Guardian's Mate

  Miles turned dark eyes to her, looking almost embarrassed that he’d shifted in front of her. Rae knew that not all Shifters liked to be petted but she took the chance and stroked the top of Miles’s head. His fur was wiry but soft and very warm.

  “I didn’t know there could be fox Shifters,” she said.

  “Yep,” Zander answered. “The Fae shits experimented on a lot of creatures. Not all of them survived, and of those that did, not all were viable. But a couple rare ones got through. Like polar bears and, I guess, foxes.”

  Zander had his hands on his hips, comfortable standing there without any clothes. He had the body for it, every muscle tight, a dusting of black curls across his chest and another line on his lower abdomen, a glory trail that led to . . . glory. A couple times now, Rae had seen how seriously large he was, and every time, her face and body had gone hot as he’d noticed her noticing.

  Zander turned away and caught the wheel, deftly turning the boat before they rammed to their death against a sheer wall.

  “Piotr, go down and release Ezra,” he said. “I’m going to take us back to my boat and you’ll pilot it out of here. All right with you?”

  Piotr studied him, his round face troubled. Then he nodded. “I think you’re crazy, my friend, but I will try. What about . . . ?” He gestured to the fox who was sitting next to Rae.

  “He’ll be fine,” Zander said. “We’ll take care of him. You just take care of my boat.”

  “Wait, we’re going back to it?” Rae blurted. “What happened to getting out of here?”

  Zander didn’t look at her as he moved controls. “I’m not leaving my boat to rot in the Graveyard. Piotr can follow me out.”

  Piotr was obviously terrified but the look in his eyes showed perfect trust in Zander. Was everyone around Zander as insane as he was? They were, Rae decided. But they weren’t wrong. Zander seemed to engender trust, as though everything he did, no matter how dangerous, would come out right in the end.

  Rae must be as insane as his other friends were, because she was starting to trust him too. If he said he could steer them out of this scary place and find a guy to fix the sword of the Guardian, he probably could.

  Piotr gave Zander a nod, laid the tranq gun next to Rae, and left the wheelhouse. He lurched on the deck as the boat tipped but caught handholds with the ease of long experience and disappeared below.

  Rae kept petting Miles, carefully not reaching for the tranq rifle. She didn’t want to spook him. “What are you going to do about these other guys when they wake up?” she asked.

  Zander wasn’t looking at her. He studied the swirling mists with a frown. “I’ll think of something,” he said.

  “Great.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it?” Zander sent her a grin over his shoulder. “Fishing all day gets boring. This is much more fun.”

  Rae and Miles shared a look. “Sorry,” Rae said to the fox. “He’s not my fault. He was foisted on me.”

  Miles’s forehead wrinkled in an expression so like his human one Rae wanted to laugh. Instead, she smoothed it out and kept petting him, while Zander guided the boat through the roiling water.

  * * *

  Zander didn’t much want Rae out of his sight, but he asked her to help Piotr lock up Carson and his men. Zander couldn’t leave the wheel, Miles was still a fox, and Ezra, when Piotr helped him into the cabin, was half asleep from tranqs. He leaned back on a bench and closed his eyes.

  Zander gave Carson’s men small doses of the tranq to make them continue to sleep—tricky, because humans couldn’t take the large amounts Shifters could. Too much and he’d kill them, and Zander wasn’t a killer.

  While Rae and Piotr were busy lugging bodies, Miles hunkered in a corner Zander pointed him to. “Stay,” he said. “Good fox.”

  Miles growled but settled in, watching Zander’s every move as Zander piloted his boat.

  Once Rae and Piotr were dragging Carson off, Zander exhaled, and in that moment, the fears and horrors that he’d healed from Miles washed over him.

  Damn, he hated this. Zander didn’t have time to deal with a healing hangover right now, but Miles’s emotions poured over him.

  Zander felt Miles’s remembered terror when he realized his body could change without his control, the world spinning as his vision shifted, his heartbeat rocketing, his skin growing fur. Fear that he was some kind of freak, that his parents would abandon him. The need to hide what he was, work hard to be like his human father.

