by Selena Scott
Either way, they had a lot of time to kill. Tre wanted to go check out the forest as the three big bad bears, but Jack hesitated. He walked back up from the shore toward the women. They watched him.
He knew that even though they knew, intellectually, that there was a man’s consciousness inside the bear walking toward them, it still must have been a hell of a sight to see. He could see the trepidation in Celia and Caroline’s faces. Martine looked simply proud and Thea, well, she looked blown away.
Thea stood and slid past the other women, making her way down the stairs. She walked toward Jack, meeting him in the middle of the yard. She pulled up short maybe two feet from him. Slowly, she lifted a hand, held it out toward him.
Love for her burst in his chest. If he’d been in his human form, he would have told her right then and there, point blank, how he felt about her. Instead, all he could do was nuzzle her hand. When she lifted her other hand and gave him a scratch behind his ears, he let out a grumbling sound that startled them both. He was still getting used to the mechanics, he supposed.
She laughed a little and scooted closer.
“Jack? Can you understand me?” She sniffed and Jack, a little stunned, realized that she was misting up. He’d never imagined seeing her cry. “God, Jack, this is insane. I can’t believe you’re in there. But I saw it. There you were. And here you are. So beautiful. You’re such a beautiful animal, Jack. I hope that’s not offensive.”
Her arms slid further into his thick hide and then she was circling him with her arms, burying her face and hugging him.
He sat down on his back haunches and wished he could hug her back. He would have rested a paw on her back, but he didn’t trust himself yet to know how heavy those paws were. The worst case scenario would be to hurt her. He’d never forgive himself. So he just held perfectly still and let her hug the hell out of him.
I love you, he thought the words as hard as he could, hoping she’d somehow hear them.
“Who, me?” Tre asked from back by the water. “Did he just say he loved me?”
“He’s thinking about Thea, dumbass. He can’t exactly speak English right now.”
“Ah. Right.”
Jack laughed to himself and it came out like a rolling grumble. He supposed that he really was shackled to these two. He wondered how the bonds of the magic that connected them would change over time. But he couldn’t really imagine them lessening much. In just a short time, those two had become almost like family to him.
Thea gasped and pulled away from Jack, her eyes focused on something behind him in the forest.
“Jack!” Jean Luc shouted in his head.
He whirled around and accidentally knocked Thea to the ground. He bent to help her but she rolled away from the huge paw he was pushing toward her.
“Jack, run!” she shouted, scrambling backwards like a crab.
He looked then, finally, and the first thing he saw was the blue light.
“Don’t look at it!” Martine shouted as she sprinted past him, her coppery hair trailing behind her and knives glinting in the starlight.
He didn’t need her to tell him twice. He knew exactly what happened when he looked into that blue light. It threatened to drag him under. Made him a puppet. Hypnotized him.
In a second Jean Luc and Tre were on either side of Jack, a formidable threesome.
The three women were behind them, protected by a wall of bear. Only Martine was in front of the bears, a machete in one hand and a dagger in the other.
“Come out and play, little Arturo!” she called into the woods. None of them had ever heard her voice like that before. Usually she was calm, almost aloof. Now, she sounded threatening and excited. Like this was a fight she really, really wanted.
“Keep those eyes closed,” Jean Luc hissed to Jack. How he’d known that Jack was half a second away from opening them, he’d never know.
“Why just me?” Jack asked.
“Because the light is meant for you, Jack. It’s calling to you. We can feel it,” Tre answered through gritted teeth. It was sort of calling to him too, but not the way it did to Jack. It was a strange magic. Designed to call to Jack on an elemental level.
“Is he there? Arturo?” Jack asked, his eyes slammed closed, hating every second of being on the losing end of this equation. Why him? Again he asked himself the question: why was Arturo singling him out?
“Of course I’m here, you fool.”
The voice was smooth and sinister, speaking in Jack’s head the same way that Tre and Jean Luc’s voices were.
Jack fought the urge to open his eyes.
“You won’t play my game?” the voice spoke in his head again. “Then perhaps your woman will.”
“No!” Jack shouted it in his head and a long, horrifying roar echoed out of the cavern of his chest.
“Thea!” Caroline’s voice shouted from behind them. “No!”
That was all it took to have Jack opening his eyes onto his own personal nightmare. Thea, blind and hypnotized, was crossing the lawn toward the glowing blue light halfway down toward the lake.
The light was so beautiful, as beautiful as it had been in his room before. It was soothing and seductive and called him forward. He wanted nothing more than to swallow it down, bathe in it, press his hands to the light. He was sure, as he’d been before, that if he could only get close to it, he’d reach some manner of ecstasy.
He stumbled forward, toward it. He heard shouts but couldn’t make out any words in particular.
He didn’t care about anything but the light. The light.
It was then that something crossed into his vision and stopped him. Thea. Thea was going toward the light, too. And it wasn’t slow. She was sprinting.
His heart stopped. He knew, suddenly, without question, that she would die if she touched it. The light still summoned him, beckoned him close, but that desire was nothing compared to his desire to protect her. He bounded forward in his bear form and, not trusting himself not to hurt her, skidded in front of her, blocking her path.
