Shifters 0f The Seventh Moon Complete Series Bks 1-4

by Selena Scott

  “Bet it feels like a long time and a short time all at once, yeah?”

  Jean Luc cleared his throat and peered at his green-eyed friend. That was exactly what it felt like. “Yeah.”

  Jack clapped a hand on Jean Luc’s shoulder before going whole hog and dragging him in for a brief, back-slapping hug. “You need anything…”

  “Yeah. Yup. Sure. I’ll let you know.” Both men knew that if Jean Luc needed anything, there was no way in hell he was going to someone else to help him. He just wasn’t that kind of person. Even if he would have been better off if he was.

  Jack figured that a little time on his own was in order, so he left Jean Luc in the kitchen and nearly ran over Celia, hovering in the back hall that led to the bedrooms. “Whoa!”

  “Sorry! Sorry. I wasn’t meaning to creep around. I was just…”

  “Eavesdropping?” Jack asked, with his eyebrows raised and an amused smile on his face.

  She flushed and straightened the cute little headband she wore that made her look like Rosie the Riveter. Well, Rosie the Riveter with tattoos and a nose piercing. “Is he alright?”

  Jack noticed that she hadn’t even tried to deny the fact that she’d been eavesdropping, which he respected. He also noticed that she was blushing even harder as the moments ticked on. She looked anxiously over Jack’s shoulder to the dark room where Jean Luc was. Huh. Interesting.

  “He’s okay. Little torn up. I’m sure you can figure out why.”

  “Yeah,” she said softly, her eyes dropping down.

  Jack cocked his head to one side. “He could probably do with a little cheering up.” He paused pointedly. “If you were up for it.”

  Celia merely looked confused. “I’m definitely not the person to cheer him up. Trust me. I can’t get through two sentences with the guy before saying something that makes me want the earth to swallow me whole.”

  Jack grinned at her. “Maybe you wouldn’t have to talk?”

  Understanding lit her eyes. There it was. Now she got what he was saying. Her cheeks flamed and about ten thousand emotions seemed to flit across her face all at once.

  “Look,” Jack raised his hands. “Just a gentle suggestion. Obviously, none of my business either way.”

  He leaned down and kissed her cheek before moving past her down the dark hall. He went to the room at the end where his woman was waiting for him. For a moment, Jack lingered at the door, looking back the way he came, wondering if maybe he’d stuck his foot in something he’d have been better off sidestepping. Then he shrugged, figured either way, what was the harm? A little heat did the body good. He should know.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Celia was not sleeping well in Florida. They’d been there two days and she was utterly wiped out. She’d have liked to say it was because of the heat, but she knew damn well that that wasn’t it at all.

  It was Jack Warren and his big mouth that was making her toss and turn. He’d suggested, not subtly at all, that maybe she should comfort Jean Luc… physically. It wasn’t the implication that kept her up all night. No, it was the way that Jack had suggested it. As if it was obvious that Jean Luc would welcome the comfort. Would welcome her. Would want her. Something in the casual way that Jack suggested it implied that she and Jean Luc were in the same league. That a drop-dead gorgeous, famous athlete with abs that could cut glass would want a curvy, nerdy, punk librarian like her.

  The fact was, she had no idea whether she wanted that with Jean Luc or not. She’d spent so much time berating herself for having the crush in the first place, she had absolutely no idea what it was she was wanting out of the crush.

  Not sex, obviously. Because that would just humiliate her. She’d never enjoyed casual sex. And she’d barely enjoyed the committed sex she’d had. She’d long ago accepted the fact that she just wasn’t a sexual person. She wasn’t good at giving it or receiving it. So yeah. Sex with someone who was likely a sex god was not a good idea. They’d get two seconds into fooling around before he’d be like, uh, what are you doing? Frankly, she’d rather die.

  No. Not sex. She couldn’t comfort him that way. But… maybe a little flirting would lift his spirits? Plus, maybe it would help her get rid of this dumbass crush that was dogging her. If she gave it a little room to breathe, let it out of the house to run around, maybe it would just keep on running and she’d be rid of it.

