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Something growled, and a dark bush in front of the bay window right by the front door heaved. Andie shrieked and clapped a hand over her mouth as she crouched.
Andie’s old coon hound ran for the hulking shape, growled at it, and returned to Andie in a frenzy of barking.
Thank you for leading it right to me, Daisy.
When it didn’t move again, Andie scrubbed her hands over her face. She could not stand amongst the raspberry plants all day. She’d cycled back to the old cabin after the wake, needing to see it.
The cabin, the magic, Granny Sam had left it all to her. What would be the harm in seeing it for a moment?
But now, she had to run for the front door or back to town. And hope that whatever animal was on the ground wouldn’t be faster than a bicycle.
She balled her hands into fists and approached, trying to walk quietly in the squeaky black shoes and polyester dress she’d borrowed for the funeral. Daisy nipped at her heels. “Don’t you bite me, you hateful creature,” she said in her most soothing voice. The dog ignored her.
When nothing else moved, she ran for the front door. Nobody locked their doors around town, but the door was as old as the cabin and latched with an iron bar that hadn’t moved smoothly since the last millennium.
“Come on, come on, come on!”
She fought with the rusted metal, expecting an attack at any moment, Daisy barking at her feet. When the latch didn’t budge, she glanced down at the shape by the window and looked into the eyes of a wolf.
His fur was dark, and his head was only inches from hers. For a timeless moment, she stared into fathomless, slate-blue eyes brimming with intelligence and pain.
Then some latent survival instinct kicked in, and she jumped backward. Of course, it wasn’t a wolf. West Virginia didn’t have wolves. Did they? She knew every herb and plant by name and magic in the entire state. She knew when they grew, where they bloomed, and when to harvest for the most potency, herbal and magical.
But somehow, she could not remember if wolves were native to the state or not.
She could hear him panting.
She kicked off her stupid shoes to run for the bike and the town and her aunts.
The wolf’s eyes closed, and he whimpered. His head lolled on the ground.
Andie froze.
With every instinct screaming that this was the stupidest thing she’d ever done in her life, she crept closer.
The wolf was huge. It was not a dog. It was definitely some kind of brown or dark tan wolf. He had crashed into the side of the house and settled into the petunias. He was as long as the wide front bay window, and his haunches came almost to the bottom sill.
Then she saw the blood.
She knelt on the little stone path that enclosed the flower bed and tried to see where it was coming from. He was panting faster now in shallow breaths, and blood was spreading from his side, black in his fur.
Her terror retreated in the face of his injuries. She rushed toward the front door again and almost laughed when the bolt obligingly slid back with one firm push. With Daisy at her heels, she ran through the neat living room toward the back hallway.
She rushed toward the shelves of concoctions in the drying room, bypassing the neatly labeled salves and moisturizers reserved to sell in the store downtown to tourists, and went to the hand-labeled mason jars full of sticky substances, mosses, grasses, and other raw herbs. Andie spared a second to run her fingers over the masking tape with Granny’s spidery handwriting: thymol, sphagnum moss, peppermint, and rose. She grabbed the jars and an old sheet off the shelf, and dashed back outside, shutting the dog in the house behind her.
She knelt by the wolf and spilled her supplies onto the path. Tentatively, she probed at the fur of his abdomen. His side was sticky and matted with blood. She took a deep breath and glanced at his lolling head. “Oh lord, don’t bite me.”
She should just get up and call in some help. The problem was, in Harpers Ferry, animal control was Pete. He was one of a few deputies on their tiny police force mostly dedicated to handing out drunk and disorderlies to the hikers a little too happy to see civilization coming off the Appalachian Trail.
There was a vet in Maryland an hour away, but there was no way she could move the wolf. She thought about calling the aunts, but something stopped her. The look in those blue eyes? The wound? Given how jumpy they were after the funeral, they might just bring a shotgun and ask questions later.
As she sorted through her supply of salves and other healing concoctions, she thought about trying to call her cousin Becca, the coven’s healer, holed up in an even more isolated cabin in the woods. But it didn’t have a phone, and Becca was firm that her magic only helped humans.
