snatched her up in his arms. He charged for the cabin, moving with inhuman speed.
“Uh,” Darcy said, as the pair disappeared inside. “What was that all about?”
Wystan chuckled. “Just first-time father nerves. Rory is, ah, struggling to adjust to Edith being pregnant. We shifters tend to be rather overprotective at the best of times, when it comes to our m-”
Wystan abruptly fell silent. Fenrir’s ears tilted in his direction. A slight flush crept over Wystan’s high cheekbones.
“Your what?” Darcy asked.
“Our, ah, spouses. Partners.” Wystan cleared his throat, gesturing at the cabin. “Shall we?”
Neither spouse nor partner started with m, Darcy noted. And that wasn’t the first time that one of the firefighters had started to say something, only to think better of it. She stared at Wystan’s back as he led the way inside, wondering.
In the kitchen, Edith was perched on a chair, wearing Rory’s jacket and an expression of mild exasperation. Rory had his head in a cupboard. He wheeled around as Darcy entered, rather wild-eyed.
“Don’t you have anything decaf?” He raked a hand through his hair, glaring at the cupboards as though he could make herbal teabags appear through sheer willpower. “Edith needs a hot drink, but I can only find coffee. She can’t have coffee, it’s not good for the baby. Do you have honey? A fresh lemon? Chamomile? Any wild mint growing nearby?”
“I’m fine, Rory,” Edith said wearily. She scrunched up her nose at Darcy. “Sorry about this. I’m barely out of the first trimester, but he acts like I’m about to go into labor at any moment.”
“No worries,” Darcy said, stifling a grin. “Do you need anything?”
“Just for my ridiculous man to stop fussing.” Edith rapped her knuckles on the table. “Rory! Stop tearing the kitchen apart. I don’t want a hot drink. Sit down.”
Rory reluctantly subsided. Darcy returned to her own seat, picking up her cooling coffee again. Fenrir parked himself next to her like a guard dog. She rubbed his ears absently, then caught herself.
“Sorry,” she said to him. “I keep forgetting you’re a person, not a dog. I shouldn’t touch you without invitation.”
Fenrir’s copper eyes gleamed up at her. He nudged his nose back under her hand, resting his head in her lap.
“He says to touch him as much as you want,” Edith said. “He likes it.”
Darcy hesitated, her palm hovering over Fenrir’s soft fur. “It isn’t weird? I mean, I don’t normally scratch guys I’ve just met behind the ears.”
“You have to understand, when we’re shifted, we aren’t human minds in animal bodies,” Wystan said. He tapped the center of his chest. “Our animals are always with us, inside, an integral part of our being. But when we transform, those instincts become much stronger. It’s hard to describe to a non-shifter, but in many ways, we become the animal.”
“In our shifted form, we have a different perspective on the world,” Rory said. “We can still think and make decisions, but a lot of things that seem important as a human don’t matter as much. And the longer we stay shifted, the stronger those instincts become. Stay an animal long enough, and sometimes it’s hard to even remember what it’s like to be human.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Darcy asked Fenrir.
She felt him tense. He turned his head away, without answering.
“We don’t know, but it seems likely,” Wystan said. “And his situation is no doubt exacerbated by the fact that he’s a hellhound. They’re extraordinarily pack-oriented, far more so than wolves or dogs. A lone hellhound very quickly becomes mentally unstable. We don’t know much about Fenrir’s past, but we do know he was on his own for a long time.”
“I found him out in the wilderness a few years ago,” Rory said. His golden eyes softened, gazing into memory. “I was out working a fire that went wrong. I got cut off from my squad, too hurt to shift and fly to safety. Fenrir found me. He’d been living with a pack of wolves, but they’d fled from the fire in panic, leaving him behind. We had to rely on each other to make it out of there alive. By the time we staggered back to civilization, we were pack.”
“We’re all Fenrir’s pack,” Edith said. Her eyes briefly met Darcy’s, then darted away. “You are too, now.”
“I am?” Darcy looked down at Fenrir in surprise. “Just because I helped you last night? It’s okay, you know. You don’t owe me anything.”
Fenrir leaned against her. His eyes met hers steadily; deep,