by Selena Scott
***
“Hey, Tweety Bird!” Tre hollered up to Martine. “Time to head back in!”
Martine executed yet another perfect twirl through the air before she dive-bombed the packed, clay earth. She shifted on the land, tumbling into a rather childish run, her hair streaming behind her like a banner. She couldn’t help but laugh and turn her face to the sun.
After a moment, she tugged her stretchy clothes back on and fell into step alongside the boys as they all tromped back toward the house.
“I wonder where he-who-shall-not-be-named was this morning,” Tre wondered aloud.
“You think he’s still in pain from his run-in with the demon?” Jean Luc asked, kicking at a rock and making it skitter over the edge of a three-foot crack in the earth.
“No,” Martine answered quickly. “I think, besides a headache, he healed pretty quickly. Unfortunately, I think four hundred years in the demon’s clutches has made him used to that kind of pain.”
“Maybe,” Jean Luc responded after a minute. “But he’s seemed much more unhappy since then. He’s been prowling around the house in a bad mood and he hasn’t been sleeping.”
Martine peered at Jean Luc in confusion, but didn’t say anything. What did Jean Luc know about Arturo’s sleeping?
“How do you know?” Jack asked, blinking into the sun and pulling his cap low over his eyes. Jack was a very easy-going guy in general. He couldn’t be bothered by things like bad weather or extreme temperatures. He’d lived all over the world in all sorts of conditions. But there was something about this Utah sun that was starting to really grate on him. It was so unrelenting. Jack imagined himself as a criminal in an interrogation room. Utah made him want to give up all his secrets. The problem was, Jack didn’t have any secrets to give up. Which meant he found himself antsy in Utah. He wasn’t a man who was used to feeling antsy.
“I ran down to check on him the last few nights and he’s never in his room.”
“You think he’s skulking around the house feeling sorry for himself?” Tre asked.
Martine kept her face neutral. Arturo hadn’t been telling the other men where he’d been sleeping. She wasn’t sure what to think about that.
“Wait a second,” Jack cut in. “Arturo is MIA every night since his demon attack and we’re all okay with that?”
“What’re you suggesting?” Jean Luc asked.
Jack paused. He wasn’t sure what he was suggesting. The sun was discombobulating him.
Tre rescued him. “I do think it’s weird that none of us have any idea what he’s doing after dark. Are we sure he’s not possessed? Are we sure he’s not scarpering off to the demon’s dimension or something equally freaky?”
The sun beat down on their backs. They were still ten minutes away from the house, which meant that they were also ten minutes away from cold water and shade and showers and non-dusty air.
Martine’s thoughts raced faster than a hawk in a free-dive. Arturo hadn’t told them where he’d been sleeping, presumably for a certain reason. But she couldn’t for the life of her imagine what that reason was. And now his three supposed allies were jumping to all the wrong conclusions and potentially destroying all of the goodwill that had slowly been forming between them. It pained her to see it happening.
“He’s not been betraying you,” Martine said, choosing her words carefully.
The three men turned to her with a quickness that told her they’d forgotten she was there, as people so often did.
“How do you know?” Jean Luc asked, with genuine curiosity in his voice.
Martine cleared her throat. “I’ve been… keeping an eye on him at night, since the demon attack.”
If there was already a world record for most meaningful eye contact exchanged, the thirty seconds following Martine’s words would have smashed it to pieces.
The silent conversation went something like this:
Did she just say…
Nah. No way. Not what she meant… right?
I dunno.
No freaking WAY. Arturo and Martine?
Arturo.
And.
Martine.
WTF?!?!
“Martine,” Jean Luc started. Apparently he’d been elected to be the one who followed up with her. “When you say that you’ve been keeping an eye on Arturo… ah. What, uh, do you mean?”
“He’s been sleeping in my bed.”
“I knew he had the hots for you!” Tre crowed, pumping a fist in the air.
“Wow,” Jean Luc said, swallowing a whole mouthful of air the wrong way.
They’d arrived back at the farthest edge of the property and the house beckoned them in the near distance.
Martine’s attention was stolen by the promise of a cold shower and colder lemonade, by the secret delight of heavy wet hair dripping down a T-shirt, something she’d come to love about her human form. She loved the fingery tickle of it. She pulled ahead of the group and thus, she was the last one that the shadow made it to.
It wasn’t a cloud that pulled over the sun, it was more like a shaded filter being pulled through their dimension. The world went from toxically bright, a shocking red on blue, to the muted tans and grays of a faded photograph.
She quickly turned, and it was to see the three bear shifters blinking at one another in confusion, blinking at the sky, turning in 360s to try and figure out what was going on.
Like newborns, was all she had time to think before she was launching herself in between the demon and her comrades. By the time she reached them, she was simply golden light, stretching and arcing through the air.
