by Selena Scott
It was a painful shift. His body tearing itself apart to put itself back together. His left side screamed with excruciating agony. It was too soon, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t have a choice. He was shifting for the woman he loved.
“Wait!” Quill shouted, skidding the car to a stop as Phoenix slammed out the passenger door, rolling on the ground, mid-shift. He felt his fingers sharpen into claw, his palms becoming paws. His knees cracked backward, his clothing tearing off of him as his mouth gnashed the air, ripping into a snout, his ears lengthening and repositioning, his teeth re-shaping into daggers. And then the fur, the tail, the howl, tearing out of his throat.
And then the sprinting. He’d never run faster in his life than he did right now, all four of his legs in perfect concert. He ruthlessly ignored the searing pain in his left side. He was gaining on the van which was now swerving dangerously toward trees, threatening to skid off the gravel road and into the forest on either side.
Phoenix’s mind was not of a human, but not of a wolf either. He was blissfully in between. With one tremendous leap -not as graceful as he used to be before the fire- Phoenix sunk his front claws into the side of the van. Clinging, he slashed one of the back tires with his back claws.
The van swerved hard and lost most of its speed. Phoenix was off and around to the other side, slashing those tires as well.
The van skidded to a stop and Phoenix heard two slashing pops coming from the front of the van, almost in unison. He knew that if he were to look up there, he’d see Orion and Dawn in their wolf forms, following his lead. He heard a door fling open and he bounded around to the other side only to see Ida stumble out of the van, clumsily landing on her hands, skinning her knees, tears in her eyes.
He could scent the adrenaline. The fear. He rushed to her side, nuzzling her, sniffing her for injuries. She screamed and scrambled back until she really, really looked at him. “Phoenix?” she whispered.
He nodded his head and realized that she was probably freaked out by seeing him in his wolf form. But then she lunged forward, tossing her arms around his neck and burying her face in his fur, fully and completely trusting him.
“Phoenix, it was—“
The door to the driver’s seat flung open and a man jumped out of the van, attempting to sprint into the woods, away from the wolves. Phoenix bounded after him, easily eclipsing the human’s speed, and landing two heavy paws on his back, knocking the man to the ground.
The man rolled, landing face up, scrambling back, but Phoenix didn’t chase him, didn’t do more than growl. Because there, staring him in the face, was a man he’d thought of as a friend.
Watt blinked and scrambled and backed away. “Tell him, Ida. Tell him. I wasn’t going to hurt her, man, I swear. He wanted me to kill her, but I was just going to take her a few states over and convince her to start over for a while.”
This was confusing enough without also being in his wolf form so Phoenix shifted back into his human form, advancing on Watt and placing a heavy, bare foot on his chest so that he couldn’t get away. “What are you talking about.”
“They’re after you, man. The government. They’re trying to recruit shifters. They want you. And your siblings. When they found out that you were in love with Ida, they decided to get rid of her. Thought it would be easier to convince you to join them if you were unattached to any humans. They wanted me to kill her. But I wasn’t going to. I was just going to take her away for a while.”
“He wanted you to think that I’d left you, Phoenix,” Ida said from right behind him, placing her hand gently on his back. “That way you’d be easier to manipulate into joining whatever government cult he’s a part of.”
“What,” Phoenix growled, increasing the pressure on Watt’s chest, making his traitor of a friend gasp for air.
“They’ve got my sister, man.” Watt groaned and gulped for air, his handsome face twisted with pain and shame and fear. “They’ve got her. I know it. They won’t give her up unless I give them what they want and what they want is you. I never meant to hurt anybody.”
Ida scoffed. “Except for Phoenix, Orion, and Dawn, when you decided to hand them over to some government wackos.”
“I just want my sister back,” Watt said, letting his head thunk back on the ground, tears leaking out of his eyes.
Phoenix wanted to kill Watt. It would be so easy just to keep compressing his chest. His neck. He could shift back into his wolf form and tear his throat out. But his words resonated in Phoenix’s head. He was doing all of this for his sister.
Phoenix lifted his foot an inch and apparently Watt was a smart man because he skittered away from Phoenix as fast as he could.
He was scrambling back like a crab, his eyes bouncing from Ida to Phoenix to Orion and Dawn, still in their wolf forms on either side of Phoenix.
“I never meant to hurt anyone,” Watt whispered again. “I swear.”
And then he was on his feet and sprinting away into the woods.
“Phoenix.”
He felt her warm hands on his shoulders, her cheek against his chest and then he tore his eyes away from the spot where Watt had just disappeared. He didn’t need to chase him down and tear his throat out because here was Ida, safe and in his arms. He turned toward her hug and ducked his head to lay on her hair.
“Ida.” Phoenix thought of the moment she’d tossed her arms around his neck as he’d been in his wolf form. He thought of the trust and the bravery that took for a human. “You were scared of my wolf.”
She laughed a teary laugh and tipped her head back. “Are you joking? I’ve never been so happy to see a wolf in my entire life. And I knew you’d never, ever hurt me.” She glanced around at the other wolves and lowered her voice. “You shifted, Phoenix.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “You’re healing. You fully shifted. That’s so incredible.”
