by Selena Scott
“Inka!” John Alec groaned and shifted uncomfortably.
“What! She told me so herself. They have sex with each other. They’re sex companions.”
Alec groaned louder, pressing his fingers into his eyes. Kain grinned at Alec’s reaction, even though the thought of Williams and Valentina together made his leg start jostling up and down, made some feeling pull nice and tight in his chest.
“You don’t like Williams?” Ruby asked Alec.
John Alec sobered a bit. “It doesn’t matter if I do or don’t. He was there for Valentina when I left. When I came to Earth to be with Milla. He’s fought alongside her for years. And for that I’m very grateful.”
Kain rose. His jostling leg was telling him to get up and go. “I’m gonna go check on the coyotes.”
He jogged out the back door and across the yard. Part of Ansel and Ruby’s house had been converted into a guesthouse of sorts. If anyone in the town of Green Mills asked about it, they said that they ran a B&B back there. But really, it was a way station for the shifters they’d rescued from Herta.
They’d been at it for a year and a half. With Valentina working from the Herta side and John Alec and the Ketos working from the Earth side, they’d been able to rescue 164 enslaved shifters. Bring them back to Earth where they’d be safe. All 164 people had stayed in this guesthouse back there. As Kain approached the demure little cottage, the number seemed both large and small in his mind.
They’d worked their asses off to rescue that many in so short a time. But still there were thousands more shifters, enslaved and wasting away on Herta that very second.
The thought strangled him as he swung through the front door and then all the way through the house when he realized they weren’t inside.
There were three coyotes in the back garden. Two were the ones they rescued and one was Griff, Ruby’s younger brother. And, Kain thought as he leaned against the doorjamb and watched them, he was Kain’s little brother, too, in a way.
Griff was a special person. He’d been imprisoned on Herta for two years before the Ketos had been able to rescue him and bring him home. The time there had really messed him up, though the four years since then had greatly improved the kid. He chuckled where he used to scowl, lingered in the doorway instead of jetting through it.
Kain and Griff spent quite a bit of time together over the last four years. Kain was the person who’d taught Griff how to shift. The kid hadn’t even known he was a shifter when he’d been lured into Herta. And he definitely hadn’t known that he was an extremely rare kind of shifter. Griff could shift into many forms. And over the last year or so, had been able to start choosing which form he wanted whenever he wanted to do it.
It was thrilling for Kain, as Griff’s mentor of sorts, to watch it happen. And his ability to shift into all sorts of animals had helped immensely with the shifters they’d rescued. A week ago, Griff had been a hare alongside a little girl who’d been in Herta for less than a year. He’d been able to communicate with her in her animal form, coax her back into her human form. That little girl was back with her parents now.
That one had felt really, really good.
Kain watched the shifter coyotes sniff at one another for a minute before he backtracked through the house. He didn’t want to disturb the process.
He re-entered Ansel’s house, hoping they weren’t still talking about Williams. And sure enough, someone else had stolen the spotlight.
It was one-year-old Carmen, sitting atop her father’s lap like a little bird on a nest. She grinned that heart-stopping smile and immediately held her hands up for Kain as he came through the door. With a joyful whoop, Uncle Kain swooped the baby off Matt’s lap and flung her into the air. She laughed insanely, half terrified, half joyous, and allowed him to rub noses after he caught her. He naturally hitched her onto his hip and kissed the puffy black hair at the top of her head, reaching down to clap Matt on his shoulder.
“You know,” Matt cleared his throat and stretched his insanely long legs out in front of himself, “there are some studies that indicate that adult-toddler relationships are strengthened by caretaker activities such as—”
“You don’t have to talk me into changing her diaper, Matty,” Kain grinned down at his brother-in-law. “Just so happens I don’t mind it one bit.” The second part Kain said right into Carmen’s chubby little neck, inexplicably speaking in a cockney accent.
Babies.
What an irony that Kain had spent the last decade and a half avoiding them and now that his sister had one he was suffering from a little bit of baby fever.
He’d thought that only chicks got that. But he was knocking on thirty and so in love with his niece that he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to have a rugrat of his own. The problem was that you generally needed a woman to do that. There was definitely no shortage of women in Kain’s life. But certainly none who he’d wanna, you know, make a baby with.
The thought depressed him.
He came back out with Carmen all tidy and fresh and plopped onto the floor with the baby on his stomach. She deftly pulled his phone out of his pants pocket.
“Careful!” Inka called from where she was now sitting on her husband’s lap, Matt’s humongous hand tapping a rhythm onto her round belly. “She’s figured out how to—”
“Holy shit, she just unlocked my phone!” Kain laughed. “Didn’t you, you brilliant, perfect little genius.” He remained charmed, even after her chubby fingers had deleted three of his apps and discovered the camera.
“I think you need one of those,” Ruby called to Kain as she watched him cheese for the pictures Carmen was almost taking of the two of them. “A baby, I mean.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Kain admitted, sending Matt and John Alec’s eyebrows right up their foreheads. Neither of them had suspected Kain wanted to give up any part of his bachelor lifestyle. “I think I need to find me a girl. Oh! You know who can help me with that?”
