by Chant, Zoe
They went through phases of wanting to look exactly like each other or not like each other at all. This was their first year at university. Early, of course; they were Belgraves, after all. Vance had gone to university in England and Anders had taken a year in the Netherlands, and they’d returned home at midterm to discover that they’d both changed up their look in exactly the same way. Long hair in a ponytail, truly terrible little moustache. In a huff, they’d both immediately gone and shaved off said moustache and lopped off the ponytail—then come back and huffed again.
Ponytail and moustache were back now, of course. They’d gotten over their annoyance at discovering how similar they were, again, and had cultivated the horrible hair in preparation for the extended family Christmas.
The others all shifted, too, and clambered through the snow to get closer now that there weren’t three massive dragons in the way. Pebbles was a few years older than her, and even more blinged out than usual—Delphine suspected Pascal’s influence, and of course being able to shift with jewelry as well as clothes would help unruffle any grandparents’ feathers about her mate. Colored stones glittered on her fingers and in rows up her ears.
Pebbles’ parents, Uncle Martin and Aunt Grizelda, were the same as ever: muscular and distant. Brutus, who if Delphine remembered correctly, had just turned twenty-one, was sporting a new undercut, and Livia, fourteen, looked as though she was trying not to look puffed from the recent flight. She had only had her First Flight the year before and was probably still getting used to her wings.
“Hello, you lot,” she said cheerfully, waving them over. “How are you all liking Pine Valley so far?”
“That’s it?” Anders said, feigning outrage. “That’s all you’ve got to say for yourself after going missing? We’ve been out night and day—”
“Wearing ourselves to the bone with worry,” Vance interjected.
“—not eating, not sleeping, worried sick—”
“Give it a rest.” Delphine waited for Anders to get close enough, then aimed a half-hearted smack at the side of his head. He ducked out of the way, his outrage reaching pantomime levels. Vance, cunningly, was staying just out of reach. “You didn’t really come look for me, did you?”
The twins glanced at one another, so quickly she almost missed it. “Course not,” Anders said. Hardwick cleared his throat. “We joined the search for the dragonling when Mr. Heartwell said he’d gone missing.”
“Mum’s not with you?”
“Nah. She’s doing a you, holing up with the olds so the rest of us can relax a bit. Speaking of...”
Both twins’ eyes flicked to Hardwick and back to her.
“Not that we’re prying—”
“We’re not even asking, we’re that good—”
“But if we were—”
“On the off-chance...”
Anders dropped to his knees. “Please tell us you managed to find some of Grandad’s bloody plonk.”
“Right. That’s the question you wanted to ask.” Delphine crossed her arms.
“It’s been three days, Delphy! It’s life or death.” Anders collapsed entirely and rolled onto his back. “And death is more attractive by the minute. I can’t believe the Grandad we’ve known all these years was happy drunk Grandad.”
That was a scary thought.
“And Grandma’s even been asking about you,” Vance added.
That was even scarier.
“I’ve been busy,” Delphine said. “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about the shopping.” She hooked one finger around the duffel bag at Hardwick’s feet and lifted it so the bottles clinked. Anders gave a dramatic sigh of relief.
“Delphine!” Aunt Grizelda called out to her. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”
Vance grumbled, almost but not quite under his breath, “Oh, ruin it why don’t you. I was trying to find a way to make ‘I’ve been busy’ dirty.”
“You’re stuck on that?” Anders exclaimed. “Are you even my brother? Come on. It’s a classic. She didn’t come back ’cos she was getting biz—”
“Aunt Grizelda, Uncle Martin.” Delphine strenuously ignored her brothers. “I’d like to introduce you to Hardwick Jameson.” The way she was squeezing his hand should have given the game away, but she said it anyway: “I should probably tell Mother or Grandfather and Grandmother first, but... Hardwick is my mate.”
Aunt Grizelda gave a smile that almost made it to the corners of her lips. “Hardwick, was it? And you are…?”
Hardwick held her gaze and her smile didn’t move an inch.
“How nice,” she said.
Hardwick’s eyelid flickered.
Ouch, Delphine thought in sympathy. This is not going to go well.
She grabbed the duffel bag of clothes and bottles in a way that clearly indicated it would need human hands looking after it in transit, and the motley group of shifters prepared to leave. Delphine was about to get on Hardwick’s back again when her pocket buzzed. She fumbled out her phone and stared at it, amazed.
If she’d had to guess who might be calling her, her boss would be top of the list. His retreat had been due to finish that day, and he probably had a thousand problems for her to solve on his way to the airport.
But it wasn’t him. It was her mother.
Delphine felt strange as she scrolled through message after message from her mum. None of them were outright panicking, but just the fact that there were so many told her how worried she’d been.
Her mother. Worried about her.
Even though she was a Belgrave. Even though their family creed meant everyone should have thought she couldn’t possibly be in any trouble.
That strange feeling still churning in her stomach, Delphine send a quick, reassuring message.
I’m fine! Bumped into dragon search and rescue team on the way back. Poor Cole safe but going to be in trouble I think! See you soon!
She got a response straight away.
Thank God. Don’t worry me like that again!
