Cat clattered down the stairs after Mateo, her hand in his. He didn’t seem to want to let go. Her vision fuzzed and spritzed with the future. It seemed like there were so many stairs between them and the ground.
It wasn’t the first time in her life that she’d gotten a vision unsought. Important moments in her life, on very rare occasions, intruded without her asking. She thought back to the moment the vision had come. She’d been touching him, impossibly drawing on his wolf. Maybe it wasn’t some huge portent; maybe it was just him. She had to be using his wolf’s magic, but that was impossible.
They had no idea what was possible or not.
She tried to contemplate the implications of this—that not only did witches make shifters, but that magic was still within them, fizzing away. Of course, it was. A human being couldn’t transform into another shape without a lot of magic. His being in some impossible way was aspell.
That was what the twins wanted to destroy. All that magic. They were deranged.
Another vision flickered as they hit the ground floor, and she noticed his family spread out before them. They pulled away from each other, and she didn’t know who made the first move to separate. She thought it would stop the vision, but one still flickered.
Not now, please not now.
She noticed smirks on some faces and absolute horror on the old lady’s. What had they been thinking? They hadn’t been thinking. They were making out in the home of his pack, and now everyone knew.
Her vision sparked again.
Seriously, she begged her magic,you’re supposed to be a part of protecting me and helping me. If you have any sanity left, you would know that now is the absolute worst time in my entire life to get a vision.
Mateo put a hand on her back.
The room disappeared; it felt like she was falling into a crystal ball or a pool of water, even though she was staring at a muddy, textured wall.
She felt paws on the earth and harsh breath in her lungs as the gigantic house of the interloper came into view. Nothing felt right in the world. Since the alpha elect had disappeared, the pack was in chaos. They had to find Friedrich.Hedid not want to be the focus of his father’s wrath; it was intolerable. Friedrich had gone out to search for the new pack encroaching on their territory, disappeared, and now everything was wrecked.
“Cat!”
He was almost sick with fear but didn’t know what else to do. His life didn’t matter. He couldn’t have the one thing he wanted, so he could have this instead.
“Catarina!”
The cold earth beneath paws faded to be replaced by a fresh fear.
Amusement and curiosity on the surrounding faces had turned to shock.
She met the old woman’s eyes, steely with fury. It was not the anger that her precious baby boy was dating the wrong woman, but of a werewolf with a witch in her den.
“There’s a wolf in the woods,” Mateo said as he headed for the front door.
Nobody moved or looked away from her.
“Get going!” he said, and two older wolves jolted. Mateo snarled. “She’s the reason we have a warning at all.”
“Strega,” Nonna hissed. “Witch.”
“Nonna, she’s only helping us.”
“They don’t help us. They kill us. For centuries!”
“She hasn’t done a single thing to a werewolf,” Mateo insisted.
Visions of an old fight with a lone wolf popped into her mind, but technically, Mateo was still correct. They hadn’t landed a scratch on him because all their defenses, it turned out, were ill-calibrated to a dynamic shifter who wanted to avoid them. Cat remembered an echo of her old self-righteousness as she defended her family from a threat.
She’d always thought of receptive magic as a little useless, just a report of the world, but this didn’t feel useless or inconsequential now, judging by the wolves looking at her.
One younger man took a step toward her, and Mateo froze. “If anyone harms a hair on her head, I will kill them,” he said with absolute calm.
“What the hell happened to you, man? We’ve been out of New York for a week, and you’ve disappeared into a blizzard, gotten into a dominance fight, and brought home a witch!”
