by Zoe Chant
Candice heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Fine. I don’t suppose you have any convenient veterinary textbooks giving standard dosages of common medications for hellhounds, do you?”
“I’m afraid not.” He spread his hands. “But I’m confident Fenrir will be perfectly fine under Bethany’s care. When I checked with her, she was just giving him fluids and keeping an eye on him. She won’t do him any harm by treating him as a large dog. He’ll likely be perfectly fine tomorrow, in any event. Shifters heal very fast.”
Candice looked alarmed. “He’s a shifter? I’m not sure what Bethany would do if she finds a naked man in a dog cage in the morning.”
“That won’t happen.” He decided this wasn’t the right time to get into the whole story of Fenrir’s inability—or unwillingness—to take human form. “Candice, you need to stop worrying about everyone else and concentrate on taking care of yourself.”
“But—“ Candice started.
“I promise, I will explain anything and everything to you,” he interrupted her. Greatly daring, he took her shoulders, gently rubbing her tense muscles. She didn’t pull away. “But in the morning. You need to rest. Please.”
She resisted as he tried to steer her back into the tent. “One question. Answer it honestly, or I swear I’ll stay out here all night.”
He had no doubt that she would. She was the most stubborn, impossible woman in the world, and he adored that about her even as she drove him mad. “Very well. If you promise me that you’ll go to bed afterward.”
She locked eyes with him. “What’s a true mate?”
He hesitated…but he’d promised her the truth.
“It’s something that shifters have. One person who is their perfect soulmate, the one person in all the world who is their true match.” Though he tried to keep his tone clinical and detached, his heart quickened as he remembered that indescribable jolt of connection he’d felt when he’d first met Candice. “If a shifter is lucky enough to meet their mate, they recognize them on sight. Instantly. And from that moment onward…there’s no one else.”
Candice had gone very still. “You…when you were talking to Buck, it sounded like you think I’m your mate.”
“I don’t think it,” he said softly. “I know.”
Her eyes were wide and dark. He could spend a lifetime in those depths, and never come up for air. Without meaning to, he’d drawn closer as he spoke, leaning into her warmth. He could feel the soft, startled whisper of her breath against his lips, and hear the rapid beat of her pulse.
Then: “Nope,” she announced.
His heart turned to ice. “I know it sounds impossible, but I swear—“
“Nope. Nuh-uh,” Candice interrupted. She held up her hands in a T-shape, one on top of the other. “Time out. You win. I have officially reached my weirdness quotient for one day. I’m going to bed.”
Yes, our mate must rest, his unicorn said. He could feel it urging him on as though its horn was poking him in the back. Lie down with her, hold her, keep her safe.
He’d have to settle for doing one out of three. Reluctantly, he released her, stepping back.
“I’ll be right outside,” he said as she crawled into the tent. “Call me if you need anything.”
“What I need,” Candice muttered from behind the tent flap, “is for things to go back to being normal.”
That was, he feared, the one thing that he would never be able to provide.
Chapter 16
Candice woke up in bed with a unicorn.
For a moment, she just stared blearily at the shining apparition. Flash’s wide amethyst eyes gazed innocently back. Little shimmering sparkles danced around her small horn, turning the interior of the tent into a fairy disco.
“Oh, crap. You’re not a dream.” Candice groaned, letting her head thump back onto the thin pillow. “None of it was a dream.”
Flash twitched her nose, and sneezed in Candice’s face.
Contrary to popular belief, unicorn spit was not in fact comprised of glitter and rainbows.
“Ew.” Candice sat up, wiping her eyes. “All right, all right, I’m up. I guess you must be hungry.”
Flash tossed her mane, her small head nodding vigorously.
“You really do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?” Candice scratched the unicorn’s arched neck. Flash leaned into the touch, eyes half-closing in pleasure. “I wish you could talk, too. I have no idea what constitutes a nutritionally complete diet for a unicorn.”
Flash’s pointed ears pricked in her direction. She suddenly found herself, for no apparent reason, thinking of a bouquet of daisies, tender green grass, and…oats?
