Penn swallowed. “I told you. Idle curiosity.”
Penn could not hold her gaze and looked back down at the book, fighting to keep her horror at the old woman’s words andher fascination with the book in her hands off her face as she flipped through the spells. They looked really old. She flipped casually toward the back and saw that the latest spells to be added were somewhere in the 1700s. This thing was that old and still reeking with power. Why was it in this room? Why did they collect it?
Toward the front of the book, she found one that went on for pages and pages. Most spells were only a page or two long. She read through it and realized she was looking at a way to construct an animal out of magic. Dear god, they had the spell to make werewolves in their spare room! She thought it had been lost.
The book was snatched from her hand and slammed down onto the metal shelves as if it were worth nothing, as if it were the same as the grossly inaccurate, ridiculous renderings of anatomy from the imagination of the prejudiced and terrified.
“Are you some kind of spy?” Siobhan demanded.
“No!”
“What do you know?”
How on earth would she know about dire wolves? She thought of Asher’s accent.
“There’s a pack close to my old home in Pennsylvania.”Far away from here.
“Of dire wolves!”
“We don’t know for sure, but they weren’t normal wolves. I just wondered if you had them out here. I was worried. Very worried you had them out here.”
The woman went pale, and her hands shook as she stumbled out of the room. “The dire wolves are not extinct? It’s far worse than we thought. How do you combat snake venom? I must talk with my sister.”
But Siobhan didn’t move. She stood at the edge of the door, and reluctantly, Penn crossed the threshold.
Siobhan shut the door firmly. Penn longed to look at probably the only accurate or useful book in that entire room, an actual grimoire with an actual spell. But she didn’t know how she could do that without arousing suspicion, and she didn’t have thirteen witches to get it done. Even if she did, no one had that kind of juice anymore, so she was no better off than she had been, and she’d aroused the suspicions of her host and terrified them in the process.
Great job.
She thought of the long drive in her tiny car back to Asher’s land. Was she even going to go back? If he was a dire wolf and evil…
She thought of the ancient pain in his eyes. If dire wolves were evil, the people they seemed to be hurting the most were themselves. For some reason she didn’t want to examine too closely, she could not stand that.
8
Asher cursed as hot caramel seared his fingers, and he retreated from the pile of profiteroles—little pastries full of cream—that he was slowly assembling into a tower.
Without warning the night before, he’d found himself in his human body at the base of a tree, his wolf suddenly calm. He had been bracing for weeks of this while a tiny, panicked voice in the back of his head worried about forever, pre-mourning the donkeys he would probably eat before it was over. Then, all of a sudden, he was human.
He’d thought he’d smelled her… But that was impossible.
He’d staggered back to his cabin buck naked and freezing, hopeful and terrified he would find her within, but he didn’t.
The disappointment from that almost sent him back to his fur willingly, so he pulled a French patisserie cookbook off a shelf with the most complex recipes he could find and picked the recipe with the hardest rating and the longest timeframe.
He regretted that now. Normally, the absurd creations that grew on his workbench shocked and impressed him, but this one was just ridiculous.
Who thought combining a dry, delicate pastry with wet, heavy cream into a tower of hard caramel was a good idea? In a very short amount of time, he’d have a dripping, soggy mess.
Gingerly, he poked at the bottom row where the caramel had already set and pried one off; it ripped in half as he pulled it. Truly, who would come up with this ridiculous thing?
He popped it into his mouth and closed his eyes. Okay, it was hard to go wrong with fat, burned sugar, and cream. It tasted spectacular, but not for this much work. It tasted good in a could’ve just bought a donut kind of way.
He shook his head roughly, feeling more human, and for that reason alone, knew he would keep going and have a pile full of soggy pastry for lunch.
He thought of fighting this fight every day for the rest of his life. He supposed he should be relieved, because twelve hours before, he’d thought he would have to endure life trapped in a wolf, so this was better.
It didn’t feel better.
