The inevitable happened… Abby faced Mikael and lost her magic in the process. She didn't lose it completely, but she used so much magic that she ran out of magical reserves and became incapable of using it.
It was horrible to lose someone from our family like that.
The one who felt it the most was Bonnie, who cried all night, and Grandma simply stopped using magic and started drinking.
She was still an amazing grandmother, but now she was trying to protect us from the supernatural world by hiding it from us.
Which would only make things worse, and it was better for me to wait a little. For some reason, I still didn't have access to my magic.
I meditated, read books online since Grandma had made all the grimoires disappear from the house, and nothing—nothing about magic.
---++++---
It's been about nine years since Abby left us, and still nothing from my magic.
Mom came to visit sometimes—once a month, to be exact—but she always made a point of avoiding any talk about magic.
I didn't need it either. It was an event when she came to see me, the only day of the month when I could be with her.
We played, went out, went to fun places, and explored the ecosystem of the Other Side.
It was like a separate world made only of dead supernatural creatures, and best of all, I was the prince of that world.
Everyone respected me. Vampires looked at me with respect, werewolves with admiration, and witches… well… apparently many of them needed to have very long and very polite conversations with my mother to solve the problem.
And it was fun.
---+++---
It was the day after I returned from the Other Side with my mother that I did my meditation ritual. With my eyes closed, I felt a light shine in front of me.
I opened my eyes and smiled happily.
"Finally you showed up," I laughed, bringing my fingers to my mouth and whistling. "Fiiuuuu."
It didn't take long for my cousin to run into my room. The old trick I created to find out where she was when we were kids still worked.
"What is it?" She jumped onto my bed. "Talk, I'm bored."
"Look at this." I raised my hand and a ball of light appeared again in my palm. "Cousin… we have magic."
"My God, what is that? Are you doing this? Is this some trick?" Bonnie looked at me in extreme surprise and grabbed my shoulder. "Put that out. If they find out, they'll burn you at the stake."
"Relax… no one's going to know," I laughed and looked at her. "We're not going to be burned."
"What do I have to do with this?" Bonnie replied, surprised. "You're the one making light out of nowhere."
"Of course you do. Do you think people would spare you when your mom, me, and Grandma do magic?" I said, laughing. "Of course you'd go to the stake too."
Bonnie froze in place.
"Wait…" Bonnie started. "Mom and Grandma do this too? And I never knew? How did I never know?"
"They wanted to protect you," I said solemnly. "They didn't want you involved with magic."
"But you—they wanted you to?" Bonnie asked indignantly.
"Of course not. They tried to hide it from me too, but they don't control my mother," I said with a sigh.
"Wait… you know your mother?" Bonnie asked, even more shocked. "I thought you were an orphan."
"I'm not, but my mother has a lot of magical work and can't stay with me. She visits me once a month."
"Why didn't you tell me?" Bonnie was indignant. "I thought we told each other everything."
"This time I couldn't," I said with a sigh. "Neither Abby nor Grandma wanted you to know."
"Abby abandoned us," Bonnie growled, glaring at me angrily. "She left Grandma like that. She had no right to stop me from knowing my family heritage."
"Abby didn't abandon you, Bonnie," I said painfully. I was about to touch a subject I didn't want to touch so soon. Bonnie in the series was very racist toward vampires, and I'm half vampire… but she needed to know. "Abby fought an ancient vampire to save a child and lost her magic. The trauma was so great that she ran away."
"So it was the vampires' fault… that our family was destroyed?" Bonnie said angrily.
"Bonnie… do you hate vampires?" I asked.
"How could I not hate them? They're evil. They were going to kill a child, and I lost my family because of them!" Bonnie shouted in rage, and I sighed. It was time to tell her.
"I have another secret," I said, tiredly. It was now or never. "My father is a vampire… I'm half vampire."
"Nooo," Bonnie gasped, standing up from the bed. "It's too much for me to digest. I need to be alone."
She said that, and I felt something inside me break. A deep sadness hit me, and I didn't even have the strength to speak.
I just nodded as she ran out of my room.
The door slammed shut, but it wasn't the noise that hurt. It was the emptiness that came right after, as if the room had suddenly become too big.
I sat on the bed for a long time, staring at the hand where the light had appeared minutes earlier. It didn't come back. Not because the magic was gone, but because something else was now taking up space inside me: guilt.
Bonnie wasn't wrong to feel angry. Her world had just been turned upside down.
