Shifter Fever Complete Series (Books 1-5)

by Selena Scott

  “Is it late?” she asked after a few minutes passed in silence. If she could see the moon, she’d know exactly what time it was, but it was useless indoors.

  “Middle of the night.”

  “Why are you awake?”

  “You’ve been sleeping on my bed.”

  “Oh,” she furrowed her brow and looked down at the couch. “You sleep on this lumpy thing?”

  He grinned at her befuddled expression, her blunt assessment. “Not usually. But Milla and Alec are in on my bed. Well,” he looked sideways at sleeping Alec. “Half of them are. And you’re supposed to be in the guest bedroom. So I get the couch for a little while.”

  She sat up and winced again, didn’t notice the way his sharp eyes followed the movement. “Can I see the guest bedroom?”

  “Sure,” he said in that easy way of his.

  She wondered if there was anything she could ask him for that he wouldn’t agree to. She tossed the blanket off her and stared in befuddlement down at her clothes. She remembered changing into these strange garments at the hospital but they hadn’t looked quite so ridiculous in the daylight. In the dim room they looked like she was wearing a cloud on each leg.

  When she looked up, Kain was bending down at the edge of the couch. Carefully, so carefully, he slid his hands under her little body. God, she didn’t weigh anything and it tugged at his heart.

  “I can walk,” she insisted.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” was his answer, which seemed to make sense to him because he rose with her and stepped back like the matter was settled.

  He carried her the few steps to a half-open door that he kicked open the rest of the way. Her first impression was that there were yet more clouds. White curtains billowed in a light breeze at the two small windows, and a humongous bed, bigger than she’d ever seen before in her life, was made with about a hundred white pillows and a white comforter.

  Kain set her gently on the edge of the bed with her feet hanging off and then started plucking pillows off two by two, tossing them in the corner.

  “Sorry. My sisters made this bed for you this morning when it was decided that you’d stay here but I didn’t know they had an insidious plan to smother you under all these throw pillows. There. That’s better.”

  And it did, actually, look better with just two pillows at the head of the bed. A little less intimidating. Kain surveyed the room, scratching his nose and seeming to realize that they were alone together in a darkened room.

  “Ah. Your tea? You want your tea? Crap. I should have asked if you had to go to the bathroom first. I can take you.”

  “No.” Her answer was resolute and final and deeply relieved both of them. “Just the tea.”

  He was back in a flash and she was laying on her back over top of the covers.

  “You’re hot?”

  “No.” Actually she was freezing cold. Something about the combination of waking up in the middle of the night and all the trauma she’d been through over the last few days.

  “You wanna get under the comforter?”

  “The what?”

  Kain looked like he was desperately trying not to smile. He failed. “The big fluffy thing underneath you. It’s a blanket.”

  Valentina surveyed the gigantic puffy blanket with a critical eye. “Oh, for God’s sake! Who needs that much blankets?”

  “Don’t knock it ’til you try it.” Kain carefully pulled the covers out from under her and pulled them up to her chin. She looked so little under there it broke his heart. “Here, Milla left these for you to take when you woke up. And, yeah, it’s time for these ones, too. These can wait until morning. Do you want something to eat with them? It says that you can take it on an empty stomach if you’re not hungry.”

  She eyed the strange colored capsules in Kain’s hand. “What are you trying to give me?”

  He had to laugh at the expression on her face. “Your medicine. Your prescribed medicine. I’m not attempting to poison her royal highness.”

  She arched a brow. “I feel like a royal highness in this godawful bed. Don’t Earthlings have any modesty?”

  “No, we don’t. We also take the medicine our doctors prescribe after we have surgery.” He jiggled the pills in his hand and when she still stared at him skeptically, he sighed. “Val, if I’d wanted to harm you, I wouldn’t have carried you five miles through the woods on my back.”

  Something seemed to break in her expression and Kain almost regretted saying it. But then she was glaring up at him defiantly and swallowing down the pills.

