The Shifter's Shadow_Shifters Of The Seventh Moon

by Selena Scott

  It was true, Thea remembered, clenching down on him as she remembered the way he’d ridden her last night. Deep then deeper. All that slide and rub. She bore down on him from the inside and a harsh breath ripped out of Jack. His hands tightened, almost painfully, over her breasts. “I never wanted to pull out. I would have slept inside you.” His hips were pressing up slowly. He was planting his feet and lifting them both up off the bed, impaling her on his cock. She’d never been filled like that. So completely, so patiently. There was no juvenile pound-pound-pound. No, this was a man giving her everything he had, because he knew she could take it.

  He dropped his hips and took her with him, and she fell forward onto his shoulder. Jack threaded his fingers through her pulled-back hair and brought her face to his. “I wanted to fuck you bare,” he told her. “I hated that fucking condom.”

  She clenched down on him, even tighter than before. “I hate it, too,” she said, leaning forward and sharply nipping his mouth.

  They’d been all hot, sliding kisses up to now, but they were fused in the most carnal way a man and a woman could be and there was only so much soft they could take. First her teeth tugged at his lips and then his tugged at hers. There was nothing soft in this kiss as they pressed against one another, pulling and grinding, neither one thrusting. He was right. Pulling out, away from each other, even if only to slam back down, was torture. She couldn’t bring herself to lift off him. They just ground against each other, swiveling hips and sweating and moaning. Thea gripped the headboard and it knocked hard against the wall. She didn’t care. Jack dropped that biting mouth from her lips and to her breasts. He ravaged one nipple and then the other. Took it raw, raked it with his teeth and then his stubble and then smashed her sensitive chest against his chest hair as he banded his arms around her.

  She did the same to him. They were hugging one another so tight there was barely room to breathe. They were gasping and swiveling and grinding. Thea’s head fell back and his teeth scraped across her throat. She tried to lift her head but his fingers twisted through her hair and held her bared open to him.

  “Jack,” she gasped, barely recognizing the raspy wail of her own voice. She was gripping him, her legs and arms around him, her nails digging in, her clit jamming and tensing and dragging across his pelvic bone. She could feel him so deep inside her that he was pressing hard against her cervix. It was a jolt of aching pain that set her on fire. If he’d been hard-fucking her this deep, he might have really hurt her. But that grinding, pulsing shove that he was doing inside her just stoked her, pulled her muscles and her nerve endings tight. Her orgasm started there, from the core of her, the center of her body. The head of his cock nudged it right out of her. Jack let her hair free and she slammed her face into his neck, shaking and begging and screaming.

  She felt a flood release inside her and all over him. She was coming deep inside and then it radiated out, to her clit. She came sharply, hard, a stab of pleasure as bright as a hard suck on a lemon, but then it echoed back, into the cave of her, where it tightened down like a fist and held, held, held. Thea trembled on the echoes of it, and smashed her closed eyes into his skin. He was wet there, whether from her tears or spit or sweat, she’d never know.

  He was breathing hard, like he might not make it back from wherever she’d just taken him. And he hadn’t come yet. She thanked God that her orgasm hadn’t made her blind to his. She raised her head up and stared him in the eye. He saw nothing through blind eyes, she could tell that. He was lost in it, grinding against her and lifting her up off the bed with his hips. He was thrusting up, but pulling her down with him too, so that he never really pulled out of her. He was questing, searching, needing.

  She knew what he needed and pushed back from him. She leaned back on her planted palms, giving him an unimpeded view of her body. His eyes focused in on her breasts, shaking from the movements of his hips. Her fire partially quelled, she pulled herself slightly off of him and pushed back down. He grunted. She did it again, both of their eyes planted on the slow reveal of his cock as she slid back. But his hands landed on her hips and he pulled her down, hard, grinding her onto him. He looked wild, lost, out of his body and his time. He needed, needed, needed. Thea sat up abruptly, sinking him even deeper into her, grabbed him by the back of his head and planted him on her breast. His mouth clamped down, hard and unrelenting. He gave an impossibly strong suck on her nipple that had her toes curling and her breath stuttering. His body went tight as he sucked again, bucking his hips upward, taking both of them off the bed. He sucked hard and came hard. It was almost as if they were one organism, and by suckling at her breast, he was summoning his orgasm from the depths of himself. He sucked harder and came harder, a never-ending pull that emptied him out so hard they collapsed to the side as he finished.

