by T. S. Joyce
With a helpless sound, Lynn melted against him. A hand rubbed her back, another gripped her arm, and another scratched the back of her head as she finally gave in and cried. The sunlight disappeared, and when she opened her eyes, they were all there, her crew, hugging her, wrapped around her like a blanket, these people who had refused to give up on her, even when she had given up on herself. There were more than a few sniffles, and it wasn’t just from the girls. No one talked. They just touched. Touch was important for shifters, especially big cats. Time and time again, hands brushed her back, her head, her arms, as if they were reassuring themselves she was still here, still warm, and still breathing.
“The wieners are burning!” Kaylee, Anson’s mate, suddenly shrieked.
Barret grabbed his dick. “My wiener’s not burning!”
Jaxon was butt-ass naked from his Change, and also covering his nethers as he watched Annalise sprint toward the grill. “Dude, she meant the hot dogs are burning,” he muttered, reaching over with his free hand to slap Barret upside the head.
Barret punched Jax in the throat, and then they were wrestling on the ground, grunting and cussing at each other.
“No, stop,” Anson deadpanned softly. “You’ll hurt each other again.”
Lynn observed the dark circles and the hollow faces of her crew. “Everyone looks like crap.”
Half of Red Havoc had joined after she’d become two bubbles shy of an aquarium, so she didn’t know the females that well other than Eden, and Genevieve, who had grown up near Damon’s Mountains too. Annalise had automatically sprinted after Kaylee to help with the burning food though, and Eden was doing the same. Clearly there were bonds that had formed in the crew that she’d missed while she was on the crazy train. She had some catching up to do.
“Come on,” Greyson, the new alpha of Red Havoc, said, slinging his arm over Lynn’s shoulder. “You’re probably tired. I’ll get you settled in your tree house.”
She parted her lips to respond, but her phone dinged with another text message. It was Jathan again, this time with a picture of her fighting Tagan, the alpha of the Ashe Crew. In it, Monster was crouched down, lips curled back in a hiss as she locked gazes with the snarling, giant grizzly. She wasn’t backing down an inch.
Be the badass.
Lynn smiled and typed back, I kind of love you, you know.
I know. I miss you. Send me a picture of your tits tonight.
Lynn snorted and shoved her phone in her back pocket, then narrowed her eyes at her old house, the one she’d shared with Brody. The break in her heart had started here. “I think I need to stop living in treehouses. I came home, Greyson. I want to come all the way home.”
He smiled at her proudly, then nodded. “I’ll get your bag.” He pulled her against his side in a hug before he made his way to Ben’s truck, leaving Lynn to look after the crew who had gathered around the burnt food and were a mess of chaos. Almost all of them were arguing. Barret and Jax had stood up from wrestling and were jogging over to the food, but they were still kicking at each other every few steps like overgrown man-children. And when she caught Eden’s eye, her friend smiled with a mushy look on her face. Eden was an albino falcon shifter with platinum blond hair and lightened eyes. She looked so relieved in this moment that it took Lynn’s breath away.
This crew was a mess. They looked like they’d been dragged through Hell, and Lynn knew she was part of the reason they had been hurting. She loved them. She needed them. Someday, she was going to make this Amberlynn’s crew, and these complaining, neurotic, half-crazed, fun-loving, joy-making weirdos would be a part of her daughter’s bigger family. And if she was really lucky and worked hard enough, perhaps Jathan would make a home here with her too.
Lynn owed it to everyone to fix what had been broken. And that started with banishing the ghosts from her old home and making it hers again.
Blink. Time was lost.
“Lynn!” Barret called from a table where he was squirting a ridiculous amount of mustard over about seventeen hotdogs he’d lined up. “Do you want six hotdogs or ten?”
Lynn shook her head, confused. She’d disappeared again, but it wasn’t any darker, and no one had seemed to notice. And when she looked over at Ben’s truck, Greyson was still pulling her bag out of it.
She’d disappeared, but only for a second. Huh.
She texted Jathan. I’m still with you.
Did you disappear?
For just a second.
