Shifters After Dark Box Set

by S M Reine et al.

  But he didn’t move. “I think I’m ready to show my painting to you,” Abram said. There was determination in his features, the set of his jaw. “I took it to the art department to show my instructors. We can go to the university together.”

  The instant of excitement she felt at the idea of seeing his painting was immediately dashed like waves over the rocks. “Okay, what’s up? That painting is your baby. You wouldn’t try to use it to bribe me if there wasn’t something seriously wrong.”

  He looked reluctant to speak, but she stared at him until he relented.

  “It’s Nash.”

  The mention of his name was enough to send shivers down Summer’s spine again. The way he had kissed her knuckles…

  She shook her head to clear it. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  Before he could respond, Summer felt a shift in the air and caught a whiff of burning plants. Nash’s smell. She turned to see the gates at the end of his road open to allow a sleek luxury car to enter.

  Her stomach knotted. If her brother spoke, she didn’t hear him.

  Nash was back.

  “Summer,” Abram said with a hint of warning in his voice.

  She waved him off. “I’ll talk to you about this later. Okay?”

  Breaking into a jog, she managed to reach the top of the hill at the same time as Nash’s car. He emerged carrying a box under one arm.

  Nash smelled strange, like artificial polymers, and also like burning hair—an unpleasant odor that made her nose itch. The box must have been the source of the metal and plastic scent. She had no idea what the rest meant.

  “The battery?” Summer asked, breathless from her run to his car.

  “The battery,” he said, setting it on the hood. He took her shoulders and stared deeply into her eyes, like he was trying to see through to the other side. “Are you okay?”

  She found her hands creeping to his hips of their own volition. Her fingers traced the edge of his belt loops. “I’m fine. Nothing happened while you were gone. It was kind of boring, actually. What did you find at the tower?”

  Instead of responding, he pulled her into his chest and rested his chin on top of her head. She could feel his heart beating underneath her hands.

  The sudden affection surprised her, but not as much as the strength of smells that surrounded her. The stink of burning hair reminded her of the gibborim. And was that…blood?

  She pressed her nose into his throat and took a deep breath. His stubble scraped against her lips. “You’re not hurt, are you?” she asked, sniffing down his neck to his collar.

  “No,” he said, and she realized what she had been doing. She had practically buried her face in his chest hair. But he didn’t let her pull away when she stopped—his arms only tightened. “I’m not injured, but we should talk.” He spoke a little louder. “Take the box to my office.”

  “Yes, sir.” Margaret slipped away before Summer had enough time to wonder how long the old woman had been watching them.

  Nash started walking toward his gardens, and Summer hurried to keep up with him. There was no sign of the warmth that had been in his greeting now—his face was stony again, and he barely looked at her as they passed through the iron gates.

  “Hold this,” he said, pulling a canister from behind a bush and placing it in her hands. It was a watering can, and a cute one at that. It had a big flower stamped on the side.

  Summer couldn’t keep herself from grinning. “Is this yours?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Oh, no. No problem at all. I love flowers,” she said. Nash twisted the knob on a pipe jutting out of the earth and cold water poured forth. Summer filled the can. “You smell like blood.”

  “I can’t imagine that I do. I came in contact with no mortals.” Once the can was brimming with lake water, Nash twisted the knob again to shut off the pipe.

  “It’s angel blood,” Summer said. “I recognize the smell because I spent way too much time cleaning you up after the last attack. Was it another gibborim? Or more of those child things?”

  He was silent as he led her down the path between trees, but she could see the storm brewing in his eyes. He was thinking hard, and not about anything pleasant. “Here,” Nash said, gesturing to a flowerbed that was mostly bare. It was sheltered by a tall apple tree and wouldn’t have received much of the recent rains. “Water this.”

  Summer tipped the can. Sparkling water sprinkled over the soil, turning it a darker shade of brown. “I have to say, your gardens are beautiful. I’ve never seen flowers or trees like these. Your gardener must be incredibly talented.”

  “I tend them myself.” His eyes skimmed over the plants that she praised with a look that could only be disappointment. “They’re nothing in comparison to the gardens I knew in my youth, but I do what I can.”

  “Homesick?” she asked.

  He turned his cool gaze on her, and Summer immediately regretted asking. “I suppose. This makes it a little easier.” He took the watering can, and his fingers brushed over hers. For a blissful instant, their hands were joined at the handle. “I discovered who’s attempting to usurp my position.”

  “Is it someone in your company?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s another angel.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “It shouldn’t be. I’ve been the only angel here for…millions of years.” His voice cracked on the last word. Nash cleared his throat before speaking again. “Leliel brought the gibborim and balam with her.” He pinched a few dead leaves off the bush and let them fall to the earth.

  “Why is she trying to hurt you?” Summer asked.

  “That question is much more complicated than you realize.” He stood, leaving the watering can on the grass. The knees of his slacks were wet. He leaned his shoulder against the trunk of the apple tree and gazed up into the branches. “She can have the business. It’s meaningless. But she can’t have you.”

  “Me? Why would she want me? Who is this Leliel, anyway?”

