Fleance believed her. He knew what that was like: to feel his alpha’s plans in his head, curdling the air he breathed. Caine kept his thoughts and his power to himself, but Parker had never seen the benefit in holding back when the alternative was putting the boot in.
“How far away is he?” he asked. “We shouldn’t react without thinking. What you said last night, about doing what he expects—”
“Fleance.” Sheena grabbed his arm. Her fingernails dug in, and he could feel her trembling down to her toes. “I can hear him. He wants the audience that he didn’t get yesterday. We need to go. Now.”
Fleance’s blood turned to ice. They were in the middle of town. It was still early enough that he couldn’t hear any cars on the street outside, but all that meant was that people would be trapped in their houses if Parker tried here what he had done in Silver Springs. And that was without a carpark full of hotel guests, huddled in the dark. The perfect audience for whatever Parker had in mind.
“Where?” he asked.
Sheena shook her head, her face twisting. “I don’t know! I don’t know this part of the country at all. If we were back home…” She pounded the wall so hard someone yelled something, muffled, from the other side. “I know back home you couldn’t go ten k’ without tripping over a farmer or someone on a camping trip or bike tour. It’s going to be the same here. There are too many people,” she anguished.
“It’s early,” Fleance countered, “and I think our definitions of ‘too many people’ might be different. If we get out of the main streets—”
“Any is too many.” She finished dressing and turned to him, her expression tortured. “He wants to hurt people, Fleance. I can feel it. I can feel what he wants to do.” She ran her hands down her face. “Maybe a national park. The tracks get closed off down south during winter. It’ll be the same here, right?”
He didn’t know. Worse, every time Sheena mentioned her home, the pit that had opened in his heart widened. It reminded him that strange as the geothermal land around her was to him, it wasn’t her territory, either. She had a home, a life, a whole world of places and people she loved. There was so much about her that Fleance didn’t know and now would never be able to learn. At least not beside her, free, souls entwined as they were meant to be.
Sheena grabbed the keys. “I don’t even know how far the closest trail is. I don’t know how much time we have.” Her eyes blazed and she bared her teeth in an uncharacteristic growl. “He’s toying with us.”
“That sounds like him.”
They raced down the stairs, past groups of confused and angry hotel guests. A security guard ushered them out through the foyer doors. There was already a small group gathered in front of the main building, but Fleance took Sheena’s hand and they slipped into the shadows and headed for his car.
The early morning air was lung-tighteningly cold. Fleance worried for Sheena’s bare legs until they reached his car and the ice on the door retreated at her touch. Her hand hadn’t been overly hot when they were running over here—she was still volatile, this close to her first shift.
“I’ll drive,” he said, and her nails squealed against the metal door. She looked as though she was about to argue—then her shoulders dropped.
“Here.” She tossed him the keys and slipped around to the passenger side. By the time he got the engine running, she had her seatbelt on and was sitting with her head in her hands. “I’m burning up,” she whispered. “How do I control it? I can’t even—I don’t want to talk to it! I don’t want this to be happening!”
He reached over and gripped her shoulder. Her skin was so hot he could feel it even through her borrowed sweater. Before he could open his mouth, she spoke again.
“But it is happening.”
Her back straightened. Without thinking, as though she were a member of his pack or still his mate, Fleance sent reassurance to her—and his telepathic senses came up against a block, like a steel wall around her soul. From the set of her jaw, she hadn’t even felt him reach for her.
He swallowed. “Sheena—”
“Don’t.” The word was almost a sob. “I know what you’re trying to do. But it makes it worse, feeling you in my heart when he’s—he’s watching.”
He pulled back, feeling sick.
That doesn’t change anything, his hellhound hissed. He almost jumped. It had been quiet since Sheena was bitten, wary and watchful, but he’d been so focused on her that he hadn’t missed it. Now it slunk around the edges of his mind, anger boiling across its hide. We came here to make sure Parker couldn’t hurt anyone else. We can’t let him take her.
His hellhound’s words put iron in his spine. It was right. It was his duty to defend all of Parker’s victims and make the world right.
He knew what he had to do.
Tires squealed as he pulled out of the carpark and onto the road. Someone shouted, and he felt a stab of guilt at leaving some poor fire warden short—which was ridiculous. Better their names be missing from the roster than the whole hotel be dragged into Parker’s game.
Rotorua at night was eerie. The city’s lights hardly made a dent in the huge blackness of the sky, and once they left streetlights behind them, the sky’s emptiness came down to envelope the whole world. The stars seemed to pull back, peeling away from the earth. The car’s headlights carved twin yellow beams through the nothing, illuminating roiling hisses of steam and gas and the skeletons of power lines, and nothing else.
Sheena fumbled with his phone. “Keep going,” she said, thumbing through the map app. “We’re on the thermal highway. That Caltex back there
