by Selena Scott
Though she found that she couldn’t eat it. The taste, the smell, the label on the jar, all of it was a searing reminder of Kain’s house.
Well, time to get it over with. She had to face the music and at least try to sleep. The rest of her life was starting now. Right now.
She ate the apples, seeds and all, and curled up in her thin but warm blanket, her hood over her hair. And she’d predicted accurately. The second there was nothing else to do, nothing else to plan or take care of, the pain rolled over her like an avalanche in the mountains.
He’d betrayed her and tricked her. Convinced her to stay as a favor to her brother. Because he loved John Alec. She’d seen it for herself. And so he’d done what he had to in order to get her to say she’d stay. She didn’t think he was completely evil. He probably really did have feelings for her. But Valentina didn’t think she’d ever get over the pain of not being loved the way she loved him. She really would have given up her world for him.
And that had been the plan all along.
Tears were hot on her face and her body shook as it hadn’t since her father had died in battle alongside her. She hadn’t just lost Kain, she’d lost her brother. Her connection to Earth. She had nothing now. Nothing but her training, her wits, and her mission. To free enslaved shifters.
That would be enough, she told herself, bullied herself. In the morning, she’d wake up and that would be enough. But right now she let herself cry.
Perhaps it was because of her tears, the convulsive act of crying, that Valentina didn’t hear the man who snuck up behind her. But she’d later realize that it was the pain. Once again her pain had made her vulnerable.
But not for long.
She felt her blanket lift and then her katana was whipping around, slicing the skin of the man behind her. His wrist stopped most of it, but his neck got some too.
“Christ, Val! You’re gonna make me bleed all over your blanket!”
“Kain?” She blinked at him in the dark as he eyed the wound on his wrist, already healing. The katana clattered out of her hand and he set it away, giving it a dirty look.
“Damn, you really got me. You didn’t hit my carotid, did you? That one takes me longer to heal.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” she crab-walked away from him.
“Currently? I’m attempting not to bleed out.” The only reason he could joke at this particular moment was because he’d just realized that she was wearing his hoodie. The blue zip-up that he’d deemed theirs. She’d taken it when she’d gone and now she wore it to sleep in. It told him that not all hope was lost.
“No. I mean why did you come here?” She didn’t need to ask how he found her. He’d probably been on her trail for a while, maybe the whole time she was gone. The thought both warmed and chilled her. Because even though she asked, she knew why he’d come. To ask her to come back to Earth with him. And as she stared at his perfect silvery scar, his black cap tipped back, she wasn’t sure she had the strength to say no.
And then her eyes flicked to the camping backpack he’d shucked off next to her bedroll.
Kain got up, strode over to the creek and washed the blood off his wrist and neck. He came back, wiping the water on his jeans.
“Kain.”
“What? Oh, why did I come? Because I need someone to show me how to survive in Herta.” He nodded his head toward the backpack.
She stared at the bag then back at him, her expression completely blank. “You want to learn to live in Herta.”
“Yeah. Well, no. Not actually. But yeah, because that’s where you want to live. So that’s where we’re gonna live.”
She didn’t understand. She rose and stepped suspiciously around the blankets, picking up her katana and re-sheathing it. “We as in…”
“You and me. And hopefully a kid or two. I really want kids.”
She frowned. Still deeply suspicious. “You want to have kids and live in Herta?”
He sighed and sat down on her bedroll, patting the space beside him. She didn’t sit and he wasn’t a tiny bit surprised.
“Val, Alec didn’t lie to you. He did ask me to do that. It was right after we first slept together. I went there to come clean to him about us but he started talking first and that’s what he asked me to do.”
She closed her eyes against the pain.
“But I said no.”
Her eyes opened.
“You can ask Alec, you can ask Milla, she was there, too. I told him how bad that idea was. That we shouldn’t try to control you. And that if you wanted to live in Herta then he and I would figure out a way to trade back and forth so that one of us was always with you.”
He paused, dropped his head and pressed his fingers into the back of his neck. She realized, with a sick little jolt, that if he’d been in Herta for two days already, then the Struggles would be loud and clear, hurting him badly.
“But then I realized that wouldn’t be good enough for me,” he continued. “To leave you every few days and just hope you were going to be okay.”
He rose. “You didn’t hear what I said to Alec right before all that mess, did you?”
She didn’t move an inch, not even to acknowledge his words. Kain stepped forward but didn’t touch her. “I said how much I wished I could live here with you.”
“You wished to live in Herta.”
“Yes.”
“Where the pain is so bright for you that on the fourth day it’s hard to breathe.”
“Yes.”
“Where you can never be your bear. Your true self. And you must always fight against the urge to fall slave.”
“Yes.”
She still stood just a few feet away from him, moonlight and leaf shadows dancing over her face. “Because you love me.”
“Yes.” His voice was low and had a little husk to it.
“Because you love me very badly. And you want to make a baby with me.”
“Yes and yes.” Neither of them moved.
“And because if you didn’t come to Herta to live with me you would be a pathetic shell of a man who couldn’t go on without me. Or smile or laugh or ever make love again.”
