by Selena Scott
Sasha nearly face-palmed. God. First of all, he hadn’t noticed that the rest of his group had completely left the house and he was the only one left with Celeste. And then he hadn’t noticed when a stranger had entered the house and stood right behind him. She could have stripped naked and danced the cha cha and until she’d spoken, Sasha probably wouldn’t have noticed.
Some shifter he was.
It was like he made it his business to be as oblivious as possible.
“Hi, Madelyn. Why don’t you wait in the meeting room? I’m just brewing the tea.”
Sasha nodded to the woman as she left the room, then he turned back to the psychic.
“Celestine is kind of my stage name. In case you were wondering.”
He wasn’t, because frankly, he hadn’t even noticed that the client had called her something different from what Jesse had. Big shocker. He nodded, putting his hands back in his pockets.
The psychic watched him and he realized that she was waiting for him to say something else. He was sure that the group was waiting for him out front. But he stayed, hands in pockets, trying to think what the right way to say goodbye to this woman could possibly be.
“You’re really gonna wear a robe and sunglasses when you meet with a client?” Aaaaand, apparently he’d decided a mild, impertinent insult was the way to go. What was with him today?
But she just laughed again, this time a small chuckle, and pulled a teapot and a delicate-looking teacup with an intricate design down from a cabinet. “She’s definitely seen me in worse.”
The kettle began to whistle and Sasha felt something shift between them. It was like the kettle was an alarm clock that marked their time as officially up.
She arranged everything on a tray and walked past Sasha to a different door than he’d entered through. She pushed on the door with her bottom, making it swing half open, balancing the tray in her hands. Her hair did that Jessica Rabbit thing again and this time, Sasha couldn’t help but wonder what color her eyes were. Those dang sunglasses were downright unsettling.
He thought she was going to disappear through the door, but she paused instead. He felt those spiders crawling all over him again and he knew she was studying him through the dark lenses.
“Whenever you want to you know… you know where to find me.” Then the door was swinging closed behind her.
“I don’t even know what you’re referring to!” Sasha called after her.
“I know!” she called back, her voice muffled by the closed door.
“Apparently she knows everything,” Sasha grumbled to himself, scratching his neck and staring at the door she’d just left through.
When she didn’t speak again and she didn’t come back, Sasha saw himself out the way he’d come in. The rest of the group was waiting for him beside the van.
“Did you use the bathroom or something?” Wren asked as he approached them.
“Yeah,” Sasha said, feeling that whatever had just happened with the psychic could definitely be classified as “or something”.
He looked up to see Jesse’s eyes on him, a knowing glance on his face.
“I’ll drive,” Sasha offered, holding the keys up from his pocket.
Jesse shrugged. “Sure.”
Sasha was grateful that Jesse was willing to give up the wheel again. Because he needed to concentrate on something other than the hungover psychic.
CHAPTER TEN
It was a deep blue dusk when Dawn and Quill finally made it back to their car. Quill nearly stopped in his tracks when he realized that he’d thought of the car as “theirs”. It had been years since he’d shared anything with anyone.
This woman was seriously in his head. And his heart. Frankly, he felt like he’d been struck down by some incredibly infectious disease. Nothing was the same as it had been before. Everything had been promptly realigned to rotate around Dawn. To face her. To stretch toward her.
Hadn’t he known this was going to happen?
In a way, it was almost comforting to know that he was going down from the start. That he’d never even stood a chance in the face of sweetness so genuine. Some people just had a match, he supposed. And he’d found his.
It was just his luck that the person he was going to die for was also the only one he’d ever met who made him want to keep on living.
“So,” she said from the passenger seat, her knees pulled up under her chin, her face painted in stripes of shadow from the passing streetlights. “You were going to teach me about shifting?”
The expression on her face had him laughing. What a ridiculous idea, that this woman had anything to learn about something she’d been doing with ease since birth. The very idea was insulting. In fact, the whole thing was insulting. That their whole plan was to diminish her, make her seem less. But the fact was that the only way to make her invisible to the Director was to make her uninteresting. If the Director got even a glimpse of what Quill saw in Dawn, he’d snatch her up and never let her leave.
“Actually,” Quill replied. “I think it’s more like I’ll be un-teaching you about shifting.”
“Huh?”
“You and your brothers are the most natural shifters I’ve ever met in my life. Think about it—you’re the only ones who didn’t grow up having to hide who you were. You could shift any time you wanted, spent most of your lives in your wolf forms, could smell humans from literal miles away. You really never had to worry about getting caught and thrown into the internment camps. You were, for all intents and purposes, free shifters before there really was such a thing. And not the kind of free we are now. Where no one is throwing us into the camps anymore, but most of us are languishing homeless or strung out on drugs or crippled under debt of one kind or another. I mean you and your brothers were actually free. You weren’t second-class citizens in reality or in your own minds. You weren’t squandering your gifts under the lead blanket of self-hate. You were—”
He cut himself off when he had to drag in a breath all at once.
“Wow,” he muttered after a second. “Guess I feel pretty passionate about that.”
