Shifters After Dark Box Set

by S M Reine et al.

  “You can’t call me,” I warn him.

  Will shakes his head, then leans in to nuzzle my neck. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he murmurs.

  “And you can’t—oh…” His lips come up to meet mine, and I forget what I was saying. I kiss him back tentatively, half-scared I’m making an even bigger mess of things, but after a moment Will isn’t having it. He deepens our kiss, one hand snaking around to the small of my back to push me closer. My hands slip under his shirt, my fingers running over the flat muscles of his chest. The edge of the stairs press into my spine, but I don’t care; I just want to keep touching him. We kiss until I’m dizzy with it, until I feel the stairs hit my spine above Will’s hand. He breaks the kiss for a moment, pulling back to check on me. “You okay?” he says, concern on his face.

  I grab his T-shirt and pull him back to me so hard that the next kiss is bruising. I can feel him smile as he curls one big hand under my butt and flips me sideways, putting himself on the bottom. I end up straddling his lap, and now it’s my turn to break away. “Very smooth,” I tell him, my hair falling around us.

  “I thought so,” he murmurs, and then his tongue darts into my mouth, pushing my desire further, faster. A moan slips between our lips, and I am not even sure who it came from. Will starts to slip on the stair, and I wrap myself tighter around his body, holding him to me. His head ducks down so his mouth can trace my breasts over the polo shirt, and I cry out.

  “Upstairs.”

  Grinning, Will lifts me effortlessly and throws me over his shoulder, making me laugh as we ascend the stairs. When we reach the top he sets me down, and the giddy moment has passed. Our bodies meld against each other.

  We leave the bundle of clothes and the bag of food sitting where they are.

  Afterwards, Will goes back down for the food, and we eat cold takeout Italian out of boxes in his bed, talking about his sisters, Amber and Jody, and a few of my misadventures at school.

  After I tell him the story of the great piglet prank during my sophomore year, he shakes his head, laughing. “I’ve never met anyone like you,” he says with a smile. “You’re like…”

  “The coolest?” I offer.

  He laughs again. “I was going to say like a superhero.”

  “How so? And don’t say because I would look good in spandex.” I wave a fork at him threateningly.

  “Because…” he pauses, searching for the right words. “You have two identities. When you talk about school, it sounds like you’re describing your secret identity—you know, your version of Clark Kent. Lots of people have different personas for different situations, but you take it to a whole new level.”

  I lay still for a moment, trying to figure out how to respond. I can’t tell him why I have to be that way, why I can’t tell any of my friends what I am. They like the easy, bubbly Sashi who’s always up for a minor prank or a shot of tequila. And none of them ask her too many questions.

  The fact that Will can tell I am not myself at school is as scary as it is sad. “You’re not wrong,” I say at last.

  Something he sees in my face makes him set his fettuccini on the bedside table. Then he kisses me on the mouth, pulling me to his chest. I can feel tears in my eyes, but I do my best to push away the thought that we’re only getting one night together.

  He’s happy to distract me.

  After we make love a second time, Will pulls me to his chest and I find myself drifting off. I fall asleep feeling safe, happy, and filled with dread.

  16. Sashi

  Help // blood // sick

  The message is so weak that at first I’m certain I am dreaming.

  Help // blood // sick

  Help // blood // sick

  I open my eyes and sit up, still half-asleep, looking around Will’s room for the source of the voice. An alarm? Some kind of noisy toy? Nothing looks different from when we went to sleep. The clock on the bedside table says 6:00, so it’s not like I’ve been out for a long time. I want to curl up next to Will and go back to sleep, enjoy these last blissful minutes together, but…something woke me up.

  I look down at Will. Frowning, I place my right hand back where it was on his chest, roughly over his heart.

  Help // blood // sick

  Startled, I scramble backwards, actually falling off the bed in a clumsy tangle of sheets.

  “Sashi?” Will says sleepily. I don’t answer. My breath is frozen in my throat.

  I have never, ever had a body call out to me before.

