Page 10 of Shift of Destiny
They stopped by the counter to thank Aurelio, then headed toward his truck. He couldn’t resist slipping his hand into hers as they walked. She smiled and squeezed his fingers. “Thanks for dinner and driving.”
“My pleasure.” He let her into the truck, then got in and started it. “Back to Tinsel’s?”
“Yes, please.” She stuffed her hoodie into her backpack, then wrapped her arms around it in her lap and rested her chin on it as he pulled into traffic, or what passed for it in Kotoyeesinay. She looked forlorn.
His simple-minded beast ordered him to find and kill whatever was making their mate unhappy. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but is something wrong?”
She straightened up for a moment and smoothed her expression, then seemed to give up the pretense and slumped again. “I really like you, and I don’t want to scare you away or anything, but my life is, well, complicated.” She sighed and looked down at her backpack. “This crazy man named Witzer has been after me for three years. Not just cyberstalking, but actually sending people to take me to him. He’s obsessed. He found me reading tarot cards at a Renaissance fair, and wants me to use my supposed ’magical gifts’ to find out secrets about his enemies and predict the future for his business deals. I keep moving, cutting all ties, but he keeps finding me.” Her arms tightened around her backpack. “This past winter, I thought I’d finally lost him for good, but six days ago, he found me, and I had to run again. He’s willing to hurt people to get to me. Last year, they kidnapped and beat up the woman I shared a hostel room with in Vancouver. The news said it was ‘drunk frat boys,’ and the woman got a big settlement, but I think it was Witzer’s goons, mistaking her for me.”
Chance took a deep, centering breath, trying to calm the growling beast in his head. “That’s why you take your backpack everywhere. It’s your ‘go’ bag. That’s why you need your car up and running.”
She nodded, a look of relief crossing her face. Ordinary folks probably found her story hard to believe, but magical people knew that kind of trouble all too well. “He’s textbook obsessive-compulsive, but he’s old money and buy-his-own-country rich, and the police think I’m the one who’s delusional. I think if he actually gets his hands on me, I’ll never be free again.” She shifted in her seat. “Luckily for me, I used my biological mother’s name at the Ren fair, because it would have embarrassed my foster father to have his engineer coworkers find out about my summer job as a pretend fortune teller. Witzer doesn’t know my legal name, so he never figured out where my foster parents live, or he’d have used them as leverage.” She fidgeted with one of the backpack’s zipper pulls. “It’s not the life I would have chosen, but it hasn’t been horrible up till now.”
He glanced at her. “What changed?” He was suddenly uneasy about her answer, afraid she meant her attraction to him, but he needed to hear it.
She was silent for so long that his shoulder muscles started cramping from the tension. “I think something’s wrong with my head.” Her voice was small and scared.
“What makes you think so?” He hoped he sounded supportive, rather than terrified at the thought his mate could be dying before he had time to fall in love with her.
“I keep seeing flashes out of the corner of my eyes, like something’s coming at me, or flickering just out of view, but there’s nothing there. It started last night when we left the diner, but it’s gotten progressively worse. Today in the store, I kept seeing... impossible things. Mostly in the mirrors. A talking bear with a Russian accent. A vampire, right out of a romance novel. A pair of young ravens instead of boys. Even Mr. Maxen, looking like a Tolkien elf, like the movies, only charcoal gray and prettier. A nineteenth-century oil painting that kept slowly changing. And when I ran into you tonight, you had amber eyes like a...” She trailed off, then shook her head. “I’ve always had a lively imagination, but even when I was little, I could always tell the difference between things I made up and the real world.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “If I have a tumor or something, it could be pushing on parts of my brain, making me hallucinate. I don’t have money or insurance. I can’t even afford to get tested, much less treated.”
She didn’t smell sick, and his nose was superb at detecting such things. He suspected her innate magic was working around her learned skepticism and eroding the effect of the elven charms. They were never meant to hide anything from magical people.
His human relief warred with his beast’s howling at her tangible despair. It was a wonder he could hear himself think. With shaky hands, he pulled the truck into the first available parking space on the side of the street, but left the engine running for the air conditioning. “Could I hold you for a minute?”
She looked up at him and sighed. “I’d like that.”
He slid out from under the steering wheel toward her and opened his arms. She dropped her backpack to slump into his embrace, and he wrapped himself around her. His T-shirt dampened with her silent tears and warm breath. The feel of her, the smell of her, swamped his human thoughts. It was all he could do to stop his beast from voicing its purring pleasure at finally holding their mate.
“Sorry about your shirt,” she mumbled.
He suspected no one had held her in a long time. “You can always cry with me.” He rocked her slowly. She was strong and soft and fit perfectly in his arms.
She snuggled in closer and he stroked her hair. She needed someone much better with people and with words, someone who knew how to ease her into understanding, but right now, he was all she had.
“Was this Witzer guy your boyfriend?” That was his possessive beast asking.
A shudder went through her. “Hell, no. He’s got twin sons older than me, and he’s a major creeper.” He did his best to hide his relief as she detailed the man’s bizarre job offer and escalating salary and benefits offers, and the subsequent pursuit all over the country. “I take jobs for cash and make random choices on where to move next, but I think he has a security company tracking me, and eventually, they will find me. I’m probably just paranoid, but I think he wants to own me, like an expensive car, or an exotic pet.”
“You’re not paranoid,” he murmured, "you’re smart.” The man sounded like a collector. Scary cautionary tales about collectors were a part of non-human lore the world over. Fortunately, most collectors knew better than to come anywhere near Kotoyeesinay, unless they had a death wish. Too many of the founding elves, fairies, witches, and shifters had unhappy personal history with them.
He wanted to pull her into his lap, but he didn’t want her to discover how much she aroused him. She wasn’t ready for that, even though he could smell the undercurrent of desire from her, too. “Maybe you really do have magic, just not the kind Witzer thinks. Maybe your magic told you what he really wants, and is what has kept you one step ahead of him for three years.”
She gave a shaky laugh. “That would be fitting justice.” She gave his chest a pat, then straightened up to give him a searching look. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
After a moment, he nodded. “I do.” He had a hard enough road to be with his mate as it was, without lying to her. He’d seen other shifters lose human mates over less. “I think it’s like a sixth sense, one you didn’t know you had. It’s been operating without you knowing, and now you have to learn to use it, so it works when you want it to.”
She smiled wistfully. “I’d have loved to have heard that when I was twelve.” After a moment, she shook her head minutely. “It’s a nice thought, but—"
A loud thump of something hitting the passenger door startled them both.
Moira looked out the window. “Huh. Not something you often see in the summer.”
When he leaned closer to look, he saw Tinsel’s red-and-gold sleigh—the one he’d built and painted—resting against the truck’s passenger door.
“What does it look like to you?” he asked cautiously, not sure what the sleigh’s protective illusion spell would show her.
“An old-fashioned miniature sleigh, with ice runners and everything. Looks like the one I saw on Tinsel’s porch. I thought it was just decoration.” She turned to him. “I’ll call her and ask if hers is missing.” She pulled out her cellphone.
