“How’d it go?” Inka, Kain’s lovely, happy sister asked the very second he slammed through the screen door of their brother Ansel’s house.

He, John Alec, and the two coyote shifters that they’d freed had come through the portal from Herta about eight hours ago and Kain had spent every second since in his bear form. He’d sprinted, swam, ambled, climbed trees, chased a bobcat, and wrestled the hell out of Milla. He felt like a million bucks.

Except for one small thing.

That was bothering the crap out of him.

“The operation went really well. Smooth as butter.” He kissed Inka on the cheek where she sat knitting in an armchair, and then Ruby, Ansel’s soon-to-be wife as well. He grabbed a freshly-baked croissant off the kitchen table and sunk into the couch.

“But…” Inka prompted, using those emotional spidey senses of hers. She shifted, attempting to get comfortable with her very round belly poking out. She and Matt, her husband, were pregnant again and she was showing so much earlier than her first time around. Kain tossed her a pillow which she gratefully tucked behind her back.

“But… I pissed off Valentina again. And I think this time she’s really mad.”

“Oh, Kain,” Ruby admonished, tossing down her magazine. She hadn’t met Valentina, but she’d heard quite a bit from Ansel about the warrior woman. “Why do you get off on teasing her so much? You know she doesn’t understand it. Ansel says she’s got less of a sense of humor than John Alec does.”

“Excuse me?” John Alec asked as he came through the screen door, fresh from a shower, his eyes casting around, looking for something. “I’m insulted by that. My wife’s not here,” he frowned.

“She’s still shifted, up on the other side of the mountain.” Kain knew because she’d been beating the crap out of him over there not twenty minutes ago.

John Alec shrugged, grabbed a croissant himself and sat down across from Kain. “I wondered why Valentina was in such a foul mood today. You did that to her?”

Kain rolled his head to one side and played with the lampshade next to him. “I may or may not have told her ‘someone’ was coming through the woods when it was really just Williams.”

A huge grin broke out on Alec’s face. “She attacked him.”

Kain grinned, too. “Felled him like a tree.”

The two men chuckled. Alec pointed at his own face. “See? I have a sense of humor.”

“Yeah,” Ruby admonished. “When you’re laughing about your sister’s boyfriend getting attacked.”

Alec grimaced. “Don’t call him her boyfriend.”

“Why?” Kain asked, intrigued. He’d always gotten the feeling that his brother-in-law wasn’t exactly crazy about Williams, but he’d never outright asked before.

“Because that’s not what they are. Not really.” Alec cast around for the right words. “Ansel is Ruby’s boyfriend, well, fiancé now. And Matt was Inka’s boyfriend before they were married. But that’s not the same as what Williams is to Valentina. He’s more of her… companion.”

“Who has sex with her,” Inka said, point-blank. She wasn’t as close to Valentina as her twin, Milla, was. But the women had gotten to know one another during their missions in Herta. And Inka, too, had questions about the quality of Williams’ and Valentina’s relationship, but at the very least she understood the nature of it.

“Inka!” John Alec groaned and shifted uncomfortably.

“What! She told me so herself. They have sex with each other. They’re sex companions.”

Alec groaned louder, pressing his fingers into his eyes. Kain grinned at Alec’s reaction, even though the thought of Williams and Valentina together made his leg start jostling up and down, made some feeling pull nice and tight in his chest.

“You don’t like Williams?” Ruby asked Alec.

John Alec sobered a bit. “It doesn’t matter if I do or don’t. He was there for Valentina when I left. When I came to Earth to be with Milla. He’s fought alongside her for years. And for that I’m very grateful.”

Kain rose. His jostling leg was telling him to get up and go. “I’m gonna go check on the coyotes.”

He jogged out the back door and across the yard. Part of Ansel and Ruby’s house had been converted into a guesthouse of sorts. If anyone in the town of Green Mills asked about it, they said that they ran a B&B back there. But really, it was a way station for the shifters they’d rescued from Herta.

They’d been at it for a year and a half. With Valentina working from the Herta side and John Alec and the Ketos working from the Earth side, they’d been able to rescue 164 enslaved shifters. Bring them back to Earth where they’d be safe. All 164 people had stayed in this guesthouse back there. As Kain approached the demure little cottage, the number seemed both large and small in his mind.