  “Leliel was…” He sighed. “She was my wife.”

  A leaden weight settled into Summer’s gut. It felt like she was sinking to the grass, melting into the earth, puddling away. All she could say was, “Oh.”

  He had a wife. That shouldn’t have surprised her, should it? Nash had told her that he was thousands of years old—as old as existence itself. That meant he had a lot of history she didn’t know.

  She swallowed hard. “Why would your…your wife… Why did she…?”

  Nash stroked Summer’s shoulder. “Hate burns most fiercely in a heart once filled with love.”

  “Do you love her?” Summer asked. It was a stupid question, but she couldn’t keep herself from asking it. Just the thought of it made her heart ache.

  Nash’s head dropped back against the tree. He said nothing.

  Guess that answers that question. “I should probably see if I can start the computer up, now that we have a battery,” Summer said. She tried to move away, but his hand shot out and seized her wrist. He pulled her toward him.

  They stood together, chest to chest against the trunk of the tree, for a long, silent minute. All of this new information was too much to process—the fact that he had a wife, and she was out to hurt them; the entire concept of angels in the first place. Life had been much simpler when Summer thought that she and her Gran were the only weirdness in the world.

  She wanted to ask Nash why he had been so desperate for her help, why he would have shaped his life around her, what the kiss on her hand had meant. But all of that seemed too intrusive. Instead, she asked, “Why do angels smell like fire?”

  “We don’t,” Nash said. “The way mortals experience angels is spectacularly subjective and personal. We hold domain over the mind, influencing every neuron within your delicate skulls. You can’t trust your senses around me. In reality, I do not look, sound, or smell as you think I do.”

  “You mean you don’t look like…” She trailed off when she rea
lized that she was about to say something stupid. The only adjectives that had come to mind were hot, sexy, and really really hot and sexy.

  His lips curved into a smile. “I appear subtly different to everyone. Hence why I don’t allow photographs of my physical form.”

  “Your physical form?”

  “There’s a lot to me that you can’t see,” Nash said.

  Summer reached up to brush the hair out of his eyes. “I think I’m getting that.”

  A twig cracked. Summer turned to see Abram walking past the garden wall, and she stepped away from Nash, opening her mouth to call to him. But the words died on her lips when the wind carried his scent to her.

  He smelled like gunpowder.

  ~ ~ ~

  Abram sped past the garden, trying to avoid his sister’s notice. It shouldn’t have been hard—she was all wrapped up in that angel, whispering like they shared some kind of secret and acting like there was nobody else in the world. They probably wouldn’t have noticed him if he walked past banging cymbals together.

  Keeping the gun he had stolen from the staff shed tucked to his side, Abram mounted the hill to the Adamson house. There were guards nearby, but none of them tried to stop him. There was no way they could have known what he was up to.

  Abram only stopped walking when he reached the forest behind the house, which was a little more secluded than the lawn. In the shadow of the manor, neither sun nor rain could reach him.

  “I’m here,” he said softly.

  A woman stepped from behind a tree. She wore a long gown that covered her from neck to toes and a beatific smile. Abram’s first thought when Leliel approached him at the Gresham cottage was that he would love to paint her, but even though they had met three times now, he still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to ask. It seemed a strange request to make of an angel.

  “Well?” Leliel asked.

  Abram glanced around before jamming the gun into the back of his belt. “I still don’t know. I don’t think Summer does, either.”

  The angel’s mouth tipped down in a frown that was just as beautiful as her smiles. “I must fear the worst,” she murmured. “Nash doesn’t seek companionship. Not without an ulterior motive.”

  “Are you sure?” Abram asked. “He seems awfully interested in her.”

  Leliel dismissed the suggestion with a flick of her fingers. “Guile and deceit. I’ve told you of Nash’s nature. He would never sink to a mortal’s level.” She nibbled delicately on the fingernail of her first finger. “I’ll have to act quickly to protect all of you.”

  “I can protect Summer from him.”

  She laughed. The sound would have been pleasant if he hadn’t known she was mocking him. “When Nash shows his true face, you don’t stand a chance against him. Even with that pathetic little firearm. Where is your grandmother? Have you explained the situation to her?”

  Abram hadn’t been able to work up the courage to talk to Gran, either. She had spent her entire time at the house talking with that old maid—what was her name, Margaret? His grandmother had given him a deep-seated fear of interrupting her. He didn’t think she would appreciate it, even if it was to warn her that Nash might be dangerous.

  He felt a nudging sensation in his belly, and he took a step back to peer around the side of the house. Summer was walking up the hill. She must have seen him after all.

  Leliel noticed what he was looking at. “I’ll have to take care of the doors before confronting Nash again. I could use assistance. Can you help me?”

  She offered a hand to him.

  Abram glanced down the hill again. It wouldn’t be long before his sister was close enough to smell the angel, and only a few seconds longer until Summer could see who he was talking to.

  Summer hadn’t wanted his help lately. “Sure,” he said, “just tell me what to do.”

  He took Leliel’s hand.

  Chapter Twelve

  Summer connected the battery to the archaic computer and flipped the switch on the back. Fans whirred to life. A blue light shone within the case, and a white “UKA” logo flashed on the monitor.

