lucia thought about her friends, about Foxtail’s hunched shoulders, about Triptongue’s fidgeting hands, about Quinn standing atop the crow’s nest while the Letherine flew across the sands. But mostly she thought about Farid. His soft lips that smiled so quick and smirked like the whole world was a joke only he understood. The soft way he looked at her, when he thought she wasn’t paying attention, the bob and weave of his hips as he piloted his ship in the gleaming sunlight.

  If she didn’t shift, the alpha-spawn would tear him apart.

  A dark wave of fear flowed up from her belly, warring with the bright compassion beating in her heart.

  What kind of shifter would she be?

  Would she be like her uncle, a rageful monster trying to make everyone bow beneath her feet, or would she be like her mother, kind and gentle and strong as stone?

  The sound of footfalls and eerie laughter rang close in the labyrinth.

  The darkness offered strength, such strength. If she embraced it, she could keep her friends safe forever. She could tear the Warmaw apart with her clawed hands. No one would hurt her friends, because everyone who even thought of it would die. She’d rip their throats out and howl their names to the moon as a warning.

  Farid stepped away from her, his face a mask of fright.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, but her voice was a guttural growl. Teeth filled her mouth suddenly, stretching into razored canines. Her hands buckled and popped, stretching.

  “You can do this,” Farid said. “Don’t be afraid.” The pirate unholstered his bolter, held a cutlass in the other hand.

  “It’s too hard,” she growled. “I’m so afraid.”

  “Look at me,” Farid said. “Look at me, Lucia Brightwolf. You are the strongest, most fearless person I’ve ever met. You lived under the thumb of a tyrant, but where most people would learn cruelty and pain, you learned hope and compassion from him. You fled across the wastes to rescue a slave you’d only just met. You trusted a crazy, smelly old man and a half-naked scoundrel like me because you’re good and you bring out the good in others.”

  Her heart beat faster, she could feel the fear receding, being pushed away by something so much more powerful.

  “You make me want to be a good man, Lucia Brightwolf.”

  The eerie laughter neared, followed by heavy thumping feet. The alpha-spawn were nearly on top of them.

  Lucia had to shift. It was time.

  She tore the armor from her chest, slashing the buckles off with her razored fingers. If she shifted in the armor, it’d suffocate her. She kept the shoulder armor, the pauldrons and gauntlets and grieves. Under the armor she wore only a lightweight white shirt, nearly see-through. She would have been embarrassed to be so disheveled in front of Farid, if there was time to do so. But there wasn’t.

  The shift came on her like her first taste of sugar, like a warm fall evening, like the excitement before a kiss.

  It strengthened her, pulling her body into a new alignment. Half-woman and half-wolf, upright and savage. Her feet were clawed and padded. Her legs reconfigured into a canine shape perfect for running. She flexed her hands and slashed open the canvas bundle she’d been smuggling to reveal her mother’s mangled glaive.

  It was her glaive now.

  Lucia hefted the blade. The silver throbbed with rage in her hand. The wooden handle felt comfortable in her grip, like a home she never knew she missed.

  The eerie laughter, a hyena shifter’s cry, sounded from around the corner.

  “I can smell you, little girl. Now where did you come from? How did you get this far?” Gashly said, peering around the corner.

  Farid fired his bolter, Jolene, the handheld crossbow hurling its charge forward with a near silent puff of compressed gas. The barbed bolt thunked Gashly right between the eyes. The hyena man roared with outrage and pawed at his face to pull the bolt out.

  Farid’s bolts weren’t silver. They’d never kill the hyena or any other shifter, but the hooked and barbed surface was torture to remove. As the hyena tugged at it, shrieking in pain, his very flesh tried to heal around the wound, fusing itself with the ten thousand tiny fishhooks circling the bolt. In the end Gashly gave up, leaving the bolt protruding from his head like a stubby horn.

  The hyena man hefted his axe and smiled at Lucia like there was nothing that could have made his day better than to find her prowling in his domain.

  “I haven’t seen a new alpha in ages. No one has.” He licked the edge of his blade, the silver scorching his tongue with a crackle. “There’ll be a great reward from the witch for bringing you in.”

  “Alive,” a voice growled next to him. “We bring her alive.” The second alpha-spawn was a ghastly mutt. His patchwork body showed snake skin, dense boar fur, and spines sticking out from his elbows at all angles. Porcupine seemed to be the dominant trait in the man, but he was easily the ugliest shifter Lucia had ever seen.

  “Alive, sure. But no one said she had to have her arms and legs attached.” The hyena laughed like that was the funniest thing ever said, tears squirting from his eyes, drool dripping in thick rivulets onto his bare chest.

