Celia got dressed in some high-waisted jeans and a black and white striped T-shirt. She tied a red headband over her hair that she’d teased up into a little bit of a pompadour. She didn’t have the breathless-effortless beauty of the other women in the group and this morning she’d needed a touch of confidence. Her septum piercing gleamed as she swiped on a little mascara over her thick lashes. The tattoos at her collarbones and shoulders peeked from the edges of her shirt and she lightly dusted her fingertips over them. Confidence. That was the whole point of those tattoos.

She could hear the group from the other hotel room calling to one another in the hallway, so even though Tre was still in the shower, she decided it was time to head down to the van. She hoisted her bag and tried not to feel as if she were trudging to her doom. But damn. Twelve more hours of carsickness felt akin to a death sentence.

She was just jogging down the outside stairs to the parking lot when Jean Luc appeared in front of her. She skidded to a stop, one foot in the air balancing over the edge of the step. He steadied her shoulder with a hand the size of half her torso, reaching out for her bag as if it were second nature. Peering over her shoulder, he tossed her bag onto his back. “Tre coming?”

She shrugged. “He was still in the shower when I left. Hey, I can carry that, you know.”

He ignored the second half of her statement, instead shoving a bagel with cream cheese into her hand. If she’d looked harder at the wrapped food, she would have seen that it was a poppy seed bagel with garden vegetable cream cheese, a favorite of hers. But she just shoved the bagel back into his hand and reached out for her bag.

“Trust me, it’s better if I don’t eat. Seriously, you don’t have to carry my bag.”

He just turned and strode down the stairs to the van. Celia sighed as he loaded her bag into the trunk along with everyone else’s luggage. He turned and tossed the bagel back to her and strode around to the driver’s seat. She sighed again when she saw that everyone was settling back into the same seats as yesterday.

They only had to wait maybe five minutes more for Tre and then the van was screaming down the highway, tearing through Middle America and on its way to Florida. About five soupy, dozy, nauseating hours passed before Jean Luc pulled off at a gas station. Celia exploded from the car as fast as she could. She’d been hoping for a burst of fresh air and had been dismayed when hot humidity had hit her full in the face like somebody’s breath. The group all went into the gas station, lining up at the bathroom and buying snacks, but Celia took a turn around the empty field next door. She swallowed past her sickness and took long, calming breaths.

When she turned back, she saw that Jean Luc was already waiting at the car so she jogged to the bathroom and came back to join the group, stretching and chatting and waiting for her.

“We need to change the seating arrangements,” Jean Luc told the group. “Celia gets sick in the back seat.”

She glanced up at him in total shock. She hadn’t said a word to anybody! How had he known?

“Cece!” Caroline said, stepping over and pressing a palm to her shoulder. “Why didn’t you say anything? Of course you can have the front seat.”

“Have you been sick this whole time?” Tre asked, concern knitting his eyebrows together.

Celia waved her hand through the air. “Seriously, I’m used to it. I could get carsick on a skateboard. It’s not a big deal.”

“Celia,” Thea said from behind her, “we have at least seven more hours in the car and we’ve already been driving for a day and a half. It’s a big deal. Take the front seat.”

Celia shrugged, certain there was a blush brighter than the sun on her face right then. “Thanks, guys.”

She slid into her new seat in the front.

“That’s for you, too,” Jean Luc said as he pulled back onto the highway. He tapped on the cap of an ice-cold ginger ale that he’d apparently bought. “It’ll help your stomach.”

“Wow. I…” she trailed off. She was shocked. “How did you know I was sick?”

He lifted an eyebrow at her. “It wasn’t exactly subtle. You were white as a sheet and grimacing every time I so much as changed lanes. Seriously, the ginger ale will help.”

She popped the top and took a small sip. “Thanks.”

He didn’t say anything more and neither did anyone else. The passengers in the back of the car drifted off one by one. Celia was pretty sure that Jack and Thea had pretty much slept every hour of the past two days. Tre was zoned out, earbuds in his ears, Caroline was snoozing, and Martine looked like she was just a few minutes from sleeping herself.

