Evershaw woke up out of a dead sleep feeling like he was on fire. On fucking fire. He kicked the covers off the bed and lurched upright, staring down at himself and then around the room, searching for the smoke. Waiting for the alarms. Trying to feel the flames.

Nothing.

Not even the scent of smoke or fire lingered.

And yet—he knew he’d been on fire. He’d never had a dream feel so real. It couldn’t have just been a hallucination, even with all the fucked-up stuff from that day.

His wolf side wouldn’t let him lie back down or just ignore it. It was a sign. Being on fire was a sign of something. He just had to figure out what.

He pulled on sweatpants and started pacing, and soon his room was too constricting and small. He strode into the halls of his private wing, the suite of rooms that were reserved just for him, and circled wider, searching for a hint of what drove him to move. Nothing. More and more nothing.

He moved into the family side of the building, where Todd stayed and a few distant cousins periodically bedded down. Still nothing. Still burning. His calves ached and his knees shook, threatening to give out, but when he paused to take stock of whether he was actually about to collapse, the symptoms faded. They grew stronger as he moved into the packhouse, down the silent halls, and made his way through the common rooms and into the protected wing where they kept questionable guests, crazy wolves, and newcomers.

Guest quarters.

His skin practically curled and blistered as he thought of the guest quarters, and a growl built up in his chest. The guest. The witch.

It had to be her doing. That hateful crone hexed him.

He snarled and stormed toward the guest quarters where she was kept. He almost barreled right into Henry as the younger wolf staggered, half-asleep, toward the same room. Evershaw glared and Henry immediately ducked his head. “Sorry, sir.”

“What the fuck are you doing up?”

“Checking on the witch,” Henry said, still not making eye contact. He gestured in the direction of the secured guest quarters. “There was an alarm. She’s doing something, so I wanted to make sure she’s—“

They both froze as a strangled yell, decidedly feminine and pained, reached them through the reinforced door. Evershaw’s chest compressed and he lurched forward. Maybe it wasn’t the witch hexing him; maybe it was her call for help. How the fuck she managed to affect him like that, he didn’t know, and he’d make sure she didn’t do it again—but since he was already there, fine.

He jerked his chin at the door and surreptitiously shifted his feet to deal with the agony in his legs. “Open it. Fast.”

Henry immediately removed the chains and undid the bolts, and the urgency increased as the witch stopped trying to stifle her cries and instead wailed so plaintively that it set his hair on end. He growled more. “Faster. Faster.”

“It’s almost…there,” Henry said, and then the door was open.

Evershaw shouldered his way through the door and found that damn witch in her underwear collapsing on top of a blanket, her legs red and blistered from thighs to toes. He picked her up as she howled and writhed, fighting whatever it was that burned her, and carried her into the bathroom. Broken glass cut his feet as his feet slid in blood, snapping over his shoulder at Henry to get one of the trained medics in the pack to get their asses up to deal with the girl’s burns, and walked into the shower with the witch.

Irritation kept him pissed off and heated as he smashed his fist against the shower controls and cold water beat down on them. The witch’s nails gouged into his chest and arms and even his face, and he had to admit she was a determined little thing even if she couldn’t fight for shit.

He snapped, “You’re not on fire, just calm the fuck down.”

“I kn-kn-know that, you fucking moron,” she said, though the fierceness of her anger was mitigated by the fact that she was shaking and still trying to hop from foot to foot. “It was boiling water, not fire.”

“Great,” Evershaw muttered. He angled the shower heads to aim more at her, so he didn’t get as much ice water in his face, and took just a bit of satisfaction in her shivering and cursing. “You woke me up with this bullshit. Is this some kind of scheme to get back at me or something?’

“F-F-Fuck you,” she said. She twisted to try and get free, and Evershaw was tempted to just let her fall on her face. Would serve her right for all the gratitude she’d shown.

But instead he looked down and saw the T-shirt clinging to her body under the stream of water, her breasts full and heavy under the thin fabric and her nipples hard from the icy bath. Well. His brain short-circuited and his thoughts drifted and it was suddenly a very good thing that he was in the cold shower, too.

The girl stopped fighting and braced her hands on the tile. In a brief flash, Evershaw imagined her completely naked, bent over in the same position but with him behind her, and the shower full of steam instead of cursing.

The wolf thought it was a great idea and there wasn’t any reason to wait. She only wore panties. It would have been so easy to tear them off and slide up behind her and...

“Let me go,” she said.

He blinked and the image disappeared, and he released the girl immediately—to save himself from the distraction, of course, and not because she asked. Her breath no longer sounded so ragged and pained, and she didn’t hop from foot to foot. The skin of her legs and ass—he checked specifically, just for safety reasons—remained red and angry and blistered in areas.

He stepped back and frowned as he looked at the shards of broken glass that had cut his feet and left bloody footprints on the tile. “What the hell were you doing in here?”

“Trying to figure out who poisoned you,” she muttered.

“By dropping boiling water on yourself?”

“I fucking hate you so much,” she said, and abruptly turned and shoved him into the wall.

She took him by surprise just enough that his feet slipped on the blood and wet tile, and Evershaw found himself on the floor. He was up pretty fucking fast, since he was the kind of alpha who didn’t let anyone stand over him, but it still took his head a few seconds to reorient. From the look on the witch’s face, she was pretty fucking perplexed about how she managed to knock him over, too.

Evershaw growled, his wolf starting to get agitated, and backed her into the corner with his body, looming as tall and broad as he could manage to intimidate her. “Don’t. Do. That. Again.”

