“Thank you, whoever!” He sniffed and frowned. “It smells like a wolf.”
She winced. “That might have been who stayed here? He left, though.”
He froze. “I can’t be here.”
“What?”
He started undoing the buttons of the shirt. “I can’t be in this. He’s going to smell me. He’d hunt me down, and I can’t kill anyone today.”
She felt the phantom“else”in that sentence and frowned. Had he already killed someone today? That wasn’t helping with her quest to calm the hell down.
He saw the look on her face. “Don’t worry, we don’t hunt humans. We don’t have anything to do with humans. We love squirrels and rabbits. Occasionally deer. That’s as big as it gets, right?”
“There’s moose,” she said automatically, stuck on his insistence that they didn’t kill humans.What about witches?
“I’m not going to eat you.”
She closed her eyes. “How did I end up in Little Red Riding Hood? How many fairy tales have an evil witch and a terrible end for a doe-eyed girl in a cloak?”
He froze again with his shirt half unbuttoned, and she was kind of sad he was going in the other direction, and then shook herself for being an absolute fool.
“What?” she asked but then realized. She said the word witch. She said the word witch to a werewolf. “You know, witches in fairy tales.”
“Yeah, but you also said that a wolf lived here. You knew about shifters before you saw my wolf.”
She held up her hands. “I just have receptive magic. I can’t do anything to you!” Dear god, she just told him she was powerless. She’d put herself firmly in his hands, which he held up carefully and slowly as if, finally, he realized that he was dealing with something delicate.
“I will never harm you or yours.”
“Then why are you here?” she exploded. “You’re from the house? Double Thirteen?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“113 County Rd. 13, the Double Thirteen house, the lost pack.”
“Is that what you call us?”
“Why did you come back?”
“Vacation?”
“I don’t believe you,” she crossed her arms, partly to keep from trembling.
“Not to harm witches! There are half a dozen covens in New York, and I’ve never even spoken to any of them. We keep to the treaty.”
“Sure. Great.” Did she believe him? Could she afford not to?
“You’re freezing,” he said slowly.
“Well, yeah, it’s freezing.”
She realized her teeth were chattering. She thought it was fear, but it was also cold.
He looked around the cabin as if seeing it for the first time. “Hey, do you have a cell phone? Because I can get us out of here. I can call in a helicopter…”
“No, you can’t.”
“They’ll be here in less than an hour.”
