by Zoe Chant
*We’re definitely going to have to do something about that,* Sheena murmured as the ruined houses passed by outside, and her psychic voice tasted like a bonfire.
The mob reformed outside the only house that had been left unscathed by Parker’s attack: her aunts’ patchwork villa. Fiona and Rena were standing together at the front door. Fleance watched them exchange an exhausted glance.
Heather tutted. “They could have left us a better park!” she complained, hauling the steering wheel around and blocking another car in as she found a spot.
Sheena squeezed Fleance’s hand and slithered into the tiny gap between their car and the next. *You can’t say I didn’t warn you.*
Fleance frowned as he opened his door. *What do you mean?*
He soon found out.
Relatives surrounded him in a swarm. All of them were shouting. Hands clapped him on the shoulder, none of them clearly connected to any of the people moving around him. Names went in one ear and out the other. Someone pressed a filled roll into Fleance’s hand.
“Better get stuck in now, mate, they’re a pack of magpies around here!” someone—possibly the same someone, possibly not—bawled in the vicinity of his eardrum.
“Thanks,” he said, feeling dizzy. When had he made it all the way up to the house? His brain hadn’t been involved in any decision to move, that was for sure. The flock had moved, and he’d been swept along with it.
He was beginning to understand what Sheena meant about going along with the flock. And why her sheep sometimes wanted to run in its own direction.
“No worries. Someone’s gotta remember to keep everyone fed while Heather’s on the warpath.”
He had no idea who the man was who’d just given him a sandwich. *A cousin,* Sheena said when he sent her a desperate question. He couldn’t see her and was seriously considering resorting to tracing her using his pack sense, when she pushed through the crowd. He grabbed her hand, trying not to feel like he was grabbing for a lifesaver.
*How many cousins do you have?*
*Jeez, I don’t know. Too many?*
Fleance barely managed to take a single bite of the filled roll before he found himself dragged into the kitchen and installed at a rough-hewn dining table. Someone pressed a bottle of beer into his free hand as Sheena elbowed her way in beside him. The two of them were at the heart of a whirling storm of her family, all emanating concern and curiosity.
“I’m fine,” Sheena said in response to a question he didn’t catch. “Really! Better than fine. I’m not going to catch cold from being outside for half a minute.”
*You could just shift and show them,* Fleance suggested. She shot him a dirty look.
*Sure, if we want half of them shifting in shock and trampling through the house.* Sheena snorted.
Her mother narrowed her eyes. It was a distressingly familiar expression, and Fleance wondered if Sheena knew just how much of her own stubborn nature was part of her sheep shifter heritage, not something new from her hellsheep’s influence.
Someone held a phone up, screen towards Fleance and Sheena. A young woman who looked Sheena’s age, with long dark hair and what was now a familiar expression of mixed exasperation and worry on her face, stared out at them.
“Aroha!” Sheena cried out.
“I can’t believe you!” the woman on the phone yelled back, her voice tinny through the speakers. “I stop talking to you for half a day and you burn down an entire village!”
“That wasn’t me! It was a hellhound!”
“A what?!”
Her mother, Heather, cleared her throat. On-screen, Aroha slammed her hands against her face and groaned. “That’s enough,” Heather said placidly. She turned to the two of them sitting on the picnic bench. “Let’s deal with the important things first.”
Fleance saw Sheena revving herself up to complain again that she wasn’t hurt, she wasn’t too cold or too tired or too hungry she was fine, when Heather followed up with: “How did you two meet?”
The mate bond trembled with indignation, but Sheena covered it well. Fleance hid his grin. *Now you’re indignant she’s not asking after you?*
*Hush, you.* Sheena ran her fingers through her hair. “Funny you should say that. I was about to run into a burning building—”
“Sheena!”
“—but then Fleance turned up and ran in for me, which was real helpful. It meant that I had the first bash at this dickhead hellhound shifter who turned up…”
“No!”
