A Hippogriff for Christmas - Zoe Chant Page 0,43

man, Scott – the one who’d been hassling Annie in the bakery when he’d arrived – had gotten himself caught up in something nasty.

Something involving shifter criminals.

Which meant it was most definitely something Beau needed to know about.

He was about to identify himself and haul the kid to his feet when he started talking again.

“Anyway, can you let me go finish this off now?” he complained, trying to jerk himself out of Beau’s grip. “The boss said that place has to burn, and so it’s gotta burn. Quick – I have to get back to HQ by eight.”

Beau just raised an eyebrow. Clearly, this kid had been lumped with the high-risk grunt work – and he wasn’t exactly bright, either.

“Burn? Did he say… that the bakery was going to burn?”

Both Beau and the kid turned at the sound of Annie’s voice behind them. Obviously, she’d gotten worried and managed to track them out here to the darkened park.

Beau grimaced. He’d rather Annie hadn’t seen this, but then, he wouldn’t have been able to keep it from her for long. If this kid was involved in something as heavy as arson – and, by the sound of things, something that involved large amounts of money – then Beau would have been remiss in his duties if he hadn’t looked into it, no matter how much he wanted to take Annie straight home to meet his family.

“What the hell is this human doing here?” the kid snarled, a flash of the wolf’s yellow showing in his blue eyes for a moment. “Get rid of her – or I’ll do it, I don’t care.”

He threatened our mate! He has to bleed!

Immediately, Beau’s hippogriff reared up, extending its claws and tearing at the air, as if demonstrating what it’d do to the kid if only Beau would let it.

With difficulty, Beau pushed down the creature’s rage, forcing his own rational human mind to take control.

“No chance of that,” Beau said. “I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m with the Shifter Patrol Corps. And it seems like you might have something to tell me.”

He strengthened his grip on the kid’s shirt as he started struggling, eyes going wide with shock.

“And don’t even think about shifting,” Beau told him. “You’ve seen my shifted form now – so you know there’s no point in running. Your best chance right now is to just tell me what exactly is going on.”

Beau could see the kid thinking it over, weighing up his chances of escape… and deciding they were very slim indeed.

Maybe he had more brains that it had first seemed, Beau thought, as the kid sighed, and at last stopped struggling.

“All right – fine,” he said. “But if I do, you gotta promise me, like, witness protection or something, right? You can do that, right?”

Beau couldn’t – but Hardwicke could. But first, he’d have to find out more information.

“We’ll see what you have to tell me, and then we’ll talk about deals,” Beau said. “No – come on. Faster you start talking, the faster we can get this over with.”

Chapter 10

This, Annie thought, has been a really weird day.

It was fine to admit that, she thought – it had, after all, been really weird, in ways she wasn’t sure she could think too closely about yet. She knew at some point she’d have to deal with it all – with the existence of mythical creatures and shifters and that one of them was her soulmate – but right now probably wasn’t the time.

She was sitting in the corner of the room, staring at the young man who had apparently been trying to burn down the bakery – and who had turned from a wolf into a human being in front of her very eyes.

Probably, she thought, that part should’ve been at least a little less surprising than it had been, considering she’d already seen Beau turning into something way more unusual than a wolf – but then, she wasn’t up to interrogating herself about these things right now.

Beau had hauled the wolf-man back to the bakery at Annie’s suggestion since she had a key to open the back door, and she’d guessed they needed somewhere inside to figure out what had been going on.

They were in the storeroom now, Beau on the phone on the other side of the room, and the wolf guy sitting sulkily on a metal chair, hands cuffed behind his back.

Annie took some time to look him over. No ears, no