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I forgo my usual back-alley shortcuts, taking the longer but more well-lit route through the streets toward my small two-story terrace house on the outskirts of town. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched. The trees lining the pavement loom above my head as I scurry along, their spindly branches casting long shadows over the sidewalk. The moon is nothing more than a silvery sliver tonight, peeking through a hazy bank of cloud.
Something scuttles in the shadows nearby. After a heart-clenching moment, I make out a dry leaf tumbling over the pavement.
Its just some goddamn leaves!
Amethyst really got inside my head.
I grit my teeth and pick up the pace. Home is only a couple of blocks from the shop, and I know this city like the back of my hand. Soon enough, I’ll be curled up on my sofa with a bowl of pasta, channel surfing.
I’m a grown-ass woman. Just focus on putting one foot in front of the other.
I can’t repress a groan of relief the second my front door closes behind me. For a moment, I just stand there, my back against the wood, listening to the quiet ticking of the hall clock and the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen toward the rear.
Everything is perfectly normal.
I remember my promise to Ammie and take a few minutes to strengthen the wards on doors and windows. No cracks or—heaven forbid—scorch marks anywhere to be seen.
Once I have a pot of pasta bubbling away on the stove and the TV on in the background, I close my eyes and let the babbling of a game show host drive out the last vestiges of the day’s stresses, leaning back against the counter.
After eating, I sprawl out on the sofa, grabbing the remote.
A sharp crack comes from somewhere outside the house.
I tense up.
Great, so this is what it’s come to. Freaking out over fallen leaves and twigs snapping underfoot...
I huff with annoyance and turn my attention back to the TV, keeping my eyes fixed on the screen in front of me.
Something rustles outside. If I had to guess, I would say it’s coming from the bushes in my pocket-sized back garden.
But I’m not guessing. I’m watching TV instead of acting like a crazy person.
A loud thud, and a muffled whine, coincide with a wallop of power that rushes through my system. Whoa! Something just triggered the edge of my ward. I snap off the television, waiting in silence with my breath held. Waiting, and listening intently.
Another stifled whimper breaks the silence. I drop to the floor and crawl over to the window, then peer over the ledge. The curtains are still open, even though night has fallen, as my garden is not overlooked. But tonight, with so little moonlight, the outdoor space is mostly shrouded in darkness.
A large shape takes up space in the middle of my lawn. I squint, trying to make out what it is. From my vantage point, I can only see a vague outline. It looks like some kind of animal: a black dog, perhaps, but if so, it is a very large dog, indeed.
Whatever it is, it’s not moving.
Another noise pierces the air. A long, low whine. The poor creature is clearly in pain. It needs to be seen to, and fast.
My stomach twists. Did my ward do that to an innocent animal? I scuttle back from the window, my mind turning over on itself.
I should call someone.
But who? I glance at the clock. It’s already past ten p.m. There are emergency vet surgeries open at this hour, but I have no idea where the nearest one might be. I haven’t had a familiar since my last cat Alfie passed on two years ago.
I loved him so much I haven’t yet had the heart to replace him.
Fucking hell. I might have the heebie-jeebies today, but I can’t just leave a poor injured creature out there.
Another awful, wounded noise travels in from the garden.
What if it dies?
Forcing myself to rise, I fumble around on the side table until my fingers close around my protective charm. I slide the charm around my neck and tuck it beneath my shirt. It’ll offer scant protection against anything truly heinous, but I feel somewhat better after I put it on. My house wards—powered by my not inconsiderable blood magic—also will provide some protection in the garden, though not as strongly out there.
Probably why the dog is merely injured, and not dead, if it happened to run into them.
I creep away from the window and then grab my jacket and boots from the hallway. I slip them on in the darkness of the kitchen, where my view of the garden isn’t much better than it was from the living room.
I open the back door a crack and peer out over the lawn.
The grass is pale and dewy in the scant moonlight. The shape I saw from the window is still nothing more than a nebulous shadow, although I can see the creature’s chest heaving up and down in a labored manner. My breath catches as I put a hand on the door handle.
Now or never.
I push open the door, before I can change my mind.
The cold night air makes me shiver, and I tug my jacket more tightly around my body as I sneak across the grass. My breath comes out in white puffs, and the darkness presses menacingly around me.
Shock floods me as I creep close enough for my first proper look at the creature.
I had been so sure it was an animal...
But instead of fur, I’m confronted by a stretch of skin, pale with the cold. Human skin.
Curled up on his side, totally motionless, lies a large and very naked man.
