Thea was the second person awake. And that surprised her. Celia, in thick glasses she hadn’t worn yesterday, fluffy slippers, purple leggings and a teal robe, was standing at the stove, stirring oatmeal and pressing buttons on the coffee maker.

“Oh. Morning,” she said over her shoulder and then mumbled something that sounded a lot like ‘this fudging thing trying to make me its bish’.

Thea could only assume that Celia was talking about the coffee maker. She strode over and took the helm, trying to read the faded buttons.

“Thanks for making dinner last night,” Celia said, running one hand over that spray of silver hair at the top of her head. “It hadn’t even occurred to me and then there you were, the whole thing all set up.”

“Sure,” Thea replied, a little perplexed at the strange vibe coming off of Celia.

“It’s my house, so I probably should have been the one in charge of feeding everyone, getting everyone settled in for the night. But…” she trailed off, giving the oatmeal one more stir and setting the lid on the pot.

“But it was a hell of a night,” Thea finished for her, crossing her arms and watching Celia carefully. They listened to the tiny, familiar noises of the coffee brewing.

“Yeah.” Celia fixed her glasses. “I’m—I’m still trying to figure out what to believe.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“Look,” Celia said, looking like she was about to burst if she didn’t say what she was about to say. “This is my parents’ place. And I have about a dozen brothers and sisters who all have a claim on it. I can’t just be having strange people here willy-nilly. Especially people all tied up in… this. Would it be terrible if I kicked everyone out?”

“No,” Thea said at the exact same second that Martine, standing in the doorway, said, “Yes.”

Thea and Martine looked at one another for a moment, Thea’s clear blues into Martine’s clear greens and something passed between them. It wasn’t dislike, exactly, but there was definitely not a ton of good will zinging around the kitchen.

Celia, in her fluffy slippers and no makeup and just over five-foot-tall stature, felt very out of place next to these two amazons. They both seemed like warriors to her, in their two different ways. Celia eyed their clothes, button-up flannel and jeans on one of them and stretchy black workout clothes on the other. The two of them looked ready for anything. Celia eyed her old cotton robe and really wished she’d gotten dressed before deciding to make breakfast for everyone.

“You explain yours and then I’ll explain mine,” Martine said, nodding her head to Thea. Martine had great respect for human women.

“It’s your family’s home and you get to decide what happens here,” Thea said simply. And it really was that simple for her. “If you want us gone, you’re well within your rights to make us leave.”

Martine studied Thea and though she knew this woman was probably going to be a pain in the ass, felt her respect for her rise. “That’s true. Thea is definitely right. But these three men, who put themselves forward in front of you three women, are going through something very painful. And life-altering. And it will change them, irrevocably. In two weeks’ time, at the new moon, it will end. They will have fully become their new selves. And only then, can they separate.”

“You’re saying they need a safe place to stay until their transformation is done?”

Martine nodded.

“And I suppose,” Celia continued, “they’re going to want a private place, so that whatever happens to them, some dope in the next hotel room doesn’t overhear or witness it.”

Martine nodded again.

“Oh, alright,” Celia sighed. “They can stay here.”

Thea studied Celia, then Martine, and nodded her head. She took a cup of coffee for herself and went back into the bedroom where she’d slept. Jack still slept. Something told her that was unusual. Despite his lazy manner, he struck her as an early riser. Though, she noticed, he didn’t look nearly as ill as he had the night before. It was no wonder that he needed the rest so badly. Who even knew what was happening in his body?

When breakfast was ready, all three of the men sort of stumbled into the dining room. Caroline, having woken just a bit before them, had set the table and there was oatmeal at every place. Coffee sat in a big thermos and there was canned fruit set out in bowls all around.

“It’s not much,” Celia said, pulling out a chair for herself. “We’ll have to go to the market in Falcon Forge. Just two towns over. We’re gonna need fresh food. The pantry won’t hold us much longer.”

The three men were already sitting, chugging coffee and falling on their food. All three of them felt a ravenous sort of screaming hunger deep within them. They didn’t quite realize it yet, but they also felt the hunger of the other two. Which intensified their own.