“It’s so weird that the maps are leading us back to your hometown,” Celia said, finally unable to keep her thoughts to herself for another second. The ginger ale had really helped, as did sitting in the front seat, and for the first time in two days, she felt that she could speak without having to be worried about puking her guts out.

“Is it weird?” Jean Luc replied. “I’ve been thinking about that. The first image on the map led us to where you used to spend your summers with your family. Maybe it makes sense that the next location would also have something to do with one of our pasts.”

“Right,” she said thoughtfully. “And Tre had a connection to the last place as well.”

Jean Luc nodded. “I don’t think any of this is a coincidence.”

“You think the demon has some sort of master plan for getting one of our souls?”

“I would. If I were him. I mean, if he thinks leading me back to the place where I grew up would make me weaker somehow, throw me off my game, make me easier to attack, well…” He cleared his throat. “He’d probably be right.”

Celia treaded very carefully. She’d been on the receiving end of Jean Luc’s sudden shutdowns way too many times at this point. She knew that asking questions might get herself frozen out, but she had to. “Bad memories?”

Jean Luc chuffed in surprise. “No. The opposite. Good ones.”

She wondered for a second why returning to a place with good memories would weaken Jean Luc and throw him off his game. If he were someone else, she might have just asked outright. Instead, she used her literary mind to answer the question. How many books had Celia read? As a librarian and lifelong literature enthusiast, the number was probably four or five digits long. She knew how to analyze a character. She knew how to use bits and pieces of information to make educated guesses about their actions and feelings. She also had an advantage where Jean Luc was concerned. Because the man was stupid-famous and though he was retired now, for a long time, every aspect of his life had been under the microscope for the entire world to see.

It was how she knew, for example, that he’d grown up in Southern Florida with his brother and his Uncle. Ah. There it was. The pieces fell into place. He’d grown up in Southern Florida with his brother and his Uncle who had both passed away. Returning there now would remind him of good memories that were painful in their absence. She pursed her lips and studied his profile for a second.

As one of eleven children, Celia simply couldn’t conceive what it would be like to be alone in the world. For as famous and beloved as Jean Luc was, he didn’t have family.

“What?” he asked, glancing over and catching her by surprise with those light brown eyes of his.

She blushed and scrambled for something to say. She couldn’t exactly say ‘I was thinking about how sad it is that your whole family is dead’. “Ah, I was just wondering what it’s like to be a bear shifter.”

Jean Luc grunted. After half a lifetime in the spotlight, he’d grown considerably fatigued of the press always asking him questions about this and that. Especially considering that he wasn’t the most articulate guy on Earth. He wasn’t witty, he couldn’t think fast on his feet. After games on the field or in the requisite press conferences, Jean Luc could always feel the reporters willfully restraining their eye rolls at his one-word answers.

Hugo used to make so much fun of him for his ‘caveman impression’ whenever he got put on the spot to answer questions. Jean Luc had spent years wishing that he could have his charismatic, funny, charming brother do all the press obligations for him. Everyone would have been happier. Jean Luc could have been out of the spotlight and Hugo could have stepped into it. The press would have gotten the media darling they’d obviously wanted and Jean Luc could have stuck to the athletics, the way he wanted. But that wasn’t the way the world worked. And now, Hugo was gone, so dreaming about that was even more useless.

Celia looked at him expectantly, waiting. Because, of course, asking questions and answering them was a normal part of the human experience. And of course she would be curious about this crazy shit. He sighed. Besides, they were the only two people awake and they were trapped in a car together for hours. hHe couldn’t exactly ignore her questions.

“Well,” he half grunted, “I guess it’s still a pretty big surprise. None of us were expecting Arturo to turn us into bear shifters.”