The demon was not in physical form, either. He was a strange disturbance on the air. A ripple of despair. Were he to land on any one of her beloved humans, they would be immediately verklempt with the kind of emotional pain that dragged one straight to hell. This was the kind of despair that one didn’t bounce back from. Even if she were able to drag the demon away from her friends, they would never forget what it felt like to be that. Fucking. Sad.
Never.
She would never let them suffer in this manner. This was what she’d been born to do. To protect the human race from this manner of insidious disease. The demon was going to do everything he could to weaken any member of the group.
Martine knew in her heart that if he weakened one of the men, he would automatically weaken the woman who loved him as well. She would fight, because this was a perfectly strong group of women, but no person could watch their beloved spiral down into darkness and remain the same.
The demon, if he couldn’t paralyze them, would force them into transition, he would force them to adapt to the horrible new rules of a game that only he wanted to play. And in those moments of change, he would strike, like an adder at an exposed Achilles tendon mid-stride. And he’d take and take and take.
In those golden, stretching moments where she arced out to protect her tribe, Martine felt a being-deep disgust for this creature who knew nothing of giving.
After a lifetime of observing humans, she finally understood what was at the core of humanity. It wasn’t a jamming at the gas pedal of life, it wasn’t a constant desire to eat the world. No, it was balancing in the center of the see-saw of life, finding some happy medium between taking and giving. Anyone who fell too far to one side burned right out into nothing.
She saw that clear as day in the relationships that the three men she stretched her light over had created. These three men knew how to give to a partner, they knew how to take when they needed to, they knew how to fuckin’ be a human alongside another human.
And it was for the sheer miracle of that, the miracle of human-ness, that she became a protective shield of fiery gold over top of them. She was a blazingly bright scar across the bleak landscape. The demon, just a darkness in the air, slow-motion spiraled through the picture. She contracted in pain as he slammed into the shield of her gold.
But she held strong. He was a twisting arrow, dark and terrible, and he was determined. Hi
s failure to possess Arturo had made him vengeful and terrible. He would stop at almost nothing to gain the soul of one of the men that she shielded from him. She wouldn’t let him. She couldn’t let him.
Martine’s energy repelled the dark force of the demon and sent him catapulting backwards. She didn’t have time to check the others, or materialize before he was coming back, trying to go through her as she stretched out and protected them, protected the whole house.
Her energy was sparking and stretching, but slipping. He was dragging her shield to the center of his black magic, like a sword driving forward into a bed sheet. She was folding and crumpling around him and if he could get around her then there would be nothing in between him and the men, the house.
She twisted but was pinned in place by him. There were Tre and Jean Luc and Jack shifting, their bears squaring off, ready to fight the demon. There was nothing to protect them except for themselves.
And then there was a blue blur of light. It was a man. He was glowing. And then he was a bear, still glowing, his energy like a halo around him. He was filling in the gap between Martine and the men. He was protecting them just as she had.
The demon attempted to get around them, but he couldn’t. Everywhere he turned, there was more bright, horrible light and color, so much color.
The demon twisted away, released Martine, and was gone, back into his dimension of darkness.
Martine fell to the ground, a woman again. She was panting and naked and on her side.
There were hands on her shoulders. A familiar grip at her jaw. She was weightless as she was lifted off the ground and then there was only darkness.
***
Martine woke in a dark room with a firm hand at the back of her head.
“Drink,” a familiar voice said.
Martine blinked away her confusion as she accepted the cool water down her throat. She rolled her head and turned to look at the speaker. “Thea,” she croaked in surprise.
“Don’t talk,” Thea scolded. “Your throat sounds like it’s made of sandpaper.”
She let Martine fall back to the pillow and then set the water to the side.
“You really kicked some ass today,” Thea said, sitting back into the darkness.
Martine could tell from the quality of the dark that it was the middle of the night. She must have been knocked out for damn near half the day. Involuntarily, she looked around for Arturo. If it was the middle of the night, he should be there, right next to her. But it was just Thea and her in the room.
“What happened?” Martine rasped.
“The demon came for us,” Thea said. “You protected the men. Did your golden energy thing.”
“And then what?”
Thea paused for a second, as if she could barely believe what she was about to say. “And then Arturo protected you. He stormed out there like he had nothing left to live for. He blocked the demon and then laid himself over you to make sure he couldn’t harm you. Then he dragged you back in here, plunked you in a bath of warm water, tossed you in bed and—”
Thea snapped her fingers, as if that explained what happened to Arturo next.
“What does that mean?” Martine attempted to scramble up.
“Then he bounced out of here and I took over.”
Arturo stood in the dark hallway outside of Martine’s room and he listened to the two women talk. He felt an overwhelming, shoulder-dropping relief that Martine was awake. He couldn’t stop seeing the moment she’d flung herself in front of the men.
As he’d watched her, part of him had just thought, this is it.
He’d been sure that that was the moment that Martine was going to kill the demon. And then she would blink out of existence right along with him.
