by Zoe Chant
But before he could decide, he heard little feet in footie pajamas hissing on the floor and Pink was back, pushing the kitchen door shut behind her with careful fingers. In one hand she carried the television channel changer. She trotted over and stood beside Xi Yong, and pointed the channel changer at the human shape on the floor.
“Woe-bot,” she said, and pressed her forefinger on the PLAY button.
Of course nothing happened.
Then she gripped the channel changer, both arms stiff, and pressed the PLAY button with both thumbs.
Xi Yong understood then, with a swoop of internal laughter—and sorrow when he saw the anticipatory delight in her face turn to utter betrayal.
She dropped the channel changer. Her eyes filled with tears, and she crumpled to the floor.
“That was a good idea for a robot,” he said, crouching down next to the little girl. “But robots have to have different types of parts. They need electric wires, and joints that can help them move.”
Pink just sobbed desolately. Her pain was an arrow to Xi Yong’s heart. He understood that to a three-year-old, a lesson in mechanics would be no consolation.
He looked around. How to comfort her? The sun was still too far off to borrow its fire, and anyway, perhaps fire was a terrible idea to play with around someone so small. She could not recognize the difference between his benevolent fire and that in the stove, for example, which no three-year-old ought to be experimenting with.
But the moon still hung low, just above the treetops, visible in the kitchen window.
He lifted his hands to gather some of its light, pulled it into his palms, rolled it into a ball, and then tossed it down so that it splashed, and rippled across the floor in widening circles.
Pink lifted her head, wiped her face on her sleeve, and watched the slow curls of light as it spread outward, dimmed, and vanished. Then she turned wide eyes to Xi Yong.
He smiled. “Would you like another one?”
She nodded, hiccoughing, tear stains on her cheeks gleaming in the moonlight.
He raised his hands and pulled light into them, rolled it together, and this time tossed it toward the ceiling. When the light ball nearly touched the plaster, he sent a mental command. The light ball burst apart and showered down in glitters of moonlight.
Pink’s face turned up, her lips parted. She reached fingers up. “I make it!”
“I will have to help you. Okay?” Xi Yong asked.
At her happy nod, he pulled more light, formed a smaller ball, and said, “Hold out your hands.”
Pink stuck her small hands out, then snatched them back. “Hurt?”
“No,” he said. “Not when I do it. But other fires will hurt very much. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” She smiled and stuck her hands out stiffly. Concentrating on keeping the light ball in the air, he pretended to set it on her hand. It floated there. She stood so still she scarcely seemed to be breathing, and gazed into the light. It glowed in her wide eyes.
“Toss it,” he said.
She patted the light ball then tried to throw it upward. He used his mental command to send it splashing against the ceiling. Then it rained down, this time in crystalline snowflakes. They faded before they reached the ground.
“I make them,” she demanded, waving a dimpled hand at the window. “Show me!”
“You have to be like me,” he said.
She looked up in question, and her lip trembled.
“It’s something I can do because of the way I am,” he said. “I’m a qilin.”
“See-win?” Pink ventured.
Ordinarily Xi Yong was careful not to shift around people. But he felt differently about children. He didn’t want to lie to them any more than he wanted to diminish their sense of wonder in the world’s possibilities. So, because she’d worked so hard, only to smash against the realities of engineering—and maybe because he was still a little tired—he said, “You remember the horse with antlers that you saw? That was me.”
And he shifted to his qilin, right there in the kitchen.
Pink’s eyes widened. He saw her expression of wonder, and knew that the failed robot experiment was forgotten. So was her frustration at not being able to play with light herself. He smiled down, seeing his fiery crimson form reflected in her huge pupils, and rejoiced as she gave a crow of delight and danced on her tippy toes.
Because he was in qilin form, his senses reached—
And caught on a glow brighter than light, truer than gold.
It was right behind him.
He turned, shifting back to his human form between one heartbeat and the next, and froze as he stared straight into the wide brown eyes of his mate.
The man stared back, breath caught. Xi Yong saw his pulse in the open collar of his shirt. This was a man he had not yet met, tall, with curling hair and a beauty that reached into and forever refashioned Xi Yong’s heart.
The man blinked, blinked again, then took a tentative step inside. “I think . . . we haven’t met yet? I’m Isidor Sabetai.”
“I am Qilin Xi Yong,” said Xi Yong. He forgot his American manners entirely, and bowed.
“Horsie,” Pink crowed. “Fah horsie!”