As long as he lived, Jean Luc would never forget the soul-slicing pain of Arturo’s blue light as it had arrowed through his heart. He, just like Jack and Tre, had passed out cold. And when he’d woken up, he’d known something was different. As a former professional athlete, he was extremely in tune with his body. He knew that something was healing and thrumming and growing within him. When Martine had told them all that the new, unexplainable thing inside the men was, in fact, the ability to shift into a grizzly bear, Jean Luc had been more than a little surprised.

“I mean,” he continued, “I didn’t really know that being an animal shifter was an option,  you know?”

Celia laughed. It was a bright, light noise. Unfettered and un-self-conscious. It surprised him a little. He would have expected a more guarded sound from her. She usually seemed to keep herself half hidden, like she was peeking out from around the edge of a curtain. Not that Jean Luc was a great reader of people or anything. It was just that he happened to have considerable practice keeping parts of himself hidden from public consumption. He’d recognized the trait in Celia almost immediately.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “I didn’t really believe it until you three went all Smokey the Bear on us the other night.”

She was referring to their very first shift. It had happened involuntarily, on the New Moon. Martine insisted that soon they’d be able to control their shifts, do it when and where they wanted, but they hadn’t been able to control it that night. “Yeah.”

“What did it feel like?”

He considered for a second, switching lanes to pass a slowpoke in a Lincoln Continental. It was a true sign that they’d passed the state line into Florida. Pretty soon every other car would be inhabited by a squinting old fogey leaning over the wheel and blasting AM radio or Michael Buble. Home sweet home.

“How’d it feel? Ah… achey. And sorta good. Like a controlled explosion. Tingly and big. Your muscles get all hot and stretched and… yeah.” Heat crept up Jean Luc’s neck and he readjusted his grip on the wheel as he realized that he might as well be describing an orgasm to Celia. He figured a woman as good-looking as she was most likely didn’t need any lessons on that. He cleared his throat. “You really should eat something.”

She blinked at him, surprised by his non-sequitur. “Huh?”             

He glanced over at her and saw that those big, dark eyes of hers were looking even bigger and darker than normal. Was it because of his sexy bear shifting description? Christ. “Celia, you’re the size of a fourth-grader. You don’t eat something for two days in a row, you’re gonna blow away in the wind.”

He could feel the positively affronted air breezing off of her as she leaned away from him like he’d slapped her. He knew that talking about a woman’s size was always tricky business, but he didn’t think he’d said something offensive.

“What?” he asked, looking between her open, offended mouth and the long stretch of highway in front of them.

“I am not the size of a fourth-grader.”

He looked her up and down real quick, taking care not to let his eyes get stuck anyplace in particular. “You’re the size of me in fourth grade. What are you, five two? A buck twenty five?”

He was right about the height and not even close about the weight. Half of her was thrilled that he thought she was twenty pounds lighter than she was and the other half of her was irritated beyond all belief that he was classifying her as the size of a preteen. She might be small, but she was all woman. He just looked so neutral and calm over there, maybe she wanted to shock him a little bit. “See, Jean Luc, there’s these things called T and A? Yeah, I happen to have those. Tends to add a little poundage to a woman’s frame.”

She could have sworn that his cheeks got a little redder but that couldn’t possibly be right. The man was a professional athlete, he’d been linked to supermodels and famous actresses before. There was no way he was blushing because she’d brought up her curves.

“Yeah,” he grumbled under his breath. “I’ve noticed.”

He noticed? Was he talking about her T and A, or the extra poundage? Celia turned to face front, watching the kudzu-covered trees give way momentarily to a long, black water canal that lined the road. She shifted, realizing that she was probably just as embarrassed as he was. How the hell had they gotten here?

He cleared his throat again and scritch-scratched a palm over the back of his buzzed head. “I still think you should eat something if you can. It’s not good to go that long without food.”

