Page 55 of A Lady’s Guide to Werewolves

“I’m dead. I have time.”

Sorcha only turned to Aidan, frowning at her in his damp and soot-stained shirt, a burn marring his left boot. There were iron nails on the floor and she had no idea where they had come from. “You might want to go before something else goes wrong. Clearly, I need to strengthen the salt wards and get myself an Iron Witch.”

Aidan’s jaw clenched, eyes going icy. “Someone set this fire deliberately,” he said. “So I’m not going anywhere. Best get used to me, songbird.”

Hosting an earl was one thing.

Hosting a wolf was another.

And hosting Aidan was a third thing altogether, with no precedent.

She might have tried to talk him out of it, but it seemed churlish, especially as he already knew everything there was to know. Anyway, she had other things to see to.

Thinking about Aidan, about wolves and curses and kisses, would just have to wait.

First things first. The kennel had erupted into a cacophony of howls and whines, and she darted around Aidan to get down the stairs faster. “Do you never rest?” he asked, chasing after her.

“This is more important,” she tossed over her shoulder. She sent more calming imagery toward the birds on the kennel roof, but it could only do so much. They had sensed too much violence. Smelled too many wolves, the smoke from the fire. And who knew what the crows had told them? They were a gossipy lot.

She circled around the side of the tower to the outbuildings. The yard outside the kennel was home to a very disgruntled donkey with wings and a pony with antlers who sneezed when he was anxious. A sneeze was innocuous enough on its own, but these sneezes called beetles out of the ground. Beetles sometimes liked to nibble on books.

The pony had been banned from Hallow immediately.

Sometimes spells went awry. And the witches of Hallow, especially the students conducting experiments that were questionable or beyond their abilities, had long ago learned that if you left animals near Nettlestone, Sorcha would take them in. She had also caught more than one professor sneaking toward the wall.

Sorcha still did not understand why one would not want to keep half a dozen mice turned accidentally magenta when they had been chewing through the wall in one of the classrooms. They also sported tiny, very fetching, horns like a unicorn’s.

“Shh,” Sorcha said, reaching over the gate to pet the sneezing pony. Beetles swarmed around her borrowed shoes. “You’re perfectly fine.”

The donkey jostled for attention, eyes rolling when Aidan stepped closer. The rabbit scurrying past peed. Sorcha glowered at him. “You’re scaring them.”

He lifted his hands placatingly. “Not on purpose. It’s the wolf.”

“Tell your wolf thank you very much and also to stop it right now.”

Aidan’s expression softened, then sharpened with curiosity. “I think that did the trick, actually.”

“He’s obliging.”

“Not especially.”

She shrugged one shoulder. “I have a way with animals.”

“Aye.” It was all he said, though it held a wealth of information. But it may as well have been in Pictish for all she understood it.

She checked on the hounds, the kittens, the goat, the chickens. Nimue, the unicorn with the broken horn who refused to leave. And then she tossed a hunk of raw meat over the wall. Aidan continued to watch her as if she were one of the curiosities in his museum. “Dare I even ask?”

“It’s for the Black Shuck,” she explained, wiping her hands clean.

“You feed a Black Shuck?”

“Everything needs to eat.”

“Black Shucks eat people. Souls.”

Sorcha waved her hand dismissively. “Rumor. Foul lies.” Possibly the truth, but she would never admit it. “They’re just misunderstood.”

“They have scared people quite literally to death. There was one in Haven just at Midsummer.”