“Something about you looks different this morning,” Jean Luc said to Tre over the breakfast table the next morning. It was just the three of them, Jack sliding into the seat next to Jean Luc with a plate full of omelette and toast.

Tre looked up at Jean Luc and rolled his eyes at the deadpan look on his friend’s face. He knew what was coming. Not too long ago, he’d been on the dishing-out side. Now, apparently he was on the taking-it side. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jean Luc said slowly, his eyes serious but the corners of his mouth flicking upwards. “It’s almost like you’ve… become a man.”

Jack snorted into his orange juice and Tre rolled his eyes, stuffing toast into his mouth.

“Oh my Lord,” Jack said, pretending to wipe a tear out of his eye and clapping a hand on Jean Luc’s shoulder. “Has our little baby given up his flower? Has he embarked on a journey down the hallowed halls of manhood? Has he punched his V-card? Lost his manginity? Popped the old—”

“Shuddup,” Tre groaned, balling up his napkin and tossing it across the table. “Yes, I had sex with Caroline, alright? Are you happy now?”

“Over the moon,” Jack grinned. “What about you?”

“Huh?”

“Are you happy now?”

“Seems pretty fuckin’ happy,” Jean Luc muttered through a mouthful of eggs.

Tre shrugged. He was happy. Happy enough that he felt like there was a tiny tap dancer in his gut, threatening to scramble up the breakfast he was trying to choke down. Was it normal to feel so happy you felt a little sick? He cleared his throat. “We gotta talk about Arturo.”

“What about him?” Jean Luc asked, glancing at Jack quickly.

There was no hiding the look, and no hiding the feeling that washed over the two of them.

“What?” Tre asked, looking back and forth.

“Nothing. Just that…” Jack trailed off and squinted at the dark hallway that led to Arturo’s room. “You know what? Finish your breakfast. We’ll talk outside.”

They did just that, and on their way to the far field where they’d been practicing, Jack and Jean Luc filled Tre in on everything that had happened with Arturo the night before.

“You believe him?” Tre asked. “That he was actually worried about her?”

“Yeah,” Jean Luc answered slowly. “I mean, he seemed really freaked out. I don’t think he was faking it. If there was some kind of evil angle he was working, I couldn’t tell.”

“Me neither,” Jack shook his head. “But I don’t get it, either. I didn’t anticipate him becoming nice to one of us.”

“Yeah,” Tre scratched at his short hair, his fingers sliding over the lightning bolt in the side of his head. He smiled as he thought of Caroline pressing her lips there, the way she did before she finally fell asleep last night. “Caroline doesn’t seem to think he’s trying to kill us. She thinks…”

“What?”

“She thinks he might have been one of us at some point.”

To Tre’s surprise, Jack and Jean Luc weren’t surprised. They merely nodded.

“Yeah,” Jack finally muttered. “I was wondering the same thing.”

“Why?” Tre asked.

“Well,” Jack thought for a minute. “I think it was something in the way Martine and Arturo were acting last night. I mean, I know that she’s fought him before and that they’ve known one another for centuries. But when he was all torn up over Caroline last night, it almost seemed like they were friends or something. Like she fully understood where he was coming from.”

“There was definitely a camaraderie there,” Jean Luc agreed. “Something I’ve never sensed before.” Jean Luc glanced at Tre. “He let us in. Just for half a second. But when he was so freaked out over maybe having hurt Caroline, he accidentally let us into his feelings.”

“Wow.” Tre couldn’t even imagine what that might have been like. Being let into Jack and Jean Luc’s feelings was strange, but becoming more and more familiar. Jack’s feelings were passionate and usually tinged with humor. Jean Luc’s were slow and desirous, tinged with sadness and loneliness, much less so now that he was with Celia. Tre couldn’t even imagine what Arturo’s would feel like. Maybe rage tinged with deceit?

Tre took a deep breath, barely believing that he was about to say this out loud. “I was thinking… maybe we should try being nice to him?”

Jean Luc and Jack just sort of looked at him.

“I mean, look,” Tre tried, pacing in front of them, the long prairie grass getting trampled under his feet. “Aren’t you guys starting to get uncomfortable about the fact that the demon hasn’t tried for us at all? Like, we’ve evaded him completely twice, we stole his right-hand man. Don’t you think that he’s probably pissed and planning some fucked-up shit? Aren’t you getting freaked out with all this waiting and no way to prepare?”

