Page 34 of His Whispered Witch (Witches and Shifters: Scott Pack #6)

“Shit!” the three-year-old echoed gleefully.

“Just go,” Becca said.

“Seriously?” Sonia asked.

“If we’re not fine after this, standing twenty feet away isn’t going to help, and besides, we’re not the ones in trouble.”

“Right,” Sonia said grimly. “Now we join together?—”

Penn didn’t hear anything else. A connection snapped between her and Asher and the rest of the grid.

Somebody screamed; several more cursed.

“Hold steady!” Charlie shouted, the only coherent voice in the maelstrom, the only other witch not rendered mute. Penn couldn’t say a single word.

Sonia was still spellcasting. Penn knew academically that this was a long spell.

Even their edited version to do one little tweak took pages.

Most spells lasted less than a page, so witches gathered energy and then used it.

Holding on like this felt like someone put a blow torch to her toes and was slowly working their way up.

If they reached her head, she’d be burned alive by magic, and she didn’t know what would happen to her then.

In all her worrying, she hadn’t once spared a moment for herself. She hadn’t thought about what it would be like as a witch to be in the middle of this double Circle monstrosity.

There were no words for the amount of magic building. It was an order of magnitude beyond what she’d ever dreamed possible; she didn’t have any reference point. It was as if someone who lived in a one-story house their whole lives suddenly went to New York.

She stopped worrying about Asher and started wondering if any of them would survive this.

Then the magic began to move.

The spell began to take shape between them.

She felt Quinn stir beside her as magic dived toward his spine.

It wasn’t some random wolf’s spine; this was Asher. She watched as Quinn traced the charm of the shifter spell within him. Intellectually, she knew what the spell was. She had the recipe, after all, but it was an entirely different thing to see it mapped onto a human body.

It was wedged between every cell, twisting them beyond recognition. What witches did to these men took her breath away. Had they consented? If they had, did they understand? Did they regret it?

She was no longer surprised Asher was teetering on the edge of insanity. She was now surprised the rest of them weren’t.

The shifter spell took the fundamental fact of their existence—being human—and twisted it until it was balanced on a knife’s edge with another being.

Worse, that change belonged to someone else.

In the original instructions, the shift belonged to witches.

Shifters couldn’t do it themselves unless it was to protect a witch.

Now, there was a gaping burned-out hole right at the base of their neck where the compulsion had lived.

So shifters had done that at least, literally snapped their leash and taken control themselves, but it meant a lifetime of balance and holding the two pieces of themselves together.

Worse yet, in this one, a third actor was lurking at the very base of the spine.

Abruptly, she swallowed all her horror, fear, and judgment about what her ancestors had done in a different age.

This, at least, she knew how to do. It felt like her entire career had prepared her for this, to set aside the complicated existential angst of being human to help an animal in need.

Quinn had been certain that she could stabilize the charm for at least five minutes, but Penn thought that was insane now.

Penn was going to have seconds if she didn’t want to do more damage.

That blown-out hole at the top haunted her.

She was so glad it was there, but they were already working on a wobbly charm. She was not going to have five minutes.

She took a deep breath and firmly brought the visualization into her mind that she had worked with Moira on all night, using the latter’s expertise in snakes to build a magical paradise.

She realized, even if Quinn had given her an hour, she wouldn’t have needed it. Animals didn’t deliberate. In questions of survival, they made split-second decisions. They had to. They lived this close to death all the time.

She wasn’t going to have a long, drawn-out conversation with a serpent. It was going to gain its freedom to move for the first time in millennia, and it was going to choose fast.

It had to choose her.

She didn’t even want to think about what would happen if it didn’t.

“Get ready!” Charlie screamed.

Screaming instructions hadn’t been the plan, but Penn heard nothing through her bond with Asher.

Something to note for the next gigantic, horrifying magic double Circle.

The coven could talk, and the pack could talk, but apparently not to each other.

Or maybe it was her problem alone, because her only connection was through Asher, whose wolf never said a word.

“Now!” Quinn screamed.

Penn opened her paradise, seeking that coiling presence at the base of his spine.

Nothing happened.

Come on!

She couldn’t sense anything, but Asher began to fall.

She dove to keep in contact.

Come on, come on, where are you?

She found the wolf first, tortured and crazy and barely holding on, and ignored him.

It howled, and she had to let it. She kept going.

There it was, the reptilian ancient presence, as incensed and riled as the wolf.

I’m here for you, she said, pouring welcome through her magic.

It didn’t move.

You are the one who deserves all the help.

It twitched, and she gulped.

Look what I have made for you.

She opened her habitat, mirroring the real world, complete with perfect warmth, better than the body that was always going to be a little uncomfortable for a snake. It was teeming with mice, and plenty of places to sun and to hide right next to each other, with water tinkling in the background.