Fleance began to suspect as the story unraveled that despite her protestations Sheena actually quite liked scandalizing her family. He joined in the retelling where necessary, but mostly sat and enjoyed Sheena winding up her audience. Even in Pine Valley, he’d never been so close to the center of such a clearly loving group of people.
These people were real family. Not just the shared blood he had with Angus. Even if Sheena couldn’t remember all of her cousins’ names or how they were related to her—and he gathered, from a few whispered remarks, that she wasn’t alone in that—they were all ride or die for her. People talked about herd mentality like it was a bad thing, but if it meant everyone coming together to protect one member of the herd from an outside threat?
He wrapped his hand around Sheena’s as she skipped over the non-PG parts of the story and began to describe their early-morning car race out of town. The mate bond hummed, and he let some of his feelings filter through it: his joy at seeing her surrounded by her family, how new it was for him to see people all coming together like this.
How it felt like a perfect Christmas miracle.
She raised one eyebrow but didn’t say anything to him until she reached a dramatic pause in her story: “There was nothing I could do. If Fleance didn’t agree to obey Parker’s every order, I’d be under his control forever.”
Everyone gasped. Sheena’s aunt Rena, who was standing by the door, covered her face. “This is all my fault,” she muttered. “If we hadn’t let him get his claws into us…”
Fiona put an arm around her shoulders and held her close.
Sheena’s eyes sparkled mischievously. “But then, just when it looked like there was no way out—”
“You must have been terrified,” another aunt/cousin/miscellaneous relation burst out.
“Well, yeah, I—”
“But you shouldn’t feel bad about not being able to get away,” another relative said quickly. “We all know—”
“Poor wee lamb!” Another aunt—How many does she have?—squeezed Sheena’s hand. “You must have been so frightened!”
Sheena’s cheeks started to turn red. The smell of burning lanolin filled the air. Fleance cleared his throat. *Babe…*
She gave him a long-suffering look. *See? They literally can’t imagine any scenario in which I did more than get in the way.*
“And out by the geysers! We all know what you’re like with the thermal wonderland around here.”
“Ooh, yes. Remember last time they came to visit? That sinkhole?”
Sheena’s cheeks were the color of traffic lights. “I—”
“But you did get away.” Her mother, Heather, turned kind eyes on Fleance. “We’re so glad you were there, Fleance. I don’t want to think what might have happened if you weren’t around.”
She still thinks I saved Sheena? Even after what I said back at the hotel? No wonder his mate was glowing with frustration. Her family were all loving and supportive… and couldn’t even conceive that she might have been the one who’d saved him. Who’d saved them both.
“I hardly had anything to do with it,” he tried to say, but no one was listening. He glanced over at Sheena. He wasn’t stupid enough to send calming thoughts through the mate bond to his beloved but was relieved when he saw that despite the conversation battering back and forth over their heads, she looked more amused than enraged.
*I’m not mad,* she explained, shrugging. *I just… this is exactly what I expected. Total support, and total treating me like a
particularly dim soft toy.*
“Where is this Parker now, then?” her father asked.
“Someone must have dealt with him.”
“I bet it’s one of those dragons she was talking about. Far, a dragon shifter! I hope we get to meet them.”
“Oh—look at her, she’s all red. She must be feeling sick, poor thing.”
“Good thing that dragon showed up.”
“She does look feverish, doesn’t she? Sheena, lamb, do you want a Panadol? I’ve got some in my purse.”
“I’m not sick!” Sheena burst out and slammed her hands palm-down on the table. “And there wasn’t a—”
*Of course she’s sick. This is just classic Sheena. Come on, I’ll put the jug on for a lemon and honey drink.*
“I don’t need a lemon and honey! Seriously, Mum, I’m not a kid anymore!” Something inside Sheena must have snapped. Even her acceptance of her family’s view of her couldn’t survive everything. “I’ll show you—”
The room quietened.
“You’ll always be my little lamb, sweetheart,” her mother told her. “And you’re not the only one who’s had a long day.” She rubbed her eyes, suddenly looking exhausted, and Fleance felt Sheena’s heart lurch. He reached out to her gently and she leaned into his touch.
