by Zoe Chant
Cover art by Isabelle Arden
Also by Zoe Chant
Shifter Bites
Cute But Prickly
Unicorn Vet
Fire & Rescue: First Mission
Fire & Rescue: Coyote in the Sea
The Dragon’s Lost Letters
Hard Luck Hellhound
The Dragon’s Tailor
Novels
Euan
Babysitter Bear
Librarian Bear
Stoneskin Dragon
Gryphon of Glass
Her Christmas Phoenix
Christmas Griffin
A Hippogriff for Christmas
Defender Hellhound
Wildfire Hellhound
And many more! See my website for a full list at Zoechant.com
Preview: Cute But Prickly
Hester
“There’s a light up there,” Peony said, pointing.
Hester wanted to argue that there wasn’t, just on general principles, but her mother was right. The trees were opening up around them, and a friendly light shone through the falling snow and the darkness: the porch light of a massive, rambling log building.
It was hard to get an accurate feel for its size in the dark. Most of the lights were off; there was just the single light on the porch. The large open area in front of the lodge, which Hester assumed was a parking lot, hadn’t been plowed. Her small car wallowed through the snow as she tried to get closer.
There wasn’t a single other vehicle here. The porch light looked less friendly now, and more lonely.
“This can’t be the place, can it?” Peony asked quietly. “It looks closed.”
“It can’t be closed!”
They had finally found the lodge! It actually existed! They couldn’t come this far just to be screwed over in a completely different way.
Hester parked as close to the lodge’s front steps as she could get. She left the car running, headlights stabbing out at the darkness, and opened her door. Cold wind and snowflakes swirled inside. Shivering, she stepped out into the snow. She was wearing tennies, and her shoes sank and vanished, the snow closing over the shoe tops and the lower legs of her jeans. The wind bit through her sweater.
“Hello?” she called.
“Coat!” Peony said, waving it at her over the top of the car.
“I’m not cold, Mom!”
But she took it and put it on anyway.
In the glow of the car’s headlights, she and Peony floundered up the unshoveled walk to the lodge’s front porch. There was a big sign on the door, and it got bigger and more obvious the closer they got. CLOSED FOR THE SEASON, it said, and below that in smaller letters, Heart Mountain Lodge Mgmt.
“No, no, no,” Hester chanted. She was shivering, and her inner hedgehog was nothing but a miserable, prickly lump. “I cannot believe that Ralph managed to fuck things up this badly. Oh, what am I saying? Fucking things up is his one true talent in life.”
Peony, somehow managing to look elegant in her long tan overcoat even with her hair wind-tossed and spangled with snowflakes, leaned over to cup her hands around her face, trying to look through the window in the door.
“There must be someone here, don’t you think?” she asked. “There’s a light on, which means they haven’t shut everything down entirely. There’s probably some sort of winter caretaker.”
“I don’t care,” Hester said bitterly. This was it, the one good thing that Ralph had left her with, and it had turned out to be complete trash, just like the rest of the relationship.
“You look cold,” Peony said. She began digging in her bag. “Here, you should put a hat on. Do you need gloves?”
“Do you just carry hats around in your purse?”
For answer, Peony shoved a hat into her hands. Hester stared. It was a multicolored yarn monstrosity, lumpy and misshapen. There was a giant pompom. To add insult to injury, the pompom was off center.
“Mrs. Yoder at church made it,” Peony said. Her teeth were chattering. “It’s warm.”
“You take it, Mom. I’m warm enough.” She actually wasn’t that cold, while Peony was visibly shivering. She’d always been able to handle cold better than her mom. She wasn’t sure if it went along with the hedgehog thing or had to do with having more insulation. Maybe both.
Peony shook her head firmly. “I’m fine,” she said, turning her collar up.
Hester sighed and pulled the hat on. It was slightly too large for her head, and instantly fell over one of her eyes, because of course it did.
The worst part was, her mother was right. The hat instantly cut the wind and she felt some small fraction warmer, if no less ready to set Horrible Ralph on fire with her brain.
She took a deep breath of bitterly cold air and clenched her hands into fists in her coat pockets.
So what? she told herself. So Ralph had fucked her over.
Again.
She wasn’t going to let it break her. She wasn’t going to let that asshole win.
Mom was right. They had to find someone here, or if there wasn’t anyone, they needed to get into the lodge somehow. There was no chance of driving back down that awful road in the dark, with the snow getting deeper. She’d be lucky if she even managed to get the car unstuck from the parking lot.
It occurred to her that this might be an advantage—one of the few—to turning into a hedgehog. Small mammals could get into places that people couldn’t. If she and Peony couldn’t find a caretaker or manager or some sort of official person, she might be able to shift and slip into the lodge through a small gap in a window or wall, and open the doors from the inside.
It was some kind of plan, wasn’t it?
“Okay, Mom,” she said. She burrowed her hands into her pockets and absolutely refused to ask for gloves. “Let’s go try to find the caret—”
She stopped. Someone had just come around the end of the building.
A man.
An incredibly well-built man, with a ladder over his shoulder.
His bare shoulder.
He was stripped to the waist and utterly gorgeous, with snowflakes melting in his curly black hair. He had shoulders to die for, visible pecs, a trim waist, and was strolling along as if he hadn’t even noticed that he was half naked in the middle of a blizzard. He didn’t appear to have seen them yet, and for that first instant, until he turned their way, she thought the cold was making her hallucinate.
“—taker,” she managed faintly.
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