Don’t worry her? What was to worry about? As far as her mother was concerned…
Delphine shoved her phone back in her pocket and bit her lip.
As far as her mother knew, she had no reason to be worried. But if Hardwick meeting the rest of her family went as badly as she expected it to, then that would change.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Hardwick
The Belgraves were staying at the main hotel in town. Which was a small hotel, but the only one Pine Valley had. They’d booked out almost the entire place and, Hardwick discovered when they got there, had bullied the manager into giving them private access to the dining room for all their meals. Where the other guests went to eat, he didn’t know, but he didn’t blame them for not sticking around.
He wished the Heartwells had invited them for dinner. They had seemed like nice people.
Not that all the Belgraves rubbed him up the wrong way. Delphine’s brothers were like any dickhead teens, more interested in their own lives than anyone else’s, and her mother seemed nice. She was short and fine-boned, with faded blonde hair. Hardwick guessed she’d married into the family, and when he shook her hand, he got a glimpse of her inner animal: a housecat.
The Belgrave obsession with shifter status couldn’t be that bad, he told himself.
Ten minutes into dinner, he was rethinking that assumption.
He was seated next to Delphine’s aunt Grizelda, one of the shifters who’d been out looking for little Cole. He’d thought this was a good sign until she started talking.
“…The family used to be far stricter about it. But there are only so many winged lion shifter families in the world, after all!”
Hardwick frowned. “But the mate bond—”
“Oh, well, fate has always been a friend to the Belgraves. And really, it could be worse!”
He could be worse, she was saying. As though shifters existed on a sort of scale, with winged lions at the top and everyone else ranked below, griffins inclu
ded.
Not just griffins, he realized as Grizelda kept talking.
“Take Pascal. Now, I’m not saying that dear Pebbles’ mate isn’t a complete darling, but, well, there’s always the risk, isn’t there? One minute the Belgraves are winged lion shifters, with a genealogy stretching back to before Minos exploded—you really must let me tell you about that one day, Hardwick darling, of course there’s no written evidence but the pictorial is quite enough, and I’ve always felt such a connection with the islands—Well, what I’m saying is, their children might turn out a bit colorful.” She elbowed him, as though she’d just told a hilarious joke. “But as I said, fate has always been kind to us. The Belgrave winged lions always breed true.”
Wow.
Hardwick was aware he was staring like a dead man. Worse, though, was the tension that whispered around the room. Not all the Belgraves shared in it. Pebbles—that couldn’t be her real name, surely—leaned a little closer to her mate, Pascal, whose edges had gone all sharp. Delphine’s mother went slightly pale, and Delphine...
...Was smiling, and laughing quietly at a joke someone else had told, and standing up to fetch another bottle of pinot gris for the table.
Hardwick’s heart sank.
“Doesn’t sound like a problem to me,” he said. “Like you said, only so many lion shifters in the world, winged or not.”
“Exactly.” Grizelda pursed her lips triumphantly and watched Delphine edge out of the room, arms full of empty bottles. “And like I said, we’re not quite so strict anymore. Not since dear Delphy.”
The door swung shut behind Delphine and the hairs on the back of Hardwick’s neck prickled. “What about Delphine?”
Grizelda was all painted-on surprise. “Well! Her mother, of course. When we all heard that Dominic had—”
CRASH!
“Oh, shit!” One of the twins sprang up and started beating at his shirt, which was, somehow, on fire. “Come on, man, fire isn’t fair play!”
“Neither’s getting Livia to telepath you the answers, asshole!” The other one threw another candle at him and the first twin yelped and dodged out of the way. “Aren’t you meant to be studying this shit?”
“Aren’t you meant to be studying med, not setting fire to people?”
“Boys.”
The voice cut through the chaos. Both twins fell silent, and so did the rest of the table. Even Grizelda paused her story.
The man who had spoken was Delphine’s grandfather, Alastair. He was seated at the head of the table and treated the position like a throne. His hair was pure silver, and his eyes a rusty gold that could control the whole room with a single look. His wife, Angela, was sitting next to him. Her hair was a paler silver and her eyes a darker bronze.
Delphine had introduced him to them both before the meal and they had waved him away. He didn’t know whether to be insulted or relieved.
When conversation started to burble up again, he tried to steer the one he was having in a less disturbing direction.
“Must have been quite the undertaking, getting everyone out here. Pine Valley isn’t exactly on the main route.”
“Yes, it’s quite off the beaten track! But after what dear Sara told us about last year—that’s Delphine’s mother but of course you know that already—we simply couldn’t miss it. We all wondered what could have lured her away from a family Christmas, and now that we’re here, we quite understand.” Grizelda bared her teeth in a smile that had too many teeth in it to be truly friendly. “It’s so freeing, don’t you think, being so far away from human towns?”
“There are still humans in the town.” Hardwick groaned internally. Did Jackson and the Heartwells know the Belgraves were being this slack about secrecy? “Anyway, I thought Delphine’s family came here to see her last Christmas.” Lured away, indeed.