It’s perfect.

For a heart-stopping second, nothing happened, and her failure took her breath away.

And then the snake struck, slithering into the construction.

And into her mind.

The snake was in her.

Someone was shouting for her to let go.

Did this make her a shifter now? Except it wasn’t tethered safely to a charm but galloping free through her consciousness.

“Let go!” the only witch she could hear repeated. Penn couldn’t remember her name.

Did she know a single person’s name? Already, she felt too warm. That wasn’t a good sign, that she was suddenly worrying about her temperature…

They tore her away from Asher, and she screamed in protest as she was folded into a traditional Circle of Abbotts.

She didn’t know these women. They weren’t related to her. She’d lost her one connection to the magic.

“We don’t have words for this,” Sonia shouted.

“What the hell do we do?”

“Are there eagles in West Virginia?” a masculine voice shouted.

She felt a blessedly cool hand on her shoulder. Whose? She cracked her eye to see Asher crouching before her, infinitely beloved.

“Don’t touch me,” she gasped. The snake might go back.

“Call a bird,” he whispered as he took her hand.

“Bird?”

“Call on a raptor,” he whispered, then he looked around. “One of you. We need a predator. You were all so intent on making her comfortable for him, you never thought of the main reason an animal would run. Call a predator.”

“We should’ve called Grace,” Sonia said.

Everybody needed grace.

“We thought we had the animal magic covered. We had her.”

Grace was a person. Another animal witch?

“Bird,” she whispered; there was a Cooper’s hawk in the trees. It was the size of a football with beige and gray feathers. It wasn’t as big as an eagle, but the squeaky, nasal cry of a raptor would be enough.

“Bird,” she whispered again, ignoring the snake rampaging through her consciousness.

“Oh god, we’ve lost her.”

Asher gripped her hand. “We haven’t.”

Penn tried to protest as the hawk screamed.

The snake dove, seeking shelter, but ruthlessly, Penn left it nowhere to hide until the essence of a snake dove for somebody else, and Penn rolled away from Asher, the only one possible, until she felt a tearing in her magic and whimpered in pain as everyone screamed.

“Be gone,” Asher said implacably. He didn’t seem frightened at all.

She felt a slithering wisp of scales against her mind. If it went back to him…

“Got him!” someone said triumphantly.

Penn curled in the fetal position on her side in the dirt with a hole in her magic.

The spell was over. The intensity was over. The snake was gone.

She turned to see Moira holding a literal snake, black as night, twined around her arm with its head in her hand.

Frantically, she spun back and launched herself into Asher’s arms.

“You’re okay,” he whispered against her scalp.

“I’m okay, are you okay?”

The Circle broke up, and suddenly it was just a field full of random men and women.

“Are you—” she whispered through dry, cracked lips.

Asher met her eyes, and she felt the connection pulse between them, exhausted, shredded, but clean.

Her eyes landed back on the snake. “Is that?—”

Moira nodded happily. “Called it. European pit viper, also known as an asp.”

Quinn shook her head as she came up to them. “That thing is probably a couple thousand years old. You know that, right?”

“That is so cool,” Moira said.

Penn scanned the rest of the wolves. “Is it gone for you, too?”

They were clapping each other on the back and hugging each other. She blinked when she saw that Malcolm had tears flowing down his face.

“It’s gone,” Malcolm said.

One of the wolves from the Abbott side clapped his hands. “Great, now it’ll finally be a fair fight.”

“It’s gone completely,” Malcolm said.

“The wolf?” Penn whispered.

“Not gone,” Asher said.

Malcolm swung his mate in his arms. “You did it? Are you okay?”

Quinn laughed. “I had the easy part.”

Penn ran her hand over Asher’s head like he usually did to her. “Are you okay?”

“The wolf is a little confused. It’s gonna be a minute, but he might have a chance to heal.”

Penn didn’t move too much. Would she have a chance to heal?

“I got you,” Becca said. “Healer, remember?”

Penn hadn’t remembered.

“You just had a little bit of a tear. I’d fix it now, but I think we’ve all had enough magic for today. If you can hang on, it’ll be okay.”

“I can hang on.”

It took a second for Penn to realize they’d done it. Asher was here and alive and sane, or he would be soon. The other wolves, too, had lost their snakes. Even the snake was okay. She shuddered. She never wanted to experience anything like it again.

Every choice she’d made for the last two years had failed or fizzled. She didn’t know what she would do with herself, now that she was living in the best-case scenario.

“Whatever we want,” Asher murmured.

“Did I say that out loud?”

Asher shook his head. “My wolf told me.”

She clutched him to her. She could live with the best-case scenario.