“Yeah, we’ve never been as militant about that as the protestants. I could always tell them you’re my lover.”
“Oh my god, you can hear for miles. That wolf is still in the woods!”
“Not miles.” He smiled. “He’s up the ridgeline by now. He didn’t hear me. I could just tell them you’re the local representative from the coven.”
“Please stop.”
“I could tell them—” He stopped talking, his eyes on the horizon, and she stopped breathing.
“What?”
“What are you to me?” He blinked a couple of times and focused back on her. “What would you like me to say?”
“I don’t have to meet anybody. I just came to warn you, though I don’t even know what you could do, short of open war, and I really don’t want to be the one who restarts the shifter wars.”
“The what?” His mouth fell open.
“The shifter wars?”
“You mean the magic wars?”
She burst out laughing. It wasn’t amusement, just stress relief. “That’s what you call them?”
“What are those two sweet little old ladies going to do?” he asked, and she gulped.
It was intense having all that focus on her. “Sweet?” Cat realized she was going a little insane.
“Terrifying? Psychotic?”
Right, the reason she was here. “They’re going to burn out the spell.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The spell to make shifters. Witches made shifters, and they’re going to take the spell that did it, and destroy it, like, retroactively so that there are no shifters.”
“Can they do that?”
“I have no idea!”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “Because that doesn’t sound like something they should be able to do.”
“Do you want to risk it?”
His hand dropped. “No, absolutely not. Okay, we have to stop them, obviously. How do we stop them?” His focus was gone again, off in the clouds, brainstorming. “Beyond the obvious way.”
What was the obvious way? She cringed. “No teeth!”
“No! Maybe. Only if we really have to.”
“Mateo!”
“We will stop them. You and I together will stop them. I just can’t get over the fact that we’re connected somehow.”
“Somehow?” She scoffed. “We’re completely connected. Our stories are intertwined, and apparently always have been.”
He snapped his fingers. “Somehow connected. That’s it.”
“What?”
