Blood Ties - D. R. Rosier Page 0,2

with windows, so that anyone outside would see an empty room instead of a void of darkness.

I paid careful attention, even though I was different. As an angel I wasn’t truly a shifter and witch. I was an angel with two fifths of my powers. Angels didn’t need to speak the words to cast a spell.

I’d discovered in the last few weeks that even though a witch could form and modify their power and aura to a certain extent, they didn’t have nearly the fine control to do so that I had. That’s why they needed the spoken word, and to break up the spells into neat little sections. It was also good knowledge to have, and I could cast that way. I often did cast verbally the first time I cast a spell, but after that I could form the magic, my aura, and the intent of the spell with nothing by my mind and discipline, to cast a spell. I could also form it in its entirety at once, as long as I could hold all the disparate concepts in my mind at once. If not, it took me a little time to cycle through them, but without the need to speak aloud that happened at the speed of thought.

I could’ve just cheated and observed Babette. She was a particularly precocious thirteen-year-old witch who was almost always first in class to successfully cast a new spell. Watching her aura and power directly, I could skip the whole casting it myself with words the first time, with the knowledge of the intents and focuses and just form my magic and aura directly. But I was more disciplined than that, and I wanted to be able to do it both ways. Maybe that was just pride and stubbornness, but I’d like to think I learned the spell better that way. Power wasn’t easy, and it took work, everything in life worth learning did. Cutting corners would just make me sloppy, and more importantly it’d make learning far more advanced spells with twenty to sixty words much harder to learn later after I was done with the curriculum and moved on to self-study. Better to put in the hard work now to have a solid base to build upon, or at least that’s how I saw it.

I wasn’t the first in class to get it, but I wasn’t a slacker and the last either. It took me about six seconds to cast the spell with words, but when I duplicated the feat with just forming it directly in my magic and aura, it took just over a second. Which really, was a fantastic advantage, but I had to do the work to get there. As usual, life wasn’t easy, but it was also good, and rewarding.

The complications of being mated to the shifter alpha and the heir to the witches were diverse and many, not to mention working toward my own ambitions of becoming an enforcer to protect humanity from the dangers they were unaware of, and to take down evil. But it was all also very much worth it in my mind, for more reasons than one, but none so important as my mates. Tiffany and Ginny were a blessing in my life, and despite the craziness of reality in my new world, I wouldn’t change a damned thing.

It’s strange how the smallest of things could change everything. It’d all started with taking out the restaurant trash and pushing a garbage bin into the path of three rogue shifters to save a sexy blonde that hadn’t needed saving.

Reality truly was stranger than fiction…

Chapter Two

The heir of the coven had her own small office on the first floor. I headed that way after class broke up. It was around eleven and we had a little time before we had to head back to the pack building for lunch with Ginny.

Tiffany’s door was open when I arrived, and I paused for a moment to take her beauty in. A incomparable beauty that still blew my mind on a regular basis. She was looking down at her tablet on the desk, and I was pretty sure she hadn’t seen me yet. Her soft silky liquid midnight hair half shaded her face as it hung down, while the rest of it flowed down her body like a waterfall of midnight. Her dark vivid cerulean eyes were filled with intelligence and concentration as she stared at the tablet.

She had soft cheekbones, and lovely tanned and