Kain pulled up his Tinder app and handed the phone to Carmen, taking her chubby hand and showing her how to swipe left or right. Then he leaned back and tucked his hands behind his head. He cracked one eye at Carmen. “Wake me up when you find me a wife, sweet girl.”
***
Valentina could hear them behind her, the hunters. She knew they could smell the fresh blood that was pouring from her abdomen, and–look at that–from her leg, too. Flashes of the battle she’d just endured seared across her brain. But she pushed it down. And kept running. She just had to get to someplace where she could open a gate. Someplace quiet and calm and hidden and she could open a gate and get through. That’s all she had to do.
She ran harder, crashing through the brush. Her vision was gray at the corners and she wondered if she was breathing–she couldn’t even feel it if she was. She was so tired.
But she was not going to die today. Valentina was a fighter. She was a survivor. She’d endured injuries at least as bad as this one and she was waking up tomorrow morning. So help her God.
Spotting a thatch of thick bushes, she ducked around one side and held her breath. She couldn’t hear the hunters anymore. God, let them be gone. Let them be lost or bored or just too slow. All she needed was a fighting chance.
She pulled out the long, thin flute that Matt, the scientist, had given her a year and a half ago. Since then, she’d only used it a few times to practice creating gates. She desperately tried to remember how to do it.
It took all her breath and more concentration than her brain could allow for, but she thought she was doing it. She thought she was opening a gate.
But then the flute fell from her hands, and there was not enough air left in the world or blood left in her body. She fought the sleep as hard as she could but she was so small and sleep was so large.
Moments later, her knives were in her hands as she fought the hunters who’d grabbed her shoulders, touched her face. But when her eyes came open, it was calm green eyes she saw. A silvery scar.<
br />
And then she didn’t see anything more.
***
Kain sighed as he took the long way through the woods to get back to his cabin. That had been a very, very, epically bad date. One for the record books. He’d thought Shauna was so sweet the first time they’d gone out a couple of weeks ago. And she’d been fun in the sack. Definitely zealous. But then dinner tonight. Yikes.
She was… boring, Kain realized with a little bit of a wince. That was not something that he liked to say about a woman, whom he felt deserved every bit of respect he had to offer. But hour three into her one-woman show, with not a question asked to him, Kain realized that she’d NEVER asked him a question about himself.
He knew he could be closed off. Being a shifter would kind of do that to you in this day and age. To the rest of the world, shifters were extinct. Most of them had been lured away into Herta by now. It wasn’t wise to advertise.
So the Ketos had kept that little secret to themselves for years. And he’d never give up that piece of information to someone like Shauna. But that didn’t mean that Kain didn’t want to chat about his favorite movies or show off pictures of his niece or chime in about what kind of puppy she should buy. He’d gotten the distinct impression that the only person Shauna had been interested in at that table had been herself.
And that made one of them.
He scraped a hand over his messy blond hair and trudged up the mountain. Since when had he started caring about stuff like this? Used to be any woman warm and willing was right for Kain. Since when had he started getting choosy? It was freaking him out.
Kain sniffed the air. There wasn’t anyone for miles. He could strip down and shift and he’d be home in less than five minutes. Yeah. That’s what he needed, he needed his bear. He’d be back for his clothes tomorrow.
He was just unbuttoning his blue button-down when a faint scent filtered through the night air to him. He turned a 180, sniffed again.
That smelled like faint mint and fresh earth.
Valentina.
Kain took a few running steps in that direction and the scent got vaguely stronger. And then he was sprinting. Because he didn’t just smell Valentina. He smelled blood.
Three minutes later and her scent was swamping him. He skidded into a clearing and looked wildly around. Where was she? Nowhere. And no sign of her. But her scent was strong enough that she should have been right beside him.
Kain froze when he saw the trees next to him were lit from the side with a faint, gold light. Exactly the same kind of light that lit up a portal when a shifter was near. He whipped around and there it was. A poorly-opened portal on the ground, just big enough to crawl through. He got down and looked through.
His heart chugged in his chest. “Fuck,” he whispered as he flung himself through the gate and over her inert body. She was covered from the waist down in blood. Her canvas pants and brown tunic were stuck to her body with the wetness of it. She looked deathly pale.
He desperately wanted to shout her name but he caught the scent of hunters. Two, no, three of them a quarter of a mile away. He had to get her out of here and fast.
Kain watched her eyes flutter—thank God—as he lifted her from Herta and into Earth. She reached for her knives reflexively but they fell as fast as her eyelids did. He didn’t want to waste a second but he had to close the portal behind him, otherwise the hunters could follow him through. He took valuable seconds, got ahold of his breath and used the tool to blow the gate closed from each edge. There.
And then he didn’t bother removing his date-night clothes. He didn’t give a fuck. He shifted faster than he’d ever shifted before, carefully hefted her over his back and strode off into the night.
