Feisty Heroines Romance Collection of Shorts

by D. F. Jones

  I wanted to shake my head—I would if I weren’t so damn tired. She couldn’t stop the fae from hunting me. Not in the woods. The woods were theirs.

  Another whispering laugh came from the forest. She shouldn’t have been able to hear it with her human ears, but she responded to it, turning around and shouting into the trees. “These woods are mine. This land is mine. You cannot hunt here. Do you hear me? These woods are mine!”

  As the echo of her final words died away, a wind swirled through the clearing, sending ice and snow with it in tiny eddies along the ground. A biting cold followed the wind, piercing me like knives, or like fingers questing through me, as if to test me.

  The cold, too, receded—but in its wake the elves in the forest hissed in pain, pulling even farther back from the clearing, separated from us now by a shimmering blue light encircling us.

  Before, the hunter’s trap kept the fae from approaching, with its iron and its human workmanship.

  Now, though, the woman had erected a barrier with her words alone.

  She had claimed this land, and the fae could not approach her. Or me, as long as I was in here with her.

  I stared at her in fascination, even as I felt exhaustion begin to overcome me completely.

  What the hell are you?

  Chapter 4

  Mary

  Well, hell.

  Heaving a huge sigh, I stared at the animal caught in the trap for a good long while. It gave me a steady, beseeching look, its eyes creepily human.

  Then again, the rest of it had been creepily human just a moment before.

  “Now I’m going to have to take you home, aren’t I?” I glared at the animal. “I ought to leave you here, let you die of exposure.”

  The fox closed its eyes and lowered its head as if in resignation.

  “Dammit to hell.” I holstered my gun and moved toward the trap. “If you bite me, I’m going to…” I couldn’t figure out what I could do that was worse than the threat of shooting him in the head or leaving him out in the cold. And since I clearly wasn’t going to do either of those things, I just let my thought trail off.

  “Wait here. I’m going for bolt-cutters. I won’t be long.” Luckily I had some in my Jeep. This wasn’t the first time I’d used them to destroy a bear trap. Usually, though, they were empty traps.

  “I’m only doing this because I have clearly already lost my mind,” I assured the fox. “I figure if I’m already hallucinating, I might as well invest fully in the psychosis.”

  I considered what I’d seen and how it connected to the possibility that I really was having some kind of mental episode.

  One of the psychs who’d worked with us regularly back when I was on the force had told me some stories about ways she had done what she called “calling out psychotic beliefs.” Mostly her methods had to do with creating a facsimile of reality mimicking the specifics of hallucinations. Apparently claiming you heard voices coming out of your wall sockets was all well and good until someone put microphones in them to create real voices coming out of the wall sockets.

  That particular psychologist had been good at figuring out when people were lying to her.

  But her methods wouldn’t work for me, since my hallucination was about a shapeshifting man-fox.

  What would one of those be? A werefox?

  The ice crunching under my boots felt real enough, as did the cold air numbing my cheeks and nose.

  At the Jeep, I tugged the rear door open and rummaged around in my box of tools. Finding the bolt-cutters, I pulled them out. But when I shut the hatch again, I paused.

  I could leave. Walk away. I don’t ever have to acknowledge I was here.

  I couldn’t, though. The more I considered the world around me, the saner I felt. The cold was real, and the snow, and my Jeep, and the trees around me. This had none of the foggy qualities of a dream. And if it was real, I needed to figure out what had actually happened back there.

  So, I turned and headed back to the fox in the trap.

  He was just as I had left him: quiet and still, with his eyes closed. This time, when I wasn’t stunned by what I was seeing, I took a little more time to examine the fox closely.

  He was caught in the bear trap—but like most bear traps, it was designed to hold the animal in place, not ravage it, so other than its broken leg, the fox shouldn’t have had anything worse than bruising, or maybe a few punctures.

  But something had attacked it. Something with wicked claws. Maybe a mountain lion? The poor creature had long strips of its skin ripped away, though they were not currently bleeding.

  “Okay,” I said, still speaking to the creature as if I were certain what I had seen was true and it really could understand me. “I’m going to be as careful with you as I can be, but this still may hurt because of your injuries.”

  I began putting pressure on the bear-trap springs to see if I could release the animal before I destroyed the trap, but then I paused. “Uh. Don’t turn into a human right now, okay? That’ll make it harder for me to get you out.”

  The fox opened its eyes, held my gaze steadily, and then nodded.

  Oh, hell.

  This was the weirdest night of my life. Like, ever.

  Channel 5

  Tristan

  What the hell is she?

  The woman’s words had somehow acted as a barrier—but I was pretty sure she didn’t know it.

  Kneeling in the snow beside me, she’d also holstered her pistol, but I noticed she didn’t snap the holster closed. She was ready to draw on anyone who approached us, even as she put pressure on the springs to try to open the bear trap.

  “I don’t know what you are,” she said.

  Right back at you, lady.

  “But I can’t leave you out here to die. It might even be kinder to put one in your head, but after seeing whatever that was, I can’t do it. This is going to hurt, and if you understand me, I am so sorry.”

