Page 4 of The Witch & the Hound
"It's safer," he added, and something in my ex-cop bone marrow stopped arguing. Old instincts recognized that tone, the one that saidI've already assessed the threat level and you're not equipped to handle it alone. Not condescending. Protective. The kind of certainty you only got from experience, and thekind I'd used myself a hundred times on patrol.It wasn’t a suggestion. It was protection disguised as logistics. And God help me, it felt good to be on the receiving end of it for once.
“Fine,” I said, because I am a strong, independent woman who makes reasonable choices after fainting. “But if this ends with me in a freezer, I’m haunting your break room.”
He opened the steel door to the back lot and let in a slice of afternoon: gray sky, gulls, the tang of the ocean even this far from Seaview. He rolled my tote one-handed like it weighed nothing and led me to a plain dark sedan that looked like it filed its own paperwork. Practical. Clean. The interior smelled faintly like coffee and something darker, smoke? Suede? Cedar from before, and underneath it all, justhim.
I stopped and looked at the car. Then at his horns, which were… spectacular. Not ram curls, but upward, sweeping, bull-strong, catching the flat light and throwing it back in a dull shine. “So,” I said, deadpan. “Headliner or windshield?”
Bram blinked at the roof, as if he’d genuinely forgotten the prominent architectural features of his skull. He thumbed a switch. The sunroof slid back with a neat little whirr.
“It’s only cramped when it rains,” he said.
I barked a laugh that startled a gull off the lamppost. "Of course it is."
He tipped his head just so, easing one horn into the open space, and leaned a fraction toward me to check the angle. His shoulder brushed mine, solid and cool even through his shirt.
A spark went through me, low and electric, and it had nothing to do with menopause. I suddenly understood every woman who'd ever written bad poetry about forearms, or in this case, horns and the careful way a man angled them to avoid hitting you in the face. He was all blunt strength and careful edges, and my body betrayed me by cataloguing every single detail like evidence I wanted to pull out and examine later. Alone. Possibly in the bath.
“Guess I’ll start carrying an umbrella if we’re ever carpooling,” I said to cover the flip in my stomach.
“Good idea,” he said, as if we’d just scheduled it.
I climbed in, tugged the seatbelt across my damp shirt, and tried not to watch his hands on the wheel. Big. Long fingers, darker nails. Not claws, just not the pink human kind. The tail settled along the console, then, as if remembering itself, curled away with almost courtly politeness.Even his tail had better manners than half the men I’d dated.
We pulled out with the kind of careful acceleration that made me think he’d studied Driver’s Ed manuals like holy texts. He checked mirrors, scanned exits, eyes flicking in a pattern that looked like math. I knew the type. I used to ride with the type.
“You’re very… alert,” I said.
“It’s my job,” he answered, but I got the sense he meant more than manager.
The highway unspooled, strip malls giving way to scrub pines, then to the low sweep of marsh before the coast. My shirt cooled. My skin stopped trying to audition for a lobster festival. The world steadied.
"I'm Maggie," I said into the quiet.
He cut me a glance, those amber eyes catching the late afternoon light. "Maggie," he repeated, like he was filing me alphabetically. Or memorizing me. "Maggie who makes soap."
“You remembered.”
“You smell like rosemary. And salt.” A beat. “And sugar. From the candy aisle.”
“Tragic,” I said again, but softer this time. “Lavender and sugar is my signature scent.”
“Hm.” It might’ve been agreement. It might’ve been appreciation. It sounded like both.And my traitor heart read it as: I like how you smell. Like you.
We passed a billboard for Seaview's Halloween Parade, cartoon bats, a skeleton band, WITCHES WELCOME in festive lettering. Underneath, someone had spray-painted in aggressive block letters: BUT CHECK OUR BYLAWS. I snorted.
Bram's eyes flicked to it, then back to the road. "Your town has good signage," he said, deadpan.
"My town has good grudges," I corrected. "The older families are still mad about things that happened three hundred years ago and things that happened last year. The Convergence didn't help; turns out opening portals to other dimensions and flooding the world with supernatural beings makes people evenmoreset in their ways." I rolled the window an inch and let in sea air. “They can handle a broom. They’re still learning how to handle horns.”
He didn’t react, but I saw it in the line of his mouth, something old and resigned. We crossed the causeway. Seaview rose in salt-bleached shingles and Halloween bunting, tidy porches lined with pumpkins and cats that might have been cats and might have been witches keeping an eye on the neighborhood.
People noticed the car. People noticed the horns. A pair of boys on bikes gawped and steered directly into a hedge. One of them popped back up, pointing and shouting "Cool!" before his friend yanked him back down.
Mrs. Quimby from the tearoom narrowed her eyes so hard I felt the draft. I bristled like my hair had opinions and flipped her the bird.
"Friend of yours?" Bram asked, his voice utterly neutral.
"She thinks I'm a bad influence on the neighborhood. She's not wrong."