  It sort of made sense. Two birds with one stone.

  On the morning of the third day, she woke up sweaty despite the chilly air conditioning and tangled in her sheets. It had been another night of weird dreams and tossing and turning. She was so exhausted that she finally admitted to herself that something had to be done. Jack’s words were haunting her.

  She couldn’t keep up this awkward dance of worrying about Jean Luc and also avoiding Jean Luc and also spying on him while he swam laps. It was gonna put her into an early grave. It was time to start seriously considering this flirting plan. She wasn’t terrible at flirting. She was cute enough and often funny.

  She was also starting to realize that she was really bothered by Jean Luc’s pain. He was hiding it from the group fairly well, but Celia felt as if she could almost taste it whenever he entered a room. It was like his spirit was heavy with it, saturated with pain and grief. Celia thought that maybe Jack was right. Maybe a little levity with a cute girl would help lift him up a bit. Even if that girl wasn’t the Victoria’s Secret models he was used to canoodling with.

  She didn’t particularly want to start this flirting experiment with an audience, so, as she flung the covers off of herself, she figured she’d have to find a way to get him alone today.

  “Celia!” Caroline knocked at Celia’s door. “Martine wants to have a group meeting in a few minutes, if you’re awake.”

  “I’m just going to jump in the shower and then I’ll be out.”

  Celia hurried to get ready, and not wanting to keep the group waiting, she just grabbed a dress from her bag and slicked it on over her shower-damp skin. She usually put together a little bit more of an outfit, but she’d always liked this dress. It was vintage style, emerald green with a low V dip at the chest. It showed a bit more cleavage than she was used to, but it was a flattering cut on her. She tucked her feet into her worn, black combat boots, 1. because snakes, snakes, and snakes. And 2. because with her tattoos and piercings and punkish hair style, it completed the look. Her hair was damp and flopping to the side so she pinned it back and into a quick, sloppy French braid and called it all good.

  She scrambled out to the living room, not wanting to hold everyone up any longer.

  “Morning!” Caroline called from where she sat on the floor next to the coffee table. “There’s muffins that I made if you’re hungry and… wow, Celia! You’re such a babe.”

  Celia startled and blinked down at Caroline who was staring up at her with wide eyes.

  “Damn,” Tre said from where he sat on the couch, cocking his head to one side. “Seriously.”

  The rest of the group nodded and agreed, except for Jean Luc who sat very still on an armchair halfway behind her.

  “It’s just a dress,” Celia said, fighting the urge to adjust it.

  She heard Jean Luc mutter something behind her, but she didn’t catch it and was too flustered to ask him to repeat it. Instead, she grabbed a muffin and went to sit next to Thea on the couch. The couch dipped in with her weight and the two women ended up halfway on top of each other. Thea grinned at her as they chuckled and attempted to slide apart again. No dice, the couch dipped even further and just had them sliding into each other again. This time, Thea just shrugged her shoulders and threw an arm around Celia to make them both a little more comfortable. Celia realized that she was comfortable snuggled up against Thea. The way she might have been snuggled up against one of her sisters. In fact, considering her relationship with her sisters, maybe she was even more comfortable with Thea.

  “Alright,” Martine said, pushing off from where she’d been leaning against the
window sill. She paced slowly into the middle of the living room. “I’ve been thinking about the maps. And why they’ve led us here. Obviously, we all have to stick together, or else we’re going to automatically forfeit one of our lives to the demon. We’re much stronger as a group than we are as individuals.”

  “Separate us and we’re vulnerable,” Tre said.

  “Exactly.” She pointed at him. “But beyond pointing us to a star in the middle of the Everglades, the map hasn’t given us a ton of guidance on what else to do.” She paced some more. “God knows that none of us are too keen on just waiting around for Arturo to come reap one of our souls for the demon’s lunch.”

  Celia and Thea raised their eyebrows at one another. Martine had such a way with words.

