by Ava Benton
Layla was the one with the feathers and beads. Daniela looked like a runway model—she had that perfect I rolled out of bed looking this stunning thing going on.
I nodded at the two of them. “He doesn’t stick around with you guys?”
“Not for long once we’ve settled in,” Nia replied. “He makes sure we’re comfortable for a little while, then goes looking for the next destination. I don’t think he likes to hang around in one place for too long.”
“I don’t understand what any of this has to do with me.”
I turned at the sound of Alice’s voice and could’ve slapped myself for almost forgetting about her.
I understood why she felt overshadowed by the others—they had that animal magnetism she could never have.
And she didn’t understand what it was all about.
She thought it was her fault, like she just wasn’t attractive or alluring enough or whatever.
I couldn’t tell her she was wrong. Not yet.
In fact, when I looked at her in the fading sunset that turned her red hair to flame, she was easily the most beautiful of all of them.
“You’re right. This isn’t fair. Come on. We’ll go inside and talk with the others, and it’ll be a lot clearer once we do.” I took her by the waist, the way I did back in the shop. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”
“Why do you care?” She sounded distracted, unsettled.
“I don’t know. I just do.”
“Because it’s your job,” she murmured, looking up at me.
“I don’t know,” I repeated. “Just come on.”
All I knew was that I wouldn’t let anybody hurt a girl with so much hurt already locked up inside her.
5
Alice
Everybody was gathered together in the cave, all of them. and they all looked at us when we walked in as a group.
No, not at us. At me.
“I did something bad,” I whispered. My feet stopped moving. “I can tell I did something bad.”
“You didn’t. Come on.” For the first time in the short time since we had met, Carter wasn’t grim or frowning. His smile was warm. The arm around my waist tightened protectively. “It’s going to be all right. I swear.”
“Why do I believe you?” I whispered, looking up at him. Just barely, since he wasn’t much taller than me.
His smile widened. “I guess I have one of those believable faces.”
When he pulled a little, I followed.
There were lanterns set up throughout the cave, making it look and feel a lot warmer than it ordinarily would. I had never been very deep inside, not far beyond the mouth, and going deeper and deeper into the heart of it felt like I was doing something wrong. Something wicked.
I still felt like a few of the group’s members—they were all so beautiful, how were they all so beautiful?—stared at me in an unfriendly way.
They resented me. I didn’t know why. For writing about them? But how could that make a difference?
Lance was there, sitting on a rock. Across from him sat two strangers who I assumed were Carter’s cousins.
Damn, all four of them dressed alike. Was it a uniform?
They turned to look at me as we approached and muttered something to each other.
Carter’s arm tightened again.
“It’s cool. Don’t worry about anything. We came here for you.”
I didn’t know what he meant—the thought of him or anybody else making a trip just for me seemed ludicrous, but why would he lie? The confusion thickened around me like layers of cotton batting.
I relied on him to lead me to where Lance waited.
“I never thought I would say this, but I wish Jordan was here.” Lance looked miserable.
“Is there any way to get word to him?” one of the cousins asked.
He was gorgeous, with ice blue eyes under thick, black brows.
“Who’s Jordan?” Carter asked over him.
“Their leader.” He stood, holding out his hand. “I’m Roan. It’s good to meet you. This is my brother, Slate.”
The other one nodded from where he sat.
Lance was completely beside himself. “It’s not like he carries a cell phone or lets me know where he’s going to be when he leaves. But he’s never gone for more than a week at a time, so he should be back soon. I don’t know what to do in the meantime.”
“I wish I understood this. What did I do to mess things up for you guys?” I asked, even though I was afraid to.
The girls had walked in with us and stood a few feet away, but wouldn’t look at me. Sadness flowed through me. Just when I thought I had found friends.
Lance shot Nia a dirty look. “I told you not to talk to her.”
“So it is my fault,” I said, feeling more miserable than I ever had. “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”
“We know you didn’t,” Roan said.
Carter nodded. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what? I don’t get it. Why is everybody talking in riddles? What is it that you can’t tell me?”
“Here. Sit down.” Carter led me to a rock in front of where Lance sat and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders.
I barely noticed until it was already tucked snugly around me.
Why was he being so nice?
He sat next to me, on the sand.
His brother sat on the other side.
What was his name? Had Carter even told me?
I was barely able to concentrate on anything for too long—maybe he had and I didn’t remember.
Lance looked at Roan and Slate. They nodded. Roan turned to me. “How much did Carter tell you?”
“I’m in trouble. I got them into trouble.” My chin quivered. “I didn’t mean to. I just wanted you guys to like me, and I wanted to write. I thought people would be interested in your stories because you’re so interesting. That’s all.” I looked at the girls and Lance, begging them to understand.
“I know,” Lance said, but he didn’t sound like he knew. He sounded like he wished we had never met.
