“You should come by the bar again.”
“Why? You want to do this again?”
Ash shrugged. “Why not? And maybe we’ll actually have a normal conversation over some drinks next time. I think I’d like to get to know you better.”
“All right, but not if you want to get to know me better for potential boyfriend material. I don’t do dates, and I don’t do romance. Friends and fuck-buddies are it.”
Ash laughed. “Yeah, that’s all I meant. Friends. I’m not looking for a partner. I’m currently recovering from a broken heart, I think. On second thought, don’t bother. I’ll be moving on before long. It was nice to meet you, though, Yuri.” They wrapped the blanket tighter around them and stared out the window. The void was back in their eyes. Where had the light gone?
“Fuck that,” Yuri said. “What did you do tonight?”
“Something crazy and stupid?”
“You beat fire.”
Ash’s heart rate sped up as if they were recalling the memory. Light shimmered in their eyes for an instant. “Yeah, I did.”
“Fuck everyone else and everything else. You got out alive. If you can do that, you can do anything. Nobody can take that away from you.”
Ash tore their gaze from the window to look at Yuri. “You know, I was ready to give up today. But now… now I feel different.”
Yuri nodded. “Make the most of every moment, Ash. You never know when it’s going to end. Might as well enjoy it while you can.” He grabbed a couple of old plastic shopping bags he found wedged in between the cushion and the backrest of the backseat and then opened his door.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going home. It’s not too far from here. Also, I’m taking these bags.”
Ash’s mouth dropped open as if they wanted to say something, but they shook their head instead.
“You good to find your way back to Fairbanks?” Yuri asked.
“I’ll just back up until I can turn around and follow our trail back. It hasn’t snowed, so the tracks will be easy enough to see.”
“You might want to put on your clothes before you do that.”
“Worried about me?”
“Nah, you’ll be fine.”
“Hopefully you will be too.”
Yuri smirked. “See you around, maybe.”
“Maybe.”
Yuri shoved what he wasn’t wearing into the plastic bags. Then he slipped out of the truck, barefoot, and shut the door behind him. He ran and didn’t look back as the black and white spruces settled in around him. He continued running until he knew he was out of Ash’s sight. Then he shifted.
It started as a tiny tremor at the base of his spine and was followed by the loud cracks of bones mystically reshaping. Orange fur striped with black sprouted over skin that stretched to cover a large frame of muscles, and he dropped to all fours. His powerful paws hit the earth, and the cold became nothing but a distant memory. His tail flicked behind him with another burst of energy. Life rippled through his body, his skin hummed, and he roared into the night because he was alive.
He was alive.
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS WELL PAST midnight, and Yuri hadn’t called to tell Lance to pick him up yet. He’d have to eventually since Lance took the SUV, so Lance kept waiting and watching the time pass by at an agonizing pace.
Most people were in bed and sleeping by now.
Lance was starting to worry, but he didn’t want to call first. Yuri had a cell phone because Lance insisted he take the one Lance bought him for situations similar to this one. Yuri always went along with it to placate his brother even though he didn’t give a damn about cell phones; he could take them or leave them.
If not for the new and modernized Eurio, Lance would have been suffering alone in Fairbanks because his brother wouldn’t have been able to get a call out to Lance’s cell phone here. Now he had service. That was looking at the bright side, but it didn’t help Lance’s mood.
Maybe he shouldn’t have gone back to Eurio anyway. It took an hour to drive to Fairbanks.
Whatever.
Yuri deserved it.
Lance was pissed off.
He let out a groan and sunk deeper into Austin and Mateo’s couch. It wasn’t very comfortable. The cushions didn’t make the hard, wooden frame much softer, but he ignored the wood jamming into his back and kept going until he sank all the way to the rug on the floor. Then he just kind of melted there like a scoop of ice cream that had been dropped on the hot pavement in San Francisco.
It was a good thing he didn’t live somewhere sunny. His skin wouldn’t have liked that, but it didn’t make much of a difference in the end. He was almost always wearing a hat of some kind outside, whether it was to keep the sun off his skin or to keep himself warm. Or both.
