Fleance turned away. “I don’t have time for this.”
“You’re going after him, aren’t you?” Rhys didn’t need to say who he was talking about.
Fleance paused. Manu’s psychic voice brushed against his mind. *He’s the reason your hellhound keeps going psycho-cop.*
*I couldn’t replicate the symptoms. But I never fought Parker as hard as you did. My hellhound must not have been affected in the same way…* Rhys pulled out a notebook and jotted something down in it. Fleance tensed automatically.
Rhys had been trying to find a way out of Parker’s power ever since their former alpha first turned him. He’d been convinced there was a logical basis to their hellhound magic. Parker had taken great pleasure in disproving more than one of his theories.
Parker isn’t here now, Fleance reminded himself. He’s not going to find Rhys’s notes and use them on us. That’s why I’m doing this, remember?
He nodded to the notebook. “What do you mean, you never fought? You were always trying to find a way out.”
“A way out of being a hellhound. Not a way out of Parker’s master plan. I wanted to be out; you wanted to be good.”
Fleance glared at him. Inside him, his hellhound seethed. Years of frustration and helplessness had crushed it down, and now he was free and had done nothing to fix the misery his former alpha had caused.
No wonder his hellhound snapped at the smallest misdeed. As far as it was concerned, Fleance had forgotten the one thing he’d always sworn to do. Make Parker pay.
“Parker is a loose end,” he said out loud.
“And you’re going to snip him off?” Rhys raised one eyebrow. “Do you even know where he is?”
Fleance looked past him to Manu, who looked uncharacteristically beaten-down. He acknowledged Fleance’s silent question with a brief nod. “That was what I was for, wasn’t it? He wanted a bolt-hole to run to if everything went wrong.” His mouth twisted. “And someone to play the native guide. Flea, I can’t go back there. My family doesn’t know what happened to me. I can’t… not like this.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m doing this alone.”
Manu looked equal parts relieved and ashamed. Rhys shot him a dark look, then turned back to Fleance. “You’re sure about this?”
“I’ve got a passport. Parker made sure of that.”
“I don’t mean the technicalities.”
“I know.” Fleance set his shoulders. “I have to do this. It’s not just my hellhound, it’s all of us. I meant it when I said Parker was a loose end.” He didn’t want to talk about this—years under Parker’s thumb had taught him never to admit to anything—but he didn’t want Rhys to suddenly decide to experiment with heroism. “You can’t still feel him in your mind, can you?”
“Of course not.” Rhys flicked through his notebook. “My current theory is the former pack bonds are severed entirely after an alpha takeover. I wonder if the same is true of other shifter bonds. I—” He broke off and his eyes narrowed. “Wait. Can you still sense him?”
Fleance nodded slowly. The other two shifters paled and took a half-step backwards. He didn’t blame them.
Parker wasn’t part of the constellation that was his pack. He was a darker patch in the darkness beyond the stars—disconnected, but waiting.
“None of us knows how this is meant to work,” he said. “But having Parker in my head still feels wrong. I won’t feel like the pack’s safe until he’s gone, and I don’t want to involve Caine and Meaghan. Not with the babies so close.”
The other two nodded. The certainty of their understanding was almost enough to drive the guilt from his heart. They said their goodbyes, with Manu and Rhys promising to defray their alpha’s reactions to discovering he was gone, and he headed down towards the road.
Fleance had been turned years before either of them, but Manu and Rhys had been his allies under Parker’s thumb and now they were the closest thing he had to family. He already missed the close camaraderie of the pack.
A few days later, stepping onto a plane that would take him to Manu’s home country of New Zealand, the constellation in his head became harder and harder to concentrate on. Physical distance had its similarities to psychic distance—he already knew that his telepathic voice had limits, but the discovery that putting hundreds of miles between him and the rest of the pack made their connection feel more distant rocked him. Especially when he was halfway over the South Atlantic and the Parker-shaped darkness in his mind was joined by a new feeling: something that pulled him forward, tugging at his soul as hard as he was trying to keep hold of his pack sense.
He closed his eyes. This had to mean he was going in the right direction, he told himself. He just had to get through the flight, and through finding Parker and whatever happened next, and then he could go home.
Back to the closest thing he had to a real family.
2
Sheena
Sheena Mackay could not wait to get away from her family.
Okay, sure, she was far enough away from them right now that she couldn’t feel their telepathic voices knocking relentlessly at the walls she’d had to put up around her mind, but that wasn’t good enough. Her phone had been buzzing since she woke up. It had kept buzzing as she said goodbye to the cousins she’d been staying with in Wellington—seriously, if her folks wanted to check in with her, couldn’t they just call them? Get the gossip without bothering her?—and now, in the middle of the Desert Road halfway up the North Island of New Zealand, it was still buzzing.
How did she even have reception out