He could feel Dawn’s eyes across the car but he kept his own on the road.
“I guess so,” she agreed. “I don’t think I ever thought of it quite like that before. That we were more free than other shifters. I think you’re right. But our life had plenty of limitations as well.”
“Of course.”
“The whole never interacting with or meeting other people thing was a pretty big one. And the whole living wild, completely uncivilized, only as animals, never as humans, that one wasn’t awesome either.”
He turned to her now. “But you got to be so in touch with your wolf. I can’t imagine how freeing that must have been.”
“And you got to be so in touch with your human. I can’t imagine how freeing that must have been. We didn’t grow up hiding our wolves. We grew up hiding our humans.”
He frowned and scraped a hand over his stubble, considering her words.
“In the end I understand your point,” she said after a minute. “I think the way my brothers and I grew up did more good than bad.” She quirked a little smile in his direction. “No offense, but I definitely would choose my life over yours.”
He laughed heartily at that. “Yeah. I don’t blame you for that.” His laughter gave way to thoughtfulness.
“I guess,” she continued after a quiet minute, “that the only truly perfect life for a shifter is one where we can be both of our halves in whatever sort of proportions we prefer. Where we don’t have to hide part of who we are in order to stay in hiding.”
“Yeah.” That sort of utopia seemed ridiculously far away. Unattainable. Not even worth daydreaming about. If that existed, it was on another planet. A different dimension. Not a place he’d ever see. Meanwhile, they were eating up the miles between here and the Director. “Wanna unlearn?”
She gave him a wry smile. “Unteach away.”
***
“This is r
idiculous,” Dawn insisted, standing in the middle of the dark hotel room stark naked, her hands on her hips.
“No,” Quill replied, his eyes making a very slow trip up her body. “It’s really not.”
“I know I have to practice and everything but I’ve never shifted indoors before.”
“Good. Use the awkwardness to get in touch with the steps of a shift. Don’t do it all at once. You shift too gracefully. You have to make it look painful and uncomfortable and clumsy. Really make him think that you’re a lost cause.”
Dawn puffed hair out of her eyes and looked at the ceiling. “This is so degrading.”
“Standing naked in front of me?”
“No,” she laughed. “Intentionally making myself look bad at shifting.”
They were only a day’s drive from where the Director was hiding out. Honestly, they could have pushed further on their drive today and gotten even closer, but they’d both silently been hoping for another night together. They’d pulled into a hotel in Georgia, paid in cash, and practically sprinted across the street for dinner.
Dinner had been an Italian restaurant that had served mediocre pasta, mediocre wine, and mediocre atmosphere. Neither of them had cared a lick.
After dinner, they made it to their hotel room and here they were, practicing all the theoreticals that Quill had run past Dawn in the car earlier that afternoon.
“Maybe we shouldn’t think about it as you becoming intentionally worse at shifting. Let’s think about it as… playing with your shift.” Quill sat up on the edge of the bed. “I’d do it with you if we weren’t on the second floor. But I’m scared my bear would be too heavy in here.”
“What do you mean playing?”
“I mean view it as a skill. Instead of thinking of it as breaking down your shifting process, think of it as sharpening it. Learning about every aspect of it. Seeing if you can isolate certain moments. The moment in between human and wolf. Elongate it, pause it, hold it.”
She pursed her lips and eyed him skeptically. But then, before he could even start trying to talk her into it again, she acquiesced and her shift began.
She shifted back and forth a few times in her usual way. Though there was nothing usual about it. Quill had seen an awful lot of shifters shift and none of them did so with the grace and assuredness that Dawn did. It was gorgeous. Filled with confidence and rightness and almost instantaneous. He couldn’t decide if she looked more at home as a human or as a wolf and there was something so gratifying about that.
As he watched her shift back and forth, he realized, in yet another way, just how special Dawn really was. What she could represent to the shifter community as a whole. He meant what he’d said about the uniqueness of her and her brothers’ circumstances. To meet shifters who truly held no shame or fear around being a shifter… it was special. To watch this woman shift back and forth with zero hesitation, zero reserve, well, it made him want to go back to the center and try like hell to give every shifter he met there a fighting chance. It made him want to tear the Director limb from limb. It made him want to work on himself.
It made him proud to be a shifter.
It made him want to live.
He was filled to the brim with emotion, hot tea all the way to the edge of a mug. If he so much as breathed, he’d spill everywhere and burn himself to a crisp. He had to tell her how she made him feel. He couldn’t tell her everything and survive. He couldn’t have both.
Luckily, the moment passed as she started to augment her shift. He breathed deeply and watched as she slowed things down, extended the moments between human and wolf.
His eyes rounded in amazement as he watched her and he couldn’t help but shake his head and laugh.
“What?” she asked, fully back in human form, her brow furrowed and her hands on her hips. “Why are you laughing?”
“Because even when you’re half human, half wolf, you’re incredibly beautiful and graceful.”
She scoffed and rolled her eyes. “There’s no chance that’s true.”