My pulse skips frantically. I’m not one of those people who love action and adrenalin. A quiet night in is always my preferred option, and I love routine and order in my day. I’m not equipped to deal with anything out of the ordinary. Not like this.
Maybe he’s a shifter.
That would explain the strange animal I was so sure I had seen before. I did see fur; I know it. But, shifter or no shifter, I can’t leave him out here naked and injured.
I just stand here, dumbstruck, caught between fight or flight with neither instinct winning out.
His chest expands and contracts in short, shallow movements, as if breathing causes him pain.
A dark slick of something glistens on his bare torso. Blood? Or some kind of bruising? Obviously, he ran into my ward, which might account for his lack of consciousness, but it wouldn’t account for blood. Perhaps he was trying to get away from an attack of some kind and was injured before he escaped into my back garden?
The sight of his injury galvanizes me into action; I move closer, circling wide in case he makes any sudden movement.
But it’s not a trick. The man really is out cold.
“Goddess, please give me strength. And protection, thank you.”
Squaring my shoulders, I dig my hands underneath his arms and begin to drag him toward the house.
The going is about as tough as I expect. I’m average height for a woman, but I spend my days pottering around my spell shop, not working out building muscle. And this guy...
He’s really freaking big.
The dead weight of a grown man—and a tall, heavily muscled one, at that—coupled with my rising anxiety that he might wake at any moment and ask me what the hell I’m doing, makes my progress slow.
When I’m about halfway to my back door, it occurs to me that dragging a strange man into my house might not be the wisest of decisions.
Didn’t I promise Amethyst I’d be on my guard?
Yet here I am, only a few hours later, flouting that promise.
I can’t leave him out here on the lawn. Whoever—or whatever—attacked him might still be out here, and I’m determined to get the both of us inside before they come back to finish the job.
I don’t like using magic unnecessarily, as its use can disrupt the balance of energies nearby. That’s a secondary reason for the wards on the shop and my home—they are not only there for protection, but to contain my spell work in a safe environment. But in this case, magic is definitely warranted. He’s just too damn heavy.
I cast above the man’s unconscious form.
“Gravitato,” I mutter.
His body lifts from the ground and hovers, his head dropping back slightly to expose the long, tanned line of his throat and causing his inky-black hair to flop down in an artful mess. A flutter of awareness rises up in my belly and I tamp it down.
Wrong time, wrong place, and most definitely, wrong guy.
I take a grip under his arms once again and this time he floats along on a cushion of air until we reach the back door with relative ease.
I figure I’ll revive him, treat his wound, and send him on his way. I also want to find out exactly what kind of creature I’m dealing with, and why he ended up on my property.
Needing a hand free to hitch open the door, I release one side of him. He groans a little and I freeze, terrified he’ll wake up, but he doesn’t. As I steer him through the doorway he remains as unresponsive as ever.
I wave my hand in a casting reversal and his body drops to the tiled floor with a bang.
Oops.
Now I have a naked, injured man on my kitchen floor. Only, he may not be a man at all.
C’mon, Topaz. What’s the next step?
I avert my gaze from his naked magnificence, and shrug off my jacket so I can throw it over his lower half in an attempt to provide a little modesty. I race into the next room and snag a cushion off the couch, then hurry back and kneel down to tuck it in beneath his head. Then I take a closer look at the wound. It looks like he was clawed or stabbed, though the edges are a little ragged for a knife. Whatever happened has damaged either his lungs or his ribs.
The wound is no longer seeping much, which is a good sign.
Shifter healing?
I set about rummaging for supplies. Luckily, my kitchen occasionally doubles as a workspace for brewing tinctures and other minor remedies, so I have a separate sink and bench area built-for-purpose in one corner, to keep everything separate from my food.
I grab a swab and a home-made salve from one of the drawers and wipe away the blood before smearing some salve over his injured flesh. My hand shakes, and when I finish applying the salve, I jump back in case he wakes.
He doesn’t.
Is he unconscious because of my ward? Or is this a normal shifter thing—going into some kind of deep hibernation-like sleep while the body heals itself? I wish I knew more about shifters.
Witches and shifters are not friends at the best of times. Most shifters actually hate witches and mages. They don’t trust our magic. Other than the occasional customer in my spell shop—usually a quick and furtive visit for something simple like a fertility or love charm, I haven’t had a lot to do with them.
I gather more ingredients, darting occasional glances at the man, and toward the window where the darkness seems to press in from outside.
