Page 29 of His Whispered Witch (Witches and Shifters: Scott Pack #6)

W hen Asher woke alone, he panicked until he saw the lizard perched on the ledge above his head in the early morning sunshine. Penn would never go anywhere without it, right?

The lizard cocked his head and then bobbed it up and down, and the wolf rose within him, recognizing a dominance display when it saw one.

It’s a lizard. Your mate’s pet. Is it really worth her wrath?

The wolf slunk back again, but the encounter left Asher winded.

He didn’t know if he was getting tired because there was hope on the horizon that he wouldn’t have to keep doing this so he could recognize just how exhausting it was to be constantly sitting on a volcano, or if it was getting worse.

Maybe he would be this exhausted even if he had never met Penn, and his ability to control his wolf and his wolf’s ability to stay calm always had an expiration date.

Either way, it felt like there was a countdown clock within him that was getting close to zero.

He couldn’t tell her that. He couldn’t put that kind of pressure on her. He could barely look at it himself.

He rolled out of bed and stretched as the lizard bobbed even harder.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said, unsure whether he was talking to the lizard or his wolf.

He dressed quickly in yesterday’s clothes because all of his worldly possessions were still in the back of a truck. He winced. So were the donkeys.

He jogged downstairs past a crowd of people in the kitchen toward the door.

“Ash,” he heard Malcolm shout.

“One second. There are animals.”

“They’re in the stable.”

Asher stopped at the door and turned back to see Malcolm looming in the archway to the kitchen. “Really?”

“No, we saw your horse trailer and thought, ‘Let’s leave them in there.’ Damn, you haven’t lived with a pack in a while.” It was an offhand comment meant to be a joke, but they both flinched. “I gotta ask, why…” Malcolm trailed off, seemingly at a loss for words.

“Donkeys?”

Malcolm nodded once.

Asher considered several explanations and went with, “Cheaper to replace.”

Malcolm didn’t get it for a second, then awareness swam into his eyes. Asher braced, but the alpha just nodded once and disappeared into the kitchen.

Asher followed him and stopped short when he saw three women at the dining room table, their heads bowed over something.

They looked nothing like each other, and yet there was a presence to all of them that felt the same.

The tiny, older woman on the left with brown hair was Malcolm’s mother, Kathleen.

Malcolm’s mate Quinn was in the middle with blonde hair, and Penn towered over both on the right.

She was also wearing yesterday’s clothes.

“This isn’t even the dire wolf spell, and it is nasty,” Kathleen said.

Asher frowned and walked further into the kitchen to see what they were all looking at. It was the book they’d stolen from the locked room of the purple house, the one with the spell for werewolves.

Alarm and hope flared within him as Malcolm wordlessly handed him a bowl of grits swimming in butter and cream. The sweet scent seared him, images of a thousand breakfasts flitting through his head.

He’d found grits in Colorado in the international food aisle under the name “coarse cornmeal.” Porridge was oats, wheat, rice, or anything but corn.

He took a deep breath and ate a spoonful when Malcolm cocked an eyebrow at him. Taste brought another thousand memories, and he started shoving more of the gruel in his mouth.

Quinn flipped a page. “They even put how to undo it, look.”

“Is that what that means?” Penn asked.

“I can just see it,” Kathleen said. She stood up and tapped her fist on the pages. “I mean, it’s a crazy spell, but I can just about see it.”

“So you can do it,” Asher couldn’t help asking.

Kathleen blinked and focused on him with a look of joy on her face. “My baby!”

Asher smiled as she wrapped him in her arms. She was only tall enough to reach his ribs.

“Hiya, auntie,” he said, summoning the name he used a long, long time ago.

She stood back, her hands on his rib cage. “No more running and calling it better, okay?”

He nodded once. The words, “I promise,” were on the tip of his tongue, but he could not promise that.

When he looked up, he met Penn’s gaze across the kitchen and felt such a well of love, he almost couldn’t breathe.

He looked around the kitchen, realizing this was the core group that lived in the big house. Malcolm and his mate and his mother, and now he and his mate. This would be most mornings in his life. The thought was dizzying.

“We don’t know yet,” Penn said, and for a second, Asher didn’t understand what she was talking about. He’d already forgotten his question.

He bit his tongue rather than press for certainty.

