by Selena Scott
“Just tell me one thing,” Jean Luc said. “Are you in trouble?”
“What?” Arturo turned, confused by the question and even more confused by the vague concern he could sense coming from the big man. No one had felt concern for Arturo in 400 years and he wasn’t sure he liked it. It felt awkward and strangely burdensome. “What are you talking about?”
Jean Luc sighed. “Come on, Arturo. We’re shifters. As much as you love to block us out, we can read your feelings, okay? Fifteen minutes ago I wake up from a dead sleep and I can sense that you’re shifted and sprinting. Either chasing or being chased. And then half a second later you’re scuffling. And then your heart is pounding and you’re all revved up and sick as a dog. And, if I’m not mistaken, turned on as hell. So what the fuck just happened? Are. You. In. Trouble.”
Arturo glared at Jean Luc. He knew that the other three men were often in one another’s heads. They either didn’t know how to or didn’t care to block one another out. But Arturo didn’t play that game. He let them in when he absolutely had to and besides that, he kept that gate firmly locked. He’d been alone for 400 years. He didn’t want three twenty-first century dudes in his head. Apparently, he’d let his guard down when he’d gone after Martine.
He didn’t completely understand what had just happened with her, but he definitely knew that he didn’t think it was any of Jean Luc’s business.
“Sounds like you had a very compelling dream just now,” he sneered at Jean Luc.
“Bullshit, Arturo,” Jean Luc strode forward and slapped a hand over the kitchen door, keeping Arturo from leaving. “You were just shifted and freaking out about something. I’m not even asking you to tell me the details here, okay? I just want to know that you’re not out here battling some supernatural force without telling us.”
“Your concern is touching,” Arturo quipped dryly. Though touching wasn’t the right word at all. Jean Luc’s concern was actually righteously annoying.
“Tell me,” Jean Luc growled through gritted teeth. “If there is more to this story, we need to know. This is our lives at stake.”
“What just happened wasn’t dangerous for me or for you. And I’m not explaining any more. Go the fuck to sleep.” He shoved past Jean Luc and strode into his room, slamming the door on this night.
A few moments later, he heard Jean Luc creaking down the halls of the strange house one floor above him. He heard his footsteps in the room above him.
Great. Now Arturo knew exactly who he’d heard having a grand old time in the bedroom above his.
Arturo laid down in his bed and tugged the sheets up, a foul mood infecting him. A strange feeling started in his chest as he heard the low rumble of Jean Luc’s voice and then the soft murmur of Celia’s voice. He heard the bed creak as Jean Luc laid down and then more murmurs to one another.
Arturo remembered what it was like to crawl into bed next to a partner. For that woman to ask if everything was alright. To slide across the bed until he found the sheets that were warmed from her body. To pull her in close until her silky hair laced over his neck.
He’d had that once. Though it was so long ago, the memories were dim and gray, like he was viewing them through thick layers of smoke.
Arturo drifted into an uneasy sleep, only fully surrendering when an image rose up and greeted him. It was dark all around him, and in front of him a golden silhouette swayed. He followed that silhouette into the dark, straight into the land of sleep.
CHAPTER THREE
Martine slept late the next morning, something she almost never did. She woke up in the blinding heat of a mid-morning ray of sun. She could feel the edges of her being dissolving softly into the sunlight and she lay still for a moment, awake and reveling in the feeling. She didn’t suppose humans ever had this feeling. When the light caught her just right and she could feel her body open up and accept the world right into it. She never knew if she was mixing with the world or if the world was mixing with her, but either way, it felt good.
Martine usually felt very calm and very rested when she woke up in the morning, but this morning her heart was racing along without her, as if it were determined to get someplace on time. Why would she…. Oh.
Last night came back to her in two parts, like two separate scoops of ice cream onto a cone. The first part. Where she’d packed her things, including her regrets, and set out, determined to be alone yet again. Determined to fight.
And then there was the second part of the night. Arturo, a dark smudge against a darker sky. His eyes looking like they could be painted with two brushes of a paintbrush through black paint.