“Oh, well.” Grizelda waved away the idea of a mother wanting to see her daughter for Christmas rather than a horde of in-laws. “Delphy’s adorable, of course. Such a sweetheart. But she’s not exactly a team player, is she? Now, the twins—excellent value there. Why, when dear Brutus had his First Flight...”
Hardwick got the feeling his input wasn’t needed for the rest of the conversation. He held his tongue for the next few minutes and was proved right. Grizelda was happy to hold forth indefinitely about her thoughts on the family, and when she eventually ran out of material, another Belgrave stepped in.
It was all the same rubbish. Belgrave this, Belgrave that, heritage this, unbroken line of shifters that. To hear them talk, there’d been a winged lion at every important event in European history for the last three thousand years. Hardwick was tempted to ask if there’d been a Belgrave ancestor propping up the manger.
Instead, he found his head was buzzing so badly he could only make out one word in ten. The haze of lies that covered the dinner table was circling him. They hit more like mallets than knives: dull, blunt trauma. Endless. Unstopping.
“Of course, we expected nothing less of our Livia—”
“And Brutus, you know, takes his studies so seriously—”
“What a surprise! Of course, I’ve always known that dear Delphy would do well…”
“—so happy for you both, truly—”
“Hardwick?”
Delphine. Her voice cut through the fog. Somewhere, a chair scraped. Hardwick fumbled for the golden light that connected her to him, but before he could get a grip on it, Delphine was beside him. He got a grip on her, instead.
Her hand was cool against his forehead. He could have told her there was no point. He wasn’t sick, he was—
“We’re going to head upstairs,” she declared, her voice carrying in a way it hadn’t ever before in front of her family. “It’s been a long day—”
It hadn’t. Not technically speaking. It had already been almost midday by the time the roof got them up. Hardwick cursed under his breath as pain shot through his skull, a vibrating crescendo above the haze.
Delphine’s other hand tightened nervously on his shoulder.
“What’s wrong with him, Delphy?” someone asked.
“Time for us to go.” Delphine hooked his arm over her shoulder and helped him up. Hardwick silently thanked her for not even trying to answer whoever-it-was’s question. She guided him to the door. Just before it shut behind them, Grizelda’s voice rang out above the noise:
“A migraine, I suppose. Oh, it’s a human thing, Papa. I wouldn’t have thought shifters suffered from them, but, well. You know...”
With that heartening display of solidarity, Hardwick and Delphine stumbled into the foyer.
“I’m so sorry,” Delphine said at once. Her voice was tight. “What do you need?”
“Silence.”
She stiffened under his arm, and he swore at himself silently. “Not you. Them. Is there a room we can go to, or...?”
“Upstairs.”
His head was still pounding. Delphine guided him through the foyer to the stairs, and he didn’t make it easy for her. His feet wanted to give up and let him fall where he was standing. Eventually, however, they made it to the third floor and a small, tidy room that looked out over the street.
Delphine helped him onto the bed and fetched a glass of water. He drank it, gratefully, knowing he should be saying something but unable to form words.
“Hell,” he managed at last. “Your Aunt Grizelda’s a goddamn menace.”
Delphine hiccup-laughed. “She’s a level four,” she said, and he must have looked either confused or about to pass out, because she added: “There are five levels. One is easy to deal with, five is hardest.”
“Who’s a five, then?”
“Grandfather and Grandmother.” She stepped away again, and when she returned, she laid a cool, damp cloth on his forehead. “I can go, if you’d rather be on your own.”
“No. God, Delphine. Stay here with me.” Away from them.
She slipped into the bed, wrapping herself around him. Every movement made Hardwick’s head throb
, but he eased himself into a better position to put his arms around her. She lay her head against his shoulder, so close he could feel her heartbeat, and he tried to tell himself it made the pain less.
The ache in his head didn’t agree.
“Is it better up here, or do we need to go somewhere else?” she asked.
Somewhere else. His mind went straight to the rustic cabin, and he groaned. That wasn’t an option, even if sleeping in a pile of snow suddenly felt like the only thing that would stop his head from hurting. He turned the damp cloth on his forehead over and lay the cooler side over his eyes.
“Maybe a walk,” Delphine suggested, “to get away from everyone.”
Out on the streets wouldn’t be an improvement. The town was full of happy families, happily lying their way through the holiday.
“Here’s fine,” he said. “I can’t hear anyone. This place must have good sound insulation. If they have shifters staying here often, that’s probably a good thing. Their guests would go mad, being able to hear every conversation in the building.”
“Still... It’s worse, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Worse than you expected, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
She pressed her forehead against his shoulder. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Just stay here with me.”
He curled one arm up to caress the back of her head. She made a soft, vulnerable noise and kissed his neck. He focused on that: her closeness, her gentleness, the warmth of her body against his.
Not the way part of the pain hazing his thoughts was because of her and had been ever since she saw her family appear in the sky.
“Hardwick—”
He flinched. He didn’t mean to, but he’d let his guard down too much. She wasn’t even lying. His body was reacting on automatic.
Delphine pushed herself up onto her elbows and looked down at him, her eyes shadowed.
“Delphine, I—”
“It’s me, isn’t it?”
He sighed. “I know you’re not doing it on purpose.”
