Shifter Fever Complete Series (Books 1-5)

by Selena Scott

  “Hmm.” He grumbled again and blinked heavily. “What’s the damage?”

  She didn’t move, could sense that he’d want facts and not comfort right now. “The knife went smack dab into your appendix. Burst it. They removed it last night. Full recovery expected. A shiny new scar, though.”

  “I always wanted a scar,” he said thoughtfully. “I thought it would make me cooler.”

  “I think you’re cool.”

  “I know you do.”

  He was still groggy from the anesthesia. “Inka?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I remembered what I forgot to do. When you were talking to my mom on the phone and I forgot to do something? I remembered it.”

  She waited patiently and then noticed his eyes falling closed.

  “Do it later, Matty,” she whispered.

  ***

  “This… really makes sense,” Matt said as he looked around at Inka’s house. Her real house. Her cabin in the woods that she could now sleep safely in again.

  The walls were a bright, almost shocking yellow. There were colors and patterns in every available line of sight and there was a knitted throw over every single chair. Inka plopped Matt’s bag down on the living room floor and instantly grabbed his elbow.

  “I’m totally fine, Inks,” Matt said, with just the smallest little bit of wince in his voice. A week out from his surgery, Matt wasn’t in pain, he was mostly just uncomfortable. He didn’t need to be babied anymore, but he let her do it. It was good for the soul. Both of their souls.

  Inka got Matt settled on her fluffy couch and then hurried to the kitchen for a glass of water for him.

  She was happy to be home, Matt noted. The way she moved through her kitchen, so sure and confident, a little kick in her step. He hadn’t realized how little Manhattan suited her while she’d been living there.

  Or maybe he hadn’t let himself realize it.

  He’d be going back in a week. When he was healthy enough to drive. And now he just had to explain it all to her.

  He took a deep breath and winced at the pull deep in his belly.

  “Hey-o,” Milla called from Inka’s front porch, pushing open the screen and coming through with John Alec.

  Neither of them had actually spoken with him at the hospital, but Inka had mentioned that they’d been there most of the night.

  “Hi!” Inka called in surprise.

  “I’ll take some of that,” Milla motioned toward the ice waters that Inka was preparing. She strolled in and plopped down on the couch next to Matt. “You got a package. It was on the front steps. Who do you know in Spain?”

  She tossed it into his lap and Matt stared down at it. The package was small, only about the size of a book, and now that it was here, Matt felt his blood slow down. “What? Oh. My mother.”

  “Aren’t you gonna open it?”

  Matt cleared his throat and set it aside. “Later. It’s actually for Inka anyways.”

  Milla’s eyes narrowed slightly.

  “What’s for me?” Inka asked, as she and John Alec brought water in for everyone.

  “Nothing. Something. I’ll give it to you later.”

  Matt fought the urge to mess with his collar. Milla sure had some laser beams for eyes and she was currently using them to stare him straight back into the hospital.

  “You jumped through that portal for her,” Milla said and it was the last thing that any of them expected her to say.

  “Ah. Yeah. I guess I did.”

  “Headfirst.” She took a long sip of water.

  Matt cleared his throat. “Yes.”

  “You were going to kill that man, so that Inka didn’t have to. I saw it in your eyes, Woods. You’re not a killer, but you were going to do that for her.”

  Finding his footing just a touch, Matt held her gaze. “You killed him so that neither Inka nor I had to.”

  Milla sucked her teeth and leaned back in her chair. “So I did.”

  Matt took a deep breath. “I guess I should say thank you, then. For doing that for me. For us.”

  “I guess I should say thank you, too. For putting your life on the line for my sister.”

  They eyed one another. To Matt’s surprise, Milla broke first, leaning forward and kissing Matt square on the mouth.

  “It’s good to have you on our side, poindexter,” she grinned at him.

  He couldn’t help but laugh.

  “I’m not going to kiss you, but yes, I’m glad you didn’t die.” John Alec held one calloused palm out to Matt and they shook.

