The Hellhound’s UnChristmas Miracle

by Chant, Zoe

  “Where?” he asked.

  Sheena shook her head, her face twisting. “I don’t know! I don’t know this part of the country at all. If we were back home…” She pounded the wall so hard someone yelled something, muffled, from the other side. “I know back home you couldn’t go ten k’ without tripping over a farmer or someone on a camping trip or bike tour. It’s going to be the same here. There are too many people,” she anguished.

  “It’s early,” Fleance countered, “and I think our definitions of ‘too many people’ might be different. If we get out of the main streets—”

  “Any is too many.” She finished dressing and turned to him, her expression tortured. “He wants to hurt people, Fleance. I can feel it. I can feel what he wants to do.” She ran her hands down her face. “Maybe a national park. The tracks get closed off down south during winter. It’ll be the same here, right?”

  He didn’t know. Worse, every time Sheena mentioned her home, the pit that had opened in his heart widened. It reminded him that strange as the geothermal land around her was to him, it wasn’t her territory, either. She had a home, a life, a whole world of places and people she loved. There was so much about her that Fleance didn’t know and now would never be able to learn. At least not beside her, free, souls entwined as they were meant to be.

  Sheena grabbed the keys. “I don’t even know how far the closest trail is. I don’t know how much time we have.” Her eyes blazed and she bared her teeth in an uncharacteristic growl. “He’s toying with us.”

  “That sounds like him.”

  They raced down the stairs, past groups of confused and angry hotel guests. A security guard ushered them out through the foyer doors. There was already a small group gathered in front of the main building, but Fleance took Sheena’s hand and they slipped into the shadows and headed for his car.

  The early morning air was lung-tighteningly cold. Fleance worried for Sheena’s bare legs until they reached his car and the ice on the door retreated at her touch. Her hand hadn’t been overly hot when they were running over here—she was still volatile, this close to her first shift.

  “I’ll drive,” he said, and her nails squealed against the metal door. She looked as though she was about to argue—then her shoulders dropped.

  “Here.” She tossed him the keys and slipped around to the passenger side. By the time he got the engine running, she had her seatbelt on and was sitting with her head in her hands. “I’m burning up,” she whispered. “How do I control it? I can’t even—I don’t want to talk to it! I don’t want this to be happening!”

  He reached over and gripped her shoulder. Her skin was so hot he could feel it even through her borrowed sweater. Before he could open his mouth, she spoke again.

  “But it is happening.”

  Her back straightened. Without thinking, as though she were a member of his pack or still his mate, Fleance sent reassurance to her—and his telepathic senses came up against a block, like a steel wall around her soul. From the set of her jaw, she hadn’t even felt him reach for her.

  He swallowed. “Sheena—”

  “Don’t.” The word was almost a sob. “I know what you’re trying to do. But it makes it worse, feeling you in my heart when he’s—he’s watching.”

  He pulled back, feeling sick.

  That doesn’t change anything, his hellhound hissed. He almost jumped. It had been quiet since Sheena was bitten, wary and watchful, but he’d been so focused on her that he hadn’t missed it. Now it slunk around the edges of his mind, anger boiling across its hide. We came here to make sure Parker couldn’t hurt anyone else. We can’t let him take her.

  His hellhound’s words put iron in his spine. It was right. It was his duty to defend all of Parker’s victims and make the world right.

  He knew what he had to do.

  Tires squealed as he pulled out of the carpark and onto the road. Someone shouted, and he felt a stab of guilt at leaving some poor fire warden short—which was ridiculous. Better their names be missing from the roster than the whole hotel be dragged into Parker’s game.

  Rotorua at night was eerie. The city’s lights hardly made a dent in the huge blackness of the sky, and once they left streetlights behind them, the sky’s emptiness came down to envelope the whole world. The stars seemed to pull back, peeling away from the earth. The car’s headlights carved twin yellow beams through the nothing, illuminating roiling hisses of steam and gas and the skeletons of power lines, and nothing else.

