The Hellhound's Un-Christmas Miracle (A Mate for Christmas Book 4)

  The Hellhound’s UnChristmas Miracle

  Zoe Chant

  Contents

  1. Fleance

  2. Sheena

  3. Fleance

  4. Sheena

  5. Fleance

  6. Sheena

  7. Fleance

  8. Sheena

  9. Fleance

  10. Sheena

  11. Fleance

  12. Sheena

  13. Fleance

  Epilogue

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

  Special Sneak Preview

  1

  Fleance

  Children were crying, and it was all Fleance’s fault.

  Fleance’s pack alpha, Caine Guinness, rubbed his jaw. Caine’s eyes were shadowed with exhaustion, and bright with the hint of his inner hellhound’s careful gaze. “Tell me again what happened.”

  What happened is that “careful” isn’t a word you could ever use to describe my hellhound. Fleance gritted his teeth and sat back. He was in the small staff room at the Puppy Express, a tourist retreat where he and the rest of the pack worked part-time to get them out of Caine and his mate Meaghan’s hair. Meaghan was expecting twins and had made it extremely clear that her pack’s instincts to wait on her hand and foot were not the way to make her happy.

  Caine being called in to deal with Fleance’s hellhound like a parent being called to the principal’s office? Not part of the plan.

  Now, more than ever, Fleance felt like a poor imitation of the alpha who had saved his life. With his powerful frame, dark red hair, and piercing blue eyes, Caine drew attention wherever he went. Fleance’s hair was a lighter red, his eyes a paler gray-blue, and even though Caine had been turned into a hellhound years after Fleance, he’d managed to do the one thing Fleance had always thought was impossible: break free of the alpha who turned him. A year and a half ago, Caine had wrestled control of the pack away from Angus Parker and broken the chains around Fleance and the other two members of the pack. And now…

  The sound of the panic he’d caused outside would have been inaudible to a human, but it grated against Fleance’s enhanced shifter hearing. And his conscience.

  Why are you angry? his hellhound asked from inside his head, smoke dripping from its words as it watched him suspiciously. We won!

  You call that ‘winning’? Kids crying because you swamped them with your fear magic?

  Yes! They will not hurt anyone again!

  Fleance’s jaw went tight. He pushed his hellhound’s thoughts away and repeated what he’d already told Caine when he arrived. “One of the kids yanked on a dog’s tail.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all it took. My hellhound wanted to hunt it down. It—” Fleance frowned, trying to trace the logic under his hellhound’s rage.

  The Puppy Express was one of the main tourist attractions in Pine Valley, the small mountain town where Fleance’s pack lived. The Express maintained a web of sled dog trails that wound through the forest at the edge of town and hired out teams of dogs to do what they loved best: run. There were jingle-bell-bedecked sleighs in winter, and Fleance and the other hellhounds had spent the slushy shoulder season repainting the summer sleds.

  It was a sanctuary. The Express, Pine Valley, every goddamned pine needle and puddle of snowmelt in the place. Fleance didn’t like to think about his life before Pine Valley, but what he’d found here was nothing short of a miracle. Friends. Colleagues. A life he could be proud of.

  Or so he’d thought. Dread clawed at his throat, following the lines of the thin scars he’d never be free of. He should have known it was too good to be true. Too good for him. His hellhound had spent the first years of its existence acting as an enforcer for the evil alpha who had turned him, and now whenever it sensed someone stepping out of line, it attacked. What sort of a monster turned on little kids for playing up?

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve had this problem with your hellhound, but I thought you had it under control.” Caine rubbed his jaw, his fingers scraping on the stubble, and guilt shot through Fleance’s gut.

  He schooled his face and his heart before anything could show. He was already causing his alpha enough problems; he didn’t want Caine to pick up on the true depth of his feelings via his pack-sense. The man had better things to do than deal with his problems.

