by Selena Scott
“Totally manageable.” He glanced her way for half a second.
She didn’t believe him. “You could make a portal, go back through for a few hours.”
He blinked at her. “You really think I would be that selfish? Endanger you like that?”
All of them had tools that could create portals, or gates, between Herta and Earth. Inka’s husband, a scientist, had invented it about two years ago. And it was what made the caravan possible. All they had to do was find where the enslaved shifters were, and then they could immediately create a door, get them through to earth, and close the door to anyone who might be chasing them. Easy as pie. Except they’d soon discovered that every time they used the tool to open a door, it called to hunters on Herta.
These men hunted shifters. They were ruthless murderers and enslavers. And they had a relationship with the portals that no one understood. It hadn’t taken long for them to realize that every time they created a door, a hunter wasn’t far behind them. It meant that they couldn’t cut back and forth as easily as they’d once hoped. And it meant that if Kain were to cut through, get a few hours of relief on Earth tonight, then cut back, he risked bringing hunters straight to their campsite.
Valentina didn’t answer. Instead she leaned forward and took a drink of water with her hand, the same way that Kain had. When she sat back, her palm landed on something between them. His ridiculous cap. He must have tossed it off. She frowned down at it. The night was cool enough to make her shiver, yet the hat was soaked through with sweat.
He wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were on the water and his elbows rested on his bent knees. If she hadn’t seen his face, felt the sweat on his hat, she wouldn’t have known he was in pain.
Valentina rose from beside him and disappeared into the woods. She returned with something clutched in her hand. It had a strong, cool scent. Like mint, but not quite. She went to her knees beside the creek and plunged her hand into the dark water. She searched for something. Her slender fingers came up with a rock and she studied it, tossing it away. She tossed away the next one as well. The third and fourth she kept. They were smooth and flat, like skipping stones.
Kain watched her, mystified, as she turned to him.
“Here,” she murmured. Her tone was both curt and soft at the same time. And then she did the last thing Kain might have ever expected from her.
She pressed the cool stones to the back of Kain’s neck. Her soft, strong fingers swept the stones up one tense muscle and down the other. He made a small sound in the back of his throat and let his head drop forward. Valentina’s fingers paused. But only for a second.
She brusquely pulled the back of his T-shirt up and pressed the stones to the tight muscles in his lower back as well. Kain hissed through his teeth and she wasn’t quite sure if it was pleasure or discomfort.
“Hm,” he shifted a little bit and chuckled. “You gave me the chills. I’ve been sweating my clothes through all night and just like that you give me the chills. How’d you do that?”
He looked back over his shoulder at her but she avoided his eyes. Looked, instead, at that long scar down his cheek. She liked scars. Always had. They told stories. “I’m a healer.”
He squinted his eyes at her. “I thought you were a warrior.”
“That, too. I’ve worked hard my entire life to be a warrior. But I was born a healer.” She shrugged, as if it were no big deal that with a few simple strokes of her hands she was easing the raging discomfort and low-level pain that had been chasing Kain for days.
When the stones began to warm against the heat of his body, she tossed them back in the river and came to her knees beside him.
She snapped open the leaves she’d picked in the forest and a thin, green juice trickled out, the fragrance tickling at Kain’s nose. She put the juice on her thumb and then firmly drew a line behind one of Kain’s ears and then the other. It instantly cooled him there, the fragrance soothing. Next, she took him by the chin and faced him toward her.
Kain’s calm, green eyes watched her carefully. She drew her thumb over his brow and down the length of his nose, dragging the leaf’s juice along there as well. Kain felt the cool burn soothe across his face. And the scent began to open up something in his head, to relieve the pounding headache that had started paying rent behind his eyes.
And lastly, she studied the leaf left in her hand. She tried crushing it between her fingers but frowned when it didn’t have the desired effect. Popping it into her mouth she gave the leaf two quick chews before pulling it out of her mouth and shoving it, with no ceremony, between Kain’s teeth.
