That night, after a day of grueling shifter practice, they decided to grill on the back porch. They knew that their month was winding down. They could see it in the moon, on the calendar, in the bite in the air each night. The autumn was coming and somehow, they knew that this adventure wouldn’t change with the seasons. It was going to end. And soon.

They were fortified as a group in a way that they had never been before. The bond between each couple was incredibly strong, but the bonds between the friendships was stronger than ever before as well.

This fortified them, but it also made them each a little nervous, because to them, it seemed as if there were nothing else to happen but for the demon to come.

The demon had come at them, in one way or another, in three different locations. But this was the fourth place. There were four couples, everyone had been a target except for Arturo and Martine and now it seemed as if they would be the last target. The logic of it made sense to each person in the group, though they didn’t talk about it out loud much. The demon was running out of chances, this was the last stand, and they couldn’t help but feel that he was going to come at them harder than ever.

It was with this in mind that Jack lit the grill on the back porch as Tre set the picnic table with paper plates and silverware and Jean Luc dragged an iced tub of drinks outside. It was with the demon in his thoughts that Jack was fiddling with the propane tank. It was with the demon in his thoughts that the fireball exploded forward, tossing Jack backward like a rag doll.

“Jesus!” Tre shouted as he and Jean Luc sprinted forward.

Somehow, it was Arturo who made it to Jack first. “Jack! Jack!”

The women burst out onto the back porch in time to see Jean Luc disconnecting the propane tank and kicking it across the yard, Tre and Arturo bent over a very still Jack.

Thea made a quiet sound like a wounded animal, and then she was there too, one cool hand on Jack’s cheek. It was her touch that had his eyes fluttering open. His skin was burnished but it wasn’t welting. His nose and chin and the backs of his hands had taken the brunt of it, but it didn’t look much worse than a sunburn. To all their dismay, though, his hand immediately went to the back of his head and came up bloody. He’d knocked his head but good against the wood of the porch.

“Martine,” he croaked, looking around for her. “I figured it out. I know why we’re here. I finally remembered.”

And then his eyes closed and he fell back.

A few hours later, Jean Luc, Thea and Jack returned from the emergency room. Only Jack was smiling. It was his usual good-natured smile. Thea and Jean Luc both looked drawn and tired. It had been stressful to see Jack wheeled away, to be separated from him by a maze of swinging doors and hospital security and reams of paperwork. Just as it had been stressful to be separated from the rest of the group. The ones left at the house hadn’t liked it any better either.

Martine considered it a small miracle that the demon hadn’t attacked while they’d been split down the seam like that.

“How was it?” Celia asked, taking Jack by the elbow and guiding him down to the kitchen table. There was soup and sandwiches. She’d made the biggest one for Jean Luc and as soon as Jack was settled she practically shoved the gigantic thing into her man’s hand. Jean Luc smiled for the first time in hours and kissed her hard before he plunked wearily into a seat at the table.

“I’m fine,” Jack said, waving a hand through the air. “I’m sorry to have worried everyone. Mmm. Good soup. Just a couple of staples in the cut on my head. Not even a concussion.”

“And your burns?” Caroline asked worriedly.

“Just some ointment on them for a few days. Really, I’m fine.”

“At least we can definitely get our money back from this piece of crap Airbnb,” Tre scowled. “I told you guys it was booby-trapped!”

“Jack,” Martine said gently. “If you feel up to it—”

“You wanna know what I meant when I said that I remembered why we were here?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Jack said as he leaned back and squinted out the side window. Night had long since fallen. The cliff face in the distance was barely visible. “Something about Utah has been bothering me ever since we got here. The sunlight.”

“Yeah, it’s hot as hell here,” Tre agreed.

“But it was more than that. It was the light itself. It… unsettled me. Reminded me of something but I couldn’t remember what.”

“And the explosion triggered your memory?” Thea asked quietly. The last few hours had taken about fifty years off her life. She’d be lucky if her poor heart didn’t just come to a humming stop in the night tonight.

“Yeah.” Jack looked up at Martine. “It was a long time ago. I was a kid. Maybe seven years old. I was on a camping trip with some family members down in Bryce Canyon. Something woke me in the night. It was a dark thing. A bad thing. I was scared shitless, but eventually I fell back asleep. Then I had the strangest dream of my life.”

Martine bit her lip, like she knew what was coming.