He groaned again.
“I don’t get what you’re doing here exactly,” Austin said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. His pale face flushed. “Mateo and I were supposed to be in bed hours ago. And why are you groveling on the floor now?”
“Just because,” Lance said.
“I’d understand if your house still looked like a bomb went off, but you’ve cleaned it out. It actually looks like a house.”
Lance didn’t say anything to that. There was no point in keeping any of that medical shit now that Yuri was better. He also didn’t know why Austin was talking to him. Last he checked, Austin didn’t like him or Yuri.
Mateo knelt in front of Lance and pushed Lance’s shoulders so their eyes met. “You’re making my mate anxious,” Mateo said and cocked his head. “Are you on something?”
Lance snorted. “I wish.”
Mateo went quiet. He searched Lance’s eyes as if he were waiting for him to expand on that thought. Lance didn’t. He said this instead: “You’ve changed. Since you came back from Utah with Austin, it’s like you’ve become a different wolf. You never go out with me and Yuri anymore.”
“You’re not out with Yuri either. You didn’t want to ‘get laid’?”
Lance closed his eyes to keep himself from screaming. Yuri hadn’t done much with sex since they were teens because his seizures acted up and then the PWD hit.
“I just wonder. What’s so great about sex?” Lance said. He meant to keep the thought to himself. He always had, but he let it slip.
His heart pounded in his chest when he realized what he had done. And he didn’t say any more. That one question brought an eerie silence. Neither Austin nor Mateo said anything, and the seconds dragged on. Lance was reluctant to open his eyes until he got this under control. He had to keep a cool exterior. His secret had to be kept a secret. So, he forced his eyes open and said, “Calm down, guys. I was just kidding.”
Mateo scowled. And he answered the question anyway. Sort of. “Because it feels good?” he said.
He stared at Lance for another moment, like he was still waiting for Lance to say something. Lance hated how he did that. Mateo took things differently than anyone else did. He saw things others didn’t. That was probably why he had gotten along with Yuri and Lance when he first came to Eurio. They were like outsiders together, but Mateo was acting like Eurio was his home. He always had in a way that Yuri and Lance hadn’t, but it was different now. He had no desire to cause trouble anymore. He wasn’t angry and had no reason to get that adrenaline rush. His wolf was forever dicey, but Austin had him now. Mateo would go for a run if he needed to, but he did it alone, without getting anyone else ripped up in the process, and he was always eager to get back to his mate.
“You don’t think so?” Mateo asked.
Lance rolled his eyes. “I mean, why is sex with your mate so great that you turned into another shifter?”
Austin shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose again even though they hadn’t fallen. He was dressed in plaid flannel pajamas and looked like a proper nerd. He frowned and folded his arms when Lance spent more than a second looking at him as if he were embarrassed Lance was seeing him li
ke this.
“For the record, I don’t have a problem with Austin. It was just confusing at first.” Lance meant to say that to Austin himself, but he couldn’t look the human in the eye. “You know, Mateo? It used to be you, me, and Yuri. You were ready to go anywhere with us, and we were ready to add Austin to the mix, but that went to hell in three seconds.”
“I don’t dislike you,” Austin defended. “But yeah, I don’t really get all the stuff you like to do. Gale doesn’t even know the extent of it, does he? You guys put yourselves in a lot of danger sometimes, you know? Mateo is bad enough, but Yuri especially… He takes things as far as they’ll go, and I… I worry. I don’t know what I’d do if Mateo got hurt.” Lance knew that Austin worried about more than Mateo getting “hurt.” He did that. Everything was the worst-case scenario with him.
“Yeah,” Mateo scratched the back of his head, “I don’t enjoy worrying my mate, and I don’t feel like I need to do that stuff so much anymore.”
“So, having a mate turns a shifter soft,” Lance concluded.
“No. I do feel different, though. I used to be empty, but I don’t feel empty anymore. Before, adrenaline was the only thing I could feel. Now Austin keeps me going, and it’s not just about sex being good. It’s everything about Austin.”
