Page 89 of Fallen Heirs

She was making him happy, something he’d long-deserved.

Their voices coming from upstairs in the kitchen continued to gravitate toward me.

“Have I told you how absolutely alluring you look in that tiny skirt?”

“Now you mention it, how about you show me?”

“So incredibly tempting, my beauty, but we can’t currently.”

“Use your magic so we’re not overheard.”

“And you think that any amount of magic can mute your screams, given how loud you are, V?”

“Me loud? What about you with your dirty mouth? Something, by the way, that I never saw coming with how refined and buttoned-up you were when we first got together.”

“What can I say? You’ve cured me of my repressed ways.”

“There was a beast within you that just needed the right woman to help you unleash.”

“Mmm, you’re certainly that.”

“Yeah?”

“Absolutely. The right woman, without a doubt. My woman.”

“Aw, El, you can’t say things like that and not expect me to jump you.”

I heard a hearty chuckle from him and then some brief lip smacking, before he said,“Thank you, V.”

“For what?”

“Giving me a whole new lease on life. Wait—that’s it… new lease on life. He’s just mad enough to do it too.”

“What does that mean? What did you just realize?”

“Come.”

In the next moment, I heard the rapid-fire clack of footsteps making their way back toward the basement stairs.

They were rushing down them in the next moment, my dad and Vanessa coming into view.

“Son,” my dad spoke as soon as he took me in standing over the stone table and eyeing the bubbling beakers of our experiment. “Show me the precise spot again where that sliver of magic was extracted from you by one of Constantine’s sorcerers.”

I unbuttoned the top couple of buttons of my denim shirt, then jerked down the neck of my white tee beneath. “Here,” I said, pointing to it.

My dad hurried to me, musing, “Right at the site of the tattoo imbued with my magic.”

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“Try to hold as still as possible. You’ll feel a little irritation,” he said, a moment before he pressed his palm to it, his power sparking.

A pins and needles sensation permeated my skin.

I held still like he’d instructed, until he pulled his palm away and cursed.

“We were so focused on the magic being taken, that we neglected to regard the importance of the site that it was extracted from,” he murmured to himself as he hurried through a door in his lab that led to the backroom.

I felt a surge of his power, a moment before he emerged, levitating an age-old leather bound volume, a spell book of sorts that I didn’t recognize.

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