by Zoe Chant
He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably.
The other dragon he’d sensed back when he’d chosen this place to sleep was still around. They weren’t in his territory—but close enough for the constant awareness of his presence to feel like an itch.
Maybe the dragon lived on the other side of the mountain. Or maybe it was the mountaintop past this one.
Either way, he’d hopefully leave them alone. They hadn’t intruded into his realm, and Jonathan didn’t want to pick yet another fight with a powerful shifter.
A moment later, Jonathan narrowed his eyes.
From behind a ridge not too far away, he could see smoke rise.
“There,” he said triumphantly. “Either that’s your house, or one of your neighbors.”
“I don’t think there was a fire going in the fireplace,” Angel said slowly. “I wouldn’t go out and leave a fire unattended. And the central heating is so convenient I haven’t even thought about using it again...”
“A neighbor, then,” Jonathan said.
In response, Angel laughed. “There are no neighbors. Not in walking distance. But hey, I’m not going to complain if you’ve led us to that Christmas resort instead. As long as I can sit down with some hot food, I don’t care where we end up.”
Privately, Jonathan thought that something about the area seemed familiar. He didn’t think he’d led them astray. They had to be close to his cave now—which meant that they were close to Angel’s place.
It took them another hour to cross the valley and make it all the way up to the ridge that blocked their view of what was beyond.
Once they did, Angel gasped.
Before them, another valley spread, thick, pristine snow gleaming before them.
Beyond, another hill arose, densely growing fir trees covering it. The air was crisp and clear, giving them an amazing view of the range of mountains spreading before them.
And it also gave them a good view of the mansion that stood not far away, the generous house with its picturesque red wood and huge windows an inviting sight.
That was, until Jonathan realized just where the smoke they’d seen was coming from.
It wasn’t coming out of the chimney. There wasn’t a blazing fireplace awaiting them.
Half of the house was blackened, windows sooty, charred planks of wood resting in the snow. The house wasn’t ablaze, not anymore—but parts of it must have been, not too long ago.
“Oh, my God,” Angel said breathlessly as she stared at it. “It—it burned down. I must have left a fire going, or forgot about the oven, and it caught fire and I burned down the house. I lost their dog and burned down their house. The dog and house of a pair of Hollywood billionaires. I’m dead.”
“We don’t know what happened.”
Although Jonathan had to admit that it didn’t look good.
Still, there was no reason to believe that it was Angel’s fault.
He eyed the charred windows. “The blizzard probably broke a window and something short-circuited.”
“Not with my luck,” Angel said glumly. “I’m so dead. Or in prison until the end of my life. Goodbye, IT career.”
Chapter Seven: Angel
The house didn’t look better from close up.
Once they’d made it close enough to see the full extent of the damage, Angel shook her head in despair. There was no way that she’d ever be able to pay for the damage, even if she worked day and night until the end of her life.
“They’ll have insurance for that sort of thing,” Jonathan said. “People who can afford these sort of houses always do.”
Angel stared at the blackened window that looked like a gaping mouth. “Doesn’t matter. These things always happen to me.”
“Maybe you won’t have a long career in house-sitting,” he said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. “But didn’t you just tell me you’re going to get into IT? It’s not like you’ll need a reference from them.”
“I suppose not,” she said and sighed. “So maybe I won’t go to prison. But I’ve still let down the Mitchells and my friend who got me this job. And Diego.”
“Maybe that’s why he ran off,” Jonathan said slowly. “Could he have been trying to warn you about the fire?”
“If he did, he did a terrible job.” Angel couldn’t take her eyes off the house.
The multi-million dollar mansion with its perfect wooden facade and huge windows was covered in soot. Several windows had burst from the heat.
She felt sick to her stomach as she imagined having to face the Mitchells.
Then she took a deep breath. She could worry about that later. Right now, she was still one dog short, and as annoying as Diego could be, she was still responsible for him.
“Diego!” she called out, looking anxiously at the burned-out windows.
Diego wasn’t the smartest of dogs sometimes—but surely even he wasn’t so stupid as to jump into a burning house?
A burning, empty house, that was. There wasn’t even anyone in here for him to rescue.
“Diego?” There was no response.
Worry spread through her again. If he hadn’t run back home—could he have survived the blizzard?
Or what if the weird monster with its fangs and yellow eyes had found him first?
She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself.
And then Lola started barking.
It was a bark Angel recognized—the happy, excited bark with which Lola usually tried to get Diego to play with her.
“Where’s Diego, Lola? Find Diego!”
Lola let out another woof. A second later, she bounced forward, pulling at the leash.
Hastily, Angel followed along, Jonathan right behind her.
Lola made them circle the house. Thankfully, it seemed like the eastern half of the mansion had been spared by the fire. If Diego had somehow made his way back inside, perhaps that was where he had hidden?
Once they’d made it to the back of the house, Lola led them straight towards the door that led into the sunroom.
Didn’t I close that door? I’m so sure I checked the doors were closed before I let the dogs out...
