Arturo’s eyes came open and he saw only the black of his darkened room. He was discombobulated about everything for a minute. Where he was. Why he was on the floor. Why he felt as if he’d been leveled by a tornado. And then he remembered.

“Caroline,” he groaned, shoving up to his knees, planting his fists on the carpet. He remembered his reaction, how out of control he’d been. He was certain that he’d hurt her. How badly remained to be seen.

Every single muscle screamed and Arturo realized it was because he wasn’t breathing. He gasped for air and staggered to his doorway, sagging against the doorframe.

He jolted as a roll of laughter came from down the hall. There were people still awake. He figured he couldn’t have been knocked out for too long.

Pain rolled through him so acutely, he felt nausea grip the back of his neck like he was an errant schoolboy. He planted palms on the walls of the warping hallway and staggered to the living room where a blurry group of people sat at the table drinking and playing poker.

“Jesus!” That was Thea’s voice. The party screeched to a stop.

“Caroline,” Arturo gasped her name almost desperately. “Where is she?”

“What?” someone asked. There was a gasp and a scramble as Arturo fell to his knees in the middle of the room.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

“She’s with Tre!” Jean Luc said, standing over Arturo.

“Are you sure?” Arturo gasped.

“Well,” Jack drawled, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jean Luc. “Either she’s with Tre or he’s throwing himself one hell of a one-man party.”

“Why are you asking?” Celia asked. “What’s going on?”

Arturo’s vision started to clear as some of his panic was subsiding. She definitely wouldn’t be able to be having a grand old time with Tre if she really were hurt from what had happened. He took a shaky breath. “I hurt her. By accident. I didn’t mean to.” He looked up and sought out Martine’s eyes amongst the group. They were just as he’d thought they’d be, painfully sad for him. “I got the past twisted with the present and I couldn’t control my energy. I hurt her. Pushed her away from me so that it wouldn’t go on. She fell back and I passed out. When I came to, she was gone. And I thought…”

The group was silent and Arturo blinked in surprise when someone shoved a glass of water in his hand. That same someone knelt beside him. Celia. She eyed him carefully from a point-blank distance, her eyes bouncing back and forth between the two of his. Thea slipped away from the room and came back a moment later.

“She’s tangled up with Tre and looking like she just discovered the elixir of life. She said she’d explain later.”

Celia nodded again, her eyes still fastened to Arturo. It was surprising her, what she was seeing displayed on his face, conveyed in his tone. After so much unbridled disdain for the group, she hadn’t expected to see this spot of blatant tenderness for one of its members. “We’ll talk to her and make sure her story lines up with yours.”
Arturo nodded. Naturally they wouldn’t trust his account of something like that. He expected that.

Celia spoke again, very slowly this time. “You were really scared for her, weren’t you? You were scared that you’d hurt her.”

Arturo neither confirmed nor denied. Verbally at least. He figured his dramatic entrance and the shaking of his hands was probably all the confirmation that the group really needed.

He took a drink of water, paused, and then slugged back the entire glass.

“You ever seen him do anything so… human?” Jean Luc murmured to Jack.

“You mean take that water straight to the head? Nawl. I’ve barely even seen him breathe.”

“No,” Jean Luc shook his head. “I meant his concern for Caroline. It was almost… nice.”

Jack turned to Arturo and narrowed his eyes for a second. Arturo, still on his knees on the floor, straightened up his spine and turned to glare at Jack. “Are you trying to fight?” he asked Jack.

Jack held his hands palms out. “Not trying to dig around in your head, just seeing if you’re bringing down that wall, is all.”

“You mean you can read his emotions right now?” Thea asked. As far as anyone had known before about five seconds ago, Arturo was apparently willing to endure incredible amounts of pain to keep them out of his feelings.

“Not really,” Jack answered her, as if Arturo weren’t right there. “He’s blocking me again. But I could for a minute. When he came in the room. When he was scared for Caroline.”

“You were scared for her,” Thea said suspiciously. “Sure, you try and flambé the rest of us but Caroline you’re concerned about.”

Arturo scowled. “Whatever. I have a soft spot for her.”

“Join the club,” Celia said, still kneeling beside him. She cocked her head to one side and eyed him. “You need food.”

“What?”

“Food. Ever heard of it? As far as I know, you’ve had broth and coffee for five days straight. You need a sandwich. Come on.”

Celia stood up and was just reaching down to help Arturo stand up when Jean Luc tugged her back. The group stared at Arturo’s semi-extended hand. The one he’d just been about to touch to Celia’s. He’d been about to take her hand to stand up. Like a human.

Ignoring the tense confusion rolling around the group, Arturo stood up on his own and had to admit that his legs were shaky. She was probably right about the food.

