Chapter 23
T here was no warning.
One moment, Buck was glumly sorting through his (by now extensive) collection of collars and handcuffs, contemplating the nightly problem of how to chain himself to his bed in a way that wouldn’t have him waking up missing a limb, or worse, on a motherloving roof.
And the next, he was sprinting across the camp.
Pure adrenaline surged through his veins. He pelted past cabins and counselors as if a firestorm was licking at his heels, ignoring the startled stares. A couple of people called out to him, but the words were just sounds, meaningless.
The woods beckoned. He plunged between the trees without breaking stride, vision adjusting to the gloom.
There was a trail, and it was the right way, the only way, the way he had to go.
His boots pounded against hard packed dirt.
Two small figures dove out of his way, and something about that tugged at his attention—but he couldn’t spare the time to think about that now.
Only one thing filled his mind. A single word. A name that was a need, a call, a summons that would have pulled him across the whole damn world: Honey.
Fur prickled under his skin.
NO .
Buck clung to consciousness, fighting the shift. If Honey was in trouble, she might need more help than a frantic, instinct-driven animal could provide. He had to go to her. Not the beast.
The force trying to slide his bones into a different shape hesitated. He felt an odd sense of alignment, like a dislocated limb clicking back into place. The pain in his scar faded, but suddenly he was running twice as fast—still on his own two feet, covering the ground in huge, effortless strides.
His internal compass abruptly swung skyward. It felt like running face-first into a wall. Buck staggered, spinning round, trying to reorient himself.
“Honey!” he bellowed, heart thundering in his ears. “ Honey!”
“Buck?”
Her voice came from high over his head. Looking up, he spotted her clinging to a narrow rope bridge, a good thirty feet above the forest floor.
A network of planks and cables stretched out in all directions, slung between tree trunks like the web of some giant, demented spider with an inexplicable penchant for carpentry.
The high ropes course .
He’d known it existed, but he hadn’t had occasion to come here before.
Their pack was restricted to the lower, much tamer obstacle course, where it would take serious determination for someone to manage to break their neck (not that Archie hadn’t tried).
Only the older, teenage campers were allowed to tackle this course—under Leonie’s eagle-eyed supervision, and while securely clipped to the safety lines.
Honey was not wearing a safety harness.
“Everything’s under control,” Honey said, the slight quaver in her voice implying the exact opposite. She stretched out a foot, trying to reach the next plank. “No need to panic. I’ll be down in no time.”
“You’ll be down in a split second if you slip.” He was already hauling himself up the nearest trunk, defying gravity through sheer desperation. “Don’t move a muscle. I’m coming to get you.”
“Really, I’m—” Honey cut herself off with a high-pitched squeak as the whole bridge swayed. She gripped the rope handrail harder. “Yes, I think that would be a good idea.”
The course had been designed to challenge fit, agile shifters with supernatural strength and the fearlessness of youth. It would normally take a team of four people coordinated effort and a good ten minutes to navigate.
Buck ran it in under ten seconds, barely making contact with the ropes. It still felt like an eternity before he reached Honey.
“I’ve got you.” He wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close against his side. “It’s all right. You’re safe now.”
“I—I’m fine.” She leaned against him, head pressing into his shoulder. He could feel the rapid, shallow rise and fall of her chest; the hummingbird wings of her heartbeat. “Just… need a second to catch my breath. Then I can follow you down.”
“Like hell you are.” He ducked to scoop her up, slinging her across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. “Hold on and stay still. What the fuck were you thinking?”
Her hands wound into his shirt. “I, um, may have made a slight error in judgment.”
“Woman, you have a talent for understatement.”
Buck eyed the distance to the next beam. In his headlong rush to get here, he hadn’t even been aware of the drop below his feet. Now, with his precious cargo, the gaps between planks gaped like the mouths of hungry crocodiles.
“This thing is designed for people who can turn into literal leopards.” He started picking his way back across the bridge, one hand on the ropes, the other spread across the small of her back.
“You couldn’t get across it with a full climbing rig and hands on help from your own personal guardian angel.
