Page 13 of His Whispered Witch

He’d had a faint idea that maybe it could be a little different for a single week, so why did it feel like his puppy had died, and somebody stole all the Christmas gifts he’d ever received as a child?

Speaking of the razor’s edge, despair was not an emotion he could afford.

He forcibly yanked himself back to the present and flipped over the naan on the flat top of the cast-iron stove that took up a quarter of the cabin to reveal its charred surface. In his previous try at this, he’d stoked the fire too hot, and the outside had burned before the inside was cooked. Today, he thought he might have hit it.

The cabin he inherited from his cousin in the Colorado wilderness had neither electricity nor running water. Since he’dlived without both for years, albeit as a wolf, he hadn’t missed them. But a few months ago, he realized he was losing touch with civilization and had started cooking more and more elaborate meals for the sole reason that his wolf would hate them.

There weren’t many cookbooks for a wood stove, at least not from this century. He delved into historical recipes before branching out to explore world cuisines that hadn’t lost touch with fire. The cookbook from India he’d picked up at a thrift store in Denver was 427 pages long. He was on page 122, and this was his second try at naan and only his seventh try at any kind of bread at all. Baking in a wood fire was a whole other beast, especially when your only temperature gauge could be: cooling coals, perfect flames, or the heat of the sun.

He flipped the naan off the flat top onto a platter from the same thrift shop with a hiss of satisfaction. It was perfect.

He danced around the stove to stir the curry and peek at the rice, even though the cookbook said under no circumstances were you ever to peek at the rice and release all the steam and ruin everything, but how were you supposed to know when it was done?

This was overdone. There was a lot of rice stuck to the bottom of the pot, but the rice above it didn’t seem to have been affected, and everything else was good.

He understood why previous generations didn’t accomplish more. The basics took up most of the day. Add in a fractious herd of donkeys and a dozen cookbooks, and the hours were taken care of. There was no time to consider whether he could stay sane, if his commitment to his own humanity would slip away, or if this time, when the wolf overtook him, he would just let it.

He sat at his single place setting and surveyed the absurd meal that had taken him all afternoon. The usual joy he felt at mastering another recipe and going on to the next had lost its shine, too.

He knew he was lonely. It was in the name: lone wolf. Wolves were meant to run in packs, but he long ago accepted that his wolf was an exception. Until now, his loneliness had been baked into his life, and he barely noticed it anymore. When an ache never changed, no matter how bad, it was just life, right?

Everything ached all over again. He took a hearty bite of the spices he’d roasted and ground himself so they were as fresh as possible at a spice level that scorched his tongue and his sensitive shifter senses. It sent his wolf reeling, which was the real goal of the exercise. He waited for a moment of peace. The ritual always made him feel more human, so it was less of a fight if only for a few minutes, but for some reason, today, the elaborate meal and fresh bread just made him feel worse, which he really didn’t think was possible.

He’d read an article in a Denver newspaper about an initiative to release wolves back into the Colorado wild, and felt cheered and then horrified, because if he did lose control and disappear, maybe at least his wolf could find a pack.

He took another bite of curry. He didn’t want to give up. Sometimes he stood on the hill closest to his house where he could see the rocky snow-capped peaks of the continental divide—ever white even in high summer—as the first rays of the sunrise hit them from across the plains, and it stole his breath. The wolf couldn’t even see the color red.

It didn’t even have to be that majestic. Sometimes, when he tasted new flavors of a recipe from a land 10,000 miles away using familiar spices in new combinations he had never thought of before, like cumin and cinnamon, the world would burst into 3D. In his world, one belonged in refried beans, and one belonged in an apple pie, but together they turned potatoes into dessert.

The wolf hated cinnamon.

He would miss that.

He would miss it all.

No, he didn’t want to go. He just didn’t want to live like this.

Until today, there didn’t seem to be another choice, so he took what joy he could from a bite of food or a glimpse of mountains and worked himself to exhaustion the rest of the time so he didn’t have to think about it.

Then she’d nearly knocked him off his feet when he saw her at the race. He had been completely overwhelmed with the crowds and the noise and the fight with his wolf’s hunting instincts, but the moment she met his eyes, all of that had fallen away.

She had luminous gray eyes and hair cut so short, he thought it would feel like fur if he ran his hand over her head. In a crowd full of athletic gear, she had seemed like an otherworldly fairy in her sparkling top. Then she’d touched him with soft fingertips and handed him a card that casually insisted she could fix animals.

Then she told him her family would kill him if he came anywhere near her ever again, and everything she promised was gone.

He took an extra big bite, and the stew seared the top of his mouth, which hurt more because of the cayenne and three kinds of chili peppers mixed in. He lunged away from the table and drank from a precious half gallon of milk in the cooler, because water would just move the heat around until the five-alarm fire cooled.

He chuckled. Well, it had been five seconds since he felt sorry for himself.

He banked the fire and went out to the paddock behind the little hut to see to the donkeys, who went running the moment they saw him.

“Oh, now you can run?”

None of the donkeys had finished the race; every one of them had gotten stuck somewhere along the route.

He didn’t care that he’d refunded the money; that wasn’t the problem, but the humiliation burned. How had he never considered that in all his practice runs, where they obediently ran as fast as they could in exactly the direction he specified, that there was a ruthless carnivore behind them? And now he didn’t know what to do. Hire some vulnerable human to come here and run with them? They’d probably never run for anyone else because these guys were now used to existing around a werewolf.

For the first time, he noticed the whites of their eyes as they wheeled around the paddock as he fed and watered them. What a horrible existence, depending on a terrifying predator for all your worldly needs, unable to get away from him.

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