“Carter was half-right. You’ll be in trouble if the people who are interested in what you wrote find you.”
“I don’t understand! What did I write that was so bad?”
Nia knelt in front of me with her hands on my knees. She finally looked and acted like the Nia I was used to. “The problem is that you wrote about us at all. I should’ve known better. There’s a reason we always move from place to place. We didn’t want them to find us, but I guess they have.”
“Who? Who could be after you? You’re all nice, good people. Aren’t you?”
She smiled. “Yes, I guess we are. But we’re not like you. I mean, haven’t you noticed we’re not like you?”
“You’re prettier than me,” I whispered.
She smiled. “We are not. But that’s not what I mean, either. The older ones—our parents—they all participated in a top-secret study performed years ago by the military.”
“Ours, too,” Carter added. “We never knew there were others like us four. Our fathers were subjects in the study.”
“All of you? But why? What was the study about?”
Carter cleared his throat. “It’s difficult to explain.”
“I think they were trying to build weapons,” Nia said, then shot a look at Carter. “Sorry. Maybe you’re not allowed to speak frankly, but nobody’s stopping me.”
“Be my guest.” His lips curved into a smile.
A dim flash of jealousy pierced my heart, but I was used to feeling jealous when a cute guy liked a girl prettier than me.
She looked back from him to me. “It had to do with altering the DNA. I don’t know exactly what happened, since my mother died a long time ago. She never liked to talk about it. I only know that the tests changed the subjects into something new. Something different than who or what they were before.”
“That’s impossible. You’re talking about science fiction.”
I felt a weird sense of foreboding. “Is this a joke?”
“I wish,” Carter muttered.
“What happened to the test subjects?” I whispered.
It was like a crazy dream, and I wanted to believe that was just what it was. A dream. I was making things up in my overactive imagination. Stories about government studies and secret plots. And a man who put his arm around me to make sure I felt safe.
“We’re not violent,” she said, squeezing my knees. “I swear. We’d never hurt you.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better,” I said with a shaky laugh. “Who are you? Weapons? You said weapons.”
“Yeah, I think the military wanted to create human weapons by making them more than human. They created a breed of shifters. You’ve heard of shifters.”
“You’re a shifter? Like the ones I’ve seen on TV, in the news sometimes?”
She nodded slowly. “We all are. Not exactly like the ones you might have seen on TV, though. You don’t have to be afraid. Please, don’t be afraid of us.”
“I—I’m not afraid,” I stammered.
I realized Carter was one of them, too, and his brother on the other side of me.
They had me surrounded. I couldn’t believe I had walked into a situation like that—it wasn’t like they had to drag me into it. I had stepped in all by myself. Idiot.
“The government made sure to cover up the experiments,” Carter said. “They didn’t want anybody finding out, so they destroyed all the evidence. We didn’t even know there was anybody quite like us until now.”
“And we banded together when our parents found each other,” Nia explained. “I don’t know how. I don’t think any of us were ever supposed to know how they hooked up. They weren’t supposed to find each other—that much I do know.”
“Can you imagine the trouble we could cause for them if we all decided to shift and attack?” Lance asked with a bitter laugh.
“That would be a mistake,” Carter replied in a tight voice. “We’re no match for weapons. We could cause trouble for the individuals, maybe, if we knew who ran the experiments. Who’s after us. But that couldn’t last for long. Word would spread, just like word of you guys has spread.”
“So…” I couldn’t piece it together in my head.
There were so many conflicting images. People I happened to like, changing into animals. It didn’t matter which type of animals, either. It only mattered that they weren’t human. And I didn’t know how to feel about that.
“So, when I wrote those articles, I told them about you? Is that right? They were never able to find you guys until now? All your hard work staying under the radar, never being able to have normal homes or easy lives. That’s all ruined because of me.”
“As I said, it’s not your fault. We’re the ones who talked to you without telling you how high the stakes were.” A tear rolled down Nia’s cheek. “I’m so sorry. I should’ve been smarter.”
“It’s all right,” I whispered, mainly because I felt like I had to say something.
“But it isn’t. Not really.” Carter moved a little closer.
I flinched away a little and instantly felt sorry for it.
“Why? Don’t I have any say in what’s a big deal and what isn’t?”
“They won’t stop at trying to get to us,” Nia explained.
“Me,” I said as my heart sank. “They want me, too.”
“Probably more than they want to round up the shifters at this point, because you have a voice. You can knock the whole thing down. You could expose them and what they did.”
“Oh, my God.” I covered my mouth with one hand as the pizza I had just eaten threatened to make a reappearance.
I jumped up and ran out of the cave as fast as I could while my stomach churned and just barely made it outside before I lost control.
At least I found a little spot behind the dunes before it all came up. I retched until my back and ribs ached, until my throat felt raw and sore. Until I went weak and fell to my knees.