  Planting one foot for leverage, she grasped the bear trap with both hands and pushed it wide. “I can’t get you out. You’ll have to pull yourself out of the trap and then, if you understand me, don’t run away. Please.”

  Oh, I wasn’t running anywhere. I didn’t know if she could tell my bone was broken, but I could—especially when I started trying to move. I managed to pull my leg in closer to my body, but I yelped in pain when I did.

  “Hurry,” she said through gritted teeth. “This thing is set tight. It’s going to shut any minute.”

  I believe you.

  Using only my front paws, I dragged myself out of the trap.

  In one movement, she let go of the trap and leapt back. It snapped closed again, and she brushed her hands together and then wiped them down her canvas pants, leaving iron oxide trails of rusty brown behind.

  “Okay. Let’s see if we can get you back to my place. I’ll call… a vet? A doctor? Someone. Maybe.”

  She stripped off her outer coat, revealing canvas pants and a heavy red sweater. I shivered at the sight of her, though my fur was keeping me perfectly warm.

  I think I’m going into shock.

  She spread the coat out on the ground, and I had enough energy left to crawl onto it.

  “Let me deal with this, and then we’ll get going,” she murmured. With the bolt-cutters, she snipped the bear-trap apart at some of its most crucial joints, presumably to keep it from being used again.

  “Normally, I would sling it over my shoulder and take it with me to turn into the sheriff,” she continued her quiet, one-sided conversation with me. “But this time, I’ll have to send Sheriff Bingley up to check it out. Later.”

  She paused to wrap the coat around me, using the arms to tie it around my midsection.

  “I’m going to lift you up and then carry you to my Jeep.” Her voice dropped. “God, I hope you don’t bite,” she muttered.

  I would not have bitten her anyway, but I doubted I’d be able to right now. I suspected I was about to pass out.

  For a second, I w
orried about leaving the ring of protection she had somehow called up around us. But maybe it wouldn’t matter. If the Jeep was nearby, the metal in its construction should keep me safe from the fae.

  Her hands were gentle as she lifted me up, but I couldn’t help whimpering at the way it jostled my broken bone.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It won’t take long.”

  She wrapped me in the coat and gathered me up in her arms. I clenched my jaw against making more noises, even though the pain grew steadily worse. She was saving my life—I had no doubt about it.

  I managed to keep my eyes open until we were in the Jeep. The short stretch between the strange barrier she had erected and the vehicle made me anxious. I kept my eyes open, watching carefully. And Maeve’s warriors flitted around us—but they never got close enough to the woman for her to catch sight of them again. Even so, she, too, was nervous—she kept glancing around us. When she put me in the Jeep, opening the passenger door and setting me gently on the seat, I huffed out a breath of relief. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to relax as much as the pain in my leg would allow.

  By the time she moved around to the driver’s side and started the vehicle, I was barely awake. For the first time in days, I felt safe enough to allow myself the relief of unconsciousness.

  I drifted in and out of consciousness as the woman drove, sometimes glancing up to see the curve of her jaw limned in silver. At first, I thought it was the reflected glow of the dashboard lights, but the more I watched her, the more certain I became it was the return of the glow I’d seen from her in the clearing.

  And then she began singing in a low voice, a kind of wordless hum that I saw spinning out of her mouth in silver-blue smoke. It filled the Jeep and when it touched me, it took away my pain.

  Chapter 6

  Mary

  I stood just inside the door of my cabin, holding what was either the embodiment of my fevered imagination or an actual shapeshifting creature who changed from fox to human.

  “Does that really make you a werefox? What do you call yourself?”

  He didn’t answer, of course. At some point as I’d settled him in the front seat of my Jeep, he had either fallen asleep or lost consciousness.

  For the first time since his human appearance in the forest had shocked me, I wondered if whoever had been chasing him out in the woods wasn’t, in fact, a who at all—but a what.

  Back in the clearing, I had assumed he’d been caught by hunters of the normal human sort. And yet, I could have sworn there was someone or something circling us as I carried him back to my Jeep.

  That had to be my imagination. Right?

  I’d spent the entire drive to my cabin wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into.

  I carried the unconscious fox the rest of the way into my home. I wasn’t really set up to care for wounded animals, but I did have a pretty serious first aid kit, including a kit for stitching up wounds.

  I also had an old dog crate left over from my last dog, Major, who had died peacefully in his sleep at a ripe old age of almost seventeen.

  It seems impolite to put a werefox in a dog cage.

  I carried him into the front room downstairs and glanced around, frowning. Where should he sleep? I didn’t really have very many options in the sparsely furnished space.

  “What if you shift in your sleep?” In that case, the loveseat would be too small, and the only other piece of furniture in my tiny living room area was a single chair.

  The loft upstairs had been converted to an office space when I first moved in. From there, I ran my law-enforcement consulting business.

  “Nope,” I said aloud. “No place for fox shifters upstairs.”

  All that left was my room. I hovered inside the bedroom door, glancing between the fox in my arms and the bed where I was actually considering putting him.

  “I have lost my frickin’ mind.”

