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She should not have done that.
Tori should not have flung that skunk out a window with her magic. She was trying to discover if he was a werewolf, but not by outing herself!
She just couldn’t stand that smell, a combination of rot, sour, and bitter that coated the tongue and didn’t fade for days.
The twins had a protocol for dealing with accidental exposure. In a coven full of foster kids and other stray witches, accidentally revealing magic was more of a concern than in a nice, neat family that all got the same training from the time they could breathe. Many kids arrived without enough control, and some didn’t even know they were witches. Cleanup mostly involved a lot of whiskey. She eyed the man speculatively and waited for what happened next.
“You’re a witch. There’s a coven in Silver Spring.”
“Yes and yes.” She waited for him to say something about wolves, but he just turned on his heel and marched back up the stairs.
She followed him and took a deep breath. “Is there something you want to share with the class?” She was fairly sure he was not human. Even the strongest man would have trouble pulling a doorknob out of a door.
“What? No! Maybe. Yes.”
She couldn’t help snickering. “Was that multiple-choice? Should I pick one?”
“You are a witch. A force witch, right?”
She blinked twice. That was the old school name for her talent. How did he know that?
“And your coven is in Silver Spring.”
“You can repeat that a couple more times if you need to. Or you could tell me yours. If we’re going for multiple-choice, I pick yes.”
He licked his lips and stared at the ground. She didn’t know much about werewolves, but his body language read defeat and intimidation. He didn’t look like he was a powerful wolf.
“Or do you want to make me guess? You like steak, but you also like tiramisu. You’re crazy strong. You hear when I whisper.” She sighed. It wasn’t actually that much to go on. He could be a bodybuilder who needed a vacation.
“The Amato Pack immigrated from Italy a hundred years ago. They staked a claim in the Colorado mountains, made an absurd amount of money in silver, invested it in cyber security, I mean, a few generations later, and moved down the hill during the dot com boom.”
All of that was fascinating, but the word that stopped her brain was pack.
She’d known.
She’d known from the moment he ripped off the door frame, but she hadn’t known.
Then the rest of the story penetrated. He said Italy. If this dude had a drop of Italian in him, she’d eat one of those frozen steaks.
“Just the Amato Pack?”
He spun around. “One isn’t enough?”
“No, I mean, you…”
“We’re not that different, turns out, though I was a teenager when I lost my pack. I was, we’ll say, adopted into a new one.”
She swallowed.
“Hey, I would never hurt you.”
Tori turned away. She wasn’t worried about that, which surprised her. The twins had trained her to fear wolves and to prepare for an inevitable battle with them when the treaty between witches and wolves was finally broken. But he didn’t seem like a threat, and she wasn’t exactly defenseless.
He cleared his throat. “I guess from now on, you tell me where the ward lines are, and we will know what not to cross. If you could also tell me the number of the road crew you are involved with, I can pick that up…”
She frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Now you retreat, right? Keep to the lines?”
“What do you do in New York? There have to be covens, right?”
“The streets are neutral territory. There are three or four covens, but they only claim a block or two.”
“And if you encounter each other on the street?”
“We walk on the south and west.”
She gaped at him. “What on god’s green earth does that mean?”
“We walk on the west and south sides of streets. They take the north and east.”
“And at the crosswalks?”
“It works surprisingly well. I’ve only encountered one witch who was pissed at me and backed away. Which you aren’t doing, so I guess it’s different out here?”
“No, it’s not. Well, we don’t assign street corners. We have the whole of Silver Spring.” She didn’t tell him the wards had stopped working decades ago.
“You hold a whole city.”
“Most covens do, and packs, too. How do you not know that, but you know about force witches?”
He shrugged. “We were taught how to counter various magicks.”
She knew how to shoot a crossbow. Tori didn’t know why she was surprised that wolf packs were also prepared.
“If I could just get that number before—” he began.
