Page 3 of His Whispered Witch (Witches and Shifters: Scott Pack #6)

“ H e could have been a werewolf!” Annie said.

Penn frowned at the younger woman beside her and pulled another business card out of the sparkly bag she’d made that morning from the sleeves of her shirt.

Penn had only moved to this coven six months ago and thought she knew the level-headed girl rather well.

Annie was normally a voice of reason in the hodgepodge coven.

Take her out of Silver Spring, though, and she saw children’s stories everywhere.

“Do you think any man I talk to might be a werewolf?”

“No!” Annie said, still gaping.

“Okaay,” Penn said.

Annie laughed. “You would never believe I lived on the streets for months, would you? Grew up in New York?”

Penn gaped at her.

Annie rolled her eyes and took a calming breath. “Yeah, the twins have this whole network of moles in social services to pick up kids with weird histories. I’ve lost my touch.”

“So you’ve seen a literal werewolf? For sure?” Werewolves to Penn were akin to fairy tales. Yes, there were packs in Pennsylvania where she grew up, but they kept to their territory, and her coven kept to theirs. She could go a full year without thinking about them at all.

Annie bit her lip and turned red. That had to be a yes, right? She had fair skin with an incredible number of freckles that were disappearing as the blush spread. Where the hell was she running into werewolves?

Annie took a deep breath. “No, I never saw a werewolf in any town.”

Penn nodded and then paused. A lot of the world was not town. That felt like a pretty big loophole, but instinct told her to leave it alone.

She forced cheer into her voice. “So there are not werewolves everywhere. You’ve never seen one in this town, but he could be?

She pointed to the lanky man who was still staring at her business card like it held the secrets to the universe and not a VOIP number that rang on her phone with a special ringtone to signal a business caller.

She’d heard precious little of it since re-launching her business in a new state, in a new town, in a new coven.

She shook that off. That was why she was here today. Everything was going to turn around.

Penn watched him walk away with a frown on his face. He looked like he belonged here with his battered jeans and plaid shirt, but he also stood apart, like he didn’t belong anywhere at all.

When she’d first approached him with her ridiculous business cards that cost her fifty bucks for a tiny box, she thought he was much older than her.

His light hair was shot through with gray, but up close, she saw that his weathered skin was unlined, and his body looked like he should be running with the professionals.

Please be professional, she told herself and deliberately turned away. She’d almost asked him to call her for another reason, but she knew what a small-town entanglement could turn into, and frankly, she needed a customer more than she needed a terrible decision.

She’d only been in these mountains for six months, and she knew gaining people’s trust would not happen overnight, but she’d been surprised at how difficult it was.

People just didn’t trust some random girl who called herself a psychologist for animals.

They went to a vet that had been in the area for thirty years, fifteen miles away.

She’d thought the burro races were the perfect opportunity. People came out of the woodwork to compete. Plus, one of her first clients was now in the race.

Like 90% of her cases, there had been nothing wrong with the donkey; it was the owner.

Gary owned the local hardware store in Silver Spring.

He was an old hippie with a mane of gray hair down his back and running shoes he’d bought in the eighties.

He’d been hauling his donkey Silver by its reins, which confused the hell out of the animal and just made it want to pull in the opposite direction.

She told Gary to run behind it with light pressure on its hindquarters, and it suddenly got the idea.

He called her a miracle worker, and she decided not to inform him that when donkeys are young, they’re always herded by their mothers from the back.

For whatever reason, nature decided it was safer for the babies to be in front.

She’d allowed Gary to believe it was some kind of breakthrough.

She’d worked a little bit more with Silver with actual magic to give Gary his money’s worth, but it was a donkey. It was bred to go all day, forever.

The pair had started the race well, and she had high hopes, but even her dedication to her business did not involve running fifteen miles at altitude to make sure.

She’d be at the finish line at the end of the street, hopefully to cheer on her victory and pass out cards to desperate owners looking for her magical secrets.

She snickered; if only they knew.