There was so much to say. So much to explain, but Phoenix jumped when he heard a car door slam.
He looked around and there was Quill, finally getting out of the car. “Let’s get back to the city,” Quill called, glancing around the woods in a nervous sort of way.
His siblings shifted back and got back into their clothes, Phoenix’s were destroyed, though, so all he could do was slid into the back seat and pull Ida close to him. She was quiet and trembling and hugging him so tight the entire drive.
He wanted to say everything to her. But they were surrounded by other people and what he had to say was so private. He especially didn’t want to say anything in front of Quill.
They were silent as they pulled up to the house, Dawn and Orion jogging up to the house on their own. Quill clenched his jaw and watched them go, so much nervous energy emanating off of him.
“Did you know?” Ida asked after a second. “Quill, did you know about Watt?”
Quill shook his head. “No.”
Phoenix was positive that he was lying.
“But I suspected,” Quill finished, a sad look in his eyes.
Apparently having heard enough, Ida slammed out of the car, dragging Phoenix with her. She took him by the hand and led him through Wren’s salon, which just so happened to be filled with women getting their hair done. They all goggled at the sight of Ida leading a very large, very naked man upstairs.
But Phoenix didn’t care. Ida was safe and that was all that mattered.
***
Well, this was the dumps.
And not just because a guy she’d once dated had tried to abduct her and convince her to leave her entire life behind.
She waited until Phoenix was stretched out on his bed and she had his burn cream in her hand to try to explain it to him.
She gently swiped the balm over his stretched and aggravated scar tissue, tears welling in her eyes even though she tried to fight it all back.
“Thank you for what you did, Phoenix. I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget how you saved me.”
He was laying on his side, his eyes fiercely focused on her face. “It was nothing, Id
a. Your safety is the most important thing to me.”
She bit her lip. “I know that it came naturally to you, to protect me. But not every man in the world would jump on the back of a moving van in order to tear out its tires. I’m—” her voice broke. “I’m lucky to have had you in my life for as long as I did. I’m better for knowing you. It’ll take me a long time to get over you, I’m sure. But you’ve taught me something I would never trade. You taught me all about what I actually deserve. A man who will fight for me and be affectionate and sweet with me and treat me well. And move and get a job and everything else you did. I didn’t mean to fall in love with you. I was a fool for thinking that I would be able to stop it. But I did. I do. I love you. So much. And I just wanted to say thank you for showing me the way. What I deserve from life. From love. And I’ll always think of you fondly.”
She couldn’t go on any more. She turned from him and let the tears come. She sat on the edge of his bed, tucked her face into her elbow and sobbed. She knew now that this was the only way this ever could have ended. Loving him was as easy as rolling down a hill. She’d never have been able to stop.
She jumped when a sharp finger poked her in the side.
When she turned, Phoenix was sitting halfway up, a rather confused look on his face. “I don’t get it.”
“What?”
“Why are you talking like we’re breaking up?”
“Because,” she hiccuped through her tears. “Because you figured out how to shift again. So now you’ll be headed back into the woods.”
His face quirked.
She tumbled on. “I get it now, Phoenix. I saw you in your wolf form and you’re just so perfect. So beautiful. I understand why you’d need to live your life in that form. I will never take that from you—”
He stopped her words with a kiss and an even more confused look. “Look, I know we haven’t really been over this, but you asked me not to leave you and I said I wouldn’t. I thought you understood that that meant I wasn’t going to, you know, leave you.”
“What?” Ida stared at him. “When the hell did I ask you not to leave me?”
“The first time we had sex. Remember? Three times you asked me. And then you came.”
I won’t, she remembered him saying into her ear. Promising her. I won’t.
“Oh. My. God.” She smacked her forehead. “You meant that you wouldn’t go back to the wilderness for good? You just gave it to me? Just like that?”
He shrugged. “I’m in love with you.”
“You’re going to stay in the human world?” she whispered.
“For the most part. Maybe I take a week around the full moon every month and go spend time with Orion and Dawn.” He shrugged again. “We’ll figure out what works the best. But I’m not leaving you, Ida. You’re too important to me.”
She pushed him back and straddled him. “Why are you being so nonchalant about this! I’m freaking out! YOU’RE STAYING WITH ME? I GET TO HAVE YOU? I GET TO LOVE YOU FOREVER? HOW CAN YOU BE SO CALM???”
He laughed and drew her down for a kiss, his hands going up her thighs to play around with her underwear. “Do you need me to calm you down a little?”
“OBVIOUSLY,” she whisper-yelled into his mouth.
She wore a dress and he was naked, so all he really had to do was tug the seam of her panties to one side to let her wetness slick along his cock. She gasped and collapsed and turned to liquid heat against him as he pushed himself up and into her.
“Anything you need, Ida. Anything you need.”
The End
A Mate for Orion
PROLOGUE
“The moon is powerful, Diana. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking it’s just a rock in the sky. There’s big magic in the moon.”
Diana’s mother, the most beautiful woman in the world, knelt in front of her, her long skirt pooling on the dewy grass.