Or maybe she hadn’t checked. Maybe, as so many times before, her clumsiness had caused yet another catastrophe.
The door stood ajar. Lola was barking again, then whined—and a second later, Diego came slinking out of the door. He looked suspiciously innocent as he whined, too, and let Lola lick his face in greeting.
“Diego!” Overwhelmed with relief, Angel fell to her knees and wrapped her arms tightly around the most infuriating dog she’d ever known. “You little monster! You nearly killed us! I’m so glad you’re okay!”
Diego’s cold, wet nose tried to shove itself into her ear, and she reared back, half laughing, half crying.
“Yuck! Cold!”
Diego produced another happy whimper while Lola’s tail kept excitedly going back and forth like a pendulum.
“You’ve caused so much trouble, I should keep you grounded for a week!”
Diego looked at her from huge, innocent eyes, and Angel hugged him again, laughing. “You little bastard, I’m so glad you’re alive.”
“Hey, Diego,” Jonathan said softly.
Angel watched as he knelt down in the snow next to her and held out his hand.
For a moment, there was something almost comically surprised on Diego’s face, which quickly changed to suspicion.
“He’s a friend,” Angel said firmly.
Diego sniffed at Jonathan’s hand, then pressed himself against Angel’s body.
“Poor baby,” she crooned. “You must be terrified. Did the fire scare you?”
“I wonder what happened,” Jonathan murmured.
He got up again, and Angel watched him open the door to the sunroom.
Inside, the blizzard had caused utter chaos.
Splinters of glass from a burst window at the other end were scattered across the floor. Snow had drifted in. Cupboards were tipped over, chairs
were upside down, a vase rested in broken pieces on the ground, and books were strewn over the floor.
“They’ll kill me when they see this,” Angel said in despair. “I thought house-sitting was going to be the one thing even I wouldn’t manage to mess up. And now look at this! The house of billionaires!”
Right now it looked more like a war zone.
“Billionaires can afford a hundred houses like this. I bet all they’ll care about is that nothing happened to the dogs. The insurance will take care of the rest.”
“I know insurance companies.” Angel grimaced when she thought back to the long, drawn-out fight when someone else had rear-ended her cheap, old car.
There’d been no doubt that she hadn’t been at fault. Still, the other guy’s insurance had fought her until she’d almost wished that she’d just swallowed her losses and saved up for another dirt-cheap wreck of a car.
“If there’s a way for them to not pay, they’ll happily blame it all on me. And I’ll go to jail.”
“Nonsense,” Jonathan said, taking a few careful steps among the wreckage of expensive, wooden furniture. “For one thing, you’ve got an alibi. You were with me when this happened.”
“What if I left a fire burning in the fireplace?” She’d only used it once during her time here so far, because despite how romantic it was, starting it and cleaning up afterward was a lot of work. “Or I forgot something on the stove. Or—”
“Did you forget something on the stove?” Jonathan turned to look at her with his calm, eerily clear eyes.
Silently, she shook her head. She was constantly forgetting things—but she’d only grabbed a hasty breakfast of cereal and eggs before she’d given in to the dogs’ demands for a walk.
Maybe she’d forgotten to put the milk back into the fridge. She’d definitely forgotten to do her dishes before heading out.
But none of these things could start a fire.
Unless I’m forgetting something...
“See,” Jonathan said. “You’ve seen that blizzard. You’ve seen what it did to the windows. Something happened to the electricity, or maybe the heating, that caused a spark. They’re going to send someone out here to check the house over, and I bet he’ll take one look at these windows and agree with me.”
Angel forced herself to take a deep breath. Perhaps Jonathan was right. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be as bad as she feared.
“All I wanted was one single, perfect Christmas,” she said plaintively. “Well, maybe not perfect, because I was going to be all alone with the dogs. But there would be no asshole boss, no relatives criticizing my lack of a job, no...” She grimaced, thinking of her judgmental aunt and her perfect cousins, all with husbands and toddlers to show off at Christmas.
“It was going to be peaceful. Lots of snow and quiet. I wanted to put on some carols, bake cookies and decorate them. And now look at this.”
Jonathan tilted his head to the side, looking at her in that calm, penetrating way of his. As if he could see something in her that even she herself couldn’t see.
“Yes, look at this,” he said softly. His eyes gleamed, clear as ice but warm like sunlight.
No—like starlight. There was something about the light in them that took her breath away. The beauty and power of a shooting star—only instead of burning for a fraction of a second, Jonathan wasn’t going anywhere.
That was what his gaze was saying.
She swallowed heavily, still not quite sure if she believed that this was real. That he wanted her around.
“Without you, I would still be asleep,” he said quietly. “Maybe I would have slept forever. I would have never met you. And now that I’m here—I’m glad all of this happened. Even if a house had to burn down for it. You’re safe, and so are the dogs. That’s all that matters to me.”
She felt another smile tug on her lips. Having that smile focused on her made her heart beat faster. Did he know what he was doing to her?
Then she remembered how she’d arched into his touch, more aroused by his kisses than she’d ever felt in her life.
