by Selena Scott
This was the plan. To grab Arturo by his mind. Surround him on three sides. Make him surrender. The great bear wrenched the anchor from his ribs and sent it flying. Driven halfway insane by the intrusion into his mind, he bounded through the deep swamp water toward the three brother bears.
“No!” Jean Luc said the word in his mind, deadly and low.
Arturo stopped, water sloshing around him. His feral eyes went wide with panicked fury. He wanted to move. They three could feel that. He wanted to get to them and destroy them. But he couldn’t move.
“Back down,” said Tre.
“Now,” said Jack.
Arturo shook with fury, but he couldn’t move another inch. He wasn’t stronger than they were. Blood leaked from his wound and he staggered sideways in the water.
“Stop,” said Jean Luc. “Stop.”
Jean Luc pushed out hard with his feelings and gripped onto Arturo’s in a furious grip. If there was such a thing as a mental chokehold, Jean Luc had him in it now. Arturo gasped and writhed, trying to maintain consciousness, but he couldn’t.
He twisted and stumbled, and the great bear fell sideways into the water. Like black soup, it covered him and started to settle. Moments later, a dark shape floated to the surface. Arturo, in his human form, unconscious.
The bears rushed forward. It was Tre who took the knocked-out Arturo to the boat. Jean Luc and Jack, whose injuries were much worse, had enough of an issue getting themselves back to the boat. The women hauled and dragged every last man into the airboat, grateful they’d had the energy to shift back into their human forms.
Celia, seeing the puddles of bloody water, the dim look in Jean Luc’s pale face, revved the boat and sped off into the night.
***
There would be scars, because the gift of warm, clean water couldn’t heal everything. But each injured man found himself washed by a woman that night, Arturo included. Each injured man found himself stinging with the hateful, essential hell of those wounds healing, closing over.
It was hours before they were well enough to drag themselves out of the tubs.
One by one, they assembled in the doorway of the hall bathroom. Thea stood in the circle of Jack’s arms, Celia clutched Jean Luc, Tre and Caroline stood side by side, and Martine knelt on the bloody bathroom floor next to the bathtub where Arturo lay, completely motionless.
His chest rose and fell in shallow beats. His wounds had closed. He did not wake.
***
Two days later, still, Arturo slept. The group packed their things and closed down Jean Luc’s house bit by bit.
The maps had spoken, wiped the Everglades clean and shown a new place that had caused Thea’s eyes to tear. It was Montana. It was her family’s land that was next. The demon would come for them there. And if they didn’t go, one of their lives would be forfeit.
It was Celia, though, who cried the most. She didn’t want to leave Jean Luc’s home. The place where she’d fallen in love.
“Celia,” Jean Luc said in exasperation, finally pulling her aside as she helped him close all the storm shutters, “I’m going with you. Don’t be so sad. This place doesn’t matter. Not really.”
She’d nodded and pressed her face to his chest; she’d needed to hear it. “Will we come back here?”
“I don’t know,” he said after a long while. “I feel, sort of, like this was my goodbye to this place. Like I came back here with nothing, but I’m leaving with you. In a way, it makes it feel like you were Claude and Hugo’s final gift to me. I don’t wanna mess that up.”
“You won’t mess it up,” she whispered into the cloth of his shirt.
She could hear the van doors slamming and knew that the rest of the group was very close to being ready to leave.
In an hour or so, the group would begin the drive from Florida to Montana. With an unconscious Arturo strapped in the back seat. Celia just hoped that they wouldn’t get pulled over.
Celia couldn’t even begin to contemplate the next leg of their journey. Not when her mind was still full of the swamps, of this place, of Jean Luc. She wanted to crawl up and lock her legs around his waist, but she was mindful of the injuries he’d healed from only two days ago. He wasn’t a god, she reminded herself. He was a man. Her man.
“No matter what happens…” Celia told Jean Luc.