  He sits up in bed, looking at me with drowsy confusion. “Did you fall?” he asks.

  “I-I had a bad dream,” I manage to say.

  Will opens his arms wordlessly, but instead of crawling into them, I stop a foot away from his chest and grab his arm, closing my eyes to concentrate. I can feel the body’s unhappiness, its unease. There’s a storm in Will’s blood, and the body…the body knows that it is dying.

  My eyes snap open. In the stairwell, I thought he looked like he had a cold… “You’ve been sick?” I demand.

  Will’s eyes finally open all the way. “What? Yeah. There’s a bug going around at work. I’ve gotten it like twice this summer.”

  “Fever? Cough? Vomiting?”

  “Yeah.”

  I roll out of bed. “Get dressed,” I order.

  Will doesn’t move, just stares at me. “Sashi, what’s going on?”

  “You need to get dressed. I’ll drive.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to the Mayo,” I say grimly.

  On the way back to Rochester, I tell Will that I dreamed about him getting sick again, that I think it was my subconscious mind’s way of drawing my attention to some symptoms I had noticed. Extremely scary symptoms, for a guy who’s already had one cancer relapse.

  He seems to buy this explanation, or pretends to. Mostly he stares out the window during the whole drive, a look of odd calm on his face. Neither of us talk about how we were supposed to part ways this morning. I can’t even consider that right now, because his body’s message is still echoing through my mind.

  Help // blood // sick

  By the time we’re twenty minutes away, I can’t stand it anymore. “How are you so…serene?” I demand. “You’re—you could be sick again.”

  Will shrugs, gives me a wistful half-smile. “I hope I’m not, but…they never thought I’d make it this long, Sashi. When I was a kid, my whole medical team thought I’d be dead before I hit my teens.”

  I nod absently. “You’re hoping they can pull out another miracle?” Maybe it was possible, with my mother on the case.

  But Will says, very gently, “No, Sashi. I’m saying that if it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go. I got a lot of years I wasn’t supposed to have.”

  I want to pound my fists into the steering wheel. He sounds just like Astrid, giving up just when he needs to fight the hardest.

  When we reach the clinic, I pull into the main parking garage and accept a ticket. Will and I both know the way to the oncology department, but he lags behind me, so I have to keep pausing and waiting impatiently for him to catch up. When we finally reach the right wing, I deposit Will in a waiting room and beeline for my mother’s office.

  She is there, of course, working through a stack of patient files. “Mum, I need you,” I say without preamble.

  To my surprise, she jumps in her seat. Collecting herself, she gives me a stern glare. “Sashi! I’ve been calling you for two bloody days! Where have you been?”

  That brings me up short, but only for a moment. “My phone died,” I explain, not mentioning the fact that I let that happen. “I went to see Will.”

  Her eyes narrow. “I thought we discussed—”

  “Not now, Mum,” I interrupt. I can tell she’s ready to bite my head off, so I add quickly, “He’s sick again. I can feel it.”

  My mother goes very still, and I can practically see her running through calculations in her head. She does this all the time, of course: deals with patients who
are relapsing or whose treatments fail. She may like Will, and she may even realize that I’ve slept with him, but on a professional level, he is an equation to her. “Another tumor?” she says at last.

  I shake my head. “I think it’s a secondary cancer, from the radiation when Will was a kid.” Blood // sick. “Leukemia, probably.”

  Mum nods calmly and pushes back her chair. “Let’s start the tests.”

  17. Sashi

  The tests take a long time.

  Then there is a conference with my mother and the radiation and chemotherapy specialists. Will has to call his family, and his mother and sisters all show up and cry over him, wringing their hands. I slip out of the room and find my mother in her office.

  “I was right, wasn’t I?” I say before she can speak.

  She nods wearily, her shoulders slumped. “Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. His white cell counts were a touch low when he was in two months ago, which is why I asked him to come back for more tests in a few weeks…but I’ve never seen it progress this fast.” She gets a calculated, I can write a paper look in her eye that disgusts me.