“Oh!” Caroline said, sipping the tea she’d made herself and peering around at everyone, tentative and excited at the same time. “We’re staying, then? We’re staying together here?”             

Thea said nothing, though the packed bag at her feet spoke volumes.

Jack, through a mouthful of oatmeal, spoke up. “I don’t think the three of us have a choice.” He pointed to the men.

“What?” Tre asked, sort of startled, wiping his mouth. “What do you mean?”

Jack looked at Martine for confirmation. “Just a guess, but I’m thinking that the three of us might be stuck with each other.”

She nodded at him, an uninterpretable expression on her face.

“Why?” Tre asked, looking between Jean Luc and Jack.

Jack, holding Tre’s eyes, reached to his own forearm and pinched it as hard as he could.

“Ah!”

“Shit!”

Both Jean Luc and Tre hissed in pain and rubbed at the corresponding part of their forearms.

“We’re linked somehow?” Jean Luc asked Martine.

She nodded. “You’re part of the same pack, I guess you could say. You’ll learn to control the connection more, as you get used to being shifters. But for now, you’ll have to stay close to one another. You’re vulnerable, while you get used to the change. It’s your bodies’ way of protecting themselves, staying close to your pack.”

“Jesus.” Jean Luc rose up from the table and paced to the far wall, massive and agitated.

“She said the transformation will be done on the new moon. In two weeks, give or take a few days.” Celia blushed the second she’d said the words. She’d changed into clothes, a T-shirt, high-waisted jeans and man-sized cardigan, and she’d put her contacts in. So she didn’t feel quite as unprepared as she had earlier. But still, she was talking to Jean Luc LaTour and she couldn’t stop the blush on her cheeks. Her eyes fell immediately back to her oatmeal.

“So we’re here for that long?” Tre asked. “I can’t. I’ve got jobs to pull. Money on the line.”

“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice,” Martine said. “The others, though…”

She trailed off and looked at the women.

Thea resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

“I’m going to be staying as long as you three are,” Celia said, clearing her throat and trying to ignore the humongous ex-NFL player who was still standing against the wall, vibrating with agitation. “I’ve got the vacation stored up and I can’t just leave you here.”

Martine nodded and her eyes shifted to Caroline.

“Oh!” Caroline jumped a little at all the sudden attention, accidentally spilling her tea over her fingers. “Right. Well, I’ll have to call my h— back home.” She’d almost said ‘husband’, but something, she wasn’t sure what, had stopped her. “But I’m pretty sure I can stay. There’s nothing too pressing.”

All eyes went to Thea then. “Sorry to disappoint, but I only made arrangements for a few days here. I’ll be heading out after breakfast. I’ve got a farm to run, animals to take care of.”

She could feel Martine and Jack’s eyes on her as she took another bite of her oatmeal, but she didn’t acknowledge either of them. Everyone else but the two of them seemed perfectly inclined to let Thea go on with her life. There was nothing tying her to the group, not really, and it was ridiculous to give up two weeks of one’s life just like that.

The rest of breakfast was quiet, subdued almost. Each person had a whole lot of things to think through on their own.

When the dishes were cleared, Thea, with her pack on her back, shook each person’s hand. She ignored the look in Martine’s eyes. And the way Jack held her hand for just a minute longer than everyone else had.

“Caroline, I’ll take that horse back to town for you, if you need.”

“Yes! Oh my gosh, that would be such a help. The owner has a stable right to the north of the general store. She said just to knock on the front door when I got back.”

Thea nodded, took one last look at all of them, and was gone.

 

 

***

 

“I’ve met you before, haven’t I?” Jean Luc asked through a grunt that he mostly managed to swallow down. It was late morning now and the group was moving around the house, really opening it up and brushing the dust off everything, now that they knew they were going to be staying there for a while. The zinging burn in his muscles had been replaced by a more centralized pressure in his gut that he knew both Tre and Jack were feeling as well.

People seemed to be under the impression that an aching pain was easier to deal with than a sharp pain. People were idiots. Pain was pain. When it was loud and bossy like this here pain in his gut, he didn’t especially care how it was classified. It was just something else he was going to have to heal from. The thought of it exhausted him. He focused instead on the surprised expression of the pretty woman to the left of him who was helping him wiggle open a jammed window.

