Defender Hellhound (Protection, Inc: Defenders Book 3) Read online

  The puppy gave an indignant yelp, then wriggled around until it was facing him. He found himself gazing into the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, and a face that seemed to be smiling. The puppy’s mouth opened, and Ransom tipped his head back just in time to avoid getting licked on the lips. Instead, the puppy began enthusiastically licking his throat.

  A freezing cold voice said, “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to pay for the pastries your dog destroyed.”

  “It’s not my dog,” Ransom said.

  The older woman gave him a look like she didn’t believe that for a moment. “Then I guess it’s a stray. In that case, I’ll have to take it to the pound.”

  She reached out for the puppy. Ransom instinctively clutched it to his chest. “No!”

  “Then you’ll pay for the pastries?”

  The absurdity of the situation almost made him laugh. There he was, in a murder mystery café, being blackmailed for pastry money over a dog that had seemingly materialized inside a locked case. But he couldn’t bring himself to abandon the puppy. Maybe Tirzah or Merlin would want it.

  “Fine,” he said, resigned.

  “Just so you understand, you’re buying the entire case,” the woman warned him. “We can’t sell pastries that were in the same case as a dog, even if the dog never touched them. It would violate health regulations. Do you want us to box up the ones it didn’t touch, or throw them out?”

  He would have argued, except that he knew that she was correct about the health regulations. Technically speaking, she shouldn’t offer them to him, either. But if he didn’t pay for them, they’d lose a lot of money. And most of them were untouched.

  “Box them up.” His office would appreciate them, and they wouldn’t go to waste. “Just throw out the ones that actually did get licked or stepped on.”

  He went around the counter this time, still holding the puppy since he didn’t know what else to do with it. As the barista began boxing the pastries, the owner rang him up at a price which, while appalling, wasn’t out of line considering that he’d purchased the entire case.

  She seemed more kindly disposed to him now that he was actually paying, and said, “It’s a cute puppy. Just keep it on a leash next time. I can’t figure out how it managed to get inside the case without any of us noticing. And the one time I forgot to latch the door, too!”

  Ransom stared at her. The door had been latched. Not to mention that he’d been looking into the case seconds before, and there had been no puppy in it. The whole thing was impossible…

  …except that he’d personally experienced animals doing impossible things before. Animals like winged kittens, a miniature pegasus, and a bright blue bugbear.

  Ransom had to resist the urge to hold the puppy at arms’ length to check for very small wings or other not-immediately-obvious unusual features. Instead, he unbuttoned his jacket, then buttoned it up around the puppy, hiding it from view.

  The puppy promptly stuck its head out from the collar, panting happily.

  “I love your puppy!” It was the voice of a small girl. “Can I pet it?”

  The girl’s father put his hand on her back. “Sabrina, don’t argue if he says no.”

  The puppy fought hard to escape the jacket, yelping and whining. Ransom hurriedly took it out before it started breathing fire or creating snowballs, and put it down on the floor. Sabrina giggled as the puppy licked her hands.

  “She’s so sweet,” said Sabrina “What’s her name?”

  Glancing down, Ransom saw that the girl was right: the puppy was indeed a she. “She doesn’t have one.”

  Sabrina stared at him as if he was a lunatic. “Everyone needs a name. Want me to name her for you?”

  “Sabrina…” her father sighed.

  “Dad and I are reading a book right now, about a girl who lives in the mountains with her grandfather and a herd of goats. She eats lots of grilled cheese sandwiches. I think you should name your puppy after her. Heidi!”

  The puppy barked and cocked her head, exactly as it she was responding.

  “See?” said Sabrina triumphantly. “She knows her name. Now you try!”

  Ransom glanced around for an escape route, but his pastries were still getting boxed up. More importantly, his coffee was behind the counter and out of reach. “Heidi?”

  The puppy turned her head to look at him. Probably she responded to anything said in the same tone. “Spot?” The puppy flopped down, ignoring him. “Fluffy? Pepper? Iditarod?” The puppy continued to ignore him. “Heidi?”

