by Zoe Chant
This is not the time! she told it, exasperated. Why do you always—
Another swell of fear rose up, coiling around her like an icy wind trying to find a way in. Sheena held perfectly still. This wasn’t normal. She’d been afraid before, scared, startled, but nothing like this.
She looked at the tree line and dread trickled down her spine. It was twenty meters away, maybe less. She could usually run that distance without even noticing. In fact, she generally called it a win when her sheep got less than a hundred meters before she noticed.
Run, the fear told her, and crashed down over her head like a surf wave pushing her underwater. Run back where she’d come from. Back towards the flames.
Sheena bared her teeth. This wasn’t her fear. Something was doing this to her. And if it thought it could herd her, well, she’d show it exactly how good she was at not paying attention to anyone else’s instructions—
Hissing laughter filled her head. Sharp fangs snapped at the back of her neck and Sheena jerked forward, her moment of bravery vanishing like mist. She twisted around and seeing nothing where she’d just felt teeth was worse than seeing those burning eyes in the dark hallway.
Because it’s behind you, always behind you, don’t let it catch you.
Sheena lurched forwards. Her sheep yanked at her legs, almost making her stumble, and then her foot caught on something. The ground rushed up to smack her. She flung her hands forward to break her fall and her wrist folded beneath her, but it was her ankle that twisted painfully as she went down.
Teeth gritted against the pain, she rolled onto her knees. I know you’re trying to help but just let me do this, I can’t get away if we’re fighting over my legs!
What are you doing? her sheep cried out, aghast. Don’t keep running! I’m sorry about your ankle but I had to do something!
Sheena stared at the root she’d tripped over. When her sheep had tried to take over her body, she’d stumbled directly onto it. You did this? Sheena screamed at it. Are you trying to get us killed?
You’re the one trying to get us killed! You keep running towards the fire!
Because it’s trying to herd me there! I know that! Pain was still shooting through her ankle and she focused on that, not her sudden panic. Her heart was beating so hard she felt like she could hardly breath past it. How is making it so I can’t get away going to help?
Confusion throbbed in her sheep’s voice. There’s nothing to get away from!
How can you say that? Can’t you feel it?
Feel what? You can’t keep running into the fire! This isn’t New Year’s! Those are burning houses, not a bonfire! I know I got startled before and joked about being fireproof, but are you trying to get yourself killed?
Sheena’s ears were buzzing. She was so terrified she could barely think straight, and now her sheep was saying it couldn’t feel what she was feeling?
Why are you so scared? her sheep nuzzled against her. There’s nothing here. It’s just you and me.
But didn’t you sense it? Sheena pressed her hands against her eyes. Every second she stayed here arguing with her sheep was a second she wasn’t using to get away. She clambered to her feet, wincing as her ankle complained. Didn’t you see the eyes?
The what?
Behind the door—
I didn’t see anything behind the door! You stuffed me in the picnic basket! You know I can’t see anything from in there!
Which had been the whole point. Sheena took a deep breath and edged along the path, wincing as she put weight on her ankle. Something is chasing us and now I can’t run! Do you want me to just lie down here and wait to die?
What are you talking about? Nothing’s chasing us! You’re acting like a crazy person and that’s MY job!
Her mouth went dry. Fear rolled around her, a solid force pushing her to her knees. Can’t you feel that? Sheena almost sobbed.
And then it was gone.
Sheena ran her hands down her face. Gone, yes, but for how long? It was like a light-switch in her brain. Terror, then nothing to show for it except her shaking breaths and sweaty hands. Not that she could see anything even when she was afraid. Except for those eyes.
If they were even real. Sheena swallowed. Her sheep hadn’t seen the eyes, and it hadn’t felt what she felt. What if she really was losing it?
Maybe everyone is right. Her heart sank. I can’t cope alone. If I can’t even trust my own eyes…
Now I don’t want you to be upset, her sheep said nervously.
Too bloody late for that. Sheena sat back.
But I think we should get up.
The fire. I know. Wouldn’t that just be perfect. Run around like a fucking lunatic and then just sit here and let the fire roll straight over her. Totally in-character. No one would be surprised.
Well, yes, the fire, her sheep said gently. But also… I told you I could smell something before, didn’t I?
When you took over my eyes and ears so I couldn’t see my way out of here? Sheena felt suddenly exhausted. So what if she burned to death? It seemed inevitable now. She should just lie down right here and prove all her family right.
Yes. Promise you won’t be mad?
Sheena took a deep breath. Why would I be—
A new scent flooded through her. Not the sweet-sick stench from before, or the throat-scorching smell of burning buildings. Something clean and masculine that filled her senses.
Sheena opened her eyes and looked in the direction her sheep was pushing her.
“Oh,” she tried to say, but her whole body was paralyzed by shock and it came out more like “Oaaargh.”
There was a man standing on the road, surrounded by burning buildings. Even through the smoke and heat-shimmer she could see that he was tall and leanly muscled. His black leather jacket and dark glasses made his pale skin and red hair all the more striking. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses, but that didn’t matter. He was the whole deal. Everything. So much muchness her mind stuttered over it.