  “Did you know?” I demand, glaring at her. “Did you know he was sick again?”

  Mum reels back as if I’d slapped her. “How can you ask me that?” she says hotly. “My whole life is devoted to—”

  “Back in June, I saw your face during his consult. For a moment you looked like you sensed something odd, but you didn’t mention anything.”

  Mum shakes her head like she’s trying to shake me away. “I….no. I thought I felt something for one second, but I…” Her voice falters, and she swallows hard. “I was wrong.”

  I’ve never heard Mum say those words, but I’m too worried and panicked to appreciate the moment. “What’s the prognosis?” I ask, because I want to hear what the science says before I’m willing to trust my magic.

  Mum takes a moment to collect herself, and I want to rip the stethoscope off her neck and smack her with it until she tells me Will is going to be fine. “Just tell me his chances, Mum,” I demand.

  Mum stands up and comes over to me. She strokes my hair, smoothing it back from my face. “Sashi…” she says in the same gentle voice she used when my goldfish died.

  “Tell me!”

  “Of a five-year survival rate, maybe fifteen percent,” she says quietly. “But that’s if he did chemo and radiation, which he’s refusing.”

  My fists clench. Of course he is. Seeing the look on my face, she adds, “You can hardly blame him, sweetheart. He’s been through this whole thing twice already, and he knows his chances of survival. He wants to enjoy what time he has left.” She shakes her head a little. “Honestly, I think the magic I used when he was a kid kept it at bay for a long time, but eventually it gave out, and the cancer rushed into his blood. The cancer’s going to win this time, Sashi. It’s just a question of when.”

  I can’t remember the last time she called me “sweetheart,” I think dimly. I hate how calm she is. Oncology is her goddamned native tongue, and to her, I am just another tourist. Despite a whole summer of volunteering, I feel like just another lost family member.

  “What about my magic?” I say. “Maybe I can…”

  I trail off, and Mum shoots me a look that is both irritated and sympathetic. “You know the answer to that, don’t you?”

  She’s right; I do know, because I’ve had patients like this before. Will’s body knows that it is dying. I can ease the pain, but the cancer has spread too far, too fast. I can’t nudge him back to health now.

  My eyes flood with stinging tears, and I make no effort to stop them. Why didn’t I listen to his body back in June? True, I don’t typically use magic on the people in my social life, but Will should have been different. I might have noticed what was happening, if I hadn’t been so caught up in hormones and my own problems.

  “There has to be something you can do,” I say desperately.

  Mum gazes at me impassively, her expression reminding me that this is what she does for a living. “I’ll keep urging his body to hold on. That’ll give him several months, and quite possibly a year or more. During that time we can look for a bone marrow donor. With a good donor, his odds of getting to the five-year mark move up past fifty percent.”

  I nod, mostly to myself, and finally get the tears under control. Okay. Okay, there’s a plan. It’s not like he’ll be dead tomorrow. “My magic, too,” I reminded her. “Maybe that will help.”

  Mum’s face cools. “You’ll be back at school, of course. Perhaps if you want to come home once a month or so—”

  She keeps talking, but I stop hearing her. Back to Chicago? Only yesterday that seemed like heaven, but now I can’t imagine being away from Will. I don’t care that I’m a witch and he isn’t. I don’t even care that he’s sick. The moment I knew I might lose him…

  I just want to be wherever he is.

  “School can wait,” I tell my mom. “I’m staying with him.”

  I walk out in the middle of my mother’s reply, not caring that she yells after me. As if in a dream, I walk straight back to the patient room where Will is waiting. He’s in a hospital gown, just like when we first met. His sisters and mother are standing under the television, arguing about a visitation schedule, but I ignore them. Will watches me approach with a question in his eyes, but when I climb onto the bed with him, he just puts his arms around me and kisses the top of my head, pressing his cheek into my hair.

  The conversation around us stops dead. I can feel Will smile at his family. “Guys, this is Sashi. Can you give us a minute?”

