Page 26 of His Whispered Witch (Witches and Shifters: Scott Pack #6)

I t was after eleven by the time they made it to West Virginia on the third day. Asher glanced over and confirmed Penn was still asleep, curled up in the passenger seat with the lizard wrapped around her like, well, a lizard with a giant heat source.

Asher maneuvered his truck carefully past the parking lot where they left most of the vehicles on the edge of pack land.

He drove onto the bumpy track into the valley itself.

He didn’t want to force her to walk through the woods in the dark for her first introduction to what was hopefully her new home.

When the trees thinned out, he could see two lights in the darkness, the porch light at the big house where he grew up as the alpha’s son and one on the front of the barn doors where two hundred horses were hopefully sleeping peacefully, soon to be joined by four donkeys.

Why had he even brought them? What were they going to do on a horse ranch?

He sighed; that was a tomorrow question.

He rolled to a careful stop and turned the key in the ignition. The sudden silence felt like an ending or a death, like he would never turn this truck on again, which was ludicrous. They weren’t prisoners, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of the door locking behind them.

He wanted to reach over and wake her, if only to catch the smile in her eyes, but he also didn’t know where they were going to sleep tonight, and he was going to have to wake somebody up to find out…

A light flicked on in the room above the front door of the big house. He was parked at the bottom of the lawn but could hear someone moving.

He took a deep breath. Step one was done. The alpha was awake.

He didn’t know how he knew it was Malcolm sliding out of the bed he shared with his mate and heading downstairs. That was information a normal wolf would be sharing with its human half, but his wolf was as silent as ever.

Is this you? he asked.

No answer.

Maybe he was making it up.

Asher pushed the door open and shut it quickly with a curse when the light came on in the cab.

He flicked the switch above his head back and forth, unsure of which way was off before trying the door again.

The light stayed off. He glanced at her, but she didn’t stir.

He sighed and latched the door gently behind him.

The crunch of gravel under his feet gave way to the silence of grass as he headed toward the front door. His skin pebbled with goosebumps even as the rest of him seemed to come alive in the cool, humid mountain air.

He slowed as his nose exploded with a scent of home: moss on wet rocks, leafy trees, and endless ferns, all anchored in soil teeming with life.

Memory slammed into him as if he’d started a film projector in his head, whipping through his childhood and the years lost as a wolf.

The beast flung himself at the bars of his cage.

You forgot this little detail, he thought as he braced.

He looked back at the truck, longing for Penn, but he couldn’t use her as his personal sanity shield. That wasn’t fair to her at all, so he clenched his teeth and clutched his paperclip as he took the first step onto the front porch, and the door opened.

“Holy shit, Ash?” Malcolm said, zeroing in on him even in the dark.

Asher let go of the paperclip, not wanting Malcolm to see that, though the move made it even more obvious what he was doing.

Malcolm’s eyes scanned the dark and landed on his truck.

“Who is that?”

Of course, Malcolm would see her. He would smell her all over him.

“A long story?” Asher said.

“Come in! Come in.”

Asher shook his head.

The older man flinched and tried to hide it with a pained smile. He never did have any kind of poker face.

Asher said, “She’s alone in a new place. I don’t wanna leave her out here.”

“She?” Malcolm asked, his smile transforming into a real one.

Malcolm spun in a circle and took a step to the left toward a new porch swing. The chains connecting it to the ceiling looked like they could haul cars. They would have to to seat a shifter.

Asher took a deep breath, told himself to stop panicking, not least because Malcolm would sense every little flick of emotion, and put his foot on the porch. It was surprisingly hard to walk the ten feet to the swing, but he did it and sat gingerly next to his cousin. The swing groaned but held.

He examined his cousin in the spill of the porch light. The man was huge, taller than Asher and built like a tank with a well-trimmed beard. He was wearing pajama pants and a t-shirt that said world’s best dad in glitter letters.

Malcolm caught his gaze, and Asher raised an eyebrow.

“Father’s Day present,” he said with a look of deep satisfaction.

Asher had never had much to do with the little eleven-year-old who had come to the land with Malcolm’s future mate.

He tried to stay away from most children.

That kept every parent’s blood pressure lowered.

He smiled bitterly. Who wouldn’t want a long-time feral, suicidal wolf near their little pride and joy?

“Are you back?” Malcolm asked.

“Obviously,” Asher said.

