The Other Side of Truth (The Marked Ones Trilogy Book 3)

by Alicia Kat Vancil

TRAVIS

  When I stepped into the hall and shut the hotel room door behind me, two guys dressed in black were leaning against the wall with pretty heavy illusionary fields up.

  One with dark hair and intensely blue eyes looked up at me and a crooked smirk crept across his lips. He leaned over and nudged a young blond guy next to him who seemed to be nearly dozing off and who couldn’t have been any older than Patrick.

  “You owe me fifty quid, James,” he stated in a heavy accent. Kaigan Midoraian maybe, or Kaigan Kirian.

  The blond guy—apparently named James—just looked at him for a moment before his eyes darted to the hotel room door and then me. His eyes narrowed, and he scowled at me as he pushed off away from the wall.

  “What are you doing here?” James asked viciously in the same accent as the other guy.

  “Excuse me?” I asked as I furrowed my brow at him.

  “Why couldn’t you just lay off ‘em, you git? Why couldn’t you just let ‘em be happy?” James spat accusingly as he stomped toward me.

  “What the frak are you—?”

  “Arius Nualla and Patrick Galathea. Why did you have to bollix up everything?” he snarled as he pushed my chest.

  “James, stay easy, gods,” the dark-haired guy snapped as he pushed away from the wall.

  “No, Damian! I need to know why. Why he was so bloody ill set!” James shouted back at the dark-haired guy.

  “I don’t know who the hell you are, but you don’t know shit about me, or her, or anything,” I said defensively.

  James jerked his head back toward me, eyes alight with anger. “Oh I don’t, do I?” he scoffed as he moved closer to me. “You’re Travis Centrina, Director of Karalia’s Department of Technical Research and Development. Oldest son of Misaki and Joshua Centrina. And you let the Arius get stabbed by a Kakodemoss agent on your watch!” James screamed at me as if the words were blades he could stab through me.

  I froze. The facts surrounding Nualla’s injury hadn’t been made public. Hell, the fact that she had been hurt at all shouldn’t have even made it outside the hospital.

  “How do you know about that?” I asked in a low growl. He didn’t answer. “Who are you, and how the fuck did you find that out?!” I shouted as I slammed him up against the wall, my forearm against his throat.

  “Oi! Lay off, you—” the other guy—Damian—put his hand on my shoulder and I whipped around, clocking him in the jaw with my fist. “—two.”

  I stared at him, and he stared back at me like he wasn’t phased in the least.

  “If the two of you insist on having a row, then go ahead, I ain’t gonna stop ya. But don’t do it in the bloody hall for cryin’ out loud, or everyone and their brother’ll know about what happened to the Arius,” Damian admonished us as he massaged his jaw. “Gods, has anyone ever told ya you punch like a ton of bricks?” he asked me sourly, which was when I noticed a tattoo on his wrist peeking out from beneath his black leather jacket. Eight spokes radiating out in a circle, each spoke ending in an Egyptian lotus.

  “You’re Protectorate?” I stated a bit caught off guard. My eyes darted to the other guy. “You too?”

  “He just completed the training program, so forgive him for being so feckin’ idealistic,” Damian stated as he let out an exasperated huff.

  I folded my arms across my chest. “What exactly is going on, you two?”

  “You’re bollixin’ up someone’s mar—”

  “James!” Damian snapped sternly. “Shut your gob, and go make sure the hotel guards ain’t coming.”

  “But—”

  “Leg it, James!” Damian roared in an authoritative voice.

  James glared back at him before turning on his heel and storming off down the hall.

  “And bring me back a fizzy drink,” he called after James.

  “What kind?” James called over his shoulder.

  “Somethin’ other than Coke,” Damian called back before turning toward me. “I’m Damian Corkoran by the way, and that there ball of piss and vinegar—” he said as he jabbed his thumb in James’ direction. “—is me little brother James.”

  “That’s great, but why exactly are two Protectorate from Kaigan Midora hanging outside the hotel of an Karalian arius?”

  “Because that arius of yours sure gets herself in a whole fecking lot of trouble, sahavi.”

  It was a completely true statement about Nualla, but still…

  “Why would the Karalian Embassy need to pull in Protectorate from another region?” I asked suspiciously.

  “’Cause apparently yours’ in a bit of a desperate state.”

  I jerked my head back as if I had been slapped. It wasn’t like we had tried to keep the facts secret, but still I hadn’t expected someone to throw it in my face, either.

  The sad truth of it all was that a good portion of those who had died in the last attack had been Protectorate, because one of the devices that had gone off had been in their facility. So when the doors had sealed shut, it had locked them in a poisonous prison they had had no hope of ever escaping. Frankly, Shawn was lucky as hell that him and the others in academy training had been away from The Embassy doing a field exercise, or they’d all be dead.

  Damian looked at me, and then sighed heavily. “Look, that wasn’t said to make you feel like a pile o’shite. Trust me, sahavi, if I wanted to start a row with ya, you’d know.”

  I considered him for a moment, and decided to let it go. “So what was all that about?” I asked as I jerked my head toward the direction James had gone.