“It is sort of an ‘all dressed up and nowhere to go’ feeling,” Jack agreed, his eyes on the sky and one hand scraping over his stubble.

“Exactly. But the thing is, we have a demon cheatsheet sitting in that house right now. Drinking our coffee as we speak, you know? We have to figure out a way to open up Arturo. We have to know what he knows or else we’re screwed.”

“You’re saying you want to befriend Arturo so that we can use him?” Jean Luc asked, his eyes in a thoughtful squint.

“Eh.” Tre paused his pacing and started stripping off his clothes. Later, he’d realize that he was so agitated, he was turning to his bear form to calm down. Something he had never done before. “Not exactly. I just think there’s a chance that befriending him might pop the top off the can, you know?”

The other two followed Tre’s lead with shedding their clothes, though Martine hadn’t even joined them for their training yet.

“That makes sense,” Jack said slowly. “Except for the part where Arturo isn’t someone we should ever think of as a friend.”

“Because you don’t trust him?” Tre asked. “Or because of his role as the demon’s right-hand man?”

“Well, son,” Jack said dryly. “Arturo hasn’t tried to murder the woman you love, the way he’s done for Jean Luc and me, so excuse us if we’re a little reticent to hold hands and skip down the road with him.”

“I’m not sure he tried to murder me,” Thea said from behind the men.

All three of them basically jumped out of their skins. And considering the fact that they were all naked at this point, it was quite a sight to see.

They whirled and there were Thea, Celia, Martine, and bringing up the rear, Caroline.

Tre hadn’t seen her since he kissed her awake this morning, slipped into her from behind, and held one hand over her mouth to silence her early-morning moans since he could hear Jack clanking around in the other room. After he’d ridden them both straight to a pulsing, sheet-grabbing ecstasy, she’d stretched and rolled over and requested another hour of sleep. He’d left her there in his bed.

And now, here she was, her hair brushed to a liquid shine, her hands in the pockets of her neat, classy trousers, red flats on her feet and that perfectly white T-shirt covering her breasts. The shirt that drove Tre insane for some reason. The one with the bow on one shoulder. He looked away from her quickly. She was too pretty in the sunlight. And though necessity had driven the group into more comfort with the men’s frequent nudity, Tre was pretty sure that comfort didn’t extend to boners. He searched the sky for airplanes and counted backwards from a hundred.

Jack smirked and threw Tre his pants, before sliding on his own. Jean Luc, lost in his deep, squinty thought, the way he frequently was, just kept squinting at Thea.

“What do you mean, Thea?”

“I mean,” she paused, looking back at the farmhouse where Arturo still was, and searched for words. “He said something to me last night. And at first I thought he was just taunting me, or playing mind games. But something about it rang true.”

“What did he say?” Jack couldn’t help but tug Thea forward so that they stood next to one another. The group, following their lead, knit together tighter. Celia swiped Jean Luc’s pants off the ground and handed them over, one eyebrow raised on her head. They exchanged some sort of silent eye conversation that ended in him restraining a smile and tugging on his pants.

“He said that if he’d really been trying to hurt us, this whole thing would be over. The demon would have one of our souls already. He said that the fact that the whole thing is still going on is just evidence that he wasn’t actually trying to hurt us.”

Jack’s eyebrows raised up so fast it was like they were snagged on fishhooks. “I’ve got about three pints of blood down the bathtub drain in Florida that are pretty scintillating evidence supporting the fact that he was trying to hurt us.”

“I know,” Thea sighed, raising her hands and letting them fall back to smack her thighs. “I can’t explain why I kind of believe him, but—”

“You believe him because he’s telling the truth,” Martine cut in. Her hands were on her hips, the morning sun slanting across her face, absorbing into her black clothing as if they were made of shadow. She looked beautiful and fierce and sad, all at once. “It’s something that I’ve been suspecting for a while.”

It was also part of the reason why she’d wanted to kidnap him in the first place, but she’d barely admitted that to herself. She wasn’t about to come clean to this entire group before she got her head on straight over it.

“You think Arturo has been… on our side?” Celia asked, perplexed.

