Page 44 of Enemy Wolf

Chapter 16

Shiloh

I woke up hugging a space heater. Or at least, that was what it felt like. The bank of warmth against my torso and cheek kept me in a lulled, drowsy state I didn’t want to emerge from. My eyes hadn’t opened yet, and I was so comfortable.

It wasn’t until my palm slid to a more comfortable position on this space heater that I realized it felt like skin. A warm body.

I snatched my hand away like it had been on a burning stove and my eyes popped open. Oh sweet moon, I’d hoped I was wrong, but no. A very human, very naked Orson lay on his side, still asleep. And I was pressed up against his back, spooning him under the blanket.

“Fuck.” Now wide awake, I scooted away from him as discreetly as I could, but the moment my body was no longer in contact with his, the werewolf began to stir.

Orson rolled to his back and rubbed his face with a groan. Then he pulled his hands away and stared at fingers, blinking rapidly.

“Good morning,” I said awkwardly.

He sat up abruptly, taking care to stay covered from the waist down. “Why am I human?”

“You must have shifted back in your sleep,” I said. “I woke up and covered you with a blanket so you’d stay warm.” And then I spooned you at some point while I was sleeping. Probably best to keep that to myself.

Orson groaned again and returned to rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Sorry about that. I’m not usually a sleep-shifter.”

“Nothing to be sorry for.” I slid out from under the blanket we’d ended up sharing, hating the loss of warmth from our combined body heat. “I’ll get some coffee started.”

It was an excuse to get my head on straight and also to give him some privacy to get dressed. Don’t turn around, I thought as I heard the rustling of clothes behind me. Don’t be a perv.

“We should reach the summit of the first peak today.” Orson’s voice floated from behind me before he entered my field of vision, wearing his white T-shirt and faded jeans as he sat in front of the fire. “Should only take a couple hours,” he added, rubbing his palms together before holding them out toward the fire.

“How much of the plant was left?” I walked around the fire with two mugs of coffee and handed one to him. “When you left last time.”

“There were maybe a dozen shrubs I saw spread out over the spot I was in. I just dug up one so I could carry it back down in my jaws.”

I tried to do some quick math in my head. Would a dozen shrubs of deadnettle even be enough for the amount the dragon wanted? I needed the leaves and flowers of the plant. Even if I perfected the recipe with the next test batch, which was doubtful, I had used that entire first shrub already. Could I scale up the recipe and still have the right amount?

A potion as volatile as this one needed to be exact in every way. It wasn’t some everyday concoction that I could use substitutions for.

“Shiloh?” Orson cocked his head at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said with false cheer. “Yeah, great.” My coffee was still at a scalding temperature but I forced a mouthful down. “Just antsy to get going, that’s all.”

* * *

The mountain’s summit was bright and sunny, though still bitterly cold. Patches of snow remained stubbornly at the base of trees and on the shadowy sides of boulders. In the distance, more snow covered the higher peaks of the mountain range. This peak was the smallest, but it was still the highest elevation I’d ever been in the territory.

All the untouched wilderness was absolutely breathtaking. As Orson drove us, I wished I could be here just to enjoy it. I wished our time together in this place of pure, wild magic wasn’t tainted by the looming presence of the dragon shifter at my back.

“Not much farther,” Orson yelled at me over the grinding, high gears of his engine. “There’s a meadow up ahead with your plants bordering it.”

I nodded, placing my cheek on the back of his shoulder. He clasped one of his hands over mine, lacing our fingers. I returned the squeeze, allowing the smile on my lips and the fluttering sensation in my chest. This werewolf just seemed to know that I needed some comfort, some reassurance that everything would be okay. I appreciated the affection from him, especially as someone who claimed to be so socially unaware. Somehow, he knew what I needed without words.

“It’s crazy to me that the deadnettle is up this high,” I said when we reached a patch of flatter terrain and his bike quieted down. “How did the early witches find it? I doubt many of them trekked this far up the mountain.”

“The feral packs tell stories of an ice age roughly a thousand years ago,” Orson answered. “They said nearly all of Vargmore was covered in snow, and Shadowburn Cliffs was once a rainforest.”

“What? I can’t even imagine that.” Shadowburn Cliffs, the dragon territory, had always been a scorching desert as far as I knew.

“If there’s any truth to it, your plant probably grew at lower elevations back when the recipe was developed. So it would have been more accessible back then.”

It was a good theory, and it likely explained why silver deadnettle was believed to have gone extinct in the last few decades. Weather systems had probably shifted dramatically in the last thousand years. The Vargmore witch community kept meticulous historical records, but I never thought much about cracking open those ancient tomes until now. Recent history was everyone’s main concern these days—the formation of the four territories and the conflicts and alliances that created those borders.

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