Behind him, Opal rolled her pearlescent eyes. *Maybe if you gave her a different nickname…*
Fleance clenched one fist. The fire went out. “It’s fine, it’s not a—”
*NOOO! MY FIIIIIRES! NOT FAIIIIR!* Ruby howled, and threw herself onto the ground. Which she immediately set on fire.
*Why are you complaining?* Cole piped up. He flicked his tail at Fleance. *He can make the fire stop, right? So there’s nothing to worry about!* He punctuated this speech by sending a rope of flame shooting towards a tree Ruby was heading towards. She shrieked and aimed her next fireball at his head. He ducked, and another tree caught fire.
Fleance stepped up before anyone else could move, and extinguished the fires.
“OK, kids, I get you’re having fun and all, but—”
*WANNA HAVE ADVENTURE! WANNA FIRE!*
“You can’t just—”
Giggles filled his mind. Sheena was doubled over with strangled laughter. She bit her lip as their eyes met. *At least I’m not the one setting everything on fire?* she said, and covered her face as she gave in to laughter. “Oh, God, Fleance, it looks like we came back at just the right moment after all.”
“It… does,” Caine said slowly. He looked Fleance up and down. Fleance shot him a distracted smile and snuffed another fire. For a power he’d only learned how to use a minute ago, he was sure getting a lot of practice.
Cole whined something about it not being fair that he had to share his adventure with his cousin, which turned out to be a feint to distract his parents as Ruby tried to make her escape. Jasper hauled off after her in human form, his dragon form too big to follow her between the trees. Rhys yelped a warning as another fire kindled beneath Hank’s tail.
And in the middle of it all, Caine laughed.
Fleance clenched his fist again, snuffing another patch of fire, and stared at him in amazement.
“I was worried, but… You sorted out your problem, then?” Caine asked, wiping his eyes.
Fleance looked around. Rule-breaking and havoc abounded, and his hellhound wasn’t rearing to lay down the law—it was ready to jump in and cause some havoc of its own.
And there was Sheena. Still laughing. As though she sensed him watching her—and of course she did—she lifted one hand and pointed behind him. He sensed fire brewing in a dragonling’s nostrils without having to look and extinguished Ruby’s fireball with a smirk.
Not a smirk like Parker would make when he looked out over the results of his latest con job, or the paralyzed, rigid expression Fleance and his packmates would find plastered to their faces as they tried not to let their true feelings show. A full-hearted, absolutely smug and glorious smirk at the knowledge that it would never again be just him against the world and all of the dangers in it. It would be him, and Sheena, together, and whatever dangers they faced, they outmatched them by far.
“Yes, I sorted it out. And then some,” he told Caine.
* * *
When the forest was once again fire-free, Fleance and Sheena piled back into the car and drove the rest of the way up the mountain. The dragons peeled off into the clouds before they reached town, leaving Sheena, Fleance and the other hellhounds on the road to the Guinnesses’ property.
The Guinnesses lived in a stone and wood house surrounded by forest. Fleance had first seen it in the winter, when he, Rhys and Manu had slunk up to Caine and Meaghan’s doorstep to beg a place in their pack. Then, it had looked like something out of a fairy tale, glowing warm and bright amid the snow-covered pines and dark, icy night.
Now, mid-summer, it was as though that magic had seeped out to color the house’s surroundings. Pale new growth tipped the branches of the trees, and small flowers clustered around the house’s foundations and patchworked the yard.
But none of that was what made Fleance’s stomach flip as he got out of the car. He looked across at Sheena as she stepped out onto the drive, and she raised her eyebrows. Did she feel it, too?
He and Sheena weren’t the only new thing in town. No wonder Caine’s message had been so tense.
Caine was already there, sitting on his haunches in front of the house. When Fleance and Sheena got out of the car, he shifted back to human form, and cleared his throat.
“You must be wondering why I didn’t come after you to help sort out Parker,” Caine said.
Fleance hadn’t. He’d thought it was up to him, alone, but somehow, standing here in front of his old alpha’s house with his new pack bond bright inside him and the echo of the Guinnesses’ pack bond running over everything he could see was giving him a new perspective. He could see at last how much this place had felt like home, even when he didn’t trust himself, or believe he deserved a home.
Sheena slipped her hand into his and squeezed it.
“Is it all right that I’m here?” she asked Caine. “I mean—I can feel this is the heart of your pack. Somehow. Is there a ceremony, or…?”
Caine looked flummoxed. “God knows. But you’re welcome here, of course you are. Both of you. Pack or not, Fleance, you’re one of us, and your mate is, too.”
“You need to get started writing that manual,” Fleance joked.
“That sounds like a task I could hand off to you, now,” he replied, grimacing.
Sheena asked what they were talking about, and when Fleance explained, snorted. “I’ll write the manual, and then you’ll both be sorry.”
“Please. Both of you come in, and—” Caine took a deep breath and gestured helplessly. “I don’t want you to think I abandoned you. Meaghan was onto me to go after you as soon as Rhys and Manu let slip where you’d gone. She was right. Or maybe she was just sick of me