Why on earth did you come up here? Scratch that, how did you get up here? ”
“I climbed a ladder.” Honey squeaked, clutching at his back as he risked a leap to the next foothold. “I didn’t realize the girls were going to take it away.”
“The girls?” Something tickled his memory. Two figures, leaping out of his way… “Estelle and Flora?”
Honey sighed. “I should have known. Did they tell you I was here?”
Thankfully, the effort of navigating the obstacle course gave him the excuse to respond with a noncommittal grunt. He paused to catch his breath, feet braced between suspended planks.
“I’m going to make that pair scrub out the toilets with their toothbrushes,” he growled, trying to ignore the way that certain soft, distracting parts of Honey were pressed against the back of his neck.
“No more hikes or cookouts. They can spend the rest of the summer making pivot tables with Conleth. Maybe that will teach them the difference between a hilarious practical joke and dangerous dumbassery.”
“It wasn’t exactly a prank. The girls had their reasons.” Honey hesitated. “Buck? What’s a fated mate?”
Her innocent question damn near broke their necks. He stumbled, almost missing the next leap. Only a lightning grab for the nearest rope kept him from plummeting to the unforgiving ground. He scrabbled to find a toehold, hauling them both back to safety.
“Why do you ask?” he said when he’d regained his balance, both literally and metaphorically.
“Um.” He couldn’t see Honey’s face, but it sounded like she was blushing. “The girls mentioned it. They seemed to think it was something I should already know.”
Buck was profoundly grateful that she couldn’t see his face either. He shifted her weight across his shoulders, pretending to be judging the next jump to stall for time.
“It’s a shifter thing.” With a grunt, he hopped to the next platform. “The whole damn lot of them are obsessed with finding their perfect match. The other half of their soul, the one person in all the world, ordained by fate, etcetera etcetera.”
“Seriously?” Honey sounded taken aback, or possibly she was just out of breath from all the jostling. “Surely they can’t really believe that. Not all of them.”
“You’d be surprised. For freaks who spend half their time scratching fleas, they’re a sappy bunch.”
“Oh.” Honey was silent for a few moments. “Buck?”
“I know, I know.” Buck scrambled one-handed down an angled rope net, reaching blessed ground at last. He let Honey slide off his shoulders, though he kept an arm round her to make sure she didn’t collapse in a heap. “The kids have this crazy idea that we’re fated mates.”
“Um.” Honey’s face was very close to his. Her tongue flicked out, moistening her lower lip. “Yes. And I may have… accidentally…agreed.”
“ What?”
“I didn’t know what they were talking about!
” Even in the dim twilight, he could see she was blushing furiously.
She pushed away from him, tugging her shirt straight.
“They said that they knew my secret, and I thought they’d worked out my actual secret!
So I begged them not to tell anyone, and they said they wouldn’t, but only if I agreed to let them help, and—well, by the time I figured out that there was some kind of mistake, I was up a tree without a ladder.
They seemed to think that if you had to rescue me, it would be… um, romantic.”
“And it didn’t occur to you to correct their misapprehension?”
“I didn’t exactly have the chance. They ran off before I could call them back.” Honey smoothed her hair behind her ears, regaining more composure. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop looking like the girls grilled your puppy. Kids always get the silliest notions. I’ll talk to them. It’ll be fine.”
“No,” he grated out. “It won’t. You told them we’re mates.”
“Well… I’ll just explain that I was wrong. That we had a talk, and it turns out you don’t feel the same way about me.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” He started stalking back toward the camp. “Shifters recognize their fated mate at first sight. It can’t be mistaken for anything else. The moment they make eye contact, they just know.”
“What?” Honey caught up with him, falling into step at his side. “You mean, fated mates are actually real?”
“Maybe. Yes. I don’t know.” Buck rubbed his forehead, feeling the beginning of a headache. “Look, I’m not saying I believe in all this instalove crap. But shifters do. Once they lock onto someone, that’s it. They’ll go to hell and back to claim their mate.”
“Claim? How?”
He shot her a look. “Give you one guess.”