She shrugged, too befuddled and nervous to argue. How did their conversations always inevitably veer off track? She could safely chit-chat with Tre or Jack or Thea or any of them for hours, and she had, over the last few weeks. There’d been so much time to kill that sometimes shooting the shit was the only thing they could think to do. But with Jean Luc, things always ended up awkward or embarrassing or tense with some emotion she couldn’t identify. Was it him or her that was making it that way? Or was it the combination of the two of them? It was just her luck that the hottest man she’d ever met would inspire her to be about as interesting and sexy as her Aunt Mary. Grand.

When she didn’t argue any further, Jean Luc leaned across the console and opened the glove compartment. She held her breath when his heat crowded her space, when the prickle of his short hair brushed her chin. He leaned back and she saw that there was an assortment of food in there.

“Your secret stash?” she asked him, picking out an apple and a little travel-sized container of peanut butter.

“I share.” He cleared his throat and blushed. “I can share. Didn’t mean to go caveman on you.”

Celia laughed, but Jean Luc didn’t. He just looked sad, and lost in thought. She sighed and munched on the apple, watching the highway zip past them.

 

***

 

It was 8 pm by the time they finally pulled in to Jean Luc’s childhood driveway. They were out on the outskirts of Homestead, Florida, right up along the edge of the Everglades.

“Huh,” Celia said in the front seat as they bumped along the dirt road leading up to the house. “Not what I was expecting.”

Jean Luc looked over at her, grateful for the excuse to talk and get his mind off the fact that he was returning to his childhood home for the first time since Hugo had died. Every familiar palm tree leaned in on him, the gnarled metal fence half swallowed by foliage, the rusted tractor they’d used to pretend was a sleeping dinosaur. All of it tightened his throat with memories, with emotion. “What were you expecting?”

“I’m not sure. Rainforest? Swamps? But this looks like a palm tree farm.”

The group, sensing they were close to their destination, started to rustle themselves awake in the back.

“Yeah, this is the edge of the Everglades. You get further in and you see all that classic-looking stuff. The mossy swamps and the tall grass and the caves of trees and stuff like that.”

“The gators?”

He couldn’t help but smile at the tremor in her slight Brooklyn accent. She was definitely a city girl. “Yeah. The gators. Though those are everywhere. Snakes too.”

She lifted her feet up from the floor of the van and rested her heels on the edge of her seat. “Okay.”

He smiled further. “I won’t let anything getcha.”

She nodded solemnly, in a way that kind of touched him. “Okay.”

He looked forward, swinging around a bend in the road and there it was. His house. His Uncle’s house, really. A sprawling one-story with more rooms than their small family had ever needed. It was a faded butter yellow on the outside, clashing with the terra cotta roof. The lawn foliage was creeping toward the house, unkempt. Though the storm shutters had been opened, the windows were dark and empty. The place looked like shit. He thought of Celia’s family’s lake house where they’d all stayed in Northern Michigan and felt a sudden bolt of shame. Not because her house was nicer than his, but because hers was obviously well cared for. Loved. This house looked exactly like what it was. Abandoned.

Sure, he’d paid a caretaker to make sure that it didn’t get consumed by the Everglades. And when he’d realized that the maps were leading them here, he’d called in a maid service to make sure the house was livable. But this place didn’t look like a home. It didn’t have any of the charm it used to have when he’d been growing up there.

Jean Luc pulled up in front of the house and immediately climbed out of the car, lost in thought. One hand on the back of his head, one hand on his muscular hip, he just looked at the ramshackle house for a while. He could hear his comrades slamming the car doors and talking to one another, but he didn’t turn until he heard the wind playing in the chimes that still hung from the front porch. Well, chimes was a generous term. They were made from the bones of animals and they clacked more than they chimed. Some old voodoo thing his Uncle had been into. Just looking at them made Jean Luc want to laugh and cry at the same time.

A rough hand clapped over his shoulder and Jean Luc didn’t need to turn to know that Jack and Tre were standing at his back. He knew they could sense the river of nostalgic grief that was racing through him.