He cracked a smile, a little light finding its way into his voice. “Sure.”
And then his arms were full of her. Her soft, sweet self. All faint mint and fresh earth. His hand automatically wrapped around her braid, his fingers tracing its smoothness. They went instantly to their knees and she pushed him right down onto the bedroll. She rolled over top of him and pinned his arms down.
“Don’t argue with me about something,” she demanded.
“Okay…” He agreed tentatively although he knew he wouldn’t be able to think straight with her straddling him like that, much less form an argument.
“We’re not going to live on Herta.”
“Val—”
“Listen. Sometimes we’ll live on Herta and sometimes we’ll live on Earth. Sometimes John Alec and I will come here together. And in those times you and Milla will be very sad and lonely.”
He couldn’t help but smile at her confidence.
“My favorite times will be when you’re here with me,” she continued. “But I won’t be selfish and make you do it forever. And we’ll start cutting back and forth much more often,” she decided. “We’ll spend our days hiking through Herta and our nights camping on Earth.”
“But the hunters, they’ll find us if we’re cutting through.”
“You think I can’t handle hunters? Didn’t you see what I did to your family?”
“Right, but before—”
“Before, I was sad and sick and without you.”
A slow, lazy smile worked its way over Kain’s face. “So I’m kind of your secret weapon, huh?”
“Yes,” she nodded, extremely solemnly. “My love for you is my greatest weapon.”
“Your love for me,” he repeated and then leaned up to nip at her mouth. “I like the sound of that.”
She let his hands free then. �
��How’s your neck?”
He smiled against her lips. “Just fine. Come here.”
“I am here.”
“No,” he whispered, tugging her all the way down so every bit of them touched. He swirled the blanket over them. “I mean stay here.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They woke the next morning to the smell of smoke. Kain could smell more than that. He could smell panic on the air. Fear. Burned flesh. In the far distance he could hear running feet.
They packed their things quickly and ran against the wind. It was an hour of moving before they saw the first shifter. A hare, with wild, rolling eyes.
“Stay here,” Kain whispered to the creature and in its weakened mind, it immediately obeyed.
Next they passed a hyena shifter, but this one hadn’t made it much past the fire they could smell over the mountain. It lay still and half burned, its eyes open.
They ran faster. When they made it to the top of the mountain, Valentina immediately swung up a tree; she needed a vantage point.
What she saw changed her forever. Took her heart and split it right in two. Fire. Fire for miles. A hundred miles. It spanned all the way to the main city. The air was filled with haze, patches of orange, but mostly there was just black and grey, rolling out into forever.
She was just climbing out of the tree when Kain whirled. And sure enough, a band of hunters.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Six hunters. Six arrows. Six heads.
She hopped down from the tree and started collecting her arrows.
“Holy shit.” Kain looked around at the wreckage. He’d seen her kill hunters before. But never six in a row. “Really glad you’re on my team.”
She sheathed her arrows. “They must be hunting the shifters who are fleeing the fire. There’ll be more.”
They worked their way around the edge of the fire, corralling shifters and bringing them back toward where the hare they found still trembled. When the light failed, they decided they needed to cut through and figure out a way back to Green Mills with the four shifters they’d found. The hare, a panther, a little red fox, and an owl.
They’d just cut the portal through to earth when the hunter came through the brush. Kain sensed him first and whirled. The hunter, seeing all those vulnerable shifters and just two weak humans in his way, bared his teeth in joy. Fresh kill, and treasures abounded. He reared back and threw his hatchet, aiming at the woman first.
Without a single thought, Kain stepped in front of the hatchet and it buried itself in his heart. He fell backward, through the portal that Valentina had just hurried the shifters through. She rushed forward, straight toward the hunter. She flung two darts, one hit his throat and the other hit his eye. He flinched and fell, the pain from the poison already searing his veins. She didn’t care.
The last thing he saw was the woman’s shoes and his own blood on the ground.
***
Valentina closed the portal and immediately pulled the cell phone out of Kain’s pocket. She called Matt. He was level-headed and would know how to track Kain’s phone.
The four unshifted shifters trembled together in a little huddle as they watched the woman fall over her lover. She yanked the hatchet from his chest and he didn’t even grunt.
“Kain. You’re going to live. I cut your carotid artery last night and you chatted my ear off right through it. You can do this. You can heal. You are going to live.” She pulled his shirt to one side and gasped at how deep the wound was. Inches deep and filled with blood. He didn’t move.
“You’re a healer, Valentina,” she told herself. “Heal him!” She glanced wildly around at earth and saw none of the herbs or plants that she was used to using. She saw nothing. All she saw was Kain whitening as he lay there, no breath, no heartbeat. Just a valley of blood where his chest was.
“No. No. God. Not Kain. Please, not Kain. Kain!” She screamed his name, and maybe it was the sound of her voice that did it.