It really was, though. He’d seen shifters before who actually struggled with their shift. Shifters who weren’t in touch at all with one half of who they were, generally the animal side. Their shifts were horribly painful, to endure and to watch. Their bodies cracked, became grotesque combinations of animal and human. They writhed, sprouted teeth and hair, and grimaced and screamed awfully through the entire lengthy process.
But not Dawn. No. Even when she was dragging the whole thing out, there wasn’t an ounce of awkwardness or discomfort. “No. Seriously. You looked like you were pulling yourself through a sun salutation or something. You looked totally comfortable. At ease.”
“So, I guess I have to improve my acting skills, then.” She crumpled up her face, made one eye bigger than the other. Dropped a shoulder, clawed up her hands. “Ouch,” she crowed. “Ah, my shift is so painful and terrible. I hate it.”
Quill flopped back on the bed and laughed, good and loud. “Well, looks like we finally found something you’re not preternaturally talented at.”
“You mocking my acting skills?” She dropped the awkward grimace and went back to putting her hands on her hips.
He leaned forward and scooped her around the waist, laying her warm nakedness over top of himself. “Yes,” he said, leaning up to kiss her soft bottom lip. “Yes, I am.”
***
Dawn awoke in the dark chill of the deep night. It was the part of night that made it seem like sunrise just wasn’t going to happen anymore. She could feel Quill’s breath against her neck, the satin heat of his naked body pressed along every inch of hers. They were tangled up in one another, his leg between hers, her breasts smashed against his chest, one of his hands in her hair, the other on top of her ass.
After practicing her shift, they’d had insistent, fast-paced sex, infused with the urgency of their entire situation. Dawn had almost felt like some sort of cosmic timer had started counting down. But counting down until what? She wasn’t certain. As they’d fallen in a sweaty heap against one another, their bodies vibrating from the force of their pleasure, Dawn had been struck with the complete certainty that Quill knew exactly what the timer was counting down to. And either he was ignoring it or couldn’t bring himself to tell her. She’d fallen into exhausted sleep, clinging to him, wishing she could take him with her even into the dream world.
But now, uncertain of what had awoken her, Dawn became aware of the fact that he wasn’t sleeping either. She started to lift her head, to speak to him, but his fingers in her hair held her still.
“Someone just came in through the bathroom window,” he all but breathed into her ear.
Dawn froze and then immediately registered that the foreign scent drifting in from the other side of the hotel room was definitely what had awoken her. “It’s someone new,” she breathed back to Quill. She took another sniff of the air. “I don’t know him. A badger shifter maybe.”
Quill nodded and began to slide away from her. “Stay here.”
He silently moved his pillows around so that it looked like there was someone in the bed next to Dawn and then slipped into the shadows next to the bathroom door. Dawn held still, watching through slitted eyes.
A person dressed in black slipped through the half-open door almost silently. If his scent hadn’t been as blatant to Dawn as stomping feet, he would have been utterly undetectable in the shadows. The only thing giving him away was the ambient street light glinting off the weapons he had lashed against his body, and the one in his hands. A gun. And this one didn’t look like a tranquilizer gun to Dawn. It took everything she had to keep herself still on the bed. She wanted to leap up and shift. She wanted to attack and run.
But there was Quill standing behind the man. And she knew in her heart that he had meant what he’d said yesterday in the forest. He was never, ever going to let anything happen to her.
The intruder took another step forward and sure enough, Quill sprang forward, his hands working in three
concise movements to disarm the man, crack his head cleanly against the wall, and pin him down to the floor.
Quill breathed hard as he pinned the man with a knee. The man was down like a sack of potatoes, but still he kicked his legs, trying to free himself from Quill’s hold.
Dawn sprang up from the bed, debating whether to shift or not.
“The tranquilizer on his hip,” Quill panted.
Dawn scrabbled for it, pulling the gun from its holster.
“Tranq him.”
“Fuck y—” the man spit out, but it was all he managed before he shouted in pain.
Dawn’s hands trembled where they held the tranquilizer gun, her finger tight against the trigger. The man struggled for another few seconds before he passed out cold against the floor.
And then Quill was there, prying the tranquilizer gun out of Dawn’s hands, rubbing feeling back into her cold, stiff fingers. “You did great,” he told her.
“I’ve never shot anyone before.”
“And you still haven’t, not really. You tranquilized him.”
“I’ve never done that either,” she said hoarsely.
“You had to do it.” His voice was grim. “I can tell you feel guilty, but Dawn, that was not a play gun in his hands when he came into this room. Make no mistake, he was here to relieve me of my duties. If we hadn’t woken up, I would be dead on that bed and you’d be tranquilized and abducted. You saved my life just now.”
She started shaking even more and Quill quickly sat her down on the bed and helped her step into her clothes.
“Dawn, we have to act fast, okay? We don’t know if there are more of them.”
“Right.”
He turned and quickly inventoried the unconscious man’s pockets. There were handcuffs, knives, another gun, a few communication devices, and a small medical pack filled with vials of liquids of a few different colors. Quill took everything except for the communication devices.