There was a long pause, and she felt that weight settling over her chest again, the one that shackled her to the ground when she disappointed people. But then right as she went to put her phone in her pocket, Jathan responded. That’s progress.
And then there was a picture of her fighting Clinton in a weed-riddled yard covered in yellow dandelion flowers. Her coat was silky and black, a stark contrast to his coarse, blond fur. This picture was of her in mid-air, leaping for the Cursed Bear, front claws out, teeth bared, eyes on his throat. Beaston had told her, “Be the ripper.”
Jathan texted, Be the badass.
Lynn walked deliberately to her old cabin, determined to be the tough girl everyone thought her to be.
Blink.
No. Stay here and deal. See it and then it won’t be so hard.
Blink.
Please Monster. Wait.
Shadows took the corners of her vision, but determined, she jogged up the stairs and pushed the door open. Inside it was dark, so she flipped the light switch. There was a healthy layer of dust on everything, and the roof had leaked while she was away, causing water damage to the floor. But other than that, everything was just as she remembered. The walls were still the soft purple she’d painted them. It drew a tiny smile from her lips at the memory of how angry Ben had been for ‘ruining the integrity of the log cabin.’ She’d thrown out the old pictures of her and Brody the night she’d found his text messages to Winter. A white vase of dried, dead, disintegrating flowers sat on the table. Okay. She was doing pretty good with this. The edges of her vision were clearing, but she hadn’t jumped the hardest hurdle in this home yet. With a determined march, Lynn strode to the back bedroom, the tiniest one, shoved the door open, and froze.
She’d decorated Amberlynn’s nursery in baby ducks.
Blink.
No, no, no. Look, Monster. We were excited once. We had fun painting this room. We were going to be good at this.
She was going to be good at this.
Forcing her feet to move, Lynn made her way through the nursery, tidying the toys and books that she had read to her growing stomach when she was pregnant and all alone. All. Alone. She’d been surrounded by the crew, but had felt a world apart.
“Red, where the fuck are you?” Barret called through the house. “Ooooh,” he murmured, easing into the doorway of the nursery and looking around. He balanced the giant platter of hot dogs in one hand and put his fingers to his lips, and without a single warning, the idiot blew the loudest, shrillest whistle imaginable and nearly ruptured her eardrums before she could cover her ears!
“Crew! Lynn’s place looks like shit, and she needs us to seven dwarves her.”
“What?”
“Like the movie where the dwarves clean up the house.”
“Are you talking about Snow White? The dwarves messed up the house. The animals cleaned it.”
“Great. I’m an animal, you’re an animal. Jaxon’s a chode hair, Anson’s a smelly pile of bat guano, Annalise is okay when she’s human, Kaylee ate all my fucking yogurt last Tuesday—”
“Oh my gosh, are we going to go through the entire crew?” Lynn asked impatiently.
“Well, I waaaas,” Barret groused, cradling his platter of mustard-slathered wieners and buns.
“I’m gonna eat one of those,” Lynn said, grabbing the one on the end.
“I made you a dozen,” Barret said, frowning down at his double layer of dogs.
Lynn snorted. “You think I can eat a dozen?”
“Remembe
r? We had a contest, and you ate a dozen. I ate like twenty-six and made fun of you because you were a pussy. And you said it wasn’t fair because you weren’t wearing the right pants.”
“Oh yeaaah.” Now it was coming back to her. That was before she was pregnant, before everything got messed up with Brody. She used to have fun. “I wasn’t wearing my eating pants.”
“Which is just yoga pants, let’s be honest.”
“You were wearing… Barret, now I remember, you were wearing a pair of my yoga pants.” She giggled. “You stole them from my house, and they were those pink and black leopard print ones, and everyone could see the perfect outline of your dick and balls. It was so weird I told you to take them off because you were going to rip them, and you did rip them! When you bent over after you ate all those hotdogs, the crack ripped, and you weren’t wearing underwear. You traumatized the entire crew.” She barely got through the last part because she was laughing so much at the memory. Anson had barfed in the bushes in front of her house immediately following the riiiiiip.
“You remember how it was back then?” Barret asked, the smile fading from his lips.