Valentina heard a whispery, light noise and she whirled behind her to see a naked young woman where the fox had been sitting. Grubby and wild-eyed, but beautiful with her wild, strawberry-blonde hair in knots down her back, she knelt over Kain. The girl didn’t look at Valentina. She didn’t look at anything but the gaping wound on Kain’s chest. She fell to her knees next to his body and held her hands a scant inch above him.
Kain’s eyes opened.
Valentina jumped a foot in the air. “Kain!”
His eyes moved wildly, and his face grimaced in pain, but he wasn’t breathing yet.
Valentina grabbed his hand and stroked it. “Breathe, Kain, breathe.”
“I. Can’t,” he replied in the halting, wispy voice of a man with no air in his lungs. The young woman moved her hands over Kain’s chest, still not touching him, and the pool of blood trembled as if there were a small earthquake underneath it. The blood spilled away, down his ribs as new flesh pushed up under it, the sides of the wound knitting together.
Kain took a huge, stuttering breath and Valentina laid her own hand on his chest, right above the wound. There was his heart. There it was. Stuttering, but alive.
He took another breath and another.
“Thank you,” Valentina said to the girl, but there wasn’t a girl there. There was a fox, watching with light, intelligent eyes.
Kain’s own healing powers took over then but it took an hour for him to be able to sit up. It wasn’t long after that that John Alec, Griff, Ansel, and Milla all came pouring out of two cars. They moved quickly, gathering the shifters in as well.
Night had fallen completely when Valentina held Kain in her arms in front of the fire in Ansel’s living room. The rest of the family sat in silence around them. All in shock from the story. From the idea of losing Kain.
Valentina wanted desperately to bring Kain home. Back to their house, but she knew that his family needed a little time with him. Time to reassure themselves.
“Looks like you two made up,” Ansel said from across the room in that squinty way of his.
“Eh,” Kain leaned back into Val. “We were never really fighting. She just thought she was fighting with me, but really she was fighting with John Alec.”
Across the room Alec groaned and dropped his head into his hands. “Can I just apologize again?”
“No,” Valentina answered flatly, not quite ready to forgive her bonehead brother.
“So does this mean you’re gonna be Aunt Valentina?” Inka asked, rubbing a hand along her stomach. She’d been having contractions for the last four hours but hadn’t told anyone yet. Valentina’s phone call with Matt had taken about ten years off his life. He was snoozing on the couch with Carmen against his chest. She’d tell him in an hour or so.
Valentina jumped as if the thought were shocking to her. “That would be nice,” she answered and charmed the room by blushing like a girl. In a very un-Valentina-like way.
Kain winked at Ruby and Ansel across the room. They weren’t gonna be able to keep their secret much longer, grinning like loons at one another. But they didn’t say anything. It wasn’t the right moment for them.
Kain took Valentina’s hand and kissed her palm. He couldn’t wait to have that kind of secret with her.
She traced her hand over his chest. “Thank you for saving my life,” she whispered in his ear.
It hit him, what it meant for a warrior like her to say those words.
“I love you, too,” he whispered back.
The End
Griff’s Game
PROLOGUE
Herta, Eight Years Ago
“Griff!” she whisper-yelled as she clicked the iron gate closed behind her. She wore a long wool cloak so green it melted in with the black shadows of the fortress after midnight. She blinked into the darkness of his cell. Where was he? There were only so many places he could be. “Griff!”
Her cry for him ended on an ‘eep!’ when the boy in question’s arms banded around her middle from behind, his st
ubbled chin scraping against the part of her cheek exposed under the hood. She laughed and turned in the circle of his arms.
There he was. Black hair, navy blue eyes, nose with that crinkle at the top between his brows. And as much beard as he could grow. He was so beautiful it made her teenage heart squeeze.
“Take this ridiculous thing off,” he growled at her in that low voice of his. He tugged the hood down and immediately buried his face in her hair. He had a thing about her hair. She was glad someone liked it, because to her it was a real pain. So thick she could barely tie it back and always tumbling into her face. She’d been thinking of chopping it all off before she’d met Griff but he’d been so drawn to it that she couldn’t bear to deprive him.
“So bossy.” She raised an eyebrow at him, but still, she let the cloak drop. Stubborn and imperious with everyone else, she had such a soft spot for this boy. She wanted him to have whatever he wanted. She wore a cotton nightgown. It wasn’t finery, by any means, but it had Griff clearing his throat. She didn’t think she’d ever get enough of the way he responded to her.
Immediately he dragged her down on top of the cloak; his lips found hers, sweet and soft. Sometimes, when she came to him in the night, he was urgent and rough. Every night was different, like a different lover in some ways. And all of it thrilled her to no end. Months ago, when she’d first started coming to him, they’d been one another’s firsts. But now, as his mouth sipped at hers and his hands found her breasts, she felt as if they’d been making love for a lifetime.
His heart pounded against hers and she smelled soap on his skin. He’d have to scrape on grit and grime in the morning, so no one would know, but he always made sure to be clean for her when she came to him. Her heart squeezed at the gesture, how dear it was, but also for the reality, one where this boy couldn’t even wash himself without fear of death. He was risking so much for her.