Defender Hellhound (Protection, Inc: Defenders Book 3)

by Zoe Chant

  “You don’t look surprised,” she said.

  “Should I be?”

  She shook her head, smiling. “No.”

  As they sipped their coffee, he remembered the last time he’d been there: how his hellhound had dragged him through the worst moments of passersby, and how the moment of peace he’d found drinking coffee in the car with Heidi had felt so fragile and precious.

  “It’s so peaceful here,” he said.

  Natalie glanced around, her gaze encompassing six uncooperative dogs dragging a frazzled dog-walker, a bike messenger darting in and out of traffic to a chorus of angry honks, and a person in a lobster suit staging a one-man protest outside of a seafood restaurant. “Yeah. It really is.”

  He could tell she wasn’t being sarcastic. Then again, she’d been raised in a traveling crime circus full of shifters.

  Licking a bit of icing off her lips, she said, “You’re not getting information thrown at you all the time anymore, are you?”

  “No. I get some knowledge without looking for it, but so far it’s always been relevant. Merlin and Pete both got their powers under control after they met their mates. They thought the reason the powers were screwed up in the first place was a side effect of the wizard-scientists trying to make sure we couldn’t bond with our mates. Once the bond happened, we could learn to use our powers.”

  “And your hellhound?”

  “Also behaving.”

  You still have a lot to learn about my power, said his hellhound. Shall I show you?

  Ransom repeated that to Natalie, who nervously asked, “What does he mean?”

  “Well, he can do more than show me people’s worst moments. I knew to yell ‘Fire’ because he showed me Jager’s greatest fear.”

  “That’s more useful. Though not much fun for you—you still have to experience it too, don’t you?”

  Ransom nodded, but his mind was already racing ahead. “I always thought ‘worst moment’ was a bit subjective to make sense as a power. Some people’s worst moments were about grief, but others’ were about guilt or anger or helplessness. Or fear—that’s what gave me the idea that my hellhound could look for a fear, specifically. I don’t think his power is about ‘worst moments’ at all. I think it’s to see memories tied up with very strong emotion—any kind of strong emotion.”

  Natalie leaned forward, excited. “So you could see a person’s happiest memory?”

  “I think so.” He pictured himself stroking his hellhound’s soft ears and said, Go for it.

  The memories opened like flowers. As he saw them, he narrated them to Natalie.

  “That bike messenger everyone’s honking at is opening an envelope. He got a full scholarship to Yale. He’s the first person in his family to ever go to college. He’s thinking of how proud his mother will be.

  “That woman honking at him loves to travel. Her last birthday, she went to Japan. She was walking along a street in Kyoto on a misty evening, and the only place lit up was a ballet school. The dancers were practicing, and the light and the mist made a golden halo. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  “The dog-walker’s memory is of the first time she woke up next to the man who would become her husband. She touched his cheek, and he smiled in his sleep. That was when she knew they’d marry.

  “The lobster guy… This is interesting. I thought his happiest moment would be scuba diving or something. But he was actually hired by the restaurant. They thought staging a fake protest would attract publicity. The lobster guy’s been depressed for a while. When he got asked to do this, it was so ridiculous that it made him laugh. When he did, it was like the storm clouds parted and a little sunlight shone through. It made him realize that the way he felt wouldn’t be forever. It made him realize there was hope.”

  Ransom fell silent. Sitting there with the woman he loved, experiencing the joy of all those people whose names he didn’t know and would never know, he felt a hard knot of old pain inside of him starting to crumble away like a sugar lump in a cup of coffee.

  “That’s beautiful.” Natalie sounded choked up.

  “When my hellhound showed me everyone’s pain, he said he was showing me the truth about the world. But this is the truth too. I just couldn’t see it before.”

  The traffic continued to flow, the lobster guy got in a conversation with a woman wearing a SAVE THE WHALES baseball cap, and people went in and out of Darker Than Black. There were five million people in Refuge City. Every one of them had memories of heartbreak, and every one of them had memories of joy. You just had to know how to look.