CHAPTER THREE
It was official. Valentina really, really wanted her old life back. One where long thin needles didn’t jab her skin and women in silly pale pajamas weren’t making strange machines beep and putting cold metal against her skin.
And she especially wanted the version of her life where John Alec wasn’t hollow-eyed and checking on her every four seconds to make sure she was still alive.
Because she was alive, damn it! She had a nasty set of cuts on her leg and down her side from a hunter’s bone sword, but she’d gotten away.
Well, she frowned and played with the end of her braid, she’d almost gotten away. She’d gotten mostly away. And Kain had done the rest.
Kain Keto, who she’d hoped to never see again, who she kind of hated, had saved her life. He’d plunged into Herta and pulled her out. She’d been told he’d carried her five miles back to Ansel’s house where the rest of the family had jumped into action to get her ass to the hospital.
She would definitely be dead without Kain Keto.
So, yeah. She really wanted her old life back.
When she couldn’t have taken another second indoors before she throat punched one of these hovering ladies who called themselves ‘nurses’, she’d been told it was time to go home.
John Alec and Milla had been there ready to take her away from the hospital, thank God.
She had to admit that she’d really liked the car ride. And parts of Earth were just as beautiful as Herta. The rolling green mountains, the sun against the trees, the sky so blue it hurt.
But for every beautiful thing there was a discombobulating and ugly thing. Office buildings. Stoplights. Highways. Huge images in the sky that Milla called ‘billboards’.
Earth was complicated and busy. And Valentina desperately wished that ‘going home’ meant going back to Herta. But she knew, without a doubt in her heart, that John Alec wasn’t letting her go back until she was 100% healed. More than that, even. She was going to have to be in better shape than she was before to get his blessing to return home alone.
“Is this your home?” Valentina asked as Milla helped her out of the car and steadied her at the shoulders. She liked the look of the small cabin, shaded under heritage pines with a newly planted vegetable garden in the front and ivy creeping up one side. But it sent a cold pang through her chest that she didn’t even know where her brother lived. For the hundredth time Valentina realized just how far apart she was from him in Herta.
“No,” Milla replied, trying not to worry about her sister-in-law, who’d lost weight since the last time she’d seen her. Besides the hospital stay, the girl didn’t look good. She looked tired and fragile. And Valentina never looked fragile. “This is Kain’s house.”
“What?” Valentina swiveled up and fixed her light brown eyes on Milla’s face. “Why are we here, then?”
“John and I don’t have a guest room,” Milla responded, helping Valentina up the stairs one by one. “Kain said we could stay here instead.”
“Oh.” She had no idea what to think about that. And she didn’t have long to dwell on it because the door screen door swung open and there was Kain.
Standing tall in a T-shirt the same calm green as his eyes and a pair of pants that, even to her inexperienced eye, fit him very well.
“Hey there, sunshine.”
She glowered at him. He was doing that thing where he gave her a compliment but she couldn’t help but feel he was making fun of her.
She tried not to like his house, on principle, but couldn’t help but be softened by the countless family pictures everywhere. She liked that the walls were the same dark wood as the outside of the cabin. And she liked the big windows thrown open. It smelled the same inside as it did outside.
She especially liked the sight of the big steaming cup of tea on one of the small tables.
She felt a touch dizzy from the walk from the car and she was barely thinking straight. “I want that.”
She pointed at the tea and started lowering herself onto the couch before Milla could get her all the way to the guest bedroom.
“My tea? Yeah. Okay.” Kain glanced at Milla, who shrugged.
“Tea is a delicacy on Herta,” John Alec explained, worried eyes on his sister. “But it’s always been Valentina’s f
avorite.”
Kain moved his tea from the table and into her thin, trembling hands. He only hesitated for a moment before sitting next to her on the couch. He’d carried her through the woods on his back, for God’s sake. He could sit next to the woman on the couch.
“What’s that taste?” she asked in delight, sipping the tea and then bringing her lips into her mouth like she couldn’t get enough of the flavor.
“Uh. Apple cinnamon.” Kain’s eyes were having trouble looking away from her mouth drinking that tea.
“I’ve had apple but never cinnamon before. It’s very warm.”
Fatigue hit her then. She was lowering her head to the pillow beside her and barely noticed when the tea was pulled from her hands.
***
When she woke up, the light had changed in the cabin. It was fully dark outside and just a small light burned on the side table. Valentina’s mouth felt like it was filled with sand. She tried to adjust herself on the couch and winced when the movement pulled at her stitches.
“Careful,” a low voice said from her right. Kain was sitting in an armchair with his feet propped up on the coffee table. He had big feet, she noticed. John Alec was in the armchair next to Kain but he was dead to the world, his head tipped back and a light snoring sounding in the room.
Kain handed her a cup of cool water that was sitting on the side table and she gratefully sipped it.
“Tea?” she asked him sleepily. She didn’t care if she was being greedy. She felt small and strange and just wanted a little comfort.
A smile played at his lips as he stood. “Sure.”
He was back a few minutes later with the same apple cinnamon blend steaming away in a little chipped mug.