  They both shivered and jerked, their bodies almost too sensitive to be touching, even though he was still lodged deep inside her. His breath stuttered and shook, his eyes still blind. Thea had come a little bit back to herself. She was just now registering how wet they were, chilling quickly in the cool morning air. She needed coffee. And a gallon of water. And bacon. And a shower.

  “Ow,” she said, with a certain tone of fascination as she landed a palm over the nipple he’d just attempted to suck her life-force out of.

  “Shit,” he murmured, coming back into himself just a little bit, his eyes focusing on her face and then her palm. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No. Not in a real way. It felt so good. And now it kinda aches.”

  “Let me see.”

  She dropped her hand and her normally soft, mauve-colored nipple was dark and purple, standing up tall as if it had been molded like clay. “Whoa. Ho-ly God, woman. You’re gonna kill me.” In fact, she felt his cock jerk inside her as he looked at her fully-worked breast. “That’s gotta be the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’ve always had good tits,” she said, holding the base of the condom and sliding up off him. They both winced at the loss of the other.

  “I’ll say. I’ve always been more of an ass-man, myself, but damn. I’m happy to convert.”

  “You’re not a fan of my ass?” she asked him, shaking it a little as she stood up off the bed.

  He crawled forward toward her, like he was on a leash. “No. I didn’t say that. I am. Hold still and I’ll show you.” He swung an arm out to catch her, but she was forward like a shot.

  “Shower,” she told him, zero nonsense in her tone.

  She didn’t have to tell him twice.

  ***

  They didn’t move back downstairs from that queen-sized room. No one complained. There were plenty of bedrooms and nobody minded not having to hear Thea and Jack bang away at each other, one day at a time.

  Both of them felt as if they were walking a very skinny path, icebergs on one side and boiling water on the other. Neither of them were people who got particularly mixed up in relationship talk. Where things were going or where they weren’t going. But they were both painfully aware of the coming of the new moon.

  In a way, Jack was dreading the new moon more because it marked Thea’s departure date than he did because it marked the date of his first shift.

  They spent most of their time together, something that neither of them had ever really done with another person. Usually, they prized their privacy to the maximum. But Thea found herself tagging along with him when it was his turn to pick up groceries. He found himself starting to head out for a walk alone and tugging her with him. They weren’t snugglers, but whenever the group sat down together in the evening, they were always leaned in close to one another, all eyes and slow hands.

  The group was pretty grateful that they were together. It made the days a bit more interesting to watch the new couple flirt and navigate one another. There wasn’t a ton else to watch. The rest of the group simply waited. Jean Luc ducked phone calls from his agent at least three times a day. Celia ducked phone calls from her family. Tre lamented the deathly slow interne
t. Caroline had taught herself to knit and was working away at some lumpy, fuzzy thing that everyone secretly worried was going to be for them. No one knew exactly what Martine was up to.

  The days passed strangely, they all felt that way. Ice water fast and syrupy slow all at the same time. Everyone wanted the days to pass both slower than they were and faster than they were. Each night they watched the moon grow smaller and smaller.

  It would be a new moon soon. And then the transformation would be complete.

  The three men, both separately and together, couldn’t quell their nauseating curiosity and concern over what it might feel like to shift. Martine showed them over and over her own shift. She talked them through the intricacies of how to do it and what it felt like. But it was unimaginable, really.

  The day before the new moon, Tre stood at the shore of the black lake in the backyard and peered across at the distant buildings on the far shore. He turned and looked at Celia’s family’s house, and then turned back to the shore.