She could try her Aunt Grace, who dealt in animal magic, but it was the kind that allowed her to talk to her rescued parrots, not the kind that healed wounds. She had witnessed the limits of Grace’s powers as a girl when an injured bird at fallen into the garden. Grace crooned to it all the way into town. It died on the way, but at least it had been happy while it went. It was almost funny, the gaping holes in their capabilities. One could heal humans and one could talk to animals, but nobody could heal animals.
For now, she’d muddle along. She leaned closer and saw there were four slashes on the wolf’s side. They looked almost like—claws.
She froze. She was so worried about the wolf; she hadn’t given a single thought to what had injured it. Slowly, she cranked her head around and peered into the shadows of the garden, heart pounding ever faster.
Nothing moved.
Run for the cabin; run for town. She clenched her hands to stop her fingers from trembling as she dug the moss out of one of the mason jars. Good for stopping anything leaking, Granny Sam had once said: spilled milk, wine, or blood.
She laid strands of the stringy stuff across the biggest wound. There was a surprising amount of moss jammed in the jar, so she could cover all the open skin she could see. Then she opened the second jar and flinched at the smell of the gloopy green paste. She shuddered once and tipped the jar over the moss. It flowed easily enough once it got going, like lumpy emerald honey that smelled of pine tar and thyme.
When it touched his skin, the wolf reared.
She scrambled backward, only to come up short against the rhododendron on the other side of the path, hands over her face. She peaked out when he didn’t lunge for her.
“I’m trying to help,” she whispered.
The wolf paused and examined his mossy green flank. He gave a tremendous sigh and put his head back in the dirt.
Andie crept forward. “I promise to help… Well, I promise to try to help if you don’t bite my arm off?” she said to the wolf, feeling silly.
To her surprise, he bobbed his head once.
She snorted. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Still, when she sat back down, she kept her eyes on his snout as she gingerly uncorked her last bottle. He gave a wheezing moan that sounded almost human but did not move.
She sniffed the peppermint and floral scent in the bottle and teared up. This one had nothing to do with healing. This was the scent Granny Sam brought to coven Circles. She said smell was the closest scent to memory, and if you wanted magic to last, you had to make sure it smelled sweet. She brought this to every Circle to lock in spells and dabbed a bit behind her ears every morning to remind her of her sisters.
Andie had wished for more magic since the very first Circle her cousins had formed, sneaking out at six and seven years old to join hands and try to bend the world to their will. The scent she used to lock in that spell was the bubblegum in her pocket. She’d made a wish like it in almost every Circle since, but never in her life had she wanted power more than she did at this moment.
She waved the bottle under her nose, a thousand Circles and a thousand days in the garden with Granny springing to mind. Then she carefully doled out a few drops on the wolf, making sure they landed on uninjured pelt.
“I have no healing power or animal magic.” She also had no poetry to craft a spell, but she muddled on. “But to the sphagnum moss, and the thymol essence, and the…” What else had been in the goop? She scrambled to look at the jar. “And the borage, and the…” She couldn’t read the words! “And whatever else this is. Oh, and Granny Sam’s peppermint and florals, please, please knit his flesh.” Was it a him? She couldn’t stop. “Knit this flesh and make him whole. Please. As I spoke, so mote it be. Um, or better. As I spoke, or something I didn’t think to speak but would actually work, so mote it be.”
When nothing happened, she almost laughed. And she was supposed to be the newest member of the Harpers Ferry Coven?
She wrapped the cloth of an old bed sheet with witches flying on broomsticks printed on it over the moss and goo. It immediately soaked through with blood and green as she tried to get it firmly against the wounds to apply some pressure. As her fingers brushed his skin, the wolf went rigid and started to shake.
Her hand prickled. Then her magic flared to life in her chest with pins and needles throughout her body.
She wrenched her hand away and the prickles stopped, so she grabbed a handful of fur again. The magic snapped into place between them.
She could feel power working through the wound. It took her breath away. She’d never sensed the magic in another human outside her family and the plants she worked with.