Shifters. They weren’t human. And the government wanted me silenced.
Why me? Why did it have to be me?
The sound of a man clearing his throat rose above the crashing waves. “I brought you some water.”
Carter.
My blood ran cold. Another one of them. No wonder they all seemed so special, so different from me. Leave it to me to find them.
“You can set it there,” I choked out.
Moments passed, but I still felt his presence.
I closed my eyes and wished he would go away so I could cry. I needed a good cry right about then. The sort of cry that knocked a person out when it was all finished. A “crying myself to sleep” cry. But not while he was standing there.
“We’re here for you. You get that, right?”
“Please, leave me alone,” I whimpered as I covered my vomit up with more sand.
I had never felt so ashamed—not because I hurled, but because it was all my stupid fault. Whatever happened to any of us would be on my head, and all because I wanted to be special. I had wanted a career. A lot of good it would do me to make a name for myself, then die because of it.
“I can’t leave you alone. You need to understand that.”
“And you need to understand that I’m completely fucked up right now,” I snapped.
“I’m not asking you to let me in,” he said. “I’m not even asking you to let me sit near you. But I can’t leave you alone—we can’t,” he amended at the last second. “You’re the reason we’re here, and we can’t let you sit out here on your own.”
“I can’t even do this? I can’t even be alone?” I turned my head just enough to see him out of the corner of my eye.
He held out a bottle of water.
I took it and rinsed my mouth as discreetly as possible.
“Thank you.” I turned and sat down, legs folded, facing the water.
It was dark, with the only light coming off the boardwalk.
I could hear the happy, laughing people up there and could almost remember when I was one of them. I was just playing games and eating pizza with the girls not an hour earlier. I was one of the ones who didn’t know any better.
He was still standing there with his hands in his pockets. “Might as well sit, if you can’t leave me alone,” I mumbled.
“I don’t need your permission to sit,” he reminded me—but then sat with his arms extended across his folded knees.
We sat like that for a long time, almost side-by-side, watching the waves. I could just make out their shapes in the glare from the neon and blinking lights far behind me. Their sound soothed me, the way it always did. But it didn’t erase my pain or confusion.
“Were you always the way you are?” I mustered the courage to ask.
“Yeah. I mean, we didn’t start shifting until we hit puberty but we were born with the gene, I’m sure.”
“I just don’t understand any of it,” I whispered, shaking my head. “I mean, you hear about things like this. But you don’t imagine they’re actually true. You know?”
“It’s been a tough day for you,” he observed.
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I wasn’t trying to. I feel bad for you. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
“You and me both.”
We fell silent again.
I decided I liked him better when he wasn’t talking—not like there was anything at all he could say to make me feel better.
“You know,” he murmured after a while, “I mean it when I say we won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
“How can you promise a thing like that?” I asked. “Jesus Christ, these goons—whoever they are—will probably want you as much as they want the rest of them. You should be moving in the opposite direction of the direction I’m moving in. Far, far away.”
“That’s not how it works.�
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“It?”
“What we do. We don’t back out on people just because things might get uncomfortable for us. And my team has an advantage on the rest of the group back there.”
“What advantage?”
“We were Special Ops back in the day. We thought we were doing something good, you know? Big surprise, we weren’t. And the guys upstairs wanted us wiped out, too, just like everybody else. We’re something they wish didn’t exist, all of us, but especially my family and me. We did a lot of things we wouldn’t have done if they hadn’t ordered us to.”
“I don’t need to know.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” he murmured.
“Thanks.” I reached down and picked up a handful of sand, letting it sift through my fingers. “So, what can I expect? A bullet in my forehead while I’m taking out the trash one morning? Maybe I’ll get run off the road one day? Or when I turn the key in the ignition, the car will go up in flames?”
“You watch a lot of TV and movies,” he observed.
I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear his condescension just as clear as anything.
“Funny how I still couldn’t have imagined anything like this,” I snickered in disgust with myself. “God, I’m so stupid. And thoughtless. If I get them killed…”
“Which you won’t. They can take care of themselves. They need to move on a little more quickly than they thought they would. No big deal.”
“But people will be watching for them now, won’t they?”
He groaned. “I don’t know, Alice. I really don’t. But I didn’t come out here for them.”
“I know, I know. You came out for me. I don’t see why.”
“You don’t?”
He sounded surprised, which surprised me.
“One person versus dozens? It makes no sense.”
“You’re just an unwitting human. They’re used to going underground and staying away from humans. It’s their way of life. Not yours. You just happened to step into the middle of it. Leaving you to fend for yourself would be cruel.”
“It would be what I deserve,” I whispered. “I was selfish.”
“You were doing your job, or what you thought was your job. Stop beating yourself up. Do you do it a lot?” he asked.