I work fast to mix a diagnostic blood spell in a shallow bowl: one that will hopefully tell me what exactly I’m dealing with here. The spell is pretty basic, but I don’t have the time or the resources at hand for anything fancy right now.
Finally, I cast my hand over the bowl and focus, adding a push of magic to activate it.
I add the bloody swab from the man into the bowl, then circle back around my kitchen island, squatting down to assess the still-unconscious visitor while I wait for the spell to take effect.
His face is slack, though he is still attractive with strong, even features. He has nice hair: thick and soft, falling in a dark wave over his brow. I take a moment to look over the rest of him. He looks almost peaceful.
That strange sensation flutters in my gut. It feels a little like regret.
Okay, focus. He can’t stay here, and I need to figure out who and what this guy is—and what he was doing in my back garden.
I force myself to stand up and head back to the work counter. I rest my elbows on the bench and wait.
And wait.
After what feels like an eternity, the spell begins to take effect. The mixture swirls and shifts, bubbling a little. It glows, flickering into purple, then pale yellow.
Finally, it settles into a dark crimson color, so deep it could almost be black.
Not what I was expecting.
I’ve been using this diagnostic blood spell for years. I could do it in my sleep.
It has never turned that color before.
Frowning, I rummage around in the cabinet above my sink and pull down the heavy tome that once belonged to my mother. The burnished, coppery letters on the front cover bear the title: A Practical Guide to Home Sorcery.
The book lands on the counter with a heavy thud. I brush off the dust and scowl, as if the book is responsible for my failure. Then I open it, flicking through. Most of the pages are thick with notes written in a sprawling black ink. Mom’s commentary on various spells, and her opinions on the author’s instructions, make it frustratingly hard to navigate through the damned thing.
At long last, I land on the section I’m looking for.
Were-panther or wolf shifter? Creature Identification Made Simple.
I skip to the section on diagnostics and scan through the classification markers. Turquoise, cyan, liquid gold... the book cheerfully advises what color the spell turns in the case of wolf shifters, dryads, vampires, or even Fae, but none are a dark crimson. At intervals, I peer at my concoction in case it changes color again. It stubbornly remains the same, no matter how many swear words I throw at it.
Eventually I give up and shove the book away, putting my head in my hands.
When I look up, the naked man is still there. Still unconscious. Still a mystery.
He looks to be breathing more naturally now, and at least he has lost the waxy look in his features. My salve, or his own shifter genes—or perhaps both—are obviously starting to work.
“You know,” I say conversationally, into the silence. “You’re proving to be way more trouble than I expected. What are you?”
The man doesn’t respond. I let out a sigh and wipe the bowl clean, then fill it with boiling water and leave it to soak in the work sink.
I grab my bag from where I dumped it on the kitchen table earlier and dig through it, pulling out a couple of bandages.
Whatever this guy is, he still bleeds like a human.
“You’re lucky I have this stuff on hand,” I say, kneeling down beside him and putting a cautious hand on his torso. “Healing spell work can be tricky. Lots of mishaps, workplace injuries, that kind of thing.”
As gently as I can, I smooth more salve over his injury and press a clean bandage over the top. His skin feels warm beneath my fingertips, though I suspect that might be his natural state rather than a raised temperature. He has a healthy color back in his cheeks. I lean back on my heels when I’m done, feeling better about his prognosis.
I should get him some clothes.
My closet upstairs in the spare room contains an odd jumble of men’s clothes I’ve accumulated from exes over the years. Not that there have been many of those, but there should be enough choice to at least find him a pair of jeans and t-shirt to fit.
I study his impressive physique and reassess my thoughts. Maybe. I don’t think I ever dated anyone as superbly muscled as this guy.
I don’t want to leave him here alone, but the prospect of reviving him while he is still naked is somehow even more unnerving. In the end, I invoke a spell, holding out my hand to catch the clothing that I’ve called forth from the cupboard upstairs.
Time to wake the sleeping beauty.
I grip the protection charm around my neck, lay a hand over his forehead, and whisper, “Felius Surgerei.”
A pale reddish glow emanates from my palm, bathing him in light. He moans, and his eyelids flicker. As his eyes twitch open, his gaze sharpens, zeroing in on me. His eyes are piercing. Far more piercing than I expected. Even in the low light, they’re a deep, intense green.
My pulse races and heat floods my cheeks as that sacred place between my thighs wakes up and lets me know what it thinks.
Holy goddess! This guy is sexy!
Without warning, he reaches out and closes his fingers tight around my wrist.