  That worry had never left Miles but that hadn’t been what knocked the fear of Shifters into him. That had come later. Zander didn’t understand the whole story; he only had flashes of horror. Men who were half beasts ripping someone apart—man or woman, human or Shifter, Zander couldn’t see. Blood, the smell of death.

  Panic—the Shifters had seen him. Run, run, hide, hide. Shut it out . . . but never forget.

  “Shit,” Zander said, his skin clammy and cold. He looked at Miles, and Miles looked back with his fox’s dark eyes. “I get why you were scared of Shifters. They’re not all like that. How old were you?”

  Miles didn’t answer and Zander didn’t speak fox. Not very old, Zander guessed from the emotions. Still a cub, probably.

  “Tell you what,” Zander said. “I’ll find out which Shifters did that and have a chat with them. I’d like to know why they were on a killing spree.”

  Miles regarded him in surprise and Zander turned back to the wheel. “I can’t read your mind. I understand what you went through because I healed your paranoia. You’ll get used to me.”

  Now if Zander could get used to himself. One of these days he was going to heal someone, and be so struck with his or her pain and emotions he wouldn’t recover. That was the fear that woke Zander in the night, the one that made him so crazy.

  Okay, one of the things that made him so crazy. Not knowing if the next person he healed would kill him, having to choose every time whether to give them compassion or run away. Compassion, so far, had won, but would there come a time Zander wouldn’t be able to convince himself to make the sacrifice? How would he live with himself after that?

  “That’s my problem,” Zander said. “I’m just too darned nice.”

  Miles snorted what Zander took to be a laugh. Rae chose that moment to walk in.

  “Too darned nice?” she demanded. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Her aura was calming, her voice like cool water on the parched places of his mind. A spike of heat shot through Zander’s heart, warming his cold limbs and easing the last of Miles’s gut-wrenching panic from him.

  Zander took his eyes off the scary panorama of the Graveyard to meet Rae’s eyes, gray like the mists outside, calm, beautiful. The heat in his heart blossomed into something like pain. Holy fucking shit.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Mate bonds didn’t always happen. Two Shifters could mate, live together, have cubs, and never form the mate bond. Rare, but possible.

  Mate bonds could also form long before a Shifter took a mate in the ceremonies performed by the clan leader under the sun and under the full moon. A beautiful she-wolf like Rae could glare at Zander with her lovely eyes and heat his body to broiling. That warmth would twine his heart, a tendril that would bond itself to her and she to him.

  In the middle of the Graveyard, with death coming at them every second, Zander couldn’t stop and decide whether this feeling that had smacked him in the face was the mate bond with Rae. Her touch soothed, her look calmed him down, the kiss they’d shared had been smoking hot and had set his imagination spinning.

  The moment he had time, Zander was going to take Rae off somewhere private and explore whether they were forming the mate bond or just craving each other’s bodies in their loneliness. Either way, they’d have a great time.

  Rae was watching him with a puzzled expression, probably wondering why in the hell he was absently moving the wheel back and forth, as though the heavy fog, looming rocks, and the fresh storm weren’t all that
important. And they weren’t, Zander realized. Taking a mate was. Holing up, going into frenzy, having cubs—that was why Shifters were alive. The instinct to mate had been bred strongly into them by the Fae, and Shifters had been happily shagging ever since.

  But first, Zander had to get them out of the tricky place he’d taken them into.

  Rae found sweatpants and a windbreaker for him, a bit too small for Zander but Rae insisted he put them on. True it was getting chilly in here. Anything for you, Little Wolf.

  The clothes must belong to Miles—too large for Carson or the guards. Strange how Miles, such a big man, could reshape himself into a small fox. Where did the extra mass go? Zander had ceased worrying about little things like that long ago—magic explained a lot—but he was intrigued.

  Zander was a little surprised, actually, when he maneuvered into the narrow channel where he’d left his own boat. Following his instincts, the charts on Miles’s battery-powered laptop, the proximity readouts, and the little hisses of Jake the Snake, whom Rae had placed on his shoulder, Zander found his boat. There she was, rocking too close to the walls, waiting for rescue.