She didn’t remember a lot of it, so she just nodded so he wouldn’t hear the lie in her voice. Her mind didn’t work as well as it used to.
“You were happy, Lynn. We had fun. Sure, we were a crew of fuck-ups, and still are, but back before you hadn’t let Brody control you yet, you smiled all the time. I watched when he started paying attention to you. You were lit up for a month, and then slowly, you started fading away. I watched the light die from your eyes, and I asked you over and over again if you were happy. Remember? And you would say yes, but your voice was hollow.”
“You used to fight him all the time,” she murmured, a hundred battles between the two flashing across her mind like lightning strikes.
“Because I wanted to kill him. Ben kept stopping me. Sometimes it takes one bad apple to ruin a crew, Lynn. That bad apple? It was never you. Stop.” He jammed a finger at her face where her eyes were burning. “Don’t you fucking cry for him anymore. I’m glad he’s dead, and you should be, too. You don’t want no daddy like him for your cub.”
“I want Jathan Barns,” she whispered and pulled the neck of her shirt to the side.
Barret’s green eyes flicked to the claiming mark on her shoulder. She would’ve laughed at his comically blank face if this was funny in any way.
“You’re claimed, Red?”
She nodded.
The slow smile that stretched Barret’s face was nothing short of wicked. “Greyson’s gonna shit his pants. Are you bringing in another Gray Back? You’re drawing the Bad Bear to Red Havoc Territory? Both Barns twins in a panther crew?”
Another nod.
Barret tossed his head back and gave a booming laugh. “We’re gonna have so many fights. Geez, Red! We’re gonna bleed so much!” Another explosive laugh, and then he shoved a hotdog in his mouth. Around the bite, he said, “This if so fucking awefome. Everyone if gonna freak out. I’m telling Greyfon.” He turned for the door. “Greyfon!!”
There was noise out in the front room. Lynn followed Barret out to find the crew cleaning dust off everything. Her cabin was small, and now extremely crowded with giant shifter bodies, but where she would’ve been instantly claustrophobic before when she was broken, now she leaned against the wall and watched the organized chaos with a strange, warm, tingling sensation thrumming through her torso. She was happy. She belonged. Anson leaned over and kissed his mate, Kaylee, in the kitchen. It was sweet, just a light kiss where their lips held, and then he leaned in and whispered something against her ear, drawing a giggle from her. It was such a tender moment, but it drew the smile off Lynn’s face. She missed Jathan so badly it nearly doubled her over. She’d been tough all day, but watching them have an intimate moment made her want a hug from Jathan. Or a light touch on her back, a hand-hold, anything. There was such an acute pain in her chest, she had to fight to stay upright.
“What’s wrong?” Eden asked as she settled against the wall beside her, flicking her platinum locks out of her face.
“I miss someone.”
“I know.”
Lynn frowned at her friend. “You do?”
“Last week, I called Jathan. We were all calling him,” Eden explained with a giggle. “Red Havoc was relentless because we wanted to know everything that was happening with you. For the first few weeks, he was pissed. He would send us pictures of you fighting the shifters in Damon’s Mountains. He sent me a picture of you fighting my dad.”
“Geez, I forgot Monster called Kellen to fight me. It’s a little bit of a blur before last week.”
Eden leaned her head on Lynn’s shoulder. “Jathan was so upset, and we didn’t understand why. He stopped answering our calls completely for a week, and then when I called this week, I expected his voicemail as usual. But he picked up. And his tone had changed. He told me, ‘Eden, I didn’t understand why you sent her here. I thought she was too far gone and I didn’t understand why you were pushing her if she was dead already.’ And then there was this big pause when I was thinking, what the fuck is going on? And then he said, ‘She’s really special. Now I understand. I’m gonna bring her back.’ It was a promise. I’ve known Jathan my whole life, and he’s never been serious about anything. He’s never attached to anyone but Jaxon. After he hung up, I just sat there on the steps of your porch, with this gut feeling that he was going to follow through because I heard the honesty in his voice. And it wasn’t just a challenge for him. Lynn, he said it like he loved you already. And ever since, I’ve been praying—praying—that you push Brody’s memory to the side enough to let Jathan in. And just a few minutes ago, he called me. He told me if you ask for space to become stronger, to make sure the crew gives it to you, no questions asked.”
