Page 8 of His Whispered Witch (Witches and Shifters: Scott Pack #6)

P enn gasped at the burst of flavor on her tongue like nothing she’d tasted in years. The naan transported her back to expensive Philadelphia restaurants. It was perfect, charred and soft.

When she swallowed, she realized she had closed her eyes, and she opened them quickly to see him standing across from her, looking harmless with a small smile on his face.

“It’s delicious.”

“Thanks.”

He had cooked this. She never would have guessed. She didn’t know why it was so strange. Shifters had to eat, right? She realized she had a picture in her head of shifters based on children’s tales and horror stories. If she’d have guessed before what a werewolf ate, she would’ve said raw meat.

“Does your wolf like curry?” she asked.

He froze for half a second, so quickly, she might have imagined it. “No.”

Just no. He didn’t elaborate.

She glanced around the cabin. It was tiny, and from the outside, with its graying wood walls and worn wood shingles, it looked like it was abandoned.

But inside, aside from equally weathered walls, everything was cozy and scrupulously clean.

A huge stove dominated one corner. Across from it, a counter held a rudimentary kitchen setup with a giant jug of water, a cooler, and shelves and shelves of ingredients that looked like they belonged in some five-star kitchen.

She couldn’t see a single packaged food of any kind.

She avoided looking in the opposite corner at the double bed with a cheery yellow quilt neatly draped over it.

“Does your wolf eat meat?”

There was another infinitesimal pause before he said, “Yes.”

She took another bite and had to keep from moaning. She was more of a microwave dinner type of gal, and ate tiki masala regularly, but the frozen squares tasted nothing like this.

She realized she was looking at the bed, then tried to cover it. “Do you craft too?”

The stitch of confusion between his eyebrows was adorable. “Craft what?”

“The quilt? It looks homemade.”

“It was a gift.”

Who had given it to him? He seemed to be alone in the world, but someone loved him enough to hand-stitch a quilt. She didn’t know why she was angry about that.

She kept eating. Though her tongue felt like it was on fire, she relished every bite. She knew from various pets who accidentally ate something spicy that the rest of the animal kingdom thought humans were insane for deliberately seeking plants with terrible defensive mechanisms.

They weren’t wrong. She often wondered what was wrong with her species that they took a substance designed to cause pain, created by plants to keep them from being eaten, and made it a key part of world cuisine.

Not for the first time, she wondered how on earth they ended up on the top of the food chain, the scavengers of the Savannah who now ruled everything.

She finished and scraped her plate.

“Do you need milk?” he asked quietly.

She blinked. Where was he raised that a glass of milk was an after-dinner treat?

“No?”

“Not too spicy?”

“No, it was delicious. You could have added another chili,” she said honestly.

He blinked twice and then nodded as if they would have dinner together again, and he would tweak the recipe.

He brought her dishes to the sink and waved off her offer to help.

She was conscious of the fact that she was alone in a room with a shifter far away from anyone.

She’d told Annie she was going to the weird ranch with the tin gate, but by the time anyone noticed she was missing and Annie thought to look here, it would be way, way too late.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered. Her eyes flared in alarm as he added, “I can hear your heart.”

Well, that didn’t exactly help calm her down. She could hear it herself now and fought to keep her breathing even. Just how sensitive were his senses? And what was he doing eating boatloads of chilies and peppers? It had to hurt.

“I’m fine with spicy,” he said.

He really had to stop doing that. When the dishes were slotted on a drying rack, he opened the door and walked outside. He didn’t say a word, just disappeared, and she stood for a moment waiting for him to return with something . An ax?

But he didn’t return, and she stumbled to the door where she found him sitting on a narrow wooden rocking chair on the porch. There was no roof above the porch, so she could see the sky turning from white to purple above them.

The too-hot day now felt perfect. She’d never get used to the changeable weather in the mountains with its massive temperature swings. It could be a blazing hundred degrees, and the moment the sun went down, the temperature plunged.

He pointed beside her, and she saw a matching rocking chair on the opposite side of the porch and sat down.

“Thank you,” she said. There was more room to breathe out here, even though she was just as vulnerable. He had to be faster than her and was definitely stronger than her, but he felt less of a threat in the open.