  Chapter 34

  Three Months Later

  Natalie had always thought she hated routine. But she loved the ones she and Ransom had developed. Go to bed together. Wake up together. Shower together. Drink their morning coffee together. Drive to work together. They were ordinary moments, transformed into something beautiful and special with love.

  Her pill box, for instance.

  Natalie had dreaded seeing another doctor, who she worried would tell her to give up gluten and fun, but Ransom used either his power or Google to find her a cardiologist who specialized in athletes. They went in together, she told the doctor that she was a bodyguard who practiced the trapeze, and he did nothing but order a huge number of tests, then put her on three different medications and tell her to practice with a net until she got used to them.

  “What’s the prognosis?” Natalie asked bluntly.

  “Excellent. Take your meds and exercise regularly, and you’ll have a completely normal life.” Then he’d chuckled, adding, “As much as any trapeze artist bodyguard ever has a normal life.”

  “You have no idea,” said Ransom.

  She had no problems with the pills themselves. What she did have an issue with was their container. She had to take one pill twice daily, and two different ones once a day. For a while she had three little orange bottles sitting on a side table, but it was hard to remember if she’d already taken them or not. So she got a pill box marked with days and times, but it was big and ugly and extremely plastic, and she hated having it lurking by her bed among her books.

  Ransom had his own pills by then, via a referral from his coyote shifter therapist, but his were antidepressants and he only took them once a day. But he actually seemed to enjoy contemplating his orange bottle. He’d taken the opportunity to study both their medications and how they worked, and for a while half his bedtime conversation was about the chemistry of the brain and heart.

  As it turned out, she didn’t have to look at the plastic monstrosity for long. A few weeks later, he presented her with a lovely little box carved with a beautifully detailed rendering of a Gabriel Hound. The golden grain running through the dark wood made the hound seem to be flying into the sun. When she opened it, she found tiny compartments with days and times marked on them.

  “I asked Pete if he could make you a pill box that you’d actually enjoy using,” Ransom explained. “But I didn’t tell him what to carve on it. That was all him.”

  “I love it,” Natalie said, running her fingers over the smoothly planed wood. “Now every time I take my meds, I’ll gloat over this gorgeous little box, and being able to fly, and having such a thoughtful mate—and an awesome teammate, too.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. He made me one too. I didn’t ask him for that. Look.” He showed her a box, the same size and shape as hers but made of sand-colored wood with a dark grain. The top of his was carved with a geometric design. “Recognize it?”

  She started to shake her head, then remembered the fat textbook he’d been reading for the last month, The Handbook of Clinical Biochemistry, which he sometimes referred to when he talked about how their medication worked. “Is it a serotonin molecule?”

  Ransom nodded. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. He did get inside my head.”

  “He deserves the biggest and the best steak,” Natalie said. “Though he’ll still have to cook it himself if he wants it to co
me out edible.”

  Now that she and Ransom had rented a small, cozy house with an actual kitchen, Merlin, Dali, and Pete had offered to teach them to cook. Natalie did intend to take them up on that. Eventually. So far all the attempts had devolved into the cooks in the kitchen doing the actual cooking, and Ransom and Natalie hanging out, chatting and playing with the pets and occasionally chopping things upon command.

  Today was no exception. They’d bought the ingredients for the barbecue, but Pete was going to do the cooking.

  Ransom stretched. Natalie’s heart sped up as she watched his lean muscles flex and lengthen, but now she welcomed the sensation instead of fearing it. Becoming a shifter had healed some of the damage to her heart, and the pills in her lovely little box took care of the rest. She could do and feel all she wanted now. And even months later, she wanted Ransom as much as she had when all they could do was hold hands and hopelessly long for each other.

  “Do we have time for a quickie?” she asked.

  “You always have time for a quickie,” he replied, pulling her down on to the bed. “By definition.”

  Afterward, they showered and then dressed together. Natalie watched with pleasure as Ransom put on a pair of tight black jeans, an equally tight white T-shirt that showed off his arms and shoulders, and the black leather jacket.

  “Best makeover ever,” she said.

