Arturo sat straight up from sleep as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water over his head. His brain split with pain and he couldn’t stop the pained groan that escaped him if he’d wanted to.

He could smell the horrid stench of death. It was familiar and disgusting. He’d know it anywhere. It was how the demon smelled.

His eyes clamped shut and his hands tearing at the hair on his head, Arturo had a horrible realization. The scent seemed to be coming from him. Arturo writhed against the pain in his head. “No.”

“Quiet. He’s gone.”

Arturo gasped and opened his eyes to see Martine crouching over him. She glowed gold, knives glinting in her hands and a fierce expression on her face.

“He’s gone,” she repeated.

But Arturo could barely make sense of her words. He was shaking with the pain now, barely able to crack open his eyes.

He hadn’t registered that Martine had been sitting on him until the weight of her eased up and she was standing beside the bed. She yanked off the sweaty sheets that had pooled at his hips and dragged him bodily from the bed. Arturo heard footsteps and a door slam.

“What happened?” That was Jean Luc’s voice. But it was Jack who was suddenly under Arturo’s other arm, helping Martine support his weight.

“The demon,” she said curtly. “Caroline, boil water, but don’t put anything in it. Jack, we need to get him to the shower.”             

Arturo tried to make himself walk but his feet just tangled and dragged on the ground. A few clumsy seconds later, he found himself standing under frigid shower water, boxer briefs and all. His shoulders fell three inches as the water began to warm.

He felt the demon’s reprehensible magic wash off his body and down the drain like dirt being flushed from a wound. Warm water was a simple remedy, but it worked. His muscles trembled as he planted his palms against the shower wall and dropped his head under the punishing stream of water.

It was as painful as it was refreshing. An uncomfortable rebirth into the land of the living.

“Drink. Now.”

A mug was shoved into one of his hands and then impatiently tipped up to his lips. Arturo gulped down the burning hot water. He felt the heat race instantly into his bloodstream and with the second gulp, the pain in his head eased. The demon had left behind a disgusting handprint of dark magic within Arturo’s mind, but by the time he’d finished the mug of hot water, the final dregs of pain were gone.

Weak as a baby, Arturo sank to the floor of the shower.

It had been a long time since the demon had attempted to possess him. But it wasn’t a feeling he would ever forget. To rescind the control of one’s mind and body was the ultimate violation. And he’d undergone years of it as the demon’s trusty servant. Whenever the demon had desired the corporeal form of a human, Arturo had been all too handy. He thought that he’d grown hardened to it.

But apparently not, considering he was crouched on the floor of a shower at five in the morning, breathing hard and trying not to throw up.

He heard the door of the bathroom close and he looked up, expecting to be closed in there with Martine.

He blinked when he realized there wasn’t a female in sight.

It was the three bear shifters who were scattered around the bathroom in a tableau that might have been titled ‘freaked-out concern’.

“Are you alright?” Jean Luc asked gruffly.

Arturo said nothing, just scraped a hand over his face and continued to crouch.

“Scared the hell out of us,” Tre said, leaning against the far wall of the bathroom and looking rather pale. “I thought—I thought he’d come back for me. I could feel him in your mind, Arturo. It was just like before. When he did that to me.”

“You could feel it?” Arturo asked, squinting his eyes in the bright bathroom lights until Jack thoughtfully flicked them off and plunged all of them into the dim gloom, lit only by the hazy pre-dawn out the window.

“Feel it?” Jack asked, a pained laugh on his lips. “Son, I was living it. Came at a hell of a time, too. I was just getting to the good parts with my girl.”

Arturo winced sympathetically. It had been centuries since he’d had sex, but he imagined that suddenly feeling possessed by the demon mid-coitus would be a real boner killer.

“I didn’t realize I was opening myself up to you three,” Arturo admitted and rose up to shut the shower off.

Jean Luc tossed him a towel. “Well, I’m glad you did. Otherwise we might not have gotten to you in time.”