“Oh! Yes!” Caroline said, a big smile on her face. She wore neat, navy trousers and a white sweater that fit her curves perfectly. Her chestnut hair tumbled shiny down her back. “I wanted to say something before, but I didn’t think you’d remember. You must have met so many people, being who you are.”

Of course, thought both Tre and Celia at the exact same time. They eavesdropped on the conversation from where they worked on the windows on the other side of the room. It made perfect, bitter sense that the famous football player and the obvious New Englander who reeked of money would have met before. Probably at some elbow-rubbing soiree that made the rich richer, with a side of lobster and champagne.

“Remind me of the circumstances where we met?” Jean Luc said, swallowing another grunt of pain.

“We both volunteered at that children’s camp outside of Philly three summers ago.”
“Right, the one for kids with hemophilia.”

Both Celia and Tre instantly felt chagrin for their uncharitable thoughts from before. “That was a fun day,” Jean Luc continued. His brother Hugo had been there, too. Still alive and making all the kids smile. If Jean Luc remembered correctly, Hugo had made this pretty Caroline smile, too. Not her husband, though. “You were there with your husband.”

“Yes,” Caroline said quickly. She felt several pairs of new eyes on her, assessing this new information. She felt those eyes on the platinum and diamond ring set that she was wearing on her left hand. “Peter.”

“Right.” From what Jean Luc remembered, Peter Clifton had been a protective and slightly jealous man, constantly inserting himself between Caroline and Hugo. “I would have thought he’d have joined you here.”

“He would have…” Caroline started, and then with a dizzying, nauseating dose of reality, realized that she had absolutely no way of ending that sentence. She turned away and busied herself with the blankets she was unfolding, ignoring the eyes of her companions until they all eventually turned away from her.

It was then, looking up at them—Jack, who’d just brought a load of firewood in from outside, Martine who was changing lightbulbs—that Caroline realized how little she actually knew of all of them.

“What do you all do for work?” she asked, turning to Jean Luc. “Well, I know what you do for work, but everyone else.”

“Demon hunter,” Martine elected, raising one hand.

“Right,” Celia muttered, shaking her silver head. “Not to compare myself to the demon hunter and the star quarterback in the room, but I’m just a librarian in the Brooklyn Public Library system.”

“Former quarterback,” Jean Luc corrected.

“No shit,” Jack mused, looking back at him with surprise. “That explains the muscles. I thought I recognized you from somewhere.”

“Yeah, the forty million billboards,” Tre said. Not unkindly.

“That also explains all the Nike crap,” Jack observed, looking at Jean Luc’s complete outfit of athletic wear.

“They just give it to me,” Jean Luc said, a little embarrassed and not quite sure why. “I have endorsements with them.” He cleared his throat. “Jack, what do you do?”

“Me? I’m a man of leisure, myself.”

Everyone in the room snorted their laughter. If Jack was a rich man, they’d all eat their hats. Just wasn’t quite the way he rolled. They all could tell.

He grinned. “Nah, I guess you could call me a treasure hunter. That, last night, wasn’t exactly the first map I’ve ever followed. First demon, though. First bear shifter transformation,” he finished thoughtfully.

“Jack Warren?” Martine asked, her head cocked to one side. “You’re Jack Warren?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve heard of you. You were the one who discovered that Aztec treasure back in ’04.”

“That’s right,” he repeated. He frowned. That one had hurt. He’d discovered it, but he’d also been knocked out and robbed before he could notify anyone of what he’d found. The whole thing had been plundered all to hell when he’d come to. All that history, gone just like that. He hadn’t gotten over the sting of it yet. The thought of it curdled inside him. He’d been testy and irritated since that morning. And he wasn’t usually a testy or irritated man. He hadn’t liked how easily Thea had just loped right out the door on those long legs of hers. And he especially hadn’t liked that he hadn’t gone after her. “Tre? What do you do?” he passed the baton and the spotlight.