That night, no one spoke. Sheila didn't come to my room to say goodnight. Bonnie didn't come back to argue, cry, or scream. The whole house seemed to be holding its breath, as if it knew something irreversible had been said.
In the following days, Bonnie avoided me. It wasn't open hostility—it was worse: silence. She passed me in the hallway as if I were a piece of furniture. When our hands almost touched by accident, she pulled away too quickly. That hurt more than any botched spell.
Grandma noticed.
Sheila always noticed.
"You told her," she said one morning as she poured coffee into her cup, hands far too steady for someone who had "given up magic."
It wasn't a question.
"I did," I replied. "She had the right to know."
Sheila sighed deeply and sat at the table.
"The right to know and the weight of carrying it are not the same thing," she said, looking at me. "But what's done is done. What's been said doesn't go back into the mouth."
"She hates me," I said, simply.
"No," Grandma shook her head. "She's afraid. And in this family, fear always turns into anger before it turns into courage."
That didn't comfort me, but it made sense.
That night, something changed.
---++---
I was sleeping when the bedroom light turned on.
"Nik, Nik, Nik."
I looked up to see who was shouting. It was Bonnie, running toward my bed and hitting me with a full Superman jump.
"Ahhhhggg," I groaned in pain, trying to adjust myself. "What happened?"
"Magic! I managed to do it!" Bonnie shouted excitedly and grabbed a pillow that had already been torn open, making the feathers float.
"Incredible… amazing. You just learned magic and you're already at this level," I said, shocked. Damn… she was more talented than me, and I was the son of the very source of the Bennett bloodline.
The feathers spun in the air for a few seconds before slowly falling onto the bed. I was still twisted, my back hurting from the impact of the "Bonnie attack," but I couldn't stop myself from smiling.
"Okay," I said, taking a deep breath as I adjusted myself. "First: you almost killed me. Second: that was… absurdly good."
Bonnie laughed, that open laugh I hadn't seen in days. Her smile looked lighter now, less weighed down.
"I didn't even think," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "I just felt it. It was like something had been trapped inside me all this time and suddenly decided to come out."
"Welcome to the club," I murmured. "The difference is that when I felt it for the first time, I could only make a pathetic little light."
"Pathetic nothing," she shot back. "That was incredible. And scary. And…" she hesitated. "You're the one who made me calm enough to try."
We stayed silent for a moment. It wasn't uncomfortable. It was the kind of silence that only exists when two people are still reorganizing everything inside.
"I was angry at you," Bonnie said, staring at her hands. "Not because you're half vampire. But because… you always knew who you were. And I didn't."
"I'd give anything to have been normal," I replied. "Because my life is a low-budget series."
She looked at me sideways.
"Easy isn't better," she said. "Those are the best series."
Bonnie took a deep breath and smiled again, this time with curiosity. She started asking me about everything—about my mother and my father—and I told her what I knew and a few half-truths.
"So… the Other Side," she said, turning fully toward me. "What is it really like? Not the scary version Grandma avoided explaining."
"It's… strange," I began. "It's not just a place. It's like an ecosystem. There are hierarchies that everyone respects."
"And you?" she asked. "What are you there?"
I shrugged.
"Well—" I smiled. "They call me prince because my mother is the queen there, and they're afraid to mess with me and have my mother get mad."
Bonnie made a face.
"That's romantic. My cousin is a prince."
"Well, you're royalty too," I said playfully. "After all, all Bennetts are descendants of my mother."
"So I'm a royal witch too—amazing," she said. "But the way you talk about the people on the Other Side… it sounds lonely."
"It was," I admitted. "Until you woke up your magic and almost crushed me with a flying hug."
She laughed loudly.
"Sorry… not really."
That brat…
She grew thoughtful for a few seconds, then spoke more quietly.
"Were you afraid when you found out what you were?"
"A little," I replied without hesitation. "It's not every day you find out you're two kinds of legendary creatures. And I could end up with a stake in my chest or on a pyre. But I have you, and Mom, and Grandma, and Abby."
Bonnie nodded slowly, as if storing that away for later.
"So…" she extended her hand, and a small spark appeared between her fingers. "You're going to teach me how to control this."
"I will." I looked at her seriously. "But only if you promise me one thing."
"What?"
"No jumping on me in the middle of the night again."
She flashed a mischievous grin.
"I don't promise."
I rolled my eyes, laughing.
There, sitting on the messy bed, with feathers scattered around and newly discovered magic in the air, we weren't heirs to an ancient lineage or pieces in a dangerous supernatural game.
We were just two siblings finally beginning to understand who the other really was.