Chasing her, determined to follow her. Shifting, electricity, touching.
Her body buzzed in a very strange way. She was heated up and antsy. Her skin bunched up and the hairs on her arms stood at attention.
Maybe she was getting sick.
Martine sat up and looked down at herself in confusion. She was still covered in red dirt from the night before. And now, so was her bed.
She rolled out of bed and immediately pulled her sheets off, bunching them up. She’d take a shower and do her laundry.
She smiled to herself for a moment. It was so human, so domestic. Her smile faded. Who was she fooling? No one. Least of all herself. Martine was not human and she was not domestic. She was put on this earth for one reason. To slay demons. She was a warrior. Not a laundry doer.
Still. It was rude to leave it for someone else to do and she wasn’t going to sleep in muddy sheets.
She didn’t acknowledge to herself that that meant she was planning on staying another night in the house with the group.
She just quickly washed up, pulled on clean clothes—all black spandex, of course—and threw her laundry into the wash. She was confused for a second when she saw that there was already a set of dirt-streaked sheets in the washer. And then she realized that they must be Arturo’s.
Her heart started up on that insistent racing that was as confusing as it was frustrating. She was usually so calm!
Martine entered the kitchen and just quietly observed for a moment. No one had noticed her enter, which was common. She was quite good at going unnoticed. And though she viewed it as a curse, there were many times she was grateful for the skill. Like now. She stood just to the side of the doorway of the kitchen and watched the seven.
Tre was rubbing the bridge of his nose, making his glasses bounce on his fingers. He laughed, loud and irreverent, at something that Caroline leaned over to whisper in his ear. Jean Luc frowned at whatever he was reading in the newspaper, sliding out a section for Thea when she asked from across the table. Celia and Jack were busy cleaning up from breakfast, Celia strong-arming a blackened pan in the sudsy sink and Jack scooping leftover fruit salad into a Tupperware.
Arturo sat apart from the rest of them, in an armchair under the window, his eyes closed and his hands folded over his stomach. He looked tense and uncomfortable, even for his quasi-relaxed pose. Martine allowed her eyes to skitter away from him after a moment, as if he were too… something to look directly at. Then, deeming that impulse as foolish, she forced her eyes to settle on him again.
Even though it brought a healthy blush to her cheeks, she studied him directly for a good long minute. He had purple under his eyes and his inky hair had grown long and unkempt. There was stubble on his chin that was so black it looked almost blue. He looked utterly disheveled, but that wasn’t what had Martine narrowing her eyes, riddling him out. There was something different about him and she couldn’t put her finger on it. Something was out of place.
Oh. It hit her all at once. Arturo, in the armchair, was sitting in a patch of sunlight that was spearing in through the kitchen window.
Any room that Arturo typically entered, he went straight for the darkest corner. If there was a shadow, Arturo was normally leaning directly into it. But not today. His face was upturned, his eyes closed. He didn’t look peaceful and he didn’t look like he was enjoying it. No. He looked like sitt
ing in a patch of sunlight was something he was making himself endure.
Why would he do that?
“Oh! Morning,” Celia said, finally spotting Martine where she stood in the kitchen doorway. “There’s coffee in that Thermos thingy over there and we saved a plate of breakfast for you.”
“Thanks,” Martine said automatically, stepping further into the kitchen. She felt, rather than saw, Arturo’s eyes open across the room. She felt the two black beams of his gaze follow her across the room.
“You slept late today,” Caroline called to Martine.
Martine nodded, poured her coffee and took an immediate, scalding sip, hoping to cover the blush of her cheeks with her mug. She wished Arturo would close his eyes again, but she could feel him continue to study her.
“You must have needed it,” Celia said, also studying Martine. “Because you look great. Man, talk about some beauty sleep.”
“What?” Martine asked in confusion, her fingertips automatically rising to prod at her own face.
“Yeah,” Caroline agreed. “Seriously. You look like you just got back from a spa or something.”
Martine was spared from having to reply by Thea who spoke to Arturo through furrowed, skeptical eyebrows. “You, on the other hand,” she told him, “look like something the cat puked up.”