“No,” Martine shook her head vehemently. “Definitely not. He’s not on anyone’s side but his own. Trust me…” She faded off and she, too, stared at the formerly white farmhouse in the distance. “I can’t explain more. It’s not my story to tell. But I think it’s deeply important that the six of you come to some sort of understanding with Arturo.”

“Martine,” Caroline said gently. “Will you please tell us why? As plainly as possible?” Caroline stepped forward and took one of Martine’s stiff fists from her hip and unclenched the fingers. Caroline squeezed Martine’s hand in two of hers. Martine blinked in surprise at the contact. Her movements were rusty, like Caroline was making her do something that she hadn’t done in centuries.

To the group’s astonishment, the demon hunter’s eyes went glassy for a moment. Tears gathered and fell before she reached back with one hand and pulled a worn scroll from her belt. She took a long breath, bowed her head for a moment, and when she came back up, she was the Martine that they all knew so well. A steely expression on her face, her strawberry hair a thousand colors in the sunlight.

“Just try,” she whispered. “You have to try.”

 

 

***

 

Which was how, three days later, the three men found themselves standing naked in the field yet again. Only this time, Arturo was there with them, arms crossed over his chest and a bored expression on his face.

“Carry on, then,” he told them, skepticism in every syllable.

Tre wouldn’t have ever characterized their little group as suffering from performance anxiety, but suddenly, the three of them were just kind of blinking at one another, trying to see who was going to go first, shifting for Arturo.

“Well,” Tre shrugged. “We’re already naked.” He took his shift at a run and it wasn’t more than a second or two before he felt Jack and Jean Luc go behind him.

Tre skidded out and trotted back to the group, feeling the crazy, zinging adrenaline that he was becoming more and more familiar to him.

“Huh,” Arturo said, cocking his head to one side as he eyed Tre. “Interesting technique.”

Tre would have liked to reply, but as he was currently a grizzly bear, English was a little bit beyond him.

Either way, it didn’t matter because seconds later, Arturo was shifting as well. There was no pomp and circumstance. Not even a deep breath. For a moment he was a man and then the next moment, he was a hulking, gigantic beast of a bear. This was no ochre grizzly. Even with the sun shining straight on him, he was a horrid, ash-like black. Just like his eyes, light seemed to disappear into him. He looked ugly and evil, with teeth the length of a baby’s arm and dead eyes. A strange scent emanated from him, like something that had just come out of the freezer.

“I’m only here because Caroline asked it of me,” Arturo’s voice sounded in the heads of the three other bear shifters. But it was almost like he was speaking on a strange frequency, one that came with a lot of feedback. The shrieking quality to his tone had the other men wincing automatically at his words.

“Now, isn’t this fun,” Arturo said, starting to pace sideways in his great bear form. “Shall we spar?”

Tre was extremely aware of the fact that they were supposed to be communicating in bear form because that was supposedly easier for Arturo. This whole thing had been Martine’s idea. “You’ll get through to him better if you’re all in bear form,” she’d insisted.

Now this twelve-foot-tall monstrosity with dead eyes and bad attitude was basically licking its chops in their direction.

Great.

With a bit of an internal shrug, Tre charged.

 

***

 

 

The attempt to open up Arturo did not go well. The three bear shifters had ended up with an array of wounds that had taken days to heal, even after their traditional warm water treatments. Arturo didn’t come away unscathed, either. As far as Tre knew, Arturo hadn’t left his room in two days.

Tre couldn’t believe how much he hated him.

Shall we spar.

Bastard.

What Tre hadn’t minded, however, was all the extra attention he’d received from Caroline due to his injuries. And due to the fact that they were now, for lack of a better term, boning down every spare chance they got.

Seriously. Tre hadn’t known that sex like this existed. His woman was hungry for him. Who would have thought that underneath that innocent, sweet, neat little exterior there was a starving sex goddess? Tre was more than happy to be her playground.

He was grateful for the distraction as well. Every day ticked down and it made him crazy with worry. Every night, with a sweaty, gorgeous Caroline panting next to him, the fear descended again. He was grateful, of course, that that day hadn’t yielded an attack from the demon. But he couldn’t help but worry about what tomorrow would bring.