He knows. He knows... And he still wants me.
“Wait a minute,” she then said slowly. “Sorry, but...you never told me why you had turned into ice. Why were you sleeping in that cave? Do dragons hibernate?”
For a moment, pain flashed across Jonathan’s face. A second later, he turned, facing a ruined painting. It showed the mountainside—or rather, had showed.
When the window had burst, shards of sharp glass had slashed the side of the painting.
Jonathan reached out to run his fingers along what was still visible of the mountaintop, then sighed.
“It’s a long story,” he said reluctantly. “One I don’t like telling. And once I’ve told it, you might not like me as much anymore.”
“I doubt that,” Angel said softly, watching as he stepped away from the painting to the broken window.
He smiled sadly, shaking his head. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Even now, just thinking of what happened is so painful, it feels like my heart is still frozen in the ice.”
He reached out, pressing his hand against his chest.
For a moment, Angel could feel it: a deep, old pain, the constant ache of it. Like touching the snow with bare hands for too long.
“What if I told you that I’d done something terrible? That I’ve destroyed someone’s life? That I—”
He broke off all of a sudden.
Angel had been too distracted by the tug of pain inside her own heart. She didn’t know how it was possible—but she knew she felt what Jonathan felt. That this pain had accompanied him every single moment since he’d woken from his sleep in the ice.
There was so much to feel there. She knew she could only feel fragments of what he was experiencing. But there wasn’t only pain. There was also guilt. Guilt and regret and a bone-deep longing.
That ache of being lost. Of not knowing where the future led.
She understood that, a little. She’d regretted her own life choices. She’d felt embarrassed, every time she met school friends or her cousins, all with jobs and many with a house and a husband, their Facebook full of pictures of smiling, gap-toothed children.
Meanwhile there she was, back to living with her mom, eternally single, unable to find anything in her field. No matter how much she loved the work museums did, loving it didn’t magically make jobs appear. Meanwhile, her cousins who didn’t love their jobs at least had jobs to complain about.
A heartbeat later, she was shaken from her own regrets by a sound that made her blood freeze in her veins.
It was a sound she knew all too well. The awful howling of an over-sized wolf.
“The phone!” she called out, but even as she took a step towards the door that led deeper into the mansion’s maze of bedrooms and corridors, she realized that it was no use.
Even if the phone still worked, even if the cops believed her—no one would make it up the mountain in time.
“Get the dogs somewhere safe,” Jonathan shouted back, running towards the door.
When he reached it, he slammed it shut, then hastily barricaded it with pieces of a broken chest of drawers.
“Is it the dire wolf?” Angel’s fingers were numb as she grabbed hold of the dogs’ leashes.
Stupid question. What else would it be?
She still didn’t know what exactly a dire wolf was, or where it came from. But what little she’d seen of it was enough.
It’s like a wolf out of a fairytale. Too large. Too angry. Too intelligent...
“Is there some sort of basement? A storage room? Somewhere you can lock yourself and the dogs in?”
Angel swallowed and shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve never been to the basement—”
Again there was the terrible, angry howl. It carried through the air.
Was she imagining it, or had the wind picked up?
It had started to snow again, she now saw through the window.
And the sky had started to go dark. There’d been no sign of another blizzard when they’d crossed the mountain just minutes ago...
“Shit. Okay,” Jonathan said, his eyes going towards the burst window. “So this is the plan. You grab the phone, call the police or the rangers or anyone you can reach for help, then hide in the basement with the dogs.”
She swallowed. She didn’t like where this was going...
“And you?”
With grim determination, Jonathan paced to the wall and tore a sword from its wall mount. “I’m going to lead the beast away from you and keep it busy for as long as I can.”
“Hey,” Angel protested weakly. “That’s not a prop—that’s the real deal. From Millennium Woman Two: Avenging Angel.”
He gave her a small smile. “Good.”
He looked like he knew what he was doing. He wielded the sword just as well as Millennium Woman during the famous training montage in the first movie that had earned the Mitchells their first few millions.
Still. It wasn’t just a rabid dog or a coyote out there. It was a dire wolf—whatever that was. Something strong and powerful and angry.
Something that shouldn’t be real, just like a dragon.
“Didn’t you say your power is all drained?” she demanded.
“Doesn’t matter.” His jaw tightened. Then there was another howl, and he swore. “Go hide. Now!”
A moment later, something came crashing through the window.
For a second, Angel couldn’t see anything but a mass of fur and teeth and gleaming, yellow eyes.
Her heart beating in her throat, she retreated until her back hit the wall. The dogs were whimpering, pressing against her legs.
And Jonathan stood calmly in the center of the room, holding out the sword as if he’d come straight from a movie screen, Millennium Woman’s latest sidekick.
Dimly, Angel thought that it was a pity that neither of them would survive this. Because now she knew that what Millennium Woman Five really needed was a mysterious dragon shifter sidekick.
Then the dire wolf opened its jaw, releasing a soft growl. Saliva dripped from its teeth.