“In the dream, I was walking through Bryce canyon, all those spires of orange rising up around me. I was being led toward the dark thing and I couldn’t stop it, even though I wanted to run away. It was going to swallow me whole. But a bird swept out of nowhere and startled me, it kept me from moving forward. The dark thing started moving toward me then, ducking in and out of the spires. I knew it was going to get me. But then there was a sort of silent explosion in front of me. The brightest blue light you’ve ever seen. I felt the light go through me and into me. I woke up in my sleeping bag and that bright, Utah sun was in my eyes, damn near blinding me. I thought about that dream for a long time afterward, but not in the last decade or so.”

“It wasn’t a dream, was it?” Caroline asked Martine, her eyes wide.

“The demon went after Jack before the maps were united?” Arturo cut in, his eyes riveted to Martine’s face. He’d thought he’d known every move the demon had made over the centuries, but even he hadn’t known about this. He hadn’t even thought it possible for the demon to identify the seven souls until the maps were united. Until three months ago.

Martine took a deep breath. “Yes, he went after Jack and technically, yes, that was a dream.” How to explain? “About thirty-five or so years ago, the demon became wildly impatient and he began hunting for the owners of the map. One of you, he knew, could potentially be his next meal. He knew his chances of finding one of the mapholders before the maps were united were extremely slim. But he got lucky. He found Jack. As it was, Jack was the only member of this group who’d been born yet, Arturo excluded, of course. So he was the only mapholder that the demon could find.”
Jack nodded in bemusement. “How could I have been a mapholder if I didn’t even own the map yet?”

Martine paused, searching for a way to explain. “You were born a mapholder. It was always going to be you. The same way the maps eventually find their way to you is the same way the demon was able to find you.”

The group just kind of absorbed that, all of them separately replaying how their particular maps ‘happened’ to come to them. All of them wondering if this was always gonna turn out just like this.

“What do you mean it was technically a dream, though?” Celia asked.

“Jack and the demon were there in person, but I was not. I was actually across the world, tracking the map that would eventually become Celia’s. But I sensed that one of our seven, the first of our seven, was in grave danger and I appeared to Jack in his mind.”

“You protected me with your light.”
“Actually,” Arturo cut in, putting the pieces together as he went. “She protected you with your light.”

“My light? I don’t have that kind of energy that the two of you have.”
Again, Martine bit her lip.

“You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” Jack said, his mouth agape as he read Martine’s facial expression.

“If the light was blue, then it means that she gifted you with it. Her light is golden, my friend. Trust me.” Arturo sat back in his chair and crossed his arms.

“You mean that you have this energy, too?” Thea asked in amazement. Suddenly, she leaned forward. “Is that why…?”

“Must be!” Jack snapped his fingers and reached up to adjust the hat he’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing on account of the staples in his head. “Sometimes when we have sex there’s a kind of a flash of light. That doesn’t happen to y’all?” He directed the last part toward Jean Luc and Tre who both just sort of dimly shook their heads.

“So… you can just gift us with light?” Tre eventually asked Martine.

“Yes and kind of no,” Martine replied. “It doesn’t work the same way for everyone. And it can be very hard to wield. Jack didn’t even know that he possessed it! I only did that for Jack because it was the very last option. The demon may have taken him otherwise.”

“Jack,” Arturo called out, getting his attention. And then he shot an arrow of energy at Jack.

Jack reacted instinctively and dived away from it, barely dodging it. The sudden movement jostled his head and he winced, bringing a palm up to his temple.

“What the fuck, you little weasel!” Thea rose up from her chair so fast she knocked it backwards, rushing around the table toward Arturo.

Arturo didn’t seem perturbed in the least; he simply tried another tactic.

“Jack!” he called again, and this time he sent that same blue arrow toward Thea, who was a good six feet from Jack. And this time Jack again reacted instinctively. His own blue arrow came rocketing out of his palm and intercepted Arturo's in mid-air. The blue on blue burned hot and bright for one second before fizzing away.

“Ho-ly shit, son,” Jack mumbled, staring at his own hand like he’d never seen it before.

Arturo turned to Martine. “They might not be able to perfect the finer points of their energies, Martine, but I think we’d be fools not to let them try.”

“Are you implying that you could gift us with that blue energy?” Tre asked. “Because I totally wanna be able to fry the demon with my own personal laser. Plus, if Jack has it, it’s only fair that me and Jean Luc can have it too, right?”

“Wait a second,” Celia said, standing up and planting her hands on her hips. “If the guys get it, there’s no reason the girls can’t have it too, right? We’ve just been sitting ducks this whole time while you guys get to be big macho bear shifters? Come on! Give us the goods!”