  I went back and forth between considering what I would do with a werefox and what I would do if I’d simply hallucinated the man in the clearing.

  Not that I’d ever hallucinated before.

  If he was a fox shifter, it might be dangerous to put him in my bed for all the same reasons that it would be dangerous to put a human male I didn’t know in my bed.

  And if I’d hallucinated, it was insane to put a wild animal in my bed.

  So here I was, standing in the doorway of my bedroom, holding a fox wrapped in my coat, and trying to decide whether or not to tuck it into my bed. I sighed and glanced down at him. If he hadn’t tried to bite me when I was removing him from a bear trap, then he was unlikely to attack me while I slept. And if he really was a werefox…

  “To hell with it. You’re hurt, you’re unconscious, and I’m exhausted. Let me see what I can do to help you heal.”

  The fox didn’t stir, and if it hadn’t been for the feel of his breathing, I might not have known he was still alive.

  I ought to clean him up first. I knew it. He had gashes on his back and a broken leg. The leg needed to be set, the gashes washed out and possibly stitched. But I was not equipped for any of that. The vet’s office in town was closed, and I wasn’t about to call the emergency vet out for a fox. She would think I had lost my mind.

  Instead, I settled him against a pillow, still wrapped in my coat.

  Then I went out to the living room to make myself a cup of coffee.

  Or maybe a stiffer drink than that.

  I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of someone coughing in my bedroom. I sat straight up on the loveseat in my tiny living room. I’d been right—it was far too small for me, much less a full-sized human version of a fox-shifter. I stood up and stretched my sore arms as I moved toward the bedroom, with a detour to the kitchen—I didn’t know what fox-shifters ate, but I was absolutely certain that he would drink water.

  I moved through the cabin in the dark, my step sure in the moonlight streaming through the window. As I moved into the bedroom, though, I turned on a lamp, the one with the lowest wattage bulb.

  Even though I’d heard him cough, even though I’d seen him outlined in the moonlight when I walked in, I still gasped and took a step back when I saw the man in my bed.

  He was gorgeous. I’d only gotten a glimpse of him for a few seconds when he had flickered into view in the clearing. But now that I could see more of him—he’d pushed the blankets down to his waist—he was broad-chested and muscular, his hair the same golden-red as his coat in his fox form. Stubble on his chin and cheeks glinted in the moonlight, and I found myself going off on a tangent for a second wondering how a shapeshifter dealt with shaving.

  His eyes were still closed—I was pretty sure he was unconscious. I moved closer until I was standing over him. I reached down to feel his forehead. But before I could touch him, his eyes snapped open and his hand flew up to grab my wrist.

  His eyes caught the lamplight and reflected it back at me, so that they seemed to glow with a bright golden sheen.

  He growled inarticulately.

  “I’m just checking your temperature,” I said. “I want to help you.” I kept talking, hoping to get through to him, even as his hand tightened around my wrist, threatening to crush it. “You’re hurting me. Please let go. I’m here to help. Just want to see if you have a fever.” I tried to infuse my voice with all the combined authority and caring that I had learned to exercise as a police officer. “Sir, you need to let go of me. You’re safe.”

  I repeated myself several times, like a mantra, until slowly, he loosened his fingers and opened his hand to turn me loose.

  “Can I check to see if you have a fever now?” I asked.

  “I don’t think you’ll be able to tell,” he finally rasped out at me. “I run hotter than most people on a normal day.”

  Despite how sick he obviously was, I couldn’t help the thought that ran through my head.

  Oh, yeah. You’re definitely hotter than most people.

  Chapter 7

  Tristan
/>   I felt her cool touch before I recognized anything else.

  I was lost in the woods, running through the dark, and there was snow, but it was hot, so hot. I shivered even as I rushed to get out of the trap the elf hunters had set. I was burning and cold at the same time.

  No. That wasn’t right. They hadn’t caught me.

  They circled me, but an angel came and saved me.

  My bones ached, and I fought to roll over, but the hunter’s trap held me in its vice.

  No. She had taken me from there. God, where was I now?

  When I finally made my way out of the confusion enveloping me, I awoke briefly in a dark room, something reaching for me. I stopped the hand coming toward me, but her voice finally got through to me.

  Right.

  She had saved me.

  I spoke to her for the first time, watching her eyes flare with blue-white light as I did. And then I dropped back down against the pillows, letting her take my temperature.

  Outside the small cabin, the Winter Court fae prowled, their whispering voices sending shivers up my spine.

  We’re waiting, they hissed at me. You must come out eventually.

  Or was it just the wind?

  After a few minutes, I dropped back into my feverish sleep.

  The touch of her hand followed by a cool cloth laid across my forehead almost woke me up again sometime later.

  And then she started singing. Not the wordless hum I’d heard in the Jeep, but I couldn’t understand these words, either. It was like my ears were stuffed full of cotton and I couldn’t paw it out, no matter how hard I shook my head and clawed at it.

  “Shh.” She lifted the cloth and replaced it a moment later, once again cool and soothing. Then she pulled the covers off my chest and arms and wiped those down, too.