“And I’ve been ignoring your calls for days. You’d think you’d get the point.”
He pushes inside the shop, stopping only when Ansel extends his wand. On instinct, he throws his hands in the air. “Wait, you don’t understand! I discovered something while I was trying to salvage the trace amount of magic that was left in the broken dust pendant.”
“You have three seconds to leave my shop,” Ansel tells him. “One?—”
“Now, just a minute!”
“Two…”
“He’s here,” I sigh. “We might as well listen to what he has to say.”
Ansel looks like he’s going to argue, but after several tense seconds, he nods abruptly. “Fine, what did you discover?”
His tone makes me think he wasn’t joking about the pig thing. The sorcerer is proof that it’s dangerous to rouse night owls too early.
Russell gazes at me as though I’m the most interesting conundrum he’s ever encountered. Then he boldly announces, “Kit is a shifter.”
Chapter 17
Feathers All in a Ruffle
“Are you insane?” Ryder demands, voicing my own thoughts out loud.
“I didn’t believe it myself,” Russell exclaims in a rush. “But it’s right there, in her magic. It must be a recessive gene somewhere in her lineage. Pixie magic is predominant, of course. You all saw the dust yourselves. But there’s shifter, and possibly high fae, mixed in as well.”
High fae makes sense—he’s seeing Rowan’s mage magic. Butshifter?
“Pixie magic only passes to children with full-pixie parents,” Ryder argues. “There’s no way for a pixie to have a shifter in her family tree.”
“That’s why I was so baffled when I discovered it,” Russell says.
Ansel has remained quiet, but he slowly turns to peer at Rowan. “Kit, did you say Rowan changed without his wand this morning?”
“He did.” My brain works at an alarming pace. “Russell, what does shifter magic look like in its raw, extracted form?”
Glad to finally be included, Russell says, “It’s almost impossible to extract. Thick as heck, shifter magic. Won’t siphon worth a darn.”
Ansel and I meet each other’s eyes. If I’m not mistaken, he’s running down the same bunny trail I am.
“If you can’t extract it, how did you recognize it in Kit’s magic then?” Ryder demands.
“I said it’s hard, not impossible. Though I’ve only ever seen it done once. My colleague managed to thin a wolf shifter’s magic a few years ago—not a great idea, let me tell you. The guy had side effects for months. Anyway. He got maybe a quarter of an amulet out of him, and we were able to experiment with it a bit. It does this weird thing—when you put a drop of it on a slide, it crystallizes like a snowflake. Kit’s dust was mimicking that.”
“You said you saw signs of high fae magic in there as well?” Ansel demands.
“Looked like it. Hard to tell. Her dust was just a little more fluid than powdery. Could have been the shifter magic, you know?”
“Rowan’s mom is a Neilfellow, right?” Ansel asks Ryder and me, repeatedly snapping his fingers as he thinks. “But has anyone ever met his dad?”
The room falls silent.
“What’s with the owl?” Russell finally asks, realizing we keep looking at Rowan.
Ignoring him, I ask Ansel, “A mage can have a shifter parent instead of a human one, right?” I ask. “That happens?”
“Yeah.” He scowls. “Most of the time, they’ll inherit shifter magic, but it’s not unusual for them to be born without any magic at all. Rarely will they be able to wield both. But if they can, they would shift for the first time when they’re a child—and Rowan is most certainly not a child.”
Rowan flaps his wings, extremely flustered now. I can only imagine how frustrating this is for him, especially when he can’t join the conversation.