Don’t be mad, her sheep repeated, and Sheena’s mouth dropped open.
I’m not mad, she told it. I mean, I might have gone crazy, but I’m not angry.
Oh, good! Her sheep’s relief was so intense Sheena felt drunk. Or maybe she would have felt drunk anyway. Here was something that made sense. Forget the strange fear, forget jumping at shadows that Sheena-the-human couldn’t explain and her sheep couldn’t even sense, here was something that they both understood bone-deep.
This man was her mate.
He looked as stunned as she felt—for a moment. Before Sheena could even think about what she could say, let alone twist her tongue around the words, he walked towards her, moving with the casual grace of someone who never tripped over their own feet.
She felt dizzy, as though she was standing on the edge of a cliff. Which she was. Metaphorically speaking. Her life was splitting off into before and after and she was teetering on the edge of after. This was it. He was it. This gorgeous stranger whose hair caught the light like a live flame.
She didn’t wait for him to reach her. For one glorious moment, she didn’t even care that she was losing her mind and covered in soot and had probably singed her eyebrows off. Her sheep skipped like a lamb as she half-ran, half-stumbled to meet him.
He stopped in front of her and reached out with one hand, as though he wasn’t sure she was real.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
His voice was like sunlight on her skin. She swallowed, opened her mouth, and absolutely failed to make any words come out. “Hngk?” she managed.
“You’re hurt.” His eyebrows came together above his sunglasses and he hesitated with his hand almost touching her face. “What happened h—”
He didn’t get any further because Sheena threw herself into his arms and kissed him.
It should have been awkward. She barely came up to his collarbone and she’d just lunged at him with no warning but somehow it worked. His arms folded ar
ound her like she belonged in them. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pressed her lips against his and, God, he tasted like running wild felt, like tall grass brushing her sides and the sky wide and open above. He kissed her back, tentative until her tongue brushed against his and then he was all hunger.
Sheena’s heart felt like it was going to break out of her chest. The shadowy mental paddock where her sheep spent most of its time filled with light and that light spilled out to fill every part of her. It sang through her veins from her heart to the very tips of her fingers, flaring like the sun.
Magic. Of course, just being a shifter was magic, but it was normal magic. She’d been a shifter all her life. She’d never known anything like this. It felt like she had swallowed the sun and the only thing holding it in was the mental fence she had built in her mind.
Her skin sang where her mate touched it. Her lips tingled with excitement. She felt more alive than she ever had done. For the first time, she wasn’t too small or too weak or too adorable to be taken seriously—she was just herself and herself was enough. If she’d had any doubts about that then the possessive way her mate was crushing her against his chest would have banished them instantly.
So, what the hell did she need those walls inside her mind for? The ones she used to keep everyone out. Right now, they were keeping all that light in, and…
This man was everything she wanted, and she wanted all of him.
She let down her defenses and the light filling her veins poured into him.
3
Fleance
He should have said something.
And then he couldn’t say anything, because her lips were pressed against his with a wild intensity that drove all the words from his mind. There was only her, this woman he knew nothing about but knew in his soul he was meant to be with.
His mate.
Her fingers tangled in his hair, pulling him down to her height. He wrapped himself around her, her shudder of breath as their bodies pressed close echoing in his own chest. Her scent overwhelmed him, clover honey and spring blossoms, the promise of long afternoons and longer evenings. Was she a shifter? The moment the question appeared in his mind he knew the answer. Of course she was. He could sense it, a hint of her inner animal twined around everything else he could feel about her. Just as his hellhound was a part of everything that made him who he was, even if it had taken him this long to realize it. He wasn’t a man with a hellhound tacked on, he was a hellhound shifter, whole, and thank God he was because that wholeness made him hers.
He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her with all his heart. Something unspooled deep in his chest in the shadows where his hellhound lurked, but it wasn’t a shadow; it was light, gleaming so brightly gold it put the sun to shame. It unfurled like a shoot pushing through the snow, one leaf then two then enough to spread through his veins until it found the same golden light in her lips, in her fingertips pressed against his skin, in the softness of her cheek and the determined line of her jaw beneath his palms. Her heart and his, bound together.
He gasped. Their lips parted, but the spell didn’t break. The shining light from the deepest part of his soul was still alight, a golden rope that connected him to the woman in his arms.
“Oh, wow,” she breathed, her eyelids fluttering. Her breath hitched, and emotions shimmered down the golden rope: wonder, confusion, a shiver of embarrassment. “I, uh. I didn’t expect that to happen so fast.”
That? Fleance was confused. He’d known he was her mate the moment he saw her; wasn’t that the way it was meant to work?
The golden light connecting them thrummed like a plucked guitar string. “Oh,” Fleance said out loud. That.
The golden rope. A bond. The mate bond.
“Also, have to admit I thought it would be more, uh, metaphorical?” The mate bond twanged again. She laughed, delight burbling out of her like water from a fountain. “Holy… wow.”
