The Hellhound's Un-Christmas Miracle - Zoe Chant Page 0,48

she was going to be a goddamned grown-up about this, she told herself, and not cry.

“I’m scared,” she admitted.

His hand swept up her side and came to rest on her shoulder. “I’m here for you, Sheena. No matter what happens.” His breathing caught, then he added: “I was alone when I first changed. You won’t be. I promise. Whether it happens tomorrow or days from now, I’ll be with you.”

Her eyes closed. Mistake. She was still hunting for the right words to say when sleep finally took over. The last thought in her mind was, If I wake up tomorrow and I’m part of Parker’s pack…

She put a wall around that thought and sleep dragged her down.

It wasn’t words that woke her, but a feeling. Like fire kindling inside her.

She jerked awake.

Fleance was still deeply asleep, his features relaxed in a way that made Sheena suddenly realize how the deep stress lines on his forehead and around his mouth made him look so much older than he was. She froze, partly not to disturb him, partly to focus on the strange crackling under her skin.

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.

Heat roiled inside her. The soul-paddock where her sheep used to live churned, bubbling and writhing like a pot about to boil over.

“Oh God,” Sheena gasped as it disappeared in a burst of sulfurous yellow smoke. “No!”

7

Fleance

Sheena’s scream echoed in Fleance’s dream. Then the smell of burning filled his nostrils.

That wasn’t a dream.

His eyes flew open. The first thing he saw was fire. Flames poured out of the sky above him—no. Not the sky.

Sheena had fallen asleep nestled against his chest. She must have shifted before she was even awake enough to get out of bed.

Fleance sat up. There were legs in the flames, he could see that now—four legs tipped with heavy paws and, somewhere in the billowing yellow fog that smelled of brimstone and ash, a sleek body and a long head with too many teeth in it. A hellhound, wild and fierce and trapped.

He could imagine how she felt. He’d felt it himself, only a few days after his eighteenth birthday.

The mate bond was jangling with tension. But it was there. He wrapped his relief around it, then reached up into the inferno that Sheena was the heart of. His fingers brushed against rough fur.

Light burst above him, a shiver that made the flames look dark, and then Sheena was human again, falling into his arms.

He wrapped himself around her. She clung to him, her chest heaving, and he could just make out her words as she gasped for breath.

“You were right about—one thing,” she began. “That was—I thought I was going to—”

It’s fine, he was about to say—needed to say—I’m with you, I promise I won’t let you do this alone.

There were tears on her cheeks. “My stupid sheep—I never thought I would miss it so much—and now—”

She pressed her head against his chest, and he braced himself for her grief to crush into him. Sharing feelings with her last night had been like bathing in sunlight; this would be like…

Ashes. Not fire, not smoke, but the gray, dead remnants of her old life. Fleance almost choked.

And then—there. A glow in the darkness. Sheena’s fingernails dug into his shoulders as she held onto him, and something surged behind the mate bond.

Fleance’s heart stopped. Sheena had turned. She wasn’t the woman who’d fallen asleep in his arms the night before. Her hellhound was a creature of fire and smoke, terror crystallized into a shape meant to strike fear into the hindbrain of any human who set eyes on her.

And the first person it was hunting down with that fear power was Sheena herself.

He reached for the mate bond, his hellhound straining to protect her, but before he could think of how he could defend her from something that was part of herself, Sheena sat up.

Her eyes were wide. They were the same warm hazel-brown they had been when he first saw her, outlined by fire as it closed in on them both. But now the fire was inside her. She stared at him, he stared back—and something new looked out at him from her eyes. Fire and rage.

“He’s coming,” she whispered. Her face was pale, and despite her eyes there was no trace of hellhound in her quiet, tense voice. “I can’t explain it, I just know that he knows exactly where I am, and he’s coming.”

Fleance remembered what that was like. How could he forget? He looked