“Fire horsie indeed.” Isidor dropped to one knee, his voice calm, though Xi Yong could hear his frantic heartbeat, and longed to reassure him. “But what have we here?” He glanced at the cookware still on the floor. He looked up at Xi Yong.
And smiled.
It was a tentative smile, full of question—and hope.
Xi Yong forced his frozen tongue to move. “Pink tried to make a robot with this cookware and that channel changer. It’s actually very clever thinking. She just needs a few lessons in mechanical engineering.”
“Which we’ll make sure she gets. I firmly believe that Pink will rule the world someday,” Isidor said, his eyes alight as he laughed up over his shoulder at Xi Yong. “And it’ll be the better for it. Pink, it’s time to put the cooking things away.”
“’kay.”
“Shall I help you?” Isidor said to the child, but his eyes stayed on Xi Yong, wide with wonder.
Xi Yong could do nothing but gaze back, as all the world stilled.
Pink lifted the bread pans and trotted to the cupboard as Isidor knelt there ready to help. He said softly, “How have we not met?”
Xi Yong wanted nothing more than to tell him everything, but settled for, “I have been outside most of the time.”
Isidor passed his hand over his eyes. A tremble in his fingers shot a pang into Xi Yong’s heart. He said, with care, “So . . . what I saw?”
“I am a qilin shifter,” Xi Yong said, and held his breath.
“Shifter . . .”
Isidor paused to help Pink’s small fingers manage the cookie sheets. As he slid them beneath the others in the cupboard, he said, “Once, when I was ten or so, I was at summer camp. A thunderstorm came out of nowhere, and we were supposed to stay in our cabin. But, being kids, we dared each other to go outside. There was a great flash of lightning. In its light I saw an eagle.”
His hand rose in the air, making a gliding motion. “Coming through the trees. Another flash of lightning, even brighter, and that eagle turned into a girl, with long wild hair. She ran off through the trees and vanished. No one ever believed me, so I agreed that it was a dream. And told no one again.” He turned his wide gaze up to Xi Yong. “But I wasn’t dreaming then. And I’m not now.”
“You are not dreaming,” said Xi Yong, and Isidor grinned.
“Awesome,” was all he said—but Xi Yong’s heart beat again, and outside trees soughed, and the fire crackled in the next room. The world had begun again, bright with promise. “Tell me more?”
“Anything,” Xi Yong vowed, “you wish.”
***
Xi Yong felt as light as his qilin as he went through the day’s tasks, helping Doris’s family with their breakfast preparations and then the cleanup of the house before their departure. He would not have be
en surprised to look down and see that his human feet were drifting a few inches above the floor, as his qilin’s hooves often did.
With the house awash in a sea of Lebowitzes, Xi Long and Isidor could not get much time alone, but every time their eyes met through a crowd, every time they passed each other in the hall with arms full of sheets and pillowcases, sparks of warm delight leaped between them.
Even Mentor Fox’s news about the wolf shifters, delivered mentally, could not entirely dampen Xi Yong’s bright spirits. He was vastly relieved to learn that everyone was safe, but he wondered how this would affect their mission. Would the mere presence of the human police be enough to deter Cang from further activities in this area? It was difficult to say; Xi Yong did not pretend to understand the workings of the rogue red dragon’s mind.
Still, as long as Isidor—his mate Isidor, how happy he was to think those words!—was by his side, he could not find it in his heart to worry about anything.
He was glad to see Mentor Fox back safe and sound, and gladder still to see how Doris’s hand sought Mentor Fox’s. The two had worked out their differences, it seemed. Xi Yong was pleased for them.
“We’ll do our last run as soon as everyone departs,” Mentor Fox told Xi Yong quietly, as they passed each other in the doorway, carrying items outside. “What can we do to help the rest of the family get safely on the road?” he said more loudly, directed to Doris.
“Food and suitcases out to the cars,” Doris stated. “The container of perishables is sitting on the sideboard, the suitcases by the stairs. Then the linens have to be folded. The kitchen floor is last, before the final inspection . . .”
Isidor said quietly to Xi Yong, “How about if we take the suitcases out?”
Xi Yong agreed, content to do any job, but happiest to be with his mate.
As they carried the first load to the cars, Isidor turned sparkling eyes to Xi Yong. “I have to confess, I keep expecting to turn my head and find you gone—that I’ve been asleep all this time, and dreaming.”
“Then we share the same dream,” Xi Yong said.
