Page 30 of Blind Date with a Werewolf
He stepped to the side of the pallets, the memory of the avalanche of garbage that had trapped Joshua and his sisters in their room reminding him that gravity could be problematic. He was unlikely to be hurt by falling boxes or even furniture, but he didn’t want to encounter his enemy with his feet trapped in detritus. He cut the yarn and watched the garbage fall, the noise obscuring the more subtle sounds of the wyrm.
Behind him, Tami’s magic writhed and built with her chant. Writhed and grew and struck while she thought him distracted.
But Asil was never so distracted that he could not react. And his old wolf had not trusted the witch, even though she had smelled as white as snow.
When black magic blasted at them, the wolf threw them backward, going to the ground where the still-falling boxes, bags, and assorted random things provided enough of a shield. The scourge of foulness washed by, leaving him choking on the reek of it. He rolled to his feet and saw Helen lying motionless on the floor and Tami’s face twisted in hatred.
Joshua’s mother’s eyes were wide with fear, and blood oozed from her outstretched arm where Tami had cut her.
He felt his wolf’s rage shake his bones, softened a little bysmugness. The wolf had known that witches were not to be trusted. Or at least that this witch had not been trustworthy.
How had she hidden what she was from him? He who knew so intimately what black magic felt like?
“You killed mymother,” Tami said—incomprehensibly.
He didn’t have time to try to figure out what she meant because she struck out at him with a second blast of black magic. This was weaker, though—that first hit had taken too much for her to do it a second time, he thought.
As he’d warned her more than once, Asil was old. After his mate’s death, he’d made hunting down black witches the focus of his life for several centuries. He knew some tricks for dealing with witchcraft.
He could have dodged the second attack as he had the first. He doubted she had power for a third without having more time with poor Helen, who had been summoned here for no better purpose than to play sacrifice to give Tami power. But if he’d dodged her strike, he doubted he would be able to stop his wolf from killing her.
And he had questions.
To that end, he pulled on pack magic to shield himself. When he’d been Alpha of his own pack, it would have been a barricade that rendered her magic as naught. But he was no longer Alpha; he’d ceded that to his son when he’d decided it was time for his long life to end. The pack he belonged to now was over a hundred miles away and he could only request, not demand.
For all the generosity and power of his Alpha, the power he could pull through his pack bonds meant he was fighting aforest fire with snow. But it was sufficient to alter her magic from a killing stroke into something that merely held him where he stood.
It was dangerous, what he did. Safer to have killed her quickly and not given her a chance at him, but Asil had done away with safety when he came to this country to ask the Marrok for death. Curiosity, though…curiosity was his besetting sin.
“I killed your mother?” he asked.
It was not impossible, but unlikely. It had been a hundred years or more since he had last killed a witch—and witches, unlike werewolves, were not immortal. Not commonly.
Not answering, Tami grasped the amulet at her neck—and he saw it clearly for the first time, as if it had heretofore hidden itself from him. He had seen her play with it, but had taken no notice of it. Now he could taste its magic, familiar magic. His lips formed her name.
Mariposa.
His foster daughter had a talent for hiding things in plain sight, making one thing seem like another: a complex magical item appeared to be a piece of costume jewelry, or black magic felt like white.
His recognition of what that amulet did robbed its spell of the rest of its power. The corrupt feel and smell of Tami’s magic filled the space around them, cloying and oily, blending unpleasantly with the residue of whatever his foster daughter had done to create the thing.
Asil ignored the magic battering at his shield, which was strengthening as the Marrock’s power figured out what Asil was shielding against. He was too consumed with…emotion of some sort. Anger. Sorrow. Rage.
Mariposa.Daughter.Butterfly.
Tami was not Mariposa’s daughter.
“Mariposa was not your mother,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse.
Even if he were wrong about the effect of the black magic Mariposa had worked upon herself to stop the effects of time, Tami shared no scent with Mariposa. That he would have noticed, amulet or not.
“She was my mother in all that matters,” Tami asserted through her bared teeth. “And you killed her.”
That wasn’t true, but he didn’t argue. Mariposa had died hunting him, though it had not been Asil who had broken her neck. He did not care if this witch blamed him for her death or not.
He had wanted answers. Mariposa was one he had not expected, and it knocked him off his game. But he needed to know the depth of the plot that had brought him here.
“How did you set this up?” he asked. “Our not-date?”
