Sun Broken (The Wild Hunt #11) - Yasmine Galenorn Page 0,22

to teach you tonight?”

“I’m learning how to ward the house this week. She’s teaching me several protection rituals. I should be able to practice on our home in a couple weeks. Marilee says I have a natural gift for healing as well, and wants to teach me several spells. It feels so weird. I’m not a witch, I’m not Fae like you, but all of a sudden, here I am, learning magic.” She bit her lip, then added, “Marilee says she thinks Mama J. had some form of magical ability and that I inherited it. She thinks there may be some magic-born blood in my background. I want to get tested, though it kind of scares me. Because if I have it, then DJ will likely have it, too.”

I froze. “A wolf shifter using magic? That would be an unlikely scenario. I wonder how he would handle that knowledge. Wolf shifters are naturally suspicious of the magic-born, and magic. If you test true for it, how will you tell him?”

She shrugged. “I’ll deal with that when and if I get there. For one thing, it depends on how much. I mean, if I’ve only got a small percentage of magic-born in my background, then I doubt I would need to tell him. His wolf shifter nature is prominent.”

“But puberty often sets off latent abilities. That’s when you began noticing you were an empath, remember?” In fact, I remembered the very day when Angel told me that she had seen a dark cloud around our seventh-grade math teacher. The next day, he had died.

“I’ll talk to Cooper and ask him what he thinks.”

I finished the last of my meal and wiped my hands on a paper towel. “Okay, are you ready to head out? I need to get moving if I’m going to get through traffic in time to reach the marina.” The Fantastica was located in a slip in Portage Bay over in the North Broadway District. And while traffic should have eased up by now, I still didn’t want to be late. Morgana expected me to be on time and she didn’t accept bad traffic as an excuse.

We carried our garbage into the house, I gave Mr. Rumblebutt a quick cuddle, and then I headed for my car while Angel called for a taxi. It had been a long day, and it was about to get longer.

Chapter Six

The drive to Portage Bay took me only fifteen minutes—a surprisingly short time, except that it was finally past rush hour and I wasn’t driving downtown. The marina was near the Seattle Yacht Club, on a side street off of Fuhrman. Misty Lane ended in a small parking lot, with six parking slots. Two were marked “Reserved” and the others were empty. I eased my car into the slot nearest the dock and stepped out into the cooling evening.

The sky was partially cloudy, but we weren’t due for rain for at least a week. I inhaled deeply, the smell of the water mingling with fresh lilacs and that slightly dusty scent that hangs heavy in the air on spring evenings. The sun was beginning to vanish below the horizon, spreading out in long crimson and yellow fingers. It was nearing eight p.m. I’d be right on time.

I headed toward the end of the dock, where a blue houseboat gently rocked on the waves. Single story, it was about the size of a school bus. Three other houseboats were moored in the slips before the Fantastica, two illuminated by lights from inside.

Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to live on the water. While the thought appealed to me, there was also my father’s blood, the Autumn Stalker who loved the foundation of solid ground and needed the deep forests and the craggy mountains nearby. My best bet, I thought, would be to live on a lake, or near the shore between forest and ocean. But that wasn’t likely to happen any time soon.

As I approached the door of the Fantastica, it opened before I could knock. Aoife stood there, her eyes shimmering with the same green as mine. Her waist-length blond hair was caught up in a tousled chignon, with golden strands lightly kissing her cheeks. Her eyes lit up when she saw me.

“Ember, welcome back. Morgana said you’d be coming tonight.” She stood back to allow me in. As I entered the houseboat, it was exactly as I remembered it from the last time I had been here. The main