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

games, listening to him ramble about buying Brielle a ring, and wonders if he should be jealous. Tyler kisses him in the mornings and fucks him through the night, but there’s no talk of the future, no real talk of what the hell they’re doing—something he’s only vaguely concerned about.

Aurora snorts her opinion of that and turns back to her endless supply of summer research.

On the longest day of the year, as he has for the last two years, Chase stands before the Standing Stones and renews his bindings, magic rippling through the air and making his tattoos burn. Tyler and Lucas press into Aurora’s legs, giant wolves that almost dwarf her, and they watch, eyes glowing, as Chase drags all that power into himself.

The summer is quiet, made up of long nights together, full moons and lucid dreams, and endless days at the bookstore, Tyler arriving to pick him up with a shy pleased smile.

It’s sprinkled through with days with his dad, and one weekend in July that he and Tyler go to Washington with John to visit Grammy.

It’s perfect, Chase’s magic feeling quietly peaceful under his skin, and he wonders when the hell the other shoe is gonna drop.

~*~

“I don't want you to leave,” Chase mumbles, and Aurora nods. It's not the first time he's said it.

“It's just a few months,” she soothes.

“He's better when you're here,” Chase says.

They don't talk about Lucas’s tendency to violence and cruelty—it's like Tyler's anti-social isolation sometimes, and Chase’s insomnia. It’s there, and a problem, and they live around it.

“I know,” she sighs.

Chase huffs into her hair, hating everything that takes his Pack away.

“He'll stop killing after Mia,” she says, and Chase wonders if it's her power or simple hope that makes her voice ring with conviction.

Chase wishes he felt the same.

~*~

Lucas takes Aurora to the airport. Chase doesn’t complain, just kisses her cheek and watches as Tyler hugs her, then huddles in his embrace as Lucas drives them away. He’s quiet and Aurora is bent over her phone, ignoring him completely, until—

“You’ll visit me. When Chase lets you off the leash, you’ll visit me.”

When you have killed and your hands run red with blood. Come to me.

Lucas stares at her, unblinking. “Of course.”

She smiles and kisses him, a brief teasing thing, before she slips out of the car and is gone.

~*~

In September, they get hit with a heat wave so intense Chase whines for days and lays naked in Tyler’s bed, slurping popsicles and being generally useless. Tyler buys a fan and puts it on the bedside table, then blows him with a quiet intensity that makes Chase shiver and shudder and babble, his hands in Tyler’s hair and his eyes squeezed shut in bliss.

A water snake moves into the lake and drowns two swimmers before Lucas puts it down, Chase’s wards burning through him and the dragon until he thinks his blood will boil.

“Aren’t your wards supposed to discourage this kind of thing?” Lucas grumps, carrying the still-steaming mage through the forest.

Chase watches the trees and stars wheeling overhead. “It was so cold,” he mumbles.

Lucas snarls. “Tyler is going to kill me,” he bitches, hitching the boy higher in his arms as Chase giggles, high and drunk on his power.

~*~

He doesn’t move out of his father’s house, not really, but as he crawls out of Tyler’s bed for the fourth morning in a row, he realizes he isn’t living there, either. It shakes him more than he’d like, so he kisses Tyler goodbye absently and drives to the station to talk to his dad.

“I don’t want to move out,” he blurts as soon as he shoves open the office door. John blinks at him, owlish and guilty over the chocolate donut in his hand, and Chase glares, pointing at him.

John takes a defiant bite and chews as he says, “Kid, you’ve been splitting residence since you were in high school. Now that you and Reid are together, it’s not really surprising. He built the house for you.”

“He built it for his Pack,” Chase says absently, reaching over and stealing the donut.

“And you are his Pack,” John says patiently, like this should be obvious.

It probably should be.

Chase slumps into his seat. “But I miss you,” he says plaintively.

John’s face softens. “Oh, kid. I’m not going anywhere. Neither are you. Our house will always be your home, even when you do move out.”

Chase nods and swallows hard. “Can—can we do dinner though? Just us, sometime this week?”

John grins. “As long as you let me eat real food.”

Chase snorts and takes a bite of the donut still in his hand. “Not a chance in hell, old man.”

~*~

He sits against the Standing Stones and listens to the howls in the forest, the eerie scream that reaches for the treetops. He feels the press of the magic against his skin, the Stones thrumming against and in him, and it feels so much like his, like home.

It’s coming, they whisper, and he listens, one ear trained on the magic, the other listening as his wolves run closer. It’s coming.

He presses closer into the Stones. What? What’s coming?

The Stones in his dream stretch high above him, scraping a moon-dark sky, spreading impossibly tall, sturdy, alive, and powerful.

Danger, they whisper, with magic against his skin, rustles in the leaves, shouts on the wind.

He shivers and listens as the Stones scream in warning.

~*~

“I got offered a job,” Tyler says one night while Chase is glaring at a Stats test and Lucas is heating soup on the stove.

“You have a job,” Lucas says sassily.

Tyler rolls his eyes and takes Chase his dinner. “I got offered a project.”

Chase hums absently and kisses his cheek, then bites into his sandwich.

“It’s in Vancouver.”

Chase stills, eyes wide, the sandwich dangling from his hand and dripping tomato soup on his book.

Tyler built a reputation around himself for designing and building beautiful houses that work with the nature around them, blending seamlessly with the world, making them as green and environmentally friendly as possible, but he’s