Zander felt Miles’s remembered terror when he realized his body could change without his control, the world spinning as his vision shifted, his heartbeat rocketing, his skin growing fur. Fear that he was some kind of freak, that his parents would abandon him. The need to hide what he was, work hard to be like his human father.

That worry had never left Miles but that hadn’t been what knocked the fear of Shifters into him. That had come later. Zander didn’t understand the whole story; he only had flashes of horror. Men who were half beasts ripping someone apart—man or woman, human or Shifter, Zander couldn’t see. Blood, the smell of death.

Panic—the Shifters had seen him. Run, run, hide, hide. Shut it out . . . but never forget.

“Shit,” Zander said, his skin clammy and cold. He looked at Miles, and Miles looked back with his fox’s dark eyes. “I get why you were scared of Shifters. They’re not all like that. How old were you?”

Miles didn’t answer and Zander didn’t speak fox. Not very old, Zander guessed from the emotions. Still a cub, probably.

“Tell you what,” Zander said. “I’ll find out which Shifters did that and have a chat with them. I’d like to know why they were on a killing spree.”

Miles regarded him in surprise and Zander turned back to the wheel. “I can’t read your mind. I understand what you went through because I healed your paranoia. You’ll get used to me.”

Now if Zander could get used to himself. One of these days he was going to heal someone, and be so struck with his or her pain and emotions he wouldn’t recover. That was the fear that woke Zander in the night, the one that made him so crazy.

Okay, one of the things that made him so crazy. Not knowing if the next person he healed would kill him, having to choose every time whether to give them compassion or run away. Compassion, so far, had won, but would there come a time Zander wouldn’t be able to convince himself to make the sacrifice? How would he live with himself after that?

“That’s my problem,” Zander said. “I’m just too darned nice.”

Miles snorted what Zander took to be a laugh. Rae chose that moment to walk in.

“Too darned nice?” she demanded. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Her aura was calming, her voice like cool water on the parched places of his mind. A spike of heat shot through Zander’s heart, warming his cold limbs and easing the last of Miles’s gut-wrenching panic from him.

Zander took his eyes off the scary panorama of the Graveyard to meet Rae’s eyes, gray like the mists outside, calm, beautiful. The heat in his heart blossomed into something like pain. Holy fucking shit.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Mate bonds didn’t always happen. Two Shifters could mate, live together, have cubs, and never form the mate bond. Rare, but possible.

Mate bonds could also form long before a Shifter took a mate in the ceremonies performed by the clan leader under the sun and under the full moon. A beautiful she-wolf like Rae could glare at Zander with her lovely eyes and heat his body to broiling. That warmth would twine his heart, a tendril that would bond itself to her and she to him.

In the middle of the Graveyard, with death coming at them every second, Zander couldn’t stop and decide whether this feeling that had smacked him in the face was the mate bond with Rae. Her touch soothed, her look calmed him down, the kiss they’d shared had been smoking hot and had set his imagination spinning.

The moment he had time, Zander was going to take Rae off somewhere private and explore whether they were forming the mate bond or just craving each other’s bodies in their loneliness. Either way, they’d have a great time.

Rae was watching him with a puzzled expression, probably wondering why in the hell he was absently moving the wheel back and forth, as though the heavy fog, looming rocks, and the fresh storm weren’t all that important. And they weren’t, Zander realized. Taking a mate was. Holing up, going into frenzy, having cubs—that was why Shifters were alive. The instinct to mate had been bred strongly into them by the Fae, and Shifters had been happily shagging ever since.

But first, Zander had to get them out of the tricky place he’d taken them into.

Rae found sweatpants and a windbreaker for him, a bit too small for Zander but Rae insisted he put them on. True it was getting chilly in here. Anything for you, Little Wolf.

The clothes must belong to Miles—too large for Carson or the guards. Strange how Miles, such a big man, could reshape himself into a small fox. Where did the extra mass go? Zander had ceased worrying about little things like that long ago—magic explained a lot—but he was intrigued.

Zander was a little surprised, actually, when he maneuvered into the narrow channel where he’d left his own boat. Following his instincts, the charts on Miles’s battery-powered laptop, the proximity readouts, and the little hisses of Jake the Snake, whom Rae had placed on his shoulder, Zander found his boat. There she was, rocking too close to the walls, waiting for rescue.

Zander guided the larger boat as close as he dared. When Miles had been piloting this craft, he’d brought it within a few inches of Zander’s without ramming it. Miles remained fox right now, though, taking refuge from his confusion in that form.

Zander sensed Rae behind him as he held the boat steady a foot or so from his own—felt her warmth, knew her scent, his entire body aware of her. She peered out the window, watching Piotr help a groggy Ezra over the gunwale and make the leap to Zander’s boat.

Piotr lifted his hand to Zander, then he and Ezra went into the pilot house.

Zander backed the larger vessel away, turning it slowly, slowly, and then pointed it past his boat, sliding alongside it to go deeper into the fog.

He felt Rae start. “Aren’t we going back the way we came?”

“Nope,” Zander said. “There are two ways out of the Graveyard. The first way might have the Coast Guard or Shifter Bureau hanging out in front of it. The second way . . . well, no one knows where it actually comes out.”

He sensed Rae’s stare and turned to look at her. Her dark hair hung in wisps around her face, curling in the humidity, and her gray wolf’s eyes pinned him. “Do you know where it comes out?”

“More or less.”

He loved the way her eyes flashed when she was exasperated. “Zander.”

“We’ll find it. The Goddess looks out for her own.”