  He did it twice more before Caroline simply gave up her attempt at giving him privacy and jumped down from the back porch.

  “Whatcha doin’?” she called.

  Tre stiffened, recognizing her voice immediately. She was the one member of the group who Tre was the least comfortable with. Not just because she was so clearly born rich and kept rich, though that was a factor. And not just because her round, friendly face and long, brown hair was just so dang pretty, though that also was a factor. No. It was mostly because Tre was almost certain that she was keeping some sort of secret from the group.

  He’d been tempted to look into her. He had his computer after all. It wouldn’t take much more than a connection to WiFi for a hacker as skilled as Tre to know everything there was to know about Caroline Clifton. From her bank accounts to her Facebook to her Google searches. He could sniff out every single digital trace of her in less than half an hour, he was certain. More than certain. But something held him back.

  Sure, Jack, Jean Luc and he had been the ones who’d surged forward, and by result, been hit with Arturo’s curse. The three of them were the ones who were set to endure this transformation, whatever it was going to end up being. They’d made one choice and now they were stuck together. But the ladies? They were staying for other reasons, maybe more honorable reasons. Caroline and Celia and Thea and Martine weren’t bound by the same magic that the men were. Or at least not quite as strong. They could at least attempt to up and leave at any time. But they stayed. They chatted and whiled away the time and checked up on him. Babied him even, at times. They were staying out of the goodness of their hearts. And that meant something to Tre.

  Did he love that he was almost certain that this Caroline Clifton wasn’t who she said she was? No. Of course not. It kept him watching her, paying attention, waiting for slip-ups that he knew were inevitable. But her loyalty to the group, and by default, to him, kept him from snooping.

  He supposed that the existence of a secret wasn’t reason enough to have that secret exposed.

  So he simply turned to her, watched her walk across the dark green lawn barefoot. She wore little blue shorts that he thought of as sailor shorts, though he had no idea why. There was a red one-piece on under them and a towel around her neck. She liked to swim the lake, he’d noticed.

  “Nothing, really,” he said to her as she came to stand at his side. “I just realized something, though. That’s a summer camp across the way.”

  “Oh yeah?” she asked in excitement, squinting and leaning forward, trying to make it out. She didn’t have very good eyesight, but didn’t wear glasses or contacts. Something else he’d noticed about her. “How can you tell?”

  “I’ve been there before.”

  She turned to him now. “Really?”

  “Yeah. A couple of summers when I was kid. Camp Mapleleaf.” He paused. “I knew that we were somewhere in the same vicinity as Mapleleaf because I knew that the star on the map wasn’t very far from it. But when I went to camp, we always called the lake Maple Lake. Not Curtain Lake, the way Celia calls it. I didn’t realize we were on the same lake.”

  “Huh,” Caroline said, genuine wonder in her eyes. “That’s crazy.”

  “I know. And what’s even crazier,” Tre continued, straightening his glasses and attempting to ignore the way the sun caught on her chestnut hair and turned it just a touch gold, “is that we used to talk about this house.” He nodded back toward Celia’s family’s house.

  “Really?” Caroline’s mouth fell flat open and she showed him all those neat, white teeth.

  “Yup. It’s so big that you can see it really well from across the lake. We used to make up stories about it. Kind of a haunted house kind of thing. I never imagined that I’d be staying here as an adult.”

  “While you completed your transformation into a bear shifter,” Caroline completed, looking so solemn and believing, that Tre couldn’t help but cock his head to the side, study her a little harder.

  “What does your husband think of all this, Caroline?”

  She snapped out of her dreamy, beguiling expression so fast that Tre wished he’d kept his trap closed. It was like he’d slapped her.

  “Oh.” She kicked a foot through the dirt at their feet, her eyes on the ground and then on the sky and then on the summer camp across the lake, even though he was positive that she couldn’t really make it out. “He’s as amazed as I am, of course. It sure is a crazy thing to have happen.”