  He looked over her usual leggings and the black top that showed off the rainbow of her newly touched-up hair. “You’re gorgeous, like always, but you’re missing something.”

  “I am? What?”

  He opened a drawer and removed a tiny box. Not a wooden box, a jewelry box. “A ring.”

  Her hand flew to her mouth. They’d talked about getting married and had agreed that they wanted to, but they hadn’t formally gotten engaged. Her old fear of being disappointed and abandoned flared up. How awful would it be if she accepted his ring, and then everything fell apart?

  Then she looked into Ransom’s eyes, and knew that nothing would fall apart. They were the brown of earth, and what could be more solid and reliable than that? He loved her and trusted her, and he always would. She could believe in that.

  Open it, said her Gabriel Hound, tail wagging hard enough to stir up a storm. I want to see!

  She extended her hand. “Will you put it on?”

  Ransom opened the box and slipped the ring on her finger. It was set with small round ruby with a tiny, offset, oval-cut emerald—an unusual and striking ring, much more artistic and interesting than the usual engagement ring.

  At least, that was how other people would see it.

  “A tomato and a leaf!” Natalie exclaimed. “Oh, Ransom, I love it!”

  All the love she felt for him went into their kiss. Then she broke off to exclaim, “Sorry, I forgot to say yes. Yes! Of course.”

  He smiled—an easy smile, full of love and sensuality and sweetness. “It’s okay. I forgot to actually ask you.”

  A burst of barking alerted them that the guests had started to arrive. On their way to the front door, Natalie paused at the refrigerator to look at her bucket list, which was stuck on with a commemorative Tomato Land magnet in the shape of, unsurprisingly, a tomato.

  Touching the very last item, which she’d added the day they’d moved in, she said, “Still my favorite.”

  “SQUID is my favorite too,” Ransom said.

  “It’s LIVE and you know it,” she said, elbowing him, then ran to answer the door.

  Tirzah, Pete, his thirteen-year-old daughter Caro, and his mother Lola were first to arrive. Two flying kittens and a miniature pegasus accompanied them. Pete lugged containers of potato salad and cole slaw that he’d made, and also tamales that his mother had made.

  “I helped,” Caro said proudly. Then she whipped a chemistry test out of her pocket and waved it at Ransom. “Check out that A!”

  “Good work,” he said.

  “I told you she needed you,” said Pete. His tone was gruff, but Ransom clearly took it in the spirit in which it had been intended.

  Natalie hugged Pete. “Thank you so much for the box. I love it. The old one made me feel like a suburban grandma.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” said Lola. While Natalie blushed and stammered an apology, Lola winked at her and said proudly, “I saw the box. He’s so talented! I’m having him make one for me. Guess what’ll be on it?”

  Everyone chorused, “A cactus!”

  Merlin and Dali arrived next. He carried an absurdly high and teetering set of boxes, while Dali was steadying her grandmother with a hand on her forearm and scolding a hangdog Blue.

  “Bad bugbear,” Dali said. Blue flopped down on his back, sending up a cloud of bright blue fur, and wagged his tail placatingly. “Oh, get up, you ridiculous creature.” To the others, she said, “Merlin went berserk in the kitchen and produced eight different desserts. We brought seven. Blue ate the raspberry cupcakes. No treats for him tonight. He already had his.”

  Roland arrived late and frazzled, carrying a cake that looked like a sinkhole had opened up in the middle. “I’m not sure what happened. I followed the recipe exactly. But when I took it out to ice it…”

  “I’m sure it’ll be delicious,” Natalie lied. Having tried his valiant attempts at baking before, she was sure of the opposite.

  In the backyard, Pete manned the barbecue like a pro with assistance from Caro and backseat barbecuing from Merlin. The pets frisked around the yard, which was shielded from nosy neighbors by a high fence with multicolored morning glories growing all over it—one of the reasons they’d rented the house.

  Carter showed up as Pete started handing out the barbecue, marching in with his black coat swirling around his legs and talking into an earpiece.

  “She can’t cancel the call! Who does she think she is, anyway?” He glanced up at everyone, then irritably said, “Well, make her reschedule it. I’m at a barbecue with my—with some associates.”