  “You mean James?” Damian asked as he looked in the direction I had indicated then back at me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, that be about some wanker posting snaps of you getting off with the Arius,” he said with a hint of a mischievous smile.

  My eyebrows shot up, and my mouth hung open. “Excuse me?”

  Damian looked at me curiously before some kind of realization crossed his face. “Wait, ah, what is it you Karalian’s say? Oh, right, ‘making out.’”

  I ran my hands down my face. “Yeah, Nualla mentioned that. Just how widespread are they?”

  “The snaps?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, mostly they seem to be on that cheeky girl’s mag. But, ah, if that brother of yours doesn’t know about you and her, might be good to tell him before he sees those snaps. Because blood ain’t gonna do nothing to stop him busting your dial.”

  Screw You, Christmas

  Thursday, November 1st

  PATRICK

  “It’s barely past Halloween and they already have the damned Christmas decorations up,” Travis said with a scowl as he glared at the workers erecting the giant fake tree and other holiday decorations in Union Square.

  I looked across the square to where a workman was trying to shoo away pigeons from a palm tree so he could string white twinkle lights through it before I went back to my burrito. Lunch in Union Square; part of Travis’ not-so-subtle new campaign to get me out of the apartment.

  “Travis, they put them up the same day every year.”

  “That doesn’t make it right,” he grumbled before taking a sip of his soda.

  “So they like to set them up early, who the hell cares? It’s just to get people in the holiday spirit. What’s wrong with that?”

  He didn’t answer me, in fact, when I looked back at him he was looking at a discarded candy wrapper that was stuck to the cement with gum.

  “Wait, you can’t seriously hate Christmas. Who the fuck hates Christmas? It’s Christmas,” I asked in disbelief as I set my drink down on the polished black granite step.

  “I have a damn good reason,” Travis replied sourly, still not looking at me.

  “Oh really?” I asked dubiously. “Well do tell, Mr. Scro
oge, how is it that you hate Christmas?” I said in a playfully mocking voice, because the idea of someone hating Christmas was just ridiculous.

  Travis looked up at me with an expression that was somewhere between unfathomable sadness and defiant fury. “Christmas is all about family. And it’s kinda hard to be so frakkin’ cheerful about it all when you don’t have one. Because they were murdered…on Christmas Eve.”

  I froze, and just stared at him. I had known they had died. And I had known that it had been winter. But somehow I hadn’t thought the universe could possibly have been cruel enough to allow anyone to die on Christmas Eve.

  But apparently it was.

  Christmas should have been a wonderful thing, full of laughter, and family, and all that TV-special goodwill bullshit. But for Travis, it was a reminder that his family had been taken from him. From us. And that was probably the saddest thing of all.

  “Oh,” was the only thing I could manage to get past the lump in my throat.

  Travis looked away, back out at the bustling people and double decker tour buses, and stuffed another large bite of burrito into his mouth. The two of us were so very, very broken, and we knew it. However, we also had no fucking clue what to do about any of it. If the universe was trying to test the endurance of the daemon psyche, it was doing a pretty fucking good job of it.

  I picked up my soda again, sipping it as I scanned the square with my eyes. For November, it was surprisingly warm. A perfect cloudless blue sky, and just enough of a breeze so you weren’t sweating in the late fall sun.

  I let my eyes drift to the cable cars traveling up and down the steep hill of Powell Street, packed full of tourists, and the occasional unfortunate commuter. And then I saw him, and I couldn’t help the small smile that crept across my lips. He was there—the man with the top hat and the duck—arguing with the cable car operator again. Trying to assure the operator that it was a service duck. But from here, even I could tell that the operator wasn’t buying it. And before I knew it, I was grinning like a lunatic, because even with as much as my world had been turned upside down in the last year, this was still unchanged. But the fact that I was finding comfort in the repeated antics of a crazy person probably didn’t say good things about my own mental state.

  “So it’s gonna be on Saturday,” Travis blurted out abruptly.

  “What is?” I asked as my brain rushed to what he could possibly be referring to.

  “The award ceremony,” he clarified.

  “Award—? Oh, the one for you?”

  “And the reopening of The Embassy,” Travis said as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his white lab coat. Even though he couldn’t get into his labs because of The Embassy closure, he still wore his lab coat to work everyday.

  He avoided looking directly at me as he continued. “Look, Patrick, you really don’t have to go, you know.”

  “Why wouldn’t I go?” I asked in confusion. “They’re giving you like, what, the highest honor our people have.”

  Travis fiddled with something in the pocket of his lab coat, something he did almost constantly lately. I wanted to tell him that the coat bothered me. That it dredged up the horrors of my past that haunted my dreams. Memories that I was trying so desperately to keep shoved down. But I just couldn’t. Because he wore that coat almost like it was armor. Like it was the only thing he could do to keep the world at bay around him. And I just couldn’t bring myself to ruin that small bit of comfort for him.

  “Because she’ll be there. In fact, they both might be,” Travis said in an uneasy voice.

  I paused. I didn’t have to ask who Travis meant by she. Nualla. Nualla would be there—of course she would, she was an arius—and Kira might be there too.

  I swallowed hard. “I’m still going.”