She could feel this strange wolf as if he was made of magic. She could feel the plants give up their potency to him. The thymol cleansed. The sphagnum bound. The borage whispered to the blood of the wolf not to leave him.
She listed to one side and had to catch herself, drunk on the magic.
The wolf trembled so violently that she worried he was having a seizure. She jumped to press the sheet against the wounds as he trembled. What had she done?
“You’re okay! You’re okay!” she said desperately, like an incantation. She kept whispering that, even though there was no magic in her words.
She tried to peel the sheets off to get at the moss and pull it off him, but he twisted away so his back faced her, and the wounds were in the dirt.
His massive head snapped back and slammed into her hip. She teetered over, bashing her elbow into a flagstone.
The wolf’s head snapped forward again, and his whole body went rigid. She wanted to crawl away from him, to run inside and lock the door like she should have done in the first place, but she was too dazed.
His neck spasmed again and his mouth contorted in a rictus grin of gigantic teeth. Then it seemed to deform, smashing and breaking. His paws stretched out spreadeagle in all directions, which she didn’t think was anatomically possible.
Then the fur disappeared, smoothing into skin in a wave from his fingertips to his heart, and a man with four bleeding streaks on his belly lay amongst the petunias.
Dazed and newly terrified, she inched away. It stupidly hadn’t occurred to her that this could be a shifter. For all their worries about the wards, no one in her family had even mentioned shifters.
After centuries of war, witches, and shifters carved the world into separate territories and warded the boundaries against the other. A high price for peace, but one they all still paid. Witches were taught those boundaries before they learned the alphabet or a single bit of magic. It just had never occurred to her that someone would or could break that treaty. In her garden. On this day.
When he didn’t move, she slowly sat up and rubbed her elbow. Her eyes continued to roam over his naked form. After a minute, she had to admit to herself her perusal had nothing to do with self-defense.
He was huge with thick brown hair that matched his fur. Even twisted and bleeding on the ground, his ropey muscles looked like they belonged on the statue of a god. This was not the body of a bodybuilder, but of a man who worked for a living, maybe hauling entire logs up and down mountains. By himself. His skin was tan, with the slightest tan line across the two divots at the base of his back. Her heart sped up for reasons entirely unrelated to fear.
Then he moved, and she forgot about his ass.
The wounds gleamed with goo and blood as he turned. They looked even bigger and deeper in his human skin. Weren’t shifters supposed to heal quickly? She couldn’t remember.
She had to get him inside, away from the dirt and the bugs and the cool air. Even in the late summer heat, this far into the mountains and so close to the rivers, it got cool in the evenings. As a wolf, he would have been fine, but an injured human was vulnerable.
He’s not human.
Truly, she had no idea what would hurt him or not, but he sure looked vulnerable laying in her flower bed bleeding.
She tried to figure out a way to get him inside, short of calling her one cousin who was skilled at telekinesis and who was also fourteen and did not need to see this.
Even as she examined and discarded plans, the litany of consequences cascaded through her mind. Shifters could pervert a witch’s magic. And once they got a stranglehold through one, they could infect an entire coven and steal the power of generations, leaving a twisted evil imitation of the craft in their wake.
Could they do that just by their unconscious, bleeding presence, or did they have to be awake and trying?
He shuddered and rolled over to face her again, but his eyes stayed closed.
Her heart tried to pound out of her chest as she scrambled to her feet. She was going insane — pinging between thoughts of bodily injury, magical injury, and bodily sensations of an entirely different kind. Cravenly, she wondered if his eyes matched the blue of the wolf’s.
Andriana Ann Abbott, stop this now.
She’d bandaged his wounds. He clearly wasn’t dying. She should just go inside and call her aunts to magic him away. Or she could just leave him in the garden and hope he skedaddled on his own. It was a cowardly way out, but it would simplify a horrible evening after a truly gruesome day.
But she remembered that some of her niblings were coming to help her weed the next morning. They’d promised at the funeral, so excited to help her keep up Granny’s legacy.
They could not find a werewolf in her garden.
She turned back.
And met his eyes. His open, aware, unearthly blue eyes.
“They match,” she whispered.