  “So,” Martine continued, “I’ve been thinking. Arturo turned you three into bear shifters because the shifting transformation, in the beginning, makes you very vulnerable. It adds complexity to your soul, like we talked about, so you’d be… tastier to the demon. But it also makes it easier to take your soul from you while you’re acclimating to this whole new way of life. Obviously, it’s not as easy as Arturo thought it would be, or else Jack would have been toast last week.”

  She nodded her head at him and he nodded back. A roll of pride waved out from both of them. They all knew that he’d kicked ass.

  “Here’s the thing. I’ve heard of Arturo turning men into bear shifters before, for this exact same reason. But I’ve never heard of him doing three shifters at once. I think he figured more bang for his buck, more chances to succeed. I don’t think he figured on the three of you having the connection that you have to one another. That you make one another stronger, not weaker.” She paced a little more, her coppery hair going golden in the shaft of sunlight she paced through once and twice and a third time. Her knives at her ankles and wrists gleamed and her black stretchy clothes clung to every curve. She was really a force to be reckoned with.

  “We’re going to have to go to the star no matter what. We have to go there and attempt to end this with the demon. That’s the location where our battle will take place. But I think we should wait until the full moon in two weeks. And in the meantime, I’ll work with you three to really hone your skills as shifters. I think we could really stand a chance against Arturo if all three of you are working together. We could end this.”

  The group shared a mixture of looks. Trepidatious, excited, focused.

  “End this… you mean kill Arturo?” Celia asked. “Wouldn’t that still leave the actual demon behind?”

  Martine took a deep breath. “Here’s the part I might have to sell you all on. I don’t think we should kill Arturo.”

  The three men let out collective breaths. They could all feel the relief rolling through them as a group. None of them had wanted to face killing a man. They would have done it to protect the group, but they hadn’t wanted to.

  “Then what are we going to do to him?” Caroline asked, still kneeling on the floor, her caramel eyes wide, her hands nervously fiddling with the ends of her chestnut hair.

  Martine’s eyes went around the group, touching on each person’s for just a second. She straightened up tall. “I want to capture him.”

  ***

  “Pass. Hard pass.” That was Celia, staring at Martine like she was a lunatic.

  “And how do you propose we do that? Wait in a tree and drop a net on top of him when he happens to walk past?” Tre asked, laughing through the words because there was nothing else to do.

  “Um,” Caroline bit her lip and looked at the mutinous faces all around her. “That sounds really hard, Martine. I’m not a huge fan of, you know, murder, but I have to say, killing him sounds easier than catching him.”

  Thea caught Martine’s eye, her bright blue eyes holding those green ones. “Is there a reason that you don’t want to kill him?”

  Martine suddenly felt old and tired. She was so many generations older than these young mortals. And of course, she was put on this earth to dispatch the evil that demons slimed all over the place. But that didn’t mean she wanted to kill. And that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t avoid it where she could. But that wasn’t the only reason she wanted Arturo alive.

  “The simple fact is that if we kill him, the demon will replace him with someone more dangerous. But if he’s alive and captured, he’ll still be tied to his master, and he won’t be replaceable.”

  “So,” Jack said slowly, crossing one leg over the other at the ankle, “this is a strategy. If we capture Arturo, we’re putting the demon at a loss.”

  “Well,” Martine legitimately considered lying for a moment before her nature got the best of her. “No. If we kidnap Arturo, it’s likely to enrage the demon. He’ll be more aggressive and more vicious. So far, we’ve only encountered Arturo’s brand of warfare. The demon’s will be quite different.”

  “You… want to make the demon angry?” Celia squinted her eyes at Martine.

  “I want to know what we’re dealing with here!” Martine paced away and back. “We’re sitting ducks waiting for Arturo to slap at us, weaken us, maybe even take one of us. If we have Arturo at our whims, we have information from him and we have a guarantee that the demon will be coming at us soon and hard.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Jean Luc said, shrugging.

