Page 11 of Wolfsbane

No reason to pack a bag, since it wasn’t a pleasure trip, or a long one. The witches’ compound on the outskirts of Boise was less than twenty miles away, and I could walk there and back easily, even without my wolf to help my endurance. I’d marched farther while less well-fed.

I once again slipped out my window, more careful this time when I landed on the ground.

Drew was sitting there at the edge of the trees watching, and turned to start walking alongside me as I went, like it was a lovely evening stroll we were taking in the middle of the night.

“You should stay here where it’s safe,” I told him, not that I expected him to understand or listen. “The witches are more monstrous than even I am. They stole my wolf, and I have to get him back.”

He looked up at me as we walked, and seemed to smile at me.

Damned fool raccoon was going to get hurt, trusting in monsters.

I sighed and tossed him a piece of dried meat from my pocket, which he snatched and started munching on without breaking stride along next to me, walking on three feet and using the fourth to hold his food.

It was a long walk, but not a terrible one, all things considered.

We stopped outside the witch compound, Drew cocking his head to one side, as though in consideration rather than fear. I sighed and motioned him back to the woods. “Stay. You’ll be safe here. No reason to go into danger.”

He seemed to scoff and turned away, toddling along the edge of the brick wall that surrounded the enclosure, but with . . . a strange sort of intensity. Not like he was wandering, exploring, but as though he were headed somewhere specific.

As though he’d been there before.

This was far for such a small creature to range in his territory, but something in me said to trust his instincts. He was over three years old, which was impressive for a raccoon, so his self-preservation instincts weren’t nonexistent as they sometimes seemed.

He led me down to a small hole in the wall, raccoon-sized rather than human-sized, but before I could get frustrated with myself for assuming a raccoon knew a damned thing about what I needed, he pointed inside, rather than just going in.

Interested, I knelt and looked through the hole.

The hole led to the back of a house, where on a patio next to a sliding glass door, there were two dishes for animals. Maybe cat-sized. I didn’t recall the witches ever smelling of cats, but . . . Drew had been here before, clearly. Had eaten here before. Knew that this was a relatively safe spot to enter, at least for him.

I smiled and reached out to pat him on the head. “Thank you, friend. This is helpful.”

Even if the hole was too small for me to fit through, it was something. The front of the compound had a guardhouse, so going in that way would get me seen straight away, and at least this wasn’t that.

Not that the guards had looked terribly threatening, one sitting in the small building with his feet on a desk, reading something, and the other leaning on that same desk with his back to the road, eating a snack cake.

Still, not being seen was preferable to being seen, even by people who didn’t concern me. I didn’t want any more attention than I was bound to get from the witches.

So I found a loose brick in the wall and pulled on it till it made a proper toe-hold, and then used it to heft myself up and over the wall. When I got to the top, I pointed back down at Drew. “You stay out here. They’re going to be as angry as a kicked hive once they realize I’m here. You don’t need to get caught up in that.”

He sat there on the outside of the wall, looking mildly concerned, but oddly enough, he followed my order.

The dishes on the patio were both filled with some kind of kibble, so . . . one of the witches seemed to be trying to feed the local wildlife, given the fact that they were overfilled. Odd, considering how little regard most of them seemed to have for any life at all.

They had abandoned multiple of their own coven to death at our hands, and Tristan to wolfhood after he’d been bitten. He was an annoying little shit, but if he’d been my pack, I wouldn’t have left him that way, annoying or not.

The glass door was locked on the inside, with a deadbolt, which was rather hard to pick, and lockpicking had never been my specialty. I didn’t particularly want to break that much glass, either, since it would be loud. Best to break a single pane if I had to resort to that. Best of all to find an open window and simply climb inside.

I skirted the side of the house, which was . . . well, calling it a house was perhaps ungenerous of me. Mansion? Compound building? It was built like those old-style houses, what were they called? Victorian? With the turrets and multi-angled roofs and such, that looked, to my eye, more like a mishmash of a dozen different houses rather than a single, cohesive unit.

This one was even worse than average, in my opinion, as it had clearly been built at different times, in different sections, and while they were all currently painted white, it had been poorly done, without proper base coats and primer, things Cash had taught me well the importance of during our years working together. It was clear that the house had once been multiple colors, and someone had tried to hide that by simply slapping a coat of white atop them all.

So one section was vaguely gray, and one had hints of green peeking through, while another was streaky and red-orangeish. The result was a hideous pastel nightmare.

When I came around the corner, I paused there. It was a huge garden, which wasn’t . . . a surprise, exactly. Witches always kept plants, since they used lots of them in their concoctions. But a garden didn’t offer me as much cover as I wanted. I considered going back around the other way, but it wouldn’t help, since that direction would reach the guardhouse before this direction.

I hadn’t seen a single open window yet, and the basement windows actually had fucking bars on them, which . . . well, again, not a surprise. They’d held Altair down there for centuries, hadn’t they?

That was a good and sobering reminder. This wasn’t trying to break into a human’s house looking for a meal like I’d done many times in the escape from Russia. This was witches, who had a history of holding Altair prisoner, and had even killed at least one of my own, though I had rarely considered Grant’s minion Avery “mine” in any meaningful way while he’d been alive.