Page 14 of Bombshell

“I’m not here to disturb your peace, Euphemia, you should know that by now. I was just curious about the magic pulse earlier, I’ve never felt anything like that from you before.”

Dallan’s earlier words about the pulse being a ‘new record’ rang in my mind as I tried to keep my face impassive. Of course Alexander wouldn’t have felt it before as the man and the rest of the coven rarely came down from the foot of the mountain where the mayor’s mansion was. Though, mansion was maybe too simple of a word for the veritable palace and its expansive gardens and ridiculously opulent insides.

I straightened, nearly giving into the urge to lean back into Dallan’s bulk for comfort, but I didn’t and just shook my head. “That’s none of your business, Alexander.”

Okay, well that wasn’t completely true. My magical panic attacks were usually thanks to the result of him and his choices in life, but he didn’t need to know that.

When I was younger my panic attacks from being in a completely new world learning to read and write like a regular human, learning how to exist in the complex social world that was a coven, and quite literally not fitting in anywhere, were usually treated as a nuisance by the man in front of me.

But they hadn’t started becoming magical untilafterI left the mayor’s mansion and hadn’t grown in size until the past few years anyway. In fact, all of my magical abilities had started to grow exponentially in the last decade, causing me to be able to do things I’d never been able to do before.

Something that I was pretty sure Alexander could feel even as he stood several feet away from me. His magic had slipped out of him and started to prod at the edge of mine, testing it, evaluating it for the changes I knew he would find.

Before, when I was a child, it used to hurt when he did this, like thousands of needles slowly slipping under my skin and into each nerve ending until I nearly sobbed for him to stop. But now my magic seemed to snap back at him like a wild animal until he withdrew the unseen threads back into his body with a contemplative expression.

“Your magic has matured.” He said it like it was a fact that I couldn’t ignore. “I didn’t think it ever would.”

“And?” I asked, my voice flat. “What of it?”

Alexander frowned at me, his eyes narrowing. “Andit means that you need to be taught again to develop your magical skills.”

“Like hell she will,” Dallan cut in, clearly done with holding his silence. “I think the decades have made you forget, Finch, but the last time you had your paws on her she nearly didn’t survive it.”

That was a memory I wished I could make myself forget, but unfortunately I’d never been any good at mind magic either so the memory came bubbling up to the surface as clear as the day it had been made.

I held up a hand to stop Dallan before he could tell Alexander to leave. As much as I wanted the man out of my life permanently, I needed him and now I had incentive for the greedy bastard.

“Okay, I’ll do it.”

Both men turned to me with twin expressions of incredulity, like I’d lost my mind in the past minute and there was a goodchance they would need to lock me up in the psych ward for all of our sakes.

“...Say that again?” Alexander asked, clearly having expected me to reject him outright.

“I said I’ll do it,” I repeated, forcing my arms to loosen to my sides as my vines slipped under my shirt to press themselves into Dallan’s chest in a silent plea for him to stay quiet. “But on my terms and I need you to do something for me.”

“Lass—” Dallan began, ignoring my plea, but I cut him off with a stern look, shaking my head.

I wasn’t going to let Daphne die the same way my mother did, and if that meant making a deal with Alexander, then so fucking be it.

Chapter 4

“And why am I back learning the foundations of magic again?” I complained as I used my vines to push the ancient tome that Alexander had put in front of me back across the table at him.

It had been two days since we made our little deal and I was already seriously regretting it.

As per our agreement I came up to the mansion every day with Daphne and Cash in tow. Alexander would check her, prescribe prenatal potions, and chant some spells that I’d never heard of let alone seen before and then they left to head back down the hill to the shop.

Meanwhile I was stuck in this mansion with him again for the first time in fifty years.

Never did I ever think I would be back here, sitting at the same ancient table in the same ancient library learning about the same old magic again.

And yet here I was, fulfilling my end of the bargain to a man I could barely stand. As long as he helped keep Daphne and her baby healthy, I would come and learn magic from him inthe afternoons now that my magic had, as he put it,‘matured.’ Alexander spoke about it like it was a second puberty—gag.

Truthfully, it didn’t feel any different than I usually did. I’d even tried using simple spells earlier and they fizzled out without so much as a spark… just like they always did.

“Because you seem to have forgotten the basics in the half a century you were away,” Alexander said, pushing the book back to me without looking up from the practice test he’d given me once we’d sat down for our lesson today.

I snorted at his word choice. Away was one way to put it. I preferred to say that I ran away, though being booted from the mansion and the coven was probably a more apt description of the events that led up to me leaving.

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