He stared at her, frozen, his eyebrows raised.
Those light brown eyes of hers were fierce, unapologetic. “It’s the only way to fully activate the healing properties of the leaf,” she explained. “Put it in your cheek and keep it there tonight. It’ll help with the pain. Help control your temperature.”
He nodded and quickly looked away. He knew he should say thank you, but his refined shifter senses were currently tasting the flavor of her mouth mixed in with the leaf in his cheek and he thought he probably couldn’t have spelled his own name at that particular second.
A few minutes passed and Valentina rose.
“Thank you,” Kain managed. “You didn’t have to do that.”
Pain had truly left his features though his blond hair was still darkened with sweat. His silvery scar caught the moonlight and his eyes looked disconcertingly honest. Almost like a child’s. Valentina felt a tiny little door crack open in her mind. A lifetime of experiences had her immediately slamming it closed. Viciously. “Well. We can’t have you holding us back tomorrow. Just because of the Struggles.”
He recoiled. He’d never once held back the group. If he had, Kain would have couched his pride and let the more skilled members of his family go on these missions. But he’d been extremely helpful in Herta. Clutch, on more than one occasion. And he really didn’t like her tone when she spoke of the Struggles. ‘Just because’. Right. Well, she’d never experienced them, so she didn’t know.
It was then that Kain scented Williams coming toward them through the woods. Great. The boulder masquerading as a man was coming to check on his woman. Kain’s mood soured even further. He couldn’t bring himself to say that dumb-ass name out loud.
“Someone’s coming,” he grumbled, as Williams came through the brush.
Valentina burst into action with a soldier’s perfectly honed reflexes. Kain’s jaw dropped in complete glee as she lunged backwards, kick-flipped off a tree, and had Williams on his back, knife to his throat in less than three seconds.
Her face went from fierce to furious instantly.
“Damn it, Valentina!” Williams huffed, red in the face.
All those push-ups and sword sparring in the woods and he still couldn’t get the drop on his 5’2” girlfriend. Kain swallowed down a laugh.
Valentina sheathed her dagger and rose off Williams, stalking over to Kain. “You knew! You knew it was Williams. You must have scented him. Yet you let me think he was an intruder!”
Kain found it wise not to say a word. But he couldn’t quite hold the smile back.
She glared at him, her high cheekbones even more prominent as she sucked in those pouty lips in anger. “Everything is a joke to you, Kain Keto. I come to you to help and you—”
She cut off in anger, tossing her hands in the air and striding away into the forest.
Williams righted himself and glared at Kain as well. Kain didn’t bother glaring back. He simply rose and held a hand out to the floored giant.
He may not like the big oaf. But he was fighting alongside him tomorrow. “Sorry man, I wasn’t thinking.”
Williams said nothing as they walked back to the campsite.
CHAPTER TWO
“How’d it go?” Inka, Kain’s lovely, happy sister asked the very second he slammed through the screen door of their brother Ansel’s house.
He, John Alec, and the two coyote shifters
that they’d freed had come through the portal from Herta about eight hours ago and Kain had spent every second since in his bear form. He’d sprinted, swam, ambled, climbed trees, chased a bobcat, and wrestled the hell out of Milla. He felt like a million bucks.
Except for one small thing.
That was bothering the crap out of him.
“The operation went really well. Smooth as butter.” He kissed Inka on the cheek where she sat knitting in an armchair, and then Ruby, Ansel’s soon-to-be wife as well. He grabbed a freshly-baked croissant off the kitchen table and sunk into the couch.
“But…” Inka prompted, using those emotional spidey senses of hers. She shifted, attempting to get comfortable with her very round belly poking out. She and Matt, her husband, were pregnant again and she was showing so much earlier than her first time around. Kain tossed her a pillow which she gratefully tucked behind her back.
“But… I pissed off Valentina again. And I think this time she’s really mad.”