“Oh.” The back of Tre’s neck, at least the part that wasn’t covered in colorful tattoos, lit up as red as his hair. He shoved his thick glasses up his nose a little further. “I’m in I.T.”

“Is that right?” Jack was unconvinced. “You ‘pull a lot of jobs’ in I.T.?” he asked, quoting Tre’s phrasing from earlier.

“Ah, yeah, well, I guess I’m more of a hacker-for-hire than I am an I.T. guy, but it’s a lot of the same skills,” he insisted, a little defensive.

“What kind of things do you hack?” Caroline asked. He could feel her pretty brown eyes on the side of his face, assessing him, and it was making him nervous. She was so perfect and neat in her fancy, rich-lady clothes. He felt like a total scrub in comparison with his faded gray T-shirt and black jeans.

He cleared his throat. “Whatever my clients want. Bank accounts mostly.”

“You’re a thief,” she said, and if his discomfort hadn’t clouded his hearing, he would have realized that there was fascination in her tone, not judgment.

“Call it what you want,” he said, his voice dropping to an octave so low they could barely hear him.

“I’m just a housewife,” Caroline said to Tre’s turned back. “But Peter’s hired a lot of people to do the things I’m not very good at, so there’s not always very much for me to do.”

Tre turned back just in time to see a strange, fleeting expression on Caroline’s face. Something like loneliness, he thought.

The group moved from one room to the next, opening up the house to the sun and wind, airing it out. They also ran linens through the wash and took stock of the pantry.

“I’m going to head to the grocery,” Celia told them around lunchtime. “I’ll bring back some pizzas, too.”

“I’ll go with you,” Jean Luc volunteered, wiping water from his mouth where he’d just been slurping it straight from the faucet. He hated dirtying a glass if he didn’t have to.

“Oh, no, that’s okay,” Celia shook her head, not sure why she was saying no.

“Do you think it’ll be alright for me to go that far?” Jean Luc asked Martine.

She studied him for a moment. “It won’t be comfortable, but it’s a discomfort you’re all going to have to get used to. It’s a part of you now.”

Jean Luc nodded, the matter settled in his mind, and followed Celia out to the car. He could tell she didn’t want him to come, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to let a public librarian pay for all the food they were going to need.

They were quiet on the ride into town. “You alright?” Celia eventually asked as Jean Luc shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat. Her rental Ford Fiesta was comically small for him. Even with the seat pulled all the way back, his knees were up to his chest. He’d put the window down and Celia was fairly certain it was so that he could let his giant, muscled arm have a little room out the window.

“Just getting used to my new reality,” he said, planting one huge palm flat on his chest.

“It hurts? To be away from them?”

“Ah,” he searched for the words; he’d never been good at words. “I think what that psycho did yesterday still hurts. But being away from them just kind of tugs.”

He liked this chick. She was unique and funky with all her piercings and tattoos. Something that was generally a turn-off for Jean Luc, but on Celia, it definitely suited her. She was cute, like he could put her in his pocket if he wanted. When they unfolded themselves from the car, Jean Luc realized that she barely came up to his ribs.

“How tall are you?” he asked in surprise, looking down at her silver, silky hair.

She peered up at him, her eyebrow raised. “How tall are you?”

They glared for a second, before breaking into shy smiles. Jean Luc went and grabbed a shopping cart.

Celia noticed him rubbing a hand over his chest every few steps, the unhappy set of his mouth.

She dumped things into the cart and so did he. Everything she chose he just ended up grabbing twice as many of that same thing. “I eat a lot,” he told her, the tips of his ears turning pink.

When they were almost all the way through the store, and she was feeling a little bit more comfortable, just the tiniest bit, she spoke up again.

“It’s kind of cool, if you think about it,” she told him, grabbing an economy-sized pack of paper towels. “This connection you have with Jack and Tre.”

“Hmm?” he asked, reading the back of a sports drink box.

“Yeah, it’s like you instantly have two new brothers or something.”

