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Except her simple plan wasn’t so simple. The wards were closed, so where could she haul him? She didn’t have her coven and their powerful, functioning magic. She needed help, but Aiden’s wolf still wanted to eat him. Finally, Buck was an enraging, stubborn ass when he was human, but he wasn’t human all the time.
Instead of making a move, she went down to the horse barn in the mornings and spent the afternoons with Aiden riding horses or riding him.
But last night, he’d told her that he’d spoken to all the other kids who’d been there that day, and they all denied closing the wards. It was past time.
She turned over to talk to him and found the bed cold beside her. Her worry about her plan faded when a new one presented itself. Where was he? Come to think of it, what did he do with his mornings while she was away playing horse matchmaker?
She got ready with more of Kathleen’s supplies and went hunting for him, trying to quell the terror that he’d gotten out of the house. How did he live like this? How did his relatives live like this, always on edge, waiting for the wolf to lose it?
He wasn’t in the dining room, the kitchen, or the library. He wasn’t in his bedroom upstairs or in the second library on that floor.
Come to think of it, where did he work? There wasn’t a computer or any kind of office setup anywhere she’d snooped.
Illuminate the wolf for me, so mote it be.
She followed the glow of her magic to a book on a shelf in thethirdlibrary, a tiny room in the corner of the house. The spine readWhite Fang.
“Wrong wolf,” she said and turned away.
Illuminate Aiden for me, so mote it be,she wrote.
The same damn book lit up.
“His wolf is brown.”
She tried to think of another spell but stopped and turned back to the book. From her brief glimpses of the outside of the house, it had a spire on one corner. She was right under it, but there was no way to go up it. She dashed upstairs just to confirm that the bedroom above had a blank wall where the turret should be. The wall wasn’t even curved.
She went back to the library and pulled onWhite Fang.
The book clicked, and the shelves slid away, revealing a steep, winding staircase heading up.
“Paranoid much?” She kept her footfalls quiet as she wound up the stairs and found Aiden at a sleek laptop, typing away in a round room with immense windows facing down the valley.
He was totally absorbed in his work, so she looked around a little and realizedthiswas where he lived. The rest of his house with his fancy furniture was expensive and impressive but didn’t match the man she was beginning to know.
The walls were covered with more bookshelves, but they were filled with battered paperbacks of Hardy Boys novels and science fiction classics, judging by the spaceships on the covers. He also had a full shelf of the books he’d written.
Souvenirs of a lifetime lay amongst the books. She saw a dog collar from the movie adaptations, a catcher’s mitt, a second-place ribbon from a horse race, pinecones, turkey feathers, a snapshot of two boys on horses, and a pair of spurs. She touched the spurs, and they clicked.
He glanced back distractedly and nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Sorry!” she said and stepped back.
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“Can’t you hear a mouse scurrying at three miles? I’ve been standing here for five minutes.”
“I was talking to my—uh—never mind.”
Goldie got a brief flash of satisfaction. Was that his wolf? Her cousins could hear the wolves they were mated to.
Is that you?
She got a rush of happiness but didn’t know if it was hers or his or the beast’s.
Aiden stretched, cracking his vertebrae, and her sense of a third presence faded. “How are you?” he asked.
She didn’t want small talk. She had never wanted to waste her one and precious life being polite.
