Page 52 of Fallen Heirs

I nodded and we headed on out to do just that.

War was exactly what I’d be risking by doing this.

But sometimes to make progress you needed to make a few waves along the way.

13

~Talon~

It was really weird being back here after everything that had happened.

And, worse, without Orpheus here alongside us.

Alongsideme.

I hadn’t been without him in years.

As if that weirdness wasn’t enough, before we’d come back here, something had happened the other night at Abigail’s house.

I’d heard a commotion as I’d been studying and getting ready for going back to Electi Academy and I’d found Alena in her mom’s study angrily going through her grimoires and muttering things to herself about darkness and “there must be a way”, a whole lot of things that hadn’t made sense without context.

I’d left and gone to find X, because Ore hadn’t been due back fromExemplarfor another couple of hours.

And then he’d teleported into the corridor upstairs as I’d been headed to his room. When I’d asked why Alena was upset, he’d merely claimed they’d had a bad night hunting. Then he’d stormed to his room wherein he’d shut the door so violently it had ripped off its top hinge.

And then Ore had come back really late, hours later than he’d been slated to.

He hadn’t even come to greet any of us and I’d found him outside tending to the garden he’d been growing for the last few weeks.

I’d gone out there to ask him if he knew what was up with Alena and Xavier, but he’d merely shrugged it off, then changed the subject, telling me he was going away to spend some time in the Dark Fae Realm when we went back to the Academy.

That awful news had taken precedence over everything else.

Him actually leaving for another realm, being that far away.

It had hit me in the gut. It had been bad enough knowing he wouldn’t be coming back with us, but for him to be all the way in the DFR was way worse. He’d given me an IC Watch to try to take the edge off, so we could still communicate while he was gone.

I’d been trying to throw myself into my studies and focus on that. And when I’d had some time on my hands, I’d been planning out some more details of my supernatural orphanage idea, looking for some possible locations too, as well as figuring out some of the intricacies of how it was going to run. Really, I needed Ore’s input for the latter, because that sort of thing was his forte. But for now I was doing what I could. I was good with figuring out what the orphans would need, things I’d been without myself and wished I’d had after I’d lost my parents.

The time I’d spent with Xavier and Alena between classes and during the evenings hadn’t been as much as I’d liked, and things with the two of them had been kind of off since that night at the house when they’d both come home in a temper. They wouldn’t say a word about what had happened, though.

They were keeping me out of it and it really wasn’t going over well.

I didn’t like these secrets between us.

We were supposed to be on the same page these days.

It had to be something about Constantine, something they thought they were protecting me from, that they needed to shield me from.

It was bullshit.

After me holding onto my control the night Constantine had tried to push me over the edge, I thought I’d proved that I could handle shit now.

Unless it wasn’t about protectingme.

Maybe one of them had done something they weren’t proud of, something fucked-up that they were keeping quiet. Maybe Ore really hadn’t known what had happened and they were keeping it fromhim.

I blew out a breath, putting it on hold for now.

---