“I know,” he said right away, a smile softening his face. He stroked a big palm over her silver hair. He wondered what color she’d dye it next. “No matter what happens, I’m your family now.”
“And I’m your family now.” She tugged at his shirt until he bent his head and kissed her.
He pulled back from the kiss and looked at her in amazement. “I just realized,” he told her, sweeping a palm over her back, “the map, the original one, it said that we’d find what we sought. I thought it was all a joke after Arturo attacked us. But maybe that part was right. Maybe I was seeking you this whole time and hadn’t even figured it out yet.”
“You big romantic,” she whispered, emotion in her voice even as her smile teased him.
He rolled his eyes at her and they both laughed as they turned back to the storm shutters and finished nailing them up. Together, side by side, they gently closed the doors on their pasts.
The End
The Shifters Seduction
PROLOGUE
Twelve-year-old Tre Sullivan cracked his knuckles nervously as he looked at the closed door of his parents’ bedroom. Well, he supposed it was just his father’s bedroom now. His mother had been gone for six months already. He sighed and started to shuffle away but froze when he heard a telltale sniff from inside the room.
Dad was crying again. Which, if he followed the usual pattern, meant that he wouldn’t come out of the room again for the rest of the night. Which meant another night alone for Tre.
Tre ignored the tightness in his throat as he padded quietly toward the kitchen. He wasn’t going to cry about it. There was enough of that in the house. His mother’s death couldn’t break both of them. There wouldn’t be anything left if Tre allowed himself to break just like his father.
He flicked the lights on in the kitchen and went to the fridge. He groaned and leaned his forehead against the handle of the fridge door. Nothing. Nada. Not even an old jar of pickles. Pizza it was.
Tre called in the order, shuffled through the pockets of his dad’s coat to find the cash he needed and then retreated back to his bedroom. He didn’t close the door. If he did, the walls would shrink. There would be nothing but eight black hours until sunrise.
He slid into his desk chair and booted up his old desktop. It was ancient, a dinosaur. His mother had brought it home from her old job and told him that if he could get it to work, he could have it. He’d gotten it to work, alright. Even now, it was flickering on and purring like a kitten.
The screen flashed blue, lighting up rectangles of color over his retinas. He breathed a sigh of relief. Things were okay in this world. Things were always okay in this world.
CHAPTER ONE
Twenty Years Later
For the first time in two months, Tre Sullivan was alone. He ambled along through a copse of trees, sniffing at the ground. Every step forward he took with one of his paws was a little thrilling shock to him. The length of his claws. The thickness of his fur.
Needless to say, he wasn’t used to the fact that he’d been transformed into a bear shifter. It helped that Jack and Jean Luc had been transformed as well. The three of them had formed a brotherhood of sorts. They could feel one another’s emotions when they were in human form and they could speak in one another’s minds when they were in bear form.
But now, in the middle of Nowhere, Montana, Tre was alone, truly alone. He was a mile from the homestead where they’d arrived two days ago. Thea’s house. She was one of the women along on this adventure with them. She was Jack’s woman, which, to Tre, meant that she was sort of a sister-in-law. Considering the sort of brotherhood between Tre, Jean Luc, and Jack. Which made Cel
ia his sister-in-law as well. Tre could palpably feel the love between her and Jean Luc from fifty feet. It was like a blanket of emotion around the two of them. A cocoon.
He envied that a little. Not the love part. That part seemed like suicide to Tre. But the cocoon part, that sounded good. It sounded good to have a little layer of protection between his ass and the rest of this crazy adventure they’d all found themselves smack dab in the middle of. One by one they’d been hunted in this group and something was telling him that his number was about to be up. It was about to be his turn.
He’d always had good intuition. It was part of the thing that made him such a good hacker. He understood something about the world that others didn’t. He was always able to see a pattern in the way things turned out. He’d known people who’d said his intuition was almost spooky. Like psychic or something. But Tre didn’t buy that. He paid attention, was all. People left all sorts of trails both from where they’d been and where they were planning to go.
