Page 5 of His Whispered Witch (Witches and Shifters: Scott Pack #6)

P enn was sure she was imagining the long looks and the whispers as she walked down Main Street in Silver Spring.

Main Street was a misnomer because it was also the only street, aside from three tiny residential side streets leading nowhere into the hills, a strip of civilization between towering cliffs.

The town was too far away from the skiing or national parks to attract much tourist traffic, but not far enough away to remain completely isolated, so it stayed a quirky mountain town peppered with small businesses catering to locals and transplants who wanted to get away.

It was just enough to allow the Cauldron and Broom to thrive.

The coven ran a shop full of stereotypical witchy memorabilia, plus other new age books, trinkets, and crystals.

There were a lot of weird communities in these mountains, which was the most harmless word Penn could find for the people who retreated to try to live by one creed or another.

Mostly, Penn admired them. Pennsylvania had its share of devout in the rural areas, but they lived by different creeds.

Personally, she’d never summoned that much faith in her life in anything except in her own bootstraps, and that was getting increasingly difficult.

One person had called.

She’d spent $50 on business cards for one call.

It’s a start?

How long would she have to stay starting?

She shook that off. It was only the day after the race.

She was afraid the rumor about equine performance-enhancing drugs would never die down, truly, but there had to be a few donkey owners who would still want to talk to her if only because of the drugs.

She’d never drugged an animal in her life.

She would never need to with her magic, but it would open a conversation?

Was that really the kind of pet owner she wanted to work for?

She almost laughed, but bit her tongue rather than look crazy in the middle of the street as she contemplated the fact that she would welcome working with horse race fixers if it meant business success, which was why she was not in some kind of intentional community tucked into the mountains chasing enlightenment…

. She really would be content with enough customers to pay the bills.

She tipped her hat at a young woman she was fairly sure worked in the library, next to the bookstore, next to the Cauldron and Broom. At least she wasn’t the only one with a faulty business sense.

She stopped under the sign with a big black cauldron sitting on a fire made of broomsticks and ducked inside to a cascade of wind chimes. She blinked because the chimes were clanging with magic as much as with sound, checking that she wasn’t a werewolf.

“Yoohoo,” Niamh said from behind the counter. The shop smelled like a clash of incense and herbs. Penn could never decide whether or not she liked it.

Niamh was one of the twins, the matriarchs of this ragtag little coven, a woman somewhere north of sixty and south of eighty with the ageless fine lines and fair hair that hid the decades. Her sister Siobhan stood up next to her, towering over her with black hair shot through with silver.

“Oh good, it’s you,” Siobhan said.

“Hey,” Penn said with a smile for the twins.

Penn didn’t even know if they were really sisters, let alone twins. They looked nothing like each other, but they’d run this shop and coven together for the last several decades. They dedicated their lives to homeless witches, and she was a little bit in love with both of them for that.

The matriarch of Penn’s coven, one of her aunts, had capitulated the same day the other coven walked over their wards like they were nothing—because at that point they were nothing—and declared all their hard-won centuries of territory forfeit.

She shook that off and started forward, walking between a shelf of rocks and crystals and another shelf of candles to reach the counter.

The store was a grid of miscellaneous displays, while books covered the walls.

She found it hilarious that a bunch of real witches were selling books on fake witchcraft, but they’d gotten quite a reputation the world over, and now did most of their business with the postman.

“Now, dear, I need a full report,” Niamh said from the counter.

Penn tensed. She had hoped the story of the drugged donkeys was not going to reach their ears. They promised again and again that anything short of murder would not get her banished, but she was just a little twitchy.

“Um…”

“Annie said you saw the Koenigs, perhaps even the alpha!”

Penn’s brain stuttered to a shop. “I beg your pardon?”

“Wolves,” Siobhan said through gritted teeth. “I know they raise asses.”

For a craven second, Penn thought they were talking about children, not donkeys but then nodded.

“Do you think you were followed?” Niamh asked.

“Is that why…” Penn nearly rolled her eyes. Annie had driven them back to Silver Spring on the most circuitous winding dirt roads. “If we were followed, they were invisible.”