  Lucia tightened her grip on the glaive, stepped in front of Farid. “You have one chance,” she said, her voice singing. “One chance to surrender and submit. I don’t want to kill anyone, but if you stand in my way, you will die.”

  Farid reloaded behind her back with a thunk.

  “This one,” the mutt named Whiskeyfur grunted. “This one needs a lesson.” From his belt the hunched shifter drew two long curved knives, silver tipped and chipped from use.

  These men
were murderers.

  Gashly made the first move, leaping low across the room, his axe scraping sparks against the floor. He ran in three quick lopes and then met with Lucia in battle. She tried to recall all the forms Conwynne had taught her, her hours spent drilling and moving as night fell across the Letherine, but none of it would come.

  She managed to block Gashly’s blows, his greataxe ringing off her glaive, but every strike pushed her back a footstep.

  Too many steps back and she’d be at the wall, unable to maneuver, and then she’d be dead, or worse.

  And Farid would be dead.

  That couldn’t happen.

  A tingle ran up her arms as a mechanism deep within the glaive—some ancient alpha science or magic—ignited. Glowing runes of bright white light shone on the surface of the sword. Memories entered Lucia’s mind. Hundreds of alphas before her, all skilled glaive fighters, were there with her in that room.

  Pack is family and pack is forever.

  The memories of these great alphas were stored in the sword. The ghostly image of a large shifter, a great cat of some kind, formed around her.

  As the hyena man swung upwards with his axe, threatening to sever her hands from her body, Lucia stepped into his attack, slapping him in the face with the flat of her blade. The silver burned like acid. She could feel the ghost of the great cat shifter smiling in pleasure at the strike.

  Gashly stumbled backwards, clawing at his face. One of his eyes was swollen shut.

  The porcupine mutt leaped in, giving Lucia no chance to breathe. These two had worked together before, knew each other’s rhythms. They were pack, too. But a dark and sickly mockery of pack, feeding off each other in a downward spiral.

  Whiskeyfur parried with one blade and jabbed with the other in a quick dancing two-step. He stabbed high and low, testing her defenses for a weakness.

  Farid darted forward and slashed the hyena shifter across his wounded eye with his cutlass. Gashly wasn’t laughing anymore. The pain was so great he dropped his axe, gripping his face with both hands. As Lucia danced with the mutt, parrying and blocking, spinning around the room, her limbs aided by the ghost of a new ancestor—a woman with a shaved head and thick rings on her fingers—Farid grabbed the hyena’s axe.

  The mutt saw what was coming, but couldn’t break away from his dance eith Lucia in time to do anything.

  Farid hefted the axe high overhead and gave a swift downward chop, burying the massive blade in Gashly’s back. The hyena man’s body writhed and shrunk. A black oily smoke hissed from his mouth and ears.

  Shifters return to a human form after death, Lucia knew. It was one of the funny tricks nature played on her kind. But she wasn’t prepared for Gashly to look so normal in his death. He was a short man, old and bald, with a pudgy face and bad acne. He could have been any merchant she’d ever met.

  With Gashly taken care of, Lucia changed her tactics. Another spirit flowed into her, this one familiar. It looked like her, with the same flat nose and pointed chin, but her eyes were different. This spirit had sad eyes.

  She was a demon with the glaive.

  The fighting style was completely different from what Lucia had been using, switching to a one-handed attack that favored fighting with the point of the glaive, as if it was a rapier.

  The ghost that overlaid her body held the exact same sword, but hers was whole, unshattered, the ghost of the blade protruding a foot longer.

  This is my mother, Lucia realized.

  Farid fired bolts at the mutt from behind Gashly’s corpse, they lodged themselves painfully into his hip and shoulder. The barbed ends worked their way deeper into the shifter’s body with his every motion.

  The fight didn’t last much longer after that. Lucia’s mother was a skilled swordswoman, though her sadness was palpable, leaving Lucia with a bittersweet feeling even as she drove the ragged point of her glaive through the mutt’s neck.

  And then it was over. As soon as the mutt died and his body turned into a handsome man of twenty, the spirit left Lucia.

  She wanted to yell at the ghost, to beg her to stay. She didn’t really remember her mother or father at all. All she had were stories from her uncle, and those couldn’t be trusted. Feeling her mother’s ghostly touch on her hand, even for a second, was the closest she’d been to her in memory.

  “That was amazing,” Farid said, reloading Jolene. “Did the old man teach you all that in three weeks?”

  Lucia shook her head. “It’s the glaive. It knows how to fight. It has the memories of a hundred alphas locked in its core.” The sword dimmed in her hand, the runes fading back into the blade.

  “That’s useful,” the pirate said, but he could sense something was wrong. “So why do you look miserable?”

  “Avar, one of those memories is my mother.”