Candice stared at Flash. “Are you doing that? Putting pictures in my head?”
Flash snorted, nodding again. Delighted rainbow butterflies flurried through Candice’s mind.
“Huh. That’s handy.” Candice raked her hand through her hair, trying to flatten what was undoubtedly a terrible case of bedhead. “Let’s go find you some breakfast, then.”
She’d slept in her clothes, so she didn’t have to get dressed. Just as well, given that the pup tent was far too small for her to stand up. Unzipping the front flap, she crawled out—and nearly sprawled face-first over Wystan.
He lay curled right outside the tent flap as though guarding it. He’d gone to sleep right on the bare ground, one arm pillowing his head, the other outflung with his palm upturned. It was odd to see him sprawled and relaxed, all self-awareness abandoned. She hadn’t realized before just how rigidly he carried himself when he was awake.
His face was strangely different too. Most people looked more vulnerable when they slept, but Wystan seemed…stronger. His habitual air of diffident reserve had vanished, revealing the true steel beneath. There was something firmer and more certain to the curve of his lips, the line of his brow. His long silver-gold eyelashes and sharp cheekbones gave him the look of a slumbering angel—but one just resting before battle, ready to leap up at any moment brandishing a burning sword.
Candice edged around him, holding her breath. His eyelids flickered fractionally, but he didn’t wake up. There were faint blue shadows under his eyes, betraying his exhaustion. He must have been up most of the night guarding the camp as he’d promised. From the careless splay of his limbs, she suspected that he’d teetered and collapsed where he stood when he couldn’t stay awake a second longer.
At least someone found him a blanket. The folds of cloth were too neat for Wystan to have pulled it over himself. Candice could picture one of Wystan’s squadmates quietly drawing the soft material over him and tiptoeing away. The whole team obviously shared a close bond.
On impulse, she drew the blanket up a little higher, tucking it around him more securely. He let out the faintest sigh, his curled hand relaxing. It might have been her imagination, but she could have sworn his lips shaped her name.
Flash poked her head out of the tent flap. Candice made a frantic shhhh! gesture at the baby unicorn. As best she could, she visualized Flash neatly jumping over Wystan’s sprawled form without waking him.
Flash cocked her head to one side. The gleam of her horn brightened. In a flash of white light, the baby unicorn vanished.
Candice spent a split-second gaping at the empty space where the unicorn had been, before something hard and pointed poked her in the thigh. She whipped around to find Flash standing behind her, looking like a cat that had gotten not just the cream but an entire dairy herd.
Of course, Flash had teleported them all to the first aid tent last night. “Neat trick. So that’s how you kept getting out of your cage. Do all unicorns do that?”
Flash snorted in denial. She pranced on the spot, arcing her neck in obvious pride. Candice received a mental picture of purple flowers and brilliant amethysts, the exact color of Flash’s eyes. Somehow, the image dripped with smugness.
“Okay, okay, I get it.” Candice booped Flash on the nose, punctuating the little unicorn’s over-inflated ego. “You’re a ch
ild genius. Don’t get too full of yourself, kiddo. You still nearly got in trouble over your head last night.”
Flash’s ears drooped. She gave Candice a mournful look. A ghostly white apparition shimmered through Candice’s head, along with a heartbreaking sense of confusion and loneliness.
Wystan was right, Candice realized, recognizing the shape that Flash was trying to convey. She doesn’t think of that creature as a monster. She only sees her mom.
“It’s okay, baby girl.” Candice stroked Flash’s soft fur, trying very hard to bury her own worries under a surface layer of sunny confidence. She didn’t know how much of her own thoughts the baby unicorn could sense. “We’re gonna fix everything. You’ll see.”
Flash perked up again, beaming out a kaleidoscope of rainbow images. Amidst the whirling, dancing impressions, Candice glimpsed Wystan, tall and strong, with herself at his side. A sense of total confidence and trust accompanied the picture.
“I wish I really looked the way you see me,” Candice muttered. Through Flash’s eyes, she had great hair. “I’ll do my best to live up to that, kiddo. Now let’s go find you some breakfast.”
