Slow Shift by Nazarea Andrews (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

John hisses. Tyler glances over, unerringly finding his brother in a gaggle of mothers taking pictures, something like amused disdain on his face.

John snorts. “Only for Chase,” he mutters. Tyler agrees.

And isn’t that all the truth—the only reason any of them tolerate each other is for Chase. He wonders what will happen to these strange men who have been part of his life for so long after today, after graduation when Chase leaves for college.

He knows Tyler is hoping Chase will leave, almost as much as he is. It will hurt, but God he wants his boy to shake free of this town.

He sits back down and Marie leans into him, smiling and so damn proud she’s almost vibrating with it. Softly, she says, “We did ok, didn’t we?”

Lucas slips into the seat on the far side of Marie and arches an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” he murmurs, shooting Tyler a small smile as Aurora rises to give her speech. “We did a fucking awesome job with him.”

Tyler hides his grin behind his program.

~*~

A few weeks after graduation, Chase slips into the woods, flanked by his wolves, and stands before the Standing Stones. The spell is crinkled in his pocket and his anathema is clutched in his sweaty grip as he stares at the stones, at the flowers trying to grow from within the circle.

He can feel the magic rippling off of it.

It’s already begun, really, the siren song the Standing Stones put out. Andre Drake told him last week that a Wendigo was nesting in the warehouse district downtown. He can stop it though—muffle the song, hide the beacon, protect the land.

Tyler whines, still unhappy, but Lucas presses against his shins and watches him with bright shining blue eyes.

Chase takes a deep breath and cuts into the tattoo on his arm, murmuring the Latin spell as his blood drips in concentric circles, soaking through rowan ash he spread on the ground and seeping into the ancient Stones as he whispers.

He closes his eyes, but there isn’t any magical display—no rush of power or blinding light or anything but the almost relieved sigh the wood gives. Power doesn’t so much flood into him, but seeps, soaking in, twisting with his magic, strengthening it, and his tattoos burn, glowing briefly. He can feel the forest, feel the trees and the animals and the magic that touches the land, that runs along the telluric currents and ley lines.

He shivers and falls to his knees beside the ancient Stones, digging his fingers into the ground as magic pushes through him like an endless sea, gentle waves battering and battering and battering.

He gasps, “Tyler,” and then, finally, he surrenders to the tug of the magic, pulling him under the surface.

High above them, the solstice moon rises. The wolves press against him and he smiles, because here—between his wolves, in the woods with magic thumping through his veins—he’s home.

Chapter 16

He doesn’t think about before often, because it hurts. He doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t slip into the dark broody moods of his brother or the quiet touch-starved clinginess of Chase, but he thinks that’s more because he spent so many years trapped in his own head, unable to do anything but listen to Chase babble and Tyler’s guilt, and think about everything he lost.

Before, he was a brother, a son, a husband.

He was going to be a father, and that... That hurts more than anything, the memory of his pretty human wife and her softly swelling belly, the way he could listen for hours to the quiet rapid-fire heartbeat of his baby.

But that was before. And now... Now, he’s a beta without an alpha, a wolf in a pack that feels incomplete and vulnerable, and it makes his hackles rise.

Chase spins his magic and carves his runes, and Lucas knows the little shaman would die to protect them—but he shouldn’t have to. There should be an alpha keeping them safe, someone who holds Chase cherished and protected, who arranges her pack to guard him.

Instead, there’s only him and Tyler.

He thinks, maybe, it will be enough.

~*~

Before the accident, his alpha was his best friend. He grew up knowing that he would be her beta, and more than that—he would be her left hand, the one who walked in darkness with bloody hands and a guilty conscious because she couldn’t be that person and the alpha.

He didn’t mind it. He had always been comfortable in the shadows his mother couldn’t walk in.

It was lonely. He saw the way his Pack watched him sometimes, wary and afraid, but his mother never looked at him like that and Tyler never flinched away from him, and his Pack was safe. He could stand the looks and fear—sometimes he even welcomed it—because the people who mattered loved him and never pulled away.

After the accident, when he sat in his chair listening to the spastic child next to him and his brother’s broken confessions, he thought.

Maybe he could be that person again.

Not for Chelsea—never for Chelsea. She wasn’t his alpha. She left him, and he didn’t want that kind of abandonment, didn't want that kind of feckless leader. She’d always stared at him with something like revulsion in her pretty eyes, the way their father did, and pulled the little ones away, like Lucas would hurt them.

No, he would never stand as Chelsea’s Left, because he didn’t give a fuck what might hurt her. Sometimes he thinks he might help someone hurt her, if only to rid Tyler of the cumbersome burden of a family who didn’t want him.

But for Chase, for the brave boy who loved him when he had no reason to, for the boy who wrapped himself in magic and runes and a world that he didn’t belong to, who ran with Lucas in his dreams...

And for Tyler, who smiles now—small, sad, and shy—who watches the world like he’s afraid it will hurt him, who glares and snaps because he would rather drive someone away than be left behind...

For them, he would