“Nah, Martine beat us there,” Tre corrected Jean Luc. “How’d she know what was going on?”

Arturo scrubbed the towel over his face with a hand that wanted to shake. He didn’t let it. “She can sense the demon’s presence in a lot of ways. His scent. What he does to the air, the way he makes other people feel. He leaves a hundred clues in his trail. Which is why he used to send me to do all his bidding. She has a harder time sensing my comings and goings than the demon’s. And she’s a sharper hunter than even the demon knows. She probably had him clocked the second he entered the house.”

Jack shook his head. “I’ll never forget what she looked like crouching over top of you, tearing the demon out of your mind with that glowy thing she can do.”

“Totally,” Tre agreed. “That shit was actually kind of hot. Like warrior Barbie or something.”

Arturo’s eyes narrowed. He was about to say something rude in response to that comment, but Jean Luc beat him to it.

“All right, all right. Let’s not get carried away here.” He turned back to Arturo. “I suppose you want to get back to sleep for a few hours.”

“Actually,” Arturo said, stepping out of the tub, his briefs dripping water down his legs, “I need to shift. It’s the only way to get the rest of the adrenaline out.”

Tre shrugged, and Jean Luc dipped his head in understanding.

“Yeah, all right,” Jack said, pulling his T-shirt over his head and dropping trou.

Arturo looked at them in confusion. “I didn’t mean that you needed to come with me.”             

“Son,” Jack said in that voice of his, so lazy it was almost insulting, “you just almost got your brains sucked out with a straw. We’re going with you.”

That was how four bears, one of them a twisted, evil-looking grizzly, watched the sunrise from the red ridge of rocks two miles behind the house.

 

***

 

Martine was strangely charged that evening as she stood barefoot outside Arturo’s door. The sun had gone down a half an hour ago, bathing an entire half of the house in a blood-red light that slowly faded to lavender.

The group had all hit the sack right after dinner, exhausted as everyone was by their early wake-up call that morning. Martine had thought that the demon’s unexpected surfacing would have put a strain or damper on the group, but when the men returned from having shifted in the late morning, they were quiet, but surprisingly relaxed.

Martine sensed, not a kinship exactly, but perhaps a peaceful kind of accord between the men that hadn’t been there before.

She understood why. It had shaken her, just as it had shaken the others, to have seen Arturo so weak and pained on the floor of the shower. When he’d first become a member of their group, he’d been unconscious and bedridden for days and days. They’d been able to sever him from the demon, but it had hurt him badly. He’d had to recover. And then it seemed as if his connection to the other bear shifters had also hurt him. They’d attempted to connect with him emotionally and telepathically, the way they could with one another, and it had caused him even more pain. It wasn’t until he’d begun to open himself up to them just a bit that his pain had eased.

Needless to say, the group was used to seeing Arturo in pain. His normal response to pain, though, was anger. They were used to seeing him spitting mad and vitriolic and rude.

They were not, however, used to seeing him in pain and scared. Which was exactly what he’d been last night. Whatever the demon had done to Arturo had deeply fucked with him, and anyone could see that. Watching the water sluice over his back, his head hanging down and his knees shaking, he’d looked so dang human. And these men had good hearts, kind hearts. Martine knew that they wouldn’t be able to keep Arturo blocked out forever.

They’d come back from shifting, sat down at the table and eaten a humongous lunch in complete silence. Martine had watched quietly from the kitchen, trying to string together the clues.

They weren’t laughing and joking, but they weren’t sniping at one another either. Arturo sat alongside Jean Luc and across the table from Tre and Jack, where he normally might have taken his food back to his bedroom or sat at the chair under the window. They sat in silence that was, dare she say it, companionable.

And then when lunch was over, they cleared their places and scattered, each going to find something new to do.

Somehow, their experience with the demon last night had bonded them just enough to tolerate one another.

She’d take it.

If everyone was finally accepting Arturo into the fold, it only made her job of protecting them all that much easier. 

There was something else that was making Martine’s job easier as well. It was this adrenaline-pumping sense of rightness that was coursing through her.

