The Hellhound's Un-Christmas Miracle - Zoe Chant Page 0,52

form before, but there was no question who he was. He looked like he was in his fifties or early sixties: sleek, too-shiny face, hair too solidly colored to be real. Like a door-to-door salesman who keeps bodies in the back of his car, she thought. He smiled when he saw her looking at him, and the expression was all predator.

Time slowed down. She’d thought he was herding them, but that must have been a distraction. He’d been there all along.

He must have been waiting all night, she thought, cold tendrils snaking around her stomach. He must have known we would try to flee as soon as I turned.

All he needed to do was phase into the car and wait.

Parker leaned forward and fire roared up inside her, sudden and terrifying. No! a voice roared in her head, familiar and strange at the same time.

Fleance shouted something. She saw, and felt, him reaching for her, body and mind turning towards her as his mouth moved voicelessly. Something inside her reached for him as well.

And stopped. Sheena felt dizzy. Her hellhound was a strange, wary thing. It felt more like a collection of instincts than an animal. Fear. Hatred. So much hatred, of the dark star that had formed in the center of her heart and kept trying to draw her closer. The cold, disgusting counterpart of the light that was her connection to Fleance.

Her hellhound saw the light of the mate bond and screamed. It didn’t see him; it saw a way away from Parker’s web. But if she reached out to Fleance, that would only draw him closer to Parker again. To the life he’d suffered under for so long.

She had to let him go. If there was some way of breaking the mate bond—

NO!

She dropped through the bottom of the car like a stone. It spun away as she hit gravel, rolling to a stop at the side of the road. Bracken crunched beneath her as she stood up on all four legs.

Her eyes were fire, her lungs were fire, fire filled the pit of her stomach and roared in her veins. She was a hellhound, burning with her first breaths. Ahead, the car spun to a stop. The scents of the men inside filtered to her, muddied by the smell of hot rubber and burning fuel. Her alpha, the central point around which her world rotated, and her mate.

Her mate, who was trapped because of her. Parker’s alpha control over her, her mate bond to Fleance. One long leash.

The ground rocked under her paws. I can’t let this happen.

The part of Sheena that was Sheena and the part of her that was a hellhound tore apart. She felt lost and hopeless, more alone than she’d ever been in her life.

Something deep inside her growled.

The car burst open. No—two hellhounds burst through it. Fleance smashed his way out through the front, shredding the metal door as though it was tissue paper, but the alpha hellhound simply stood up through the roof and jumped casually to the ground. Sheena tensed, expecting the gravel to hiss and spit beneath his paws, but he wasn’t setting anything on fire.

Yet.

*Well now, that wasn’t too bad for a first attempt!* Parker’s wolfish grin made Sheena’s hackles rise. *You should have seen how long it took my boy there to figure out how this shit works when he first shifted.*

*Don’t talk about him like that!* she snarled back, and then blinked. She snarled? She never snarled. But when she thought about what Fleance had told her about how Parker had treated him, her ears flattened against her head. It must be the new shape doing it, she thought. Fangs and claws had to be used for something, after all.

Parker’s eyes blazed. Something wriggled inside Sheena’s head like she’d just opened an old takeaway container and found it full of maggots. Part of her wanted to run—not a very fangs-and-claws part, true—but how could she run away from what was inside her own head?

*Now you’re starting to understand.* Parker stretched out his neck and the maggots in Sheena’s head writhed in time with his voice. No, not in time with it—they were his voice. Wrongness crashed through her. Speaking telepathically was like brushing up against someone else’s mind, but Parker’s voice wormed its way up from inside her.

Fleance had told her about this. She’d known it was awful, but now that she was experiencing it herself, she wanted to take him away and keep him