Night approached faster than any of them were prepared for. They ate dinner all together around the big dining room table. Jean Luc grilled and Celia made pasta salad. Caroline cut up fruit and scooped vanilla ice cream for dessert.

It was a beautiful, colorful meal that pretty much no one was in the mood for. Except for Jean Luc who ate like a horse.             

“How can you possibly eat right now?” Tre asked, half in disgust and half in admiration.

Jean Luc shrugged. “I swam across the lake and back today.” He’d been loving swimming in the lake and was really going to miss it. He ordinarily jogged, which was really hard on his bad knee, but there hadn’t been a day in his natural life that he hadn’t worked up some sort of sweat. He wondered if, when this was all over, he shouldn’t buy a lake house. He owned a townhouse in the East Village and, of course, his uncle’s house in Florida had been left to him, so he’d never considered splurging on a new place. But there was definitely something about swimming in that murky, cold lake every day. Call him crazy, but he loved it.

“Did you get all the way to the other side?” Caroline asked in amazement.

He nodded and reached for another bowl of ice cream.

“Did you see Tre’s summer camp?” she asked.

Martine’s head snapped up. “What’s that?”

“Tre went to the summer camp that’s directly across the lake,” Caroline said conversationally, flourishing sliced strawberries over the last bowl of ice cream and licking some juice off her thumb.

“Really?” Celia asked him. “I’ve always been so curious about that camp. We used to watch them with binoculars every once in a while, when you guys would be out playing capture the flag and stuff.”

Tre laughed. “A bunch of kids knocking each other ass-first into the dirt. I’ll bet it made for riveting entertainment.”

Celia shrugged. “It was better than over here. No TV, no internet, three whole months every summer trapped here with all ten of my siblings. If it weren’t for the library in town not all of the Lamplighter children would have made it out of those summers alive.”

“We had stories about this house, over at camp. Because it looks so spooky from over there. Lopsided and huge and the lights in the top level would always flick on and off. We said it was ghosts.”

Celia leaned back in her chair and laughed, a real laugh, one that eased the tension in all their guts. “That’s hilarious. That’s the attic. I shared it with my sister, Lauren. She needs perfect darkness when falling asleep and I like to stay up and read. So every night was a war with the light switch.”

“Wow. I never expected that mystery to be so mundane.”

“Hold on,” Martine spoke up finally. “Are you saying that two of you have a connection to this place? This part of the world? From childhood?”

“Well, I obviously spent my summers here as a kid,” Celia said slowly, like she was wondering what the big deal was. “That was one of the reasons why the map was so interesting to me. I recognized the area immediately. I probably wouldn’t have taken—ah—borrowed it from the archives if it hadn’t been from a place I recognized.”

“Same as me,” Tre said. “I wouldn’t have stolen it if I didn’t know it was Northern Michigan. I just felt like it was mine when I saw it, maybe because of camp or not, I don’t know.”

Martine said nothing, just leaned back in her chair and eyed them all. The candles that Caroline had lit were turning Martine’s strawberry hair a nice deep gold, her arms crossed over her chest.

“What?” Thea asked, something crawling up her spine as she watched the expression on Martine’s face. The two women might not be friends, but she could still read the woman. And she didn’t like what she was reading.

“I’m not sure,” Martine said slowly. “It’s just that there’s more connections here than I had originally thought.” She rose from the table and drifted over to the window that overlooked the lake. It would be time soon to get the men outside. Moonrise was to be in twenty minutes, even though it wouldn’t be visible. They were going to need to have plenty of space.

“At first,” Martine said, facing the group again, “I had thought it was just a connection between the three men, because of the curse from Arturo. But then Thea came back. Which proved that there was at least a connection between her and Jack. Now, though, you’re telling me that Tre and Celia have a connection. Which I assume isn’t of the same nature as Thea and Jack’s.”

She’d spoken the words absently, more thinking out loud than anything else. She barely noticed when both Tre and Celia instantly went bright red. Their connection was absolutely nothing like Thea and Jack’s. Celia liked Tre. She thought he was funny and smart, but she did not want to drag him upstairs and bang him, which was pretty much the majority of what Thea and Jack did.

