“But you have to understand the risks,” Kathleen said seriously, zeroing in on his face.
He forced himself to listen and not just immediately agree. The truth of the matter was, he would take any risk, any chance.
“It might kill you.”
He didn’t want to tell her he was heading that way anyway.
“It might kill all of you,” Kathleen continued.
Asher froze. His head emptied of thought. “What?”
“What?” Penn echoed.
“One thing I know for sure is that this can’t be a surgical removal just for Asher. If we change the spell, we change it for every dire wolf.”
“You mean in the entire world?”
Kathleen shook her head. “No. We would limit this to the Scott pack, but that’s as granular as we can get. You all have the same spell.”
“So either you succeed,” Malcolm said, “and take the snake away, or we all die?”
Kathleen spread her hands. “That’s not the most likely outcome. But it’s on the table.”
“We could also take the wolf as well,” Quinn said. “My part is stability, right? Charm magic is what makes it stable. We’ll deliberately destabilize it. If I can’t put it back, the whole thing is gonna dissolve.”
Asher took a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. The options are: everyone loses their snake. Everyone dies or has some terrible level of disability, I’m assuming that’s also on the table?”
The women nodded.
“Or everyone loses their wolf. Did I miss anything?”
Penn took a deep breath, then let it out.
Kathleen said, “Yes.”
“I missed something?”
“No. Yes, those are the options on the table.”
His head was shaking before she even finished speaking. “No.”
“None of that is likely,” Penn insisted. “The most likely thing is that we do this and succeed, and you are okay.”
Asher met Penn’s eyes, the woman he loved. “No. I would risk all of that myself, don’t get me wrong.”
Penn swallowed. “I could be wrong about your wolf. It might not be the snake. You might be fine some other way.”
“But you’re not wrong,” Asher said. Once she explained it, it seemed so obvious.
“None of us is fine,” Malcolm said. It was supposed to sound like a joke, and nobody laughed.
“I didn’t know,” Quinn said, stepping closer to her mate. “It’s been such a struggle for you?”
Malcolm shrugged. “It’s manageable, but we lose so many so young. This isn’t just your decision to make,” he said to Asher.
Asher immediately shook his head. “Yeah, but you would never risk it if I were not in the equation.”
“But you are in the equation. You’re a huge part of the equation.”