It was in Caroline and Caroline alone that he could quell those worries. Even his bear form gave him no relief from the constant fear. And so he set about on his mission to drown himself in Caroline. He hoped he never found the surface.

As for her, she was really enjoying her time with Tre. This adventure was funny to her in some ways. The time moved so strangely. The stakes of each day were so high, and there was almost nothing to do to pass the time. No jobs. No life except for one another. So even though it had only been a little under two weeks since she and Tre had first slept together, Caroline felt as if it had been months. Maybe even a year.

Physically, their connection was brutally satisfying. She’d never in her life known pleasure like this existed. Tre was generous and demanding and creative and patient and everything she’d ever wanted in a lover. It was hard not to feel cracked like a peanut after every single time. When they were having sex, she could feel him open up, the energy of him, the core of him. It was like peeling a piece of fruit to get to the ripe innards. But then sleep would take them and when they woke up, there was friendly, kind Tre with his guard firmly in place.

She knew this was what he’d meant when he’d claimed that he wasn’t good for women. She knew that the guard he had up wasn’t a choice for him. It happened naturally. From necessity or nature she wasn’t quite sure.

Either way, she didn’t blame him for it. She didn’t wish Tre were different. Tre was Tre and she wanted him. It made her deeply sad to think that they probably weren’t destined to be together forever. She’d never be able to make it with someone who so firmly shut her out of his life, his story, his history. Eventually they’d have to part ways. She’d be devastated, she knew. But she also knew she could get through it.

If there was anything she’d learned from her divorce it was that you had to enjoy the good parts while you had ‘em and let people go their own way when they wanted to. The small fear in the back of her mind was that Tre didn’t actually want to. She couldn’t help but think that he wasn’t completely in the driver’s seat when it came to his anxieties and fears.

She could clearly see a world where one day, Tre pushed her away so firmly that there was no choice but to keep on walking. She could also see that world leaving Tre even lonelier than he was when they first met. It said something about Caroline that even in that scenario, in her heart of hearts, she would be more concerned with Tre’s pain than with her own.

No! She firmly reminded herself that she’d learned to put her needs up front. She’d spent far too long punting herself down the line for Peter. She needed to take control of her life and be strong!

But as the days marched on, Caroline found herself swirling farther and farther into Tre. The scent of him, the warmth of him, the taste of him. Every night she’d tiptoe to his room and knock gently on his door. And there she’d find him. Brushing his teeth, or reading in bed, or clacking on his keyboard. And every night, her heart lurched.

She wasn’t going to try and change him. And she wasn’t going to waste time wishing he were different.

All she could do was be grateful.

 

 

***

Jack and Jean Luc and Tre were scowling into their dinners, barely capable of raising their eyes to the other end of the table where Arturo sat.

“Did something happen on the playground that you boys need to tell Mommy about?” Celia asked, looking back and forth between them all.

“Baby, please don’t refer to yourself as my mommy,” Jean Luc said on a pained laugh.

Celia laughed hard then, and so did the rest of the women. “Fair enough. But what the hell happened out there?”

Seriously, the men were all acting like they’d buried a body this afternoon or something.

“Well,” Tre said, dropping his fork onto his plate. “In a nutshell, Arturo’s a raging bag of dicks.”

Arturo rolled his eyes and plopped his chin on his hand at the other end of the table. “Aw. Does it hurt your feelings that I don’t want to be friends?”

“Nawl,” Jack jumped in. “But it irritates the shit out of us that you know everything about this fucking demon and you won’t do shit to help us.”

“Why should I help you?” Arturo asked, leaning back in his chair and picking at his teeth. “Simply because I’m here? We’re not allies. No matter what Martine might think.” Arturo sat up from his chair and strode out of the room, stopping briefly to squeeze Caroline’s shoulder in penance for his behavior. But then he was gone.

“Martine,” Thea said, pushing her plate away. “Pretty sure we need a new plan. Our boys aren’t getting anywhere with Arturo and time keeps on ticking. I can’t imagine it’ll be long before we hear from the demon in one way or another. Don’t you think?”

Martine said nothing.

One by one, the group realized that Martine had gone desperately still. Her eyes were glassy.

Automatically, in a gesture that squeezed Tre’s heart, Caroline reached across the table and took Martine by the hand. “What’s wrong?”

