Highland Son (Highland Sorcery: A New Dawn) by Clover Autrey Read Free Book Online Page B

Her eyes snapped to his. “Please.”
    “I won’t. I promise.”
    He sank down to sit beside her on the edge of the bed. Maybe there was a way to ease her mind of having magic. It could be a frightening thing. “I sometimes got nosebleeds too. At first.”
    She looked down at her lap. “You did?”
    “Sure.” But he’d had his mother and father around to help him learn how to find the core of his magic to better focus its power. “Next time when you release your magic, come at it from a different direction. It will help reduce the nosebleeds.”
    “What do you mean, come at it from a different direction?” Her fingers worked at a wrinkle in her trousers.
    “Find that place deep within your belly…” He took her hand and pressed it to her abdomen. “Right around here where everything is still and quiet…and waiting.”
    “Waiting?” She glanced up at him.
    He nodded his head. “Waiting for you to open it.”
    “Sounds vague.”
    He smiled. “You’ll know it when you first touch it and then it’s smooth sailing from there.”
    “Okay.”
    “Before you let your magic just go, reach deep within for it first, that place, where your essence resides, and then use it to focus and sharpen what you want to do. It makes things a lot easier, and a lot less painful.”
    She smiled sadly. “Did your mother teach you this?”
    “She did.”
    “So…you’re kind of a healer yourself?”
    His smiled deepened. “No. I take more after my father.”
    “Which is what?”
    Alexander frowned. It’s not that he didn’t want to tell her, but saying he was a bluidy sorcerer, last of the line of High Sorcerers came off a tad bit as boastful. “I have a lot of unique abilities.”
    She didn’t pry, but instead squeezed his hand still in hers and brought it from her belly to rest on her thigh, still entwined with his. “You’re fortunate to have had parents to teach you.”
    “I’m sorry you didn’t, Jewel.” Because of his family. They brought the Sifts into being. But they were also working to rid the world of them.
    She shrugged with one shoulder. “I didn’t even know my mother had magic until she was gone. My brother and I…she kept that from us. I guess she hoped we wouldn’t take after her. But apparently we did. Guess it was latent. My brother figured out what he could do long before I did…”
    “You have a brother?”
    He felt her stiffen beside her. “He’s gone.”
    “I am so sorry.” He felt like a heel for bringing it up.
    She brushed it aside, clearly not wanting to talk about it. Who could blame her? “What about your parents? Are they at your lighthouse?”
    “No. They’re…not with me.” Because he’d left them forty years in the past. Them, and all his aunts and uncles who had come to the future to help him. He’d sent them all back to Scotland where they’d be safe from this timeline. It had been a selfish move, yet he’d also remembered his childhood, waking that Christmas from a horrific ordeal of monsters coming for him, and his aunts and uncles being there…and for several years after. Had he allowed them to remain in this timeline with him, his entire childhood would have been altered. He didn’t understand how. He just felt it in his bones.
    His uncles and aunts time in this future had come to fruition. But déithe, he missed them.
    Yet he’d often wondered what happened to his parents and his aunts and uncles and young cousins when he’d jumped ahead through time from the year twenty thirty-five to twenty eighty-two. Had they survived the past decades on the Scottish coast while the Sifts ravaged the world? If they had, his parents would be in their eighties on a different continent. So many times he’d yearned to create a rift in space and go there to find out for himself. Just to know what became of them. Yet creating any rift was dangerous. The Sift could feel the telltale vibrations of the puncture within the rifts and follow the signature straight back to his