"It's singing now, Father," she replied. The sensations were similar to her bond with Jule: sweet and warm. She ached for him, and the magic thrummed around her, echoing her loneliness. Laughter rose within her, and the magic laughed with her. It flipped her hair and swirled around her. For the first time in her life, she felt her magic was a gift and not a curse.
"Tomorrow, we'll come here just before sunset. The magic is at its strongest between dusk and midnight. Come, daughter."
Yully opened her eyes, suddenly aware she was floating two feet of the ground. She panicked, and the magic released her.
"I've been waiting for generations for you," her father said, his eyes glowing. "I groomed hundreds of others like you, and only you can do this."
Yully didn't ask about her predecessors. She suspected they were buried with the Guardians. As she stepped away from the magic of the Henge, sorrow for those women who came before her pulled her from the powerful high. Her eyes went from the ancient site glowing in the moonlight to her father's form as he walked up the hill.
A new emotion was forming in her breast: hatred. She hadn't expected it to form so fast or so strong. She stepped away from the monument amplifying her magic and followed her father. The intensity of her emotion faded as she crested the hill, but it didn't completely disappear.
She'd born untold ridicule from everyone she'd ever met and believed her father to be the only one who understood and protected her. The past few days had turned her beliefs on end. With the rise of her anger came another emotion: gratitude for finding Jule, the one man who had accepted her.
Yully touched Jule's medallion at her neck. She'd make him proud and protect him and the rest of the Guardians from her father, even if destroying her father took her own life. The Guardians deserved this after losing so many of them.
Resolved, she trailed her father down the hill, through the people who couldn't see them, and to the awaiting car. She couldn't help thinking her life had been wasted and hoped she still had a chance to make it up to the one person who mattered.
Neither spoke on their return trip to the bed and breakfast, and she went straight to her room. Yully slept fitfully and awoke before dawn, unable to rest with her troubled thoughts. She rose and stretched then left the small house on a hill for a quick walk. The day dawned cloudy and cold with a light rain that chilled her after ten minutes. She continued to walk, needing to feel the cold to remind her she was still alive. She returned and searched for her father.