Flash flicked her ears, then bounded away—though not in the direction of the path that led back to the main fire camp, and the remains of the animal rescue tents. Instead, she trotted toward the campfire at the center of the Thunder Mountain Hotshot’s encampment.
It wasn’t yet fully dawn, but the camp was starting to stir. A few firefighters did double-takes as the unicorn bounced past. Given that they didn’t drop everything and scramble for cellphone cameras, Candice assumed that they were seeing Flash as a white fawn—startling, but not front-page news.
“It’s okay, she’s with me,” Candice called out to the confused crew as she hurried after Flash. “Animal Rescue Officer! The situation is completely under control!”
“It’s way too early in the morning for that level of optimism,” Blaise fell into step at her side, yawning. The short, curvy woman glanced up at her, brown eyes sharp despite her just-woken-up crankiness. “You feeling a bit better, huh?”
“I think I’ve reached the point of numb acceptance.” Candice shrugged. “Since it doesn’t look like this crazy train is making any stops, guess there’s nothing I can do but ride it to the end. Do you have coffee? Coffee would definitely help.”
“We have…” Blaise hesitated in a way that was not entirely reassuring. “Joe coffee.”
“The best kind of coffee!” said Joe himself, overhearing. The huge man was hunched over a pot simmering on the fire, stirring it with the intense concentration of an alchemist. “Just a few more minutes. You can’t rush perfection.”
Candice looked around for Flash, and found her on the other side of the campfire, next to Callum. He was hand-feeding the unicorn long stalks of fresh-cut grass, with a gentleness that belied his cold, closed expression. Flash was chowing down with extreme enthusiasm, stretching out her neck to demand more.
Well, he turns into a pegasus. She remembered Callum’s shift animal from the introductions Wystan had rattled off last night. Guess he would know what tastes good to a fellow equine.
It was hard not to stare at the shifters, trying to spot the beasts hidden under their skins. Now that she knew their secret, there was a strange sort of vibe to them, a sense of raw animal vitality. Callum had something of a hawk’s brooding wariness combined with a stallion’s restless energy. Even just stirring a pot, Joe moved with a smooth liquid grace of a huge sea creature.
And Blaise…Wystan hadn’t said what sort of shifter she was, but she too had that indefinable sense of power. Candice could almost feel it against her skin, hotter than the smoldering campfire.
“Here.” Blaise passed her a plastic lunch box. “Joe picked up breakfast on his Walk of Shame back to camp.”
“I think you mean Swagger of Glory,” Joe said without looking around. “And you should be thanking me for persuading the head cook to whip us up an early batch. She likes me.”
“Your indiscriminate conquests are occasionally useful,” Blaise conceded.
“I resent that,” Joe said indignantly. “I am extremely discriminating. There are just a lot of women in the world.”
Candice opened the box to find a steaming pile of pancakes swamped in syrup and butter, with four thick slabs of sausage. Her stomach growled, reminding her that she’d only eaten half of dinner yesterday.
Several busy minutes later, she’d taken the edge off her hunger enough to experience a pang of guilt. Wystan had to be starving as well.
“I should go wake up Wystan,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. She could just see his blanket-shrouded form through the scattered rows of tents. “He’s missing out.”
“Don’t worry, we’ve saved him plenty,” said Blaise, gesturing at a waiting stack of boxes. “Let him rest. You’d find it difficult to rouse him, anyway. Rory laid him out with an alpha command.”
“A what?” Candice asked.
“It’s his special power.” Blaise chased a morsel of pancake around the bottom of her own breakfast box, soaking up the last of the syrup. Her tone was as casual as if she was describing Rory’s haircut. “Most mythic shifters—people who turn into creatures like dragons and griffins and whatever rather than regular animals—have some kind of innate ability. Rory’s is his voice. He can do a sort of hypnotic suggestion thing that’s hard to resist.”
“Don’t worry, he only uses it when he really has to,” Joe added. “Like to force Wystan to get some rest. Otherwise the big idiot would have stood guard over you all night.”