“Middle of nowhere, huh?” Tre said at his side, turning a circle. He wasn’t wrong. There wasn’t another house as far as the eye could see, and out here, the eye could see far. There were long, flat stretches of dirt-packed farmland to the left and scrubby foliage and twerpy-looking palm trees abutting the house on the other side.

“Yeah. Uncle Claude liked it that way. Away from civilization.” He cleared his throat when some feeling scratched its way up. “Ah, there’s a canal out back. Where he parked his airboat. Leads to the swamp.”

“He was a tour guide?”

Jean Luc nodded. “Yeah. And he was always renting out our extra rooms to tourists or passers-through. Boarding-house style. That was his hustle. Come see the Everglades through the eyes of a Frenchman. Well. French Canadian.”

Jean Luc cleared his throat one more time and strode up to the front porch. He dialed a code into a rusty padlock and out popped a house key. Quickly deciding to forgo any ceremony, he just unlocked that familiar front door and pushed inside.

He was instantly relieved to see that the house looked considerably better on the inside than it did on the outside. It was dim and hot and muggy inside, but he could tell that the maid service had really been worth the mint he’d spent on them. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere and he could smell the lemon pledge on the air.

After Claude had passed away, he and Hugo had returned home to pack up and throw out most of his old knick-knacks, of which there had been a stunning amount. If Jean Luc never saw another gator claw again in his life it would be way too soon. They’d had it in their minds that they might rent out the house, so they’d left it furnished, but the walls and side tables were bare. It left Jean Luc with the strange feeling that he’d returned home to find it had been robbed. Even though he and his brother were the ones who’d done the robbing.

Jean Luc took a deep breath and started flicking on lights as he walked over to the central air panel and prayed like hell that it was working. He let out a breath of relief when the thing hummed on and cool air almost immediately puffed up from the grates in the floor.

He turned to see that the group had followed him in. Most of them were looking around in curiosity, except for Celia, who was watching him quietly with those big, dark eyes. She looked away with a little jump when he made eye contact with her.

His hands in fists on his hips, Jean Luc figured he should probably take the lead here. “Alright. There should be enough bedrooms for everybody. Just not, ah, not the farthest one down this hall, please.” He nodded with his head and tried valiantly not to picture the bedroom he’d shared with Hugo for his entire childhood. It was the one room they hadn’t been able to face stripping down and it remained largely the same. The posters on the walls, the two beds jammed into far corners from each other. There were six other bedrooms in the place, they definitely could have split up. But they just never had. They’d been best friends, and had always enjoyed one another’s company.

Yeah. That door needed to stay locked.

He strode from the front parlor through to the kitchen. “I arranged for the kitchen to be stocked and… yeah.” He opened the fridge and was relieved to find it chock full. “We should be good for at least a couple days. This way.”

He led the group through the kitchen and through the back dining room. They’d almost never used this room except to walk through to the screened-in porch, where they’d spent most of their time. Even when it was balls-hot, with the two fans and the shade, it had been pretty nice out there. Plus, it overlooked their pool and the canal.

“Feel free to hang out back here.” He was glad to see that the pool was in good shape, cleaned and filled, the way he’d paid for. But he was bummed that the pool deck was cracked and pushed up with weeds. Ah well. What had he been expecting? He hadn’t been here in years. “Pool’s in good shape. Just check for gators and snakes before you get in.”

Half the group nodded and the other half looked at him with wide eyes, Celia included. She gulped and Jean Luc had the urge to laugh. It surprised him.

“The rest of the house is all yours. There’s a TV room that way, there should still be DVDs and video games and stuff. Ah, let’s see. You’re gonna have to share bathrooms. And there’s a laundry room around the corner from the kitchen. Other than that, yeah, my house is your house.”

The group split up, wandering away to choose rooms and Jean Luc let out a long, grateful breath. The worst was over. He’d come face to face with his childhood home and held it together while giving a group of people a tour of it. Now that it was over, he could finally admit to himself that he’d been tense as a spool of wire for the last 500 miles. It was over. He hadn’t broken down and cried like a baby in front of everyone. And now all there was to do was relax. Right.