  Sheena fumbled with his phone. “Keep going,” she said, thumbing through the map app. “We’re on the thermal highway. That Caltex back there was the last thing we’re going to hit until Tumunui, whatever that is. Wee township. Or something.”

  “A what?”

  She looked confused. “A… small town? What would you call it?” She shook her head and flinched. Her question forgotten, Fleance clasped her hand.

  “What are you getting from Parker?” he asked.

  “Getting from him?”

  “Distance. Direction.” He tried to describe what the pack sense felt like to him.

  “Like a radar?” She half-grinned, then blanched. “Oh, God. That isn’t a joke. I used to be able to see my flock mentally, like someone had scattered rice on a black sheet, but…”

  “I know. He’s the center, and you’re moving around him.” He remembered it all too well: the lurch from his mental image of himself being central to his understanding of the world, to being on its periphery. From being free to being a pawn.

  Sheena’s voice dropped. “I might have been the smallest sheep in my flock, but at least I was still the center of my own universe.” Her hands made fists on the dashboard. “Be nice if this new hellhound radar came with a scale. I can see where I am, and where he is, but not how far—”

  She slammed back against the seat. Fleance didn’t need to ask why. Cold fingers of dread curled around his throat. Parker was close enough that he could feel his fear magic, too. He pressed on the accelerator. The fear was coming from behind him—if he could just get enough distance—

  “How is he keeping up with us? Nothing can move this fast,” Sheena muttered, glancing at the speedometer. “Wait… It’s a trap. It must be. He’s doing the same thing he did yesterday, herding us forwards!”

  “Where else are we meant to go?” The road stretched out in front and behind, empty.

  Sheena pointed. Her face was skull-like, lit from below by the phone screen. “There should be a turnoff on the left before we get to Tumunui. There!”

  Fleance took the turn onto a thankfully sealed road. A sign warned of logging trucks, but all that appeared in his headlights were pine trees.

  Including one that had fallen to block the road.

  Fleance swore and braked. He turned the car, half-expecting to find Parker looming on the road behind them. But the forest was still empty.

  “There was a gravel road back there,” he muttered, half to himself. “I don’t know where it goes, but the more remote the better.”

  “Fleance…”

  “Can you see on the map?”

  “I…” There was a clatter and the phone fell to the floor. Its screen illuminated Sheena from below, making her face look almost skeletal. She swallowed. “Fleance, when you said hellhounds have weird powers…”

  He cursed himself. He’d already seen that she was volatile—he should have seen this coming, too.

  She flickered. Not invisibility—this was worse. Fleance gasped, despite knowing what was happening. “Try to focus on being in the car,” he said, and repeated the words telepathically. Sheena’s mind slid against his, one second there, the next gone. Like trying to touch mist. He went back to speaking out loud. “Don’t think about stopping moving or getting out of your seat. Stay here. We’re safe so long as we stick together. Stay with me.”

  He hoped he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

  “I think it’s—” She faded out again. Fleance’s hand went through the s
pace where her shoulder had been, and he snatched it back. “Afraid. Trying to get away.”

  “Focus,” he urged her, his voice sharp with fear. Terror was building up inside him. His hellhound snapped at it. The shadowy Sheena tried to pick up the phone and it fell through her fingers. “You can turn invisible, that’s fine, just don’t fall out of the car.”

  “Oh God,” she burst out. “Fall out of the car? You mean fall through the car? Is that even… Oh, shit, if I can walk through walls now then you’re right, I could fall right through—”

  “You won’t.” Fleance reached for her hand without taking his eyes off the road. Her hand was too warm, but it was solid. “See? You’ve got this. It’s going to be okay. You’re a, a box of birds.”

  Her fingers tightened around his and she snorted. Fleance was about the reach for the mate bond, hoping to find her smirk reflected there, but remembered just in time.

  He swallowed.

