knew that. But a werewolf wouldn’t need to trap her in his car in order to hurt her. And she was, as he’d said, a witch. She was not without power.
He knew she was a white witch. This time she couldn’t help it; her right hand wrapped around the pendant, but she said, “I walked here from my apartment. Where is your car parked?”
* * *
—
“Joshua is fifteen and has two much younger sisters who are five and three,” the witch told him.
She hadn’t taken her hand away from the amulet she wore; he supposed that it held some sort of protective magic. With rare exception, white witches were not very powerful, and they were prey to their darker sisters. They needed all the protection they could get.
Asil knew a lot about witches. He and his beloved had taken a witchborn child into their home. That child had grown up and killed his mate. She had killed a lot of other people, too.
“Take the next left,” she said, then continued as if he had asked her a question—maybe he had. “We found Joshua wandering around homeless two years ago, scooped him up, and as there was nothing wrong with him other than his mother being a hoarder, we dusted him off and found a foster home for him. Straight for about two miles.”
He had to admire her emergency persona. Her voice was calm, and if she kept a hand braced on the dashboard, he didn’t hold it against her. He was driving thirty miles an hour over the speed limit in traffic, and she was only human.
“But he visits his sisters?”
“A good thing,” she told him. “His mother was better when he was a child. He tells me that before she inherited her parents’ house, they lived in a small apartment and she kept that clean. But her parents were hoarders and she just . . . let the house absorb her, too. Next right.”
His wolf didn’t like taking orders—even directions from her, from someone less dominant than he. And few people were more dominant. Also, his wolf did not like witches. Neither did Asil, but he also believed in being fair. She had not asked to be a witch; she had chosen not to go after power, to remain vulnerable to the witches who were not so nice.
His wolf felt no need to be fair: a witch was a witch. White witches might draw upon only themselves for power—unlike gray witches, who drew upon the willingly offered pain and suffering of others. Or black witches, who did not bother with consent when they tortured and killed their victims. Black witches like Mariposa, who had killed his mate.
The Subaru broke loose on the ice, and Asil had to concentrate to bring it back in line.
So. Part of the speed he was driving was to keep his wolf occupied. Even with his reflexes and his car—he’d brought the Subaru, which handled better on winter roads than his Porsche—driving on the ice and slush was tricky.
They turned onto a street of Victorian houses—not mansions, but substantial two-story buildings. Most of them were well tended, a few showed signs of being recently renovated, and one of them was boarded up with scaffolding lining the outer walls.
The one Tami directed him to park in front of had good bones, as if it had been in good shape sometime in the last decade. But the paint was faded and peeling in places. The once-white picket fence leaned this way and that and was missing pieces, giving it the look of a jack-o’-lantern’s grin.
As soon as he got out of the car, he could smell rotting food, moldering fabrics, and something foul that had him reaching over the back of the seat for a case he kept there for old times’ sake. He slung the strap over his shoulder and followed Tami to the gate.
“No smoke,” she said, her voice quiet. “Let’s head to the back door. It’s closer to the girls’ room. That way we might avoid Joshua’s mom. She doesn’t like strangers—especially strangers who are male and—” She looked for a word, then said, apologetically, “Not white.”