It was going to befine. Vicki would understand. Heknewhow bad it looked, and he knew how much worse not talking to her immediately afterward was, but she had to understand, Zane told himself desperately. He didn’t know why she had to, except he needed her to, and because?—
—because it couldn’t really be fate, if she didn’t, and Zane suddenly realized he badly,badlywanted it to be fate. He wanted them to be meant for each other, not just in an ordinary love at first sight kind of way, but in a magical, fairy tale way. He’d spent so much time resistant to the idea, and now that he was on the verge of losing it, he knew it was all he’d ever really wanted in the world. He should have embraced it from the start.
So it was going to befine, because it had to be.
It was nearly eleven at night before he pulled into Vicki’s apartment complex parking lot, and staggered upstairs to knock on her door.
There was no answer.
Zane pressed his forehead against the door, trying to be loud enough to be heard while also not being so loud he’d wake up the neighbors. “Vicki? It’s me. It’s Zane. I’m so sorry. I’m sure you don’t want to see me, but if you’d give me a chance to explain…”
No one answered, and Zane, after a long, nervous moment of glancing up and down the hall looking for both security cameras and any chance of someone stepping out of their apartment suddenly, took a risk and shifted into a wolf.
It only took a few seconds to be sure Vicki wasn’t home. Her scent wasn’t strong enough, and he couldn’t hear her moving, or breathing, or anything. Zane shifted back to human, stared at the door in dismay, then said, “Dion,” under his breath, and went to the B&B.
Emmy Jones answered the door resentfully, which was fair, given that it was now past eleven. She also closed it in Zane’s face, which wasalsofair, although he blurted, “No, please, wait—!” and she cracked it open again, glaring at him.
“Dion checked out this evening to go down to New York to findyou,” she told him icily. “Aaron's all in a tizzy and the whole town is mad at you, so go away.”
“But—”
“I don’t care! Go sleep in a ditch for all I care!” Emmy closed the door again, and this time she didn’t reopen it. Zane, simultaneously indignant and crushed, slunk away, looked around the square, and with a sigh, went to curl up in the gazebo. It was perfectly warm and cozy as a wolf, and he would be awake long before anybody had a chance to see him. He tucked his nose under his tail, and went to sleep.
A creakingnoise woke him hours later, and he opened his eyes to find a small boy sitting on the gazebo rail, staring at him with interest.
Zane froze, a dozen conflicting impulses running through him at once. Part of him wanted to run away. Part of him wanted to…well, maybe most of him wanted to run away, except the child wasn’t in the least concerned by the fact that there was a wolf in the gazebo. He tried to remember if he knew this kid, and his wolf said,Rowly’s cub,with faint impatience. Zane knew he wouldn’t have gotten that much identification out of the wolf if he hadn’t been in wolf form, but he was grateful for it, and said so. The wolf ignored him.
No wonder the kid wasn’t bothered by a wolf in the gazebo. He was Noah Brannigan, and his stepfather was a wolf. That explainedthatpart.
The other part was that it was very, very,veryearly, and the little boy had no business being up, alone, and in the town square at this hour. After a minute or so of staring at each other, Zane cautiously shifted to human, and watched Noah’s expression go from interested to surprised. “How come you’re sleeping in the gazebo, Mr. Bellamy?”
“How comeyou’reup at six in the morning all by yourself in the town square?”
Noah looked scornful. “I’m always up early. Why are you sleeping in the gazebo?”
“Because Emmy Jones shut the B&B door in my face and wouldn’t let me stay there.”
If possible, Noah’s expression became even more scornful. “Yeah, well, you deserved it. You’re a big ol’ jerkface. Everybody says so. Ms. Hawthorne was so mad she wasbeautiful.”
“She’s beautiful anyway.” Zane had a faint sense of disbelief as the conversation progressed. He couldn’t possibly behavingthis conversation with a little kid at this hour of the day. Or any hour, but he really was concerned about the time. “Whyareyou here? Where’s your mom?”
“Oh.” Noah waved toward his mother’s massage clinic. “She’s open early on Saturday.”
“At six in the morning?!”
“It’s almost seven,” Noah said with the same scorn as before. “And she’s not opening until eight but she likes to get set up. I came in with her so Dad could sleep when I forget to use my inside voice with the dog.” His tone suggested that inside voices were for suckers.
Zane took a breath to start defending inside voices with, then held that breath instead, trying to focus on what was important. “Noah, when did you see Ms. Hawthorne being so mad she was beautiful? Do you know where she is?”
The kid lit up from the center of his soul out. “Everybodysaw. It was when Star Captain landed his helicopter RIGHT HERE IN THE TOWN SQUARE and FLEW AWAY WITH HER!”
Zane’s eyebrows rose so high he thought he might lose them in his hairline, and he had to blink slowly a couple of times, trying to process that. It didn’t work. “…what?”
Noah leaped down from the gazebo railing and jittered his way down its steps into the grass. “See, over here, over HERE! You can see the, uh, the footprints that the helicopter left! He landed RIGHT HERE!”
Zane, dazed, got up and followed Noah into the muddy green. There were, indeed, something that looked a great deallike helicopter ‘footprints’ in the soft dirt: two long stretches from the skids, where its weight had pressed into the ground. “A…helicopter…came to get Ms. Hawthorne?”
Noah howled, “Star Captaincame to get Ms. Hawthorne IN a helicopter!!!” as if Zane was very, very dim, which right now, Zane thought might be true.