Last night, Martine had kicked ass, if she did say so herself. It had been a long time since she’d fully gone with her instinct and talent and hadn’t let any social misgivings get in her way.

And she’d saved Arturo’s life because of it.

She was good at this.

And it wouldn’t kill her to remember that.

A few nights ago, she might have talked herself out of what she was about to do. But not tonight. Tonight she, barefoot, night gown swirling around her ankles, knives lashed to her wrists and ankles, her hair in a braid down her back, knew exactly who she was.

She was a warrior. A hunter. She had instincts like whoa. And someday she was going to kill this fucking demon.

Convincing Arturo to let her protect him was, by comparison, a piece of cake, as Caroline liked to say. She knocked once on the door and pushed it open.

Arturo’s head snapped up where he sat on the edge of the bed. He was shirtless and hunched over his knees, his hair all mussed from where he’d been gripping it.

“My room or your room,” she told him, with that zinging energy rushing her from every side. She felt about ten inches taller than she normally did. If the demon showed up at that very second, she’d roundhouse kick him in the teeth.

“What?”

Arturo was looking at her like she hadn’t just spoken the king’s English.

“You and I are the only two people in this house who are sleeping alone. The demon isn’t coming for me, he’s obviously coming for you.”

He stared at her blankly. “You think we should share a bedroom.”

“Yes. Yours or mine.”
“Martine,” he sighed in exasperation. “That’s ridiculous. We both know that if the demon is really coming for me, he’s not going to let something like a bed partner deter him.”

“I can fight the demon. I can kill him. He knows this. He fears me.” She lifted her chin. “You’re safer with me.”

Obviously, he’d decided that ignoring her completely was the only way to go. “I’m going to bed.” He stood up and yanked his sheets halfway off his twin bed. It was strange to have Martine in here with him. He knew the room was small and dark and dank, but having her there, a little golden drop of woman, everything seemed smaller and darker and danker. He wanted her gone so he could just be alone. Everything would seem less depressing if he could experience it alone.

A half second later the door slammed closed and he was being shoved toward the wall as she pushed her way into the bed beside him.

Arturo’s body stiffened and sparked in every place she bumped against him. He felt as if she’d just touched a match to him in a hundred places. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m not negotiating on this,” she told him as she yanked the sheet up to her chin and set the pillow squarely between them. He attempted to ignore the silk of her nightgown where she pressed into him, hip to knee. Her elbow accidentally jabbed him hard in the ribs and even that was in danger of arousing him past the point of no return.

“You can’t be serious.”

“How can you ask me that? The demon almost possessed you last night.” Her voice was quiet but very hard.

He winced in the dark. She was right. He was no match for the demon. He never had been. Four hundred years he’d been at the whim of that evil creature. And now, all he had to do to protect himself from the demon was sleep next to a beautiful woman?
Why the hell was he protesting this?

Oh yeah. Because she hadn’t been pressing against him for more than thirty seconds and he already had a boner that could raise a circus tent.

The small room bore down on him claustrophobically. There was barely any moonlight through the slatted window and the darkness felt as if there was another blanket draped over them. It increased the intimacy. The cement wall dug into his back as he tried to pull a few inches away from her.

Nothing doing.

“This is ridiculous. We obviously can’t both fit in this bed.”

“My room, then?” she asked with the bright tones of someone who knew she’d just won another battle.

“Fine,” he growled, grabbing pajama pants and a T-shirt as he rolled out of bed. If he was sleeping in a bed next to Martine, he needed armor.

A few hours later, Arturo was still awake, lying in her airy room, the moonlight filtering over both of them as if they slept on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Her white bed was soft and large and made him feel as if he were slowly rotating away into the sky.

She slept deeply on the other side of the bed. She lay on her side, facing him, the thin sheet rising and falling with her breath.

