Blade Bound

   “Sorry we missed the party.” Gabriel’s gaze narrowed at his son. “Someone had a tantrum.”

   “He looks displeased,” Ethan agreed.

   “Yeah,” Gabe said. “I offered him a cup of water.”

   “A parent’s worst betrayal,” Ethan said soberly.

   Gabriel’s mouth twitched. “I love my son. God and Pack willing, he’ll lead the NAC someday. But if there was a pill that would get him to adulthood that much faster, I’d take it.”

   “Probably a good thing you missed cake time,” I said, imagining Connor smearing green frosting down the hallway. “But there’s plenty left, if you’d like a piece to go?”

   “Let’s see how it goes.” He looked at Connor, brushed a dark curl from his face. “Would you like to say hi to Elisa, kiddo?”

   In response, Connor buried his face in Gabe’s shoulder.

   “We’ll get things started,” Ethan said, and carried Elisa to the front parlor, put her down on the rug in the middle of the floor, where she promptly sat down in her footie pajamas. It had been an exhausting night, evidently.

   “Here we go,” Gabriel said, and put Connor on the floor in front of Elisa, giraffe still firmly in hand.

   They hadn’t actually met yet. Scheduling vampire-shifter playdates hadn’t been the easiest thing to do, especially given the sheer number of people who’d wanted to lay eyes on Elisa, assure themselves that Ethan and I had actually managed to make her.

   None of them, curiously, wanted to deal with her when she had soggy diapers, pureed carrots in her nose, or Spaghetti-Os in her hair.

   For a long moment, Elisa and Connor just looked at each other.

   “Doggy,” Elisa said.

   I stared at her. “Did you just call him ‘Doggy’?”

   Ethan lifted a brow at Gabriel. “Do I even want to know how she knows that?”

   Gabriel grinned. “Magic is magic.”

   “Doggy!” Elisa said again, this time with more force, and bounced on her butt.

   Connor blinked at her, then looked up at Gabriel for support.

   “She’s not wrong, son. Technically.”

   Elisa looked at the toy in his hands, her eyes widening. “Doggy?”

   Connor frowned, hugged the toy to his chest. But much like her father, Elisa was bound and determined to get what she wanted. She scooted forward on her bottom, touched a finger to the giraffe, and lifted those big green eyes to his. “Doggy?”

   Connor’s eyes narrowed, a toddler not quite ready for sharing—or a shifter trying to distinguish enemy from friend.

   “Doggy!” Elisa said, clapping her hands together. Then she laughed like she’d told herself the world’s funniest joke, and tossed her head around. “Doggy doggy doggy.”

   “Not a dog,” Connor said with a burgeoning smile, and held out the giraffe. “Giraffe!” He said it with a hard “g,” so it came out more like “graph.” But close enough for Elisa’s eyes to widen with the thrill of a new word.

   “Graph!” she said, and took the toy, mashed it against the rug like it was running. “Graph! Graph! Graph!”

   “And I apologize for that,” Gabriel said.

   “Graph!” Connor said with a grin, and they took turns marching the giraffe up and down the rug, Elisa occasionally laughing in that utterly selfless, completely happy way.

   “The beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Ethan said with a smile.

   Gabriel made a rough sound. “Now,” he said, gold and amber swirling in his eyes. “But you just wait—”

   I knew where he was going, so I cut him off with a pointed finger. “No. No more prophecies unless you’ve got a time and place I need to be to keep my daughter safe. Barring that, she lives her own life, ‘tests’ or otherwise.” I didn’t want the pressure. Not anymore.

   Gabriel went quiet, and for a moment I was afraid I’d pissed him off. But he was watching Connor and Elisa, brow furrowed in contemplation. “No one’s future is written completely. Not in stone. There are always choices to make, roads that could be taken. Life is in the choosing of them.”

   Ethan reached out, put a hand at my back. “And they have to make their own choices, just as we did. Just as we do.”

   Gabe grunted. “This got philosophical quickly,” he said, then glanced at me. “You sure you don’t want details?”

   I narrowed my eyes at him. “Just tell me this—is there a happy ending?”

   Screams erupted from the floor, and we all looked back again. Elisa had made the unforgiveable mistake of putting the giraffe on top of a plastic dollhouse. Because toddlers.

   We all sighed.

   “I guess that answers that,” Ethan said, and we went to separate our screaming children. “On the other hand, I’m pretty sure our first meeting looked fairly similar. And look what we have now.”

   I glanced at the crying child, plastic giraffe in her mouth, now kicking at the shifter who was trying to take it back from her. It didn’t get any more real than that. Or any more perfect.

   “Everything,” I said. “We have everything.”

Don’t miss the first novel in Chloe Neill’s Heirs of Chicagoland series!

   WILD HUNGER

   Coming in 2018 from Berkley

   As the only vampire child ever born, some believed Elisa Sullivan had all the luck. But the magic that helped bring her into the world left her with a dark secret. Shifter Connor Keene, the only son of North American Central Pack Apex Gabriel Keene, is the only one she trusts with it. But she’s a vampire and the daughter of a Master and a Sentinel, and he’s prince of the Pack and its future king.