“Sit,” Martine told him, shoving him toward the table where the rest of them had been sitting.

A few minutes later, Celia shoved a plated sandwich under his nose and Jean Luc set down another glass of water and, to Arturo’s great surprise, a glass of red wine.

The group sat down at the table, some of them messing around with their cards and poker chips, all of them eyeing him in varying degrees of speculation.

“By all means,” he told them, gesturing to their game. He slowly ate his sandwich and drank his wine.

It was bizarre to the hundredth degree to be sitting in this warm, bright room, with the night closing in at every window, eating a sandwich of all things. They resumed their game of poker and basically ignored Arturo’s existence. Except for Martine, who just once, turned and looked at him. Deeply. She stared right into him. And he knew she was thinking of the same thing he’d been thinking of. The last time that she and he had been sitting at a table like this one. How different and similar the circumstances had been. Amelia had sat at that table and Arturo had been plummeting into love with her. Martine had sat at that table and she’d been just as alone then as she was now. 

The group was laughing about something, tossing cards and chips and arguing loudly. It was then that Arturo noticed Thea, who was sitting closest to him, eyeing him carefully.

“I didn’t try to flambé you, you know,” he told her.

“Is that right?” She sucked her teeth and rocked back onto the back two legs of her chair.

He nodded, just once, tersely. “That’s right. If I’d wanted to, I would have done it. The very fact that you’re sitting here, unharmed, means I didn’t really try.”

She narrowed her icy blue eyes at him, her beautiful face drawn in suspicion. “What’re you saying?”

He shrugged, just as tight-lipped as she was. Just as unwilling to dole out benefit of the doubt.

He couldn’t possibly be saying that he’d taken it easy on them. “You almost killed Jean Luc twice. You tried to capture me to take me back to the demon. You slashed the hell out of Jack’s chest. Made Tre lose a couple pints of blood. And you’re telling me that you weren’t trying to hurt us?”

“People heal,” he answered tersely.

She stared at him, trying to read between the lines of his words.

He turned to her. “Everybody’s still got their souls, don’t they?” he asked her quietly. He leaned back and finished his wine.

He was the last person at the table that night, staring into the dark.

 

***

 

It was the deep dead of the night, when the black sky was flat and impenetrable. Tre and Caroline were still touching and kissing and whispering to one another. The light through the cracked bathroom door was just enough to toss a slice of illumination across their bodies tangled in the bed.

Tre couldn’t stop picking up her hair, letting it sift through his fingers.

“I love seeing your tattoos against me,” she said from where she lay across his chest. One of her arms was bisected by one of his and she couldn’t stop looking at his skin. “The designs are so gorgeous. And so colorful! Like beautiful fabric.” She stacked one fist under her chin and grinned, point-blank. “It’s almost like you’re part-man/part-tapestry.”

He couldn’t help but laugh and scrub his eyes underneath the glasses he’d put back on after their shower. He knew glasses weren’t always great for sexy time. But for post sexy time, well, he really wanted to see her in all her brilliant detail. “Great. Glad you look at my tattoos and instead of seeing me as a badass, you see me as a blanket.”

She laughed and he kept going.

“That was exactly what I was going for when I endured excruciating pain for countless sessions.”

“Did they really hurt that much?” she asked, tracing the silhouette of a tiger etched across his chest.

“Well… yeah.” For some reason he didn’t want to talk about that with Caroline. It embarrassed him a little, how much pride he used to take in how much pain he’d been able to endure. He knew that that wasn’t something she’d think was necessarily cool.

“Then why did you do it? I mean, they’re beautiful. But why go through all that pain?”

“Ah.” He cast around for a way to describe it to her. “I mean, the pain is kind of part of what makes it beautiful. The experience is really intense and it’s definitely a high. But the process was important for me. I wanted, like, a visual reminder of how beautiful it can be if you make it to the other side of something really painful.”

She was quiet for a while, tracing his tattoos and letting her legs tangle with his even further. “Tre?”

“Yeah?” He could almost feel the question before she asked it. At first glance, Caroline didn’t seem like she’d be the sharpest tool in the shed because of how bubbly and optimistic she was. But Tre knew just how ruthlessly observant she could be. How quickly she connected the dots between the things people said and the way they acted.

“Why did you say that you weren’t good for women? That night when I slept in your bed?”

He sighed. And here they were. So soon.

“Well.” He tightened his grip on her and coasted a warm palm down her back. He spoke slowly, honestly, choosing his words with extreme care. “I said that because I’ve never been good for a woman before. Not the way Jack and Jean Luc are.”

