Page 12 of His Whispered Witch (Witches and Shifters: Scott Pack #6)

“Just out of curiosity, Niamh, what does the one with the arrow pointing down do?” Tori asked as she headed toward the door.

“Hmm? Oh, it’s dye. Pick your color.”

“Right.” She tossed and caught the bottle, which seemed remarkably cavalier to Penn, and strode out of the room.

“So, Penny, what brings you to the belly of the beast?” Siobhan asked as she hauled fermented dough from the huge cauldron to the counter with a flick of her wrist. Her talent was telekinesis, too.

“Careful!” Niamh said as she pushed at the jiggling blob. It looked like a horrible monster about to eat the other blobs on the counter.

“I’m curious about wolves?”

“Why now?” Siobhan asked abruptly. “What have you seen?”

“Nothing here. It’s just, when we were in Leadville for the race, Annie said we saw?—”

Annie pivoted, her eyes huge in her head. Her pale skin turned beet red, and Penn choked. “ Might see. Possibly see but didn’t actually see a werewolf.”

“You didn’t?” Niamh asked with unexpected heat. They were little old ladies, yes, but they were also witches in charge of a fractured coven and major business owners in the town. They were the opposite of gullible.

“We didn’t!” Annie said as loudly as she could, still completely flushed.

“I’ve never seen one before in my life, including in Leadville,” Penn said, aware she sounded less believable with every word, but she didn’t know it was supposed to be a secret.

“It’s just that Annie said you guys are complete experts on shifters.

Like you have a whole collection on them?

And I was just curious about it. That’s it. I thought I would ask you more.”

Penn was expecting condemnation and jumped when Siobhan clapped her hands together with a delighted smile. “Are you joining in the fight?”

Penn frowned. “What fight?”

“There’s no fight,” Niamh contradicted from the stove. “The preparation for the fight.”

Niamh leapt toward Penn, and the ladle clattered into the cauldron. She groaned and jumped back toward it.

Penn flinched when she felt a hand on her forearm. She hadn’t seen Siobhan move. “See, witches and shifters are peaceful, right? They have their territory, and we have ours.”

“Right?”

“Wrong! The treaty was not a treaty.”

Penn swallowed. “Then what was it?”

“Just a temporary truce !”

Cat smiled from where she was cleaning out the cauldron. “A temporary truce that has lasted at least a millennium.”

Penn hoped she would one day feel comfortable enough to contradict Siobhan in her own kitchen without an ounce of fear.

Siobhan waved her away. “Be that as it may, we have to be ready to take up the cause again at any moment. To that end, we prepare. We learn everything we can. We collect every spell we can get our hands on.”

“Don’t forget the weapons!” Niamh crowed, looking like a harmless grandma stirring soup at the stove as she shouted about killing people.

“You have crossbows here, too,” Penn said, because of course they did.

“Way better than those boys down the block!”

There was a whole host of businesses up and down Main Street, but Penn immediately knew the store she meant. For the first four months of the year, it was a tax preparation office, but every other person she’d met in Silver Spring explained that was just a front.

The rest of the year, it was some kind of doomsday prepper depot where people could come twice a month to pick up absurd levels of non-perishable goods, hunting outfits, and far less innocuous ways to defend themselves.

She knew many people thought the backwoods were a good place to hole up if you thought the end of the world was arriving, but she hadn’t thought the twins were a part of it.

“We’ve got stakes,” Niamh said.

“Vampires don’t exist?” Penn mumbled.

“You can never be too sure,” Cat said with relish and tipped the cauldron upside down over the threshold to the greenhouse. She left it there as she stood up. “I mean, I’m from Romania, so I should know.”

This was one too much for her worldview. “You don’t know that.”

“Well, no. They adopted me when I was five. All I remember about Romania was…” She trailed off. “Cabbage. What else, Niamh?”

“Oh, right, we’ve got silver.”

“No, I meant the dough…” Cat shook her head and pushed the cauldron further into the greenhouse. Penn glimpsed a formerly potted plant lying on its side. Were they growing things in their cauldrons?

“Silver bullets,” Siobhan continued. “Silver knives, silver cutlery…”

“Tori’s clients are the ones who wield silver spoons,” Annie said. “I don’t know that the werewolves are going to have a problem with them.”

Penn thought back to the spoon she’d eaten her curry with. Asher had obviously collected it from some kind of thrift store because none of his silverware matched each other, but some of them had been silver. “Yeah, I really don’t think that’s going to work…”

“Don’t forget the crossbows,” Siobhan said.

“Statistically speaking, we are more likely to kill ourselves with defensive weapons in the home than any burglar,” Cat said with relish.

“They’re not for when Gary gets drunk and confuses our house for his, even though how he could mistake the purple door, I will never understand,” Siobhan said.

Cat crossed her arms. “He’s colorblind.”

“That is beside the point!”

It seemed not at all beside the point to Penn. She wondered if they’d painted the entire house in garish colors to avoid a drunken Gary.

“Come with me,” Siobhan said, and Penn was just relieved they’d stopped listing weapons. Now she was worried because if they thought silver and stakes were good defensive measures, she wondered how useful the collection would be, but she wasn’t going to turn away help.

Siobhan led her back down the hallway toward the front of the house and turned into the library.

Penn felt a stirring of disappointment. She’d been in this room before.

Aside from the Griffin grimoire in a locked case—a collection of written family spells now completely useless without a full coven—it looked like a fairly standard library.

Siobhan lay one finger aside her nose and winked as she put her hands around a silver carved statue of a wolf that, moments before, Penn thought was just a bookend.

The bookshelf swung toward them, and she leaped back. She didn’t know whether to be amused or afraid as they stepped through the door, and it swung seamlessly home, the bottom whispering over the carpet of the library.