  “Okay,” Travis said with an inflection in his voice that I couldn’t place. We sat there in a slightly uncomfortable silence before he spoke again. “I wish I didn’t have to be there.”

  “Because there will be a lot of people?” I asked as I crumpled up my burrito wrapper. Because of his empathic ability to sense and be affected by other’s emotions, I knew Travis generally avoided being in large groups of people. That, mixed with his agoraphobia was like an antisocial cocktail served on the rocks.

  “Yeah,” Travis answered in a small voice. “And because I’ll have to face them all.”

  “The people you saved?”

  “The ones I didn’t.”

  I just stared at him. “Travis, no one could have saved them all. Hell, everyone would be dead if it wasn’t for you,” I pointed out.

  He looked at me like he wanted to argue, but couldn’t find the right words. So instead he folded his arms across his chest, and leaned back against the black granite stone of the steps, staring off at the holiday prep.

  We fell to silence and I finished my soda, watching the people on the sidewalks rushing about. Either the man with the duck had given up or the operator had, because he was no longer on the street.

  “You said ‘our,’” Travis finally said in a quiet voice after nearly fifteen minutes of silence.

  “What?” I asked in confusion as my head jerked in his direction.

  “You said, ‘our people.’ You’ve never said it like that before, like you were one of us too.”

  I just kinda stared at him a little taken aback, because he was right. I wasn’t sure when it had happened, but somehow, in the last few months I had stopped thinking of myself as formerly human, and started thinking of myself as a Marked One. A daemon.

  Never Let Them See You Cry

  Friday, November 2nd

  NUALLA

  Negative.

  I stared down at the digital read-out on the blue and white plastic stick. It was negative.

  I had bought the test yesterday, but I had been too afraid of the results to run it until now. But now, after one-hundred and eighty seconds of staring at the digital screen of the pregnancy test not daring to breathe, or even blink, the results were spelled out clearly in black. Negative.

  I slid slowly down the wall to the floor, because my legs were shaking too badly to continue standing. And then I burst into tears. But I didn’t know if it was because I was so happy it was negative or heartbroken that it wasn’t positive.

  I dropped the stick to the floor and doubled over, sobbing into my hands. This was what I had wanted—right now a baby was the last thing I needed. But it was my duty as an arius—as Karalia’s only arius—to produce a new heir, and hoping the test would be negative felt dishonorable. Because regardless of how much of a fucked up mess my life was at the moment, the fact that I wasn’t pregnant felt like I was letting all of Karalia down.

  And then another fear crept in with a sickening twisting in my stomach. What if I couldn’t get pregnant? They—the doctors—had said that I would be just fine. That nothing important had been damaged. That there would only be a scar. But what if they had been wrong? What if the infection—the mutation—had done something to me. What if I was broken? What if I could no longer produce a—?

  Oh gods.

  I covered my sobs with my hands, shaking so badly. The bloody war of 1341 had been sparked because the Chancellarius of Macedonia had died without an heir. And though we liked to think of ourselves as more advanced than humans, we were still a deeply superstitious people. And I knew—just knew—that more than a few would see it as a bad omen from the gods that I wasn’t pregnant yet. And with the drastic changes to the law that Alex had made, and the numerous attacks, there was already dissent in Karalia. This would just add fuel to the fire. Give them more proof that the gods no longer favored the Galatheas.

  As these thoughts raced through my head I had started to suck in deep gasps of air past my hands, my chest rising and falling in jagged puffs. I couldn’t get my breathing under control, couldn’t fig
ht the panic rising up within me. Everything was losing focus, the darkness creeping in from the edges of my vision.

  I was going to cause a civil war. So many people were going to die, and it was all going to be my fault because my body was rebelling against me. Bodies were going to line the streets and it was going to be my fault.

  All my fault.

  My fault.

  A sob ripped through my throat, and I saw black dots across my vision.

  All my fault.

  There was a knock on the door and I jerked my head toward it quickly, causing more black dots to appear.

  “Nualla?” Nikki called through the door.

  I didn’t answer because I was still hyperventilating. The door handle tried to turn, but stopped because it was locked.

  “Nualla, are you in there?” Nikki called out again.

  “I’m busy,” I called back, trying to slow the frantic beating of my heart.

  “Okay, but—”

  “Go use the other bathroom, Nikki!” I screeched out in a breathy, uneven voice.

  “I don’t actually need to use it. It’s just…Roy’s here to see you,” she called back through the door.

  “What?” I asked in surprise as I sucked in a little too much air.

  “Roy is waiting for you downstairs in your dad’s study.”

  My heart squeezed and shuddered as it skipped a few beats. The last time I had seen Roy had been at the funeral—Draya and Emmy’s funeral—his face lit up in the glow of the pyre.

  I took a few steadying breaths, fighting down the panic. As badly as I wanted to run—to hide under a pile of blankets and pretend the world would just disappear—I couldn’t. Because despite everything, I could never run from who I was.

  “Let him know I’ll be there in a few minutes,” I squeezed out past the rawness in my throat.

  There was silence on the other side of the door before the telltale creak of the floorboards as Nikki leaned closer to the door. “Nualla…are you okay?”