  Outside, the world was blanketed in white. Frost glittered in the headlights, and the trees on the side of the road clutched frozen lumps of snow in their branches. He thought of something that might reassure her.

  “I know it seems bad now, but we’re going to get through this,” he said, scoping out the road ahead. Sheena had mentioned national parks might be an option to avoid any collateral damage; this forest might not be a real park, but it was isolated enough. “If there’s anything I’ve learned these past few years, it’s always worth holding out for a Christmas miracle.”

  “That’s… a long wait.” Sheena sounded baffled.

  Fleance frowned. Winter had the world firmly in its grip; true, he hadn’t seen festive decorations other than posters advertising a light show and banners with stars on them, but he knew in a vague sort of way that not all countries went as full-tilt into Christmas celebrations as America did. He said as much to Sheena.

  “Those are Matariki decorations,” she said. “For when the constellation reappears in the sky. Christmas isn’t until summer.”

  The world tilted around Fleance. He knew the seasons were reversed south of the equator. But he’d known it with his head, not his heart, and it was his heart that had clung to the cold and the dark as signs that things would end up okay.

  “Forget I said anything,” he muttered.

  Sheena’s eyes narrowed. *Did someone just laugh?* Her voice brushed against his mind, but it felt undirected, as though she was poking around randomly.

  “Invisible…” She looked up at the rear-view mirror just as the car went over a bump in the road. The seatbelt rattled tight, snapping through her chest to lie flush against the seat behind her. Sheena’s eyes went wide. She flickered out of sight and Fleance hit the brakes. If she’d phased through the car—

  Then she popped back into sight. Screaming.

  “He’s in the car,” she yelled, *Run, get out, he’s already here!*

  8

  Sheena

  It was a trap. Sheena’s throat closed over as surely as if the man looming in the back seat of the car had put his fingers around it.

  She’d never seen Parker’s human form before, but there was no question who he was. He looked like he was in his fifties or early sixties: sleek, too-shiny face, hair too solidly colored to be real. Like a door-to-door salesman who keeps bodies in the back of his car, she thought. He smiled when he saw her looking at him, and the expression was all predator.

  Time slowed down. She’d thought he was herding them, but that must have been a distraction. He’d been there all along.

  He must have been waiting all night, she thought, cold tendrils snaking around her stomach. He must have known we would try to flee as soon as I turned.

  All he needed to do was phase into the car and wait.

  Parker leaned forward and fire roared up inside her, sudden and terrifying. No! a voice roared in her head, familiar and strange at the same time.

  Fleance shouted something. She saw, and felt, him reaching for her, body and mind turning towards her as his mouth moved voicelessly. Something inside her reached for him as well.

  And stopped. Sheena felt dizzy. Her hellhound was a strange, wary thing. It felt more like a collection of instincts than an animal. Fear. Hatred. So much hatred, of the dark star that had formed in the center of her heart and kept trying to draw her closer. The cold, disgusting counterpart of the light that was her connection to Fleance.

  Her hellhound saw the light of the mate bond and screamed. It didn’t see him; it saw a way away from Parker’s web. But if she reached out to Fleance, that would only draw him closer to Parker again. To the life he’d suffered under for so long.

  She had to let him go. If there was some way of breaking the mate bond—

  NO!

  She dropped through the bottom of the car like a stone. It spun away as she hit gravel, rolling to a stop at the side of the road. Bracken crunched beneath her as she stood up on all four legs.

  Her eyes were fire, her lungs were fire, fire filled the pit of her stomach and roared in her veins. She was a hellhound, burning with her first breaths. Ahead, the car spun to a stop. The scents of the men inside filtered to her, muddied by the smell of hot rubber and burning fuel. Her alpha, the central point around which her world rotated, and her mate.

  Her mate, who was trapped because of her. Parker’s alpha control over her, her mate bond to Fleance. One long leash.

  The ground rocked under her paws. I can’t let this happen.