The twins shared a look. “You never know what they’re capable of.”

“Invisibility? I thought they just turned into wolves. Like, that’s their whole deal. One trick pony, so to speak.”

“There are rumors of fangs,” Niamh whispered.

“Monsters!” Siobhan added before walking behind the curtain that led to the back storeroom. She was so tall, she had to duck.

Penn sighed. Her old coven avoided werewolves like any other sane witches, but that didn’t mean they spent time worrying about them. There weren’t any packs anywhere near her home in Pennsylvania, so rival witches were always the bigger concern, which, hey, they hadn’t been wrong about.

Out here, it wasn’t the first thing the twins mentioned every time they saw Penn, but there were very few conversations that didn’t at least offhandedly touch on shifters.

There were supposedly a lot of wolves in the woods. It was just no one had ever seen them come anywhere near Silver Spring, but by god, these ladies were ready if they ever did.

“I think we’re safe for another day,” Penn said.

“Good,” Niamh said and brushed her hands over the counter like she was brushing away the threat. “You know, we have a defensive kit just behind the register.”

“Yes, you did show me that.” It involved holy water, which Penn did not think would do anything to a human being who occasionally changed species, but she held her tongue.

Niamh nodded again.

“And a crossbow in the back!” Siobhan yelled from the storeroom.

Penn looked around the store, worried that an unsuspecting customer might hear about the weaponry, but it was empty. She summoned a smile from somewhere. “Got it.”

“So, what brings you here, my dear?” Niamh asked.

“I actually have a client.”

“Oh, congratulations! Where?”

“He’s meeting me here. I booked the room.”

In addition to the downstairs retail, they had a tiny upstairs space over the storeroom that they rented out to local massage therapists, psychotherapists, body workers, and the one healer in the coven who, like Penn, did vague healing things to her clients with magic and called it something else.

Penn preferred to meet clients in a neutral location, though she sometimes had to go to somebody’s home. One massage therapist was allergic to cats, and Gary could hardly have hauled his donkey up the tiny stairs, but today’s client hadn’t specified the animal.

When she’d asked the man on the phone whether he had a cat, he simply said no. She’d waited for him to elaborate, but he hadn’t, so she’d taken the risk. Well, she would see soon enough.

The chimes tinkled and tilted sideways in a non-existent breeze, warning them that someone was at the side stairs.

“That’s him.” She waved and headed for the side door.

“Remember, that’s just a doorbell. We can’t ward the stairs,” Niamh called after her.

“Hunh?”

Niamh groaned. “The chimes kept going off when raccoons snuck by.”

“Your spell can’t distinguish between a raccoon and a werewolf?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Be on your guard,” Siobhan shouted from the back.

“Yes, ma’am, um, ma’am’s.”

She jogged to the tiny door between bookshelves and pushed it open. Her jaw dropped when she saw who was waiting for her at the base of the rickety stairs that led to the second level.

It was the man from the race, the one with the white-gray hair and haunted eyes. He wore the same clothes—faded jeans and a checked blue button-down shirt, long-sleeved even in the summer heat—with that strange leather necklace around his neck. He seemed to suck up all her oxygen.

He tipped his head like he was wearing a hat. “Good morning.”

Belatedly, she looked down and around him, searching for a pet. She knew he had donkeys, but fortunately, none of them were in evidence.

“If it’s your burros, I also make house calls. I should have mentioned that.”

He said nothing until her eyes met his. “No.”

She glanced down at herself. She was wearing jeans and a plain black t-shirt. Absurdly, she wished she had dressed up for this meeting, but she was used to rolling around on the floor with fractious puppies, and why did it even matter?

“Okay, then.” She gestured behind her to the stairs. “This way.”

He held out a hand for her to precede him.

She was about to protest, but she suspected he had the kind of old-school manners that would not allow him to go first, and they’d be stuck at the bottom of the stairs until the twins came out to investigate.

She climbed up first, feeling like there was a predator at her back who wanted to eat her alive.

Truly, he had the most intense presence of anyone she’d ever met.