Page 80 of Cursed Heirs

Her magic binding me to the ground dissipated and I staggered to my feet, looking out where they had been but moments ago.

Now long gone.

In more ways than one.

16

~Xavier~

“I told you! I fucking told you all!” Tal fumed, stomping up and down the patio as I watched from a shaded spot in the kitchen.

“Take flight, or come inside and discuss this with me. It’s hard to keep calling through the doors.”

“Right. Sorry,” he said. “I’m still not used to this new thing with you,” he said, coming back inside.

I rolled my eyes. “Please, this is a test. You wanted to make sure I wasn’t gonna burst out into the sunlight the first chance I got with the guards my father had stationed around Abigail’s property having been re-deployed to the Dark Fae Realm along with a handful ofExemplarmembers, including Professor Marlowe.”

They’d been sent there to reinforce the gates and to safeguard the Dark Fae Realm while the King, the Prince, and the Commander of the army were incapacitated, and the army had taken a brutal hit. It had even taken them hours to break through the immobilization spell that Constantine had put on Cassius and the remainder of the army that had survived his brutal attack.

Marlowe was also heading back there to see to that fucker, Taelorn.

Our key to tracking down Constantine and Alena.

There was also a world-wide search on now byExemplarinto tracking their whereabouts, something that had been ramped up now that Constantine’s attacks had ceased. It was also because Abigail had apparently seen Alena with him when she’d headed to the DFR and come back with an unconscious Orpheus and Saryan.

She hadn’t elaborated—at least not in front of us. But suffice to say, whatever she’d seen had been bad enough for her to make things personal for once and to useExemplarresources for her, when she never usually did that and operated precisely by the book.

We’d know more when Orpheus and Saryan woke up.

It couldn’t come fast enough.

Knowing Alena had been there was eating at me and Talon something fierce.

Knowing she’d been there within reach, out in the fucking open, right there with Ore.

We were desperate for news of her, to know that she was okay, to know that Constantine hadn’t hurt her, to know that there was hope there. With Abigail so tight-lipped it had just served to exacerbate our fear for Alena. All she’d told us was that she was mobile anduninjured.That had been suspiciously specific. Why hadn’t she just said that Alena wasn’thurt.Did that mean she wasn’t wounded, but Constantine had hurt her in other ways? Had he… touched her?

“Fine, all right?” Tal spoke, pulling me from my troubled thoughts. “Maybe it was a little bit of a test, me making sure. Because Iamworried about it, about you, and I’m gonna be for a long while after what happened, what you did.”

I went to him and laid my hands on his shoulders. “I won’t do anything like that again. I swear it to you. What Orpheus did for me… what he showed me… it’s shifted things.”

“You need to see somebody, though, okay? You might feel okay now, but—”

“I know.” I gave his shoulders a squeeze. “Iknow, brother. My dad has already set me up with somebody.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It’s the same specialist Healer who he saw after we lost my mom,andwhen he dabbled in black magic in trying to spare me three years ago.”

“Well, good.” He eased away and shoved his hand through his hair. “Really good. That’s one less thing to be freaking out about right now then.” He spun around, yelling, and having yet another outburst as he had been since Ore had left, something that had escalated majorly when Ore had been brought back here unconscious after whatever the fuck had gone down in the DFR. “One thing! As if we didn’t have enough without Orpheus running off into a fucking warzone and getting himself hurt again! I mean, shit!”

“We don’t know what happened yet.”

“We don’t, huh? What else is there to know? He went there and came back fucked-up! Hurt yet again! He obviously went up against Constantine again and got his ass kicked!”

“It wasn’t Constantine,” a familiar voice came from the door before Orpheus walked on in, pulling a purple long sleeve tee over his bare chest, then did up his gray jeans. He’d obviously come down here in a rush.

While I took him in, Tal bolted over to him and threw his arms around him.

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