Lynn rested her cheek on the top of Eden’s hair. “That was really sweet of him to do.”
“Well…he followed it with ‘Remind Lynn to take pictures of her tits for me tonight,’ so not that sweet, but I got the gist. He’s special to you.”
“He’s very important to my story. He’s maybe the reason I’m still here.”
There was a long silence as they watched the crew cleaning dust from Lynn’s house. At last, Eden murmured, “If he’s the reason you’re fighting again, then he’s very important to me too.”
****
Lynn locked her arms against the bathroom sink and stared at herself in the mirror. She hadn’t really looked at herself much in the last year. Every time she did, she would see how far she had fallen. She had watched her eyes go vacant, her hair go limp, and the circles under her eyes darken. She’d lost weight, and her skin had turned pale. Her freckles, which had been light before, had made a stark contrast against her pallid skin. But today, she looked a little less like a ghost and a little more like her old self. Her red hair was healthy and shiny, hanging in waves down her shoulders. Her eyes were the soft brown of her human form, not the constant gold of Monster. She had color in her cheeks, and when she did a test smile, her eyes crinkled and danced. They weren’t vacant anymore. She was really here. Really present.
“I brought girly booze,” Anson announced.
Lynn jumped because she’d thought she was alone in the cabin. “Dude, you could knock!”
“Uh, I never knock, and where the fuck are your pants?” Anson asked.
Lynn looked down at the extra-large T-shirt she’d stolen from Jathan right before she left. It smelled like him, and she wanted to sleep in it. Ignoring Anson’s question, she asked, “What is girly booze?”
He stood there with two brown paper bags of clinking bottles while the other crew members trickled into her bedroom one by one.
Anson frowned down at his liquor store wares. “I got peach schnapps, vodka flavored with lime, watermelon, and raspberry, margarita mix someone had the audacity to put pink coloring in, tequila, orange juice, seven packages of fruit candy, and purple sugar granules for the rim of glasses, and a bu
nch of other stuff. I Googled the shit out of ‘things girls like to drink,’ because we’re getting wasted tonight, and I’m one hundred percent tired of the girls complaining about only ever having beer here.”
Eden grabbed one of the bags out of Anson’s hands and looked into it with a beatific smile, like rays of heaven were coming out of the bag. “I’ll be bartender!”
“No!” Barret yelled way too loud as he followed Eden out of the bedroom. “You make the weakest drinks. It’ll take us a month to get drunk. I can get us drunk in eight ounces.”
“That sounds disgusting,” Annalise muttered, following the other two. “I’ll help Eden.”
“If we’re doing this, we need glasses,” Kaylee said.
Anson pulled pink and purple plastic cups from the other bag with a grin. “Y’all owe me a damn trophy. I’m MVP of Red Havoc tonight.”
“False! I am,” Barret called. “I pissed in your landscaping for the last week, and you didn’t even notice.”
“How does that make you MVP?” Anson asked, his voice fading as he left her bedroom. “And why the fuck would you do that?”
“Because I hate you. Where’s the fruit candy?”
Greyson and Ben were the only ones who remained, and both were leaning against the wall across the room, watching her with matching smiles.
“Hi, alphas,” she said, crossing her arms and resting against the bathroom doorframe.
“Aw, I’m no alpha anymore,” Ben murmured. He twitched his head toward the blond, tatted-up giant beside him. “That’s Grey’s burden now. I’m barely Second in the crew, and I’m pretty sure that’s just because She-Devil lets me be. She half-assed bleeding me when I Challenged her for Second a couple weeks back.”
“Where’s Jenny?” Lynn asked. This part had troubled her. Ben’s mate had been a pivotal part in the crew, but she was gone now, and there was a hole in this place.
“She’s pregnant. Gonna give me another cub. She can’t shift until the baby is born, and I can’t have her here where she can’t protect herself. She took the boys, Raif and Bentley, into hiding.”
