Page 9 of His Whispered Witch (Witches and Shifters: Scott Pack #6)

He was silent for a while as he gazed out into the deepening dark.

She was going to have to drive down those curvy roads with her tiny car and its tiny headlights, which she hated.

She put that aside. That would not be the hardest thing she did tonight by a long shot, it sounded like.

She had no idea where this story was going next, but she really hated the beginning.

“My—the alpha didn’t like me. Targeted me. Don’t know why.”

He knew why, but how did she know he was lying? As bad as the story was, it sounded like she wasn’t going to get all of it, or even the most important parts, and that was worse.

“Anyway, I spent five years as a wolf.”

“Okay?” She waited for more. Was that the climax?

“That’s not supposed to happen,” he said mildly.

“So, a shifter who doesn’t shift… What happens?” Her imagination failed her again.

“The human is supposed to be in control. Always. Even as a wolf, we can wrest it away. The children who don’t learn that are killed.”

“What?” she shouted, jumping up.

She didn’t have murdering children on her bingo card.

“It’s for the best. They’re dangerous predators. It’s not like we slit their throats when they’re two. They try for years. What part of wolf pack wasn’t clear?”

He sounded angry, and she sat down, aware that she’d asked him for this story.

She was also aware this was incredibly hard for him, and he didn’t have to do it.

She had no idea what life was like for his family.

There were a lot of things about a coven that would horrify outsiders, like the communal living, the pooled money, the arranged marriages, and the control the matriarchy had over everyone, but it worked for them.

When you had the kind of power that witches had, there had to be guardrails.

And as dangerous as her power was, it still didn’t come with teeth.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“Don’t be. It’s just, they should have put me down.”

“When you didn’t shift?”

“But they didn’t. And when we finally got a new alpha...”

She braced.

“No, he’s awesome.” Asher laughed quietly. “When he’s not the worst person in the world. Anyway, he forced me back, kept me human.”

“That’s great,” she said sincerely. She didn’t know why she felt an unbearable sense of grief at the idea of losing this man.

“That was not the word I used then.” He scrubbed a hand over his chin. “Or for a very long time.”

She swallowed. “Or now?”

“Sometimes now. My wolf wasn’t right after that. It had lived too long with too much power. And now it’s hard to control.”

That seemed like a massive understatement, if his white knuckles on the arms of the rocking chair were any sort of tell. Automatically, she scooted her chair away from him across the porch. The sound of wood screeching against a nail was loud in the night.

“Hard to control,” he said with a small smile, “but not impossible. I’m not going to eat you. That’s part of the deal, after all.”

She deeply felt how useless that declaration was in a world with uncontrolled shifters. She had no guarantee he could keep that promise.

“So, you want me to, what? Talk to him?”

“Oh, I talk to him. I had hoped…” He trailed off again. She got the impression he didn’t talk to many people. She smirked, amused with herself. She was a real Nancy Drew to figure that one out.

“Hoped what?” she asked at last.

“I had hoped that he might actually listen to you. Or I had hoped that perhaps you would hear. He doesn’t talk to me.

I don’t know what’s wrong, but he’s miserable.

If there’s a wound to be healed or part of the spell to be fixed or something, I’d like to try.

Now that I say it, it sounds ridiculous.

You don’t know me. You’ve never met a shifter before, and somehow you’re gonna know exactly how to fix one? But I had, um, hoped.”

She took a deep breath. “You’re right. I have no idea what I can do, but if your wolf really is an animal, I can try.”

Finally, he met her eyes. “Thank you.”

Two simple words she’d heard a thousand times, yet it felt like she’d never heard them before in her life.

She glanced down at her phone again, shuffling through her questionnaire in her head. There wasn’t a single thing that applied to this situation. And it wasn’t like there was any other witch she could ask, not unless she wanted to find herself chased out of town with crossbows.

She took a deep breath. “Now is usually the time where I pretend to talk to the animal while actually using magic.”

He frowned. “Isn’t the ability to talk to animals what your talent is?”

She blinked twice. How did he know that? He clearly knew a lot more about witches than she did about shifters. Who had taught him? And why did that make her jealous? She threw it off. “Yes. I talk to animals.”

“So you pretend to talk to the animal while you actually talk to the animal?”

“Yep. That’s pretty much it.”

