Page 71 of Secret Shifters Next Door

“What does that mean? Like, a shapeshifter? Like in some movie or something? Are you supposed to be a werewolf?”

“Not a werewolf, no. Not me, anyway. But yes, it’s what you’re thinking.”

Harley stared at me for several seconds, then her face broke into a huge manic smile, and she started laughing. Blinking, I took a step back, not sure what she was laughing at. She continued laughing, big belly laughs, until she began crying. The laughter became almost hysterical. She put her hands in her hair, and took a huge deep breath to calm herself.

She walked in a tight circle, mumbling to herself. “What the fuck is even happening? Am I going crazy? Wait, that guy that captured me said he saw a dragon. Is that what you are? What’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening?”

Harley was on the verge of a breakdown. I couldn’t let that happen. I stepped forward and put my hands on her shoulders. “Calm down.”

Harley slapped my hands away, startling me, and pointed a finger in my face. Her voice was venomous. “Don’t you tell me to calm down. Don’t fucking do that. Do you have any idea what I saw with Emily? She held a car in the air like some goddamned wizard. I thought I was going crazy. You don’t get to tell me any damned thing until I know exactly what’s happening.”

Harley was still crying, but this time it wasn’t hysterical tears, it was tears of fear and anger. I was worried about the baby and what all the stress might be doing to him.

Holding my hands up, I said, “Okay… it’s okay. I don’t want to make you more upset. I’ll just take you home. We can forget the whole thing.”

Harley was only five-foot-six, petite, and unassuming. Still, when she took two steps toward me, snarling and enraged, I felt a twinge of fear. I resisted the urge to jerk back.

She slapped my chest. “You aren’t taking me any-fucking-where until you tell me why the hell your eyes glow, and how Emily can shoot forcefields out of her hands.”

Most of Harley’s rage seemed to melt out of her, and she sagged in exhaustion. Now that she was calmed down, I took her hand and led her to a small outcropping of rocks and sat with her.

I took a breath and jumped into the story. “So, there are secrets about the world you and your kind aren’t aware of. The unnatural is not easy to accept. Iama shifter. My kind have roamed the earth for centuries, thousands of years, really. We are magical creatures, and due to that magic and how dangerous we are perceived to be, we usually stay in our human form. We integrate into human societies. After some time, we really seem to be more human than beast.”

“We actually changed to keep our secret hidden. We are born as human babies now instead of eggs. We don’t even get to know our beast until several years after we’re born. Our son will be born a shifter. I can already feel it.”

Harley was trembling and put a hand to her mouth. “What are you talking about? How is this real?”

“There’s more. There is a group, they’ve been around for centuries. We simply call them Hunters. Their creed, their very reason for being, is to eradicate every shifter on earth. They hunt us, and kill us like the animals they think we are. Emily is… Jesus, this is complicated… she’s a witch.”

Harley’s eyes went wide. “A witch? Like, magic wand? Poof, abracadabra? Harry Po?—”

“Yes, and no. Emily is a witch but, as you saw, there’s no need for a wand. Her power is from within. She’s in league with a band of hunters. They’ve already captured and killed several of us in the surrounding area. We think she got close to you to killme, Steff, Blayne, and Miles. We’re all shifters. Miles is a wolf shifter, Blayne is a panther, Steff is a bear.”

Harley said, “The guy who had me prisoner in the mansion, before he fainted, he mumbled something about a dragon. Was that you outside?”

I nodded. “We got to the mansion and were attacked. When I’m in my dragon form, my scales are impenetrable to man-made bullets. I shifted to protect myself as well as… get my rage out. Shifting hadn’t been part of the plan. We’d intended to go in quietly and try to get you out without anyone knowing we were there. Things got out of hand.”

Harley stared at me. The look on her face told me she didn’t believe it. There was a part of her that wanted to, I could almost see it in her eyes. The problem was there was too muchstuffin her head to keep her from fully accepting—thousands of hours of school, untold documentaries, hundreds of books, magazines, and articles, that claimed reality and the world were only what science said was possible. Everything she’d ever been told pushed her against believing. Witches weren’t real, werewolves were the stuff of movies, dragons were myths. I had to show her. There was no other way.

I stood and took a few steps away. Looking into her eyes, I said, “Remember, I love you. I love you so much. My dragon loves you, too. We would never hurt you. Ever. Please don’t be afraid.”

Before she could say anything, I shifted. My arms elongated and stretched out into wings. My skin slipped away, replaced with bright scales. My jaw expanded, my teeth sharpened and became rows of fangs. In seconds I stood before her, a fully formed dragon straight out of a story book.

I could feel my dragon’s excitement and also trepidation. It’d never been so worried. I could sense how terrified it wasthat Harley would run screaming. Rejection would be almost unbearable to my dragon—to me as well.

Harley looked up at me as I towered above her, and started laughing hysterically again. “I’m hallucinating. That has to be it.”

My dragon leaned down and pressed his snout gently to her belly. She gasped, feeling his warm scales against her body. I waited there, with our head bowed, touching the baby inside her. I waited for her to call me a freak, a monster. Waited for the rejection I was certain was coming.

Instead, she placed a hand on my head, sliding her fingers across the ridges of scales, and with wonder in her eyes, she simply said, “Oh.”

THIRTY

HARLEY

The analytical part of my mind told me this couldn’t be real. There was no scientific reason that what I was seeing could be real. My eyes told me it was all reality, but my brain was arguing, almost frantically, that it was somehow pretend. What my brain couldn’t argue against was the heat of the creature in front of me. The feel of its scales. The eyes that looked at me the same way Tate did. I was touching a dragon, and that dragon had been my boyfriend a few minutes ago. There was no way to explain that away.

Finding my voice, I said, “This is surreal. Does it hurt when you change?”

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