  “Rhys and I have been working on it,” he said. Rhys was another member of the pack. Where Fleance saw his hellhound as a curse, Rhys saw it as a puzzle—one he could break. “I haven’t had any outbursts for weeks and I—I thought I’d be safe working the till. I wouldn’t go out on the trails, there’s too much potential for things to go wrong, but I thought inside would be… safe.”

  “And how’d that work out?” Caine muttered. He raised a hand and grimaced apologetically as Fleance started to answer. “That was a rhetorical question, Flea.”

  Fleance shrugged away a momentary unease at the nickname. “My hellhound says it wants to stop people being hurt.” The words came out as an embarrassed half-growl. “But ever since Christmas it sees threats everywhere.”

  “…Yes.” Caine gave him a searching look, which Flea accepted warily. He wasn’t sure how much Caine could feel of his thoughts, but he trusted he’d never pick into his brain for them.

  Not like his first alpha.

  Fleance shivered, and tried to pass it off as another shrug. When Caine still didn’t say anything, more words forced themselves past Fleance’s lips. “Something doesn’t make sense.”

  He didn’t have Rhys’s talent for figuring things out, but something about this latest horror wasn’t right. His hellhound snarled softly, and he hushed it. Caine is our alpha. A good alpha. We can trust him. He went on, piecing his thoughts together word by word: “Rhys’s theory is that my hellhound wants to protect people. Last Christmas, it went crazy when that couple went off-trail in the snow, because they were putting themselves in danger. But a kid pulling a dog’s tail? What’s the worst that can happen, that scaring the hell out of some poor five-year-old is the better option? It doesn’t feel like I’m protecting anyone.”

  “No.” Caine’s voice was calm, but his eyes were watching Fleance too carefully for him to be entirely at ease. “It sounds more like it’s punishing them.”

  Yes! Make them pay! Make it RIGHT!

  Fleance flinched. Caine’s eyes widened and he leaned back, hands raised. “Easy.”

  Anger flared inside Fleance. His anger, not his hellhound’s. Why are you wasting time talking? Why not fix this yourself? Fleance swallowed hard over the bile that rose in his throat. Caine wasn’t that sort of alpha. Fleance didn’t want him to be that sort of alpha. He’d spent too long under the boot of a man who used his alpha powers to cage and control him. But now, with this…

  He clenched his fists on the torn fabric on the chair’s arms, then released them slowly.

  “You were in Parker’s pack the longest out of the three of you, weren’t you?”

  Fleance’s eye twitched. Had Caine read his mind?

  No, he told himself. He’d just cut straight to the point, like usual.

  He dropped his head. “I was the first one he turned. His test subject, Rhys calls me.” Fleance resisted the urge to touch the bite scars on his neck. Across from him, Caine’s knuckles went white as he gripped his upper thigh, where his own turning scar was. “You think he got something wrong when he turned me.” His voice was flat. “My hellhound’s broken. That’s why it’s so violent now that I’m not under Parker’s control.”

  Caine made a face. “I don’t think that. And I
’ve known Angus Parker since I was at college, remember. Given the way he treated the three of you when you were his pack, I doubt he’d consider violence to be something wrong with you.”

  “Is that meant to make me feel better?”

  “Yes and no?” Caine’s lips curved in a wry half-smile. “Yes, reassuring, because whatever you’ve been telling yourself, you’re not a monster. I spent long enough thinking I was one, so I should know. And no, not reassuring, because like I said. I know Parker. Not as well as I’d thought, but from what Rhys and Manu have told me…” He sat back and rubbed his face. “This is my fault.”

  “What?” Fleance was still managing his reaction to the news Caine had been talking to Rhys and Manu. All those years with Parker had trained him to keep his problems secret. His surprise that Caine thought this was his fault slipped onto his face.

  “I’m your alpha, aren’t I? I’m meant to take responsibility for all of you.”

  Strange way of saying ‘control’, Fleance thought before he could stop himself, as Caine kept talking.

  “I should have seen you weren’t coping. I should have done something to help. I’ve been so distracted with Meaghan’s pregnancy. We knew it would change things, the Heartwells warned us about that, but now…”

  A shiver rippled across Fleance’s pack-sense. He leaned forward, trying to trace the source of the disturbance, and gasped.