“Oh,” Sheena mumbled. She whispered into Fleance’s mind: *I thought it was normal that my whole family would somehow show up out of nowhere, but it’s not, is it? They all raced here from across the whole bloody country because they thought I’d got myself into real trouble this time.* Sheena bit her lip. *Gotta admit, I was planning on going for the whole ‘surprise, motherfuckers’, but now, I think…*
She stretched one hand across the table and took her mother’s hand. “I’m all right, Mum. Really. You don’t need to worry about me anymore.”
“Of course I need to worry about you!” Heather sniffed, half-laughing. “My little lamb, always getting in over her head.”
Sheena laughed. “It’ll take a bit more to get in over my head these days, Mum.” She squeezed Heather’s hand. “When Parker bit me and my body tried to fight off the hellhound infection, my sheep… disappeared.”
“But it came back,” her mother interjected. She closed her eyes briefly and Fleance felt a strange pressure through the mate bond; the feeling of being watched, but experienced through someone else’s skin. “I can still see you there, part of our big old flock.”
“It did come back. Just… a bit different.”
“What do you mean?”
Sheena’s smile started off nervous, but she clearly couldn’t hold it back for long. Glee spread across her face, bright and shining, and Fleance wondered how much of the energy burning behind her eyes was her inner animal and how much was herself, thrilling with excitement. “I didn’t turn into a hellhound. But I didn’t totally not turn into one, either. And you don’t have to worry about me now, because I’m not a little lamb anymore. I’m…”
Sparks flashed over her skin. Her body shimmered at the edges, light and shadows dancing like sunspots, and the smell of wool and woodsmoke filled the air.
*…a hellsheep.* Sheena’s voice crackled like a bonfire.
Fleance blinked as the lights of Sheena’s shift temporarily dazzled him. When his vision cleared, Sheena’s hellsheep was taking up more space in the small kitchen than he’d thought existed. Fire sprouted from its eyes and licked along its curly black-and-white coat.
It got exactly the reaction that Fleance suspected Sheena had been hoping for—before she’d decided to ease her family into the news rather than jump it on them. He wondered just how much her hellsheep was steamrolling Sheena’s gentler feelings. Not that it wanted to scare anyone—he could feel as clear as his own thoughts that it was just overjoyed to be able to show off.
Her mother stood up, mouth wide open. Several possibly-aunts swore; one could-be-an-uncle made a sound that was close to a shriek. There was a flutter of wings by the door, and suddenly a small bird with darkly iridescent plumage and a white bit of fluff at its throat was perched in Fiona’s hair. She patted it absently, mouthing something Fleance couldn’t make out.
*See? Not so little,* Sheena said, kicking her back legs happily. She’d half-phased through the window, Fleance realized belatedly; that was how she could still ‘fit’ in there without crowding everyone else out. *I’ll have to try a lot harder to get in over my head now!*
Her mother just stared at her. Beside her, Sheena’s dad pushed his hat back off his head.
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.
*And as for Parker…* Sheena looked over her parents’ heads—which wasn’t difficult—towards Fiona and the bird-shaped Rena. *He’s not in charge anymore. I am. I’m the alpha of his pack. And I’m going to make sure he fixes everything he broke here. Down to the last singed flax bush.*
Heather was still staring at her. “Sheena, you’re…”
Sheena lowered her massive head to look at her. A hint of clover mingled with her hellfire scent. *Finally big enough to deal with the trouble I keep running into by myself?*
Heather let out a breath that was half-sigh, half-laughter. She drew herself up. “Big enough? Look at you! Do you know how much extra energy a form like that must need? And you haven’t eaten a thing since you got here!” She put her hands on her hips and shouted over Sheena’s huge, slightly-on-fire shoulder to a group of men gathered around a grill outside. “Kev! Gav! Hurry up with those sausages!” She reached up and patted the side of Sheena’s nose with a smile on her face. “I don’t care how big you are, my wee lamb. I’ll still worry about you as long as I know you’re out there getting into mischief. That’s my job.”