Besides, the human race had been around for millennia. It would be arrogant to think that anything truly new could ever happen. Which was why he followed his intuition so well. He followed the pattern and made good guesses. None of them had wanted him to go out on his own, they thought it was better to stay together as a group. But Tre had just sort of known that nothing was going to happen to him. He’d be safe for the next few hours. And to appease them all, he’d agreed to shift into his bear form so that he could defend himself if he needed.
He hadn’t realized just how damn good it would feel to be on his own in bear form. It was like jumping into a fresh cold lake at dawn, but in a good way. It was like watching the sun through the leaves and then the wind shifts and the sun gets in your eyes for a moment, in a good way. It was like a long, hard run that he knew was gonna leave his muscles wrecked the next day, but in a good way.
That was the best he could explain it. Being in bear form was just an instinctual rightness, an animalistic simplicity that made every decision very easy. Though his thoughts were still decidedly human, his human worries and concerns fell away. He was calm and happy. He thought perhaps that was also in part due to the fact that he was a grizzly and they were in his natural habitat these days.
The maps had brought them all the way to Montana. He liked it better than Florida, where they’d been before, but not as much as Northern Michigan, where they’d been before that.
It was strange to him that he was starting to think of their group as family. He hadn’t had real family in a long time. Since his mother died. But he supposed that being chased by a soul-hunting demon, attacked by the demon’s right-hand man, and getting transformed into shifters was most likely a recipe for automatically bonding a group.
Tre sat back on his haunches and looked at the trees around him. His great grizzly head was the size of a dinner chair, his shoulders almost as wide as the front seat of a car. He enjoyed the size of himself as a grizzly. The smell of the pine trees in the distance was sharp. The blue sky above him was bigger and bluer than the ocean. He could almost taste the water vapor making up the puffy white clouds sailing over the distant mountain ranges.
What was it about distance that turned everything that same, hazy blue? Something tugged at the edge of Tre’s mind and he turned back in the direction of the homestead. There it was again, and he realized now that it was a voice.
Jean Luc’s voice in Tre’s head.
“Tre, man. Come back. He’s awake.”
Tre bounded forward, toward home, as fast as he could go. He didn’t have to ask who ‘he’ was. It was Arturo. The demon’s right-hand man who they’d captured and nearly killed. He was waking up.
Tre kicked into an even higher gear. Thea’s home came into view. Rickety and leaning to one side, the farmhouse must have once been white. It had a huge, picturesque, wraparound porch complete with swings. Tre could smell the animals in the barn and stables as he, still in bear form, bolted past. He could also smell and hear their unease at the proximity to a grizzly. When he was ten feet from the house, he stilled his run, closed his eyes, and concentrated. A strange, cold density came over him and had Tre shaking out one limb and then the next and the next. He was back in his human form.
“Oh, good. You’re back.”
Tre’s eyes came open to see Caroline Clifton leaning over the porch rail toward him. She barely blinked at his complete nakedness. Tre resisted the urge to cover himself as he strode forward to the stairs where he’d left his clothes. He tugged on his pants. “Jean Luc shifted and called me back. Arturo’s awake?”
“Just barely,” she replied, those caramel honey eyes wide and on his back as he shrugged into his shirt. He knew that she was sort of fascinated with the mosaic of tattoos over his back and chest and arms. Whenever he was shirtless, he always caught her looking. “You’re blushing.”
“Ah.” He couldn’t very well deny it. Tre was a redhead. When a redhead blushed, there was no pretending that redhead wasn’t blushing. He felt the heat of it race up his neck and to his cheeks. “Yup.”
“Why?” She cocked her head to one side, a furrow in her brow. Her chestnut hair tumbled over one shoulder as she tucked her hands into the pockets of her neat blue trousers. She wore demure little flats and a trim blouse.
