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PROLOGUE
With heart pounding, lungs burning, and magic pulsing, Goldie Abbott ran for her life.
This was new for her. Goldie did not run. She did not invest in overly expensive shoes to go jogging for “fitness,” nor did she run from any challenge. Usually, she started the fight in the first place just to get it out of the way.
She was running now.
Because what was chasing her broke every rule she had. The wolf was huge and not really a wolf. He’d been a man walking through her family’s woods until he caught sight of her, declared he had to have her, and shifted into this abomination of a wildlife documentary.
The low growl behind her set every hair on her body on end. She tried to weave magic into words to defend herself, but as always, magic slipped and slithered away. Her half-formed spell blasted an innocent sycamore to smithereens.
She had cousins who could aim spells wherever they wanted with a pointed finger, but Goldie was a scribe. Her magic flowed through the written word. Even out here fighting for her life,she had to imagine writing to get her spells to work. It was aninefficientway to fight.
She leaped from boulder to boulder, forcing her limbs faster because she could not force her magic.
She was one of the stronger witches in her coven, but out here, she had no way to bop the damn shifter on the nose. Magic that required written words was super fun for a witch with dyslexia.
She heard a growl in front of her and slammed to a stop, arms outstretched, frantically writing a defense spell on the tablet in her mind.
Another wolf stood in her path. There was no time.
“My coven will hunt you to the ends of the earth if you do this,” she said, wincing when the wheezy words came out between panted breaths.
Something growled from above, and she looked up at a white wolf on a damn tree branch, grinning with gleaming, poisonous fangs.
“Did you hear me? The ends of the earth.”
Something heavy slammed into the back of her head, and she knew no more.
1
Goldie woke wondering if they had thrown her in a dryer and turned it on. She was bouncing around; her head hurt like crazy; her hands were tied behind her back, and she was bent in half. She registered the sound of clopping hooves and opened one eye to see an expanse of horse hide.
She twisted her head carefully to watch the woods fly by. She lived in the heart of Appalachia, but unlike so many of her neighbors, she didn’t voluntarily seek out nature. She didn’t know the names of trees, bushes, or mountains. She did not hike.
All she knew was that these woods smelled of dead leaves and decaying vegetation, the same as the ones outside her apartment this late in the year back in Harpers Ferry. The air had a bite, and the sky was a bleached gray. All of it was flying by.
The back of her skull throbbed, and her mouth was bone dry. She swallowed against the bitter, metallic taste of adrenaline. She tried to take a deep breath, but the horse whacked her in her diaphragm with every step.
She twisted her head to the right to see a naked leg dangling in front of her. The shifter was human again.
Her vision spotted, and she bit hard on her tongue to keep conscious. She tried to shove the fear down and grasp for rage. How dare they? What did they think they were going to do with her? Where had the horse come from?
She still couldn’t get over the horse.
It would take her family longer to find her because they wouldn’t know to track a horse. What kind of shape would she be in when they did?
That thought sparked her anger again. If Goldie Abbott didn’t run, she definitely didn’t get rescued.
She wasn’t afraid they would hurt her, exactly. She knew they wanted her power. Long ago, witches made shifters for protection, but then the protectors snapped their leash, and centuries of war followed. It turned out that most shifters didn’t love turning into animal servants. She couldn’t exactly blame them.
In recent history, an uneasy peace existed between coven and pack, enforced by treaties and wards. Each side kept that peace by never coming near each other.
Her sister and her cousins had thrown that history out the window when they’d fallen for shifters, finding power and magic in the connection wolves and witches still shared. When one side was not trying to control or dominate the other, shared love and trust led to more power for both sides.
This rogue pack had learned about the power but not about the love and trust part. If they thought they could haul her away and get anything from her…
She didn’t actually know if they could take her magic without asking. So many of the myths about shifters and witches had proven false, but the old horror stories were hard to ignore. She’d been taught shifters trained their whole lives to kill witches, and if they amassed enough power, they could take overa coven. She stopped that thought where it was. Blind panic wouldn’t help.