He wasn’t aware of falling asleep. But he was sure as hell aware of waking up. He was lying face down on a warm, sweet-smelling stomach, one hand firmly lodged under her back and the other palm-to-palm with one of her hands. He came awake slowly, little by little understanding the exact position he was lying in. When he felt her make a small adjustment with her hips, he immediately rolled off her.

He’d been giving her his full weight! Arturo quickly glanced at her face to see that she was just starting to stretch and wake up, her eyes pressed closed.

“Mmm,” she made the smallest little noise and it nearly paralyzed him.

He was lying on his stomach when her eyes opened, the sheet over his ass and his forehead on both of his palms, and he rolled his head to catch her eye.

Her eyes were apparently busy. Her gaze roved over his body, hitching on his ass and the plane of his back. By the time she looked him in the eye, a golden glow had stolen over her body. Arturo’s hands fell away from his face as he stared at her in fascination.

Every inch of her skin that he could see was starting to glow gold with her electric energy. Her lips were on golden fire and her irises. God. She was heating up for him. Glowing and burning for him. Just letting her eyes travel his naked shoulders and arms.

In his mind, Arturo allowed himself to reach for her. In his mind, he sucked that gold fire off her lips. He tasted her mouth and tossed one of those legs behind his back. He chased her gold fire with his hips. He galloped into her, finding the core of her as many times as he could before he lost his fucking mind.

He shook his head and dragged himself out of that fantasy. Because he knew he was right. Loving on Martine would certainly mean losing his mind. He thought of the buzz of her against him when they’d grappled in the dirt.

A man like him wasn’t capable of making love to a creature of Martine’s caliber. He thought of her as the rarest, finest, most delectable nectar that planet Earth had to offer. He was certain that she’d be the equivalent of drinking sunlight. He’d burn alive trying to gulp down her pure light and heat.

The same way he knew a butterfly’s wings were too delicate to stroke, he knew that Martine was not his to touch. She drew him, fascinated him, attracted him like mad, but that was his cross to bear. She wasn’t his to touch.

She was everything righteous and light and good. He couldn’t even keep the demon out of his brain. He had four hundred years of sins to atone for. Who was he to think that he could just roll over in bed and put his tongue in the mouth of this woman?

The only thing that Arturo could do was fight alongside Martine when the time came.

 

***

 

“Who shit in your sleeping bag?” Tre asked, glaring at Arturo as he limped away from him in human form. They’d been sparring in their bear forms, but Tre had shifted immediately back just to slip between the arms of the great, battling bear.

“Seriously,” Jack called, his baseball cap low on his eyes. “You’ve been especially pissy today.”

Arturo shifted from his bear form back to his human form and stalked over to the water bottles they’d carried out into the hills. He slugged back an entire one in four epic swallows. “I’m not pissy.”

“You definitely are,” Tre scowled as he frowned at a four-inch slice of a wound on his ribs that Arturo had just given him. They were fighting one another harder and harder, in preparation for any attack from the demon, but this was a little extreme. They usually tried to avoid bloodshed.

“I’m just hot,” Arturo said, tossing the water bottle aside. “Who’s next?” He was already shifting back into bear form.

“He’s not wrong, I suppose,” Jack said, squinting up at the sun. “It’s hotter than Satan’s jock strap out here.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Jean Luc said, narrowing his eyes at Arturo. He’d noticed Arturo sending irritated glances at the sky all day. The only thing in the sky today was the sun. Oh, and the hawk that made large, graceful circles over top of them. Martine, always keeping watch. “I think our boy’s got his panties in a twist over something.”

On that thought, Jean Luc launched himself forward and shifted into his bear form. He caught Arturo by surprise and the two of them smashed bodily into one of the orange rock walls that rose up around them. They’d chosen this canyon for their shifting adventures because it kept them out of sight. But being surrounded by rocks had its downside.

Tre winced as he watched both of the bear fighters rise up, shaking their heads dazedly before they lunged at one another again.

“What the hell you think’s gotten into him?” Tre asked Jack as they watched the two bears fight.

“Not a damn clue.”