  That done and taken care of, Kain left her there, snuggled in bed and her eyes already drowsy. When he wandered back out to the couch and sat down heavily, he noticed John Alec’s eyes were open.

  “Is she alright?”

  “Yeah,” Kain kicked his shoes off and fluffed the pillow that Valentina had been sleeping on earlier. “She woke up and I moved her to the guest bed. She took all her meds.”

  John Alec leaned forward onto his knees and glanced at her closed door. He raked a hand over his short hair. When he spoke his voice was quieter and rawer than Kain had ever heard it before. “Something’s wrong with her.”

  Kain blinked and pulled his T-shirt over his head, tossing it aside. “Yeah, dude. She got attacked by Hertian hunters and stabbed in two places.”

  “No,” Alec shook his head. “I mean even more than that. The Valentina I grew up with could have taken three hunters with her hands tied behind her back.”

  “Maybe they just got the drop on her.”

  “That’s just it. You can’t get the drop on Valentina. Trust me, I’ve been trying for about 30 years.”

  “I don’t know, man, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her. I’ve seen her in action a bunch over the last year and half. She looks pretty good from where I’m sitting.”

  Alec leaned back in the chair and gave his hair one more tug. “That’s all child’s play. She could rob a band of slave movers in her sleep. I’ve been noticing that she’s been going through the motions more than anything. You don’t understand. Valentina, when she’s really on, there’s nothing like it. She can jump from one tree top to another. Two backflips without landing. She could literally fight me with her eyes closed and win.”

  Kain’s eyebrows went up. He’d fought John Alec a lot over the years, running through all sorts of combat training. And he’d yet to win. Once. If Valentina really was that good, then maybe she had been holding back.

  Alec kept going. “She’s lost so much weight. And she’s unhappy. I don’t know. I just don’t know.” He rose up. “She’s going to want to return to Herta the second that she gets well enough. But—”

  “She can’t.” Kain shucked off his jeans and tossed them over the armchair. “After what she went through? There’s no way she’s just waltzing back there all by herself.”

  Alec scoffed. “Try telling her that.”

  A thought sifted down over Kain. “Why was she alone? Where the fuck was Williams the douche?”

  “She didn’t say when she told me what happened. She just said she was alone when they found her. All three at once. They’d gotten the swipe to her abdomen before she’d even known they were there.”

  “She’s not going back.” The heat in Kain’s voice surprised both of them. “We’ll think of a way for her to stay. A way that she’ll want to stay.”

  John Alec didn’t speak again; he seemed deep in thought. It was Kain who said the last words of the night.

  “We have to.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A week later, Valentina was over the worst of it. She was sore still, but nothing she couldn’t handle. And she was thoroughly, one hundred percent, sick of being babied.

  She liked the bed, though.

  Going back to her stiff bedroll and stingy blanket was going to be a rough transition. But she wouldn’t mind sleeping under the stars again.

  She was thrilled to her core when Milla and John Alec left her alone for the firs
t time in what felt like a year. The house was blissfully silent. Valentina got up from the chair in the corner of her room, under the window, and stretched a little. It tugged at her stitches, though a fair few of them had already dissolved.

  As she walked from one room to the other, she caught sight of herself in the long, perfect mirror on the wall. The first time she’d seen it, she’d been confused. She’d thought there was an indoor window in the house, between two rooms. It hadn’t taken her long to figure it out. She’d seen mirrors before, small ones, cloudy ones. But never one this perfect. And never one this large.

  She’d glance in it now and again, but now she really took the opportunity to look. Really look.

  She liked what she saw. She looked like John Alec. But a girl. She was pretty. Not, maybe, as flawless or stunning as Milla and Inka, but who was? She leaned close to the mirror to examine her eyes and flushed with embarrassment when her forehead conked into it. Her eyes were lighter than her brother’s. Almost honey-colored. And it felt strange that she’d never really realized that before. That everyone who’d ever seen her knew something about her that she hadn’t.