“She’s got me to help her with that, now,” Fleance added. Heather turned her eyes to him.
“If that’s meant to reassure me,” she said, a sparkle in her eye, “then you have a lot to learn about my Sheena. You’ll end up helping her into trouble more than you help her out of it.”
“That sounds just fine to me,” Fleance said, and the golden rope that connected him to Sheena glowed as brightly as the twin suns in the center of his mind.
Much later, after Heather had made good on her threat to feed Sheena until she was bursting in order to fuel her hellsheep properly, the two of them managed to slip away into the trees.
Sheena had managed to pull her clothes with her when she shifted back into human form. She squeezed herself up against him, sliding one hand up under his jacket. A thrill shivered across his skin at her touch.
*That could have gone worse,* she said. *I think they like you.*
Fleance stretched his hearing out to catch the conversation from one of the nearer clusters. *I think they’re already picking out baby names.*
*Oh, God. If we don’t act quickly we’ll wake up tomorrow morning with the rest of our lives planned out for us.* Sheena nuzzled against him with a groan.
“You’re lucky to have a family that cares about you.” Fleance put his arms around her.
“And you’re brave, saying that out loud where they might hear you,” she quipped, then sighed. “I hate to admit it, but you might be right. I’ve always thought they smothered me, but seeing them all here today… it’s because they care about me. Not just because they want to wrap me up in cotton wool.” She snorted, and a puff of amusement raced along the mate bond. “In retrospect, if they’d actually been smothering me properly all these years, I wouldn’t have caused them nearly as much stress as I have done.”
“Really, they’re the victims here.”
“You are so right. Better say it a bit louder, the aunties will love you forever.” She pulled his head down and snuck a kiss that drove the last of the strain of the previous few days from his shoulders. “What about your family? Not Parker. Your pack back in Pine Valley.”
“They’re not my pack anymore, remember?” he reminded her with a fond grimace. “You took care of that.”
They walked deeper into the trees together, picking their way
over frozen leaf litter and tough, winding roots. The tree ferns and palm-like plants looked more exotic the longer Fleance looked at them, and he couldn’t help but wonder aloud what they would look like in the summer.
“Very green,” Sheena said flatly. “These ones have white flowers, but for the most part it’s just green, green, green. And—my bag!”
She dashed over to a bright blue backpack, which was lying abandoned at the base of one of the fern-like trees.
“I dropped it when I smelled the smoke…” She trailed off, frowning. “That feels like years ago, now.”
“You were planning a trip, weren’t you?”
“Huh! I was meant to fly out of here tomorrow evening. Still am, technically. Auckland to Honolulu to San Francisco, and then… wherever the road took me. Meaning wherever I ended up after my sheep does its thing.” She stared at her pack and nibbled on her lower lip. “You know, before I met you, I thought that once I found my mate everything would slot into place. I’d put down roots wherever I was and get stuck into the rest of my life. Which would mean right here, I guess.”
Right here? Fleance let the thought sink in. Then he looked up again, at the frozen forest that surrounded them, and let that sink in, too.
He’d barely had time to appreciate New Zealand as a place. His arrival and memory of everything from Auckland south was a blur, and if he’d thought about Rotorua at all, he’d thought it was a fittingly hellish backdrop to his mission. The sulfuric gases, boiling mud pits and steam gushing from natural vents at the sides of the roads had seemed eerily apt.
Now, though, he could see the beauty in it. This landscape was strange, almost alien, like the photos he’d seen of Yellowstone, but made stranger still by the unfamiliar trees and bushes and the birdsong that fluted from hidden branches. The landscape seemed new and somehow incredibly ancient at the same time, and somehow alive. It wasn’t monstrous, or some vision of hell. It was beautiful.
“I could see myself staying,” he said, pressing his lips against the top of Sheena’s head.