Page 19 of His Whispered Witch

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 otherwitch 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’tanything 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. Theyturned him into awolf. 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.

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