Page 28 of His Whispered Witch

“Right?”

“Wrong! The treaty was not a treaty.”

Penn swallowed. “Then what was it?”

“Just a temporarytruce!”

Cat smiled from where she was cleaning out the cauldron. “A temporary truce that has lasted at least a millennium.”

Penn hoped she would one day feel comfortable enough to contradict Siobhan in her own kitchen without an ounce of fear.

Siobhan waved her away. “Be that as it may, we have to be ready to take up the cause again at any moment. To that end, we prepare. We learn everything we can. We collect every spell we can get our hands on.”

“Don’t forget the weapons!” Niamh crowed, looking like a harmless grandma stirring soup at the stove as she shouted about killing people.

“You have crossbows here, too,” Penn said, because of course they did.

“Way better than those boys down the block!”

There was a whole host of businesses up and down Main Street, but Penn immediately knew the store she meant. For the first four months of the year, it was a tax preparation office, but every other person she’d met in Silver Spring explained that was just a front.

The rest of the year, it was some kind of doomsday prepper depot where people could come twice a month to pick up absurd levels of non-perishable goods, hunting outfits, and far less innocuous ways to defend themselves.

She knew many people thought the backwoods were a good place to hole up if you thought the end of the world was arriving, but she hadn’t thought the twins were a part of it.

“We’ve got stakes,” Niamh said.

“Vampires don’t exist?” Penn mumbled.

“You can never be too sure,” Cat said with relish and tipped the cauldron upside down over the threshold to the greenhouse. She left it there as she stood up. “I mean, I’m from Romania, so I should know.”

This was one too much for her worldview. “Youdon’tknow that.”

“Well, no. They adopted me when I was five. All I remember about Romania was…” She trailed off. “Cabbage. What else, Niamh?”

“Oh, right, we’ve got silver.”

“No, I meant the dough…” Cat shook her head and pushed the cauldron further into the greenhouse. Penn glimpsed a formerly potted plant lying on its side. Were they growing things in their cauldrons?

“Silver bullets,” Siobhan continued. “Silver knives, silver cutlery…”

“Tori’s clients are the ones who wield silver spoons,” Annie said. “I don’t know that the werewolves are going to have a problem with them.”

Penn thought back to the spoon she’d eaten her curry with. Asher had obviously collected it from some kind of thrift store because none of his silverware matched each other, but some of them had been silver. “Yeah, I really don’t think that’s going to work…”

“Don’t forget the crossbows,” Siobhan said.

“Statistically speaking, we are more likely to kill ourselves with defensive weapons in the home than any burglar,” Cat said with relish.

“They’re not for when Gary gets drunk and confuses our house for his, even though how he could mistake the purple door, I will never understand,” Siobhan said.

Cat crossed her arms. “He’s colorblind.”

“That is beside the point!”

It seemed not at all beside the point to Penn. She wondered if they’d painted the entire house in garish colors to avoid a drunken Gary.

“Come with me,” Siobhan said, and Penn was just relieved they’d stopped listing weapons. Now she was worried because if they thought silver and stakes were good defensive measures,she wondered how useful the collection would be, but she wasn’t going to turn away help.

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