“Who’s going to stop me?” Her head had to tilt waaaaaaay back so she could still meet his gaze, and the challenge in her eyes set his hackles up even more as she shoved the tangled dark hair out of her face. “Your ass hit the floor pretty hard, slick.”

She challenged him. She challenged him. His fists clenched so he wouldn’t grab her shoulders and shake some sense into her. “Look, witch,” he started.

A cleared throat from the doorway made him pause and glance back, and the witch ducked to try and slide around him. He caught her arm and shoved her back under the stream of cold water, scowling at the medic who’d appeared with Henry. “Sweep up the broken glass. Find her new clothes. Get Mercy.”

The witch gurgled something that might have been an objection, and he dragged her out of the water so she could catch her breath. When she started to hiss threats at him again, he put her back under the water and waited for his pack to carry out his orders.

Luckily everyone knew his temper and didn’t delay, so the medic had swept up the broken glass and dragged in his bag of supplies by the time Henry reappeared with towels and clean clothes and Mercy. The female wolf still looked half-asleep, and it was the quietest she’d ever been that Evershaw had seen, since she didn’t immediately start talking.

He still had a tight grip on the witch’s bicep as he turned off the water and gave her a second to splutter and shake her head and blink the water from her eyes. She immediately started cursing and spitting and coming up with some pretty vile accusations about his preferences for fuck buddies, enough that even Henry blinked in surprise. The medic smirked but tried to hide it as he fussed with the supplies.

Evershaw ignored it and instead hauled her out of the shower to stand her up on the cushy mat in front of the vanity, then took the towel from Henry and wrapped it around her so it covered her from mid-thigh up. He didn’t want anyone else looking at her in the T-shirt that clung to her like a second skin. Or the panties that clung to her ass in the most appealing...

Mercy cleared her throat and gave him a raised-eyebrow look, and Evershaw rethought the wisdom of having the young wolf look after the witch. She was too observant by half. He hadn’t been staring at the witch’s ass for that long.

He didn’t let the witch get far, and instead kept her arms swaddled in the towel as he gestured for the medic to approach. “She somehow managed to dump boiling water on herself. Treat it.”

The medic, a low-key wolf with a touch of gray at his temples that made him a little older than Evershaw, yawned a bit and opened up his bag to fish out some kind of ointment. “Burns, huh? Normally boiling water doesn’t spread like that, boss.”

The witch made a pained noise as the medic rested his fingertips against one of the angry red marks on her calf, and she tried to twist away despite Evershaw’s iron grip. “Stop. It’s fine. It’s not…a real burn. It’s just magic.”

“Just magic?” Mercy perked up immediately and leaned forward to peer at the burns over the medic’s shoulder. “Magic boiled the water or magic made the burns?”

It was way too late at night—or too early in the morning—for that bullshit. Evershaw cleared his throat before either the witch or Mercy could get a word in edgewise. “Worry about that later. Put something on the burns, then the witch goes to bed and Mercy sleeps on the couch to keep an eye on her. Henry, outside the door. Tom, deal with the burns and come back to check on them at ten.”

The witch scowled so fiercely she looked like a cat who’d gotten caught in the rain and was pissed off at the world because of it, and he laughed in sheer surprise.

His pack members froze, looking at each other, but the witch’s expression darkened considerably and she ground out the words from between her teeth. “Let. Me. Go. Now.”

He sure as fuck didn’t take orders from her, especially in front of his pack. “No. You woke me up with this bullshit, so I’m going to deal with it so you don’t do it again. Got it?”

Her eyes narrowed and flashed an enchanting green, dark as emeralds and just as rare. “Don’t be ridiculous. I wasn’t yelling anywhere near—“

“I woke up to having my legs on fire, witch.” He turned his attention to what the medic was doing, smoothing some kind of medicinal-smelling lotions on the girl’s legs, because he didn’t want to acknowledge the shock in the witch’s face. Maybe she hadn’t meant to wake him up after all.

“You want some aloe, too?” Tom asked laconically, looking at Evershaw with one eyebrow arched.

Smug motherfucker. And Mercy giggled. Giggled. At him. He scowled, just as irritated at that damn witch, and snapped his fingers at the younger wolves. “That’s it. Out.”

“Don’t be so sensitive,” Mercy said. She practically bounced to her feet and out to the main room, and Henry followed, shaking his head.

Which left Evershaw standing there with the speechless witch and the taciturn medic. Tom straightened and pulled a few more packets of ointment out of his medic bag, and handed them to the witch. “This is aloe with a mild numbing agent in it. If the burns don’t, uh, magically disappear by the time you wake up, reapply a bit of this and it should get you through. No bandages on it, though—let the burns breathe for a while. Unless they blister and any of those blisters break. Then I’ll fix you up with something else.”

The witch shivered and shook but tried to unwrap the towel enough so she could take the packets of ointment, but Evershaw didn’t release her enough. He jerked his chin at the door behind Tom. “Give them to Mercy. She’ll deal with it.”

The witch’s teeth chattered as she tried to scowl at him. “Y-Y-Y-You’re an ass-ass-asshole.”

Tom snorted and beat a hasty retreat, but Evershaw didn’t dignify it with a response. He marched her into the main room and stood her up in front of Mercy, then finally released his grip on her arm and the towel. “Make sure she sleeps.”

The wolves nodded, ready to obey orders, and the witch was the only one who snarled about it. He ignored her and walked out of the room, ready to put on dry clothes and go the fuck back to sleep.

But when he was finally back in his bed, staring at the darkness, he couldn’t sleep. The witch’s expression when he said he’d felt the fire, same as her, troubled him. Everything about her troubled him. Even that fine ass of hers.