  “I heard you carried me out. Back onto Earth.”

  John Alec nodded. “You’re a big motherfucker. Almost broke my back.”

  “Ah, sorry about that?”

  John Alec broke into a quick smile. And then watched the way Inka was staring at Matt. “Time for us to go.”

  “But—” Milla protested.

  Alec looked at her meaningfully. “It’s time.”

  Milla glanced at her sister as well, suddenly getting the memo.

  “Alright, kids,” she said, swinging her hands. And found that there wasn’t anything else to say. There was always tomorrow.

  Neither Matt nor Inka paid attention to them leaving. They simply stared at one another. She moved to sit next to him on the couch.

  “I didn’t understand at the time,” she said quietly. “But you were really going to do that? Kill him so that I didn’t have to?”

  Matt nodded. “I told you I would do anything for you, mariposa.”

  Inka nodded and pressed her cheek into his palm.

  “Inka, I’m leaving in a week. I have to go back to Manhattan. And I assume that since all this mess is cleared up here, you’ll want to live here permanently.”

  Inka was as speechless as that first time he’d told her he wanted to kiss her. There was nothing to say back to what he’d just said. She got the horrible feeling that he was saying it all.

  His eyes were absent, far away, the way they were when he was chewing over something in his mind. “You can come with me then, or maybe it makes sense to just come when it’s all finished. Actually, you wouldn’t even have to come at all, if you didn’t want to. I can always get your things from Milla’s.”

  When his eyes focused on hers again he saw her terribly confused, pained even.

  “Oh, crap,” he searched her eyes. “I botched this. Shit, mariposa, I didn’t mean to make you sad.” He turned and searched frantically on the couch for the package. “Here.” He slammed it into her hands. “Open it.”

  She was flustered and on edge as she opened the thick envelope and peeked inside, expecting a letter. There was nothing. “It’s empty.”

  He blinked and took the package from her, peering in. A grin flashed across his face. “No, it’s not. Hold out your hands.”

  She did as he asked and he upended the envelope into her palms. A flash of green, a catch of the light, and a small gold ring fell into her hands. “It was Abuela’s,” he spoke softly. “The emerald makes me think of your eyes.”

  Inka stared at it. Then at Matt. Then back to the ring.

  “You…” she started, and then couldn’t finish.

  “Love you,” he murmured, catching her face and pressing his lips to hers. “Love you so bad.”

  “Por supuesto,” she spoke in Spanish, as flustered as she was. “Te amo. Te amo.”

  He coughed out a laugh. He’d thought that flustered Spanish was his move. He was happy to share it with her.

  “This is what I forgot, mariposa, that day you were talking to my mother. I realized that this whole time that I’d been so concentrated on the frequency tool, on your safety, on falling in love with you, that I’d forgotten to make you my wife.”

  He picked up the ring from her palms and held it out to her.

  She held out one shaking hand and he slipped it on her finger.

  It slipped right off.

  “Oh, crap,” he muttered. “I guess Abuela’s hands were a little chubby.”
>
  Inka laughed and jammed the ring onto her middle finger. “I don’t care. I don’t care at all. Matt,” she said, her eyes wide and honest, “you’d live here with me? That’s what you’re saying? You’d leave the Chinese food and running in the park and the lingerie store and your falcon at the window? And you’ll come live here?”

  “Inka,” he scooted closer to her. “What I feel for you? I’ve been trying to put a pin in it for a very long time. It’s not adoration. It’s just to the left of that. It’s not lust, it’s, ah, the vehicle that lust rides on. It’s not quite happiness or desire either. Because love is all inside all those feelings, but it’s also right on the edge of them. It’s everywhere for you.” He tapped his fingers against his chest. “It’s–It’s—”

  “It’s the common denominator,” she finished for him.

  “God, yes,” he groaned, so grateful she understood. The way she always understood. “And when you come up against something like that? You move your life. I want to come here. I want you.”