Tre didn’t look at her as he shoved his feet into one sock and then the other. Sometimes he wished that Caroline had that kind of icy, unapproachable beauty that models and actresses had. Instead she had all this friendly beauty. With her big smile and kind eyes and soft little voice that was always laughing or asking a question. She was the kind of pretty that made a man want to stay up too late talking to her on the phone. Or spend a stupid amount of money on an Italian dinner. Or make sure her feet were tucked under a blanket at night. Not Tre, he didn’t exactly feel that way, it was just that he could see how a man could feel that way. He cleared his throat. “I’m starting to think I should get you some singles.”
She cocked her head. “Singles?”
“Yeah, considering how often I strip for you.” Tre made a joke out of the fact that she’d seen him naked a handful of times, all for bear-shifter-related reasons.
She laughed, that bright, clear bell of a laugh. “Oh, that’s why you’re blushing? You don’t have to blush about that, Tre. You’re a very handsome man. You have nothing to be embarrassed about.”
He held open the screen door for her and she ducked under his arm. He stared after her. Handsome? He’d never been called handsome a day in his life. He’d made peace with his coppery carrot top and pale skin, though it had been a source of endless ridicule for him when he was a kid. The tattoos helped with that. People usually commented on those before they commented on his hair these days. He definitely didn’t think of himself as unattractive. He had pretty fair odds with the ladies. But with his thick glasses hiding his green-brown eyes and his wiry frame, he was just strange enough to have never been considered handsome. Except by Caroline, apparently.
He shook his head as she hurried through the kitchen toward the back guest bedroom where they’d plunked Arturo down a few days ago. When they’d first kidnapped him, they’d accidentally knocked him out using their bear emotional telepathy skills. He’d slept through the entire trip to Montana all the way from Florida.
Tre ducked his head into the door to Arturo’s bedroom and felt Jean Luc and Jack both relax now that he was there. There was no question that the three of them were stronger when they were all together.
“What’d I miss?” Tre asked, scanning the group. Jack and Jean Luc stood most of the way in the room. Jack’s hands were in his pockets and Jean Luc’s were crossed over his chest. Thea leaned back against one wall, a wry tension emanating from her. And Martine, the demon hunter in their midst, knelt at the edge of the bed, her coppery blonde hair pulled back and her hands in fists at her sides. Tre’s eyes automatically arrowed in on Arturo lying on the bed. He was shirtless and sweating, his black hair as wet as ink across his forehead. Every few seconds, A
rturo’s eyes fluttered open, only to have the lids dragged inexorably back down, as if even that was too much of a battle.
Tre looked over to see that Jean Luc’s eyes were closed. Tre could tell he was probing out toward Arturo, searching to see if he could get a read on his feelings. Automatically, Tre closed his eyes and did the same; moments later, he felt Jack join them.
Tre stood with his eyes closed, but it was almost like they were open. He could feel Jack on one side and Jean Luc on the other so clearly he felt as if he were looking at them. He could feel Jack’s fury at Arturo, his half wish that the guy just hadn’t survived any of this. He could feel Jean Luc’s cautious trepidation, his understanding of exactly how much power Arturo had. And, lastly, Tre started to get a sense of another set of feelings. Arturo’s feelings.
With his eyes still closed, Tre’s eyebrows hopped high on his forehead. The other time he’d felt out with his feelings for Arturo’s feelings, he’d come up against something snaky and reptilian. Arturo’s emotions were dry and cold and constantly writhing away from anything warm. But this time, that quality was gone. Arturo’s emotions were warm, pulsing almost. And they were almost completely pure pain.
Tre stepped back as if he’d been burned, losing the connection with Arturo. He opened his eyes to see that Jack and Jean Luc had done the same.
“What is it?” Martine asked, turning to face them. Her eyes were narrowed.
“Pain,” Tre answered. He trained his eyes on Arturo’s lined face.
