Moon Child (The Year of the Wolf #2) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,59

stayed put for a year, maybe two, at the most, and then we had some truancy issues so my father had us on the move again.

“Traveling around is what we did best. The poverty? Nothing worse than what I had to deal with during those times.” A breath escaped her. “Father was a good shot, and there were periods when he had to go hunting just to put food on the table. I always hated that. But those were the lows, and somehow, he always managed to get us out of it. I have no idea how, but something would come through, and we’d be back on top once more.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“You’d think so. I just… I don’t know.”

“What? Come on, tell me.” I reached over and ran my hand over her arm.

“Truly, I don’t know, Austin. It’s just something I sensed.”

“Like what?”

“When I touched Cyrilo’s mind, it was black. I thought that was fitting. Like imagery, you know? He was evil. Therefore, his aura would be black.” She exhaled roughly. “Pitch like coal. It was disturbing. But when I touched Lara, I saw something.”

“What? What did you see?”

“A reflection of my color. That’s also black.”

“You’re not evil,” I scoffed, instantly hitting to the heart of the matter, because I knew that had to be what she was thinking. That was why she sounded so pensive.

“No, I’m not.” Her lips twitched as she shot me a look.

“You’ve never seen your aura before?”

“How would I?”

“In a mirror?” I asked dryly.

“Doesn’t work like that,” was her calm retort, when, if I’d asked Ethan a similar and somewhat obvious question, he’d have slapped me upside the head. I swore to the Mother, I had the best mate ever. “So if I’m not evil, and my energy is black like his, just like coal, then the link has to be blood, doesn’t it?”

“There are many other variables—”

“I’m sure there are,” she agreed, her tone reasonable. “But when I saw Lara, her coloring was silver. A gleaming silver. The complete opposite.”

It didn’t take much to piece things together. “Did you ever see Jana’s coloring?”

“No. I spent most of the time when I was a teenager ignoring my gifts, because they were an inconvenience. They usually got me into trouble, and when Lara was unable to control her own, it just got us into more bother with father, so it was a deterrent against using them. He already beat us enough without having to add to the list of reasons why he’d slap us.” As rage filtered through me at her words, she reached over and patted my arm. She soothed, “He’s dead, there’s no need to get angry anymore.”

“There’s every need.”

“I appreciate it, but I don’t want you wasting energy on him. He’s gone for good, and that makes me feel infinitely better.”

I just hummed at that, because in my opinion, it wasn’t enough. Draga Krasowski needed his ass kicked, and only then would I be satisfied he’d got his.

“Only when I was fortune telling and reading tarot did I start to rely on my gifts, and even then, it wasn’t that necessary. I had to stay under the radar or I’d come to someone’s attention, and that was the last thing I needed. So I kept it to love lives and misery at home. Simple.

“What I saw today… It wasn’t just a different color, it was a different feel. Her energy was like mine, but the coloring wasn’t.”

“If your dad got aggressive because you didn’t jump high enough when he told you to, do you really think your mom would’ve had the guts to have an affair?” I asked her again, trying to get to the heart of the matter.

“No. I don’t. But that’s what I’m saying. If he sold her out, then…he couldn’t get angry, could he? And kids are often the result of sex, aren’t they?” she said wryly, but her eyes were loaded with a bitterness that hurt me to witness.

I wasn’t used to that look in my mate’s eyes, and I wanted to take it away, wanted to free her from it, but I couldn’t. She was buried in the past, steeped in her personal history, parts of her life I could never touch, would only be able to witness from afar and from the limits of what she shared with me.

For the first time in my life, I found myself wanting to know everything about a person. Sure, there’d been whispers of that before, ever since I met