  She leaped to her feet, tail wagging.

  Sabrina’s father chuckled. “Guess your new puppy has a name now.”

  “She’s not my…” Ransom began, then decided not to argue. Instead, he looped the giant bag of pastry boxes over one arm, picked up his coffee with one hand and Heidi with the other, and made his escape.

  Recalling an unfortunate incident with Blue and six boxes of Girl Scout cookies, he stashed the pastries in the trunk and Heidi in the back seat. She wagged her tail and licked his hand as he checked her for physical oddities, but he found none. Nor did she display any powers. Ransom began to doubt whether there was anything magical about her after all. Well, he’d let Merlin or Tirzah or whoever wanted to adopt her figure that out.

  Heidi whined, gazing up at him with those intense blue eyes of hers.

  “Sorry, pup,” he said, scratching behind her ears. Her fur was incredibly thick and soft. “I can’t take you. It’s just not in the cards. You’ll be happy with Carter or Roland or whoever you’ll end up with.”

  He got in the front seat, but took a long drink of coffee before he started the engine. It was surprisingly not bad, and he did feel better once he’d had some…

  Or rather, he realized, he’d started feeling better before he’d had any. He wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened, but his headache and shakiness had faded away at some point before he’d gotten in the car. That was odd, too. Normally he’d have needed the caffeine, and even then, it would have only taken the edge off.

  He sat in the front seat, drinking his coffee and appreciating the absence of pain and the quiet inside his head. If he changed anything, even so small a thing as starting the car, maybe everything would change. And once he got to the office, he’d have to give Heidi away. There was something nice about having her with him, right there in the back seat, as if she was his.

  “Hey, girl,” he said, stretching out his arm to pat her. He couldn’t quite reach. As he started to twist around, she vanished.

  Ransom stared at the empty back seat where she had been. A cold nose touched his hand. Heidi sat in the passenger seat, her tail wagging, seeming to grin.

  Chapter 5

  Natalie held her phone, eyeing her flight reservation. The India trip had been her single biggest planned expense, and she doubted that she’d get her money back if she canceled this late. On the other hand, she’d budgeted to spend her entire life savings on her bucket list, so it wouldn’t clean her out.

  Her finger gave a decisive tap.

  A box popped up, asking her if she was sure she wanted to cancel.

  Wally also popped up, blinking out of thin air and into her lap. He snuffled at the phone.

  “Yes,” Natalie said aloud, gently pushing his head out of the way. “I’m sure.”

  As she once again hit the “cancel” button, Wally gave an excited bark. He began running in circles around the motel room, occasionally popping out of view to reappear somewhere else, still running. This was a much more ambitious technique than he had the coordination for, and sent him tumbling head over heels or crashing into walls or furniture.

  Laughing, Natalie said, “Wally! What’s gotten into you?”

  A second puppy materialized. Natalie stared. Like Wally, it was a husky, and about the same size as him. But while Wally was pure white with only the faintest of pale gray markings, this husky’s markings were pitch black against her snowy coat.

  The puppies flung themselves on each other
, joyously yelping and tussling and blinking in and out to pounce from an unexpected direction. Natalie watched, bewildered and charmed in equal measures.

  There was a sharp knock at the door.

  “Just a moment!” She lunged for the puppies, thinking to cram them into the bathroom and… she had no idea how to make them stay in the bathroom…

  “It’s Ransom.” But he hadn’t needed to say so; she’d recognized his voice instantly. He added, “I already know about the puppy.”

  Natalie opened the door and ushered him in. “It’s puppies.”

  “Oh.” He looked down at the cavorting puppies. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “No one expects the teleporting puppies.”

  “I meant that I hadn’t realized there were two of them. I found the black and white one in a café. She disappeared when I came up to the motel, and I heard barking, so I knew where she’d gone.” He watched them for a moment, not looking anywhere near as happy as a person should while observing a pair of teleporting puppies playing together. “I guess they’re both yours, then.”

