Inception (The Marked Book 1)

by Bianca Scardoni

  “This doesn’t mean you can start being careless now. If you find yourself in danger, avoid a confrontation at all costs—run if you have to. Especially if that situation involves Dominic Huntington. Is that clear?”

  Good thing I already had the running thing down pat.

  “Do you really think he’ll do something to me?” I asked, bouncing glances between the two of them. “I mean, he had his chance to make a move and he didn’t. He seemed a lot more interested in getting even with the two of you...”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Tessa, her raspy voice low and forlorn. “The only way he can hurt me is by hurting the people I love. He’s done it before. You don’t know him. You don’t know the things he’s capable of doing, even to his own family.”

  “I do know! I know what he did to Gabriel.” I wanted her to know that I wasn’t that naive. That I had picked up a few details along the way and was still standing on my own two feet. More or less.

  “You told her?” I couldn’t tell if her glare was rooted in anger or just shock that he had the audacity to flout her.

  “Not everything. I told her how I turned. I had no choice, she needed to know the truth about Dominic.” His voice was surprisingly firm on the point. “I left you out of it. I thought she should hear that part from you.”

  “Well, then.” She turned back to me, steely eyed. “It looks like you don’t even know the half of it.”

  And that’s exactly what I was afraid of.

  30. BEDTIME STORIES

  The rain gathered traction as it batted down over Hollow Hills and all of its collared inhabitants without the slightest regard for our well-being. I sat on the couch, face to face with my sister, waiting for her to fill in the holes to a story that has been chock-full of them since the very beginning. Outside, the wind howled viciously, loud as an army of disembodied ghosts convening on the other side of the glass, crying out to us for sanctuary, for reprieve.

  “I’m not perfect,” started Tessa. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, mistakes that I’m still paying for today, and I accept that.” She lifted her chin as if to illustrate her valor. “Even still, I always hoped I’d never have to have this conversation with you. That you’d never be in a position where you needed to know any of it, but I guess that’s not possible anymore. I don’t know how else to keep you safe now.”

  She hadn’t even revealed anything and already I had the overbearing urge to run for the door.

  “Two years ago, I made a decision to do something I knew was wrong in order to help a friend.” Her eyes bore into me with a grounding intensity. “To help my Keeper.”

  “Are we talking about Linley Macarthur?” I turned to Gabriel as the house lights flickered aggressively. “Was she the Keeper from the future?” The one from his story.

  Gabriel nodded.

  “I knew it.” It came out smug.

  “She was more than just my Keeper—she was a sister to me.”

  I was surprised to hear so much emotion in Tessa’s voice, a voice that had always been so cool, calm, and collected under even the most intense fires. Sometimes irritatingly so.

  “It all started senior year, the night we went to Easton’s Fall Festival. Linley thought it would be fun to get a tarot reading from some Gypsy hack running one of those fortune-telling booths,” she said with a dismissive hand gesture. “Turned out she wasn’t a hack after all. Probably had some Seer blood in her,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

  A riotous round of thunder rang out around us, jolting me with its reverberations.

  “She read Linley, told her things about her family that no one else knew. Things about who she was. That she was gifted—different from the others. Everything she said was spot on and Linley was loving every second of it. We both were.” Tessa’s eyes slid over to Gabriel before boomeranging back. “That is, up until she drew the Death card.”

  “The Death card?” I spoke in whispers, frightened to my core at the prospect of such a thing existing. I didn’t want to know, and yet I couldn’t stop myself from digging deeper. “What is that? What does it mean?”

  “It means she prophesized Linley’s death. She knew something was coming, something horrible and unnatural.” Tessa’s distant eyes traveled over my shoulder, imaging it, reliving the scene in her mind. “The next day, Linley went to see the Council and told them about what happened. She demanded one of the Elders read her to disprove the prediction. She demanded it even though deep down she knew it was true.”

  “And did they?” I swallowed hard. “Confirm it, I mean.”

  She gave a morose nod. “Nothing was ever the same after that night. Over the next few months, Linley became completely obsessed with it—with her future—with changing it.”

  “But I thought you couldn’t stop Death? I thought it was like, ordained?” I didn’t mean for it to ring out so lax.

  “It is. Death is the one appointment we all have to keep no matter who you are or where you come from. Linley knew that better than anyone, but she also wasn’t the type of girl to give up on what she wanted—even if it went against the very laws of nature—and what she wanted more than anything else at that moment was to find a way to come back.”

  “What do you mean come back?” I blurted out, somewhat taken back by this. I was under the impression she wanted to stop her death, not return from it. “So Linley wanted to be a Revenant?”

  “No.”

  “Then what? I didn’t know there was another option.”

  “There wasn’t. Well, not a feasible one anyway, and that was exactly the problem,” explained Tessa. “She knew her family would disown her if she willingly accepted Revenant blood into her body, and since family meant everything to her, there was no way she could go down that road. She needed another way and she vowed not to stop until she found it. She was incredibly stubborn that way.”

  “Did she ever find anything?” I wondered, overcome by my own disturbing curiosity.

  “Depends on who you ask.” Tessa’s disparaged expression made it clear where she stood on the matter. “She became fixated on the idea of recreating the necromancy spell, the one that created the First Revenants, and using a variation of it on herself.”

  “But isn’t that the spell that turned them all into evil, blood-thirsty killers to begin with?”

  “She was convinced that if she made some key changes to the original spell, substituted the demon blood with the blood of a higher being, she could come back proper.”

  “Is that even possible?” I asked, turning to Gabriel as though he were the expert on all things resurrection.

  “I suppose everything’s possible, but...” He shook his head.