  Zander guided the larger boat as close as he dared. When Miles had been piloting this craft, he’d brought it within a few inches of Zander’s without ramming it. Miles remained fox right now, though, taking refuge from his confusion in that form.

  Zander sensed Rae behind him as he held the boat steady a foot or so from his own—felt her warmth, knew her scent, his entire body aware of her. She peered out the window, watching Piotr help a groggy Ezra over the gunwale and make the leap to Zander’s boat.

  Piotr lifted his hand to Zander, then he and Ezra went into the pilot house.

  Zander backed the larger vessel away, turning it slowly, slowly, and then pointed it past his boat, sliding alongside it to go deeper into the fog.

  He felt Rae start. “Aren’t we going back the way we came?”

  “Nope,” Zander said. “There are two ways out of the Graveyard. The first way might have the Coast Guard or Shifter Bureau hanging out in front of it. The second way . . . well, no one knows where it actually comes out.”

  He sensed Rae’s stare and turned to look at her. Her dark hair hung in wisps around her face, curling in the humidity, and her gray wolf’s eyes pinned him. “Do you know where it comes out?”

  “More or less.”

  He loved the way her eyes flashed when she was exasperated. “Zander.”

  “We’ll find it. The Goddess looks out for her own.”

  “You sound very sure about that.”

  “Listen, sweetheart, if I didn’t trust the Goddess every single day of my life, I’d be dead. Or too terrified to leave my house. I’d be living in a tiny cottage in the Shetlands, afraid to touch anyone, figuring the world would be better off if I just stay put. Walking around with the Goddess messing with me every day makes guiding a boat through the Graveyard a walk in the park.”

  He hadn’t meant for his voice to grow so harsh, but Zander didn’t exaggerate. When he’d been younger, some days it had been all he could do to get out of bed. He’d known he’d have to heal some Shifter—because in the old, wild days, they could get into many violent situations—and he’d end up in deep, terrible pain, maybe dying for it. He’d spent a long time furious with the Goddess for doing this to him. Why did he have to draw the unlucky straw?

  Rae had drawn one too. She was young, far too vulnerable for the bad shit that she’d get pulled into. Sailing around the Graveyard was the least of her worries.

  To distract himself, Zander touched Jake’s cool head. “What do you think, my friend?”

  Jake’s tongue flicked in and out, in and out, then he gave Zander a look from his steady black eyes.

  “I agree,” Zander said. “Adjust the heading a little to the north, northwest.”

  Rae was giving him her long-suffering look. “Snakes can’t talk.”

  “Yes, they can. You just have to learn how to understand what they say. He didn’t really say go north, northwest, he just wants me to go that direction.” Zander pointed. “The smell is right.”

  “We’re Shifter,” Rae said patiently. “And I can’t smell anything but stink. I can’t tell the difference.”

  “But Jake can,” Zander said with perfect confidence. “He can also see in the infrared, did you know that? He’s got little organs that detect heat signatures so he can find a rat to eat on the darkest night. He can tell warmer water from cooler, or warmer air. And he says it’s that way.” Zander pointed again into the murk.

  Rae gave a fed-up sigh and plopped down to the nearest seat. “If you can get us out of here, Zander, I’ll . . .”

  She trailed off. Zander sent her an amused glance. “You’ll what? Kiss me?”

  “Kick your ass.” Rae jammed her arms across her chest. “My dad brought me to you to train me and keep me safe from Shifters who aren’t happy with me being Guardian. So what do you do? Get me into a bar fight, have us run from the Coast Guard and then be captured by a bounty hunter, and lose us in a dangerous waterway in the densest fog I’ve ever seen. And now you say you don’t know the way out.”

  “Most interesting night you’ve ever had,” Zander said, keeping his gaze forward.

  He felt Rae’s glare for a while longer and then she dissolved into laughter that warmed the air. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  Zander risked another glance at her. Her laughter changed her, softened her face, made her eyes dance. Her smile was wide, lips red, reminding Zander how warm they’d been when he’d kissed them.