  It worked. Great.

  So why wasn’t she excited?

  Worry had lodged in her throat, like she had failed to swallow the rotten pit of an avocado, and she couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong. Something even worse than scary angel-monsters and scarier ex-wives.

  Summer had tried to catch up with Abram outside the garden earlier and never managed to find him. The guards said that they had seen him going for a walk, but nobody knew where. Nash said that he didn’t sense any other ethereal creatures in the area, so the chances that Abram had been hurt were low. Nothing to worry about.

  Nothing aside from potentially being murdered by Nash’s ex-wife, anyway.

  She tucked her feet underneath her on the chair and scooted closer to Nash’s desk. She kept glancing at her cell phone where it sat beside the keyboard, hoping that Abram would call, but it remained silent.

  Summer distracted herself by clicking through the computer’s files as soon as the operating system loaded. The directory structure was surprisingly familiar. Although the hardware was antiquated, the software wasn’t all that different from what she used in school. It only took a few minutes to become comfortable with the navigation, and soon, she found herself digging into the code itself to look around.

  There was little information stored on the computer itself, since most commands called back to a networked database. But an old copy of what the last user accessed had been archived on the computer’s memory. She found a few hundred thumbnails and a lot of plain text files, which referenced unfamiliar locations. Denver? Boulder?

  Summer spent hours absorbing all of the information that the computer carried in its memory. She pored over every article until it felt like her brain couldn’t hold any more information, and then she leaned back in his chair and stared out the freshly-washed window. The black, stormy waters of Lake Ast roiled below.

  How was it possible for these files to reference so many countries that Summer had never heard of? Italy. France. The United States of America. Canada. New Zealand. She tried to fit them together in her mind like pieces of a puzzle.

  Where did Hazel Cove fall into that world? Which country were they in?

  She dug deeper into the directories. In addition to text files, there were images attached, too. Summer clicked through to see them.

  Most of the photographs were boring—some kind of visual inventory of equipment, apparently. But there were surveillance photos, too. It looked like the cameras were mounted high, and the pictures had been taken without the subjects knowing about it.

  Summer went through them one by one. Even though the images were blurry, she could make out a few faces. A young man with white hair. A guy with a strong nose and broad shoulders. And there were wolves, too. Wolves that looked a lot like Summer did when she wore her second skin. A lot of those wolves were around humans, none of whom looked worried to be around such massive beasts.

  And then Summer found a picture of a gray-haired old woman with twin braids and a cowboy hat, and she forgot how to breathe.

  The door opened.

  She looked up, expecting Nash, but it was Gran who stepped through. “Where have you been?” Summer asked, minimizing the window.

  “Just been chatting with the maid. Nice lady. I like her. You got the computer working?”

  Summer’s tongue was dry and heavy in her mouth. She nodded mutely.

  Her grandma sat at a chair on the other side of the desk, and Summer brought up the last picture again. That was definitely Gran in the photo. She hadn’t aged a day since the picture was taken. And she was in the company of a young pregnant woman, maybe Summer’s age, with long blond hair and a huge stomach.

  How did her grandma’s photo come to be on an archaic computer?

  “What’s wrong?” Gran asked. She couldn’t see the monitor or the photos from her position on the other side of the desk. “You’
re making faces like you ate a lemon.”

  Summer took a breath to steady herself. “What do they look like? My parents.”

  The speedy change in subjects seemed to surprise Gran, and she sat back in her chair. “Oh, well, they look a lot like you and Abram.”

  That was the kind of answer she had always given in response to Summer’s requests for information about her family. What did her parents do for fun? Oh, a lot of the same things you and Abram do. Where did her parents come from? Oh, pretty much the same place you did. It was the most frustrating non-answer Summer could imagine getting.

  “Was my mom blond?” Summer asked.

  Surprise flitted across Gran’s face. “Oh,” she said, and then, “yeah, actually.” At Summer’s expectant look, she breathed out a long, low sigh. “Your mama looks a lot like Abram, in the face, but she has gold irises—that’s the wolf in her. Skinny legs. Nice smile. She’s about as white as I am and as blond as I used to be.”

  Summer closed her eyes and tried to imagine Abram as a woman—a skinny woman—with long blond hair. It was kind of a hilarious mental image. It also matched the blond woman in the photo pretty well.

  “You take more after your daddy in most ways,” Gran went on. “You’re tall, like he is, and his skin’s darker. He’s kind of a mean-looking guy. Very scary. But he’s good on the inside, just like you are on your outside.”

  It was the first time that Summer had been able to form a clear mental image of what her parents looked like, where she had come from. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. “How did they meet?”

  “They met because your mama—Rylie—was dating your daddy’s brother. The fact they got together was an accident of fate.” Gran sighed. “It’s not much of a fairytale, babe.”

  Dating her father’s brother? Summer’s stomach flipped. She clicked to the next picture. There were a couple of men talking to one another, and they both kind of matched Gran’s description. Obviously brothers, even in such low-quality surveillance photos.

  Was she related to them? It was too hard to tell.