She looked frustrated and lost, trying to get around him to get to the light.
“Hold her back!” Martine shouted. “Arturo, show yourself, you coward.”
Jack looked around and realized that though the voice was in his head, there was no materialization of the man.
Celia and Caroline came out of nowhere and took Thea by the arms, holding her back.
“Isn’t this precious,” said a man, standing on the porch, back behind them all. They whirled around, horrified at the sight of him on the porch. He shouldn’t be anywhere near the place that had kept them safe through all of this. “You’re all protecting one another. Even the bears. Awww.”
He was just as handsome as the first time they saw him. And just as creepy. Dressed in all black, his dark eyes and dark hair seemed to be made of shadows themselves. “I see the group bonding exercises are going well, Martine. Kudos. Maybe you’ll actually manage not to get one of them killed this time.”
She was charging toward him, knives glinting, rage on her face, but it was the wrong move. Arturo merely flicked his wrist and the blue light, glowing benignly behind them all, started racing straight toward the group.
“Run!” Caroline shouted and the group scattered except for Martine, who charged the sphere; she slapped it out of the air with her machete and it seemed to dim its light.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be, woman,” Arturo growled. “If you drag this out, he’ll only make it harder on whichever soul he takes.”
Arturo flourished a hand and pointed it straight at Thea’s heart, while she lay on the ground, her head in Celia’s lap, her eyes clenched tightly closed.
Jack watched in horror as the blue light raced directly toward Thea’s prone body. He bounded toward the porch, faster than he ever thought possible. There was a satisfying crunch as one swipe of his paw took out half the porch stairs and caught Arturo on the side. He obviously wasn’t a human because the swipe of Jack�
��s paw would have felled a tree and torn a man in two. Arturo was tossed to the side like a bag of flour, sure, but he wasn’t killed.
The blue light stopped in its tracks as now both Jack and Martine raced toward Arturo. He rolled away from one of the knives Martine threw and just barely missed a swipe of Jack’s paw. Jack roared as he bounded after Arturo. He saw the blue light whiz past him, just missing him. He’d had enough. He was over this.
He swiped again and this time he caught Arturo square in the chest. The man crumpled forward, seeming almost broken in half. When he raised his head, there was something akin to hatred there, blind, irate hatred. The blue light raced toward Jack again, but he noticed it had dimmed considerably. The light raced toward its master and hit him full in the chest. The light whited out the shadows for a moment before it blinked. Everything was gone.
Jack fell back on his haunches and turned back to the group. Thea sat up, blinking. Martine bent over, her hands on her knees. “Good one,” she panted at him. “You sent him away, hurt him enough to send him away. Just like I did last time.”
Martine stepped forward and inspected the place where Arturo had just disappeared. “I’d say we should get back inside but—”
“No.” Celia looked around at everyone from where she sat, Thea’s head in her lap. “I’m sorry. I know that shit was intense, but that’s where I draw the line. No bears in the house.”
The group burst out laughing, obviously needing the tension breaker.
“Alright,” Caroline said, jumping up. “I have an idea.”
She was back a few minutes later with her arms full of blankets and a bottle of water for Thea, who had yet to do much besides sit up and take a few deep breaths.
Caroline spread out the blankets for the women and snuggled in herself.
The men, in their bear forms, made a sort of protective circle around the women who snuggled under the blankets, their eyes on the stars.
Thea and Jack pushed up against one another and she was grateful for the warmth of his fur. It was there, with the stars shining brightly above and the new moon high in the sky, that they stayed all night.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jack awoke with a shiver. There was dew on his bare skin and a warm woman curled up next to him. He sat up and held his head, feeling like he was recovering from the flu. He heard a groan and saw that the other two were perfectly mirroring his position. Naked and a little freaked out.
He’d turned into a bear last night. He’d fought a demon. Thea had almost died.
He looked down at her and saw that she still slept peacefully amongst the huge blanket bed the women had made.
He leaned down and nuzzled her before he rose, following the other two as they wordlessly made their way to the lake.
Seemed that they all wanted the same thing. A dip in the lake.
They swam wordlessly, letting the cool water wash away some of the strange, energetic residue from last night. For a while, this whole predicament had seemed sort of normal. It now seemed excessively strange again.
When they made it back to shore and had pulled on their discarded clothes again, they found that the women had gone inside; breakfast smells wafted out to greet them.
They were greeted with hugs and cheers from the women as they came in and Jack noticed immediately that Thea wasn’t there.
“So,” Martine asked, “how was it? Your very first shift?”
“Ah,” Jack said after a minute. “Words escape me. I’ve, obviously, never experienced something like that before.”
“How does your connection to one another feel?” Martine asked, leaning over the counter and eyeing them. The three men felt like they were at a doctor’s appointment.
They turned to one another and shrugged, silently agreeing.
“The same, I guess,” Tre said. “I mean, it was crazy to speak to each other in our heads—”
“And to hear Arturo in our heads,” Jean Luc put in, scowling. That had been a horrific invasion to him. If Jack hadn’t done it, Jean Luc was seconds away from beating down the demon himself.
