Changelings — K.D. West

Three lost souls have won a war and been stripped of everything else - except each other What do you do after the final battle? Ari, Annie, and Timi have every reason to be happy. They helped defeat the invading horde from another plane and won the war.Yet happy is the last thing any of them are feeling. After losing so much, they feel like anything but themselves. Anything but human.Like changelings.And yet like many other forms of magic, these three find that love cannot be denied. Preview: Timi felt the urge to howl at him some more, to tell him that he was an idiot, that if he walked out of the door that she would kill him, but Annie was quicker. “I just thought I’d show you what love looks like again,” she said.For the first time in months, something other than images of death and loss rendered Timi speechless. The butterfly heat of Annie’s kiss had stolen all power of thought from her. Again she turned to Ari and saw color coming to his cheeks for the first time since the previous spring. He was also speechless.Annie stepped forward and kissed him too, and he gave a moan as their mouths came together that melted Timi utterly — it could have been sounded from the depths of her own soul.Timi stood there, dumb, blinking, until Annie stepped back from Ari, leaving him gasping. The blonde girl blinked then too, and twined her arms in front of her. “I sort of lost a boyfriend last June too,” she said, very evenly. “Sort of lost two, though Sam only kissed me once and Joe never did seem to be listening when I told him how I felt. But there are two people in this room that I love very much.”Timi and Ari moved towards her. (Novella-length, post-tragedy contemporary fantasy; polyamory MFF romance)