Candice wasn’t keen on the sound of Rory’s power, but she had to concede that in this case it had probably been justified. “Huh. Okay. So Rory’s got that alpha voice thing, and Flash teleports—“
Callum’s head jerked up. “Flash does what?”
“Uh.” Candice looked around at them. All three shifters were staring at Flash as though she’d sprouted antlers. The little unicorn flicked her tail, unbothered by the attention. “Is that…not normal?”
“No,” Blaise said, very definitely. “It really is not. I’ve never heard of any shifter that can do that. Especially not a unicorn. They’re all healers.”
“Oh, so that’s Wystan’s special power?” Candice frowned. “Wait, in that case, why didn’t he heal Fenrir?”
From the silence that fell, she’d just put her metaphorical foot into a conversational pothole. Callum’s gaze slid away. Joe was abruptly very interested in stirring his coffee, or whatever he was concocting.
Blaise blew out her breath. “Wystan doesn’t have any powers. Don’t let on we told you. He’s…sensitive about it.”
“Oh.” If the rest of his squadmates had abilities as powerful as Rory’s or Flash’s, Candice could see why. “So what do the rest of you do?”
“I sense people and animals,” Callum said. “Blaise—“
“I sense fires,” Blaise interrupted, throwing Callum a distinctly warning look. “And Fenrir breathes fire, and can phase through solid objects. All pretty standard stuff for a hellhound. The fact that he can also make himself look like an ordinary dog is a bit unusual, though.”
“That’s the unusual part?” Candice muttered.
Blaise flashed a grin at her. “Choo choo. All aboard the crazy train.”
“No kidding.” Shaking her head, Candice turned to Joe. “And what about you?”
“Oh, anyone will tell you that I don’t have any powers,” Joe said easily. “My charm is all natural. If you ask me, shifters without powers are the lucky ones.” He handed her a steaming mug, forestalling any further questions. “Here you go. This will pep you right up.”
Candice eyed the pitch-black contents with some trepidation. She glanced at Blaise. “Do I want to drink this?”
“Depends.” Blaise raised an eyebrow. “Do you want to be very, very awake?”
What Candice wanted was to sleep for about a week, but that wasn’t an option. There was going to be a ton of work
sorting out the damage from the attack on the animal tents. And no doubt there would still be call outs to go to, emergencies to handle…not to mention figuring out what the heck to do about Flash and her mother. She was going to need all her wits about her today.
And that meant caffeine. No matter what form it came in.
Well, no point doing things by halves. With a mental shrug, Candice took a large swig of coffee.
And was immediately extremely awake.
“Candice!” Wystan barreled into her, sending the coffee mug flying. He seized her, pulling her tight against his chest as though to shield her from a lurking sniper. His head swiveled, scanning the surroundings. “What is it? Where’s the danger?”
“Good grief, Joe.” Blaise sounded impressed. “Your coffee triggered Wystan’s mate-protect instinct.”
Joe gazed thoughtfully into the black depths of the pot. “I may have used just a touch too much Tabasco.”
“Wystan,” Candice wheezed, nose flat against Wystan’s pecs. It was a position she would have appreciated, had Joe’s so-called coffee not just scorched her throat and sinuses like red-hot paint stripper. “Can’t breathe.”
He slackened his grip enough for her to turn her head and gulp down air, but his arms stayed locked around her. Both his hair and his eyes were rather wild. “You’re all right? You’re safe?”
“As safe as I can be, given the circumstances.” She coughed, tasting chili-and-caffeine fumes. She suspected they were going to stay with her for some time. “I’m certainly safe from falling asleep anytime within the next seventy-two hours or so.”
Wystan looked like he could do with a shot of Joe’s concoction. He was still staring owlishly around, as though his brain hadn’t yet caught up with his body. Had he really gone from sound asleep to full alert just because she’d been startled by terrible coffee?
It’s true. The realization hit her like a brick to the back of her head. She would have staggered, if Wystan hadn’t been holding her. What he was saying about shifters and true mates, a fated connection…he wasn’t lying. It’s all true.