  The black-and-white puppy hurled herself at his ankles, set her teeth in his pants and ripped a hole in them, then stood up on her hind legs with her paws at his knees, barking loudly. The next instant, he had an armful of puppy making happy squeaking noises and licking his face.

  “No,” Natalie said. “Wally’s mine. The little darling you’re holding is obviously yours. Have you named her yet?”

  “Heidi,” Ransom said, his voice slightly muffled as he ducked to avoid a kiss on the lips. “But she came here. To be with you.”

  “You’re here. She came with you.” Natalie didn’t bother asking how he’d found her motel; the same way he’d found her at the cliff, presumably. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  Ransom deposited Heidi on the floor and held up a gigantic bag with a logo of a gun, a knife, a bottle marked “poison,” a pair of handcuffs, a fingerprint, a magnifying glass, and a fedora encircling the words DARKER THAN BLACK MURDER MYSTERY CAFE. “I brought you some gluten.”

  As she watched, incredulous, he began covering the table with pastry boxes stamped with the over-the-top logo and the names of the pastries. To her delight, they were And Then There Were Buns, Whodonuts, Who Bun Its, Book ‘Em Danish, Fingerprint Cookies, Crime of Passionfruit Tart, Sinnamon Rolls, and The Butter Did It. As a woman who had spent her entire adult life at a crime circus called The Fabulous Flying Chameleons, she appreciated commitment to a theme.

  “You sure know the way into a woman’s… stomach.” She took out her bucket list, crossed off EAT GLUTEN, and picked up a slice of Key Crime Pie in one hand and a Death by Chocolate in the other. “Go on. Have a seat. Have a terrible pun pastry. Unless you already stuffed yourself in the car.”

  He shook his head, sat down, and took a Serial Kruller, holding it as gingerly as if it was rigged to explode. It was like eating a pastry was a wholly unfamiliar experience for him. Natalie watched him, fascinated, as he took a bite, chewed, and swallowed.

  “How is it?” she asked.

  “Good.” He sounded surprised.

  She gestured at him to go on eating. He did, in the same manner, as if he expected each bite to blow up in his face and was pleasantly surprised each time it didn’t, but didn’t entirely trust that the next one wouldn’t be booby-trapped. She ate both of hers and a Crime Puff in the time it took for him to eat one. Without regular trapeze performances to burn energy, she was less hungry than usual; if she’d performed the night before, she’d have inhaled an entire box in that time.

  “Thanks for the gluten,” she said. “Did you say you found Heidi in a café? This café?”

  Ransom nodded. “Inside the pastry case. Everyone assumed she belonged to me, so I had to pay for all the pastries, because it would have violated health regulations to sell them after that. Oh—I should have warned you—”

  “That they’ve been in close proximity to a puppy?” Natalie waved it off, then pushed the Whodonut he was eyeing into his hand. “Don’t worry about it. I grew up in a shifter circus, remember? Merlin and I used to have picnics with tiger cubs and flying squirrel kits.”

  He took a cautious nibble of the Whodonut. “Yes, I’ve heard a lot of stories about that from Merlin.”

  “I bet. Merlin tells great stories.” Just saying that made her miss him and his stories with a startling intensity. Ransom was so lucky to work with him. “He must be the life of the office.”

  “You could say that.” Ransom, having apparently satisfied himself that the Whodonut wouldn’t explode, took a larger bite. Natalie helped herself to another Crime Puff. They sat in contented silence, eating their pastries and watching the puppies play. Heidi and Wally ran a few more circuits around the room, then flopped down on the rug with Heidi’s head on Wally’s fuzzy stomach.

  “Think they’re related?” Natalie asked.

  Ransom started to shrug, then said with absolute certainty, “Yes. They’re brother and sister. There were only two in the litter.”

  “Did you just… know that?”

  “Yes.”

  He could have been bullshitting her. There was no way to prove or disprove what he’d said. But Natalie was convinced. It wasn’t only because he’d proved that he really did have visions—just because something was possible didn’t mean it was always true—but because of the careful way he’d eaten the pastries, the anonymous way he dressed, and what he’d assumed when he’d seen her standing at the edge of a cliff.

