Mind Over Magic by Lindsay Buroker
1
The rainand the dog’s noseprints on the windshield made it hard to see into the twilight gloom ahead. Lucky whined from the passenger seat as Morgen guided the car through mud, over downed branches, and around water-filled potholes large enough to support a small flock of mallards. Possibly a large flock. And their cousins.
Lucky whined again.
“We’re almost to the house,” Morgen said. “You can hold it.”
Lucky snuffled at the cracked window like a hedgehog with nasal polyps and did his best to shove his snout through the gap. His whip of a tail thwacked at the side of Morgen’s head, making her regret letting him out of his crate for this last leg of the journey. He stood on the armrest of the door, one paw finding the controls, and the window slid open further.
“Just remember that goes both ways.” Morgen concentrated on the road, navigating around another pond-sized pothole. Maybe she should have rented an SUV instead of driving her electric car up here. “If you get your head stuck again, I’m not going to be sympathetic.”
As Lucky inhaled deeply, oblivious to the rain spattering his copper-furred head, Morgen checked the GPS again. It had been years—decades—since she’d been up to the house. Was it possible she’d turned at the wrong spot? It was hard to believe Grandma had driven up the treacherous mile-long driveway every day on her motorcycle.
A deer shot out of the moss-draped fir trees and darted in front of the car.
An alarm on the screen flashed and beeped. Cursing, Morgen slammed on the brakes as the headlights illuminated antlers and startled deer eyes.
Lucky slid off the seat but was too busy barking out the window to notice. The buck sprang off the road and into the woods.
Morgen smashed the controls to roll up the window before Lucky could leap out, then gripped the wheel with both hands, willing her nerves to settle. That was hard with her dog barking loudly enough to be heard by the crews of freighters sailing through Rosario Strait miles away.
“You’re not going after that deer,” Morgen said. “You’re a vizsla. Vizslas are bird dogs.”
She was about to nudge the car into motion when a huge gray furry animal ran across the road after the deer. Blue eyes glanced in her direction before the creature—a wolf?—disappeared into the trees.
“Where the hell are we? Grandma’s estate or Northwest Trek?”
Morgen put the car in park. Her fraying nerves were on the verge of snapping.
Surprisingly, Lucky stopped barking. He sank low in the seat and whined. It was different from the I-need-to-water-a-tree-as-soon-as-possible whine of earlier. This was a concerned maybe-we-should-have-gotten-a-hotel-in-town whine. At least that was how Morgen chose to interpret it.
“We’re almost there.” She took a deep breath and checked to make sure the keys to the house hadn’t gone flying out of the cup holder. “We can—”
The wolf leaped out of the trees and back into the road. Morgen couldn’t help herself. As those blue eyes stared through the windshield at her, she screamed.
Lucky sank below the dashboard and whimpered. Morgen clamped her mouth shut, trying to calm herself, but the wolf stood in the mud three feet in front of the car and growled, lips rippling as white fangs flashed in the headlights. It was not a calming experience.
If the fir and pine trees to either side of the road hadn’t been so close, she would have turned the car around. This was too much to deal with by herself with night encroaching.
She honked the horn, willing the wolf to run away.
Its blue eyes widened, an almost human expression of indignation, and it crouched lower, hackles rising.
As a city girl, Morgen didn’t encounter wolves on a regular basis, but she was positive this one was far larger than typical. Its thick gray and black fur did nothing to hide the power of its muscular frame, and she could easily envision it chomping into her tires and stranding her here.
She flashed her headlights at it and tried the horn again, but it didn’t budge. Maybe the quiet engine of the electric car didn’t alarm it the way a vrooming gas vehicle would have. The silence made it easy to hear the wolf’s continuing growls.
“One more try,” she muttered, nudging the car forward. She wouldn’t hit the wolf, but maybe the bulk of the vehicle would finally scare it into moving. She dreaded the idea of trying to back a half a mile down the obstacle course of a driveway.
Its blue eyes widened again, and it sprang onto the hood, fangs only inches from the windshield. Morgen threw on the brakes, but she wasn’t going fast enough for the wolf to fly off. It remained on the hood, snarling at her.
“All right, all right,” she said, afraid the thing had rabies and that it might be able to break the windshield to get to her.
Even as she put the car in reverse, something happened to the wolf. It blurred and morphed, as if it were as malleable as clay. Morgen had no idea what was going on, but she didn’t want to stick around to find out.
She accelerated in reverse, but the back-up camera was spattered with mud, and rivulets of rain made it hard to see out the rear window. The car had barely gone five feet when a tire sank into a pothole. When she pushed the pedal harder, the tires only slipped in the mud.
As she struggled to maneuver out of the pothole, the wolf’s fur disappeared, replaced with bronze skin. Bronze human skin.
A naked man crouched on the hood, powerfully muscled arms and legs on display, along with male body parts that Morgen hadn’t seen since her divorce.
She was too terrified to think straight. What was happening?
The wolf—the man—leaped off the hood and landed in the mud beside the driver’s door. Now, she had a view of his upper body. Cut abs and pectorals, a head full of shaggy black hair, a mustache and goatee, and those same blue eyes. They were as striking against his dark skin as they had been in the gray-and-black furred face of the wolf. And every bit as angry.
She double-checked to make sure the door was locked.
“No trespassing,” he snarled through the window.
She hadn’t lowered it, and had no intention of doing so, but she heard his gruff voice clearly.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“Leave now, or I will tear your throat out.” His voice was accented, though she couldn’t place it, maybe because he was busy threatening her life.
He thrust an arm back down the road, the veins visible under his skin. If she hadn’t been terrified that he would punch a fist through the glass and strangle her, she might have admired his physique.
Lucky whined from the passenger seat.
“I know, buddy,” she whispered, still trying to navigate the car out of the pothole. Afraid the wolf-man didn’t understand that she was attempting to leave, she raised her voice to speak and buy time. “Look, this is 137 Alder Lane, isn’t it? I’m not trespassing. This is my grandmother’s property.”
Technically, it was now her property, left to her after Grandma Gwen’s passing. Her brothers had been bitter that they hadn’t been mentioned in the will, but Morgen wondered now what kind of mess she’d inherited.
“Get out,” the man snarled, sounding more like the wolf that he’d just been.
“Communication-link failure,” she muttered, quoting an error code she saw a lot at work. Or had before she’d been let go.
Not taking her eyes from him, she grabbed her phone off the console, took a clumsy one-handed picture—though he was standing so close that all she got was his naked torso—then put both hands on the wheel again.
“Maybe the police can use that to identify my murderer when my body is found,” she grumbled and wiggled the tires left and right as she tried accelerating again.
This time, the car lumbered out of the pothole. She backed down the road as quickly as she dared. Fortunately, the man didn’t follow the car. He merely stood in the mud with his fists on his hips and his legs spread, like some sculptor’s statue. Some sculptor’s very angry statue.
She spotted a place wide enough to turn the car around, then drove faster toward the road. Lucky grew braver as the wolf-man fell farther behind. He climbed into the back and resumed barking.
“FYI,” Morgen told him, her heart still hammering against her rib cage, “that is also not a pheasant.”
When she reached the main road, the rain picking up and spattering on the pavement, she turned to head into town. Maybe it was her imagination, but when she glanced back into the woods, she thought she spotted blue eyes watching her from the trees.