Chapter 4 Chance
Chance
Townsend, Tennessee gave its heart and soul to the Christmas parade.
The main street was barricaded off, tents jammed every inch of sidewalk, and kids in thrift-store holiday gear ran wild between folding chairs and blankets.
Smells hit first. Popcorn, hot cider, the dizzy, unpleasant punch of peppermint, everything blasting from trays of cookies and cocoa bombs.
Whoever made mint part of the season deserved a beating.
I'd agreed after an expert guilt trip from Maeve to staff the Sweet Dragon sample table for the first shift. "Smile and let people grab what they want. Don't scare the teens," she'd warned me, straightening my borrowed red apron. "Be friendly, even if it hurts."
It did hurt. But I did it anyway, Caden grumbling the whole time. Still, every now and then a ripple of heat rolled through me. Not from the ovens, but from that same tug I'd felt before dawn. Something in town was waking up my dragon in ways he'd never stirred before.
Next to me, there was a pyramid of gingerbread bites big enough to choke a bear, mini cinnamon rolls, and tiny shortbread cookies shaped like, what else, dragons.
I served the steady stream of parade-goers, smiling and repeating, "Try the cinnamon, it's our bestseller," while little fingers grabbed pastries.
I didn't mind crowds, but this many people made the air pressurize. Caden prowled under my skin, scanning for threats, but all he found were fake snowflakes and the fake-jolly jangle of carols.
That was before the crowd parted, and my world slammed to a standstill.
A girl in the camp chair, huddled small around her phone.
The way she hunched, shoulders caved so tight, made something inside me go cold.
Next to her, crouched on the curb, was another girl with a similar build, probably a sister.
Protective. She kept one hand on the other's knee, drawing slow, calming circles.
Those two girls locked my attention in pure, raw focus.
My hands stilled on the cinnamon tray. The whole parade could've been called off, and I wouldn't have noticed.
It wasn't just protectiveness that punched through me.
Something about the way the older one squared her shoulders.
Stubborn chin, steady gaze, tightened a coil low in my stomach. Echoes of someone else. Of Tash.
Caden went ballistic. In my head, he tore up every fence and barrier.
Our hatchlings, he snarled. Claim. Now.
I almost laughed, but it came out as a gasp. Caden had some wild moments since he emerged, but I'd never had to fight him like this before.
Shifting in public wasn't going to happen.
Are you insane? Dragon-human kids don't happen.
I'd never even heard of a hybrid outside of rumors.
When I spent the night with a woman, I chose carefully.
No witches, no shifters, just human women, and I was always careful to disappear before morning.
Caden didn't generally like the women I picked, and there couldn't be a relationship with him opposed to it.
But… The way the kneeling girl squared her jaw, she reminded me of someone close. Catching sight of someone or something, she relaxed a little.
My eyes jerked up, following her gaze, and my heart stopped dead.
Tash. I'd know her anywhere. My body reacted before my brain did, a full, visceral jolt that burned straight through my ribs. The years fell away in a single violent rush of want and memory.
She stood several feet back, arms loaded with food and drink. Her hair was swept up under a cap, and she wore an ugly Christmas sweater, like the girls.
Everything about that night seventeen years ago crashed into me at once. Her hands in my hair, the taste of absinthe, the way my name had sounded on her lips. I'd tried to forget it a hundred times, convinced myself I'd dreamed up the chemistry, the afterburn of wanting her to stay.
She hustled forward, gaze locked onto the girls.
Caden nearly shattered my brain howling. She's ours too. Mine. Ours. The spark is ours. Go!
Locked in place, fighting the shift, I couldn't move. Her smile hit me like heat from a forge. Warm, familiar, devastating. I'd forgotten that my knees used to go weak around her. Apparently, Caden hadn't.
Sister and mother cocooned the shaky girl. At that moment, I didn't even need proof. I just knew.
Caden roared, Our spark is in distress!
Stop! We can't change here, and I can't go to them until you stop trying to shift! I snarled back at him.
My mother used to call me her spark when I was barely holding together under pressure in my teens.
It was a gut punch, the kind that winds you and keeps squeezing. For the first time in decades, my own dragon almost overrode me. And I needed everything I had to force him down.
Still fighting the change, I watched as they gathered their stuff and moved, ducking and weaving through a parade crowd that couldn't have cared less about my personal apocalypse.
They turned down a side street before I got full control back. Just before they turned, I managed to pull out my phone and get a picture of the three of them, even fighting Caden.
Meanwhile, the parade rolled on. A marching band swarmed by, brass blaring over "Jingle Bells," followed by a float of kindergarteners dressed as gingerbread men.
Each step they took, the crowd rippled and shifted, making it harder to see.
Confetti shot into the air, mixing with the white haze of fake snow.
Caden was livid. He thrashed inside, snapping at invisible chains, hurling the word "mine" over and over.
I dumped the rest of the pastries onto the table for Maeve to deal with and barreled into the crowd.
There was no finesse to it. I shoved past a cluster of old men painting their noses with spiked cider. I nearly tripped over a dog in an elf costume. But every time I thought I was gaining ground, another surge of people cut across my path.
Some kid lobbed a handful of parade candy into the air, and it pelted me, hard. A dozen children stampeded for it, blocking my way with sticky hands and wide eyes. I couldn't even sidestep, the crowd pressed too tight, shoulder to shoulder, everyone yelling for a better view or a better treat.
The smell of peppermint intensified, like someone detonated a hundred air fresheners at once. Caden gagged, retreated, and came back even meaner. My senses went haywire. No dragon alive could track a scent through this much mint. My eyes watered from the overload.
It was parade hell. No way out.
I fought my way around them, heart cranked to the max, and searched for a trace of them.
Anything. For a second, I thought I caught the girls' voices, but it was just a pair of teenagers arguing over hot chocolate.
The only certainty was the pain drilling holes through my chest, and Caden's refusal to let the hope die.
I checked the cross street. Nothing. Tash and the twins were gone.
All at once, it hit me. I'd failed. They were right here, under my nose, and I let them vanish. The panic twisted with something else. A bruising, unwelcome ache I hadn't felt since the morning after we'd met. I wanted her back in my sight. Close enough to touch. Close enough to breathe in.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw every folding chair in the street. My hands shook as I reached for my phone, trying to ground myself in anything that wasn't raw panic.
I squared my shoulders, fighting the urge to roar, and pressed further into the crowd.
They might be my daughters. They were my daughters. I had no way to know, but I knew. And the red harried one had a dragon fighting to emerge.
The thought almost floored me. I braced against a lamppost, lungs scraping in cold December air, and stared down the alley where their footsteps had disappeared.
Mere seconds ago, they'd been right here. Now the crowd swarmed in, blocking every path with lawn chairs, wagons, and tinsel-stuffed coolers. I tried to scent them out, but the peppermint drowned every note. Even a dragon's nose couldn't cut through that weed.
Rage. Pure, unfiltered rage.
Caden went feral. He wanted to shift, to rip the world open and fly over the rooftops just to get eyes on them again. I gritted my teeth and clung to the last scraps of human self-control, refusing to lose it in broad daylight on Main Street.
I turned and began heading for the bakery, grabbing onto control like a fist.