“Can you do it from here? Because I really don’t think I should shift.”

She swallowed and was surprised to find her mouth dry. The phrase “hard but not impossible” kept echoing in her mind.

She closed her eyes and pushed her magic toward him like she would toward another animal and found the curious, muted silence of humanity.

She always wondered how it worked. Humans were also animals, after all, but it seemed like they’d forgotten how to communicate with this otherworldly sense she had.

It was far easier with babies. She could treat them almost like she’d treat a dog or a cat, but the moment they started to speak, the awareness faded.

She always knew more about people than normal, but nothing like she could discover about the speechless.

“No dice?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I mean this in the most innocuous way possible, but perhaps if you were touching me? Just a hand? I can hear him.”

She nodded and got up and walked the five feet that separated them. Aside from the rocking chairs, there wasn’t anything else on the porch, so she kneeled by his chair and put a hand on his arm.

“So I’m just going to…”

“Have at it.”

It felt awkward without all the fake production she did around this. She just took a deep breath and sank in.

She found not an animal, but magic.

She toppled backward and had to catch herself with her hands before her head hit the porch.

He crouched beside her but didn’t touch her. “Are you okay? What happened?”

He was riddled with magic, looped with spell upon spell upon spell.

She’d never seen anything more complicated or powerful in her life.

No coven on earth could do this today. He said that witches made shifters and implied it had been at least several millennia ago, yet the spell was still going as strong as ever, passed from generation to generation with no help from any coven. Dear god, what had they done?

She bypassed his arm and put her hand right on his heart and then grimaced because it was too hard to sense through fabric.

Her eyes sought his, and wordlessly, he pulled his shirt over his head to reveal a torso as tan as his face with lean, wiry muscles in abundance. He was strong, far stronger than he looked.

She couldn’t think about that right now. She closed her eyes and laid her hand palm flat against his chest.

This time, the swirls of magic made more sense. She saw less of the structure of the spell and more of what it was doing to him.

Suddenly, like putting on a pair of glasses, things snapped into place, and she could feel the wolf.

Because there was definitely an animal living within him, one made of her magic. Every magic under the sun was tied into the spell, but hers was the biggest part of it. Of course it was. They turned him into a wolf . Animal magic would’ve had to be a big part of that.

What’s wrong? she asked the being within, like she would ask a cat why it didn’t use its litter box.

Incoherent rage rushed at her, and she fought to stay connected and not fly off the porch.

Animals had emotions. Every higher life form did, but not usually recognizably human emotions. Animal emotions were quick and changeable and aided in survival. It was only humans who didn’t know how to work their brains or use their impulses to help themselves.

This felt like the futile rage of a human. Normally, if an animal were this upset with the situation, it would’ve fled, fought, or died its way out of it a long time ago, but this wolf had done none of those things. It was powerfully, futilely angry.

Then, to her shock, she felt another alien presence within: reptilian, simpler, and older, and entirely undamaged.

“Penelope!”

When she came back to herself, she was flat on her back on the porch, and he was crouching over her, his hands hovering everywhere but not touching.

“Are you okay? What happened? What is it?”

“Penn.”

“Hunh?”

“Call me Penn. I hate Penelope.”

He sat down with a whoosh. “Well, you’re definitely not a Penny.”

“Hell, no.” The last minute of her life came rushing back to her, and she curled up. She almost put her hand back on his chest, but discovered she was afraid to do it.

“What the hell else is in there?” she demanded.

“What?”

“There are two animals in that spell.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot about the snake.”

Her jaw dropped. “You just forgot that you can also transform into a snake?”

He sat back and draped his hands over his knees as he shook his head. “No. I can’t. But…”

“There’s a but to that sentence?”

“We’re dire wolves. Well, that’s what we’ve called ourselves. Our teeth are fangs. That’s the only part of the snake that we have.”

She was shaking her head before he finished speaking. “I promise you that’s not true. I don’t know about the whole shifting thing, but you have a lot more than snake fangs.”

“Also venom.”

She was going to throw up in another minute. Some witch had built a man into a wolf, which was bad enough, but not content with one predator, she’d put in two! Two predators that hated each other and avoided each other like the plague in real life.

Then that ancient serpent presence twitched toward her, and she was off the porch and away.