“I’m serious,” Isidor said, but he was smiling. “It usually takes me six months before I feel a relationship is a real thing. If it even gets that far. You and I, we went from zero to sixty in a day.” He huffed a laugh. “Ten minutes, more like. Is that your mate bond?”
“It is yours, too,” Xi Yong said.
Isidor set his pile of plastic tubs down by the Lebowitzes’ car. Then he straightened up and put his hands to his chest. “I feel it. Is it always this way?”
“At its best,” Xi Yong said. “But you must ask Mentor Fox for details in the many ways it can be difficult.”
“I still haven’t had a chance to really talk with him yet. He’s always been in the middle of a group, helping, or else cooking, or else off with Nicola’s Aunt Doris. He seems like the nicest type of guy.”
“Yes,” Xi Yong said soberly.
“And he has mythic powers, too?”
“He does. Very powerful, in his own way. Not violent, if he can help it. Foxes prefer to use their minds, rather than their teeth or tails.”
Isidor leaned against a car. “And there I am again, feeling like I’ve fallen into a dream. The shifter world is . . . I don’t even know what to call it. Weird, and wonderful. Magical, if I can use that word. The word ‘magic’s kind of worn out—people in my life constantly say I have a magic touch, when really all I have is patience. Well, and I’m good at sports.”
“Sports,” Xi Yong repeated. “What sports?”
Isidor gave him a wicked grin. “You’re going to find out, as soon as we’re alone.”
Xi Yong laughed, and then sobered. “There will be danger once all the humans are gone. I’ve told you a little about Cang, but I cannot impress upon you strongly enough how vicious he is. You should leave with the others, rather than waiting for me.”
“But I want to wait for you,” Isidor said quietly. “I won’t let you go into danger without me. That’s what being mates means, isn’t it?”
In all his daydreaming, Xi Yong had never thought of this problem: the cold fear of loving another more than your own life. He would give anything to have Isidor safe, and now he suddenly began to realize what Mentor Fox had been going through with Doris.
But a mate did not cease to be an independent person just because you loved them. They must make their own decisions still.
“Besides,” Isidor added, “Doris is staying too, isn’t she?”
Xi Yong glanced over at Doris, who was helping her sister pack her car. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any sign of Doris packing her things, or heard anyone mention which car she was going in. Somehow he was not surprised. He gave a sigh.
“Very well,” he said. “But please obey all our instructions, no matter how strange-sounding. There may be things happening on the mythic plane that you are not aware of.”
“Mythic plane?”
“Let me tell you of it,” Xi Yong said, and they went inside to get another load.
***
In the end, the fight was over, it seemed, almost before it had begun. Xi Yong’s body still fizzed with the memory of the dragonfire as he had used his qilin light-controlling powers to take it inside himself.
He had never deal with such powerful energy before. For a moment, he had almost been overwhelmed. But then he had felt the strength of the mate bond flare inside him. Isidor didn’t know he was helping, but his awe and pride in Xi Long had bolstered the qilin’s flagging strength, until the terrible, destructive dragonfire was rendered into a shower of harmless light.
As Mikhail the silver dragon took to the air, Isidor pulled Xi Yong into an embrace. Xi Yong felt the tremor of residual fear in him, and the longing to reassure him in all ways possible was nearly overwhelming. But he settled for leaning into his mate’s warmth, grounding himself as the last of the dragon’s energy flowed out of his body into the world around him.
“When the dragon attacked you, I thought for a moment you were going to die,” Isidor murmured into his shoulder. “I never want to feel like that again. I wished I could have done something.”
“You did,” Xi Yong told him. “For shifters, the mate bond provides us strength. I could feel your pride in me. It is because of you that I am alive.”
“Wow.” Isidor laughed softly. “It seems like there’s always something new to learn about shifters.”
“For as long as we live, I hope to continue teaching you new things,” Xi Yong murmured.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around dragon.” He raised his head and met Xi Yong’s gaze. “Then I’m back in the kitchen, watching a ruby-red qilin, before I fell into his eyes.”
Xi Yong kissed him, and warm ruby light, full of love and the promise of a bright future, wrapped around them both.
More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant
The Silver Shifters series
Silver Dragon
Silver Fox
The Hollywood Shifters series
Hollywood Bear
Hollywood Dragon
Hollywood Tiger
A Hollywood Shifters’ Christmas
The Upson Downs series
Target: Billionbear
A Werewolf’s Valentine
See Zoe Chant’s complete list of books here!