She was quiet for a while again. “Did you ever try?”

“Yes and no.” He shifted his hips, uncomfortable with the conversation but determined not to close down on her. “I tried with a couple girls when I was younger. But when I think on it now, they were kind of random choices. Like, I didn’t have a crazy connection with either of them. We were just sleeping together regularly and I thought, might as well try my hand at being a boyfriend. And they both wanted more. Needed more. Deserved so much more than I could give.” He deflated. “When it was all over, I felt so helpless. And like such a piece of shit. They were both so wrecked. I thought, never again. I’m not cut out for this.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty with the first girl and twenty-two with the second.”

“That’s how old I was when I got married.”

He blew out a long breath. “It’s so crazy that you were married that young. Like, who let you walk down the aisle that young?”

“Let?” Caroline laughed. “My mother would have frog-marched me down the aisle if I hadn’t been so excited about it on my own.”

“Why did she want you to get married so badly?”

“She wanted me to lock down a Boston Clifton, obviously.”

His eyes widened in surprise at what she was implying. “What is this, the 1800s?”

“Might as well have been. East Coast money can be weirdly incestuous. They want you to keep it where they can see it. And in the hands of people they trust. My family trusted the Cliftons to build their social cache and not to drain the coffers. Ironclad pre-nups for all.”

“Did you sign a pre-nup?” Tre asked, his eyes wide.

“Of course. So did Peter.”

“Wow. I can’t imagine signing a pre-nup. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, of course! I just… man. I get by just fine, but pre-nup money? That’s a different ballgame.”

“Love and money are two very strange ingredients to the marriage soup,” Caroline said, still tracing his tattoos. “For me and Peter, they weren’t two flavors that complemented one another.”

“So, you did love him?” Tre asked, ignoring the weird, scratchy, bratty feelings rolling over in his chest. He found he was in a strange place of wanting to know Caroline, but not really wanting to know certain parts of this particular truth.

“Of course,” she answered, holding his eyes. “I’m not the kind to get married if I wasn’t in love. No matter how much pressure I was under.”

Her words softened him. He could picture her, young and in love, eager to be married. He found that the petty jealousy that had risen up in him was extinguished by his stronger desire for her happiness.

They'd talked about her divorce many times before. He knew that Peter had pushed her toward an open marriage without providing her any of the emotional support and patience it would have required to make it work. But honestly, nothing she’d said made Tre think that their marriage had been particularly happy before that, either.

“When did things start to go wrong with Peter?”

She scrunched up her face and rolled over, facing the ceiling.

“Sorry,” he said immediately. “You most likely don’t wanna talk about your divorce right now.”

“No,” she waved a hand floppily through the air. “It’s okay. You’re entitled to want to know. It’s just something I’m still trying to figure out myself, you know? I don’t know if I’ll ever have all the answers.”

“That makes sense.”

“I just don’t think either of us actually married who we thought we married.” She lifted up one of her feet and watched the shadow it cast on the far wall. “I thought of Peter as this super steady guy who had his feet under him. The kind of guy who could support me through anything because he had his life together. He was grounded. He thought of me as this ever-happy ball of sunshine who could bring light to his life and charm the pants off his business partners, so to speak.”

“And you weren’t those things?”

“No. I mean, yes. We were those things. But neither of us wanted to be exclusively those things. Peter is steady and reliable. He had all the fixings of being a supportive husband. Except for the fact that he didn’t want to be one. Same with me. I’m sunny and happy and charming. But after a while, I stopped wanting to be trotted out during parties like a parlor trick. I stopped wanting to do the thing he’d married me to do. And same with him.” She rolled back to face Tre. “I realized that I’d much rather have a sloppy, absent-minded, trainwreck of a husband who tried to support me than a stalwart one who didn’t care.” She sighed. “I imagine Peter must have come to a similar conclusion.”

They were quiet for a long time. Caroline could feel something turning over and over in Tre’s mind. She had no idea if she had gone too far or said too much. And frankly, she couldn’t afford to care. If there was one thing that she’d learned from her divorce, it was that the only thing she could afford to be in the business of was telling the truth about who she was. There was no reason at all to cultivate some sort of perfect image, or waste time telling Tre what she thought he wanted to hear if she was just gonna show her true colors someday. Caroline had no interest in building a house of cards, even with someone she was as into as Tre.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to enjoy the heck out of this while it lasted, though. She’d never been made love to like that before. She swore he had some sort of magic spell within him. Some sort of internal furnace that just went ahead and swallowed her up in the heat of him. She loved his red hair. And his almond flavor. And his colors. She’d never met anyone like him. And she loved that, too.

“Caroline, love.”
“Hmmm?”

