“We’ve been for like a half hour,” a woman shouted from the back.
“Do you wanna rush this?” Charlie demanded.
“No, I was just saying we’re ready!”
Penn bit her lip. Some things were exactly the same.
Charlie surprised her by disconnecting and moving to Penn, Moira, and Quinn, who were standing next to each other behind their mates.
“You guys ready? ‘Cause this is your show.”
Sonia would be saying the spell, but it would be Quinn and Penn who would work it. Quinn was to loosen the charm temporarily, and Penn to free the snake.
Please, god, let it be temporary.
Moira was there not because telekinesis or empathy would be particularly useful in this situation, but because she knew snakes and she’d helped Penn construct their snake bribe.
It was the clearing, with the sun and the water, as well as a half dozen mice she’d released from her snake breeding facilities that were currently burrowing in their first taste of freedom in their lives. More than the clearing, they needed the world Penn constructed in her head, an absolute paradise for a pit viper, while Asher shivered and suffered, cold and hungry in comparison.
She thought back to the conversation that she and Moira had had last night.A snake is an animal, too. He’s not the enemy. He doesn’t like this any more than the wolf. You have to be on his side. You have to be convinced this is for him. And it is. He deserves this as much as the wolf. He’s been suffering just as much.
Penn had visited the snake house, a hermetically sealed cabin at the edge of the land. The clamoring of reptilian desire within had nearly overwhelmed her, and while she was able to tell Moira that the anaconda’s humidity was a tad too much and the green tree python needed a bigger branch to dangle from, she hadn’t really gotten into the mind of a snake. There had been too damn many.
Instead, she’d gone home and cuddled her dragon. A bearded dragon was not a snake, but its needs were similar, and not so different from her own in all ways but one. It wanted water, food, and safety, but it also craved warmth and coolness like she craved food. Cold-blooded creatures had a drive around temperature that was evenmoreacute than their need for food.
Temperature mattered to mammals, especially the hairless primates a long way from their natural temperate climate in Africa, but it just wasn’t the same. Death waited at the extremes, but there was an acre of wiggle room between too hot and too cold. Death for the cold-blooded was always a few degrees away.
I can make it better.
She tried to think of the Rottweiler that had savaged a child in one of her last jobs in Pennsylvania. It didn’t think of itself as the villain. Nobody thought that of themselves.
She hadn’t found it hard to empathize with the dog, even though all she could do at that point was help it die peacefully. It wasn’t a super villain. It just got confused and made a terrible mistake relying on instincts as old as time.
I can make its life better,she thought firmly.
She opened her eyes and realized everyone else’s eyes were on her.
She squeaked, and Asher squeezed her elbow. They were still connected. She’d barely noticed.
“I’m ready,” she said.
The chattering voices of doom and failure in her mind were just that. They meant nothing.
Sonia closed her eyes and said, “We of the?—”
Penn felt a force stir immediately within her and then die off as Sonia looked around. “Oh my god, what do we call ourselves?”
Penn couldn’t help but laugh. In all their preparations, no one thought of this?
“What do you say normally?” one wolf demanded.
“We’re the Abbott coven. But this is not the Abbot Coven.”
“And the Scott Pack?”
“Hey,” one of the wolves connected to an Abbott witch said. “What about us?”
“And us,” Quinn said.
