Page 2 of Bound to the Minotaur (Hillcrest Hollow Shifters #2)

Gregory

Standing inside my living room, I stared at my phone as if it had just sprouted a head.

Getting a call this late at night? That had never happened before.

Well, that wasn’t strictly true. The inhabitants of Hillcrest Hollow kept odd hours, at least some of them did.

Once upon a time, I’d frequently get calls at odd hours: from the vampire broken down after his moonlight drive, or the troll by the north bridge who thought he could fix his motorcycle at midnight.

But nowadays, Hillcrest Hollow was as quiet as a mouse, and I’d grown to like that.

But tonight, that caller had been human.

Distinctly, devastatingly human, and very much in distress.

My instincts roiled inside my chest with discomfort, another damn word starting with a “d.” I was turning into a regular poet right on the spot, and I didn’t like it.

Snorting heavily, feeling a heavy dose of self-mockery, I stomped to the backdoor.

My cat, Avis, traipsed after me on dainty feet, his tail waving high in the air like a flag.

He meowed as I began stomping into my boots with as much force as I’d used to clomp across the short distance.

“What?” I said, the single word coming out in a short, clipped tone that made Avis hiss.

He gave me his haughtiest, most annoyed look, then twisted to lick at imaginary ruffled fur.

I wasn’t going to get any answers from him, so I picked up my jacket and pulled it on, the worn leather creaking as it stretched over my shoulders.

Patting my pockets, I wondered whether I’d need anything else.

My forehead itched, and I knew what that meant, but I ignored it.

The human had demanded my help; there was no time to shift and let out the beast. The maze behind my home called to me, though, pulling on my gut with the lure to build, to expand it, to perfect it.

I snorted again, but this time, my breath fogged into two perfect white plumes in the cold night air.

Temperatures were plummeting toward the freezing point; the human would struggle if she wasn’t adequately dressed.

My boots crunched on the gravel path as I circled my house toward where the tow truck was parked.

She was getting on in age, but her engine was still a work of art and powerful enough to haul pretty much anything I asked of her.

My fingers brushed across the hood, where a new spot of rust had marred it.

I needed to do something about that, but bodywork was not my favorite part of working on cars.

I was better at repairing or reshaping. My eyes flicked back to the shape of the maze that I had carefully shaped and built over the past years. I was good at building stuff like that.

I swung myself into the cab of the truck, rubbing at my itchy forehead with one hand while flicking on the ignition.

Avis meowed as he leaped into the cab with me, his body a gray blur as he skipped right past my lap to land on the gearbox.

Then he padded to the seat at my side and curled his tail around his paws.

He was a big fellow, so he could peer over the dash and out into the night.

“What?” I said again, though I knew how useless it was to talk to this lunkhead.

He never answered with anything but glares and hisses.

“Since when do you come out on calls with me?”

I slammed the door shut and turned the truck into the night.

The engine rumbled pleasantly, vibrating the seat and the steering wheel.

It was bright out, with a moon that shone silver light on the bare branches of the forest. My sharp eyes could still make out the hints of red and gold that lay in drifts of fallen leaves around the base of the trees, or still clung stubbornly to a few last branches.

A pleasant night for a drive, if not for the problematic fact that I was heading out to meet a human.

She had not told me exactly where she was, but I didn’t need to hear it from her to know.

There were only so many roads into town, and I had a gift for sensing those in trouble.

I knew exactly where she was, and the sense of impending doom I got from her was only growing larger.

She was in danger—not the immediate, I’m-about-to-die kind of danger, but danger nonetheless.

The feeling was too big for it to be simply about her car trouble. I didn’t like it.

This was why I couldn’t live in a big city, and why I much preferred the solitude of my home on the edge of Hillcrest Hollow.

A town with a population of about a hundred, the number having dwindled over the years, though it had never been large even in its heyday.

In a town that size, I could enjoy the peace and quiet, not constantly feeling pulled in every direction by people who needed .

Avis licked his whiskers when I turned onto the one decent road into town.

An asphalt stretch barely wide enough for two cars or a single tractor.