“Have you ever wondered why everyone cares so much about what keeps us apart?”
He scrubbed his stubbly chin. “No?”
“I’m not leaving a job half done. You don’t want to kill me. I don’t want to kill you. So let’s just get it done.”
“And then what? Your coven will welcome us with open arms and a banquet?”
Tori sagged. Somebody somewhere in the next few hours was going to tell the twins that the Double Thirteen house was occupied. Maybe Marta as she dropped off pastries at the coffee shop. Maybe one of the guys from the butcher or Ernie who worked on the electrical lines would mention where they’d been that morning. Somebody was going to talk, and the witches were going to find out, and then they were going to ask Tori.
“Probably not a banquet,” Tori said.
“You can’t finish the job. We both know that. So just tell me where the wards are and the crew that’s coming and…”
“And?”
“And that’s it.”
“I’ll show you the county map. It’s just the final street,” Tori lied, feeling a bizarre sense of déjà vu because she’d literally had this practice conversation with the twins before, exaggerating their defenses.
“Okay then,” he said. “And the road crew?”
“Yes, I’ll get you their number.”
Neither of them moved.
“You couldn’t be sure I knew about witches when you tossed that skunk out of the window. What would you have done if I didn’t?”
Tori waved a hand. “There’s a whole protocol.”
“A protocol?”
Tori nodded. “For when someone finds out about magic. It involves a bottle of bespelled whiskey.”
Matt cocked his head and walked backward toward the little bar set up between the kitchen and the living room.
“I didn’t bespell that!”
He picked up the bottle. “Good. So we could just do the regular kind.”
“You getting drunk is not going to make you forget the existence of witches. Can you even get drunk?”
He shrugged with a half smile at the corner of his mouth. “I mean, I don’t want to mess with protocol.”
She didn’t want to leave, so why was she pushing him away? “I mean, I like to be thorough.”
He snorted and started unscrewing the bottle.
She looked around at the oversized furniture, the heart of their pack.
“Not here.”
“Okay?”
“Come on,” she said and led toward the back door and out the back.
It took her a moment to realize he’d stopped at the threshold.
Surprised, she turned back to see his eyes on the horizon where the mountains were tinted rose from the setting sun.
She sighed. “Sorry, we don’t get the really good sunsets because the mountains are in the way. It gets dark long before the sun sets, so it’s just this weird twilight.”
“You mean you’re actually used to that view?”
She turned back to the horizon and watched snow-topped mountains turn from pink to purple. “Okay, no, you’re right.”
She led him to the fire pit she’d stocked the day before and lit one long match to light the kindling.
There was a series of stone benches around the fire, and she sat on one. He had a half dozen to choose from, but he sat right next to her and offered her the bottle.
When she didn’t immediately take it, he said, “Sorry, should I get glasses?”
She took a swig of whiskey and gasped at the burn and the strong, complex fumes that overwhelmed her.
“So now what?” he asked.
“Now what what?”
“If I weren’t me and you weren’t you, and I saw you throw a skunk out of a window…”
“Well, that whiskey would have some suggestibility baked in.”
He shuddered. “Magic can do that?”
“I would narrate how I bravely picked it up, and it didn’t even try to spray, and the window was open, and aren’t we lucky?”
“And that actually works?”
She scoffed and handed him the bottle. “That works on real witnesses of actual crimes.” She shuddered dramatically and shook her hands. “Their fur is so weird. It’s soft but sharp underneath. And it was lighter than I thought when I was throwing it!”
“Wait, is that true?”
“See, you’re believing me already.”
He laughed. “No, I know you didn’t touch it. I deeply know that. That moment will be burned into my mind for the rest of my life, but have you ever touched a skunk?”
“Oh yeah, there’s a dude in town that has one as a pet.”
He coughed on his next swig of whiskey. “What?”
“They removed the glands. It doesn’t spray. It’s actually a really sweet little pet.”
“Seems kind of barbaric.”