Celia swallowed against the uncomfortable feeling that everyone was looking at her. She slowly passed her fingertips from one collarbone to the next, reminding herself what her tattoos were there for. Courage. “No, not the same type of connection.” She mustered up a wink for Tre. “Sorry to break your heart.”

He grinned back at her, relief written all over his face. Celia was really hot, sure, but the thought of her suddenly confessing feelings he hadn’t even guessed at felt terribly… wrong. “I’ll live.”

Caroline’s face bounced back and forth between the speakers, interested in all the details and drinking down every last word. It was better than reality TV.

Martine shifted, as if she was going to keep speaking, and all attention went back to her. Except for one face, which was still turned toward Celia, studying her. Jean Luc. She turned to him and raised an eyebrow, like what? He studied her for another second before shrugging and turning back to Martine as well.              

“That just means,” Martine said, “that we have brotherhood connections in this group and romantic ones. And now, friendship ones. I just didn’t realize…” She took a deep breath. This was much more complicated than she’d envisioned before. How many times had she done this? Battled this particular demon as he attempted to steal a soul, but had she ever done it in a group like this before? Not even close. It was a good thing, a point in their favor for them all to be so very connected to one another. She knew exactly why it bothered her. Because there was so much to lose with this group. If they lost a single one of them, there was every chance that all of it would crumple in on itself. That was the flipside of loving, she supposed. Losing. “It just means that the demon has devised this even more intricately than I originally thought. It means that he won’t give up this time. He won’t lose interest. He’ll keep coming until I kill him.”

She sighed and turned back to the group. They were all looking at her with various stages of shock and remorse on their faces. They knew what that meant, that either the demon won and one of their souls was taken. Or Martine won, and she became mortal. Not exactly a win-win. But, she knew, it was the natural way of her world.

“We should head outside,” Celia said, checking her watch. She’d been carefully eyeing the moonrise timetables all week.

Tables and chairs scraped as everyone rose up. Jack reached out for Thea’s hand, tugged her forward and gave her a firm kiss on the mouth before he rounded the table and clapped Tre and Jean Luc on the shoulders. “Here we go, boys.”

 

***

 

They assembled themselves on the lawn. Martine was decked out in her full weapons arsenal and she stood to the side of the other women who sat on the porch steps. The men had walked down to the lake, were murmuring words to one another and kicking at rocks down by the water.

“Any minute,” Celia whispered, eyeing her watch.

“No countdown!” Caroline shivered. “I can’t stand countdowns. I get too excited. You should see me on New Year’s, I’m practically running circles around the house by the time the ball drops.”

Thea laughed. She wasn’t usually a fan of people like Caroline. All sweet and loose and marching to their own beat. But there was just something about this woman. If you didn’t love her you didn’t have a heartbeat. Her laugh ended on a sigh as she watched Jack down by the water. She wanted to be there, to be next to him. To go through this with him.

But she’d listened hard to what Martine had said. There were so many different kinds of connections floating around their group. This one, the bear one, that was Jack’s connection with the two men down there. It wasn’t her place.

Maybe a minute went by when the men started shedding their clothes.

“Holy guacamole,” Celia whispered under her breath, her eyes wide and unblinking. “Gawd.”

“We’ve seen them naked before,” Caroline said, but her eyes, as well, were glued to the silvery silhouettes of the men as they dropped their shirts in the grass and then their shoes and pants.

“Yeah, but…” Celia trailed off. Apparently that sentence wasn’t necessary to finish.

“I didn’t notice last time how cute Tre is,” Martine said, leaning on the newel post and watching just as much as the other women.

“Oh, he’s super cute!” Caroline insisted. “I love his tattoos, they’re like a hundred different stories all at once.”

“Are you attracted to humans?” Thea asked Martine, her eyebrow raised.

Martine shrugged. “I don’t think there’s a living creature alive who wouldn’t be attracted to that.” She pointed at Jean Luc’s incredibly huge and sculpted body.

“Fair enough,” Thea agreed, eyeing him critically. The man was like an Adonis.

“Hey!” Caroline insisted. “You can’t make eyes at two of them. That’s no fair. You already landed the cowboy.”