She was turned away, grabbing laundry detergent, so she didn’t see the way the pain lanced across his face at her statement. Like she’d stabbed him. And he almost felt as if she had. He’d come here to say goodbye to Hugo. Not to replace him. The thought made Jean Luc sick to his stomach, physically ill. In that moment, he missed his brother so much he could barely breathe. He resisted the urge to put his hands on his knees and bend over to gasp for air. A few deep breaths later and he was just barely staving off a panic attack. Just barely.

Celia, oblivious to it all, turned back to him and tossed the laundry detergent in the cart. “You know?”

“No,” he responded curtly, not even bothering to look her in the face. “I don’t know.”

Celia pulled up short as she watched him push the cart down the aisle away from her. His shoulders nearly took up the entire aisle.

Rude! Super rude!

For a minute, she was incensed with anger. How dare he talk to her like that! Just because he was famous and rich didn’t mean that he got to treat her like she was nothing. But then the wording of her question echoed back to her and she realized what she’d said to him. Everyone in the world knew about the car accident that had ended Jean Luc’s career as a quarterback and taken his brother’s life.

Oh God. And she’d gone and run her mouth about him having new brothers? She winced, one hand over her face. Oh man, Celia. Good one. Just great. Really top-notch friendship-making.

She groaned and forced her feet to start moving. She’d need to apologize. Like yesterday. As one of ten kids, Celia hated apologizing. It was something that her parents had made her and her siblings do automatically, without any sort of reflection, simply to put some kind of ending punctuation on an argument or dispute. Apologies to Celia were rote and meant nothing.

It was something she was working on.

Because apparently, the rest of the world felt differently about that particular point.

She took a deep breath and rounded the corner of the aisle, the apology on the tip of her tongue. She found the faster she spit it out the easier it was.

But she stopped short.

Because there was Jean Luc, smiling like she’d never seen him smile before. Well, in person. On TV and in advertisements, she’d seen that smile plenty of times. It really lit that plain face right up. His heavy brow slashed across his eyes and his long face went from an oval to much more square. His teeth was a white slice against his chestnut beard. And man, he looked big. All ripped and leaning on the shopping cart, one hip cocked out and the toes of one of his shoes balancing on the floor.

Celia finally tore her eyes away from the vision of Jean Luc smiling to finally narrow in on what exactly Jean Luc was smiling at.

Celia’s burgeoning butterflies abruptly caught pneumonia and died. He was smiling at a woman whom Celia could only categorize as ‘Instagram model’. She was gorgeous in a quirky way. In tight clothes with shiny hair and looking utterly fuckable. She leaned toward Jean Luc and said something to him that had him both laughing and scratching at the back of his neck at the same time.

Celia rolled her eyes hard.

Of course.

She took a moment to be brutally honest with herself. Here it was. Real Talk Time: She was currently fighting with a little bit of a crush on the ripped, good-smelling, gigantic, wildly famous man standing ten feet from her. And somewhere, somewhere deep in her heart, she’d fostered a tiny little fantasy about what it would feel like to be the One He Chose. Out of all of them. All the women who inevitably threw themselves at him. In the fantasy, he was on this crazy map-following-demon-fighting-bear-shifting-adventure with her and he’d inevitably think, You know what I want? A punky, bookwormish nerd with piercings and clothes from the dollar bin at the Salvation Army. Yum.

She watched him nod at something that the Instagram model was saying and Celia kissed that little fantasy goodbye. Waved adieu as she kicked its burning ship out in the ocean. If she had had bagpipes she would have played Amazing Grace just so that dumbass fantasy would have known it was good and buried.

That was over now.

Jean Luc LaTour was a superstar. He probably waded through pussy.

Celia had spent so much of her life feeling like she was just one amongst many. Her parents had been too busy and too distracted to make her feel any sort of special. She’d had to do that herself. She knew one thing for sure, it was dangerous to assume that Jean Luc would ever see something in her that he hadn’t already seen in a thousand other women.

She was special. She repeated this to herself ten times in a row before she approached the cart and smiled tightly at the two of them. It didn’t matter how these two demi-gods saw her. She, Celia Lamplighter, was special and smart and kind and just a little mixed-up. Who cared? She wasn’t going to lust after him anymore.

Wanting Jean Luc LaTour was suicide.