***

 

“Thea, you put one more shake of salt in that salad and I’m gonna put Nair in your shampoo, all right?”

Celia had tossed the threat casually across the kitchen but she stiffened in surprise when someone who wasn’t Thea started laughing from the other side of the kitchen.

“Oh!” Celia said as she and Thea looked up in surprise. “Martine, we didn’t see you there.”

“I get that a lot,” Martine said, strolling into the kitchen and stealing a bite of salad from the bowl.

Celia raised her eyebrows and Thea raised hers right back. Neither of them could remember a single occasion when they’d heard Martine laugh like that. With gusto. Straight from the gut. Neither of them could also remember a time when Martine announced her presence like that. She usually liked to linger unnoticed on the edge of any given room.

“She’s right,” Martine said. “The salad is too salty.”

“I’m not done with the rest of the dressing!” Thea insisted, hip-bumping Martine out of the way in a friendly manner.

“Ugh,” Caroline said, skipping into the room. “I mean, I know they have bear shifter practice all day, but I really hate when it ends up with all the women making dinner, you know?”

“It is pretty gender-normy,” Celia agreed.

“Fuck the patriarchy!” Caroline crowed cheerily.

“What about the bear patriarchy?” Martine mused. “Are we supposed to fuck that, too?”
“I prefer to just fuck the bear shifters instead,” Thea quipped, dripping olive oil and vinegar into the salad.

There was one moment of silence before all four women burst into laughter.

“Sometimes I still can’t believe this,” Celia admitted, staring bemusedly into the middle distance. “That I’m dating a bear shifter. I have sex with a man who can shift into a bear if he so chooses.”

“You also have sex with a man who won the Super Bowl a gajillion times,” Caroline reminded her. “But I know what you mean. Sometimes I’m scared that this isn’t really my life. That I’ll wake up in Swampscott in my big house next to the ocean, lonely, undervalued, with nothing to do and no one to love.”

“Aw,” Thea said, pulling Caroline in for a rough hug. “Here, if it makes you feel better I’ll make you a promise, okay? If you wake up and this is all just a dream, come and look me up in Montana and I promise I’ll be your friend in the real world, okay? And you and me will go search for Tre together.”

Caroline clapped her hands together. “I love that promise! After we find Tre, he’ll use his hacker skills to track down Jack for you.”

“What about me?” Celia asked.

“Oh, you’ll be easy to find,” Thea insisted. “We’ll just waltz right in to the Brooklyn Public Library and ask for the hot tattooed librarian with the nose piercing. And then we’ll track down Jean Luc and parade you around in front of him in that red bikini of yours and he’ll fall harder than a box of rocks, just like he did in Florida.”
“But how will we find Martine and Arturo?” Caroline asked, biting her lip, carried away in the fantasy world they’d created.

“I’ll find you,” Martine promised. “I don’t think you’d be able to track me down otherwise.”

“No Instagram or Facebook?” Thea asked with a teasing smile.

“No,” Martine answered solemnly.

“That makes it harder to find someone,” Celia agreed.

“That and the fact that I’m made of pure light when I’m not in my human form. That makes it harder to find me, too.”

Martine was only aware that she’d said something stunning by the looks of incredulity splashed across the three other women’s faces.

“I’m sorry,” Celia said, holding one hand up. “Would you mind running that last part back?”

“Oh.” Martine’s brow furrowed. “I haven’t gone over that with you all yet?”

“Ah. No. Must have slipped your mind,” Thea said.

“Well,” Martine cast around for a way to explain it. “You know how I have that golden light that I sometimes use for fighting? Well, that’s basically what I’m made of. And when I want to, I can shift into light. The same way I can shift into hawk form.”

“I—what?” Welp, Celia had tried to come up with something to say to that. She’d failed. But she’d tried.

“Can we see?” Leave it to Caroline to ask the one question that everyone was thinking.

“That’s… something you’d want to see?” Martine asked, confusion knitting her brow. She’s spent so much time attempting to make herself more human and less other. It had never occurred to her that maybe they’d be drawn to the things that made her inhuman.

