The Hellhound's Un-Christmas Miracle - Zoe Chant Page 0,50

first shift.

“I’ll drive,” he said, and her nails squealed against the metal door. She looked as though she was about to argue—then her shoulders dropped.

“Here.” She tossed him the keys and slipped around to the passenger side. By the time he got the engine running, she had her seatbelt on and was sitting with her head in her hands. “I’m burning up,” she whispered. “How do I control it? I can’t even—I don’t want to talk to it! I don’t want this to be happening!”

He reached over and gripped her shoulder. Her skin was so hot he could feel it even through her borrowed sweater. Before he could open his mouth, she spoke again.

“But it is happening.”

Her back straightened. Without thinking, as though she were a member of his pack or still his mate, Fleance sent reassurance to her—and his telepathic senses came up against a block, like a steel wall around her soul. From the set of her jaw, she hadn’t even felt him reach for her.

He swallowed. “Sheena—”

“Don’t.” The word was almost a sob. “I know what you’re trying to do. But it makes it worse, feeling you in my heart when he’s—he’s watching.”

He pulled back, feeling sick.

That doesn’t change anything, his hellhound hissed. He almost jumped. It had been quiet since Sheena was bitten, wary and watchful, but he’d been so focused on her that he hadn’t missed it. Now it slunk around the edges of his mind, anger boiling across its hide. We came here to make sure Parker couldn’t hurt anyone else. We can’t let him take her.

His hellhound’s words put iron in his spine. It was right. It was his duty to defend all of Parker’s victims and make the world right.

He knew what he had to do.

Tires squealed as he pulled out of the carpark and onto the road. Someone shouted, and he felt a stab of guilt at leaving some poor fire warden short—which was ridiculous. Better their names be missing from the roster than the whole hotel be dragged into Parker’s game.

Rotorua at night was eerie. The city’s lights hardly made a dent in the huge blackness of the sky, and once they left streetlights behind them, the sky’s emptiness came down to envelope the whole world. The stars seemed to pull back, peeling away from the earth. The car’s headlights carved twin yellow beams through the nothing, illuminating roiling hisses of steam and gas and the skeletons of power lines, and nothing else.

Sheena fumbled with his phone. “Keep going,” she said, thumbing through the map app. “We’re on the thermal highway. That Caltex back there was the last thing we’re going to hit until Tumunui, whatever that is. Wee township. Or something.”

“A what?”

She looked confused. “A… small town? What would you call it?” She shook her head and flinched. Her question forgotten, Fleance clasped her hand.

“What are you getting from Parker?” he asked.

“Getting from him?”

“Distance. Direction.” He tried to describe what the pack sense felt like to him.

“Like a radar?” She half-grinned, then blanched. “Oh, God. That isn’t a joke. I used to be able to see my flock mentally, like someone had scattered rice on a black sheet, but…”

“I know. He’s the center, and you’re moving around him.” He remembered it all too well: the lurch from his mental image of himself being central to his understanding of the world, to being on its periphery. From being free to being a pawn.

Sheena’s voice dropped. “I might have been the smallest sheep in my flock, but at least I was still the center of my own universe.” Her hands made fists on the dashboard. “Be nice if this new hellhound radar came with a scale. I can see where I am, and where he is, but not how far—”

She slammed back against the seat. Fleance didn’t need to ask why. Cold fingers of dread curled around his throat. Parker was close enough that he could feel his fear magic, too. He pressed on the accelerator. The fear was coming from behind him—if he could just get enough distance—

“How is he keeping up with us? Nothing can move this fast,” Sheena muttered, glancing at the speedometer. “Wait… It’s a trap. It must be. He’s doing the same thing he did yesterday, herding us forwards!”

“Where else are we meant to go?” The road stretched out in front and behind, empty.

Sheena pointed. Her face was skull-like, lit from below by the phone screen. “There should be a turnoff on the left before we