Martine took a deep breath. “I was just really hoping that you’d all be able to make things work with Arturo without being backed into a corner.”

“What corner?” Jean Luc asked.

“I didn’t realize it until we were already on our way here.” She slipped her hand from Caroline’s and pulled a piece of parchment from her belt. They all recognized it. It was the map that had originally led them to northern Michigan. It had eventually wiped itself clean and led them to southern Florida a little over a month ago. And then they’d wiped and redesigned and led them all to Montana. However, the map that Martine was holding out to all of them was completely blank. “Mine wiped after Florida. But it never showed Montana for me.”

Celia leaned across the table and took the map from Martine, turning it over in her hands. “It’s completely blank! Are you sure—” Celia’s words cut off and her eyes went wide as she stared down at the centuries-old piece of parchment in her hands. As they all watched, a map of Montana drew itself onto the map. “Whoa.”

“What the hell?” Tre asked no one in particular, leaning closer and squinting down at the map.

Martine held her hand out, silently asking for the map again. Celia wordlessly handed it back and in front of all of their eyes, the second the map touched Martine’s fingers, it wiped itself clean. Once again, it was blank.

“Whoa,” Jean Luc said.

“Yeah,” Jack murmured. “What does it mean, Martine?”

“It means,” Martine said slowly, “that I’m no longer one of the seven.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Jack said. “You were with us from the beginning. The map says that there’s seven of us. The seventh soul…” He trailed off at the grim looks of everyone in the group.

“There still are seven of you,” Martine said quietly. “I’m just no longer one of them.”

“Arturo,” Tre groaned. “Arturo is now our seventh?”

“I cannot even begin to explain how much I hate that motherfucker,” Jack growled, pinching his eyes shut and scraping a hand over his face.

“I can’t be certain,” Martine said.

“There’s one way to find out, isn’t there?” Caroline asked. “Let’s go hand the map to Arturo and see if it draws itself in.”

Caroline took the map from Martine and marched out of the kitchen. The group fell in behind her.

Tre’s head hurt. He scrubbed at his eyes underneath his glasses. He wanted to reach for Caroline, clasp his arms across her collarbones, clamp her to him. He felt exposed in his confusion. As if the demon could see them all. He hated the pattern that had begun to form over their last two locations. In Michigan, Thea and Jack had become lovers and through Arturo, the demon had targeted them. In Florida, Celia and Jean Luc had become lovers and the demon had targeted them. Now they were here in Montana, big sky and mountains and the scent of real grizzlies on the wind. And Caroline had just fucked his brains out last night and for two weeks of nights before that. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess where the demon was going to set his sights next.

If it wouldn’t have automatically forfeited one of their souls, Tre would have been on the next plane out of here, Caroline buckled in next to him. He wanted to find a houseboat on the Mediterranean Sea where they could hide out. A shack in the Canadian Rockies. A hostel in southeast Asia. He didn’t care. He just wanted to hunker down and hide her away from here.

“The only way out is through,” Jean Luc muttered into Tre’s ear as they tromped their way down the hall to Arturo’s room. “You can’t hide from this.”

Tre should have known that his emotions were being broadcast loud and clear to his friends. Tre nodded.

“I know. I just… I wish I had even an inkling about what was coming our way, you know?”

“That’s why we’re trying to get into Arturo’s head.”

Jack looked back over his shoulder, obviously eavesdropping on their conversation.

“Yeah,” Tre replied. “I hate the guy. But if there’s anything I can do to make Caroline safer, or to get this fucking target off her back, I’m gonna do it. Even if it means holding hands with the devil.”

Jack groaned from up ahead, Jean Luc made a bit of a growly sound, scraping his hand over his beard. But neither of them protested. They all tromped through the house to Arturo’s room. Where he was nowhere to be found.

“Arturo?” Caroline called into the stillness of the house.

There was a beat of dead silence and then, “Yes, angel?”

Arturo’s deep voice came from behind them. He wore a towel around his waist and his hair was wet.

Almost in unison, the entire group that was facing him cocked their heads to one side as they eyed the former demon-helper.

Tre said what pretty much all of them were thinking. “Didn’t know you… took showers.”

Arturo rolled his dark eyes and shoved past them all into his room. “How many more times am I going to have to remind you all that I’m human?”