“Why? We neuter dogs all the time.”
He crossed his legs. “Don’t remind me.”
She’d forgotten for a second that he was a wolf.
“And then what?” he asked when she took the bottle back.
She was feeling pleasantly buzzed as the fire grew and she leaned over to put another log on it. “That’s it, really. We get them to tell the story too, so it’s fixed in their mind, and then I always tell one other person in town. Either Miss Johnson at the local high school, who has never stopped talking for a second in her life unless she’s unconscious, or Aaron who owns the coffee shop because everybody goes there. And that’s it. So long as someone authoritatively knows the wrong story, they’ll set the record straight for us.”
“So it’s really true that everybody knows everybody’s business in a small town.”
She took another sip and decided she’d probably had enough. “When we read Anne of Green Gables, I identified a lot with the whole one-room schoolhouse vibe.”
“The schoolhouse only has one room?” That seemed to be more shocking than the skunk out the window.
“No, of course not. There’s, what, 200 kids? They come from all over the mountains.”
“Your entire high school has 200 children?”
She shook her head with a laugh. “The entire school… But it isn’t one room.”
“I had 200 kids in my chemistry class my last year of high school.”
“How the hell did you do any experiments?”
He scoffed. “They wouldn’t let us near a lab, are you kidding me?”
She shook her head. “We have lived very different lives.”
He glugged the whiskey.
“You may wanna take it slow…” she said, visions of vomit and ambulances in her head. “We don’t actually have a road right now, and alcohol and altitude don’t mix.”
“I’m really hard to damage, including with alcohol.” He put the bottle down. “Thank you for your help. I already said that.”
“You’re welcome.”
He took a deep breath. “I’ll get that map, and I’ll tell Mateo to stay on the side of the line.”
“Just Mateo?” Whoever the hell Mateo was, he didn’t seem like enough.
He laughed. “He’s the alpha. Believe me, where he doesn’t go, no one else will.”
“There really is an alpha wolf,” she said, disturbed by the thought.
“Oh hell yeah. I mean, not for me. I’m still a lone wolf, but I run with their pack.”
They watched the hills turn from pink to gray. It happened so quickly. “And I’ll tell my coven not to come out here either.”
So this was it. This was the end.
“Can I call you?” he asked suddenly.
“Why?”
“We’re not here to restart the magic wars, I swear, and—”
“The what?”
“The war between witches and shifters? The thing the treaty ended and has been trying to prevent ever since?”
“Oh, you mean the shifter wars.”
He burst out laughing. “Is that what you call it? We’re not here to kill witches, we’re here to…”
Tori perked up. Now she would get the real explanation? “Yeah?”
“I don’t even know. Something about mates and wolves and preserving the pack and lineage, all of those things.”
Tori felt irrationally angry that there was a wolf out there in the world who would have this man: lighting fires, drinking whiskey, and making plans, and this would be their life instead of Tori, who was drunkenly trying to say goodbye.
“You could call me even if your family wasn’t going to attack…” he said slowly, his eyes on the flames.
“What?”
“You could just call me.”
“I mean, I can still try to get things done from town. Whatever you need.”
“You could just call me even if I didn’t need anything, either.”
Tori froze, finally catching the hesitancy in his voice.
“And what? We hang out? Try to get drunk again? Drive an hour away to eat Boba and sushi in another town wearing sunglasses and a hat?”
“You’re right, I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking.”
He leaned back on his hands to stare up at the darkening sky. The stars were coming out in ones and twos as the light fell.
She should really get going, but she didn’t move.
Tomorrow, she was going to have to go to the twins and the rest of the coven and tell them that a huge pack of werewolves was descending on the eastern border, but not to panic, because they were definitely and completely going to stay on their side of the line.
Tomorrow, she would arrange for a road crew to come and smooth their way.
She didn’t know who moved first, but all she knew was that she turned toward him as he turned toward her, and they kissed.