Now, she focused on any pet owners in the crowd. She’d thought she’d gotten all the donkey owners until she saw him scare the living daylights out of his herd to get them going.

She ran that moment back in her mind, trying to figure out what he had done. Four donkeys stood frozen at the line, and it looked like he’d just flapped his arms, a thing they normally easily ignored. Except they all took off like an apex predator was nipping at their tails.

She broke her vow and looked back to find him. For purely professional purposes.

He was tall, and that hair was distinctive, so he shouldn’t have been hard to find, but he’d disappeared.

With a sigh, she turned to a spectator. The older woman was already cherry red.

Penn wanted to offer sunscreen but held out her card instead when she saw a little teacup poodle in the crook of a stroller.

It was happy enough, but felt a little sick and worn down from all the “treats” her master fed her.

Long experience told Penn not to voice that opinion.

She didn’t want to give things away for free, and more importantly, unsolicited advice backfired for the animals.

She only stepped in when there was massive abuse.

While she thought feeding a canine bread should be classified in those laws, it didn’t do any good to report them.

“I’m not paranoid,” Annie said as they made their way down the street to the banner where the finishers would come into town.

“I didn’t think you were,” Penn said. At least she hadn’t thought that until today.

“This is a wolf’s natural habitat,” Annie said. “And now that the environmentalists have released a bunch of regular wild ones, we’re going to get all sorts of packs. And we don’t have enough of the right kind of magic to defend ourselves.”

Penn winced and nodded. She still hadn’t gotten used to the feeling of nakedness of living in a town without solid wards and magical protections around.

Her family’s protections had failed back in Pennsylvania five years before, but it hadn’t been a wolf pack that had taken over.

Frankly, she wasn’t sure what a wolf pack would do with a bunch of gossiping witches.

No, it was another coven who had swept in under the guise of protecting the vulnerable Youngs, who’d been in that Dutch town in Pennsylvania since before America had been a country.

They were all benevolence and generosity as they took everything her family had built over those centuries.

She ran a hand over her buzzed scalp, feeling the sun pounding at her skin, even though she’d doused herself in sunscreen and the day wasn’t that warm. She wasn’t in Pennsylvania anymore, and she had to put down old hurts she couldn’t do anything about.

She looked around at the milling crowds and caught the angry chatter of a Chickadee, a wild bird that was becoming increasingly convinced this was the end of the world.

It had been born in the spring and had never seen this many humans in its very short life.

She shook off the animal consciousness that was bracing for this to be forever.

Most animals couldn’t think logically or extrapolate the future from the present, which was normally a blessing.

Frankly, she thought it a sign of a better functioning brain and branch of evolution, except when your entire world seemed to be ending and you didn’t have the frontal lobe to hang on for better.

“You’re the expert,” she said to Annie, far too late for this to be a functional conversation. “I will be, um, careful of werewolves.”

She ran a hand over her hair again, remembering the day she met the man that she was supposed to “explore life” with. Penn didn’t think there was a phrase she hated more. The invading coven got fresh territory and new witches to marry off to some of their less desirable family members.

She shuddered at the thought of the cousins who had given in. Unlike the rest of America, arranged marriage was common with witches, focused on power and not inconsequential things like compatibility.

She’d politely declined her generous offer and fled in the middle of the night, keeping her head down until she heard of a coven in Colorado built of strays like her.

When she finally reached the tiny town tucked in the shadow of unimaginable snowy peaks, she’d been chagrined to realize that most of the unrelated witches had been raised in Silver Spring as well.

The leaders of the coven, twins in their seventies, did have daughters and granddaughters of their own, but not enough to form a coven, so they took in foster kids and runaways.

Fortunately, they’d still welcomed her with open arms, probably because they didn’t have someone with animal magic.

So now she was here, giving pep talks to donkeys and worrying about werewolves.

“That’s a werewolf,” Annie said casually, and Penn spun around.

She’d never actually seen one before.

“Where?”

Annie subtly pointed as she faced away, and Penn’s eyes scanned the other side of the street.

She saw massive crowds.

“Where?”

“The blonds.”