Martine blinked around at the group in extreme surprise. “You mean… you’d want this? But it would make you all less human. It would set you apart from the rest of your species. Make you strange. Make you outsiders.” Without thinking on it, all of her thoughts about herself over the years just sort of poured right out. “Why would you ever want to set yourselves apart from your people? You run the risk of becoming estranged from other humans if they find out—”

“Fuck other humans,” Caroline said succinctly and resolutely. “Martine, we have a demon to kill. We want weapons!”

Martine blinked around uncertainly. “You all want this? All of you?”

Every face looked excited and certain, except for Jean Luc, who looked grim and certain. But she got a whole table full of nodding heads.

“You know this will draw him,” she said to Arturo. “If I use my energy to turn them, he’ll understand what’s happening and come at us.”

Arturo’s mouth flattened into a thin line. “He’s going to come at us anyways, Martine.”

“You won’t have any time to train,” she said to the group. “He’ll be on us fast and hard.”

One by one, the group rose up, standing. The black night leered in from every window.

They knew it without having to say it out loud. It was time to break out the maps again. It was time to find the X that marked the spot. It was time to end this.

 

***

 

“Before we go,” Arturo said to Martine as they stood alone in their bedroom, organizing their things neatly, “I want to do one thing.”

Their belongings were in neat piles on the bed. They had both wanted to make sure they weren’t leaving a mess behind for their friends to clean up. They wouldn’t be coming back here. That much they knew.

“What’s that?” Martine asked.

Arturo held out one hand to her. “I want to marry you.”

Unsure of what he meant, she took his hand. “But you know we can’t legally marry. We don’t have identification or—”

“I don’t care about that. I want to marry you in my heart. My soul.” He switched their hands so that they were palm to palm, fingers laced. He took her other hand in the same way. “I want to bind.”

Slowly, she understood and stepped toward him. He brought his forehead to hers and his eyes fell closed. She watched his handsome face for a moment before her eyes fell closed as well.

Her energy called out to his and it all rose up together, mixing instantly. It was an ecstatic, pleasurable moment, but it didn’t have the same orgasmic quality as before. This was a mixing of their hearts, not their bodies. Both of them stood quietly as their energy wrapped them up completely, forced them flush against one another, binding them.

In a moment of inspiration, Martine quickly augmented two sections of their energy and when it all faded away and they stepped back from one another, a bright green ring of energy sat on Arturo’s left ring finger. And one sat on hers.

“Wedding bands,” he said, grinning a sad grin as he studied the band of energy on his hand. It marked his union to her. He took her by the chin and kissed the hell out of her.

“Now, I’m ready,” he told her. And strangely enough, he realized, it was true.

 

***

 

“Okay, fuck this,” Jean Luc suddenly blurted into the silent van as they rode toward Bryce Canyon and the X that marked the spot.

He pulled off the road as every person in the car, including Celia, looked at him like he’d just lost his mind. He didn’t care.

“We are not just going to silently drive into this like we’re headed to a fucking funeral, okay?” He flipped on the radio and started searching through the channels. “I said, ‘okay’?” he roared and half the car jumped at his tone.

This wasn’t gentle Jean Luc. This was kickass Super Bowl winning Jean Luc.

“Okay!” Caroline called back.

“We are not stepping in there with our tails between our legs, you hear me? We are fucking storming in there, getting electrocuted—or whatever the fuck—by our resident demon hunter. And then we are going to beat some demon ass. Okay?”

“Okay!” This time it was more than just Caroline calling back.

“Perfect,” he muttered to himself as he found the opening strains of The House of the Rising Sun on a classic rock station. He turned the volume of the song up to an earsplitting volume and still he shouted over the noise, he turned in the driver’s seat and pointed at each person in turn, his eyes blazing with ferocity. “I’m not leaving anything on the fucking field, all right?”

He slammed one hand on the steering wheel. “I already lost my family once. I am not losing you all. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for each and every one of you.” His eyes clashed with Arturo’s in the rearview mirror. “I will fight to the motherfucking death if I have to.”

“So will I,” Arturo said, but with a kind of dire certainty in his tone.
“And I,” Martine said.

“Me, too,” Jack said, his voice strong.

“And me,” that was Thea.

“Nothing I wouldn’t do for you all,” Celia spoke up, tears in her voice.

“Let’s do this thing,” Caroline called.

“Let’s fucking DO THIS!” Tre hollered as the song crescendoed and Jean Luc hit the gas. They kicked up red dust and gravel as they rounded a long turn. It was the dead of the night and their van was a shining beacon of light and energy in the dark. They were a unit, racing toward their fate and it didn’t matter. None of it mattered because they’d found one another.