  Her nose was small and plain and she thought her lips were a little bit too pouty. They gave her a sullen look, even when she was just relaxing her face. And she was too thin. She knew she’d been losing weight over the last few months. But her appetite had gone out the door with her happiness. It gave her face a tight, pulled look that she wished were a bit softer.

  She cocked her head to one side and stepped back a foot or two from the mirror. Valentina pulled her soft T-shirt up with one hand and came up against a clean, white bandage which she promptly peeled away. She jogged her body to one side to better see the wound. It was thin, and not too deep at the beginning or end, but the damn bastard had gotten her from armpit to hip. She was eager for the next moment she came upon another hunter. She was going to put him on a spit and roast the bastard.

  “Oof,” Kain said from behind her and Valentina moved only her eyes to his. She stayed with her wound exposed and reflecting in the mirror. He respected the poise, the lack of shame. “That’s a doozy.”

  “What’s a doozy?” Her voice was flat but not unfriendly.

  “Your scar.”

  “No, I mean what does doozy mean?”

  “Oh,” he laughed and came into her room, bouncing on the end of the bed as he sat down. “I can’t really explain it, I guess. I just mean that that’s gonna leave a big scar.”

  “Not as bad as this one.” She dropped her shirt on one side and lifted it on the other.

  Kain leaned forward and inspected the wicked scar she had on the other side. “Gnarly.”

  “Like a tree?” She inspected her own scar. “I suppose you’re right.”

  With zero self-consciousness or innuendo, Valentina let her shirt drop and pulled down one side of her sweat pants to see her other incision. She pulled the bandage off and inspected it, missing the way Kain’s eyes skittered from the line of her white underwear against her hip, to the ceiling, and back again. “This one’s not gonna be so bad,” she decided.

  “Nah,” Kain rose and stood beside her in the mirror. “That one’ll be kinda cute.”

  “Cute?” She looked supremely suspicious of that assessment. “How?”

  “I dunno. Some scars are cute. Sexy, even.” He grinned down at her. “Like mine.”

  Kain turned his head so she could inspect the silvery crescent moon that lined one side of his face from brow to jaw.

  “How’d you get it?”

  “Fought a bobcat.”

  “And lost, apparently.”

  He laughed. “Nah, I was a kid, messing around with Ansel. He kicked me off a tree branch and I hit an old nail in the tree on the way down. He felt worse about it than I did.”

  “You didn’t mind?”

  “I didn’t like the stitches, but I didn’t hold a grudge. Especially when I realized how many chicks a scar like this can net a guy.”

  She narrowed her eyes, trying to understand. “I take it that ‘chicks’ means willing women?”

  He grinned. “Indeed.”

  She rolled her eyes and then looked up at him again. “But I thought shifters were incredible healers?”

  “Not before you have your first shift. That’s when all the cool stuff happens. I was too young to heal right when I got this.”

  She considered him for a moment and then turned to the mirror to start putting her hair in one of those incredibly complicated braids she liked so much.

  Kain looked at the two of them in the mirror and realized just how close he was actually standing to her. He sidled back to the bed.

  “I didn’t come to talk about scars.”

  “Hm.”

  “I came to invite you to Ansel’s house for dinner. Milla thought you might be up for it.”

  If it had been a walk in the woods, Valentina would have jumped at the chance a hundred times over. But a family dinner at someone’s house on Earth? Eh. Not so much.

  “Don’t say no.” That was all he said. Until his face twisted to one side. “Unless you actually don’t feel up to it. And then we could just hang out here.”

  Valentina’s stomach twisted. Her whole life she’d found it so hard to create situations where she got to be around other people. But it was obviously so easy for Kain. Simple as that. We could just hang out here. Like he wouldn’t have minded skipping the dinner with his family.

  “No. I’ll go. Actually, I’m hungry anyways.”

  ***

  “I want that. Or one just like it,” Valentina said to Kain as he pulled up in front of Ansel’s house.