  She pulled him into a kiss that was much more vigorous than anyone a week out from surgery should have been participating in.

  He shivered, from everything, the feelings, the adrenaline, the early summer breeze through the open windows.

  Inka automatically threw one of her knitted blankets over the two of them. “Welcome home, Matty.”

  “Yeah,” he kissed her once more, leaned their foreheads together. “You too.”

  The End

  Kain’s Game

  PROLOGUE

  Valentina wasn’t angry. She was furious. She sprinted deftly down the edge of the river, her eyes on a perfect, low-hanging willow branch. She sprang, gripping the branch and letting momentum rocket her out toward the middle of the river. She let go at the perfect moment and cleanly dislodged her brother from the floating log he’d stolen from her moments ago.

  Their father roared with laughter from the bank of the lazy river as John Alec surfaced, sputtering, river grass in his hair. “That’s what you get, John! For trying to steal from our Valentina.”

  She lounged atop the log and stuck her tongue out at him, laughing when he sent an armful of water straight into her face.

  They scuffled in the fresh, clean river, playing as they so rarely got to. Every once in a great while, their father gave them the day off from training. The two little warriors, 11 and 8 years old, were very serious about their skills. They began and ended every day with weapons practice. A bit of sparring was thrown in here and there every day as well, not to mention hunting and trapping. Valentina was extremely proud of her abilities as a warrior, especially when it meant dunking her older brother in the river.

  But today had been so beautiful, all golden sun and achingly blue skies, that their father had opted for a resting day. He’d chosen a particularly lazy stretch of river, found himself a tree to lean against, and watched his children play.

  It was moments like these when he missed their mother so much he almost couldn’t see straight. He knew it was selfish to keep his children in such rigorous training, but it was still the only time he ever felt that he could breathe.

  Perhaps a different kind of father might have laid down his mantle when his children came along. But the man was a fighter. He fought for freedom. For the humanity of shifters. They were the enslaved of his planet and it disgusted him to no end. He supposed he could have given up the fight, moved to a small village and taught his children about the simple life. But somewhere in his heart, he knew it would have been like a poison in his veins. He would have wasted away without fighting for what he believed in.

  Seeing the two of them, John Alec with his honorable way of fighting, always taking care not to hurt his sister, and Valentina with her vicious efficiency, winning as quickly as possible, he knew that he’d made the right decision. His children were warriors to the bone. To deprive them of that would have been to take some vital nutrient from their diet.

  His eyes drifted closed here and there as he watched them, tired from fighting each other and now floating on their backs. He had a dream. A disturbing one where he was very far away from his children while they played. And each time he took a step closer, he was a step farther away.

  His eyes came open to the sunny day and when he looked at the river, his skin chilled. There was a man standing on the opposite river bank. And not just any man. He wore the bones of a shifter over his face and in an intricate armor over his chest and legs. He wore the dress of the hunters. Those that hunted down shifters and brought them to Herta to be enslaved. He was still, blending in with the shadows behind him, and staring at the children.

  He didn’t call out to them, he didn’t have to. He simply shifted in that alert way of his and they knew that something was wrong. John Alec’s eyes flew to his father, Valentina’s eyes flew to the intruder.

  The children had been warned of hunters countless times. They knew that hunters would kill them, simply for being allies to the shifters.

  Alec shifted in the water and his father knew that he’d picked up a stone with his toes, was shifting it to his hand. Good boy.

  But Valentina was still, half on the log and half in the water, her honey-brown eyes taking up her whole, eight-year-old face.

  The hunter sprang, drawing the bow from his back and pointing it at the children. But he was struck with three things first. The second and third things were the rock from Alec’s hand and the hatchet from their father’s. The first was the small knife from Valentina’s little fist. It had landed directly in the man’s heart. He probably hadn’t even felt the other two things strike him.