“You heard Arturo in your heads?” Martine asked sharply.
“Yeah, he spoke to us. Is that unexpected?”
Martine’s brow furrowed. “It means that he has a connection to you three. One I didn’t expect. Accidental, maybe? It was unintentional when he made you shifters? Strange. Very strange.”
“So,” Caroline said, slicing up bananas at the counter. “Does this mean that he’ll still be after us?”
“I think so,” Martine nodded. “Some demons are known to give up after they fail, but the fact that your connection to one another is still strong indicates that there is still danger at play. And the fact that he’s sent Arturo three times in two weeks implies that he wants one of you very badly.”
“He?” Celia cut in, though all of them were wondering the exact same thing. “He who?”
“Why, the demon of course,” Martine looked at them all like they were completely losing it. She knew that humans were mortal, but she didn’t know that they apparently had the attention spans of a puppy.
Again, Celia was the one to speak, slowly, carefully. “Are you telling us that Arturo isn’t the demon?”
“No!” Martine exclaimed. “The demon is hideous beyond belief. Arturo is his soldier. He was a man at one point. A bear shifter like you three. Now he works for the demon. Sold his soul, in fact. Well, half of it. Long story.”
Jack shook his head. This was all too much. He needed Thea. Where the hell was she? He strode toward the stairs to find her when she came sprinting down, her map in her hand.
“You are not gonna believe this!” she called. She strode forward and threw her map onto the kitchen table. “It changed.”
They crowded around the table to see and sure enough, there was a new map there where the old one had been.
Celia left the room and came sprinting back with her old map. “Mine, too.”
One by one, they each retrieved their copy of the map until they were all laid out on the table. They were identical. A new place. None of them recognized it until Jean Luc leaned down and squinted at it. “I think… son of a bitch.”
“What?” Celia asked anxiously.
“I think this is right around where I grew up. In Florida.”
“Another connection,” Martine muttered.
“Arturo doesn’t actually think we’re dumb enough to follow this map, does he?” Thea asked. “It’s obvious that he’s leading us to our deaths at this point.”
Martine leaned forward and flipped one of the maps over. “I was thinking the same thing. Except…”
The words there had changed, too.
Seven Souls
Down to One.
Each part weak on your own.
Separate if you dare.
And say goodbye
forever
to the Seventh Soul.
“So, now,” Celia said slowly, dropping down into the chair beside her, “if we don’t follow the map, one of us will automatically forfeit our soul? God, they’re gonna kill me at work.”
“Is there any chance this isn’t true?” Tre asked, leaning forward to study one of the maps, his eyes squinting. “Could Arturo and the demon just be bluffing in order to get us all in one place at one time?”
“No,” Thea answered and surprised them all. “Can’t you feel it, Tre? The connection between us all? It isn’t waning. It’s getting stronger.” She paced away toward the window and looked out. “Trust me. You can’t walk away from it. I know what that feels like.” She turned back. “It was because I walked away that Arturo singled out Jack. Because I love him and I walked away. It made him vulnerable. Arturo thought he’d be easier to take because he was abandoned by me.”
“You came back,” Martine reminded her softly. “That’s why Arturo couldn’t take his soul. Because you love him and you came back.”
Thea nodded, her eyes distant. It was time to give up this guilt that had been r
iding her since she’d left. She came back in the end. And that was what was important. She came back and she wasn’t leaving again. “He’s not lying. These maps aren’t a trap. They’re a promise.” She picked one up and threw it back down. “If we separate, we become vulnerable.”
“So….” Tre dragged out the word, looking around at everyone. “We’re going to Florida, then?”
Thea looked up and saw Jack’s eyes on her. Burning. Shocked. “You love me,” he said from across the room.
Record scratch. The women watched intensely; the men wondered if they shouldn’t flee the room.
Thea shrugged, not particularly minding the audience. She figured, in a way, it was partly their business. “You know I do.”
“I didn’t know that,” Jack said, rounding the table slowly. “But I hoped like hell that you did.”
He stood in front of her, the air between them vibrating.
He cleared his throat. “Because I love you. And I’m pretty sure I have since I saw you picking knives in that general store. Meeting you was like meeting a part of myself I never knew I was missing.”
She nodded, understanding perfectly. “It was like my whole life my eye had been wandering and when it landed on you it was like that’s the one.”
“Damn right,” he muttered, cuffing her forward and swallowing her up in those long arms of his. “I’m gonna be yours until the day I die.”
“Damn right,” she repeated and rose up on her tiptoes to kiss him.
Caroline burst into tears. The group turned to her in shock. Seeing Caroline cry was like watching a kitten commit suicide. Celia rushed forward. “Caroline!”
Caroline let herself be hugged for a second before she wiped her eyes and stepped forward. “I can’t lie anymore. Not after that.” She pointed at Thea and Jack. “You’re so honest and brave and in love.” Caroline put her hands over her face and just cried.
Tre was caught between wanting to hug her and wanting to punch through a wall. He couldn’t stand to see her like this. It made him want to grind his teeth down to sand.
