Page 74 of His Whispered Witch

Asher stopped at the door and turned back to see Malcolm looming in the archway to the kitchen. “Really?”

“No, we saw your horse trailer and thought, ‘Let’s leave them in there.’ Damn, you haven’t lived with a pack in a while.” It was an offhand comment meant to be a joke, but they both flinched. “I gotta ask, why…” Malcolm trailed off, seemingly at a loss for words.

“Donkeys?”

Malcolm nodded once.

Asher considered several explanations and went with, “Cheaper to replace.”

Malcolm didn’t get it for a second, then awareness swam into his eyes. Asher braced, but the alpha just nodded once and disappeared into the kitchen.

Asher followed him and stopped short when he saw three women at the dining room table, their heads bowed over something.

They looked nothing like each other, and yet there was a presence to all of them that felt the same. The tiny, older woman on the left with brown hair was Malcolm’s mother, Kathleen. Malcolm’s mate Quinn was in the middle with blonde hair, andPenn towered over both on the right. She was also wearing yesterday’s clothes.

“This isn’t even the dire wolf spell, and it is nasty,” Kathleen said.

Asher frowned and walked further into the kitchen to see what they were all looking at. It was the book they’d stolen from the locked room of the purple house, the one with the spell for werewolves.

Alarm and hope flared within him as Malcolm wordlessly handed him a bowl of grits swimming in butter and cream. The sweet scent seared him, images of a thousand breakfasts flitting through his head.

He’d found grits in Colorado in the international food aisle under the name “coarse cornmeal.” Porridge was oats, wheat, rice, or anything but corn.

He took a deep breath and ate a spoonful when Malcolm cocked an eyebrow at him. Taste brought another thousand memories, and he started shoving more of the gruel in his mouth.

Quinn flipped a page. “They even put how to undo it, look.”

“Is that what that means?” Penn asked.

“I can just see it,” Kathleen said. She stood up and tapped her fist on the pages. “I mean, it’s a crazy spell, but I can just about see it.”

“So you can do it,” Asher couldn’t help asking.

Kathleen blinked and focused on him with a look of joy on her face. “My baby!”

Asher smiled as she wrapped him in her arms. She was only tall enough to reach his ribs.

“Hiya, auntie,” he said, summoning the name he used a long, long time ago.

She stood back, her hands on his rib cage. “No more running and calling it better, okay?”

He nodded once. The words, “I promise,” were on the tip of his tongue, but he could not promise that.

When he looked up, he met Penn’s gaze across the kitchen and felt such a well of love, he almost couldn’t breathe.

He looked around the kitchen, realizing this was the core group that lived in the big house. Malcolm and his mate and his mother, and now he and his mate. This would be most mornings in his life. The thought was dizzying.

“We don’t know yet,” Penn said, and for a second, Asher didn’t understand what she was talking about. He’d already forgotten his question.

He bit his tongue rather than press for certainty.

By the time he scrubbed his bowl, there were two more witches in the dining room, Goldie and Moira, the mates of two other wolves on the land. Goldie was from a coven one town over with a West Virginia accent as thick as his, but Moira, with her vivid red hair, was from some fancy coven in Boston. She spoke like a yank but dropped most of her r’s.

He kept expecting more workers to walk through the door. Kathleen fed everyone in the mornings, but no one did.

Malcolm sipped a cup of coffee and caught where he was looking. “We didn’t want to overwhelm you. They’re on their own for breakfast.”

“I didn’t wanna put anybody out,” Asher said quietly.

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