  The part of Sheena that was Sheena and the part of her that was a hellhound tore apart. She felt lost and hopeless, more alone than she’d ever been in her life.

  Something deep inside her growled.

  The car burst open. No—two hellhounds burst through it. Fleance smashed his way out through the front, shredding the metal door as though it was tissue paper, but the alpha hellhound simply stood up through the roof and jumped casually to the ground. Sheena tensed, expecting the gravel to hiss and spit beneath his paws, but he wasn’t setting anything on fire.

  Yet.

  *Well now, that wasn’t too bad for a first attempt!* Parker’s wolfish grin made Sheena’s hackles rise. *You should have seen how long it took my boy there to figure out how this shit works when he first shifted.*

  *Don’t talk about him like that!* she snarled back, and then blinked. She snarled? She never snarled. But when she thought about what Fleance had told her about how Parker had treated him, her ears flattened against her head. It must be the new shape doing it, she thought. Fangs and claws had to be used for something, after all.

  Parker’s eyes blazed. Something wriggled inside Sheena’s head like she’d just opened an old takeaway container and found it full of maggots. Part of her wanted to run—not a very fangs-and-claws part, true—but how could she run away from what was inside her own head?

  *Now you’re starting to understand.* Parker stretched out his neck and the maggots in Sheena’s head writhed in time with his voice. No, not in time with it—they were his voice. Wrongness crashed through her. Speaking telepathically was like brushing up against someone else’s mind, but Parker’s voice wormed its way up from inside her.

  Fleance had told her about this. She’d known it was awful, but now that she was experiencing it herself, she wanted to take him away and keep him somewhere no one could do this to him again.

  Parker laughed. *Not much of a one for self-preservation, are you? You know I gotta admit, I didn’t know if this was going to work. That’s why I targeted the other ladies. Just to test the waters, you know? Birds, sheep, nothing I couldn’t clean up easy if things didn’t work out as planned.*

  Clean up? Sheena’s stomach dropped. Fleance had said Parker never killed, but that had been when he had Fleance to do his dirty work. Sheena couldn’t believe that Fleance had never fought his alpha’s command. And he might say now that he would murder Parker, but it was obvious how difficult he found the idea. She would bet that Parker had known he could only push Fleance so far. The whole alpha control thing
couldn’t be unbreakable.

  Which meant they might have a way out of this without her mate turning into a murderer.

  *And isn’t that a tragedy,* Parker’s voice drawled in her head, like oil and nails. Sheena stomach went cold.

  She was trapped. She knew that. And Parker was inside her head. The thoughts jolted around her mind, too frantic to come together and make any sort of conclusion. She was fire and rage and teeth and claws and a cringing, writhing fear that she’d never experienced when she had her sheep. A fear that made all the rest of it worthless. What was the use of all this strength if she was too afraid to use it against the one creature she wanted to take down?

  Parker winked at her, and the sight of one burning eye closing and opening was somehow more horrifying than anything else. Maybe because it was so human, she thought, her mind bouncing off on a tangent that she really didn’t have time for.

  Doing what I do best, Sheena thought to herself, not thinking about how she’d normally think it to her sheep and launched herself down the tangent. Hellhounds were the sort of overwhelmingly terrifying that ranked on a scale alongside earthquakes and tsunamis. Scary, but inevitable, and simple in their inevitability. Burny dog makes things burn. Scary magic makes things scared. But that wink was entirely human and human evil was far more complex than natural disasters.

  Parker yawned. *All this and we haven’t said hello yet? You’ll give me a big head.*

  And he could read her mind.

  *Quick on the uptake, aren’t ya?*

  She wasn’t even sure she could read her own mind, most of the time. Another tangent appeared. Sheena shot towards it like a dog towards its bowl. This was what she did best and right now, it might be her only chance, a thought she veered away from like it stung. Luckily, she always had another useless thought to grab onto, something only vaguely related to the topic at hand, like—What’s the time, Mr. Wolf…