This room was even smaller than the main library.

It was stuffed with industrial metal shelves and nowhere to sit.

Opposite the door, the shelves were all filled with books.

They weren’t in nice, neat rows but piled on top of one another.

The piles included looseleaf papers and even a couple of scrolls.

She turned in a circle and jumped when she saw the shelves next to the door, full of a variety of weapons.

“Holy shit,” she murmured.

“There’s not a safer house in the state,” Siobhan said seriously and caressed a metal spiked pole that looked like something out of the Middle Ages.

Penn turned away from the weapons and examined the rest of the shelves around the room. There was some kind of dark fabric piled on one of the side shelves, as well as other beakers and glass jars with waxed stoppers and illegible labels.

None of that was going to be useful to her. She didn’t want to hurt him. With fading hope, she turned back to the bookshelves. There were maybe a hundred titles. It wasn’t an immense collection. It was only huge if you considered the topic and how much time it must have taken to collect all these.

“Can I look through these? Would that be okay?”

“Of course, my dear. It is just so great to see someone taking an interest! None of the next generation has shown any desire, or frankly, aptitude.”

Penn pulled a book off the shelves that looked vaguely old, which was confirmed by the nearly unreadable language. She opened the first chapter: Thou must immobilise Thy Beast before Thou appliest the hot oil.

She shut the book.

The next one she picked up was an instruction manual for some of the implements behind her, including the spike, which should be driven through the muzzle at a right angle.

She put that down too. She wanted Siobhan to leave, but the old woman just stood there looking vaguely pleased, and Penn didn’t dare ask her.

She picked up a new book on the nature of wolves, judging by the binding. She flipped to the front page and found a copyright from the 1850s. The title was Werewolf Anatomy.

She flipped through it to reveal black and white printed drawings of various bits of wolf anatomy and how human anatomy interacted with it. That was fascinating to think about. How did they transform a hand into a paw?

She traced strings labeled “divine threads” that hooked from one elbow joint to the other. They weren’t actually that different. She sighed; Penn didn’t think divine threads were involved. She shut it when she found an entire chapter on their glowing red eyes.

She’d only glimpsed Asher’s wolf, but she was fairly sure she’d remember glowing eyes. He’d looked like a completely normal wolf to her, just big. Granted, she’d only seen a wolf in a zoo when she was a child, but she’d seen a ton of dogs in her time.

She remembered the alien presence within him and put the book back on the shelf. She turned to Siobhan. “You haven’t heard of a wolf and a snake together? Is that something that is recorded somewhere?”

The smile fell off Siobhan’s face, and Penn turned back to the bookshelf, trying to pass it off as idle curiosity.

“That is an abomination. Where did you hear of such a thing?”

“I didn’t. I just wondered why it’s all wolves all the time?”

She picked up another hand-bound book and immediately felt her magic tingle.

She frowned down at the cover and gasped.

They had another coven’s grimoire casually stuffed on their werewolf shelf.

It couldn’t have been the Griffin grimoire.

There was only one per family, and that was in the regular library.

Her hands went cold. Were they the kind of coven who had taken over someone else’s?

She took a deep breath. No. There was no subjugated family in town.

There were just random one-off witches, mostly found as children and taken in.

Maybe one of them had come with their grimoire? But why put it in the werewolf room?

She kept her movements casual as she flipped it open, and Siobhan took a huge breath. “Those are the dire wolves.”

Penn’s heart stuttered, and she met Siobhan’s eyes.

“They are to be killed immediately. That evil unleashed on the world should never have happened.”

“Evil?”

“How do you even know about them? They’re extinct. What have you brought to our door?”

Penn swallowed. “I told you. Idle curiosity.”

Penn could not hold her gaze and looked back down at the book, fighting to keep her horror at the old woman’s words and her fascination with the book in her hands off her face as she flipped through the spells.

They looked really old. She flipped casually toward the back and saw that the latest spells to be added were somewhere in the 1700s.

This thing was that old and still reeking with power.

Why was it in this room? Why did they collect it?

Toward the front of the book, she found one that went on for pages and pages.

Most spells were only a page or two long.

She read through it and realized she was looking at a way to construct an animal out of magic.

Dear god, they had the spell to make werewolves in their spare room! She thought it had been lost.

The book was snatched from her hand and slammed down onto the metal shelves as if it were worth nothing, as if it were the same as the grossly inaccurate, ridiculous renderings of anatomy from the imagination of the prejudiced and terrified.

“Are you some kind of spy?” Siobhan demanded.

“No!”

“What do you know?”

How on earth would she know about dire wolves? She thought of Asher’s accent.

“There’s a pack close to my old home in Pennsylvania.” Far away from here.

“Of dire wolves!”

“We don’t know for sure, but they weren’t normal wolves. I just wondered if you had them out here. I was worried. Very worried you had them out here.”

The woman went pale, and her hands shook as she stumbled out of the room. “The dire wolves are not extinct? It’s far worse than we thought. How do you combat snake venom? I must talk with my sister.”

But Siobhan didn’t move. She stood at the edge of the door, and reluctantly, Penn crossed the threshold.

Siobhan shut the door firmly. Penn longed to look at probably the only accurate or useful book in that entire room, an actual grimoire with an actual spell.

But she didn’t know how she could do that without arousing suspicion, and she didn’t have thirteen witches to get it done.

Even if she did, no one had that kind of juice anymore, so she was no better off than she had been, and she’d aroused the suspicions of her host and terrified them in the process.

Great job.

She thought of the long drive in her tiny car back to Asher’s land. Was she even going to go back? If he was a dire wolf and evil…

She thought of the ancient pain in his eyes. If dire wolves were evil, the people they seemed to be hurting the most were themselves. For some reason she didn’t want to examine too closely, she could not stand that.