“Fair enough,” Thea said again. For the first time it crossed her mind that maybe her adventure-mates might be interested in one of those men the way she’d been interested in Jack. On a primal level, sure, but also on a that one, right there, sort of level. Like, she’d never even stood a chance.

“Do you—” she started, then cut herself off and stood up, staring at the men down by the water.

“We have liftoff,” Celia muttered under her breath.

Thea couldn’t take her eyes off Jack, who’d fallen to his hands and knees.

“It’s alright. He’s alright.”

Thea turned at the hand on her elbow, expecting Caroline, but it wasn’t. It was Martine.

“I know it’s unsettling to watch. And the first shift is always the hardest. But trust me, Thea, he’s alright.”

Thea nodded, her eyes pinned to the arch of Jack’s back, the tremble of his muscles. The other two men were the same, shaking and falling and looking for all the world like they were seconds from death.

And then, just like that, they weren’t three men writhing in pain. They were three grizzly bears, chuffing and growling into the cool night air.

 

***

 

Before that moment, Jack would never in a million years have said that he knew what it felt like to grow. He’d done it, of course, little by little until he was 25 or so. But he couldn’t have identified that feeling until now.

It was strange to him that turning into a grizzly bear would feel oddly familiar. But it did. He recognized the ache in his bones, the sting in his muscles. He felt the familiar and old feeling of teeth pushing up out of his gums, of growing hair in new places. It was like puberty in a way. The fastest, most intense puberty that anyone had ever gone through.

And, of course, at the end of it, he was a bear, not a man.

So were Tre and Jean Luc, he realized, moving his now-massive head to the side to see them. Tre was smaller and darker in color, though he looked fast. Jean Luc was enormous, larger than any naturally occurring bear to ever walk the earth and had browner hair. Jack was somewhere in between.

“You still have your scar,” Tre’s voice said in Jack’s head. Jack nearly jumped out of his skin, or his fur, as it were.

“We can talk to each other.”

Jean Luc nodded that huge head. “Looks like it.”

“So. What do you boys wanna do?” Jack asked. He was busy flexing those massive paws, rearing back and just looking at himself.

Tre tried a few steps and when he didn’t fall, looked back at the others. “I dunno.”

Jean Luc was already comfortable in his new body. He’d been certain that he’d hate it, because his body truly was his temple. He’d never wanted to be anywhere else, even when his leg had gotten smashed in the accident. He was who he was and he wasn’t interested in making trades. Finding out that he’d have to get used to an entirely new body of an entirely different species hadn’t sat well with him. But, he was intensely relieved to note, he still felt like himself. His bad leg was still worse than the other, his shoulders felt like his shoulders, he stretched his spine and that felt familiar too.

He took a few bounding steps toward the women and Caroline screamed before clapping her hands over her mouth and laughing. Jean Luc turned and gamboled back toward the men. He knew what he wanted to do. He hadn’t wanted to do it since Hugo died. But he didn’t think about that now. Jean Luc simply used his momentum and his weight and bowled Tre’s bear aside like a bowling pin. He kept on going toward Jack who anticipated him a little better and tackled him back. The two bears rolled over one another toward the lake.

They laughed hysterically in their heads and Tre was back and in the action in no time.

They wrestled and flipped over one another. Eventually, Tre and Jack teamed up, trying like hell to dunk Jean Luc’s bear into the lake.

No dice.

Martine had explained that on their very first new moon, the urge to shift would be too strong to ignore; they’d have to do it. And they most likely wouldn’t be able to shift back until the morning. Eventually, they’d be able to control it better. They would be able to shift back and forth as much as they wanted, no matter when it was, though the urge would always be strong on a new moon.

Either way, they had a lot of time to kill. Tre wanted to go check out the forest as the three big bad bears, but Jack hesitated. He walked back up from the shore toward the women. They watched him.

He knew that even though they knew, intellectually, that there was a man’s consciousness inside the bear walking toward them, it still must have been a hell of a sight to see. He could see the trepidation in Celia and Caroline’s faces. Martine looked simply proud and Thea, well, she looked blown away.