“Oh, Kain,” Ruby admonished, tossing down her magazine. She hadn’t met Valentina, but she’d heard quite a bit from Ansel about the warrior woman. “Why do you get off on teasing her so much? You know she doesn’t understand it. Ansel says she’s got less of a sense of humor than John Alec does.”
“Excuse me?” John Alec asked as he came through the screen door, fresh from a shower, his eyes casting around, looking for something. “I’m insulted by that. My wife’s not here,” he frowned.
“She’s still shifted, up on the other side of the mountain.” Kain knew because she’d been beating the crap out of him over there not twenty minutes ago.
John Alec shrugged, grabbed a croissant himself and sat down across from Kain. “I wondered why Valentina was in such a foul mood today. You did that to her?”
Kain rolled his head to one side and played with the lampshade next to him. “I may or may not have told her ‘someone’ was coming through the woods when it was really just Williams.”
A huge grin broke out on Alec’s face. “She attacked him.”
Kain grinned, too. “Felled him like a tree.”
The two men chuckled. Alec pointed at his own face. “See? I have a sense of humor.”
“Yeah,” Ruby admonished. “When you’re laughing about your sister’s boyfriend getting attacked.”
Alec grimaced. “Don’t call him her boyfriend.”
“Why?” Kain asked, intrigued. He’d always gotten the feeling that his brother-in-law wasn’t exactly crazy about Williams, but he’d never outright asked before.
“Because that’s not what they are. Not really.” Alec cast around for the right words. “Ansel is Ruby’s boyfriend, well, fiancé now. And Matt was Inka’s boyfriend before they were married. But that’s not the same as what Williams is to Valentina. He’s more of her… companion.”
“Who has sex with her,” Inka said, point-blank. She wasn’t as close to Valentina as her twin, Milla, was. But the women had gotten to know one another during their missions in Herta. And Inka, too, had questions about the quality of Williams’ and Valentina’s relationship, but at the very least she understood the nature of it.
“Inka!” John Alec groaned and shifted uncomfortably.
“What! She told me so herself. They have sex with each other. They’re sex companions.”
Alec groaned louder, pressing his fingers into his eyes. Kain grinned at Alec’s reaction, even though the thought of Williams and Valentina together made his leg start jostling up and down, made some feeling pull nice and tight in his chest.
“You don’t like Williams?” Ruby asked Alec.
John Alec sobered a bit. “It doesn’t matter if I do or don’t. He was there for Valentina when I left. When I came to Earth to be with Milla. He’s fought alongside her for years. And for that I’m very grateful.”
Kain rose. His jostling leg was telling him to get up and go. “I’m gonna go check on the coyotes.”
He jogged out the back door and across the yard. Part of Ansel and Ruby’s house had been converted into a guesthouse of sorts. If anyone in the town of Green Mills asked about it, they said that they ran a B&B back there. But really, it was a way station for the shifters they’d rescued from Herta.
They’d been at it for a year and a half. With Valentina working from the Herta side and John Alec and the Ketos working from the Earth side, they’d been able to rescue 164 enslaved shifters. Bring them back to Earth where they’d be safe. All 164 people had stayed in this guesthouse back there. As Kain approached the demure little cottage, the number seemed both large and small in his mind.
They’d worked their asses off to rescue that many in so short a time. But still there were thousands more shifters, enslaved and wasting away on Herta that very second.
The thought strangled him as he swung through the front door and then all the way through the house when he realized they weren’t inside.
There were three coyotes in the back garden. Two were the ones they rescued and one was Griff, Ruby’s younger brother. And, Kain thought as he leaned against the doorjamb and watched them, he was Kain’s little brother, too, in a way.
Griff was a special person. He’d been imprisoned on Herta for two years before the Ketos had been able to rescue him and bring him home. The time there had really messed him up, though the four years since then had greatly improved the kid. He chuckled where he used to scowl, lingered in the doorway instead of jetting through it.