Austin’s face went cherry red, and he fixed his glasses with a nervous fury; he simultaneously knocked them over as he tried to push them up the bridge of his nose. Over and over. Lance had to look away from him. It was just too damn pitiful.
But he didn’t get it either.
He didn’t get Yuri’s dangerous streaks that went beyond… well, beyond. But he would go along with almost anything because Yuri was his brother. At the very least, he had to be there for Yuri to keep him safe. Yuri was his world ever since their dad died. Even before that, Yuri had always been his world.
Lance bit the inside of his cheek.
Yuri was a loose cannon in a lot of ways, but he wouldn’t do any of that crazy stuff with Ash, would he? He hadn’t in the past. He would tell ladies what they wanted to hear, use his good looks and his charm to get sex. That was what he had planned for Ash, right? He was just joking around when he said—
Banging on the door jerked Lance out of his thoughts. Austin’s face paled back to its normal white, and he grabbed the collar of his shirt in surprise. Mateo jumped up and answered the door. Yuri came rushing in without so much as a hello. He was half-dressed; he didn’t even have a shirt on, let alone a coat.
“Did you run all the way back?!” Lance demanded. “You could’ve called me. I would’ve picked you up.”
“I figured with the way you left all pissed off that you didn’t want me around. And what are you doing here? I went home first, but you weren’t there. Did you even get laid?”
Lance wrinkled his nose. Lance didn’t smell like sex. Granted, he could have come home and showered away the scent, but Yuri hadn’t. He smelled like sex big time. And he smelled like Ash.
Lance didn’t care. He really didn’t. Or, he wouldn’t have if he hadn’t felt so threatened.
He shoved past Yuri and grabbed his coat. Then he was out the door, trudging through snow at a furious pace as he made his way home. Yuri could return the SUV to the Lodge. Fuck this. Ash wasn’t even Yuri’s type, and he had gone right for them with a laser focus. Lance couldn’t take seeing Yuri make a move on Ash like that. He couldn’t take the smell of sex. Because Yuri would win. Lance would be nothing but a memory to Ash if even that.
Yuri always won, no matter the obstacle, because he was real, and Lance was but a shadow.
It was cold and dark. Snow was underneath his paws. Yuri had no recollection of how he got here. He knew he had to have given his form over to his tiger, but he didn’t remember doing so. And something felt off. The black and white spruces seemed bigger than he remembered, towering up into the sky and nearly concealing it entirely.
He didn’t know why he was running, but when he tried to stop, nothing happened. It was like his body had a mind of its own. He tried to turn his head to look behind him, but he couldn’t get his head to move much. If he tried very hard, there would be some give, but then his head whipped back to the front.
He had no control.
His paws didn’t look right either. They were a silvery white and narrower than he remembered, like a wolf’s paws.
His head bent down, and his nose almost connected with the snow below as he sniffed and sniffed again. It was nothing but pure snow. Then he was running again.
Yuri let it, his body, take him. He didn’t have much of a choice. It continued. He walked through snow, ran, stopped, and sniffed. He had to endure this same routine, over and over. His nose connected with the snow yet again, and he expected nothing. But then he smelled something strange. It burned his nose, crackled all the way up to his brain. It was familiar, too familiar, because he knew it and its destructive power too well: Black Magic.
When his body tried to move on its own again, Yuri roared in his head. He refused and imagined digging his feet in past the snow and into dirt, anchoring his body. And then his sight jumped out of his body. It made him dizzy. He couldn’t focus at first, but then he could. His vision cleared, and he was like a specter floating in the sky as he looked down at where he once stood.
It wasn’t his body at all.
The one in the snow, with the deep blue eyes Yuri had been looking through, was a humongous wolf. His eyes pierced through to Yuri’s core, and Yuri’s heart stuttered because they were just a little bit too familiar.
Yuri’s mind seized up.
He gasped and shot up straight in bed. The vision was gone. There was nothing but familiar darkness creeping along the wooden corners and walls of his and Lance’s rather empty room. Nothing looked out of place.