He knew what Malcolm was asking. Are you back to stay? And he was, but why couldn’t he say it?

“I suppose that’s the only answer I’m gonna get?”

He hadn’t spoken for weeks when they’d first forced him into his human body. Getting lips, teeth, tongue, and vocal cords to line up seemed about as possible as juggling knives.

He hadn’t felt like that for a year, but suddenly it was back.

“You wanna get started on that long story then?” Malcolm asked.

Asher watched the bugs fling themselves at the porch light for a few seconds. There were always a thousand more here than in Colorado.

“Yeah,” Asher said but couldn’t say anything else.

Malcolm cracked his knuckles. “I’ll start. Once upon a time, a dire wolf shifter named Ash moved across the country, convinced he was saving his pack from himself, even though his pack didn’t want him to go.”

Finally, Asher’s throat unlocked. “ You didn’t want me to go. There were a lot of happy goodbyes in that crowd.”

“Some ignorant people thought he was still a threat, even though he’s less a threat than anyone on earth, and he still moved half the country away.”

Asher rolled his eyes.

“And then in the middle of the woods where he avoided all human civilization, somehow, magically, a witch walked right into his life…”

“How did you know she’s a witch?”

“Because I was in the same cabin, not meeting anybody anywhere, and the universe sent me a photo of my fated mate. You can’t avoid her.”

“She doesn’t believe that part,” Asher said.

Malcolm threw up his hands. “Don’t worry. I’m not making any announcements.”

Asher snickered.

Malcolm scratched his beard. “Yeah, that’s where I run out of story. Somehow, I don’t think it ends with, and then she was completely happy and you’re completely happy and you came home to live happily ever after together with your pack.”

Asher closed his eyes. How he wished that were the story.

Malcolm cleared his throat. “Either she’s alone in the world, or she’s got a coven coming after her, or something else has gone wrong?”

Asher took a deep breath. “She’s alone. And she had a coven coming after her. Two, if you count her birth coven.”

“Two!” Malcolm’s eyes flared, scanning the darkness.

“Hey, I would never lead them here, and it was more of a get off our property than pursue her across half the country.” He hoped.

“I believe you,” Malcolm said, sounding totally unconvinced.

“That’s not the problem.”

“Lord, what’s the problem then?” Malcolm asked when Asher’s throat seized again.

Asher took a deep breath. Now they came to it. The question Malcolm wasn’t asking. The part of the story he’d sidestepped completely. “She doesn’t need the help. She thinks she can help.” Asher trailed off and rubbed his hands together rather than reach for the paperclip.

Malcolm cleared his throat. “Help train a horse, muck at a stable, cook dinner, deal with the flooded creek at the base of the land? What kind of help are we talking here?”

“Help me.”

Malcolm sucked in a breath, but his face stayed impassive. The dude was getting a little better, but Asher could feel the alpha’s perturbation and fear.

“Help you achieve as many orgasms as possible? Train the animals in there that are not horses?”

“Another long story.”

“Help with what?”

“With the wolf.”

The truck door clicked open, and Asher rolled up and over the railing, landing five feet down on the grass as he called, “Hey, I’m over here. You’re good.”

She looked around sleepily with the lizard on her shoulder.

He looked around, too, trying to see what she could see.

From where he parked, the light from the barn was blocked, so there was a vague dark outline of a building to her left and the spill of a porch light with a strange man sitting on it to her right.

“That’s my cousin.” He bit his tongue before he said the word alpha.

It looked like he brought her to a cabin deep in the woods to meet a huge, intimidating man. It didn’t just look like that. It was that. That’s exactly what he did.

“You good?” he asked as he ran a hand down her arm, unable to keep from touching her.

She nodded absently but didn’t take a step as she petted Oz’s soft spikes. “I forgot this feeling.”

“What feeling?”

“Starting over.”

He winced.

She went on, “Where even the air doesn’t smell right, and everything is new, and you don’t know anybody, and you don’t have anything. I seriously thought I was never going to have to do this again.”

“I’m sorry.”

Finally, she met his eyes. “It’s not your fault!”

He bit his lip, trying to keep any emotion off his face.

She burst out laughing.

“It is literally my fault,” he said.

“What the hell did you do?” Malcolm asked from the porch, and she froze.

“I should mention if you want to have a private conversation, we have to flee to the next county.”

“He didn’t do anything,” Penn said, her eyes never leaving his. “It’s their fault. Their ignorance and their fear.”