“Yeah. Duh. Show us.” Thea had two hands on her hips, her ice-blue gaze staring at Martine like she was nuts for even asking.

“Oh. Well, all right.” She glanced out the window. “Let’s go around the back of the house, then, where no one from the road will see.”

Celia turned off the burners and the women scrambled out the back door after her.

Jack and Jean Luc came into the kitchen just in time to see the women hustle away. They exchanged confused looks and walked over to the back window to see what they could see.

“What’s going on?” Tre asked from behind them.

“Not sure,” Jean Luc replied. “The girls are doing something.”

The three men watched as Martine faced off the women. None of them heard Arturo come up behind them, his eyes pinned on Martine just like everyone else.

The sun had set half an hour before, so the deepest part of the sky was an endless royal blue. There was enough light to make out everyone’s faces but the entire world was cast in an ethereal, sleepy tone.

Arturo watched, waiting for whatever was going to happen, when suddenly his nails cut into the meat of his hands.

The faces of the three women suddenly glowed golden and bright as Martine went from a strawberry-haired, green-eyed woman to a beacon of sunshine. For a moment, she still had a face and arms and legs and a torso, but it didn’t take long for her clothes to fall away in a heap and in front of them, there was just a shining ball of light, three feet in diameter.

The entire world pressed pause as far as Arturo was concerned. He heard the gasps of the men beside him, but for him, everything was frozen. He’d seen Martine fight with her golden energy. Hell, he’d fought her himself. But he’d never seen her become her energy before.

She shimmered and became amorphous, a floating cloud tossing light onto every surface that faced her.

Arturo lifted his own hand in wonder. Even right now, he was bathed in her light. Martine’s light.

“That’s… something you don’t see every day,” Tre finally intoned. “Did you know she could do that?”

Arturo blinked and shook his head, but he found that he still couldn’t tear his eyes away from Martine’s light. “Yes and no.”

A second later, the light sphered up again. It went denser and darker and gently, a foot touched down, her arms spread to the sides like she was treading water. She went darker and denser and then she was standing there, on top of her clothes, grinning at the women and gorgeously naked.

As usual, whenever Martine was naked, the three men beside Arturo became caricatures of casual indifference. Hands dipped into pockets, mouths whistled aimless tunes, eyes wandered the ceilings, the bookshelves, their own fingernails.

Arturo, on the other hand, propped his forearm against the window and swallowed her whole with his eyes. She was blindingly alluring. It was something about the graceful curve of her. She was shorter than Arturo by at least six inches, but she was still tall for a woman. Her breasts sat heavily on her chest and her ass popped out sullenly from her back. Her legs were long and shadowed with graceful muscle tone. She looked strong and graceful and womanly all at once. She was a true warrior.

For the first time in centuries, Arturo let himself think back to the night he’d sacrificed his life to the demon so that Amelia could live. Martine had had her golden energy wrapped around the neck of the demon. She’d had him submitted like a dog, crawling for her. She was poised to tear backwards her golden energy, she was poised to rip the throat of the beast right out.

But she hadn’t seen the demon lean forward, and with his own blackened energy, grip Amelia around the middle, draw her towards him.

It had been a race then, between the demon’s life and Amelia’s. It wasn’t a chance that Arturo had been willing to take.

He’d thrown himself at the feet of the demon, spared Amelia, and damned himself.

The rest was history. Now, though, looking back on the memory, something tugged at his brain. There was something more there. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on or identify.

He watched Martine slip back into her clothes and he said nothing. He watched the women file back into the house, chattering and lit up with excitement. He watched Jack lift Martine clear off her toes.

“Where the hell have you been hiding that?” one of the men asked her.

Martine laughed, a beautiful blush on her cheeks and a light laugh on her lips. He’d never seen her look happier or more energized or calmer.

She wasn’t lingering on the outskirts of the room or of the group. She was chatting at dinner, passing food, teasing and joking.

And all the while, Arturo sat silently.