He spared one second to see if he could see the other wolf, but there was not a tip of a tail above the snow.
Instead of trying to get up and out of the snow, he started swimming through it sideways, pushing it away from in front of him and getting it behind him.
He saw his salvation ahead of him, which was great because he couldn’t feel most of his legs. A tree had broken and was lying on top of the snow. With the last of his strength, he got his hand around one of the top limbs and pulled as hard as he could, slithering onto the trunk like he really was swimming in water.
“Okay, we’re good,” he muttered, waiting for the sweet bliss of warm fur.
“Oh my god, are you okay?”
He froze and looked down to see a woman standing in the trees like a backwoods miracle.
Don’t do it,he told his wolf even as his frozen, chapped fingers struggled to keep hold of the bark.
He could not shift in front of a human.
She stepped closer, and his wolf froze for an entirely different reason.
Well, the good news was he’d found the source of the incredible scent.
The bad news was that he was naked, freezing, and human in a tree in the middle of an avalanche.
2
Cat stared at the broken pieces of the crystal ball on the dining room table. The thing had cost over two hundred dollars and lasted through one scrying session.
This was why she usually used a glass of water, but in a glass, she only saw pieces of a vision. To get a true 360 view, she needed a sphere, not a circle.
She’d been working on this puzzle for the past three weeks. Ever since the Thanksgiving break, there had been a series of thefts around town, and Gary, the owner of the local hardware store, had finally come to the witches.
He didn’t know they were genuine witches with real power, but the Griffin family ran theCauldron and Broom, a new age supply/bookshop/tea shop with a ton of Wiccan resources, and the twins who settled in Silver Spring decades ago and ran the shop cultivated a reputation as the local experts in all things magic.
The old grandfather clock in the hallway chimed, and Cat nearly jumped out of her skin, landing back in the present with a thump that hurt her head.
“Is that a good sign or a bad sign?” Siobhan, one of the twins, asked from the front window. She looked to be hovering perpetually around seventy, though her hair was still black with a shock of white at her widow’s peak.
They were not related at all, but Cat liked to pretend they were, because she looked a little like Siobhan. They shared black hair and blue eyes, though Cat was paler with far sharper features. Cat was also a normal height instead of a giant.
“Cat?”
“Sorry, what?”
“What does it mean?” Siobhan asked, staring at the broken crystal.
“I don’t know,” Cat said, thinking back on the vision.
It had started with a flash of white light. She’d been getting that flash for a few weeks. Then it had transformed into a chant: two, three, six, twelve, with swirling images of jewels and flowers. She’d heard that before, too. She normally didn’t get repeating visions, and it was freaking her out, but no sense of imminent threat had come with it. Maybe it was just how her visions started now?
After that, she’d Seen a local pack of kids from the high school. Unfortunately, she had guessed before scrying that the thieves were local teenagers, given what was stolen and how they did it, so she didn’t know any more now and was down a crystal ball.
They’d started with gold panning equipment that was normally used for the bizarre sport of running beside donkeys in a nod to Colorado’s mining past. They’d also stolen fertilizer, a magnet, and granola bars from Gary’s store, and some chemistry supplies from the high school. It was Cat who connected these random thefts.
What worried her was the theft from the tax preparation business at the end of Main Street. It also served as a front fordoomsday preppers to pick up supplies. They were rumored to be stashing weapons, and everyone gave them a wide berth while pretending that a town of 600 people needed year-round tax services. They’d reported the theft of four ultra-heavy sleeping bags and denied anything else.
She looked at the pieces of crystal. The thieves were planning a project she couldn’t understand yet, but her vision made one thing clear: the pending blizzard was the perfect cover.Thathad come with a sense of danger. Bizarrely, not from the blizzard but from a stalking animal?
There was a tinkling crash, and Cat jumped, her eyes flying to Siobhan, who was covered with crystal icicles.
“What are you doing?” Cat asked.
