Hidden: The Swamp

by Royce, Rebecca

  “Well, not tonight.” I laughed at my own joke and then stopped. No one could do cheesy as well as I could.

  Jarret met my gaze, and I dropped my own. This was going to get harder and harder. At home, I’d sometimes had this happen but rarely. Without the shift, I’d pretty much felt like a regular human most of the time. I must have been really far down on the food chain to be unable to really look at anyone.

  “Kenzie,” he said my name, and I forced my eyes up in time to see Anton smack his arm. “What?” Jarret asked his brother. “She told me that is what most people call her. It’s fine. Right, Kenzie?”

  I nodded. “More than fine. I’m comfortable with it.”

  Anton’s shoulders sagged. What was wrong? I turned to him. “You okay?”

  He nodded, a smile coming back to his expression. He held up the bacon, sticking it back in my mouth. I chewed and swallowed. I liked bacon, but I don’t know that I’d ever liked it this much. Had anything ever tasted this good?

  “I’ve never shifted.” Jarret passed a glass of orange juice to me. “What was it like? Anton and I weren’t old enough to have had the shift when the Accords were signed. We never got the chance.”

  “I was also too young. But then those people kidnapped me and hurt me. It just happened.”

  Jarret sighed. “That’s always the risk. That’s why we have to be careful with ourselves. Not get ourselves into situations that present that.” He held up his hand. “This wasn’t your fault. It’s good you shifted. I bet you protected yourself.”

  “It was more like I stumbled around. Drank some blood and stumbled into Gus who saved me. If he hadn’t gotten there, I might have found myself shot in the head.”

  Jarret lifted his OJ. “Well, then here’s to Gus.”

  I smiled. “Here’s to Gus. Where did he go?”

  “He left.” Jarret set down his glass. “Lately, that’s what he does. There was a time we were all very close, but the last two decades, for at least as long as I can remember, Gus doesn’t stick around long. He can’t take the Accords. He runs and runs.”

  Anton pushed back from the table. Jarret stared at him and something unsaid seemed to pass between the two of them. Preston had called this place a hatefest and my nose could finally pick up the low taste of anger clinging on them. They’d been pleasant, but that low frequency could quickly pick up into another explosion. There wasn’t enough bacon in the world to get me through that at the moment.

  “You guys don’t see each other much, right? Preston said something like that. You’re regularly in New Orleans?”

  Jarret nodded. “We were all born here but the last… eight years or so… Preston has mostly been here. We’re only here now because every so often someone,” he said, nodding toward Anton, “gets a bug up his ass to come try to convince Pres to come home. We all turn around and do that because none of us can ever say no to Anton.”

  The aforementioned brother grinned. He linked our fingers again. This time Jarret noticed. He stared down at our linked hands and then back at me. Once again, I lost my ability to look him in the eye.

  “You’re very pretty,” Jarret walked toward us, until he stood on my other side. “Your brown hair has all kinds of colors in it, and those blue eyes.”

  I wasn’t vain, but I’d heard this before. I knew I was pretty enough to gather male attention whether I wanted it or not. But hearing Jarret say it or noticing the way Anton looked at me made me warm inside. Still, there was nothing to be done about any of this. We were all werewolves, and if the Accords were to work, we all had to figure out how to be in relationships with regular humans as we tried to breed the wolf out of our bloodlines genetically. Those were the rules.

  Even if our parents hadn’t managed to follow them. The Lejeunes, if I knew enough about them, had been a family of one woman and six men before they lost one male. That didn’t count their four sons. I had five fathers, one mother, and three older brothers. We did tend to make more boy werewolves than female, but given that our wolves didn’t mind sharing mates, it had all worked out mostly well.

  But we were going to be asked to mate with a human, one-to-one and pretend that all was well. Fake it our whole lives. This was why I didn’t date.

  “My wolf nature, it’s very high right now. I’m feeling off.”

  Jarret touched his nose. “I’m not able to scent anything that a human can’t.”

  Anton nodded.

