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Chapter One
~Celia Warner~
“Hi, my name is Celia, and I’m a werepanther.”
“Hi, Celia.”
I swallowed thickly as I stared around the room at all the gazes that were locked on me. Everyone was smiling softly and I’m sure they could tell how nervous I was.
This was my third meeting, but the first time I’d been brave enough to actually get up and share my story. Though, now that everyone was staring at me, I wasn’t sure it had been such a good idea.
“About a year ago,” I began again, my voice shaking as I spoke. “I was attacked in the woods by my house…my old house, I mean. Once we realized what I’d become, my mom started researching stories about supernatural creatures and she found Fayshore. So we moved here.”
My gaze swept the room again as I crossed my arms over my chest. I still wasn’t ready to share the whole saga of what happened to me, and it was as if I were challenging everyone in the room to call me on the fact that I’d not really shared any details.
Colton Steele, the mayor of Fayshore, was sitting across from where I stood, and he just gave me a slow nod. He’d been the one who encouraged my mom to move here, and the one who’d been pushing for me to not only join this support group, but to get up and start talking about my attack, about my condition.
I turned to walk back to my seat and noticed an incredibly hot guy leaning against the doorjamb at the back of the room. His arms were crossed as mine had been, and he had a smirk pulling at the corner of his full lips. I narrowed my gaze at him, assuming that he was judging me for something, and his smirk turned into a full-on grin as he shook his head and straightened, heading out the door.
My heart was hammering in my chest as I sat down and I couldn’t stop myself from turning to look for him again, but he was gone. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but as the next person got up to talk, I forced myself to put thoughts of the handsome stranger out of my head and pay attention to the actual reason I was there.
The rest of the meeting continued as the previous ones had. People bravely sharing about their lives being turned upside down by wild supernatural creatures attacking them and turning them into different kinds of monsters.
There were only about a dozen of us in the group, but Colton had explained to my mom that rogue attacks were on the rise all over the world. As more and more towns started to come out to the human world, some monsters didn’t like it and were trying to cause fear and panic. Colton believed that these rogues wanted to go back to the way things had been. But he wasn’t sure if the attacks were a warning against the monster leaders to stop opening their world to humans, or if they were just trying to terrify the normal humans who accepted supernatural creatures.
I didn’t care what the reasoning was behind it. I just wanted the people in charge to do something about it. It was too late for me, but there were a lot of other people in the world, going about their lives with no idea what was really hiding in the dark.
As the meeting wrapped up my phone chirped in my pocket, and I looked down to see a message from my mom.
Devan’s son Trevor is picking you up from the meeting. Sorry for the short notice. Love you.
Devan was my mom’s new husband. He was a really nice guy, and I was glad that mom had finally found someone who treated her well, even if he was a werewolf. God knows my father never did anything for her…or for me.
I’d seen photos of Trevor around the house but had never actually met him. He’d been off at college when Devan and Mom got married a few months earlier and he hadn’t been able to get away from school for the wedding.
My stomach dropped as I stood and looked back at the door to see that the smirking guy from earlier had returned, his gaze locked directly on me.
That was the guy from the pictures. That was Trevor Gaynes.
Great. I was getting a ride home from my hot werewolf stepbrother.
Chapter Two
~Trevor Gaynes~
I gripped the steering wheel tightly beneath my palms and bit my lip for most of the drive back to my dad’s place. The bundle of attitude sitting next to me was obnoxiously adorable in her quiet rage and I knew that nothing I did or said was going to make her accept what she was.
When I’d seen her standing up at the meeting, for a moment I actually prayed that it wasn’t Celia. Because the woman I saw had made my heart skip a beat in my chest and all the blood in my body to rush downward. But then she’d opened her mouth and not only had she confirmed that she was my stepsister, but also that she absolutely hated being a werepanther. Neither of which were conducive to making me want to date her.
Dad had warned me that his new stepdaughter was having trouble adjusting to being a shifter, but I hadn’t expected the disgust in her tone when she’d talked about her condition.
Granted, Dad and I were born with our shifter powers, so there hadn’t been an adjustment period required. And yeah, Celia had been viciously attacked and turned against her will. But from what I understood from Dad, that had been a year ago. She’d had plenty of shifts to get the hang of it, and she should have been able to recognize how awesome it was to be a monster.
I tried to remember what Dad had told me. That Celia was eighteen years old, living in a new town, with new powers and a new family. It couldn’t have been easy to get hit with so much change at once.
“So,” I said, trying to be polite and strike up a conversation with my new stepsister whom I absolutely wasn’t attracted to in any way. “Have you thought about where you’re going to college?”
“I can’t go to college,” she answered, her face turned toward the window away from me. “I still don’t have the monster under control and can’t risk shifting in a dorm full of people once a month.”