But there was an absence of warmth.
Yuri’s hand reached out behind him for his brother, who should’ve been there at his side, but he wasn’t. He sat up and grasped the blankets as if that would reveal his brother’s location, as if Lance were hiding underneath them when Yuri knew that wasn’t the case, but his brain and body insisted he search. He took in a shuddering breath and whispered, “Calm down.”
That seemed to shock his mind and body into playing nice again. Yuri sighed, tightened his grip on the blanket for only a moment, and then let go. He closed his eyes and focused on a sound that caught his attention. It was a low rumble and a high hiss: running water.
It was morning, and Lance was just taking a shower.
Yuri plopped back down on the bed and rolled over, not bothering to cover himself or to fix the twisted blanket. He was going back to bed. Everything was fine.
Everything was fine.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WARM WATER CASCADED OVER Lance, and he took a moment to enjoy it. He could’ve just stayed like that for the entirety of his shower—until he used up all the hot water—since he had already finished washing. But no, that wasn’t what he was doing in here.
He took a breath and tried to pump himself up.
He hadn’t done this in a while.
He stared down in between his legs and knew he could easily get it up by relaxing and handling himself, but wasn’t it supposed to be even easier than that? Couldn’t other guys get it up just by looking at someone they found attractive? Lance knew that was how Yuri worked. If he saw some “hot chick,” all the blood would rush to his dick. Lance was used to the smell of arousal. As shifters, this kind of knowledge was a free-for-all buried deep into their senses. It wasn’t anything weird, and Lance never thought a thing about it before. He was aware of it—but he had never experienced it himself. Not like that.
Lance thought about Ash, conjuring up an image of them in his mind, and closed his eyes to focus only on them. He could see every detail clearly because he took them in whenever he was with them. That crazy beautiful rainbow hair, exactly how high their smile reached, the sparkle in their green eyes, all that smooth skin. He could picture Ash’s typical
outfit. It was always ripped up jeans and a tank top indoors. He tried to find a detail to focus on, one that would make this work.
Then he thought of it. Ash never wore a bra. He could visualize the outline of their breasts. Good. He could also recall the exact width of their hips, the curves in their legs, down to those boots lined in a furry synthetic material that Ash was so fond of. Okay, he shouldn’t be thinking about the boots.
He went back to boobs and hips. They didn’t really make him feel any different. Every part of Ash evoked warm memories. That warmth settled inside of his chest, but there wasn’t any sort of epiphany in his dick. It was just Ash, and Ash gave him that fluttery feeling in his stomach.
Ash gave him butterflies, like that song they sang at Tipsy. Was that song about him? It couldn’t be…
Focus, idiot, Lance berated himself and shook his head.
Maybe the key was to imagine Ash naked, then.
Lance went through that checklist again, visualizing Ash from head to toe, naked this time. But he immediately got stuck. He’d never seen Ash naked before. He had an idea of what they’d look like. He knew they had the body of a female, but imagining a basic female body wasn’t working. He knew how female bodies worked. He had seen females naked plenty of times due to shifting, but it was never anything other than them being naked. It was never anything sexual.
So, his thoughts drifted. They went to Drew.
Lance remembered Drew very well. It was hard not to. When he and Yuri were sixteen, before the seizure that drastically changed Yuri’s life for so many years, Yuri had been as flighty as he was now. He looked for new people to meet, crashed parties, and picked up chicks. All of that was happening again. And, like back then, Lance went along with him.
At sixteen, Fairbanks was the place to be. It was the biggest city the twins could get to in the least amount of time. Once they got there, they’d split up. Yuri would find a girl to run off with, and Lance would usually busy himself with something quieter. They’d have phones or they’d arrange to meet at a certain time and place, and that was that. Lance wasn’t a socialite like Yuri, but he did end up in scrappy, small clubs (some of them allowed sixteen-year-olds and others didn’t) until Yuri found someone who caught his interest and went off on his own. It was during one of those times that Lance met Drew.
Valentine's Day Tigers (The Holiday Shifter Mates Book 3) Page 4
