Page 3 of Fallen Heirs

Whenever anyone brought it up, he just shut down or changed the subject, though.

Even with Alena.

And we were all in closer quarters than ever right now. With Electi Academy currently shut down for a few weeks to recover after that battle and everything, we were staying together at Abigail’s house. Usually I’d go with Xavier and so would Ore, because of the estrangement that had been going on with Ore and his father and the DFR. But Alena had wanted to stay in her mother’s house, to say goodbye and be close to memories of her while she worked through her grief, and she’d invited us to stay with her.

It had to be weird for X as well as Alena, because the last time he’d stayed there he’d tried to burn himself to ashes in the sun. It had been a dark time.

He hadn’t said a word about it so far.

And today clearly wasn’t the time to get into it either.

“So we haven’t really talked about it with everything else, but it must feel amazing to have your magic back, right?” I asked him, hoping to inject something more lighthearted into all this shit.

“It is, yeah,” he said. “I feel like myself again.” He shook his head to himself. “After all that effort of trying to be okay without it, huh?”

“I know. But it wasn’t just about that. It was about you learning to become comfortable with your vampire side. And you’ve made major strides there when it was taken from you.”

“That’s true. Good point, firebird.”

“I thought so.”

His brief spark of humor faded all too quickly though.

“What?” I pushed.

“It’s tainted. Having it back came at a price.”

“X—”

“It’s true, though, isn’t it? I mean, he must have given it back to me for a reason. And that reason definitely wasn’t out of thegoodness of his own heart. It’s part of some plan, some awful plan to use me through the sire bond again, something that needs me to have my magic this time.”

“His plans were destroyed when Abigail stopped him from ever performing that spellandtaking his black magic.”

“He’s a Machiavellian puppet master, he’ll pivot and construct a whole other strategy, this one a lot worse than the last in all likelihood with how pissed he must be that something he’d been planning for that long was ripped to shreds.”

I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Look, even if he did do that, Elliot said that without black magic, he can’t control you to the extent that he did before.” I touched the indigo bracelet around his left wrist. “And with this, we’ll all be able to tell if he did try to invoke the sire bond in any way and Elliot would be alerted and teleport in to stop anything from happening.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, pulling away. He downed the rest of his drink. “Once again, my dad needs to save my ass. Once again, I’m a problem, not an asset.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself.”

He scrubbed his hand over his face with his free hand that wasn’t currently clutching his now empty glass in a death grip. And then he plastered on a smile that I knew him well enough to identify as fake. “You’re right. I should focus on the positive of having my magic back.”

“X—”

“How areyoudoing?”

“We weren’t done talking about you.”

“Yeah, we are,” he said, firmly.

Dammit.He was closing himself off.

“Tal,” he pushed.

I blew out a breath. “I’ll be all right. Yeah, what happened did bring up some issues for me, namely, what happened with my parents.”

“I’m so sorry.”

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