Really, all there was to do was swim 100 laps in the pool, lift weights in the weight room for an hour, and hope like hell he could pass out even with all these memories whispering in his ear.

“You alright?” Jack asked, making Jean Luc turn from the view of the pool.

“Probably no point in lying is there?”

“Son, you been hustling as long as I have, you’ll learn that there’s always a point in lying,” Jack drawled, his arms crossed and an easy grin on that lined face of his. “But, nawl. If you lie, that’s your business, but you’re not gonna fool me, or Tre.”

No point in lying to the people he was psychically connected to.

Jean Luc shrugged. “Haven’t been back here in a while.”

“Since your brother died.”

Jean Luc straightened up tight, like somebody had zipped him up from head to toe. He hadn’t outright talked about Hugo to anybody in the group. He figured they knew, considering it had been front page news for a long time. The car accident that had ended the NFL’s most talented quarterback’s career and ended his brother’s life. Jean Luc might have turned and walked away from the conversation if it had been anyone but Jack. But the fact was, he could feel Jack’s feelings. He knew that the guy was concerned, kind, sweet. There was nothing morbidly curious or salacious in his line of questioning. It was that and that alone that had Jean Luc talking.

“Yeah. Last time I was here, we were packing up the house after my uncle died. Hugo intended to come down here and pick up where Claude left off with the tour guide business. But he had ends to tie up in New York before he did and then a few months later the accident happened.”

“Couple years ago now?”

“Yeah.”

“Bet it feels like a long time and a short time all at once, yeah?”

Jean Luc cleared his throat and peered at his green-eyed friend. That was exactly what it felt like. “Yeah.”

Jack clapped a hand on Jean Luc’s shoulder before going whole hog and dragging him in for a brief, back-slapping hug. “You need anything…”
“Yeah. Yup. Sure. I’ll let you know.” Both men knew that if Jean Luc needed anything, there was no way in hell he was going to someone else to help him. He just wasn’t that kind of person. Even if he would have been better off if he was.

Jack figured that a little time on his own was in order, so he left Jean Luc in the kitchen and nearly ran over Celia, hovering in the back hall that led to the bedrooms. “Whoa!”

“Sorry! Sorry. I wasn’t meaning to creep around. I was just…”

“Eavesdropping?” Jack asked, with his eyebrows raised and an amused smile on his face.

She flushed and straightened the cute little headband she wore that made her look like Rosie the Riveter. Well, Rosie the Riveter with tattoos and a nose piercing. “Is he alright?”

Jack noticed that she hadn’t even tried to deny the fact that she’d been eavesdropping, which he respected. He also noticed that she was blushing even harder as the moments ticked on. She looked anxiously over Jack’s shoulder to the dark room where Jean Luc was. Huh. Interesting.

“He’s okay. Little torn up. I’m sure you can figure out why.”

“Yeah,” she said softly, her eyes dropping down.

Jack cocked his head to one side. “He could probably do with a little cheering up.” He paused pointedly. “If you were up for it.”

Celia merely looked confused. “I’m definitely not the person to cheer him up. Trust me. I can’t get through two sentences with the guy before saying something that makes me want the earth to swallow me whole.”

Jack grinned at her. “Maybe you wouldn’t have to talk?”

Understanding lit her eyes. There it was. Now she got what he was saying. Her cheeks flamed and about ten thousand emotions seemed to flit across her face all at once.

“Look,” Jack raised his hands. “Just a gentle suggestion. Obviously, none of my business either way.”

He leaned down and kissed her cheek before moving past her down the dark hall. He went to the room at the end where his woman was waiting for him. For a moment, Jack lingered at the door, looking back the way he came, wondering if maybe he’d stuck his foot in something he’d have been better off sidestepping. Then he shrugged, figured either way, what was the harm? A little heat did the body good. He should know.