  That made sense. That had been me up until recently, and hopefully, if I could pull this off, I’d be like that again. How else was I going to survive?

  Jarret rubbed my arm. “It’s very, very late. I don’t know anything about shifting, but you’ve eaten. Maybe you should go back to sleep.”

  Anton stepped away. He crooked his finger as though we should follow him, and without another thought, I did just that. We walked together into a room I hadn’t been in yet. I would have called it the Great Room back home, but I didn’t know what it would have been referred to as in a house like this.

  A fireplace was on one side of the room with a couch facing it. Other than that, there was a red rug in the center and no other decorations or furniture at all. I smiled. No one had taken any time to decorate this place. Maybe Preston, who was usually here alone, just didn’t have the time or money to do it. Or maybe he was just trying to fix up the house itself before he furnished it.

  Anton took the pillows from the couch and threw them down on the ground. He walked past us out of the room and came back with a blanket. I didn’t know where he’d grabbed it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted a blanket anyway. It was hot outside and humid in here.

  Anton held out his hand, and I walked toward him not even sure yet what he was proposing. Did he want me to sleep downstairs on the rug? He lay down on the rug and tapped the floor next to him.

  Jarret grinned. “I think we’re all camping out down here tonight.”

  How was that going to work? “Where should we all lie?”

  I actually liked the idea of being here with them. It was a wolf thing, like everything else that was weird about me at that moment. Wolves liked company. They didn’t want to sleep alone. I’d seen it with my parents. We’d tried to climb into bed with them every night until they ousted us when we were each about eight. Still, we never did lose the instinct to want to sleep like a pile of puppies.

  Anton patted the floor next to him, and I lay down where he’d indicated. Jarret came down on the other side. Anton had really set this up perfectly. Three pillows and a big blanket, but I didn’t want the blanket.

  “I’m hot.” I sort of blurted that right out.

  Jarret laughed. “You are.”

  I snickered. “That’s not what I meant, although, thanks.” I rolled my eyes, but my cheeks heated up. “Would it be okay if we didn’t use the blanket? Or you know what? I can go upstairs if you want the blanket.

  Anton picked up the blanket and threw it across the room.

  I grinned. “Or you could handle it like that.”

  Jarret laughed, and Anton made a noise that had to be called a snicker. It was the first noise I’d heard him make. I hardly knew these guys, but I was going to spend the night on the ground with the two of them, in between them as though we were old friends. It must be a male werewolf thing. Of course, I’d never had any of this comfort around the ones I knew back home. But then there was the whole shifting thing…

  Jarret touched the side of my face. “You’re thinking really hard. I know it because I do it myself.”

  “You smell like cloves.” I looked over at Anton. “And you smell like the woods. I know I shouldn’t really be able to know these things unless I pressed my nose to your clothes or something. The way humans do. But now that I have it?” I stared up at the dark ceiling. “How do I give it up?”

  Anton scooted over and rolled over until he had his head on my shoulder the way he had in the hall. He sat up suddenly and the movement was so jarring I actually sucked in my breath. What was he doing? H
e quickly took his shirt off, throwing it aside the way he had with the blanket before coming back down to put his forehead on my shoulder again.

  He scooted closer so that his body was as close to mine as it could be. Jarret met my gaze in the dark. “Rainer and Preston both gave up their wolves. Maybe they could help.”

  “My parents did, too. And there is the odd thing about this whole thing. I was kidnapped from my job. I…” Those memories made me dizzy. “I should be really upset; I mean really upset. I should be crying and trying to deal with that time. But I can hardly think about it, like the whole thing was a fog. What is the matter with me? And I need to call my parents. Why haven’t I done that?”

  Jarret linked our fingers together. “Hate to point out the obvious, but it’s three forty-five in the morning. That is probably why you haven’t called them, and you’ve been out of the shift fog for like an hour. It’ll all come back, most likely. And you’ll deal when you deal. Or…”

  His voice drifted off. “Or?”