Thea stood and slid past the other women, making her way down the stairs. She walked toward Jack, meeting him in the middle of the yard. She pulled up short maybe two feet from him. Slowly, she lifted a hand, held it out toward him.

Love for her burst in his chest. If he’d been in his human form, he would have told her right then and there, point blank, how he felt about her. Instead, all he could do was nuzzle her hand. When she lifted her other hand and gave him a scratch behind his ears, he let out a grumbling sound that startled them both. He was still getting used to the mechanics, he supposed.

She laughed a little and scooted closer.

“Jack? Can you understand me?” She sniffed and Jack, a little stunned, realized that she was misting up. He’d never imagined seeing her cry. “God, Jack, this is insane. I can’t believe you’re in there. But I saw it. There you were. And here you are. So beautiful. You’re such a beautiful animal, Jack. I hope that’s not offensive.”

Her arms slid further into his thick hide and then she was circling him with her arms, burying her face and hugging him.

He sat down on his back haunches and wished he could hug her back. He would have rested a paw on her back, but he didn’t trust himself yet to know how heavy those paws were. The worst case scenario would be to hurt her. He’d never forgive himself. So he just held perfectly still and let her hug the hell out of him.

I love you, he thought the words as hard as he could, hoping she’d somehow hear them.

“Who, me?” Tre asked from back by the water. “Did he just say he loved me?”

“He’s thinking about Thea, dumbass. He can’t exactly speak English right now.”

“Ah. Right.”

Jack laughed to himself and it came out like a rolling grumble. He supposed that he really was shackled to these two. He wondered how the bonds of the magic that connected them would change over time. But he couldn’t really imagine them lessening much. In just a short time, those two had become almost like family to him.

Thea gasped and pulled away from Jack, her eyes focused on something behind him in the forest.

“Jack!” Jean Luc shouted in his head.

He whirled around and accidentally knocked Thea to the ground. He bent to help her but she rolled away from the huge paw he was pushing toward her.
“Jack, run!” she shouted, scrambling backwards like a crab.

He looked then, finally, and the first thing he saw was the blue light.

“Don’t look at it!” Martine shouted as she sprinted past him, her coppery hair trailing behind her and knives glinting in the starlight.

He didn’t need her to tell him twice. He knew exactly what happened when he looked into that blue light. It threatened to drag him under. Made him a puppet. Hypnotized him.

In a second Jean Luc and Tre were on either side of Jack, a formidable threesome.

The three women were behind them, protected by a wall of bear. Only Martine was in front of the bears, a machete in one hand and a dagger in the other.

“Come out and play, little Arturo!” she called into the woods. None of them had ever heard her voice like that before. Usually she was calm, almost aloof. Now, she sounded threatening and excited. Like this was a fight she really, really wanted.

“Keep those eyes closed,” Jean Luc hissed to Jack. How he’d known that Jack was half a second away from opening them, he’d never know.

“Why just me?” Jack asked.

“Because the light is meant for you, Jack. It’s calling to you. We can feel it,” Tre answered through gritted teeth. It was sort of calling to him too, but not the way it did to Jack. It was a strange magic. Designed to call to Jack on an elemental level.

“Is he there? Arturo?” Jack asked, his eyes slammed closed, hating every second of being on the losing end of this equation. Why him? Again he asked himself the question: why was Arturo singling him out?

“Of course I’m here, you fool.”

The voice was smooth and sinister, speaking in Jack’s head the same way that Tre and Jean Luc’s voices were.

Jack fought the urge to open his eyes.

“You won’t play my game?” the voice spoke in his head again. “Then perhaps your woman will.”

“No!” Jack shouted it in his head and a long, horrifying roar echoed out of the cavern of his chest.

“Thea!” Caroline’s voice shouted from behind them. “No!”

That was all it took to have Jack opening his eyes onto his own personal nightmare. Thea, blind and hypnotized, was crossing the lawn toward the glowing blue light halfway down toward the lake.

The light was so beautiful, as beautiful as it had been in his room before. It was soothing and seductive and called him forward. He wanted nothing more than to swallow it down, bathe in it, press his hands to the light. He was sure, as he’d been before, that if he could only get close to it, he’d reach some manner of ecstasy.