  Chapter 10

  The Rescue Attempt

  “We have to get to that prison,” Farid said, peeking around a corner of the labyrinth.

  Lucia had walked through the walls as a ghost wolf, had found the prisoners, but that didn’t help at all in actually getting to them. They still had a maze to solve.

  “Why do think she was so sad?” Lucia asked.

  “Sweetheart, how should I know? I never met the woman and I didn’t see what you saw. Now how about you use some of that fancy alpha magic and find us a way through?”

  Lucia tried to concentrate, but her mother’s grief was an anchor around her heart. She couldn’t even shift. Seconds after the mutt had hit the floor, her body returned to normal. Lucia’s clothes hung wrong on her now, stretched and torn by the shift. If they survived, she would have to make Conwynne teach her how to shift her clothes, too. She was immodestly dressed before Farid, which should have sent her into a furious blushing fit, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

  “There was a sense of her, more than just the sword instruction,” Lucia said, resting against a stone wall that looked like every other stone wall in the perverse labyrinth. “With the spirits that moved me, I could sense them, who they were. Nothing clear, no words or images, just like a lingering song or a feeling on my skin.”

  Farid used one of his bolts and a plate of stolen armor to scratch a rough map of the maze, only half-listening.

  “But with my mother, it was more intense. Probably because we share a connection? But it was like whatever they did to capture her essence for the glaive, she was about to do something that made her feel despair. And shame.” Lucia slumped to the floor. She didn’t want to cry in front of the pirate, but she might not have much choice.

  “I used to dream that my parents were merchants,” Farid said, sitting down next to her. “Back in the group home, in Sala City, no one spoke about their folks. You’d think a bunch of orphaned kids would always talk about what their parents really were, but it was too painful. Bottom line was that we’d all been abandoned. Or orphaned by war. No one was coming to rescue us. But I still dreamed.”

  “Tell me about your dreams of them, please. Distract me, Avar.”

  The pirate took her hand in his, interlacing their fingers. Lucia’s heart swelled in her chest. He was so warm, it was amazing just to touch him.

  “I dreamt they were fabulously rich merchants, sailing the skies in an airship. Buying spices and urns and rugs in New Angeles and trading them for ore in Los Robles and trading that for ancient science and magic in The Straits. They were handsome, dashing adventurers, making a killing while secretly fighting for all that’s good and right. It was a silly dream. A juvenile dream, but I clung to it.” His voice was calm and wistful. For a moment Lucia forgot where they were, that she’d just killed a man.

  Lucia smiled at the pirate captain. “I can’t see that it was an inspiration or anything.”

  He laughed without smirking for once. “The only person I could talk to in the home was Quinn. But he knew his parents, so it was different.”

  “They gave him up, didn't they?”

  “Yeah, he became a mutt when he was se
ven. Got scared by a rattlesnake and shifted too young, is what they said. No one’s really sure why some kids turn into mutts. Is it a curse in their blood or a shift gone wrong? It didn’t matter why, his folks just didn’t want him anymore. He had a bunch of brothers—his parents were busy trying to repopulate the wasteland single handedly—so I guess they felt they could just jettison any that underperformed.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “That’s Sala City. Fabulous wealth and unimaginable squalor heaped right on top of each other, caged by the Suzerainty and forced to play nice.”

  They sat in silence, holding hands, staring at the blank stone walls as if death didn’t lurk around every corner.

  “Y’know,” Farid said, “it occurs to me that the hyena guy had something of a drool problem.”

  Lucia shuddered, “Don’t talk about it, please. I’ve never been so scared in my life.” That wasn’t true, the night when her uncle had killed her aunt—nothing could be scarier than that.

  “What I’m saying is, maybe you could track his drool? Smell it or use your gifts or something?”

  Lucia jumped to her feet. “Avar, that’s brilliant. I could kiss you.” She beamed.

  “You’ll do more than that, once we’re out of here.”

  Lucia grabbed onto the excitement she felt at that idea, about kissing the handsome pirate, feeling his oh-so-warm body pressed against hers, and shifted.

  It was even faster this time. With practice, it would become second nature to her. If she lived that long. In her werewolf form, her nose was sensitive enough to pick up the scent of the hyena’s slaver. She sniffed at the ground, bent double, and the path forward opened before her.

  Lucia sprinted through the maze, tracking the hyena’s spoor. Farid ran at his top speed just to keep her in sight.

  “Hold up,” he whispered harshly. “I can’t run as fast as you, girl.”

  Lucia looked back at him, her sharpened senses taking in every detail of the man. She could hear his heart thudding in his chest from the exertion of keeping her pace. She could see every droplet of sweat on his brow, sliding down his handsome face to disappear under his stolen armor. But mostly she could smell him.