“Apparently he had a long night,” Jean Luc chimed in, not bothering to raise his eyes from the newspaper.
Martine almost choked on her coffee and busied herself by grabbing her plate of breakfast and sitting on the opposite side of the room from Arturo. Oh God. What would she say if Arturo told the group what had happened? She could barely explain what had happened to herself, much less a group of people with eyes and questions and judgments.
Even worse, she realized, he had the power to expose the fact that she’d been leaving the group. She knew that Arturo didn’t care a whit about group unity. He might even find it funny to reveal that she’d been leaving the group to venture out on her own. She knew, without question, that the group would view it as a betrayal. She wasn’t part of the seven, but to them, she’d been there from the beginning and they relied on her to stay. She knew that in the backs of their minds, having Martine up their sleeve had always been a comfort to the group. Finding out that she’d been venturing out on her own would shake them up—it might even make them more vulnerable to the demon. Martine squeezed her eyes shut, felt Arturo’s gaze on her, and silently begged him to keep his mouth shut.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack asked, looking back and forth between Jean Luc and Arturo.
“It means nothing,” Arturo said. “I shifted last night and apparently that woke up Jean Luc and sent him into a hissy fit.”
“Wait…” Tre cut in. “I think I dreamed about that. Weird. I can almost remember but not quite.”
“Me too,” Jack said, squinting to remember. “I had the weirdest dream. It was a shifter dream, but it was also a sex—never mind.”
Thea turned a 180 in her seat to raise her eyebrows at Jack. “Does that explain the lovely little wake-up call I had at 2 in the morning?”
“Oh!” Caroline chimed in. “Jack woke you up at 2? Tre woke me up at 2!”
“Huh,” Celia said, cocking her head to one side. “Sounds like we were all getting busy around 2 am last night.”
“Not all of us,” Arturo said.
“I’m even more confused now than I was last night,” Tre said. “Hold on. You shifted and somehow that woke up Jean Luc and then gave me and Jack sex dreams? How does that figure?”
Arturo shrugged lazily, though it did very little to mask his extreme annoyance with this conversation. Martine kept her eyes glued to her breakfast.
“Maybe the three of you are all in love with me,” Arturo said acidly. “And dreaming about me shifting is enough to rev your engines.”
“Arturo,” Thea said. “Not to be rude, but I don’t think anyone is sexually attracted to you right now. I’ll say it again. You look like something the cat puked up.”
Martine snuck a glance at Arturo. She couldn’t help thinking that Thea’s assessment was a tad harsh. Martine had, in fact, seen cat puke before and Arturo didn’t look that bad. He looked rumpled and disheveled and unkempt and exhausted and irritated and a little dirty. But he was still almost paranormally handsome.
“I see you’re not even attempting to veil your insults any longer,” Arturo replied, one menacing eyebrow raised.
“I’m not saying it to be rude,” Thea said, making Jack snort. “All right, maybe I’m being a little rude. But I’m also just making a point. Why are you wearing those tiny clothes again? We found you ones that fit.”
Arturo was, in fact, wearing old sweatpants and an old T-shirt that they’d scrounged up at Thea’s farmhouse in Montana. Eventually, they’d tracked down some athletic wear that fit Arturo’s long frame a bit better.
Arturo sucked his teeth, his eyes out the window, looking for all the world like he might just ignore her point-blank question. But then, finally, “I tore my clothes shifting last night.”
“Ah,” Jack said, sitting next to Thea at the table. “And we’re back to this mysterious night-shifting again.”
Arturo stood up. “I’ve told you everything I’m going to tell you about it.”
Martine felt a nearly swamping relief sweep over her. He wasn’t going to tell anyone what had happened last night. Her leaving, their fight. The warm, tense touching they’d done. The glowing energy. The flexing heat between his legs. The liquid warmth between hers.
For now, at least, it remained a secret.
“Oh, don’t leave in a huff,” Thea said. “Would it make you feel better if I admit that I’m being an asshole?”