They’d worked their asses off to rescue that many in so short a time. But still there were thousands more shifters, enslaved and wasting away on Herta that very second.

The thought strangled him as he swung through the front door and then all the way through the house when he realized they weren’t inside.

There were three coyotes in the back garden. Two were the ones they rescued and one was Griff, Ruby’s younger brother. And, Kain thought as he leaned against the doorjamb and watched them, he was Kain’s little brother, too, in a way.

Griff was a special person. He’d been imprisoned on Herta for two years before the Ketos had been able to rescue him and bring him home. The time there had really messed him up, though the four years since then had greatly improved the kid. He chuckled where he used to scowl, lingered in the doorway instead of jetting through it.

Kain and Griff spent quite a bit of time together over the last four years. Kain was the person who’d taught Griff how to shift. The kid hadn’t even known he was a shifter when he’d been lured into Herta. And he definitely hadn’t known that he was an extremely rare kind of shifter. Griff could shift into many forms. And over the last year or so, had been able to start choosing which form he wanted whenever he wanted to do it.

It was thrilling for Kain, as Griff’s mentor of sorts, to watch it happen. And his ability to shift into all sorts of animals had helped immensely with the shifters they’d rescued. A week ago, Griff had been a hare alongside a little girl who’d been in Herta for less than a year. He’d been able to communicate with her in her animal form, coax her back into her human form. That little girl was back with her parents now.

That one had felt really, really good.

Kain watched the shifter coyotes sniff at one another for a minute before he backtracked through the house. He didn’t want to disturb the process.

He re-entered Ansel’s house, hoping they weren’t still talking about Williams. And sure enough, someone else had stolen the spotlight.

It was one-year-old Carmen, sitting atop her father’s lap like a little bird on a nest. She grinned that heart-stopping smile and immediately held her hands up for Kain as he came through the door. With a joyful whoop, Uncle Kain swooped the baby off Matt’s lap and flung her into the air. She laughed insanely, half terrified, half joyous, and allowed him to rub noses after he caught her. He naturally hitched her onto his hip and kissed the puffy black hair at the top of her head, reaching down to clap Matt on his shoulder.

“You know,” Matt cleared his throat and stretched his insanely long legs out in front of himself, “there are some studies that indicate that adult-toddler relationships are strengthened by caretaker activities such as—”

“You don’t have to talk me into changing her diaper, Matty,” Kain grinned down at his brother-in-law. “Just so happens I don’t mind it one bit.” The second part Kain said right into Carmen’s chubby little neck, inexplicably speaking in a cockney accent.

Babies.

What an irony that Kain had spent the last decade and a half avoiding them and now that his sister had one he was suffering from a little bit of baby fever.

He’d thought that only chicks got that. But he was knocking on thirty and so in love with his niece that he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to have a rugrat of his own. The problem was that you generally needed a woman to do that. There was definitely no shortage of women in Kain’s life. But certainly none who he’d wanna, you know, make a baby with.

The thought depressed him.

He came back out with Carmen all tidy and fresh and plopped onto the floor with the baby on his stomach. She deftly pulled his phone out of his pants pocket.

“Careful!” Inka called from where she was now sitting on her husband’s lap, Matt’s humongous hand tapping a rhythm onto her round belly. “She’s figured out how to—”

“Holy shit, she just unlocked my phone!” Kain laughed. “Didn’t you, you brilliant, perfect little genius.” He remained charmed, even after her chubby fingers had deleted three of his apps and discovered the camera.

“I think you need one of those,” Ruby called to Kain as she watched him cheese for the pictures Carmen was almost taking of the two of them. “A baby, I mean.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Kain admitted, sending Matt and John Alec’s eyebrows right up their foreheads. Neither of them had suspected Kain wanted to give up any part of his bachelor lifestyle. “I think I need to find me a girl. Oh! You know who can help me with that?”

Kain pulled up his Tinder app and handed the phone to Carmen, taking her chubby hand and showing her how to swipe left or right. Then he leaned back and tucked his hands behind his head. He cracked one eye at Carmen. “Wake me up when you find me a wife, sweet girl.”

 

***

 

 

Valentina could hear them behind her, the hunters. She knew they could smell the fresh blood that was pouring from her abdomen, and–look at that–from her leg, too. Flashes of the battle she’d just endured seared across her brain. But she pushed it down. And kept running. She just had to get to someplace where she could open a gate. Someplace quiet and calm and hidden and she could open a gate and get through. That’s all she had to do.

