Page 42 of His Whispered Witch

Penn sat back, thinking of that spell in that terrible room. They did that to a human being. Did the first shifters consent, and even if they had, did they truly know what they were getting into?

Because of that, millennia later, were there two people running around with each other’s magic?

“Do you want me to check?” Cat asked hesitantly.

Penn opened her eyes. “Check?”

“See if I can see a future for the two of you?”

“How do you check?”

“I scry. Mostly in water. Technically, I could use a crystal ball, but those are expensive and break if you look at them wrong.”

Penn took a deep breath. “So you can only see the future if you’re looking for it?”

Cat sat back with a wave of her hand. “Thank god, yes! I know witches with enough strength to get visions whenever they want, or rather, whenever they don’t want. Sucks for them. But unless it’s like, the end of the world, I don’t just randomly see things.”

“Since the world hasn’t ended yet, I take it you haven’t literally seen that?”

“When the twins took me out of that orphanage, I saw that. I dreamed of that for years before it happened.”

“That was the end of the world?”

Cat traced the edge of her chair. “It felt like it at the time. But I guess it was also the beginning of the new world.”

Penn took a deep breath to ask more and then let it out. This wasn’t a casual story to pull out of someone in small talk.

“Anyway,” Cat said, “if you want me to. No guarantee I see anything or I understand what I see.”

She couldn’t resist. “Okay fine, if you don’t mind.”

Cat grinned and then looked around and pulled an abandoned glass of water sitting on the coffee table toward herself.

“You might mind, though,” Cat said, and her grin faded.

Penn rubbed the back of her neck. Her previous experience with divination was with a great aunt whose house smelled of denture cream and cedar. There hadn’t been another Young born with the talent since. Penn only visited twice in childhood. Everyone was terrified of the old woman. She read tea leaves, and until Penn had met Cat, she hadn’t known there was any other way to do divination. To Penn, it always looked like a soggy mess at the bottom of the cup, and she half thought the old woman was just making up the things she said.

She said that Penn would be a natural witch, which was accurate, but she had a 33% chance of being right on that.

“May I?” Cat said, and Penn glanced down to see Cat reaching toward her.

Penn took her hand and nodded.

“You want to try and direct things?” Cat asked. “Or should I just see what I see around this dude?”

“What dude?” What had she given away?

Cat scoffed. “You asked about, and I quote, ‘Fated, um, partners.’ There is a particular tone of voice people get when they ask a seemingly general question that’s actually about one specific person.”

Penn took a deep breath. What was she doing? Seriously? Would she change the rest of her life based on what Cat’s magic saw? Wasn’t that as insane as trusting fate? “I don’t want to know if we live happily ever after or anything.”

“Yeah, my timeline is so not ‘ever after.’ We’re talking weeks, maybe months on a good day.”

“Right. I just want to know if there’s some kind of tie between us that goes beyond what’s, um, normal.”

“Honey, there’s no normal.”

“But—”

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