  Valentina was the first to rise. She climbed up onto the bank and kicked at the dead man’s foot. Next she took her father’s hatchet out of his belly. And last, she snicked her knife out of his ribcage, washing it in the river.

  It was her first kill.

  CHAPTER ONE

  HERTA

  Valentina tipped her blade to catch the firelight. She frowned. Not sharp enough. She kept her eyes on the knife so that she wouldn’t look across the fire.

  Her brother had brought the clown again. And that made Valentina frown, too.

  She much preferred it when John Alec brought his serious-minded, kick-ass warrior wife. Not the wife’s brother. This silly, joke-making fool.

  Valentina looked up and took a quick moment to observe the fool in question. His long legs extended out from him, one bent at the knee, as he lay on his back next to the fire and watched the night sky. His shaggy blond hair was inside that strange cap he wore. All black and boxy with a big brim that just extended from the front. His eyes were closed but she knew he wasn’t sleeping. She knew because he was crunching something in his mouth. She would have bet her favorite dagger that it was— yup. She was right. She smirked to herself as he absently tipped his head to the side and spat pistachio shells into the fire.

  What an idiot.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t like Kain Keto. He just annoyed her. And she happened to think that freeing enslaved shifters from Herta was very serious business. And the way he lazily lay around their campsite put her teeth on edge. The way it always did. Every time she’d seen him for the last year and a half.

  He was a good fighter, though. She’d give him that much.

  John Alec came around the fire holding that ridiculous glowing earth tool that he seemed to love so much these days. Living on Earth with his wife had changed her brother in a lot of ways. All of them she approved of. Except for his fondness for this iPad thing.

  “Stop frowning at me,” John Alec said good-naturedly as he sat down beside her.

  “It’s not you I’m frowning at.”

  John Alec’s eyes instantly roved across the fire to his brother-in-law crunching pistachios and looking for all the world like he was lying on the beach somewhere. Instead of in a hostile world that was designed in every way to enslave him, body and soul. But that was just the kind of guy that Kain was; his feathers were very hard to ruffle. “H
e’s not so bad, you know. If you’d bothered to know him at all over the last year and a half.”

  “I know him just fine,” Valentina answered with just a touch of that royal aloofness she employed when she felt a little bad. “And it wasn’t him I was frowning at. It was the devil’s play-toy that you love more than life itself.”

  John Alec let out a small noise of frustration for his little sister. “You would like the iPad if you would just learn to use it.” He pinched the bridge of his noise. “Never mind. I refuse to have this argument again.”

  Across the campsite, Kain spit more pistachio shells into the fire and Valentina shifted in annoyance.

  “You know, they help him,” John Alec said in a low voice. One that had just a hint of disappointment in it. Valentina hated it when he used that voice.

  “What?”

  “The pistachio shells, they help Kain with the Struggles.” He was referring to the bone-deep discomfort of any shifter when they were in the world of Herta. Something about the nature of Herta was like poison in a shifter’s blood. It made a shifter tired, uncomfortable, it willed a shifter to succumb to a master. Especially if they shifted. Which Kain did not do whenever he was in Herta. It was too dangerous to shift. If he did, he might never be able to shift back. He’d be in his bear form for the rest of his life, searching for a master. So whenever any of the Ketos came with John Alec into Herta, it was a constant resistance to the Struggles. A constant management of pain.

  Valentina felt a burst of regret for having been so annoyed by him. She knew it must be painful to lie so casually by the fire. He’d been in Herta for three days this time. At that point in a trip, Milla, John Alec’s wife, would be sitting in a tight crouch, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. It hit Valentina then, that all of them dealt with it in a different way. All of the Ketos.

  Whenever Ansel, the oldest Keto, came on these missions, he was quiet the entire time. And by the end of the trip, he wasn’t even responding to yes or no questions. Inka, Milla’s semi-loopy twin sister, would jabber on and on about things that Valentina had never even heard of. By the end of a mission, Inka would literally be talking to the squirrels, the owls, the trees.