He stumbled forward, toward it. He heard shouts but couldn’t make out any words in particular.

He didn’t care about anything but the light. The light.

It was then that something crossed into his vision and stopped him. Thea. Thea was going toward the light, too. And it wasn’t slow. She was sprinting.

His heart stopped. He knew, suddenly, without question, that she would die if she touched it. The light still summoned him, beckoned him close, but that desire was nothing compared to his desire to protect her. He bounded forward in his bear form and, not trusting himself not to hurt her, skidded in front of her, blocking her path.

She looked frustrated and lost, trying to get around him to get to the light.

“Hold her back!” Martine shouted. “Arturo, show yourself, you coward.”

Jack looked around and realized that though the voice was in his head, there was no materialization of the man.

Celia and Caroline came out of nowhere and took Thea by the arms, holding her back.

“Isn’t this precious,” said a man, standing on the porch, back behind them all. They whirled around, horrified at the sight of him on the porch. He shouldn’t be anywhere near the place that had kept them safe through all of this. “You’re all protecting one another. Even the bears. Awww.”

He was just as handsome as the first time they saw him. And just as creepy. Dressed in all black, his dark eyes and dark hair seemed to be made of shadows themselves. “I see the group bonding exercises are going well, Martine. Kudos. Maybe you’ll actually manage not to get one of them killed this time.”

She was charging toward him, knives glinting, rage on her face, but it was the wrong move. Arturo merely flicked his wrist and the blue light, glowing benignly behind them all, started racing straight toward the group.

“Run!” Caroline shouted and the group scattered except for Martine, who charged the sphere; she slapped it out of the air with her machete and it seemed to dim its light.

“Don’t make this harder than it has to be, woman,” Arturo growled. “If you drag this out, he’ll only make it harder on whichever soul he takes.”

Arturo flourished a hand and pointed it straight at Thea’s heart, while she lay on the ground, her head in Celia’s lap, her eyes clenched tightly closed.

Jack watched in horror as the blue light raced directly toward Thea’s prone body. He bounded toward the porch, faster than he ever thought possible. There was a satisfying crunch as one swipe of his paw took out half the porch stairs and caught Arturo on the side. He obviously wasn’t a human because the swipe of Jack’s paw would have felled a tree and torn a man in two. Arturo was tossed to the side like a bag of flour, sure, but he wasn’t killed.

The blue light stopped in its tracks as now both Jack and Martine raced toward Arturo. He rolled away from one of the knives Martine threw and just barely missed a swipe of Jack’s paw. Jack roared as he bounded after Arturo. He saw the blue light whiz past him, just missing him. He’d had enough. He was over this.

He swiped again and this time he caught Arturo square in the chest. The man crumpled forward, seeming almost broken in half. When he raised his head, there was something akin to hatred there, blind, irate hatred. The blue light raced toward Jack again, but he noticed it had dimmed considerably. The light raced toward its master and hit him full in the chest. The light whited out the shadows for a moment before it blinked. Everything was gone.

Jack fell back on his haunches and turned back to the group. Thea sat up, blinking. Martine bent over, her hands on her knees. “Good one,” she panted at him. “You sent him away, hurt him enough to send him away. Just like I did last time.”

Martine stepped forward and inspected the place where Arturo had just disappeared. “I’d say we should get back inside but—”
“No.” Celia looked around at everyone from where she sat, Thea’s head in her lap. “I’m sorry. I know that shit was intense, but that’s where I draw the line. No bears in the house.”

The group burst out laughing, obviously needing the tension breaker.

“Alright,” Caroline said, jumping up. “I have an idea.”

She was back a few minutes later with her arms full of blankets and a bottle of water for Thea, who had yet to do much besides sit up and take a few deep breaths.

Caroline spread out the blankets for the women and snuggled in herself.

The men, in their bear forms, made a sort of protective circle around the women who snuggled under the blankets, their eyes on the stars.

Thea and Jack pushed up against one another and she was grateful for the warmth of his fur. It was there, with the stars shining brightly above and the new moon high in the sky, that they stayed all night.