Whoever this girl was, she had to be lost, because no sane person came here on purpose.

That brought me back to the pull of her need, her danger.

It had to be a large, looming danger, and she was on the run from it.

I never should have answered my phone, and even now, I could feel it burning a hole in my pocket.

“Are you going to behave when I get there?” I said to fill the silence.

It wasn’t Avis who had to worry about his behavior, though, he was always nice to my customers.

It was me who only knew how to bark orders or growl like a bear.

The look in his blue eyes told me as much: a mocking reprimand, a disdainful flick of his tail.

I huffed, glaring at my mussed reflection in the rearview mirror before focusing on the hilly road.

I’d help this lady, then get the hell out of Dodge before she wanted more help than I was willing to offer.

This was already too much. My forehead wasn’t just itching now, it ached, as if ready to sprout horns right that instant.

Beneath my jacket, my shirt was stretched tight over my chest, as if my body had already shifted.

I needed to fix her car, send her on her way, and get rid of this agonizing, half-shifted pull.

Maybe I was unused to the intensity of this feeling, having been isolated as much as I was, but I couldn’t recall ever feeling the pull this badly before.

The car was visible before I spotted the woman, and I tried to make it my only focus when I parked the tow truck and got out.

Don’t look at the pale face and pink cheeks.

Do not stare at the long blonde hair and pretty sapphire eyes framed by a pair of black-rimmed glasses.

She was dressed in jeans and a sweater beneath a far-too-thin jacket, and was shaking with the cold, her hands buried deep inside her pockets.

I’d forgotten how lovely her voice was, even with that scared, helpless little tremble in it.

That was the first thing I’d noticed when I answered the phone earlier.

I couldn’t stop noticing it now when she spoke, either.

Or how she stared at me when she thought I wasn’t looking.

Too bad for her, I had senses far beyond those of a mere human. I knew.

The car was a mess. Old, badly maintained.

It was a miracle it had driven at all, but that was not why it had broken down now.

The uneasy pull in my gut was right: she was in danger.

The worst kind of danger. And there was nothing I could do to fix her car on the side of the road; I’d need parts I didn’t even keep stocked at my shop.

Which meant… ah fuck, she’d have to get a room at the B there was no way I could fix her car that fast or provide her with an alternative means of transportation that wasn’t going to cost her an arm and a rib.

I eyed her fancy but unsuitable jacket and wondered if she might not have that kind of money, she looked fancy enough for it.

I hoped so, because it appeared to be the only way to get her out of my hair.

“Dead as a doornail,” I said, and my mind conjured up the dead cars that had made it into my maze as building blocks.

This car was just as ready to be committed to that graveyard, but I had a feeling she was going to insist that I fix it.

I had a feeling I was going to have to call in a few favors to put a rush on that because I wouldn’t be able to live with this itch for much more than a day or two.

The thought of having to survive that long made me feel positively claustrophobic.

“I’m Kess,” she murmured after a prolonged silence.

Her hands kept petting Avis, a nervous energy clinging to her that seemed to seep out through her fingers.

A cat was good for that, Avis always seemed to soothe the most frantic customers.

Kess, huh? That was a pretty name. I liked it, and it was tempting to wrap my tongue around the single syllable—to say it out loud.

That would only encourage her to keep talking, though, and I didn’t want that.

“That’s when you offer me your name back, you know?

” she dared to say with a half-smile that trembled at the corner of her mouth.

It was half-sass, but offered without any real snap, as if she’d learned to curb that impulse at an early age.

This was a woman who didn’t really want to rock the boat.

I wanted to think, Good, I liked it that way, but it felt wrong, and it scraped against my nerves.

I jabbed my thumb at the patch on the front of my coveralls and that made her smile turn wider, more genuine.

“I know it says the name of your shop. The Pit Stop, but that’s not your name, now is it?

” She stroked Avis again and I wondered if it felt nice before I yanked my eyes back to the road and refused to look again.

Shrugging was the only answer she was going to get, for now.

I didn’t need to be polite, I just needed to help her move on. As fast as possible.