  Cautious man, she thought. Always expecting the worst. Bracing himself for the worst.

  It was the opposite of a con artist’s personality. A fake psychic was flamboyant, brazen, and certain that they could fool anyone, so confident in their own skills that it came across as honesty.

  “I believe you,” she said. “About everything.”

  His dark eyes met hers, wide and startled. “What convinced you?”

  “If you were a great con artist, I wouldn’t have doubted you at all. And if you were a bad one, I’d have already caught you with your hand in my wallet.”

  “Oh.” He seemed more wary than relieved. As if the very fact that something had worked out the way he’d wanted it to made him not trust it. But, just like he hadn’t hesitated to go over the cliff with her, he didn’t let that stop him from pushing forward. “So you’ll let me go with you?”

  “To India, you mean?” When he nodded, she indicated the puppies. “I canceled my ticket. I decided I wanted Wally more than I wanted to see the Taj Mahal.”

  “Wally?”

  “After the Flying Wallendas. They’re a famous family of wire walkers and aerialists.”

  “I know,” said Ransom. She was learning to distinguish his varieties of “I know.” This one seemed to only mean that he’d heard of them. “Aren’t they mostly famous for falling to their death?”

  “Well,” Natalie said. “You can’t let a little thing like that stop you.”

  For the first time, she heard him laugh. Just a brief huff of breath, but she’d take it.

  “So what’s next on your list?” he asked. “After the tall motel?”

  And that made her laugh. Then she sighed, thinking of all the money she’d lost. “A bunch of other things involving airplanes, unfortunately. That little cutie pie is messing with a lot of my plans. Even for the things I want to do and see in America, I’m nervous about taking a teleporting puppy aboard a plane.”

  “Understandable. Could you do any of them as a road trip?”

  Natalie ran her fingers through her hair. “I’m embarrassed to admit this…”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “I have a friend who had a fear of driving.”

  “Oh, it’s not that,” she assured him. It was nice, though, the way he mentioned his friend’s phobia. Kind, but not condescending. Pulling out her bucket list, she showed him the relevant line.

  “BURN THE HIVE?”

  “Please. My writing’s not that bad.”

 
“I’m going to guess it actually says ‘LEARN TO DRIVE,’ but that’s just because of the context.”

  “I never got around to it,” she explained, ignoring the implication about her handwriting. “We all traveled around in a circus train, so we didn’t have cars. Except for the clown car.”

  A mischievous light glinted in the dark depths of his eyes. “Of course. Well, I know how to drive. If you won’t let me be your bodyguard, will you let me be your chauffeur?”

  “Bit of a step down, isn’t it?”

  The light winked out, leaving him utterly serious. “No.”

  Natalie felt like she’d been skating on a frozen pond, and the ice had cracked beneath her. If she accepted his offer, what would she really be accepting? Heartbreak and loss and grief, false hope that would only make everything hurt so much more than it would have if she’d never hoped at all…

  Or, Natalie thought, I can be an adult, and take the responsibility for keeping it light and professional.

  “To be clear,” she said. “You drive, you teach me to drive, and when we stop for the night, we get two rooms.”

  It was like a wall slammed down between them. The intimacy she’d felt and shied away from vanished, and so did all the restrained emotion she’d sensed in him. Ransom gave a sharp nod. “Understood.”

  “Good,” Natalie said, trying to hide her disappointment. She was the one who’d moved to preemptively crush anything romantic; it shouldn’t bother her that he’d agreed.

  It was good. He was too serious. Too intense. Give him an inch, and they’d both end up a mile deep, and crushed under the weight of it.

  Light and professional, she told herself.

  She gave him a light, professional smile. “Want to see what’s next on my list?”

  Chapter 6

  Ransom told himself that it was unreasonable to be so disappointed. He’d offered to drive her around, and she’d accepted the offer. He’d gotten exactly what he wanted, which was nothing more—nor less—than the opportunity to save her life. As for Natalie, she was being clear and assertive, which were both excellent qualities.