Diana was cold. She was barefoot, in thin pajamas at 5 AM with the full moon rising overhead. But she would never tell her mother that it was too chilly to be outside right now. Diana would have walked across Antarctica in shorts and a t-shirt if her mother had asked her to.
At seven years old, Diana thought that her magical, flighty, spooky mother was perfection. She had no interest in having one of the other, buttoned-up, boring mothers on her block. Her mother was beautiful and funny and weird and perfect.
She just wished that her stepfather felt the same way. Even at just seven years of age, Diana could tell that her stepfather wished her mother was different. He was always buying her sweaters with pearl buttons and hinting that it might be time for a haircut for all that wild, black hair her mother could never seem to contain.
And he really didn’t like when her mother took Diana on one of her special adventures, like they were doing right this very minute. “You’ll make her turn out just like you,” he’d say. As if that were a bad thing.
Diana wanted to turn out exactly like her mother.
So, even though her toes were frozen against the wet grass and her nightgown was too thin and the black forest that encircled them was a little too scary for her, Diana just imitated her mother, raising her hands to the sky and saying a prayer of thanks to the full moon.
The sky lightened just a touch, turning sapphire blue at one edge, the black of the night starting to recede, and Diana wondered if her mother had done that. If that was all because of some magic power her mother had, even though her stepfather insisted it was all hooey.
Together they greeted the dawn, put the full moon to bed. They chanted and danced in circles and laughed with each other. When neither of them could hide their shivers a second longer, her mother swooped Diana up in her arms.
“Breakfast?” she asked. “Berry pancakes?”
Diana was thrilled to her core. Woken up in the night by her spooky, mysterious mother and then dancing in the dark together? All followed up by berry pancakes? She didn’t think it could get any better than this.
They held hands and ran through the forest and back to the house. Diana’s stomach sank. The kitchen light was on. She was almost positive they hadn’t left the kitchen light on. Which could only mean—
“Toni!”
Diana’s mother winced, her smile somehow weak and defiant all at once. “Good morning, Robert.”
“You took her out in the middle of the night with no clothes on?”
Diana’s stepfather stood in the threshold between the kitchen and the living room, his pajamas on, but his feet shoved into his unlaced boots, like he’d just been getting ready to go out and look for them. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d come to find them on a full moon night.
“I’m not naked!” Diana insisted, wanting desperately to defend her mother. “I have my nightgown on.”
Diana’s mother blinked down at her, as if seeing her for the first time. “Oh. Honey. I didn’t think that you might be cold dressed like that.”
“That’s right!” Robert yelled, taking two steps toward them. “You didn’t think, Toni. Her lips are blue!”
“I—“ Her mother trailed off, the joy of the moment officially burned away in the jetstream of Robert’s anger.
Diana wanted to scream, to lock Robert in his bedroom. She wanted to rewind the morning and come back earlier so that Robert would never know that they’d been missing. She wanted berry pancakes with her smiling mother.
“Diana, sweetie,” Robert said in a much softer voice. “Why don’t you go take a warm shower and put some clothes on. There’s only a few hours before I have to be at work. I’ll drop you off at the daycare center on my way.”
Diana felt her disappointment gather even more steam. Robert had taken a morning that had been filled with so much wonder and possibility and squashed beneath the heel of his unlaced boot.
“I don’t want to go to the daycare center today,” Diana said quietly. “Why can’t I stay here with Mom?”
“You know the reason why,” he said through gritted teeth.
; And she did. They’d been through it many, many times before. It was too much for her mother to look after Diana on her own all day. It strained her. And besides, stuff like going into the woods and dancing barefoot happened when she was alone with her mother. And Robert hated stuff like that. So he forced her to spend her weekends, and after-school time, and summer days in a daycare center.
With all the other kids whose parents couldn’t be around.
“Don’t argue, my love,” her mother whispered in her ear, planting a brisk kiss on the shell of Diana’s ear. “Robert knows what’s best. I’m sorry you’re cold.”
Diana turned back to claim that she wasn’t even that cold and that Robert didn’t know what was best for her when she caught sight of the blue in her mother’s lips. She looked down and saw that her mother’s bare feet were just as reddened and grass stained as her own. Her other’s beautiful face was sunken with fatigue.
Don’t argue.
She wasn’t reprimanding Diana, she was making a request. The arguments tired her mother out.
Diana nodded and stalked past Robert on her way out of the kitchen. But something made her pause before she headed upstairs to the shower. She looked back and already Robert was there, folding her mother up in a hug and whispering in her ear.
Diana’s mother’s eyes filled with tears. “I know,” she whispered back. “I know.”
Diana had no way of knowing, but that was the last time she and her mother would ever dance under the light of the full moon. Just three months later, Toni would be gone. And it would sometimes seem to Diana that the gossip mill that had plagued her mother for years would be the only thing that kept her mother alive.
Because Robert certainly didn’t speak of Toni at night around a quiet dinner table as they ate whatever dry, sensible thing he’d prepared for them. She might be only seven, but she was very aware of the fact that he hadn’t known he was signing on to be a single parent when he’d married Toni. But there they were. Just the two of them.
