From the Shadows (A Shadow Chronicles Novel) (19 page)

Slowly, wondering where my brother and his mate were and why they hadn’t come out to us already, I pushed open the door to the Escalade and climbed out. As I was rounding the front end to stand next to Race, it occurred to me that Mark and Saphrona might well be in the house having sex—a thought that gave me the willies to have even considered. I brightened at the barking of Moe and Cissy, Saphrona’s Chihuahuas, who were standing against the chain-link of their kennel trying desperately to get our attention. With a grin I walked over and knelt to pet the little dogs, who calmed almost instantly as soon as they’d gotten a good whiff—apparently they remembered my scent. Race joined me, kneeling at my side to tickle the tiny dogs under the chin as Lochlan leaned back nonchalantly against the fender of his car.

“I can see our hosts coming up the path on the other side of the barn,” he said. “Should be here in a few minutes—sooner once Saphrona’s sixth sense tells her we’re here.”

“Sixth sense?” Race queried as we both stood.

“Saphrona—and theoretically all other vampire hybrids—have the ability to sense when other
supernaturals are near,” I explained. “I don’t know that she ever mentioned her range to me, but she did say that she thought Mark was human based on what he smelled like, until she was about thirty feet away. But then it may well have been his nature that confused her.”

“Aye,” Lochlan agreed. “With others, like your kind or vampires, she’s apt to sense us a hundred feet or more away. As a matter of fact, from what I can see from here, she and Mark have just increased their mounts to a gallop. I think she’s just realized that she has visitors.”

Race and I walked over and stood next to Lochlan at the fender of his car, and looking through the open ends of the barn, I could indeed see at a distance two figures on horseback speeding toward us. My nervousness returned with a vengeance and Race must have noticed, as he reached over and put an arm around my shoulders and planted a quick kiss on my temple. I took another breath meant to calm me as the figures came into focus the closer to us they got. Saphrona’s face was alight with joy, her blonde hair flying out behind her as her horse, Hadhafang most likely, carried her along. My brother’s expression was determined, which meant he probably hadn’t yet decided how to react.

Knowing
him, he wouldn’t decide whether to rail at me or just wrap his arms around me until he set foot on the ground in front of us.

Perhaps due to her preternatural origins, when the two had crossed through the barn to our end, Saphrona was off of
Hadhafang and throwing her arms around me before Mark even had one foot out of a stirrup. I was wrenched away from Race and enveloped in her arms in the blink of an eye, so quickly it took a moment for me to register the action. After the briefest hesitation I hugged her back, all the while watching my brother slowly descend from Herugrim, his eyes darting from me to Race and back again, a frown marring his brow.

“Oh, Juliette, I’m so glad you decided to come home!” my future sister-in-law exclaimed softly in my ear. Standing back, she added, “It’s so good to see you.”

I chanced a smile. “It’s good to see you too,” I said, and I meant it. Saphrona Caldwell was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever met, being a very petite 5 feet 1 inch tall (a full foot shorter than my brother), athletically slim yet still curvy in the right places, with platinum blonde hair and eyes of bright blue. Her nose was pert and her lips just plump enough, and when she smiled she was stunning. Were I batting for the other team, she’d make my mouth water.

Saphrona moved back to make room for Mark, whom she smiled at tentatively, as though she were also not entirely certain how he was going to react. My brother stepped up to me and after flashing yet another questioning glance up at Race, studied me
, and then did as his lover had done—threw his arms around me and welcomed me home.

“Baby sis, I missed you,” my brother said in a choked whisper.

Tears stung my eyes as I returned his tight embrace.
Baby sis
, he’d called me. The nickname he always addressed me by when he was or had been worried. Usually it was ‘Jules’ or ‘little sister’. “Missed you too, big brother,” I replied softly. “I’m sorry I worried you.”

Mark loosed his vise-like embrace, drawing his hands to my shoulders as he looked into my eyes. “You know what? Don’t even worry about that—doesn’t matter anymore, you’re home now. That’s what counts. Mom, by the way, will be relieved. You should call her soon.”

I sighed. “I know. And I will, I promise.”

Releasing me at last,
he stood back and eyed Race warily. “Not to be rude or anything, but who the hell are you?” he asked.

I turned to Race in time to watch a shit-eating grin cross his face. “You haven’t changed a bit,” he noted with a chuckle.

Mark’s frown deepened. “Do we know each other?”

“Let’s see if this refreshes your memory, pal: On your Mark, get set—”

My brother’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. “Holy shit—Speed Racer?! No fuckin’ way, man!”

The two old friends embraced each other in a back-clapping bear hug, laughing over their old joke and the surprise of meeting one a
nother again. I caught Saphrona’s questioning raised eyebrows and grinned.

“This is Race Covington, an old friend of Mark’s,” I said.

She eyed Race with avid curiosity. “He mentioned him once—something about falling out of the tree in his back yard and breaking an arm.”

I nodded.
“One and the same.”

She turned to me. “You never mentioned he was some kind of
shapeshifter.”

Mark froze in his welcome of Race and leaned back. “What the hell?”

Race nodded. “Yeah… It’s why Mom and I left town so suddenly. You probably remember that my dad left her before she even knew I was coming, or shortly after she found out. Some shit like that. So she never knew about shifters and vampires and all that nonsense. When I first started shifting, she got scared and did the only thing she could think of—packed us up and ran. Thought keeping one step ahead of—whoever—would keep me safe.”

Mark turned to me. “Mom’s a shifter—she didn’t know?”

I shook my head. “As I explained to Race, werekind children smell as human as human children until they’ve changed the first time. Only then do their hormones make them smell different, and as you know, he and his mom left like, a week after he turned fourteen.”

Race nodded.
“The day after I phased for the first time, into Patches.”