  The rest of the group turned to him, looking at him like he’d just said he liked to put sugar on spaghetti.

  “Which part?” Tre asked. “The part where we’re supposed to capture and contain someone who’s tried to kill at least two of us? Or the part that doing so will cause a demon to really try to kill us.”

  “The part where we’re doing something besides waiting here on the defensive.” He shrugged. “I mean, this bear shifter thing has gotta be good for something, right?” He looked at Martine who held his gaze but didn’t answer one way or another. “We get good at shifting, we’re three grizzly bears who can read each other’s thoughts. Don’t you think we could take down Arturo?”

  The meeting hadn’t lasted much longer after that. It had devolved into question after question, lots of tension, disagreements. Until finally, Caroline had stuck her fingers into her mouth and whistled like she was calling for peanuts at a baseball game. “Time out,” she’d said, stomping her foot. “We can talk about this again tomorrow. But right now, we’re splitting up and taking a break.”

  They’d all muttered agreements and had started to split up when Caroline had stomped again. “And we’re having family dinner tonight!”

  That huffy little proclamation was met with some smiles and more agreements and then the group really did disband. Celia did her best to appear casual, but she couldn’t help but let her eyes follow Jean Luc out to the backyard. For a second, she’d thought he was going to swim laps, but he kept on going beyond the pool and straight to the small canal that snaked along through the back property.

  She considered for a moment, wringing her hands in the kitchen before she took a deep breath and forced down the chorus of voices in her head. They sounded suspiciously like her siblings. So what if she went out there and flirted a little bit? So what if she put herself out there and made them both feel better? So what? It didn’t mean that she thought she was Miss Thang. It didn’t mean that she’d had her brains scrambled and she suddenly thought she could nab a man like Jean Luc outside of the vacuum of this crazy experience. All it meant was that she thought she was good enough to trade flirtation with him. Which, she reminded herself, she did think. She thought that wholeheartedly. Plus, he just looked so sad out there.

  Celia quietly crossed the porch, taking care not to let the screen door slam. And then she stepped across the pool deck, mindful of snakes as ever.

  She crossed to the canal, where his uncle’s old airboat floated innocuously, looking like some sort of ancient Greek sea creature with its huge fan. He crouched at the edge of the canal, one hand on the fan of the boat, leaning in, inspecting something.

  “Going for a ride?”
she asked him.

  “Oh.” He turned quickly. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Nah, no, that’s okay.”

  She noticed that he was almost pointedly not looking at her. She scrolled back through the morning and realized that she didn’t actually think he’d looked at her the entire morning. Interesting. Either he hated the green dress or he really liked the green dress. She peeked down at herself and her eyes snagged on her own two inches of deep cleavage showing.

  She guessed that he really liked the dress.

  Bolstered by this idea, she went to stand on the cement wall at the edge of the canal. “So, ride?”

  “Ah.” He cleared his throat and sat back from his crouch so that his legs dangled down over the wall, toward the boat, the water about four feet down from the tips of his running shoes. “No. I don’t even know if it would run at this point. But I figured I should take a little inventory and see what needs fixing. I figure this is probably what we’ll use to find that star out in the swamps.”

  She nodded and tucked her dress under herself as she sat next to him. Yesterday’s Celia might have put a good foot and a half between them. Today’s Celia put a hair’s breadth between their shoulders, and she felt him stiffen beside her. Hopefully that was a good thing. “Did you spend a lot of time in the swamps as a kid?”

  “Not unsupervised or anything. They’re really dangerous. All sorts of animals and ways to get lost. But Uncle Claude would take us out. Before I got all wrapped up in football I used to do tours with him. I can show you some pictures.”

  “Think you’ll go back and see your high school while you’re here? The football field where it all began?”

  He laughed, half humorlessly. “That would be a no. I hated high school football and want zero reminders of it. Besides. The field where it all began is right over there.” He pointed to the empty field at the other side of the house. That’s where Uncle Claude taught me and Hugo how to play football.”