Her eyes focused on his. They were as bright as her voice, her laughter, the light that connected them. Flecks of gold sparkled in warm brown, like slices of sunlight cutting through the canopy to dance on the forest floor.
“I’m Sheena,” she said.
“Flea—Fleance.” He caught himself just in time and gave his full name, not the embarrassing nickname.
She smiled. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
There was more he should be saying. He knew that the same way he vaguely remembered there was something he should have said earlier, before the kiss that broke his world into before her and the rest of his life.
The smoke… his hellhound whispered. Fleance could have hit himself. He was standing around like a stunned fish while buildings burned all around him—and his mate. He had to get her out of here.
“I can’t believe this is happening.” Sheena pulled her hands away from his shoulders but kept them resting on his chest, as though she couldn’t bear to stop touching him. He understood. He didn’t want to lose her touch, either, the way her waist molded to his hand, the punch-drunk wonder of her body so close to his. “I thought my sheep had really lost it this time. Or I had. I thought I saw…” She shook her head. “But my sheep said there wasn’t anything. I must have breathed in too much smoke.” She half-smiled, as though she was trying to convince herself.
He wanted to get lost in her eyes, the tentative quirk at the corner of her lips, the almost tangible need to think that everything was fine, everything was normal, no problems here.
No. What he wanted didn’t matter. What his hellhound wanted didn’t matter now, either. What mattered was that he had chased the shadows in his mind to this remote, abandoned community, and although Parker’s signature was clear in the burning buildings, he couldn’t sense the other hellhound anywhere. No scent or sound or sight of the man who’d once controlled his life. And nothing supernatural, either. No ghost of the old chain around his soul, dragging him back.
And his mate had just said—
“You thought you saw something?” A trickle of foreboding made its way down Fleance’s spine.
“It—” She shrugged, and even without the mate bond he could have seen her thoughts on her face: No, that’s crazy, it can’t have happened, there’s nothing wrong…
The hairs on the backs of his arms rose. Inside him, his hellhound jumped to high alert.
“We need to get out of here.” He wrapped one arm protectively around Sheena and hurried back up the road towards the least on-fire part of the subdivision. *What did you see?*
*Nothing.*
Fleance clenched his jaw. The word had arrived in his head accompanied by a tremble of fear.
He hadn’t been able to sense Parker. He’d been glad not to feel any remnant of the control the man once had over him. It had put one of his fears to rest: that Parker would still somehow be able to control him, despite the fact that Caine had taken over the pack.
He’d been a fool. Without the pack sense, Parker could make himself as untraceable to Fleance as he was to any other human or shifter. How could he protect anyone from a threat he couldn’t even sense?
The same way the people I hurt couldn’t do anything against me.
Sheena stiffened in his arms and for one horrible moment, he thought he’d let his thoughts reach her mind. Then he saw her attention wasn’t on him.
“The motorway’s back that way,” she said, pointing behind them.
“I took a—I won’t call it a shortcut,” he said. “My car’s this way.”
“Sweet. Wait, my phone—” She looked up towards the patchwork house that overlooked the rest of the community and fear flickered across her face. It was only momentary, and as quick as it had appeared it vanished, replaced by a strangely frantic determination.
Or not so strange. Fleance tightened his arm around her.
“I left my phone at the house,” she said. Her voice was normal, but the mate bond screamed like a steel cable under pressure. “I should—”
“We’re getting out
of here,” he reminded her.
“Without calling the fire brigade?”
He recognized her sudden stubbornness. When nothing else made sense, cling to the things that did. Fewer people called on emergency services than you might expect, when under attack by hellhounds, and those that did found that human cops and firefighters were less help than they might have hoped.
Hope. It was hope that was behind the stubbornness, the need to believe that everything was going to go back to normal. And much as he wished it didn’t have to be so, hope was a luxury he couldn’t let his mate be fooled by.
“The fire service can’t help with this,” he began, and Sheena spun out of his arms.
“What are you talking about? It’s in the name. Fire. Which there’s a shit ton of here, if you hadn’t noticed!”
“It’s not the most dangerous thing here.” She raised her chin, defiance on every inch of her face, as he bulled onwards. “You know it’s true. You sensed something else, didn’t you? Something you won’t let yourself believe is real.”
Uncertainty cracked the edge of her expression. “N-no…”
Her face was wearing the same tense mask Fleance had seen on so many other people before. Adrift in uncertainty, she was searching for something, anything, to cling to. She’d mistrust the proof of her own eyes and ears to convince herself that everything was fine.
That’s what hellhound magic did best.
His hellhound rose up inside him. Parker was here. Which meant Sheena wasn’t safe. He’d only met her a handful of minutes ago and he was already failing at keeping her from harm.
His hellhound snarled. I won’t let him hurt her!
At last, Fleance thought. A good use for his hellhound’s frustrated rage. He let its fire build inside him, a fierce heat next to the shining light of his connection to Sheena.
He would get Sheena out of here. Then he’d come back and find Parker, and—
Suddenly, Sheena jerked away from him, her eyes wide.