A chipmunk was chattering angrily in a tree at its mate, which wasn’t moving. She cringed; animals usually had an intuitive understanding of death, but this one seemed to think that his friend was coming back.

She shut down her gifts, surprised they had leaked out, and turned to him.

“So normally I have a, um, questionnaire?”

He nodded once, and she dug in her bag for her phone. She swiped it on and pulled up a spreadsheet of questions.

“I don’t know how many of these are going to apply. They’re mostly about ownership.”

He laughed softly.

“What’s funny?”

“That is one of the questions. The question of ownership.”

She frowned. Was there another player involved? Who owned him? Why? It didn’t make any sense.

Focus.

She scrolled through her spreadsheet, blushing when she saw the questions about toilet habits, then laughing when she saw the questions about playtime and toys. She had questions about routines, leashes, and vet visits.

She put down her phone. As she did, she noticed she didn’t have service and swallowed down a new spike of fear.

This was another crazy thing about the mountains.

Before, she hadn’t thought there was anywhere on earth her cell could not reach, but she was used to losing service at every other bend of the road now.

“Why don’t you just tell me what the problem is?” she said at last.

He chuckled, but it was about as far away from amusement as it was possible to get.

“How much do you know about shifters?”

Visions of crossbows, monster movies, defensive spells, and blood danced through her head, and she swallowed. “Maybe pretend I don’t know anything?”

“But you believe me that witches made shifters.”

That broke her brain. It killed everything she knew about the history of her family and her world.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you…” Did she believe him? She didn’t know him from Adam. How could she trust him? She was sitting alone in the woods with a shifter who had volunteered the fact that there was something seriously wrong with his wolf.

“You can just pretend it’s true,” he said. “The story can be whatever you want it to be.”

“Why? Why would any witch do that to some random dude?” She also wanted to ask how, but she thought that question would probably not go over well.

“Protection? That’s the prevailing theory.”

The magic had to be immense to change the very essence of a human being. She couldn’t fathom that kind of power, nor that kind of fear.

“So, if your wolf is made of magic, has the magic gone wrong? ‘Cause if so, you really need to find a coven. I am alone.”

He frowned. “I thought a coven ruled Silver Spring.”

She smiled ruefully. “What is a coven, really?”

He scratched his head. “Is that a philosophical question?”

“No. It’s got a genuine answer. It’s thirteen witches from the same family with different talents who can join magics together.

Well, there are only twelve talents, and then somebody to lead the whole thing.

Never mind. That’s not important. There are witches in Silver Spring, a lot of us, actually.

” Way more than thirteen. “But we’re not from the same family, and we have overlapping talents, though no one else has animal magic.

They were quite happy when I showed up. But we can’t join together. They’re working on it.”

She tried not to think about the fact that she would never feel that again, the power building and building, so much greater than the sum of its parts. She’d never feel the warm embrace of wards around the land, knowing nothing could get through to harm her.

“What happened to your family?” He swallowed. “Was it… Was it shifters?”

“No. It was another coven. It wasn’t violent. Everyone is still alive. We just couldn’t keep the wards up, and we didn’t have enough talent left. Everything’s kind of falling apart, you know? I mean, for every coven, not just ours.”

“For the packs as well. Fewer and fewer kids are born with wolves. It’s why—” he stopped abruptly and got a funny look on his face, like he’d just eaten a lemon.

“Why what?”

“Nothing.”

From the look of him, it was the opposite of nothing, but she couldn’t make him tell her.

“That’s not the most important part of the story,” he said.

“It’s not important how you got your wolf?”

“I mean, it matters ‘cause none of this makes sense without knowing that, but the important part of the story is the alpha.”

She leaned forward despite herself. “So there really is a leader of wolves?”

“It’s more often a pair. A couple. But my fa… We only had the alpha. His wife died, and he got dementia. It turns out it’s not great for a man with a giant predator inside to lose the human half of his mind.”

She quailed. What could she do about that?

“Don’t worry. He’s dead too,” he said, reading her face.

“Oh good,” she said faintly.

“But when more powerful wolves issue an edict, the less powerful wolves have to follow them. They have to. I don’t know whether it’s part of the magic or part of the wolf or what. But it’s not fun.”

“I bet.”