She ran harder, crashing through the brush. Her vision was gray at the corners and she wondered if she was breathing–she couldn’t even feel it if she was. She was so tired.

But she was not going to die today. Valentina was a fighter. She was a survivor. She’d endured injuries at least as bad as this one and she was waking up tomorrow morning. So help her God.

Spotting a thatch of thick bushes, she ducked around one side and held her breath. She couldn’t hear the hunters anymore. God, let them be gone. Let them be lost or bored or just too slow. All she needed was a fighting chance.

She pulled out the long, thin flute that Matt, the scientist, had given her a year and a half ago. Since then, she’d only used it a few times to practice creating gates. She desperately tried to remember how to do it.

It took all her breath and more concentration than her brain could allow for, but she thought she was doing it. She thought she was opening a gate.

But then the flute fell from her hands, and there was not enough air left in the world or blood left in her body. She fought the sleep as hard as she could but she was so small and sleep was so large.

Moments later, her knives were in her hands as she fought the hunters who’d grabbed her shoulders, touched her face. But when her eyes came open, it was calm green eyes she saw. A silvery scar.

And then she didn’t see anything more.

 

 

***

 

Kain sighed as he took the long way through the woods to get back to his cabin. That had been a very, very, epically bad date. One for the record books. He’d thought Shauna was so sweet the first time they’d gone out a couple of weeks ago. And she’d been fun in the sack. Definitely zealous. But then dinner tonight. Yikes.

She was… boring, Kain realized with a little bit of a wince. That was not something that he liked to say about a woman, whom he felt deserved every bit of respect he had to offer. But hour three into her one-woman show, with not a question asked to him, Kain realized that she’d NEVER asked him a question about himself.

He knew he could be closed off. Being a shifter would kind of do that to you in this day and age. To the rest of the world, shifters were extinct. Most of them had been lured away into Herta by now. It wasn’t wise to advertise.

So the Ketos had kept that little secret to themselves for years. And he’d never give up that piece of information to someone like Shauna. But that didn’t mean that Kain didn’t want to chat about his favorite movies or show off pictures of his niece or chime in about what kind of puppy she should buy. He’d gotten the distinct impression that the only person Shauna had been interested in at that table had been herself.

And that made one of them.

He scraped a hand over his messy blond hair and trudged up the mountain. Since when had he started caring about stuff like this? Used to be any woman warm and willing was right for Kain. Since when had he started getting choosy? It was freaking him out.

Kain sniffed the air. There wasn’t anyone for miles. He could strip down and shift and he’d be home in less than five minutes. Yeah. That’s what he needed, he needed his bear. He’d be back for his clothes tomorrow.

He was just unbuttoning his blue button-down when a faint scent filtered through the night air to him. He turned a 180, sniffed again.

That smelled like faint mint and fresh earth.

Valentina.

Kain took a few running steps in that direction and the scent got vaguely stronger. And then he was sprinting. Because he didn’t just smell Valentina. He smelled blood.

Three minutes later and her scent was swamping him. He skidded into a clearing and looked wildly around. Where was she? Nowhere. And no sign of her. But her scent was strong enough that she should have been right beside him.

Kain froze when he saw the trees next to him were lit from the side with a faint, gold light. Exactly the same kind of light that lit up a portal when a shifter was near. He whipped around and there it was. A poorly-opened portal on the ground, just big enough to crawl through. He got down and looked through.

His heart chugged in his chest. “Fuck,” he whispered as he flung himself through the gate and over her inert body. She was covered from the waist down in blood. Her canvas pants and brown tunic were stuck to her body with the wetness of it. She looked deathly pale.

He desperately wanted to shout her name but he caught the scent of hunters. Two, no, three of them a quarter of a mile away. He had to get her out of here and fast.

Kain watched her eyes flutter—thank God—as he lifted her from Herta and into Earth. She reached for her knives reflexively but they fell as fast as her eyelids did. He didn’t want to waste a second but he had to close the portal behind him, otherwise the hunters could follow him through. He took valuable seconds, got ahold of his breath and used the tool to blow the gate closed from each edge. There.

And then he didn’t bother removing his date-night clothes. He didn’t give a fuck. He shifted faster than he’d ever shifted before, carefully hefted her over his back and strode off into the night.