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

watches Tyler’s eyes gleam and his tattoos heat against his skin—he wonders.

Of course he does. It was a choice he didn’t even realize he was making, and it changed his life. Naturally, he wonders.

But he never regrets it.

~*~

“I can’t teach you anything else,” Harper says, a few weeks before his semester ends.

“I’m not done learning,” Chase huffs. He knew this was coming, but he’s still frustrated to find it here, staring him in the face and forcing him to make a decision.

“Have you reconsidered going to the Druids?”

“I’m not leaving Harrisburg,” he says, the same thing he’s been saying for over a year. He can feel the Standing Stone’s magic itching in his skin, tugging him, whispering stay, stay, stay.

After ten months of living with the Stone circle’s magic just under his skin, he’s mostly used to the pushy demands, so it’s easy to filter it out and focus on Harper’s placid disapproval.

“You can’t learn what you need by staying here.”

He bites at a ragged edge of his thumb and nods. He knows that, too.

~*~

“He wants me to go to the Druids,” Chase says.

Lucas tilts his head, studying the boy resting his head in his lap. “You can, you know.”

Chase rolls his eyes and sits up, and Lucas immediately misses the soothing feel of soft hair in his fingers. “I know I can. I just—I don’t like the idea of leaving you and Tyler, or the land. We’re not—” Complete, he wants to say. “We’re vulnerable,” Chase says instead, “And we don’t know what the Stones will do if I leave.”

“We’ll never know that until you actually go,” Lucas says reasonably.

Chase arches an eyebrow at the other man. “Trying to get rid of me, big bad?”

“Never,” Lucas says lightly, but with an underlying seriousness that makes Chase still. “But we do need to finish your training.” He’s quiet and a smile spreads, slow as syrup, across his lips. “Would you trust me to solve this problem?”

“Can you do it without dropping bodies?” Chase asks, and Lucas smirks, the only acknowledgment to the supernatural threats he’d neutralized that he’s willing to give.

“I believe I can,” he says, pleased with himself, as he settles back against the couch.

~*~

Tyler slips into his bedroom and Chase shuffles over on the bed, tugging his notes closer to give Tyler room to sit next to him.

They’ve done this often enough that it’s second nature to give him space, but Tyler is fidgeting tonight and it’s distracting. He does this occasionally, comes to Chase when he’s a mess of nerves and strung out on the waxing moon. Chase doesn’t think much about it anymore. He doesn’t let himself.

“Want to talk about it?” Chase asks.

Tyler shakes his head. “Lucas left,” he whispers. Chase hums and Tyler curls around him, pressing close in the way he always does when he’s feeling lonely and needy, not sure of his Pack. Chase doesn’t comment on it, just hands him a stack of flashcards.

“Quiz me,” he orders and Tyler huffs, his breath disturbing Chase’s hair before he settles down and flicks through the cards.

“He’ll come back?” Tyler asks, and for maybe the millionth time, Chase wants to skin Chelsea Reid alive—slowly, then give her goddamn fur coat to Tyler as a birthday present.

He breathes out and nods. “He’ll come back. Lucas always comes back to us.”

~*~

He falls asleep in Tyler’s arms, tangled up watching a documentary together, and wakes up in the dark.

Tyler’s arms tighten around him as he shuffles around a bit, and Chase looks up at him. This isn’t unusual, them sleeping together. After the Standing Stones took to pulling at his dreams, it became almost commonplace to find one of his werewolves in his bed, shifted or human. It never means anything. Even when he wants it to, Chase is careful to remember that it doesn’t. Lucas adores him, in a way that he can’t quite define but has never neared sexual, and Tyler—

Tyler doesn’t want him.

It’s been a constant refrain, and despite marking his skin with Tyler’s crest, despite binding himself to the DeWitt pack—he hasn’t forgotten. He knows the score.

But sometimes he wakes up with Tyler watching him, just like he’s watching now, his fingers still sifting through Chase’s hair, his expression open, unguarded, and wanting.

He feels his heart trip, the way it always does when he wakes up to this, to the expression in Tyler’s eyes that makes him hope.

“Tyler?” Chase says, licking his lips.

Bright eyes track the movement, then slowly lift back to meet his own.

“Go to sleep, Chase,” Tyler murmurs, and Chase makes a low noise in his throat.

Tyler’s eyes close, shuttering, and he starts to pull away. Chase whines, gripping him hard to hold him still, to press into his embrace. He whispers, “G’night, Ty.”

There isn’t a response, but as his breathing evens out and he slips into dreams, he thinks he feels the press of lips against his forehead.

~*~

Lucas returns as the sun is setting, two weeks after vanishing without a word. Chase and Tyler are wrestling, a sparring session having devolved into hands batting, scrambling for purchase against each other, and Chase’s high laughter.

“Hello, brother,” Lucas says when Tyler finally catches sight of him, an easy smile on his lips as he watches them fondly.

“You’re back!” Chase chirps from where Tyler has him pinned to the dirt. He rolls his hips to dislodge the werewolf and Tyler scrambles off him, falling back a few steps, flushed and flustered.

“Where’ve you been?” Chase asks, standing and dusting off his hands.

“Get dressed,” Lucas says, instead of answering. “I have a present for you.”

Chase arches an eyebrow but he shrugs and trots inside to change out of his workout gear. Tyler hesitates a moment longer, and Lucas steps close, allowing Tyler to scent mark him.

“Be careful, Tyler. I won’t allow you to hurt him any more than you’d allow anyone else to.”

“Do you think I would?” Tyler asks, plaintive.

“I think you could, even if it was unintentional,” Lucas answers gently.

~*~

Chase always feels like an imposter