  He looked down at where she was pointing. “My hoodie?”

  “One like that. That parts in the middle.”

  “A zip-up. This is a zipper.” Sometimes it floored him how different their worlds were. Like how she’d put down the window and let the wind mess up that complicated braid, like she couldn’t believe speed like this existed. He had to admit that he’d flirted with the gas pedal just a little for her. There was something about being on the road with Valentina’s stern little face in his passenger seat. He liked it.

  “Well, it’s very clever.”

  He pulled off the sweatshirt and handed it over to her. “It’s yours, sunshine.”

  She took it from his hands immediately. No hesitation. Just like she’d taken the tea that first night at his house. Kain found himself charmed by it. She said what she wanted, and if it was offered to her, she took it. It was the same thing that hadn’t had her flinching from her own scars. She’d shown them to him without a single beat of shame or self-consciousness. He could rock with that kind of confidence.

  He went around and pulled open her passenger door. She tried to get out but winced when the seat belt pulled against her wounds.

  “Shit.” He leaned into the car and unbuckled her.

  “I forgot about that thing,” she admitted and stepped out, ignoring the hand he held out for her. Or maybe she just hadn’t noticed. It tweaked his nerves a little bit, that she didn’t know a man was supposed to help a woman out of a car. Not that they had cars on Herta. But still. Add it to the list of reasons that Williams was a tool.

  Valentina came out of the car and put his hoodie on over her T-shirt and sweatpants. The only clothes that were comfortable for her yet. She held the sleeves out for inspection. “Too bad it’s such a ridiculous color.”

  He laughed. “I like that color. It’s a good blue.”

  She frowned. “But it could be seen for miles. There’s no hiding in a color like this.”

  Her words saddened him. That she’d had to think in terms of survival for so long. He looked at the cerulean blue against her tan skin, her honey-gold eyes. It kind of made her pop. “You’re not supposed to hide in a color like that.”

  His voice was too gruff. He cleared his throat. Walk it back, thug.

  “Obviously,” she retorted. “Since you picked it. You’re not exactly a hider.”<
br />
  He took that as a compliment and led her into Ansel’s house. They were the last ones to arrive and Kain was very relieved that there wasn’t a big fuss when Valentina walked in. He knew she would have hated that.

  John Alec immediately called her to the couch where he inconspicuously set up some pillows up for her to lean on.

  Valentina looked around once she was settled and saw a humongous man smiling very large from next to her on the couch. Had she met this man before? He had black hair, a crooked nose, and a friendly sort of handsomeness. “How are you feeling?”

  “Who are you?”

  He blinked. “Ah, I’m Matt Woods.” They’d met before. He’d given her the portal maker and showed her how to use it. “Inka and I are married. That one’s mine. Carmen.” He pointed behind him at a baby with black hair and chubby hands who was currently gripping both of Kain’s ears and attempting to blow a raspberry right on his lips.

  “Gah, Carm,” Kain laughed hysterically, the way you do when something is just on the edge between fun and terrible. “She won’t let go of my ears!” He called to his sister, but he wasn’t calling for help. Instead he turned his attention back to baby Carmen. “If you get me, I’m gonna get you.”

  The baby didn’t listen, and she tried it again. Kain ducked his head, planted his mouth in her neck and blew a loud wet raspberry. Now it was the baby’s turn to laugh. A full on belly jumper. She was hiccupping by the time Kain was done with her. He flipped her, taking mercy on her little soul, and set her butt on his hip, her arms swinging out to grab at a stack of books. He stepped deftly away and popped a rattle in her hands.

  Valentina blinked at the scene. There was no reason to feel like she’d been scraped clean by a pricker bush. No reason at all. But there it was. She was stinging and raw and it had nothing to do with her injuries. She forced her eyes back onto the man in front of her. This Matt fellow.

  “Okay,” was just about all the response she could muster up.

  “Ah, okay.” He pinked in the cheeks, a little flustered by her blunt attitude.