Arturo hadn’t been ready. He’d thought, ‘no’. He’d—God—wanted to stop it. How many centuries had he dreamed about destroying the demon and now he was stepping in to prolong the evil being’s life?
Arturo scraped a hand over his face. One makeout session with Martine and every single one of his priorities had been turned on its head.
Arturo was confused and frustrated and… angry. Yeah. He was good and truly pissed. How dare she come into his life now of all times?
“For the record,” a voice down the hall said to him, “it’s never the right time for the kind of feelings you’re dealing with right now.”
Arturo’s head snapped up and there was Jack, standing in the shadows at the end of the hall. His hands were in his pockets and his cap was pulled low on his head.
“What are you talking about?” Arturo rose up, quickly.
“I mean that you’re here sitting in a pile in the hallway and internally bitching about the timing of all this. And I’m here to tell you that the timing is never right to have your life completely flipped upside down by the love of a good woman.”
Arturo rolled his eyes and scowled as Jack ambled up the hall toward him. “I know you three fancy yourselves mind-readers because of our shifter connection, but trust me when I tell you that that is not what’s at stake here.”
Jack raised an eyebrow like he didn’t believe Arturo. “Then what’s at stake here, then?”
“I would think it would be obvious.” Arturo glared at Jack because there wasn’t a better place to put his anger at the moment. “There’s a reason Martine has been holding herself back from the group. There’s a reason that no one should feel close to her. There’s a reason why she threw herself in front of you all without so much as a second thought.”
And that, there it was, the part that infuriated Arturo more than anything. She’d tossed herself headlong into a potentially deadly fight with the demon. And she hadn’t hesitated. She hadn’t looked around for him. She’d just… done what she was here to do. She was here to fight the demon, not to make out with Arturo when the sun went down and didn’t that just piss him off?
“You mean because…” Jack couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“Because when she wipes the demon from the face of the planet, she’s wiping herself from the face of the planet.” Arturo spat the words into the dark hallway and made Jack wince. “I’m not reeling from having feelings, I’m reeling because those feelings are for the wrong fucking person. Because I’ve waited four fucking centuries to stab the demon through his fucking heart and I’m not pulling back now. Not even for—”
Arturo cut himself off and grabbed at his hair like a crazy man. It didn’t matter tonight. She wasn’t dying tonight and neither was the demon, so why was he tying himself into knots like this? He turned from Jack and disappeared down the hallway. He needed dark and quiet and alone.
Jack watched him go and he didn’t envy Arturo, not for one single second.
***
Martine wasn’t always good at understanding humans and their human choices, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Arturo was avoiding her. Distancing himself from her.
She was smart enough to understand his reasons if she really tried, but she suspected that clarity on this issue would only bring more pain. So Martine simply tried to put Arturo out of her head. She was healed up by the next day after the demon attack and resumed business as usual.
She did shifter training with the men in the mornings and afternoon, studiously pretending as if Arturo were just like the other men. She ate dinner with the group, her eyes on her plate. She watched the occasional movie in the evenings, never looking away from the television screen.
And every night, she took a pillow and a blanket and curled up outside of Arturo’s door.
He wasn’t coming to her room anymore, and he still needed protection, so this was the way it had to be.
Arturo knew he was a bastard of a royal degree to continue letting Martine sleep on the floor outside of his dingy room. But he also knew that there were more important things at play here than his own self-image.
If he crawled into Martine’s bed one more time, there was no telling what would happen. Arturo had to acknowledge that there wer
e feelings in his chest for her. It was like a flowering tree in springtime. He could see the yellow-green buds on all the branches weathering the weak sun and forty-degree weather. But give that tree one good blast of springtime, one good day, sixty degrees and sunny, and those flowers were going to bloom. He could not afford to let his feelings for her grow.
What he really needed was to kill the demon. The end. Hard stop. That’s all she wrote.
Roughly translated, that meant that Martine slept on a hard floor every night and everyone else in the group looked at Arturo like he was pond scum.
So be it.
He’d figured it was only a matter of time before the rest of the group figured out that something had happened between him and Martine. And that something was now very, very over. And now she was sleeping outside his door like a puppy kicked off the bed.
Needless to say, Arturo hated the nights.
Not as much as he hated the days, but still.
He spent his time grinding his teeth, letting his blue energy swirl angrily inside of him, and praying for the demon to come and end this, once and for all.
CHAPTER NINE
Martine accepted her fate. Lonely, but lonely wasn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things. She, too, was praying for the demon to come. Her last two encounters with him had left her confident.
For the first time in all her existence, she was positive that the demon was not stronger than she was. They might be evenly matched, but she wanted this more. She could never let the demon take another human soul.
In another world, Arturo loved her. In another world, she kissed his lips goodnight. In another world, she would grow old and die gently.
In this world, she waited for the demon. She sharpened her knives, slept soundly, ate well, and waited for the end.
It was four nights later that Jack spoke up at the dinner table. Thea had been concerned about him for a few days. There was something on his mind.