  He wanted nothing more than to take her into his arms, lay her on the bench, and slide his hands down her body. He’d lift her to him, kissing her like crazy, yanking away clothing until they could be skin-to-skin.

  His blood was fiery hot, his cock, uncaring about danger, growing hard. He’d sail them out of here and then celebrate the best way he knew how.

  Zander took his hand from the wheel long enough to brush back a lock of Rae’s dark hair. Rae’s laughter died and an answering spark lit her eyes.

  No matter what, when they reached safety he and Rae were going to celebrate being alive the way Shifters did, with an all-night frenzy. It would be loud, rough, and if Zander read Rae correctly, amazingly loving. This woman had much to give, if only someone would let her give it.

  Zander said to Jake, “All right, my friend. Which way now?”

  * * *

  The boat inched through the rain, which did nothing to slacken the fog. Rae slid into the copilot’s chair after a time, while Miles remained on the floor as his fox.

  Rae watched Zander peering ahead to the ice walls, rock, fog, waves, and who knew what else, tension in every line of him. He was confident they’d get out, but not one hundred percent positive. Rae wanted to yell at him again for dragging her in here but she didn’t want to risk distracting him.

  The view out the front window didn’t change. That is, it altered from moment to moment, but it didn’t clear and show them open water.

  Lights on the stern of this boat directed Piotr, who was following close behind in Zander’s. If Zander ran into anything, Piotr would slam directly into them and they’d all go down. Comforting thought.

  To take her mind off such things, Rae brought out the Sword of the Guardian and took both pieces out of the sheath. She laid them on the front windowsill, careful to keep them from sliding onto the controls.

  Two pieces of dull silver, etched with runes, lay inert before them. Daragh had known what the runes meant but Rae hadn’t had time to look them up or even read any of his logs about it, which were on his computer back home. The computer was in the small house Daragh had used as his personal retreat but Rae hadn’t been let in there.

  Rae studied the crack in the silver, which lined up perfectly when she slid the two pieces together. She half hoped to see a magic spark fuse the two together, but nothing happened.

  “Sorry, Daragh,” she whispered.

  Did Rae imagin
e the slight ripple that ran through the silver? She leaned forward eagerly but the sword simply lay there, flat and unwinking. Yes, she’d imagined it. Damn it.

  “Still talking to a dead guy?” Zander asked her.

  “Still talking to a friend who’s gone to the Summerland,” Rae said right back to him. “Friends . . . You know, those people who have your back?”

  “Peace, Little Wolf, I was teasing you.”

  “I know.” Rae did know it. Zander was easy to grow angry with, but it was hard to stay mad at him for long. He knew just the right thing to say to put Rae’s back up and then how to make her laugh.

  “When did you know you had healing power?” Rae asked him, curious. “Did you have a Choosing, like for the Guardian?”

  “Nah.” Zander made a minor adjustment to their course—Jake probably told him to. “I was a cub, minding my own business, when wham. Suddenly I’m thrown to the ground by nothing. When I get up, I’m putridly sick. I went back home to find out my dad had been shot. Not fatally,” he added quickly, “but a hunter mistook him for a real bear and shot him. Not that hunters were supposed to be targeting polar bears at all, but some people will open fire on any animal, just for the hell of it.

  “Anyway, I went to help my mom bandage up my dad . . . and I healed him. Just like that. Bullet popped out under my hands, the wound closed up, and then I was doubling over in serious pain, like I’d been shot myself. My mom and dad freaked out a little bit, and when I felt better, I ran away. I was too young to make it on my own though, so I went back home and sucked it up. But people treated me weird from then on. I learned I could only find peace when I was alone.”

  “Was this when you were in the Shetlands?”

  Zander gave her a nod. “Our neighbors knew we were Shifter—or at least not human—and they didn’t care, but they were powerfully superstitious, especially a hundred and more years ago. They thought I was either touched by the devil or by an angel, depending on the mood of the day. Once I was past my Transition, I lit out to see the world. Which was why I wasn’t around when the rest of my clan was rounded up by the humans.”