  I don’t lift my head from Will’s chest as the three women toss out a couple of half-hearted “Nice to meet you’s” and file into the hallway.

  “I probably didn’t make the best impression just then,” I murmur into the hospital gown.

  “They won’t mind. They’ve dealt with the whole cancer roller coaster twice before. They know it messes with people.”

  We sit in silence for a long moment, me just enjoying the strong throb of his heartbeat. I try pushing healing and wellness into his body, but I am still weak from healing Astrid. It will probably be a couple of days before I’m strong enough to do more than listen to his body.

  Will kisses the top of my head again. “Let’s go somewhere,” he suggests.

  Now I tilt my head back so I can look at him fully. “What?”

  His face is drawn and pale, like he’s lost a few pounds. Why didn’t I see that yesterday? Oh, right, because I was caught up in my own problems. “Let’s go somewhere,” he repeats. “Belize. Prague. Tokyo, wherever you want. I’ve got a little bit of money from when my grandparents died. Let’s just go.”

  I consider it. We could escape from all of it: cancer, abused werewolves, my mother. I could see a little bit of the world, finally. Maybe even write a few freelance articles, which could kick off my whole career. And I could be with Will, no strings attached, knowing I wasn’t endangering him. Hell, I could even tell him about the Old World, since he’s probably not going to be around long enough for it to be a problem.

  But I can’t think like that. I don’t want Will to be with me for a few months nearly as much as I want him to have a long, happy life, even if I can’t be in it. Running away from the situation is just a great way to find ourselves with even bigger problems.

  “You have to stay here,” I tell him, “I understand why you won’t do chemo and radiation again, but you need to look for a bone marrow donor.”

  “My sisters and my mom were tested when I was a kid,” he replies, his voice even. “No matches.”

  We both know the odds of finding a random donor are miniscule. My mind whirls, searching for possibilities. I’m already in the National Donor Database, of course, so if I’m anywhere near a match it’ll be flagged. What else can I do? I think about the Old World side of my life for a moment, consider if there’s a solution there. Aside from my father, who I have no way of contacting, I am the most powerful thaumaturge witch
I know of. I could probably look into helping Will become a vampire, but I don’t actually know any vampires personally, and I’m not sure what it actually does to people. Would he still be Will if he turned? Would he want to live his life that way?

  There’s the other option, of course. I could ask one of the werewolves to bite him. Astrid probably owes me a big enough favor now. But not every person who is bitten actually changes—many of them can’t tolerate the blood magic, and they die a very painful death. And even if he does make it through the change, what if becoming a werewolf poisons Will’s soul with the same violence and rage that’s infected Luke?

  Maybe I’m just being selfish. If I’m being honest with myself, maybe I just don’t want Will to become a vamp or a werewolf because then we wouldn’t be able to be together. I’m a witch; even if I wanted to I couldn’t tolerate being with a werewolf. The very idea makes me shudder, and Will tightens his arms around me in response.

  “I think I’m in love with you,” I whisper, so low that when he doesn’t respond right away I think he hasn’t heard me.

  But after a moment he lets out a huge sigh. “I think I’m in love with you, too. And I’m dying. We’re like a goddamned Nicholas Sparks novel.”

  I chortle. Then a spark of an idea flares to life in my mind. A stupid, reckless, unethical idea that would change my whole life. But what was I doing with my life anyway? Wandering around in it?

  If this works, if it actually works, maybe Will and I could start over somewhere, not running away from our problems, but making a conscious decision to start a new life together.

  18. Astrid

  The first few days are more about humiliation than anything else.

  Caroline sits with me while I heal, and when Luke finally shows up to make sure I’m dead, she calmly explains that I have decided to capitulate. That I give up. His eyes narrow, and even if I couldn’t smell the confusion and anger radiating off him, I can see it in his body language. He’s still thinking about killing me.

  Of course, I can’t entirely blame Luke for not trusting my surrender. I did, after all, do my damnedest to kill him first.