Arturo ignored her, striding out of the kitchen and Thea lunged forward and grabbed him by the shoulder.
“I was just trying to suggest,” she said, “in as dickish a way as possible, that you go to that mall we passed about twenty miles back and get some clothes that fit.”
Arturo glared at her. “You want me to go to a mall?”
Caroline laughed. “I’ll go with you! Shopping can be fun. Trust me.”
“I’ll go, too,” Thea said suddenly. Malls weren’t her thing any more than they were Arturo’s. But the group was still mildly suspicious of Arturo’s intentions around the very innocent Caroline. Apparently he needed a chaperone.
“I will not be going,” Arturo informed them.
“Oh, please?” Caroline asked, rising up from her seat, her chestnut hair shiny over her shoulders and her hands clasped in prayer in front of her chest. Her big, white smile was what finally did it. “It’ll be fun, I swear. And you’ll be more comfortable in clothes that fit.”
Arturo looked down at himself and had to admit that he’d prefer to wear a shirt that didn’t gather at his armpits and show an inch of skin at his belly. And perhaps he’d like to wear pants that didn’t end at his calf and scrape a seam over his man parts.
He didn’t bother answering, just turned on his heel and left the room.
“Be ready in twenty minutes!” Caroline sang after him, a big grin on her face.
***
There were many things that Arturo hated about modern life. He hated cars. He hated advertisements on the radio. He hated how strangely flabby most men seemed to be. He hated how skinny women were expected to be. He hated the long, white line an airplane left behind, cutting the sky in half. He hated the constant hum of electronics.
But… he did not hate these clothes.
Arturo stood in front of a three-way mirror, Caroline grinning and clapping her hands behind him and Thea yawning in a chair. He turned one way and then the other. He wore jeans that fit him well. They were dark in color and a little tighter than he thought he’d like to wear. But he had to admit that they felt good. Secure. On top he wore a deep blue button-down with small black arrows patterned across every inch of it. It was soft material and buttoned to his throat.
Call him vain, but
he looked good. He looked big and slim at the same time. The color of his clothes made his eyes look darker and more menacing in a good way.
He missed the charmed smile that Caroline shot at Thea in the mirror. Thea, naturally more closed off than Caroline, wasn’t completely charmed. But she had to admit that it was a little fun to see Arturo strut and preen himself like a leopard.
In the end, they left the mall with lots of soft V-neck T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, three button-ups, two hoodies, some pajama pants, a pair of running shoes (that Arturo had openly turned up his nose at), a pair of leather sneakers (that Arturo had obviously thought were very sharp), and a bathing suit (Caroline had utterly insisted).
Caroline stuffed Thea and Arturo full of soft pretzels and Coke slushies and shoved Arturo into a barbershop at a far corner of the mall. She gave the barber explicit instructions on how to style Arturo’s hair.
A half an hour later, Arturo strode out of the mall, weighed down with bags and feeling weirdly exposed after his hair had been shorn so closely to his skull. Twice during his haircut he’d had to bodily force himself not to throat-punch the barber who dragged a shaver against his skin. It wasn’t a natural impulse of Arturo’s to let someone touch him like that. But he’d done it for Caroline.
He’d done this whole thing for Caroline, and he had to admit that he hadn’t hated it. He actually felt a strange shopper’s high as he slid into the back of their newly maintenanced rental van. Caroline and Thea sat up front.
Arturo eyed his new bags of clothes and as they pulled out of the parking lot toward home, an uneasy heaviness settled over top of him. He felt like maybe he’d just been tethered to the ground by an iron chain. He eyed his new clothing.
Earthly possessions.
Ugh.
What the fuck was he doing letting these mortals dress him up like a doll? He wasn’t one of them and it wouldn’t do any of them any good to forget that.
Arturo was an immortal. Though they’d freed him from his bond to the demon, he would never be completely free of the demon either. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Arturo knew that his fate was tied up with that of the demon’s. He knew as long as the demon walked this earth, Arturo would exist in this half-life he’d been living for four hundred years. He would be defined by restlessness and dissatisfaction. He’d never connect with another being again.