  Fleance had always been keenly aware of his pack. When it was just Parker, there had been no escaping it: his alpha had been like a black hole, dragging at his attention and ready to lash out if he felt he wasn’t being shown due respect. When Parker had added Rhys and Manu to the pack, the black hole had been joined by two other circling stars—caught in its orbit, always at risk of being eaten alive.

  Two Christmases ago, Caine had defeated Parker in combat. Suddenly, the black hole had vanished. Now, when Fleance closed his eyes and looked inside himself, past his hellhound’s smoke-filled den, he saw a constellation of lights whirling through a black night sky. Still caught in orbit, but no longer crushed into place by a cruel alpha’s control.

  That was what made Pine Valley so precious to Fleance, and Christmas even more so. It felt like a charmed place and time. The longer he spent there the more true that seemed, as he learned about the other miracles the town had experienced each Christmas season. The Christmas before he’d moved to Pine Valley, one of the local dragon clan had found his mate, breaking a curse that would have forced him to lose either his dragon or his human side forever. Then, Caine had met his mate, and broken Parker’s control over his pack. And again, last Christmas, another piece of magic. Two more hearts made whole.

  In Pine Valley, Fleance felt safe for the first time since he was a teenager. He didn’t need to keep one eye on his pack-sense at all times, and this must have been why he never noticed the newest changes to his psychic night sky.

  Two new points of light, barely pinpricks against the darkness, whirled near the central star, around the shining moon that represented Caine’s mate. Fleance blinked—and there was another rippling shiver, and they were gone.

  Two almost-there new pack members. Twins.

  Fleance’s eyes flew open and he met Caine’s tired gaze. “They’re hellhounds? Without being bitten?”

  “Seems that way.” Caine became agitated. “And Abigail’s been telling Meaghan about things that changed for her after she had Ruby, and there’s going to be two of them, and… It’s going to be a lot.” His eyes went glassy. “A lot.”

  And he doesn’t need an uncontrolled, violent, broken hellhound to deal with on top of all that. Fleance gritted his jaw. “This isn’t your fault,” he told his alpha. “It’s—I can handle it. I will handle it. And if worse comes to worst—”

  He reached towards the central star in the constellation that represented his pack. Almost invisible against the darkness were the threads of power that linked him to his alpha. They were only threads, not the coiling, choking chains Parker had used to control his lackeys. But they were there. “You can make me stop.”

  “It won’t come to that,” Caine replied.

  “You don’t know that.”

  Caine levelled his gaze at him. His hellhound’s fire moved behind his eyes, assessing. Thinking. Fleance forced himself not to show his discomfort.

  Then Caine sighed, ran his fingers through his dark-red locks, and stood up. “Sounds like they’re finished out there,” he said. “Bob’s taken the tourists off into the trails, and Rhys and Manu ran at the first sign of trouble like the sensible bastards they are. No one left to cause you any trouble.”

  Fleance didn’t mention that the reason the other hellhounds had vanished like smoke was that they were afraid they’d catch his hellhound’s rage. It was contagious; he might not be an alpha, but something in his hellhound’s hunting instinct lit a similar instinct in the others.

  Thank God for Caine, he thought, standing up. He would hide himself away in a cabin if he needed to. Pine Valley had plenty of hunting lodges, farther out in the mountains where you’d have to run for days to meet another soul. But having Caine’s alpha authority as a backup if everything else went wrong…

  He’d never thought he’d come to consider his chains with relief. But he’d never thought he’d be free of Parker, either.

  “Let’s get a move on. I’m driving Meaghan down to town for her ob-gyn appointment this afternoon.” Caine paused at the door. *Hmm.*

  The voice in his head was Caine’s, but the rumble underlaying it was all hellhound. Fleance bowed his head. Caine was his alpha, and he was a good one, but Fleance knew from bitter experience how these things worked. If his alpha said jump, you didn’t wait to hear how high. If your alpha said hmm, you kept your mouth shut until he finished thinking.