“Will you tell me what happened with Arturo?”

“Oh.” Caroline sat straight up then. Making love to Tre had discombobulated her so thoroughly, she’d halfway forgotten that anything freaky had happened with Arturo. She shivered as she remembered the feeling of his blue energy racing over her skin. Searching for a way inside of her, like a virus of some kind. “I’m not entirely sure what happened. But whatever it was, I think it hurt him as much as it hurt me.”

“Thea said that he was alright,” Tre reminded her. They’d been interrupted maybe two hours ago by their very worried friend who’d seemed like she was begging for a reason to march back out there and kick Arturo’s ass.

“I know. I guess I don’t just mean physically, though. I felt something… strange when we kissed.”

Tre stiffened and let out a long, tight breath. He wasn’t going to be a jealous asshole. He was the one that had driven her to be interested in Arturo in the first place. He couldn’t blame Caroline for that. He could, however, blame Arturo. Somewhere, in the darkest corner of Tre’s mind, he chained Arturo to a wall and kicked him right in the dick. There. That made things a little better. “What do you mean ‘strange’?”

“I think I felt what Arturo was feeling. I think he lost control and sent me some of his emotions through the energy that came out of him.”

“Huh.” Tre almost laughed. It just figured that after the three bear shifters had tried so hard for so long to break through Arturo’s wall, it would be Caroline who got there first. Well, you catch more flies with honey, he supposed. An idea occurred to him but he instantly hated it so much that he shoved it back into its drawer and turned his attention back to Caroline. “What was it that you felt coming off of him?”

She scrunched up her face again. “Grief? I think? And love? I think I remind him of someone that he once loved. And for a second, I felt like it was me that he loved. But then everything just sort of shifted and I realized that he was lost, confused. Stuck between two realities. It wasn’t me that he was imagining in his arms. It was someone else. And he realized it, too. And then the blue stuff happened and we both kind of fell down and he got knocked out, I think.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah.” She turned up to face Tre and spoke carefully. Tre would never make fun of her for taking a stab in the dark, wild as it might be. “Tre, I wonder if…”

“What?”

“I wonder if Arturo used to be like us?”

“Human, you mean?”

“Yes, but no. What I really mean is that I wonder if Arturo was once on a mission like ours? With the maps and the race for a soul and fighting the demon.” She bit her lip and tried to read his reaction. “Honestly, Tre… he kind of reminded me of you.”

The look on Tre’s face went immediately from pensive to shocked. “Me? What do you mean?”

Caroline studied him. Tre knew just how intelligent she was. But there were plenty of people who didn’t think that Caroline was smart. She didn’t care one way or another. She knew who she was. And right now, she put those smarts to work. She decided that she understood something that Tre didn’t quite yet. And her point-blank telling him was likely to make him freak out. She pulled back and told him half the truth. “I can’t quite explain it. But when he was confused, halfway caught between two realities, I got a little window into his past. And I think he may have done exactly what we’re doing now. And I think he might have been very similar to you in the past. Kind of… skeptical and funny. Like all of this would never be something that he believed in except for the fact that all of his friends believed it. He seemed loyal and determined to protect everybody.” And he’d been ass-backwards in love with a woman and had absolutely no idea what the hell to do about it. But she didn’t say that part out loud.

“I guess,” Tre said slowly, looking at the ceiling and tracing a hand through his hair, “that we never really stopped to ask ourselves how Arturo became the demon’s right-hand man.”

Caroline leaned forward and traced the lightning bolt shaved in the side of Tre’s coppery hair. “You really did this because you hoped I’d like it?”

“Caroline, I do everything because I hope you’ll like it.”

She laughed and halfway crawled back over his chest. “You can quit trying to impress me, Tre. You bagged me.”

He laughed. “I’m not trying to bag you.” I’m trying to keep you. He fell immediately quiet as those words rose up within him. Keep her? What the hell was he thinking? He couldn’t keep Caroline! He’d never be that selfish to trap her in a relationship that could never go anywhere. With a man who’d never feel more than lust and friendship for her. Sure, he would always treat her kindly and respectfully, but he’d never be able to give her the kind of love she truly deserved.

All Tre could do was appreciate this moment while he had it, and try to keep her safe through all this mayhem with Arturo and the demon. Once all of this was over, and she was truly out of danger, Tre would have no reason to keep pursuing things with her. In fact, when that happened, she’d be safer away from him than she would be with him. Her heart would be safer. The thought cramped something in his chest. He felt sick just thinking about it. But that was tomorrow’s problem, he told himself. Right now, he had two arms full of Caroline Clifton and every reason in the world to keep her there, warm and safe in his bed.