“What? Patches, your cat?” Mark queried. “I didn’t think shifters could copy other animals.”

“You’re thinking of werekind, actually,” I said. “I know it’s a little confusing given how I keep referring to most two-natured beings as shapeshifters, but if you’ll remember, I told you that all single-form shifters are technically were-animals, precisely because we have just one form.”

“So what is he? I’m definitely getting the scent of animal and human, but I can’t get a fix on which animal,” Saphrona put in.

“Apparently I’m a chimaera,” Race replied. “Jules told me I’m quite possibly the only living ‘true’ shapeshifter, because I can take on the form of any animal I’ve seen in the flesh. I probably copied Patches that first time because he was there and I was looking right at him.”

Saphrona smiled.
“Fascinating.”

Mark shook his head,
then clapped Race on the shoulder again with one hand. “Dude, you and I have
so
much catching up to do. I can’t believe you’re really here—having you home is almost as good as having my sister home. How did you guys meet up anyway?”

Race and I, in turns, explained his run-in with Merrick in the alley
in Cleveland and how I had (“Yes, recklessly, given I didn’t know who he was at the time.”) accompanied him home in my animal form. We explained how after I had appropriated his clothes later that night, I was about to leave when he caught me, and how when looking into each other’s eyes in our human forms, we bonded.

Mark looked between us, clearly shocked by this news. “Are you guys shitting me? This guy you haven’t seen in sixteen
fuckin’ years is the guy of many talents you once called friend that the dragon lady told you about?”

Before either of us could reply, a thought apparently occurred to him, and after looking between us again, he turned to Race and said, “You break my sister’s heart, I’ll break your
fuckin’ neck.”

Race didn’t flinch, and his expression was solemn as he replied, “Mark, I have no doubt you would. But you don’t have to worry, brother
—maybe it’s this bond between us, or maybe it’s that I’ve been missing her for the last sixteen years, but I can assure you that Jules, and her heart, are safe with me.”

I couldn’t help walking over to wrap my arms around him at those sweet words, causing Mark to shake his head at us. “Just so we’re clear,” he said with a grin.

Then, all of a sudden, Mark looked over at Lochlan, and I could almost see the wheels of his mind turning as he realized just who it was that had brought Race and I home. He charged toward him.

“You lied to me! Just how long have you
known where she was?!” he demanded.

Lochlan slowly raised an eyebrow, loo
king down at the hands now fisted in his shirt and then back up at the man who owned them. “I’ll thank ye kindly to remove yer hands, mate,” he said slowly. After a moment Mark complied, and Lochlan made a show of straightening his shirt before he spoke again.

“First things first:
yer me brother now, and I love ye as though we shared blood. But just so
we’re
clear, brother or no, mate, lay yer hands on me again and you’ll wish ye hadn’t.

“Secondly, I
didnae lie to ye. While I have been searching her whereabouts, I only learned of Juliette being in Cleveland last evening. I went north straight away in the hope of convincing her to come home with me. Had she declined to do so, I’d have then informed my sister and yourself of where she had run off to.”

Maybe it was my lingering paranoia, but something about the way Lochlan spoke had me suspecting that he wasn’t being entirely truthful. After all, he’d called me at Cool Beans yesterday
morning
, so he had to have known where I was for at least a couple of days. Hell, for all I knew, he’d waited less than one before beguiling some sop at the bus station into telling him which city my bus was headed for.

Mark’s shallow breathing slowly settled, and he looked up at Lochlan with an apologetic expression. “I’m sorry. It’s just…you know how worried we’ve been about her.”

“Aye,” Lochlan said. “I’ve been just as worried as the lot of you.”

Saphrona stepped up to Mark and laid a hand on his back. He seemed to instantly settle even further, and I watched him look down on her with a smile. “I’m sure that if he’d known sooner, he would have told us,” she said.

Mark took a breath and held it a moment, saying as he released it, “I know. I just…”

He turned to me then. “You really scared the hell out of us, kid. I wish…
I wish you’d at least have told
me
where you were going, even if you didn’t want to tell Mom. I thought you trusted me.”

“Mark, I do trust you,” I said, stepping up to him. “But it’s like I told you on the phone yesterday—I needed to deal with what happened in my own way, and leaving town for a while was simply a part of that. Admittedly it didn’t help all that much, and God knows I have more shit to deal with still, but at the same time I know it was the right thing to do. After all, leaving led me to Race, and I needed to be in Cleveland to reunite with him and bond with him.”

My brother nodded. “Okay, I get it. Your leaving ended up being part of this destiny crap that goes with being supernatural. I get it.”

He sighed again and looked back at Lochlan. “I am sorry, man.”

Lochlan nodded. “Forgiven. But my warning still stands: Don’t ever raise a hand to me unless you’re ready to go a few rounds.”

Mark grinned. “
I might actually have to take you up on that one of these days. I could use a good workout.”

“Even though you’d be risking getting your ass kicked—no, killed—by a vampire?” Race asked with surprise.

“I’m trained to be one of the USMC’s deadliest,” Mark replied confidently. “While he surpasses me in speed and strength, I have no doubt I surpass him in cunning and guile.”

Lochlan grinned. “Oh, I’d still kill you, but
yes—I’ve no doubt you’d make me work for it.”

Saphrona stepped in between her brother and mine. “Whoa, boys, stop right there. There will be
no
killing of anyone, got it? Not even taking into consideration what Mark’s death would do to me, if you ever laid a hand on him, Lochlan, I’d kill you myself.”

He turned an innocent gaze her direction. “But sister, you just said there would be no killing of anyone—you’d really go back on your word?”

The punch that sent him stumbling and laughing into the hood of his car went by almost faster than I could follow. Lochlan continued to laugh as he rubbed a no doubt sore shoulder.