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

she finds him as she expects, but he’s...different. Not whole. He hasn’t healed, and she wonders distantly if he won’t.

Chase is strange and she doesn’t like him, but she knows that Tyler does, and she does want to keep her brother happy. Still, his scent has changed.

She nudges him with one foot and he rolls his head back, bares his throat and stares up at her with shining white eyes that make her jerk away.

White.

Chase closes his eyes, and her heart pounds in her chest, her fingers shaking as she pets a hand through her hair.

“You’re mine now, puppy,” she whispers.

Chase flares to life, and she can feel something in her rip as he reacts.

He doesn’t howl—he screams, high and animal and furious. She wants to snarl in answer, wants to howl defiance, but there’s a shocking emptiness in her that makes her stumble.

“What did you do?” she breathes.

Chase looks back at her, half shifted with sharp teeth and a feral smile, eyes shining. His tattoos gleam silver and black, and his fur—his fur looks different. Strange.

She whispers again, desperate, “What did you do?”

“I told you when I was seventeen,” Chase says, “You may be the Reid Alpha, but you aren’t mine.” She snarls and he grins, delighted. “They’re coming. Can you feel them? They’re coming. Lucas is going to kill you.”

Chelsea blinks. “Who?”

He stares, startled, then he laughs, a high barking thing that makes her skin crawl. She understands then that yawning emptiness, sudden and sick, and she does the last thing she can think to do—

She runs.

~*~

They’re turning on 8th Street, heading toward the Iron Works, when Tyler doubles over suddenly, then straighten as Lucas slams on the breaks. They spill out of the car, half shifted and eyes gleaming, and Tyler turns.

The noise—not a howl, but a call—comes again from the east, and Tyler blurts, “The train!”

Lucas blinks, but Tyler is already running, chasing that eerie call and the bond that is yanking him onwards.

~*~

The magic settles with Chelsea’s absence, licks of heat moving along his broken bones and the worst of his injuries, putting him back together. It feels almost maternal, a low humming displeasure that he was hurt. The wild creature circles that place in his chest it’s claimed as its own and curls up to sleep, and the magic huffs.

If a power source could be grumpy, Chase thinks his is.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, flexing his human fingers and stretching as much as he can. The change didn’t come with werewolf strength or healing—even his magic is faltering, and he thinks he’ll be bruised and healing for a few weeks.

He wonders if that’s because of the magic that claimed him first, or because he isn’t a werewolf. He has no idea what’s living under his skin, but he knows what it isn’t.

The runes on his arm—Tyler’s and Lucas’s—flare briefly as the magic slips away, settling over the sleeping creature with a quiet glow.

Then they burst into the warehouse, half-shifted and frantic, and Chase bursts into tears.

~*~

Tyler skids to a halt as he catches sight of Chase. He’s wrapped in chains and duct tape and wires, burns covering his naked body and half healing scratches on his face, messy tears sliding down his face. His torso is one continuous bruise and his eye won’t focus, something that’s worrisome.

There are long flat burns on his legs that make Tyler’s hands shake and his claws extend and—

There is a bite, on his side, fresh, bleeding, and terrifying.

His sister’s scent is thick and heavy in the room, touching everything, a sinister layer under the raw magic, blood, and pain.

“Chase,” he chokes out, and Lucas is shaking in fear and fury.

Chase shivers and twitches toward him, and something else shivers with him. It feels like something very young and impossibly ancient is peering at him through those familiar honeyed whiskey eyes.

“Oh, pup,” Lucas breathes.

Chase grins through split bloody lips and tear-stained cheeks. “What—I’m not a ‘wolf,” he says.

Lucas shakes his head.

“Sometimes the shift—-doesn’t take like it should,” Tyler murmurs, “And you’ve never been a wolf.”

“I’d make a fucking awesome wolf,” Chase says, indignant—how can he be this bloody and beaten and still be indignant? Tyler huffs and rips the arms of the chair off, freeing Chase and scooping the boy up before he can crumple, although he doesn’t quite manage to bite back the cry of pain.

“You’ve never been a wolf,” Lucas says, “In our dreams, you’ve never been a wolf.”

Chase blinks. “I thought I was human.”

“No.” Tyler shakes his head, walking out of the warehouse. “You—you’re a fox, in the dreams. A corsac fox.”

Chase jerks. “I’m a fucking werefox?”

“Don’t be silly,” Lucas says dismissively, despite the relief and worry rolling off of him. He opens the truck door to let Tyler lay Chase in the backseat. “You’re a kitsune.”

Chapter 29

They take him home.

Lucas calls John, warns him that Chase is hurt, that he’s different, and they take him home. It smells different, and he whines, burying his face in Tyler’s chest as the older man carries him inside.

“Why aren’t I healing?” he asks, moaning as his foot jars against the door. “That’s a goddamn perk of being furry. Why don’t I get the perk?”

“I told you, pup—kitsune,” Lucas says.

Chase snarls, a mouthful of teeth and a vulpine note to the noise, and it startles all three of them still.

“Shit,” Chase slurs around sharp little teeth, and Tyler has the irrational and inappropriate thought that he wants to feel those teeth at his throat while he’s buried in Chase.

Chase sneezes and wrinkles his nose. “What—that smell, what is that?”

“Yes, brother, do tell. What is that smell?”

Tyler flushes and carefully lowers Chase onto their bed, then turns to glare at Lucas.

“What the hell is going on?”

~*~

The problem wasn’t his magic, and it wasn’t the Bite. Those were known entities—for a shaman, a Bite turns or kills them by burning them out under the Bite. But Chase wasn’t just a human, and he didn’t just have normal magic.

He was the Standing Stones’