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

“You’ll wake him,” Lucas says simply, and the other man goes still. “Go and look. Quietly. He’s exhausted.”

“But he’s ok?”

Lucas stirs the soup, a savory potato chowder Chase had frozen last week, and considers how to answer this. The frustrating, frightening truth is that he doesn’t know. He has no idea how the Standing Stones’ power affected him. “He’s alive and whole. The rest is just window dressing. The rest we can fix with time and care.”

John falls into the chair at the table. Lucas eyes him for a moment, then pours a tumbler of whiskey and pushes it at him.

“I hate this,” he says hoarsely. “I know I can’t keep him out of it—Chase has been knee deep in the supernatural since he hit puberty—but I hate it when he ends up hurt.”

“Believe it or not,” Lucas says softly, “I do, too. I would remove him from this world completely to keep him from it, if I could.”

“Even though—”

Lucas looks at him. “Even though.”

~*~

It takes time.

For weeks, Chase is too tired to even spend much time out of bed. He sleeps and spends hours complaining about the fact that he’s stuck in bed.

Lucas and Tyler take the time to lavish him with attention, almost shameless in it. He explains to his professors his medical leave of absence, and after two weeks of sleeping and watching trashy TV with Lucas, he’s finally allowed to start classwork again, and that helps immensely.

But it takes time for him to not be exhausted by walking downstairs, for the burns of his tattoos to heal, for him to stop shaking when he tries to cook.

It takes time for him to have the strength to walk from his father’s house to the pack den.

“I hate this,” he mutters, when John brings him water and painkillers for his sore muscles.

“I know,” John answers easily.

“It’s ridiculous,” he grumbles, when Lucas steers him to a chair and finishes making dinner.

“Of course it is, pup.”

“I don’t want to be a burden,” he whispers into Tyler’s throat, when he’s almost crying in bed.

“Never. You could never be,” Tyler vows, pressing a kiss to his hair.

~*~

The first time he finishes his dinner without complaining or coaxing, the first time he makes it all the way through his slow jog through the forest, the first time he puts Tyler on his back, he grins, wild and bright, and thinks it’s going to be ok.

~*~

“I heard a rumor,” Aurora says, her voice honey sweet in his ear.

“Rumors are such silly things, darling girl,” Lucas says. She’s been on the phone for an hour, her voice dipping lower and huskier, softened with sweetness, and he’s half hard just listening to her.

He doesn’t know when he became the person Aurora called—he thinks maybe after he sent her a very special obit—but he can’t say he minds.

“It’s about a tiny pack in northern California. A pack that destroyed a united pack, a pack whose shaman is the strongest druid alive. A pack whose Left Hand is bloodless and terrifying.”

Lucas smiles and reaches for himself, lets her voice wrap around him like a caress.

“Sweet girl. Don’t you know better than to listen to rumors?”

~*~

Lucas gets restless. Sometimes Chase will look at him and see the rage in his eyes, and when he does, he nudges travel plans at the other man.

He never asks, and Lucas never says, but more than once, someone will go missing while Lucas is traveling, and always, Chase can look at it and see someone responsible for the accident—one of the many Drake cousins, one of the pretty boys Mia used.

He doesn’t let himself think about why Lucas is killing them and how it will lead, inevitably, to Mia Drake. He doesn’t let himself think about how that will change the balance in Harrisburg with the Drakes. He only lets himself think about the relaxed peace in Lucas’s eyes when he comes home with blood on his hands.

Chase knows he’s morally grey, knows that he isn’t a good person, but he doesn’t care. He thinks that if this is what buys Lucas’s happiness and peace of mind—the world is better without murderers anyway.

~*~

After two months, Tyler and Lucas have both relented enough to leave Chase alone sometimes, trusting that he won’t collapse while they’re working. Still, occasionally they’ll pop back in, surprise him by checking on him during the day. It’s as endearing as it is infuriating.

He’s reading his psychology textbook, making notes while Aurora studies by Skype, when the door opens, and he grins, looking up.

He expects Tyler. He’s startled when he sees a woman—tall, willowy with dark hair, a stern face, and Tyler’s eyebrows. He feels the air in the room still as she looks at him, and he’s torn between fear and rage, that she is here.

“So I guess you’re Chase,” she says.

“I think,” Chase says cheerfully, clearly, so Aurora can’t miss it, “that makes you Chelsea.”

Chapter 20

She studies him for a long moment, not moving, and Chase forces himself to remain still and relaxed.

She isn’t what he expected. She’s pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way, not the model good looks of her brother or Lucas. She’s fidgety and clearly ill at ease—probably from being in a den that doesn’t have her scent.

Chase doesn’t do anything to soothe that unease. She waltzed into his den, unannounced and uninvited. Let her be uneasy.

“I must admit, I expected someone a little...older,” she says.

He shrugs. “Being older doesn’t mean shit. If it did, Harper’s protection charms would have held and the Drake coven wouldn’t have been able to kill your family.”

She flinches at that, her gaze flaring red, interestingly enough.

Her control is almost nonexistent.

He wonders if it’s because she’s so far from her adopted Pack, or if it’s because she’s been so far from her Pack.

“That wasn’t Harper’s fault,” Chelsea says evenly.

Chase blinks. “It was Mia Drake’s fault,” Chase says slowly, “but a shaman’s job is to make sure that things like this don’t happen, to protect the Pack. So it wasn’t