  “You told him the whole story and he believed you? Wished you luck when you decided to stay here?”

  “Oh.”

  He wondered if she knew that she said a sweet little ‘oh’ right before she scrambled to think of a lie.

  “Um, I’m not sure what Peter really believes in.”

  He wanted to press her further. What exactly had she really told him? But then, quickly scanning back through his thoughts, he couldn’t remember her ever stepping out to make a phone call. And their bedrooms were right next door to one another. If she was talking on the phone at night, he would have heard her. He supposed that they could be texting or messaging, but service was shit out here, and the WiFi was dinosaur-slow. He also didn’t think a married couple would be completely satisfied just texting for two weeks. Wouldn’t they have phone sex?

  His eyes involuntarily skated down Caroline’s body. Her trim little legs and small breasts in that modest suit. In fact, the only thing on Caroline that wasn’t modest was that ass. Yeah. Caroline had quite the back seat. Round and high and completely disproportionate to the rest of her body. She wasn’t quite an hourglass figure, because her top was so small. Tre was sure there was a much more delicate way of saying it, but the woman just had a big, juicy ass. And that was that.

  Yeah, if he were Caroline’s husband, which he wasn’t, he would definitely want to be having phone sex with her if she went away for two weeks.

  In his imagination, her voice floated to him over the crackling connection of a phone line going in and out, which somehow only made it hotter. She was breathless, begging for something—

  He twisted that thought off at the root. Yikes. Wowza. No, no, no, no, NO. Bad road to head down. Time to veer back. He pumped the brakes and tried not to let his hard breath crash between them.

  He cleared his throat. “You’ll head home after the new moon?” he asked her.

  He swore that she visibly winced on the word ‘home’.

  “Oh, I suppose so.” She shrugged and gave him a smile that was way too bright to be believable. Even for Caroline’s sunny disposition. “Where else would I go?”

  She decided to take her swim then and he headed back into the house. He cast a grumpy look at the piece of shit WiFi router that was barely fast enough to load a Facebook page. A thought drifted down to him.

  He wasn’t comfortable tracing Caroline through the internet. Something told him that that would be crossing a major line, flaunting a thin line of trust in this group of people who were only recently startin
g to feel less like strangers. But…

  He played with an idea, testing its natural bounds of morality. Was that his conscience piping up in the background? Why no, no it certainly wasn’t.

  He wasn’t going to cyber stalk Caroline. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t cyberstalk her husband.

  Tre grabbed his backpack from his room and called to Jean Luc, reading in the living room, to let him know he was going to head into town for a little while.

  He wasn’t more than one foot out the door before he felt Jack enter the room behind him, eyes on his back. He turned and there was that smug, smiling bastard, looking so well satisfied, the way he always was these days. “Headed out?” Jack called.

  “Town and back. Need anything?” It would have bothered him in any other context to have someone check up on his comings and goings the way Jack and Jean Luc did. But Tre understood. The bonds that connected them were deep and unusual and couldn’t be ignored. Tre could feel, in his bones, the second that Jean Luc decided to go for a run around the lake. And he wasn’t comfortable until the big man was back and in the house. He could tell the minute Jack started thinking about getting Thea naked. Though Tre tried his valiant best to stifle those thoughts as best as he possibly could. They were connected and there wasn’t anything any of them could do about it.

  Jack cocked his head at Tre, his eyes falling to Tre’s backpack, and for a minute, both men wondered if Jack was going to ask about the strange, sort of sneaky energy emanating from Tre. He didn’t. “Nope. See you when you get back.”

  Tre disappeared out the front and into Celia’s car that she let anyone borrow at any time. He’d used it on countless occasions. Tre couldn’t help but speed down the country roads toward town. There was an internet cafe there that had passable WiFi as long as no one else was there. But, he’d discovered, the dentist’s office actually had lightning-fast DSL and he’d hacked into it to get their passcode, no problem. All he had to do was go to the corner of the public library that was closest to the dentist’s office and he was made in the shade.