Page 4 of His Hunted Witch

She spun around in the dim, listening hard. Had they already stolen a witch?

This magic, show me, so mote it be,she wrote. This was an old spell she’d learned from her aunt, so she wasn’t worried about it malfunctioning.

She had to clap both hands over her eyes as the entire room lit up, and her head pulsed. Every inch of the outside wall glittered with swoops of magic.

“Stop it!” The spell faded, and she risked a glance. The aftereffects seared her vision like she’d stared into the sun.

Her family’s houses looked a little like this, but this was far beyond the protection her aunts put into place anywhere except her Aunt Berry’s living room where the coven grimoire lived. That horrible book full of endless words of endless spells of endless generations was locked up with this kind of magic.

Goldie went over to the shelves. Was there a grimoire in this room? Had they taken her to a coven? No coven would put a strange witch in the same room with their spell book. None of this made sense.

Abandoning a magical solution, she looked for a heavy book and found an atlas of the world from 1980. She patted it. “You’re totally wrong now, anyway.”

She threw it as hard as she could at the window. It bounced and flew right for her head. She ducked just in time and screamed in frustration. She did not need a third concussion. She strode toward the interior door, tired of being in the dark, tired of not knowing where she was, and tired of hiding.

She pulled on the door handle and nearly fell over when it opened without a whisper of protest.

She staggered into a wood-paneled hallway with a red carpet runner like something out of another century.

When nothing moved, she walked down the hall, her dim ball of light tagging along behind her like a balloon.

After a few seconds, she realized it wasn’t the only light source in the room. Sconces along the wall glowed with witch light. She was definitely in a witch’s house. She’d been stolen by dire wolves and locked in a witch’s house.

“So where is the witch?”

Illuminate me, so mote it be,she wrote, and threw out her hand, pumping as much power as she could into the spell to reveal that she was standing beside an enormous staircase in a foyer opposite a double front door. She tried the doors, not because she expected to get out, but because she would kick herself if they opened. They didn’t budge, and she could feel magic pulsing in them.

“Hello?” She’d always rolled her eyes at the women in horror movies who headed straight toward the monster, but she could understand it now. The tension was worse.

Through an arch to the left, she saw a huge dining room and made for that because all the best weapons would be in the kitchen.

She paused when she saw the chairs around the rectangular table that ran the length of the room.

“It can’t be.”

She told herself to find a weapon, find the exit, and if she couldn’t, prepare for whatever was coming next. Instead, she crouched down to look under the nearest chair. She froze and carefully removed her hand from the arm she’d gripped to get down. This was a Franklin chair. She glanced under the table. This was a complete Franklin table and chair set from the turn of the century. She’d only seen one like it at an auction on TV. It had sold for a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Goldie traveled around Appalachia to estate sales and garage sales searching for furniture and antiques to flip online or in the big markets up north. Her best find had been a cabinet set worth $10,000. This was an order of magnitude rarer and more valuable.

She turned to the hutch against the wall, just out of curiosity. She didn’t recognize it, but she recognized the dishes inside of it. She realized there had to be a quarter million dollars’ worth of furniture just in this dining room.

She heard the whinny of a horse and dropped like a stone, snuffing out her light with a wave. She scuttled toward the window and carefully glanced out into the night. She could hear the horse going by but couldn’t see it.

She only started breathing again when it clopped out of sight without stopping.

She looked around the room again, not for furniture but for a weapon. She was nearly useless in an emergency with her glacially slow talent, but they’d made a fatal mistake. They’d given her time. While she probably couldn’t get out of this house, spelled as it was, she could make it absolute hell on earth to get back in.

There was another door on the far side of the dining room. It had to be the kitchen.

“See Sally fight,” she said and ran.

2

As Aiden stepped into his home forest for the first time in a month, the wolf warned him of danger.

Oh, now you’re talking to me?

He’d been on an extended book tour, and his wolf had not forgiven him. He’d known the aggressive carnivore that shared his soul was not going to like fawning humans feigning submissiveness. There wasn’t much the beast hated more than politeness. Human society cloaked all manner of orders with the word please. But staying home would have been far more dangerous.

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