Kain and Griff spent quite a bit of time together over the last four years. Kain was the person who’d taught Griff how to shift. The kid hadn’t even known he was a shifter when he’d been lured into Herta. And he definitely hadn’t known that he was an extremely rare kind of shifter. Griff could shift into many forms. And over the last year or so, had been able to start choosing which form he wanted whenever he wanted to do it.
It was thrilling for Kain, as Griff’s mentor of sorts, to watch it happen. And his ability to shift into all sorts of animals had helped immensely with the shifters they’d rescued. A week ago, Griff had been a hare alongside a little girl who’d been in Herta for less than a year. He’d been able to communicate with her in her animal form, coax her back into her human form. That little girl was back with her parents now.
That one had felt really, really good.
Kain watched the shifter coyotes sniff at one another for a minute before he backtracked through the house. He didn’t want to disturb the process.
He re-entered Ansel’s house, hoping they weren’t still talking about Williams. And sure enough, someone else had stolen the spotlight.
It was one-year-old Carmen, sitting atop her father’s lap like a little bird on a nest. She grinned that heart-stopping smile and immediately held her hands up for Kain as he came through the door. With a joyful whoop, Uncle Kain swooped the baby off Matt’s lap and flung her into the air. She laughed insanely, half terrified, half joyous, and allowed him to rub noses after he caught her. He naturally hitched her onto his hip and kissed the puffy black hair at the top of her head, reaching down to clap Matt on his shoulder.
“You know,” Matt cleared his throat and stretched his insanely long legs out in front of himself, “there are some studies that indicate that adult-toddler relationships are strengthened by caretaker activities such as—”
“You don’t have to talk me into changing her diaper, Matty,” Kain grinned down at his brother-in-law. “Just so happens I don’t mind it one bit.” The second part Kain said right into Carmen’s chubby little neck, inexplicably speaking in a cockney accent.
Babies.
What an irony that Kain had spent the last decade and a half avoiding them and now that his sister had one he was suffering from a little bit of baby fever.
He’d thought that only chicks got that. But he was knocking on thirty and so in love with his niece that he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to have a rugrat of his own. The problem was that you generally needed a woman to do that. There was definitel
y no shortage of women in Kain’s life. But certainly none who he’d wanna, you know, make a baby with.
The thought depressed him.
He came back out with Carmen all tidy and fresh and plopped onto the floor with the baby on his stomach. She deftly pulled his phone out of his pants pocket.
“Careful!” Inka called from where she was now sitting on her husband’s lap, Matt’s humongous hand tapping a rhythm onto her round belly. “She’s figured out how to—”
“Holy shit, she just unlocked my phone!” Kain laughed. “Didn’t you, you brilliant, perfect little genius.” He remained charmed, even after her chubby fingers had deleted three of his apps and discovered the camera.
“I think you need one of those,” Ruby called to Kain as she watched him cheese for the pictures Carmen was almost taking of the two of them. “A baby, I mean.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Kain admitted, sending Matt and John Alec’s eyebrows right up their foreheads. Neither of them had suspected Kain wanted to give up any part of his bachelor lifestyle. “I think I need to find me a girl. Oh! You know who can help me with that?”
Kain pulled up his Tinder app and handed the phone to Carmen, taking her chubby hand and showing her how to swipe left or right. Then he leaned back and tucked his hands behind his head. He cracked one eye at Carmen. “Wake me up when you find me a wife, sweet girl.”
***
Valentina could hear them behind her, the hunters. She knew they could smell the fresh blood that was pouring from her abdomen, and–look at that–from her leg, too. Flashes of the battle she’d just endured seared across her brain. But she pushed it down. And kept running. She just had to get to someplace where she could open a gate. Someplace quiet and calm and hidden and she could open a gate and get through. That’s all she had to do.
She ran harder, crashing through the brush. Her vision was gray at the corners and she wondered if she was breathing–she couldn’t even feel it if she was. She was so tired.
