Page 6 of The Witch & the Hound
The house smelled like rosemary and lavender and the faint burn of a candle she'd forgotten to snuff. Warm. Lived in. The kind of place that held memories in its walls like pressed flowers. The opposite of my square beige apartment where even the silence felt temporary.Her world wrapped around me the way shadows never did. It was scent and color and laughter pressed into the walls. It was everything my rented silence wasn’t.
I liked the arches. The house was full of them from the round-topped door to the one leading into the living room and then into the dining room.Old bones. Curves built to hold. The kind of house that endured.
“Shoes off,” she called over her shoulder as she vanished up the stairs.
I hesitated. Looked down at my boots. At my feet inside them, broad, claw-tipped, more hound than human. The kind of feet that made people nervous, that reminded them I wasn't quiteotherenough to ignore and not quite human enough to forget. I peeled the boots off anyway and lined them neatly by the door, hoping she wouldn't notice the size or the shape when she came back.
It felt like laying myself bare in a way I hadn’t in years. Leaving claw marks on someone else’s floor had never been an option before. Now I wanted her to let me stay.
Her living room opened wide and low-ceilinged, cozy in a way that felt like it wanted you to sit down and stay. Jewel-toned pillows crowded the couch: scarlet, sapphire, emerald, shot through with threads that caught the lamplight. The kind of fabric that belonged in another country, another time.
Pictures lined the mantle and the shelves. Friends, cousins, maybe. A ginger-haired woman who must’ve been her mother, freckles stamped like Maggie’s. A cluster of witchy women with wine glasses.
One frame pulled me close.
Her hair was hidden under a hat, her smile tight and proud. She wore a black uniform with a badge pinned neat, and beside her stood a man, definitely older, same ginger hair, same sharp eyes, his smile the same brand of careful. Father, older brother, maybe. They squared off to the camera like they'd seen things no lens could capture, like they'd learned to stand straight even when the weight wanted to bend them.
I knew that look. Had worn it myself. The armor you put on so the world didn't see what you carried, didn't know how close you came to breaking under it.
I straightened just as her footsteps padded down the stairs.
She'd changed. Yoga pants that clung in ways that made my fingers itch to touch those infinitely appealing, rounded hips. A cropped sweatshirt that left a strip of pale skin bare, freckles scattered across her stomach like constellations I wanted to map with my mouth. Bare feet, toenails painted a glossy witchy black. Soft and sharp all at once. A body not untouched by time but made more dangerous by it. A body that called to me in ways no twenty-year-old ingénue ever could.
I had to look away before she caught me staring. Every inch of her was giving me ideas, most of them completely inappropriate for a first dinner invitation.
It was worse when I looked back. She'd moved to the dining room sideboard, bent over to reach the wine cabinet, and it wasmy turn to start sweating. The yoga pants did things that should be illegal. She straightened with a bottle in hand and worked the cork free with practiced ease.
Her hair was still wild, cheeks still pink from the heat, or maybe from catching me watching her. She carried two wine glasses into the living room and pressed one into my hand.
“You’re staying for dinner,” she announced. “Non-negotiable.”Her voice carried the same tone I used on customers in an emergency, calm, firm, impossible to refuse. Except with her, I wanted to obey.
The glass felt delicate between my fingers. Her hand brushed mine. It was warm, steady, no hesitation.
I wanted to tell her no. That it wasn’t my place. That I didn’t belong here among jewel tones and photographs and the scent of rosemary.
But the words wouldn’t come.
So I took the glass.
And stayed.
She tipped her glass at me. “Come on. Soup’s nearly ready.”
I followed her through the arched doorway, past the dining room, into the kitchen—and stopped.
The back wall wasn’t a wall at all. Just glass, floor to ceiling. Beyond it, the yard fell into a riot of green. Potted herbs crowded the sunroom shelves: sage, rosemary, lavender, some I didn’t recognize. Vines tangled up hooks, blossoms pressed lazy facesto the glass. The October night pressed back, black and salt-tanged, lanterns swinging in neighbors’ yards like fireflies.
And at the very back, nearly hidden behind the garden's sprawl, stood a shed. Bigger than it first looked. Windows aglow with faint light, like it kept its own heartbeat. Her workshop, no question. Of course she had a place like that, a space that was hers alone. A heart beating behind the house, making and remaking the world with her hands. She didn't just live here. Shebuiltit.
The kitchen itself was a half-sunroom, half-greenhouse, all Maggie. Copper pots on the wall. A battered butcher-block island crowded with bowls, jars, an open book face down with her neat cramped handwriting in the margins. It smelled of herbs and yeast and the ghost of citrus.
She moved easily in it, a witch in her element. She picked up a loaf, carved it into thick hunks with a knife that glinted under the light. Her cropped sweatshirt tugged when she leaned, showing more freckled skin, and my hands twitched against my sides. My tail gave an involuntary flick before I forced it still.
“You look like you’ve never seen bread before,” she teased, not glancing back.
“Not like this,” I said before I could catch it.Bread was supposed to be rations, survival. Not warmth cut thick, not sustenance offered with a smile. Not… holy.
She laughed, low and pleased, and slid a plate of slices toward me. “What, SuperMart doesn’t stock rosemary sourdough?”