  “Or maybe you are dealing. You’re lying here with us. Company is sometimes how we cope.”

  I knew something right then. It must have been the way he used the word cope. The way his voice dropped when he said it. Anton clearly had things he had to deal with, having no voice. But Jarret had his own demons. He was a guy who maybe knew how to cope. Maybe tonight we were both dealing, and Anton had brought us both into this dark place with him so that all three of us could lie here together.

  Fuck. Maybe I was overthinking it.

  Next to me, Anton’s breathing deepened. I couldn’t see him because of how his head was positioned on my shoulder. He moved slightly, his hand coming onto my side where he splayed out his fingers.

  “He never sleeps,” Jarret whispered. “Maybe a couple of hours every four days. He just keeps himself constantly busy. He’s actually asleep.”

  Well, I didn’t think Anton was faking it. I looked over at Jarret. “What do you do when you’re not having to hide me in the swamp? And for that matter how can you possibly hide me in this place? I’m sure you have a life you have to get back to.”

  “I’m supposed to start law school in the fall. I went to college and then spent the last two years running one of my father’s clubs in the Quarter. But I applied and got into law school. So in a few months that’ll start. I’m sort of at odds right now. Guess it’s the perfect time for me to hide you.”

  So he did have a plan. That was nice. I’d had one too that I was pretty sure I was going to have to let go of, considering the kidnapping and now the fact that I was going to have to figure out how not to be a werewolf after being one.

  “I’m a stranger to you. You don’t have to spend your free months before grad school babysitting me. Gus was sweet to ask you guys to help me but… I can’t ask it. I’ll have to figure things out.”

  He scooted closer. “Close your eyes, Kenzie. Everything will be okay. We may never get to be all that we could have been since there aren’t any Omegas to keep the pack healthy, but werewolves, whether they shift or not, take care of each other. I want to be here with you until this gets sorted. I want to be your friend. And obviously, Anton does, too. Let’s try to sleep.”

  That seemed like great advice, just close my eyes. I tried to do that. And not for the first time in my twenty-two years I wondered why there weren’t any Omegas left and how in the hell all of us were supposed to live a half-life.

  Chapter 3

  I ran through the swamp, my nose down on the ground as I breathed in home for the first time. This was what I’d waited for. My paws ached. I had been gone too long, and I wasn’t used to this. Still, I knew he would find me. Alpha always found me. They would all come. My years of being lost were over. I followed the scent that had caught my attention. It might have been a rabbit. My mouth watered. I loved them.

  Abruptly, I came up short, it was hard for me to look up. There was someone powerful here, someone who waited for me.

  I hadn’t seen her before, and somehow, I managed to lift my head to look.

  “MacKenzie, where have you been?” The old woman asked me. She knelt on shaking legs. “Where have all of you been?”

  I came awake slowly, the dream floating away. That had been weird. The smallest swathe of sunlight trailed into the room, and I was warm, pressed between two very hard werewolf bodies. That should have been weird too, only it wasn’t and maybe that was because I was still riding the werewolf high from having shifted.

  “If you spent any time around us you would know how significant this is. I’m not sure either of them has slept… not really… in a year.”

  Rainer’s voice reached my ears even though I was pretty sure he was trying to be quiet in the hall. He spoke in a hushed whisper. If I hadn’t woken up, I wouldn’t have heard it. As it was, neither of my werewolf companions budged at all. Anton breathed deeply; his hand had moved from my side to my stomach, but his forehead remained on my shoulder. This seemed to be his thing. For all I knew, he did it to every female werewolf he encountered—or maybe every female period.

  Although my ego kind of hoped it was just me.

  Jarret breathed quietly. Neither one of them snored, which was incredibly nice, considering I’d always had a terrible time sleeping through noise. Jarret lay on his back, his head turned toward me. His foot twisted against mine. They were both shirtless, and now that we had light in the room, I could see that Anton was tattooed right above his hip, twisting onto his abs. It was a moon obscured by the clouds. I had the strongest desire to reach out and touch it. I didn’t, but a quote from George Carlin, the comedian one of my fathers had loved, struck my mind: “There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”

  The older brothers’ conversation drifted in again. Rainer whisper-talked again. “So sad, lately Mom has been thinking about sending him to a psychiatrist.”

