“Oh, hell no.” She laughed, and he wondered what was funny again. He loved the “Is this a joke?” gamesomuch.
“So do you use magic for your computer?” he asked, lost.
“I can barely type. Computers hate me.”
“Computers cannot hate. They don’t reason. They do exactly what you tell them to do.”
“Metaphorically speaking,” she said and dove back under the covers as she shouted, “So cold!”
“We have to leave the bed to fix that.”
She poked the tip of her nose out. “With my magic, I See into the future and ask: if this is happening, then what?”
He curled up all the way. “You look into the future.”
“I’m a divination witch.”
“It is impossible.”
She smirked. “You turn into a wolf, and you’re telling me a glimpse of tomorrow is impossible?”
“I just don’t know how it would work.” It broke his brain to think there could be any definitive glimpse of something that hadn’t happened yet.
“I can see only a couple of weeks. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen next year; it’s too far away. Things already have to be in motion for me to see how they play out.”
“But you do see.”
“I definitely See.”
He wanted to ask a dozen more questions. Was she ever wrong? Could she misinterpret? Did she see things and not understand, or did she always know what they meant? Was it like a movie or a metaphor?
He bit his tongue. He knew from experience that most people did not, in fact, enjoy interrogation as a form of casual conversation.
He took a deep breath. “So, leaving the bed?”
“Boots first,” she said as she launched out of bed. “Boots and then wood and then fire and then food.”
His wolf wrenched for the reins, ready to hunt, but he forced it down.
“Are you okay?” she asked when she saw him still frozen in bed.
“I’m fine.” He was in the woods with a beautiful woman and not dead in an avalanche. That felt really amazing. He leaped out of bed. “So cold!”
“I know!”
He retrieved the boots he’d found in a drawer the night before, along with a winter coat.
As he pulled them on, he looked around. “What do you think happened to this guy?”
She froze. “I think he had to leave,” she said with deceptive casualness.
“Did you know him?”
“Not well,” she said, and he knew there was a story in that sentence, but she was already heading for the door.
She opened it an inch and peered out.
“Terrified of Bigfoot?” he asked.
