Starlight Web (Moonshadow Bay #1) - Yasmine Galenorn Page 0,51

The driver skidded, but he clipped him a good one. It was hard on the whole neighborhood when he died.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. Finally, I opted for, “Then you’ve been aware of shifters all your life.”

“I wanted to be a witch. But my mother told me we didn’t have the blood for it. I begged her to send me to one of the magic academies, but I couldn’t even get admitted. We just have no magical blood in our veins.”

“How did you come to start Conjure Ink?”

“I came across the Urban Legends organization about five years ago. I decided since they didn’t have a member site here in Western Washington, I’d create one. That’s when I began to pull together Conjure Ink.” He pulled into a drive-thru Starbucks and we all placed orders for far too much caffeine and sugar.

While waiting for our orders to be filled, I thought about Tad.

So many people envied those who were born to magical families, but there were other ways to work with magic, even if you didn’t have the aptitude. For instance, there were garden witches who worked on the practical level—they grew the herbs and harvested them under the right signs of the moon, and while they couldn’t cast the spells, they could commune with the plants and produce ethically sourced ingredients for those who could work the magic. But I knew that sort of side business wouldn’t have suited Tad at all. He had a thirst for knowledge, and running Conjure Ink seemed perfect for him.

As Tad handed around our order and I passed out the cups and pastries, we got underway again.

“So, my friend Ari—she’s been my best friend since I was little, is going into my side business with me,” I said. “Since we both work day jobs, we don’t have to rely on it for income, which means we can be selective about time and the cases we take on.”

He nodded. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Once you start relying on something for your daily bread, it becomes a much heavier responsibility.”

Caitlin, who had been listening from the back of the van, said, “So what does Ari do for a living? Moonshadow Bay is small, but I don’t remember ever running into someone with that name.”

“Ari owns a hair salon. She runs it out of her own house—she’s tiny, petite…flame-red hair?” When Caitlin shook her head, I added, “How long have you been here? I don’t remember you from high school.”

Caitlin grinned. “I went to high school fifty years ago. I’m a bobcat shifter, remember? Shifters live a lot older than most humans, or even than most witches. I was born in 1952.”

Longevity rates could really be confusing for those who weren’t part of the Otherkin community. Shifters were long-lived, well into two or three hundred years or more. Witches—magical families like my own—were one step away from human. We lived a lot longer than most humans, a few up to two hundred, though mostly we topped out around one-fifty, and we aged slower so we stayed aware and able most of our lives. Vampires, whom I knew existed but had never met one, of course could live on much longer than either the shifters or witches. And there were other members of the Otherkin community.

Hank sort of straddled the edge. He was a psychic—a human with intense psychic abilities. Which meant he and Tad would age faster than Caitlin and me.

That made everything clearer. “That’s why you weren’t in my class. I thought you might be younger than me, but I guess that’s not the case.”

“Can I ask something?” Hank said. “How did you get the name ‘January’?”

I laughed. “My mother and father were convinced they were having a boy. I was conceived a few years before they could use ultrasound to determine gender. I’m not sure why they thought that I was going to be a boy, but they were so sure that they only picked out boy names. When I arrived without a penis, they were so thrown they couldn’t figure out what to name me. So—”

“Let me guess. You were born in January?” Caitlin asked.

“January 16, and yes. That’s how I got my name. They were as equally uncreative about my middle name. They decided to name me January K. Jaxson. That would be ‘K’ as in the letter, not the name. I tell people it’s ‘Kay’ when they ask, just to make things simpler, but it’s really just a placeholder