The Hellhound's Un-Christmas Miracle - Zoe Chant Page 0,6

I—” He broke off and his eyes narrowed. “Wait. Can you still sense him?”

Fleance nodded slowly. The other two shifters paled and took a half-step backwards. He didn’t blame them.

Parker wasn’t part of the constellation that was his pack. He was a darker patch in the darkness beyond the stars—disconnected, but waiting.

“None of us knows how this is meant to work,” he said. “But having Parker in my head still feels wrong. I won’t feel like the pack’s safe until he’s gone, and I don’t want to involve Caine and Meaghan. Not with the babies so close.”

The other two nodded. The certainty of their understanding was almost enough to drive the guilt from his heart. They said their goodbyes, with Manu and Rhys promising to defray their alpha’s reactions to discovering he was gone, and he headed down towards the road.

Fleance had been turned years before either of them, but Manu and Rhys had been his allies under Parker’s thumb and now they were the closest thing he had to family. He already missed the close camaraderie of the pack.

A few days later, stepping onto a plane that would take him to Manu’s home country of New Zealand, the constellation in his head became harder and harder to concentrate on. Physical distance had its similarities to psychic distance—he already knew that his telepathic voice had limits, but the discovery that putting hundreds of miles between him and the rest of the pack made their connection feel more distant rocked him. Especially when he was halfway over the South Atlantic and the Parker-shaped darkness in his mind was joined by a new feeling: something that pulled him forward, tugging at his soul as hard as he was trying to keep hold of his pack sense.

He closed his eyes. This had to mean he was going in the right direction, he told himself. He just had to get through the flight, and through finding Parker and whatever happened next, and then he could go home.

Back to the closest thing he had to a real family.

2

Sheena

Sheena Mackay could not wait to get away from her family.

Okay, sure, she was far enough away from them right now that she couldn’t feel their telepathic voices knocking relentlessly at the walls she’d had to put up around her mind, but that wasn’t good enough. Her phone had been buzzing since she woke up. It had kept buzzing as she said goodbye to the cousins she’d been staying with in Wellington—seriously, if her folks wanted to check in with her, couldn’t they just call them? Get the gossip without bothering her?—and now, in the middle of the Desert Road halfway up the North Island of New Zealand, it was still buzzing.

How did she even have reception out here?

She shook out her dark curls and sat back, trying to coax a sliver of comfort from the bus seat. But there was not even a sliver to be found. Generations of butts had sat in that seat before her, she reckoned, and each of them had squashed a wee bit more puff out of the seat cushion until there was none left for her.

Her phone buzzed again, and she checked it. Finally—the one member of her family she could count on not to ask her if she was sure she felt up to traveling on her own, and had she packed enough snacks in case she got hungry, and how no one would blame her if she wanted to put off the trip for a few weeks or months so that Cousin This or Auntie That could come with her, or ideally wrap her in bubble wrap and lock her in her room so she couldn’t get herself into any dangerous situations…

She plugged in her earbuds, accepted the video call and propped the phone against the back of the seat in front of her.

Her cousin Aroha’s face appeared on-screen. Aroha was a few months older than Sheena’s barely scraping twenty-three, with long dark hair and a wicked smile. Her voice crackled through Sheena’s earbuds.

“Have you not even left the country yet? Geez, cuz, get a move on.”

Sheena laughed. “I’m trying!” She lifted her phone so that her cousin Aroha could see out the bus window. “Guess where I am.”

“Move your thumb off the camera then, egg.”

“Fussy much…” Sheena held the phone up in front of her face, careful of her fingers, so she could see the same landscape she was showing to her cousin. Aroha was half the country