By the time he scrubbed his bowl, there were two more witches in the dining room, Goldie and Moira, the mates of two other wolves on the land.

Goldie was from a coven one town over with a West Virginia accent as thick as his, but Moira, with her vivid red hair, was from some fancy coven in Boston.

She spoke like a yank but dropped most of her r’s.

He kept expecting more workers to walk through the door. Kathleen fed everyone in the mornings, but no one did.

Malcolm sipped a cup of coffee and caught where he was looking. “We didn’t want to overwhelm you. They’re on their own for breakfast.”

“I didn’t wanna put anybody out,” Asher said quietly.

“The whole pack gets fed twice a day without lifting a finger. They can fend for themselves for twenty-four hours.”

“We can’t do it,” Penn said, and Asher clinched his fingers together to keep from reaching for her. She shoved the book away and sat back in annoyance. “It takes all the talents. Even if I believe that we can join together, though I met all of you an hour ago, we need all the talents.”

Goldie flipped her hair behind her with a smile. “My coven has so many witches that we’re doubling up by now. I’m sure they’d help.”

Penn’s eyebrows climbed to her hairline. “Another coven? Another whole coven knows about witches and werewolves?”

Goldie cackled. “I’ve got a little niece and a nephew that just got their wolves.”

“Oh.”

Penn met his eyes. Had she truly not thought about children until this moment?

It was a dream he’d never allowed himself to dream in years.

Hell, he’d never dreamed of a mate either, but at least Penn was a full-grown adult who could protect herself.

Vulnerable babies would never be safe around his wolf. But if the spell worked…

“So if we got thirteen, you could do it?” he asked again, unable to stop himself.

“Yes,” Kathleen said.

“You can’t promise that,” Penn said.

“We can do it, can’t we?” Kathleen replied. “You can’t sit there and say we can’t. Because it’s possible. We have the recipe. It just has to be tweaked for snakes.”

Moira waved a hand. “I can do that.”

Hope surged.

“But what does the rest of this mean?” Penn asked.

He came close and read the script at the top of the page. “Two, Three, Six, One, Two.”

“I think that last one is twelve,” Penn said. “Twelve talents, three kinds of magic.”

“Pattern, Natural, and Elemental,” Kathleen said, ticking them off on her fingers. “So what’s two and six?”

“Two could be active and receptive?” Moira said.

“So what’s six? We never divide anything in half.”

“And what’s the rest of this?” Asher asked, still reading. “The essence, the jewel, the life, and the beast for each. Two conjoined, the last of four, all on one hallowed ground.”

“That’s a lot of numbers,” Penn murmured.

“Numerology is bullshit,” Goldie said.

“Do you think we need to find two sets of conjoined twins?” Kathleen asked.

Goldie scoffed. “Technically, two conjoined would be one set, and I think it’s safe to say we don’t know what any of that means.”

“Maybe it’s just words to say?” Quinn said. “I mean, I’m a charm witch. I don’t do words, but maybe it’s the invocation, just super weird?”

“Do you have to know?” Asher asked.

“It’s not the important part,” Kathleen said.

“Probably not the important part,” Goldie corrected.

“The important part is that they built an unraveling right into the spell.”

He bit his tongue rather than insist they get started.

“But you have to understand the risks,” Kathleen said seriously, zeroing in on his face.

He forced himself to listen and not just immediately agree. The truth of the matter was, he would take any risk, any chance.

“It might kill you.”

He didn’t want to tell her he was heading that way anyway.

“It might kill all of you,” Kathleen continued.

Asher froze. His head emptied of thought. “What?”

“What?” Penn echoed.

“One thing I know for sure is that this can’t be a surgical removal just for Asher. If we change the spell, we change it for every dire wolf.”

“You mean in the entire world?”

Kathleen shook her head. “No. We would limit this to the Scott pack, but that’s as granular as we can get. You all have the same spell.”

“So either you succeed,” Malcolm said, “and take the snake away, or we all die?”

Kathleen spread her hands. “That’s not the most likely outcome. But it’s on the table.”

“We could also take the wolf as well,” Quinn said. “My part is stability, right? Charm magic is what makes it stable. We’ll deliberately destabilize it. If I can’t put it back, the whole thing is gonna dissolve.”

Asher took a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. The options are: everyone loses their snake. Everyone dies or has some terrible level of disability, I’m assuming that’s also on the table?”