  “What is Jarret going to tell the psychiatrist? I am always going to feel like half the person I should be? There is literally nothing I can do.” Preston sounded unimpressed. Footsteps passed by. “I’m very glad they’re all sleeping so soundly. Frankly, if I didn’t have to work, I’d crawl in there with them. I’d even drag a mattress in to get everyone off the floor.”

  Rainer was visible for a second in the doorway. “You’re missing the point.”

  “I’m not missing it. I know you want me to care about this, and there is nothing I wouldn’t do for the three of you even if you all hate me.”

  “Hate you?”

  The rest of what would have been said was obscured from my hearing. In the meantime, Jarret rolled over as he threw an arm around my shoulders. He muttered something unintelligible. His family was worried about his happiness, and Anton almost never slept.

  I guessed I wasn’t the only one with lots of issues to fill my days.

  “What time will you be leaving?” Preston was within earshot again.

  “Why would I be leaving?” Rainer sounded confused. I didn’t know him well enough to know if that was real or put on. My nose was telling me nothing from this distance away, considering I was wrapped up in his brothers and their overwhelming and very appealing mixture of scents. Oh, and Jarret was totally hard. I tried not to notice. Most men got hard in the morning. I was pretty sure that was true of werewolves, too.

  “Because you always leave. I have to go set up four boats today, and I’m expecting four or more drop-ins. I won’t leave her here alone, so I need to know what time you’re leaving so I can be back.”

  Something fell in the hallway. “Gus asked me to help watch her and keep her hidden. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  “Oh, because you’re always so concerned with what Gus wants. That is your utmost concern.”

  I expected more yelling, but this time when Rainer spoke, he just sounded tired. “I’m so sick of having this argument with you. I want my brother back. I miss you.”

  Anton shifted slightly, his hand coming into my hair. His eyes were open, slits rea
lly, but he smiled at me so sweetly my heart clenched. I didn’t know what time it was, but I knew it had been more than just a few hours of sleep, which meant that was quite a lot for Anton. He looked over his shoulder toward the door and then shook his head. He curled back down, his forehead on me again. I smiled. I might have brought it up if I wasn’t afraid he’d stop doing it, and I liked how that felt.

  “Good morning,” I whispered.

  He nodded, and his hand in my hair brushed my scalp gently. He opened his eyes wider and moved his head so we could look at each other again.

  “I meant what I said last night. You’re a flirt, aren’t you?”

  He shook his head, and I rolled my eyes at him. “Deny it all you want.”

  Anton took my hand and placed it over his heart. For just a moment, we lay there like that, his meaning very clear to me, which meant that he was either the most romantic person I’d ever met, or he was completely full of shit and the biggest player—voice or no voice—I’d ever encountered. And his brown eyes were so filled with… I wasn’t even sure what. His scent changed, deepening, calling to me. It would be so easy to give in to this. To press my mouth to his and go with whatever was calling to both of us. But I’d already broken a rule by shifting, even if I was pretty sure I’d had no choice.

  I wasn’t supposed to mate—in any form of that word—with werewolves. It was too risky we’d form a real bond, call to our wolves, and then eventually make more werewolf babies. With the Omegas gone, that couldn’t happen. We were all one mistake from madness and discovery. We’d given this up for our own protection and to save humanity from us since we couldn’t control ourselves anymore.

  He didn’t push, didn’t join our lips, or make any moves to show he would. We just lay there together, my hand on his heart as the minutes passed.

  Jarret tightened his hold on me, and I turned my head to regard him. His face wasn’t passive anymore. Instead, he looked almost pained. He made a sound in the back of his throat that might have been a growl before his head went back and forth. Anton lifted his head, furrowing his brow at the same time. He didn’t like this any more than I did.