Slow Shift by Nazarea Andrews (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📗

Chase, checking on where his brother is and how Chase is. He’s pleased to find Lucas on an ambling walk about a mile away and Chase relaxed and content as he chops chicken for their dinner.

“How was training?” he asks, pulling out a bottle of water, and Chase hums a little, a thoughtful noise that’s not quite an answer but isn’t one either.

He pushes the chicken aside and says, “Harper thinks he’ll be done training me by the end of the summer. Said there’s some druids I could train with if I wanted.”

Tyler freezes. “You’re leaving?”

Chase glances at him, a sly smile on his lips as he pauses in chopping tomatoes. “Why? Would you miss me, big bad?”

Tyler flushes and something drifts across Chase's face, and then—

The kiss is light, soft and slow.

It’s a sure, confident press of lips that are a little bit wet and so plush he almost groans, a barely open mouth that’s tantalizing as Chase kisses him, pressing close like a promise. His hands grip Chase’s hips, and he does groan when Chase nips at his lower lips with blunt teeth, then licks over the sting.

And he’s pulling away, pulling out of Tyler’s arms, and it’s—he whines and Chase smiles at him, a small thing that’s honest and sweet and his. He darts in for one more quick kiss, lighting fast and a brush of tongue that makes Tyler’s claws dig into his hips.

Then he twists away and finishes slicing the tomatoes, saying, “Grab the sauce for me, would you? Lucas! Dinner!”

And Tyler is left holding a homemade cilantro-lime dressing, his lips tingling, listening to his brother sweep into the house, not sure what the hell just happened or what he’s supposed to do next.

Chapter 13

For most of his life, when things went wrong, he ran.

He ran after he failed Chemistry, after his first girlfriend broke up with him, and after the accident. He ran when his mom got angry with him, when he fought with Chelsea, and when he argued with Lucas.

Some of it was being a wolf, the urge to run, to escape, to hide. Part of it is that he just can’t fucking deal and needs to escape.

And this time, he wants to.

He wants to run until the world makes sense and Chase isn’t laughing at Lucas over a fucking cilantro lime salad that still can’t drown out the taste of the boy on his lips.

He wants to run until he knows what the fuck he’s supposed to do now.

He doesn’t, though. He can feel the anxiety thrumming through Chase, under the laughter and the quiet conversation with Lucas. So he shoves it down, the unease, the desire to run, and sits at the table, quietly eating his own salad and letting conversation with his pack swirl around him.

~*~

He doesn’t run, not exactly, but—

He pulls away.

Chase knows what he’s doing, even expected it when he leaned across the small distance and kissed Tyler.

He knew it would spook him.

He changed what they knew and what they’d been for years, and now he has to deal with that.

So he waits in the same place he’s always been—next to Lucas, in the house they built, in the heart of Tyler’s Pack.

~*~

He spends a lot of time alone.

It isn’t fair, dragging Lucas away from Chase because he suddenly doesn’t know how he fits, and he would never send Chase away, push him from the house. It’s his home as much as it is Tyler’s and Lucas’s.

So he goes.

He goes into the woods and runs, sometimes shifted and sometimes human. He aches for the moon to rise, full and round and soothing to the chaos in his blood.

He wants the simplicity of the wolf pacing in his head, the simplicity of Pack and mate and mine.

Simplicity has never been Chase, never been the boy ten years younger than him and too damn smart for his own good.

So he goes.

He goes to the woods and when Chase’s heartbeat chases him there, he goes to town and broods in corners of bookstores and libraries and coffee shops, easily found if one were to look.

Aurora eyes him a few times, her gaze sharp and knowing as she texts and sips her coffee, but she doesn’t approach and Chase doesn’t appear. He doesn’t actually know what to make of that, so he does what he does best and ignores it completely.

John appears once, in the bakery. Tyler eyes the cupcake in his hand and John eyes Tyler. Then he says, “We never saw each other.”

Tyler nods sharply and the chief vanishes, a smug edge to his scent.

Chase must have restricted his diet again. It’s easy to gauge Chase’s stress level by his father’s diet and Lucas’s exercise regime.

The thought sends a pang of longing through him, and he huffs into his pie, wishing like hell he were home.

~*~

Lucas is the one who finally comes to him, his eyes snapping with anger, a hint of glow to them that sets Tyler’s own temper on edge. He doesn’t want to hear this, and he knows it. So he glares down at the dirt and Lucas stands close enough that he can feel the heat of his skin, and he checks the urge to press close.

“You’re being stupid and stubborn,” he says, predictably blunt.

“He kissed me,” Tyler says, nearly spits the words out.

Lucas sounds unimpressed. “Does that bother you because you don’t want him to, or because you do want him to?”

Tyler makes a noise, low and helpless, almost angry.

Lucas sighs. “He needs you, Tyler. Don’t do this.”

He looks away and doesn’t say what’s burning on his tongue—that he needs Chase too, that he doesn’t know how to be what he needs, what he wants. That he doesn’t know what to do.

~*~

He missed years.

It’s never more evident than when he’s standing in front of his emotionally stunted brother and trying to talk him through a love-life crisis.

Sometimes Lucas wonders how the hell he got to this point, the weakest link in an alpha-less pack, the