They jumped out of the van and followed the map for the twenty minutes it took them to hike through the park. The spires were blood red in the dark and rising up everywhere.

“We’re here,” Jack said, not even needing to consult the map. This was the location of his dream. He’d know this place with his eyes closed. It was exactly as he remembered it. The black sky stretching forever, points of light burning like ancient fires in the sky, the blood moon rising.  Behemoth shadows of rock everywhere they turned.

It was a naturally spooky place. There were vibrations here as ancient as the world. It had the same stillness as an old cathedral in the tense, holy seconds after the organ stopped playing. The spires seemed to be asking something of the sky, of the universe. They were like ancient, organic antennae, pulling something toward them. Beacons for the supernatural.

Lightning cracked on the horizon and the group felt the electricity on the wind as a cold front moved toward them.

“Fitting,” Tre muttered.

“All right,” Martine turned to the group. “Let’s do this fast.” She raised her hands and lowered them, as she thought of another thing to say. “Careful not to shoot one another with the energy. You won’t be able to wield it very well. Worst comes to worst, shoot your energy toward mine—it’ll help fortify me, make me stronger.”

Arturo came to stand beside her. “And no one be a hero,” he told them. “Trust me. It doesn’t work.”

They stood in a circle on red dirt land, surrounded on all sides by a maze of spires. The black velvet sky capped them in on top, the air was cavernous and neverending in every direction.

As if by tacit understanding, hand gripped hand gripped hand until they were all linked. Martine was linked between Jack and Arturo. Arturo held onto Caroline held onto Tre held onto Celia held onto Jean Luc held onto Thea held onto Jack and the circle was complete.

Martine closed her eyes and called up her energy. Arturo’s, unbidden, responded to hers and rose up as well. Jack’s rose up next and he gasped with the feeling, having never felt something like that in all his days.

Arturo’s energy and Martine’s mixed and it was the spring green energy that shot out toward the rest of the group. Her eyes closed, Martine pushed the energy gently, in a hundred small rivers, through the hearts of each member of the group.

They’d expected it to be painful, but it wasn’t. It was a sort of racing heat that sped up their heartbeats, rode their pulsing blood all the way out to their fingertips.

It was a tense, tight thirty seconds as Martine bound all of their cells with the energy. There was no breath, every person in the circle had their faces turned to the sky, their bodies up on tiptoe.

And then, all at once, they released and fell flat to their hands and knees.

Martine let go of Jack and Arturo and walked to each person one by one. She helped them to their feet, a bracing hand on their shoulders and soft words in their ears.

Arturo watched her with a tight throat and heat behind his eyes. She was more like a mother than she’d ever know. She’d just given all these people light and life and now she was nurturing them back to health.

In the end, he realized, she’d given Arturo a family after all. Somehow, their union had taken the two outsiders and pushed them straight to the head of the group. They hadn’t always been liked by the group, but they were going to protect them, they were going to die for them.

Everyone was shaking out their hands, turning to one another, watching in amazement as they brought their energy out onto their fingertips, shot little spurts of it into the air.

The men had blue energy, like Arturo and Jack, and the women had gold, like Martine. A whippy excitement was starting to settle over the group when an extra cold wind blew in, and on it, a horrible stench.

Arturo’s heart went cold. It was the scent of an evil, dead thing. He’d know it anywhere. The demon was here.

“Brace yourselves,” Arturo muttered to the group, and then he was grabbed about his middle by a dark arm and yanked backwards into the darkness.

“No!” Caroline shouted, sprinting toward the place where he’d just been standing. But she was practically bowled over by the three bears who bounded into the darkness, roaring furiously. Martine’s hawk swept into the sky and split the dark like an arrow, a trail of burning gold ripping along behind her.

Celia and Thea looked at one another for one second before they, too, charged into the dark, after Caroline, golden light sparking at their fingertips.

The women raced through the maze of the spires, trying to follow the noises in front of them. Bursts of light and swaths of black shadow alternately deepened and destroyed their night vision.

Celia cuffed Thea around the neck and dragged her back to avoid getting smashed to bits by Tre’s bear who skidded hard through the dirt in front of them, a long gouge on his back already bleeding. He roared and sprinted back into the fray.

This time, they followed him. The three women came into another clearing, much like the first, and what they saw, none of them would ever forget.