  Caine stared at him coolly over his shoulder. “Before we go… one more thing.”

  He walked over to the safe that held the Puppy Express’s cash earnings for the week and pushed his hand through the door of it. The metal shimmered around his wrist as he used his hellhound powers to make it as insubstantial as mist.

  When he withdrew his hand, he was holding a stack of bills. Fleance watched as he casually pocketed them.

  “What are you—” He broke off as his hellhound reared up inside him, all fire and rage. Smoke curled at the edges of his vision. If he looked in a mirror, he knew his eyes would have transformed from their usual mild gray-blue into pits of spitting hellfire.

  His hellhound held back—barely. Caine was his alpha. Fleance couldn’t even conceive of his hellhound attacking his alpha. But…

  His hellhound snarled, a low, fierce rumble that made Fleance’s vision blur.

  Fleance sat down again and dug his fingers into the arms of the chair. Worn vinyl cracked beneath his fingertips. No, not fingertips. Claws.

  “Boss,” he forced out. Caine shot him a smile that said we’re-all-friends-here and patted his pocket.

  “Let’s head out,” he said, his voice casual. “I’ll escort you back to the house, and let the others know they’re on the hook for your shifts until we’ve figured this out.”

  “But you’re—” Fleance broke off as his throat went dry.

  Caine was leaving with the cash in his jacket pocket. And even though Fleance knew this was some sort of trick, a test, and because he knew it his hellhound should too, the beast inside him was howling with rage.

  Its voice thundered in his skull. No! it howled. Not this time! We won’t let him get away with it!

  Fleance leaped up, unable to stop himself. His hellhound was tearing his way out of him, forcing a shift that would—

  “All right, that’s enough.”

  Caine’s alpha authority wound like chains around Fleance’s limbs. His hellhound stopped. Its rage was still there, but contained within the power of his alpha’s command. Fleance’s chest heaved as he gasped in air. He dropped back into his seat like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  “That proves one thing,” Ca
ine said, grinning. Fleance stared at him. Had he gone mad? “Don’t worry, Flea. I might not like to use them, but if my alpha powers mean I can stop you from—”

  Not this time! Fleance’s hellhound roared. Make him—stop him—our alpha should not—

  The rest of its words were lost in a storm of brimstone-laden fire. Fleance’s spine cracked and he fell forward as his shift took hold. Muscles burning, he tried desperately to catch hold of his hellhound, but the creature of smoke and flame evaded his grasp. He transformed in a blaze of fear and rage.

  Fear poured from him. It sent tendrils out to choke the breath of anyone it could find, to drive sharp fingertips into spines and the backs of necks, to make shadows dance at the edges of vision, to make every breath seem shallower than the last. Once it found its prey it would stick to them like a tick, scaring them into running. The hunt would begin.

  It found Caine.

  Transformed, Fleance’s hellhound filled the small staff room. He loomed over his still-human alpha, panting out smoke. The urge to hunt flooded through Fleance’s veins: his hellhound’s primary instinct, primal and unstoppable.

  Villain—monster—stop him—protect—

  His hellhound’s voice howled through Fleance’s head, screaming words that were disconnected but pulled together by its bonfire rage.

  Stop this! he commanded. His words disappeared like tissue paper held to a flame.

  His hellhound prowled forward, placing its massive paws carefully, heavily. The floor hissed, smoke rising from under his claws.

  *Don’t do this, Fleance.* Caine was still in his human form, but his voice packed a punch like a freight train. Surely his hellhound couldn’t ignore it.

  His hellhound took another step forward.

  Awareness crackled at the edge of Fleance’s mind: the rest of the pack. Manu and Rhys, the two younger hellhounds, were back at the Guinnesses’ lodge. Fleance’s urge to hunt singed the edges of their minds, a match flame to kindling. The huskies left in the kennels started to howl, and the ones Bob had taken out with the kids stopped in their tracks, shivering with anticipation.