Page 20 of His Whispered Witch

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.

6

Everything in Asher, including the wolf, wanted to run after her and make sure she was okay, but he held still on the porch sincehewas the thing she feared.

She’dtalkedto his wolf.

The only people he knew who could communicate with wolves who weren’t wolves themselves were the true mates of wolves. That could not be what was going on.

She was an animal witch. She spoke to all animals, including, apparently, the magical kind. It meant nothing more than that. It couldn’t mean anything more than that.

When he heard a car start up, he let out a long breath and tried not to think about anything at all. The wolf was close, whether because Asher was wobbling or because she’d called to it, he wasn’t sure, but this was dangerous.

Deliberately, he stood up until he was on two legs and tried to ignore how far off the ground he was and how precarious he felt. The wolf wasreallyclose.

He fumbled with the doorknob and realized he’d forgotten the existence of his thumb. He finally gripped the round knob as if he had terrible arthritis in his hand and managed to open it.

He went to his kitchen, not to his bed where he would lie awake and dream, and got out a brown mixture from the fridge. He’d been saving this project for a time when he might really need it. The wolfhatedchocolate.

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