“Well,” Celia reasoned. “You’re also the right-hand man to a demon and basically immortal, so you’ll forgive us if we think it’s strange to see you do something so normal.”

Arturo looked for a second like he was trying to restrain a smile before his face wiped clean. “Were you expecting me to be so powerful I’ve become self-cleaning?” he asked, quasi-innocently.

“Arturo!” Caroline exclaimed in delight. “You made a joke!”

“It’s been known to happen,” he said dryly, pulling an old pair of sweatpants out of the set of drawers in his room and tugging them on under his towel.

“Actually,” Martine chimed in, “he used to be quite funny.”

Arturo scowled at her. “I could still be funny. If I wanted to be.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re too busy putting yourself through unnecessary pain and intentionally scaring the pants off of everyone to have any time to be funny,” she replied, leaning against the wall under the window and letting her eyes drift outward, toward the sky. He scowled at her but she didn’t see it.

“Regardless.” He turned back to the group. “What the hell are you all doing in my room? I thought our lovely little kumbaya moment at the table would have tided you all over at least until tomorrow.”

“Oh!” Caroline jumped a little, as if she were just remembering that she was the one in charge here. “We’re conducting a little experiment. Here.”

She held the blank parchment out to Arturo and he eyed it with distrust. His gaze zipped to Martine. “What’s this?”

She turned to him. “You know what this is.”

He still didn’t take the parchment. “That can’t be right. Martine, you know that can’t be right.” His brow furrowed and they stayed frozen like that—Martine with half her back to him, her gaze out the window and Arturo staring at her.

“Will someone please explain what exactly you’re talking about?” Tre asked impatiently, his arms crossing over his chest. He was sick of the two immortals having all the information and rarely sharing it with the rest of them.

They ignored him.

“Take the parchment, Arturo.” Martine seemed exhausted.

He turned back to Caroline’s outstretched hand and stared down at it. A look of deep confusion crossed over his face, and then it segued, briefly, into something that looked strangely like fear.

For just a moment, maybe half a breath, Arturo’s wall came down and suddenly Tre could read his feelings, the same as he could Jack and Jean Luc’s. Arturo was scared. He didn’t want to touch the parchment. He didn’t want to know its secrets.

But the wall resurrected itself, Arturo’s face went blank, and he snatched the parchment from Caroline’s hand. “Well, there you go,” he muttered as a map of Montana immediately drew itself onto the paper.

“You’re the seventh person,” Caroline said, looking up at Arturo’s face in wonder.

“I knew there was a reason I didn’t fit in with the group,” Martine muttered, finally turning back to everyone. There were no glistening tears. Nothing but a steely expression.

“What do you mean you don’t fit in?” Thea demanded angrily, and perhaps a bit guiltily. She and Martine hadn’t exactly been fast friends. “You fit in just fine!”

“No,” Martine said as she shook her head. “Something has always been a bit off. And now I know what it was.” She turned and looked at the group. “I wasn’t meant to lead you to the demon. I was meant to lead you to Arturo. And now he’ll take you on from here.”

“You’re leaving?” The pain in Caroline’s voice had Tre wincing. He stepped forward toward her but she was already rushing toward Martine, taking her in her arms. Martine was stiff and surprised at the contact, the same as she’d been when Caroline had taken her hand.

“Not yet.” Martine pulled away from Caroline. She turned and stared at Arturo. “All of you have to make a connection with one another or you don’t stand a chance at destroying him.”
“Do you even want to destroy the demon?” Jean Luc asked Arturo, his arms crossed over his chest.

As if a sudden wind had blown through the room, a wave of Arturo’s blue energy pulsed out from him. His feelings came with it. Rage, scorn, pain, humiliation, terror, regret, heartache, all of it washed over them. He couldn’t keep it in. He couldn’t control it.

The group wasn’t hurt, but they were shocked by the outburst. Arturo’s face was dark and hateful, his eyes on Jean Luc’s.

“Of course he wants to destroy the demon,” Martine said, stepping forward and laying a hand on Arturo’s shoulder. “He’s been enslaved by him for nearly four centuries.”

“Drinks.”

Everyone turned to look at Caroline who was squinting thoughtfully into the air.

She nodded. “Yup. We need drinks. Yeah. Okay, everybody into the kitchen.”