  Removing the earpiece, he said, “Fenella Kim’s up to her usual tricks. Or, actually, these are new tricks. Usually she wouldn’t miss a chance to get me on the phone to hold her leverage over me and make my life miserable. I’ll take that big steak.”

  “No, you won’t,” said Natalie. “That’s Pete’s. He gave me and Ransom a set of absolutely gorgeous little boxes, so he gets the best.”

  Carter glanced down as she swatted his hand away. “Lovely ruby. Hey, is that an engagement ring?”

  Natalie burst out laughing. “It is! I made Ransom promise not to mention it. I wanted to see who’d notice first. My money was on Merlin.”

  “Mine was on Lola,” said Ransom.

  Amidst the chorus of congratulations and requests to see the ring, Natalie wondered about Carter, with his sharp eyes and quick mind and mystery shift form. Now that she was on the team, she wished he’d go ahead and admit that he was on it too. But he still wouldn’t. And she didn’t even know why.

  But he did take a different steak, only a bit grudgingly. And she even forgave him for his periodic phone-checking when he produced his own contributions to the barbecue: a bottle of very expensive sipping tequila for the adults and imported French elderflower lemonade for Caro.

  “Thanks again for paying for the damages to Tomato Land, Carter,” said Natalie. “I think you might’ve overpaid them, actually. They had a bunch of new animatronics the last time Ransom and I went. You should come with us some time and check them out.”

  “The way things have been going, I better not,” Carter said gloomily. “I’d probably take one look at them, and they’d explode.”

  “I wouldn’t blame yourself for the refrigerator incident,” said Merlin. “Things just spontaneously explode sometimes.”

  “No, they don’t!” chorused Carter, Dali, and Tirzah.

  When they’d finished eating, Natalie gave a stealthy glance at Ransom. He was sitting on the grass tickling Heidi’s belly, loose-limbed and relaxed, the picture of contentment.

  “You ever t
hink you’d be throwing a barbecue for your co-workers in your suburban backyard?” Natalie asked.

  “If I had, I’d have thought it sounded like a conformist nightmare and the surrender of all my principles, but…” He gave a wave of his hand, encompassing the flock of kittens overhead, Blue creeping up on an oblivious Carter, and Roland trying to saw through his apparently steel-hard cake.

  “Who knows?” Natalie said, snuggling in beside him. “A lot of those suburban homes might be surprisingly nonconformist if you ever got a look inside.”

  He smiled at her, stroking her hair. He looked happy, and unsurprised by it: as if he trusted that good things were real after all.

  Laying her head in his lap, she knew she could trust that good things would last.

  “Want to shift?” he asked. “I thought we could work up an appetite for Merlin’s seven desserts playing with Wally and Heidi.”

  “Six desserts,” she corrected.

  The hem of Carter’s coat was covered in blue fur, and Blue was slinking away from an empty box on the ground.

  “Merlin!” Carter yelled.

  “What?”

  Natalie and Ransom left them to it. She summoned her inner hound and he summoned his, and a moment later they were chasing each other and the pups around the yard. Without either flight or teleportation, Ransom should have been at a disadvantage in their wild game, but he wasn’t; he seemed to just know where a puppy would appear or when Natalie would swoop down.

  First the kittens joined in, flapping in to swat at the hounds, then dart away. Then Blue, lumbering patiently after the quicksilver kittens and vanishing dogs. Next Caro joined in, with her mini pegasus flying at everyone’s faces to distract them so she could tag them. And Merlin, of course, sometimes zipping around in his tiny form, sometimes suddenly growing big to grab at them with his new reach. He too played as a team, paired with Dali, who made up for his lack of flight by occasionally picking him up and tossing him at an aerial attacker.

  If Natalie hadn’t been a hound, she’d have laughed when she saw how Tirzah and Pete joined the impromptu game. She’d have expected Tirzah to stay in her wheelchair and let Pete chase people to her, as it wasn’t easily maneuverable on the grass. Instead, Pete became a cave bear and Tirzah rode him, perched precariously atop his massive shaggy back.