Honey’s puzzled expression persisted for a second, then her eyes widened. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” The conflict between his own muddled emotions and the motherloving mutt’s pure, smug joy was turning into a full-blown migraine.
“And it’s more than just physical, with shifters.
More than marriage, even. Shifters form a psychic link with their mates.
No mistakes. No take backs. No divorce. Joined mind and soul, now and always, forever and ever, motherloving amen. ”
At least Honey looked more horrified than excited by this prospect. “But… what if it doesn’t work out?”
“No idea. Sucks for all involved, I guess.”
A warning bite of pain in his arm. Buck tried to ignore it, but the pressure increased to the point where he could practically feel the bone splinter.
“All right ,” he said under his breath. “All right, you damn mutt. I’ll tell her.”
“What?” Honey sucked in her breath, studying his face. “I’ve seen you look like that before. Your—I mean, the stormwolf is talking to you, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t call it talking, but yeah. Motherlover’s got definite opinions on all this.
” The pain ebbed as he spoke. “It’s certain that fated mates always do work out.
To be fair, it might not be wrong about that.
I’ve seen a lot of shifters meet their mates.
They were all utter morons about it, and I have no idea how the women involved didn’t snap and beat their supernatural would-be Romeos over the head with a shovel…
but the mated couples I know are happy. Disgustingly so. ”
Honey digested that in silence for a few steps. “I guess if people can turn into animals, I shouldn’t be surprised at anything. But it still seems… well, unbelievable. That soul mates can be real. How does a shifter know when they meet that special person?”
“No idea.” He shrugged, as offhand as he could manage. “Pheromones, probably.”
He didn’t dare look at her, but out of the corner of his eye, he could tell that she was looking at him ; sidelong, speculatively.
Please don’t ask, he silently prayed. Please don’t ask, please don’t ask…
“Buck?” she started, and his stomach sank. “Do you think you have a—”
“Not a shifter,” he cut her off, brutally.
He made his tone as curt and forbidding as possible.
His old fire crew would have recognized that voice, and shut up instantly.
It was a tone that he would never, ever use on the kids, since he had no desire to have to jump back from a sudden spreading puddle of urine.
It was a tone that said, in no uncertain terms, that the discussion was Over.
Honey did not take the hint. Of course she didn’t.
“You say that, but you are,” she said, like a doctor probing a wound that was refusing to heal. “Maybe you do have a mate out there, somewhere.”
“Lot of people in the world. What would be the odds of bumping into each other?”
“It does seem unlikely.” Honey sighed. “Maybe it’s not such a great thing after all, being able to recognize your soul mate. It must be hard, knowing that there is someone out there for you, but you might never find them.”
He kept his eyes firmly fixed on the path ahead. “Can’t say it keeps me awake at night.”
“You must have thought about it, at least a little,” she persisted, because the maddening woman was born to torment him. “Don’t you ever wonder what your mate might be like?”
“Nope.”
“Well, I’m curious, even if you aren’t.” Her tone softened, turning wistful. “I bet she’s someone special.”
He was very aware of her hand, inches from his own. Every breath filled him with her scent. He could have closed his eyes and still known exactly where she was—from six feet away, from across the camp, from the other side of the world.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure she is.”
Honey started to say something else, then stopped. Literally stopped, freezing in mid-step.
“Wait.” Her voice shot up. “You said shifters recognize their mates on sight? And they never make a mistake?”
“Yep,” he said grimly. “You see the problem now.”
“And I let the kids think that I… oh no. Oh no, no, no.” Honey pushed both hands through her hair, pressing her palms against her head as though trying to force spiraling thoughts back in. “Buck, what are we going to tell them?”
He’d already ridden this train of thought all the way to the inevitable destination. “Nothing.”
“That’s not going to work! They’re not stupid, Buck. They’re going to figure out pretty darn fast that I’m not your mate. And then they’re going to start wondering why I lied, and from there it’s only a short step to working out the truth. They’ll figure out my secret!”
“No,” he said grimly. “They won’t. You told the kids that we’re true mates. So that’s what we’re going to be.”