There was a huge, dark creature, reptilian in look but with a strange smile of razor-sharp teeth. It stank of death and rose twenty feet up in the air. On the air around it was a feeling of great despair, of pain. The women fought against the urge to simply lie down and die.

Arturo, in his bear form, leapt from one spire that he’d been clinging to and landed on the back of the demon, his claws and teeth sinking into the demon’s back, his blue energy sinking fast into the puncture marks.

Thea immediately raised her hands and shot her own energy into the demon’s wounds, just as Arturo was doing. She knew immediately that she wouldn’t be able to hold on to any kind of accuracy for long. Her golden energy rocketed out of her like a fire hose.

Beside her, Celia and Caroline followed her lead, raising up their energy as well.

The demon roared and bounded toward them, its disgusting tongue lolling to one side and Arturo fighting to stay aboard its back.

Three bears slammed into the demon hard enough to shake the earth. Jean Luc immediately had his jaws around the throat of the demon, Tre tore at his back legs, and Jack ripped a section of stinking flesh straight from its ribs. The demon made a horrible, rageful sound before a shockwave of black energy pulsed out from its chest. All four bears were flung from the demon as if it had set off a bomb. Their bodies smacked the surrounding spires and fell hard onto the ground, limp and still.

The demon righted itself and once again went hard toward the women. Its feet skidded as it choked on the golden rope that had just been lassoed around its throat.

Martine stood, perfectly naked, framed by the night sky, at the top of one of the towers, her energy sparking from her hands in a long chain she used to choke the demon.

It wheeled on her and grabbed her energy in one of its palms, making the flesh sizzle and burn. But it didn’t seem to care. The demon yanked forward on the rope of her energy, sending Martine tumbling down off the spire. She quickly shifted to her hawk form and then back into her human form as she hit the ground running, full-on sprinting toward the demon.

She jumped into the air, her energy swirling around her like a tornado, lifting her up in a whirlpool of golden light. The demon’s black energy slashed out at her, but Celia, Caroline, and Thea added theirs to Martine’s and the light swelled.

The bears shook themselves off, injured, but not down for the count, and started to charge the demon again.

Though it went against every survival instinct that Arturo had, he shifted back into his human form. He had sworn to Martine that he would be by her side. He wanted his last moments with her to be as a man, not as a bear. Something caught his eye as he ran toward her and he realized it was the spring green energy ring on his finger.

His wife.

She was his wife in every way that counted and he wouldn’t let her face the demon alone.

Arturo called forth his energy and let it lift him up as well. His shoulder slammed into Martine and they were together, their energy mixing in a whirlpool of frantic racing below them.

The demon roared as Jean Luc ripped another length of flesh from his flank and Tre’s jaw sunk into its ribs. Jack took Arturo’s place on the beast’s back and shot blue energy straight down into the skull of the demon.

“Now,” Martine muttered to Arturo. “He’s weakened. It’s now.”

“I love you. More than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life.”

It was the only proper response for when the love of your life tells you that your time on Earth is about to be up. He didn’t want to die with hatred for the demon in his heart. He wanted to die with love for Martine swamping him.

“Forever,” she agreed. And then, because she was a total badass, because she was born to do it, because she was going to protect the mortals even if it meant dying, she turned her focus back to the demon.

Martine and Arturo, fifteen feet above ground, bearing down on the demon, lifted their arms in unison and shot brilliant green energy straight into the body of the beast.

The demon jolted, stricken with the force of the energy.

Martine was dimly aware of the women adding their energy to hers, of the men shifting back into human form and adding their energy as well.

The glowing green electricity created a cocoon around the demon, trapping him in. Martine gritted her teeth and focused even farther. The demon was using his black energy to rip through the cocoon, but she wouldn’t let him. This ended today. He would never terrorize another group of people. He’d never take someone as a slave, the way he’d done to Arturo. He’d never eat another soul.

With a twitch of her palms, she changed the shape of the cocoon, she forced it into a hundred spears of energy, which gave the demon the opportunity to try to escape.

But she didn’t let him. The demon, ugly, harsh and hungry, fear and fury in every molecule of its being, lunged toward an opening.

It was the last thing that the demon ever did.

Martine, using her final well of strength, lunged the spears of energy forward, straight through the heart of the demon, pinning it still in its last beat.

Martine felt the life leave the demon, just as she felt the life leave herself. Her body began to dissolve away into the air, just a hint of gold on the wind. She was going to go back to the earth, back to the light, back to where she came from.

The very last thing she saw was Arturo’s body falling through the air as his energy left him. His eyes were open and lifeless, his chest still. The demon was dead. And so was he.