The women nodded.

“Or everyone loses their wolf. Did I miss anything?”

Penn took a deep breath, then let it out.

Kathleen said, “Yes.”

“I missed something?”

“No. Yes, those are the options on the table.”

His head was shaking before she even finished speaking. “No.”

“None of that is likely,” Penn insisted. “The most likely thing is that we do this and succeed, and you are okay.”

Asher met Penn’s eyes, the woman he loved. “No. I would risk all of that myself, don’t get me wrong.”

Penn swallowed. “I could be wrong about your wolf. It might not be the snake. You might be fine some other way.”

“But you’re not wrong,” Asher said. Once she explained it, it seemed so obvious.

“None of us is fine,” Malcolm said. It was supposed to sound like a joke, and nobody laughed.

“I didn’t know,” Quinn said, stepping closer to her mate. “It’s been such a struggle for you?”

Malcolm shrugged. “It’s manageable, but we lose so many so young. This isn’t just your decision to make,” he said to Asher.

Asher immediately shook his head. “Yeah, but you would never risk it if I were not in the equation.”

“But you are in the equation. You’re a huge part of the equation.”

Asher held up his hands. “And the kids? You would risk their lives?”

Malcolm stepped toward him, but Quinn put a single hand on his forearm, and he stopped. “Maybe we should…” She nodded to the exit.

“So you’re just not gonna talk to me?” Asher shouted as they headed away.

The other women got up as well, filing out of the kitchen in a rush.

He turned to see Penn sitting at the table.

“No,” he said quietly.

“What happens if we don’t do this?” she asked. “The truth, Asher.”

He wanted to hug her. He wanted to take her in his arms and forget the world, but that was last night, and now it was morning.

“Nothing is certain.”

“What happens to you if we don’t do this?” she asked, undeterred. She got up and came toward him, but didn’t touch him, and he didn’t reach out. “Tell me you’re going to be fine. Tell me this isn’t a problem. Tell me you can live your life white knuckling every second.”

He opened his mouth to do just that, but he’d never been able to lie to her.

“I have you.”

“Fated mates?”

“Yes.”

“But neither fate nor love will fix this, will they?”

He could not keep from touching her. He wrapped her in his arms and rested his head against hers. “No.”

“You have to let me help you. I can help you. We can help you. Me and your family.”

Reluctantly, he pulled back. “You have to let it go.” He took a deep breath and, though it was breaking his heart, he added, “And I can’t stay.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry I dragged you across the country to a new place, but they’ll take care of you. They’ll love you forever.”

“I don’t need them. I need you!”

“I’ll hold out as long as I can. There’s a place I’m safe until Malcolm has to do what he’s been delaying for years.”

“Kill you. You lose control, and he kills you.”

He winced.

“Why won’t you fight?” she demanded.

“I would fight to the end of the Earth for you and me. But those idiots love me just enough to try this, and I cannot let them do that.”

“No.”

“I would risk anything except them. I have to go.”

“You don’t. We could have years.”

“I will not do that to you.”

“And that’s just up for you to decide?”

“In this? Yes.”

He tore away before she could say more and dashed outside.

Malcolm and the gaggle of witches were collected on the edge of the lawn, fifty feet away from the house, ensuring their privacy.

He froze at the bottom of the steps, meeting his alpha’s eyes, feeling the power and the summons in them. Asher tore off his shirt and felt the braided leather around his neck with his paperclip. Deliberately, he pulled it over his head, and Quinn gasped.

“Don’t,” Malcolm said.

Asher let it drop from his fingertips and then gave up. He gave up the fight, the denial, and the control.

The wolf flowed into form with relish and leaped out of his pants as hips shrank before its tail flicked them away.

It fled into the woods in seconds, and Asher tried to stay present through the disorienting loss of all his senses.

He could still hear what the wolf heard and feel with the wolf felt, but it was always one step removed.

The world retreated into cotton wool, a sensation he remembered.

He’d spent years trapped like this until he forgot he was human at all.

As he suspected, his wolf headed for their den far up in the mountains. His heart ached for his mate, his family, and the hope he’d cherished for what was possible, but he knew he would forget that, too.

Beneath the grief, there was a fear and pride that he had made this choice. He wanted them all, but he could not have them and keep them safe, so at least he could do this for them.