  “It’s unlikely,” said Tessa. “Before she could even consider testing her theory, she needed to get her hands on the spell’s incantation which can only be found within the codex of the Original Scribes, and of course, the Immortal Amulet used in the First Rising Spell. The Scribes were scattered all over the world, guarded and nearly impossible to come by, and there were even fewer pieces of the Amulet. It was mission impossible, but odds like that never stopped Linley.”

  She sounded kind of kick ass.

  “Anyhow, after some digging around, she found out that our Order had been in possession of a copy of the Scribes, and that the Huntington Sentinels had been charged with their safekeeping. Unfortunately, she also discovered that they perished in a fire two years prior—a fatal fire that destroyed the Scribes and killed both the Huntington brothers…Gabriel and Dominic.”

  My mouth fell open. “What?” I turned to Gabriel, slack-jawed. “You and Dominic died in a fire?”

  His dark hair grazed over his eyes as he dipped his head. “That’s what I’ve been told, though I have no recollection of that particular expanse in time.”

  “Because we changed it,” explained Tessa, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “We went back and changed what happened. We warned Gabriel, we stopped the fire, we stopped all of it
. But it wasn’t supposed to be that way. We weren’t supposed to change anything. When we got back, the other reality had already been erased—gone to everyone but Linley and me. It was as though it never even happened and fixing it was a lot easier said than done. Gabriel was alive because of what we—”

  “But he was meant to die.” My voice was abnormally pitchy. “He didn’t want this, he didn’t want to be a Revenant!” How could she not go back and fix her mistake? How could she allow Dominic to impose this eternal life-sentence on Gabriel?

  Tessa steeled her gaze. “We don’t always get what we want, Jemma. That’s life, whether you like it or not.” Her iciness reverberated in the room.

  “So you didn’t even try?” I asked, tremulous. I didn’t want to believe that. I didn’t want to believe that my sister would just leave Gabriel to live out his life as the thing he hated most in the world. All because of her own bad decisions.

  “Of course we tried.” She seemed annoyed by my questions. “We went back as soon as we realized what was going on—that Dominic had Turned—but by then it was already too late. He had his own plans and he made sure we couldn’t get in his way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There was nothing she could do,” offered Gabriel in her defense. “Dominic was using a Binding Sprite to ensure no one could travel back to that point in time and alter any of the events that had transpired. Tessa and Linley tried, but they couldn’t get through the protective barrier. No one could.”

  It was clear he wasn’t harboring any blame or resentment towards them. So why was I getting so worked up about it? And what the heck was a Binding Sprite?

  “We couldn’t go to anyone for help,” continued Tessa. “Our Laws are clear and we violated nearly every one of them in the worst possible way. We were between a rock and a hard place. What Linley and I did...” She rattled her head. “Linley would have been Bound—maybe worse, and God only knows what the Council would have done to me for leading the charge.”

  My thoughts briefly flashed back to Trace and his distress over the possibility of being Bound by the Council. Whatever that meant for them, it clearly wasn’t something they could live with.

  “So what ended up happening with the Scribes?” I asked after a short reprise. “Did Linley ever get them or was it all for nothing?” I couldn’t fathom the desperation needed to pull off something like this in the first place let alone what it would feel like to come up empty handed.

  “They weren’t there,” she answered dryly. “Linley found the vault empty. They must have been moved before we got there, but we had no way of knowing for sure. Besides, I had more pressing matters to contend with at that point.”

  I furrowed my brows, wondering what could have been more important than the Scribes they went back in time to get.

  “As in the coven of Revenants in the living room,” she clarified, reading the confusion in my expression.

  “Right. Dominic’s girlfriend.” I’d almost forgotten.

  “His girlfriend?” scoffed Tessa. “She was a Revenant, just like the others. Nothing more.”

  “So you’re the one who vanquished her,” I said, having just realized it myself. “You vanquished Dominic’s girlfriend and Gabriel backed you up, right? That’s why Dominic hates you. That’s why he said all those things about you.”

  She nodded unceremoniously. “And I’d do it again without question.”

  “And the Amulet? Who’d you have to kill to get that one?” The second the words left my mouth, I wished I could rewind time and stop them from ever seeing the light of day. Her expression alone was enough to make me want to throw myself to the gallows.

  “How easy it is for you to judge me from your sheltered existence,” spat Tessa. “I could fill a stadium with the amount of blood I’ve had to spill, and you know what, little sis? Soon your hands are going to be just as bloodied as mine.”

  “Tessa.” Gabriel reached out to calm her, but she smacked his hand away. “Don’t do this.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” she warned, her eyes a deadly shade of gray. “I’ve spent the last three months on the run trying to keep this Amulet safe, and I risked it all to come here, for Jemma—”

  “Three months?” Gabriel stood up suddenly. “You’ve had the Amulet in your possession for three months?”

  “More or less,” she said, dusting her hands across her jeans. “Does it really matter how long I’ve had it?” There was a slight edge to her voice now. It was clear his question was making her defensive.

  “Why didn’t you come to me?”

  “Why do you think? Jesus, Gabriel. I had men coming at me from every direction—men who would happily slaughter their entire family to get their hands on the Amulet. I couldn’t take the risk. You would have done the same thing.”

  Gabriel sharpened his stare. “Whose men?”

  “That doesn’t matter right now—”

  “WHOSE MEN?” he boomed.

  I straightened my back as though standing at attention. I never heard his voice sound so vociferous, so commanding. I didn’t know how else to react to it.

  Tessa speared him with contempt. “Engel.”

  “Dammit.” Gabriel pinched his eyes shut and stalked off towards the kitchen.

  “Who’s Engel?” I asked, my throat drier than a bag of cotton balls.

  “Engel is my problem, I’m taking care of him.” Tessa stood up and took a few steps towards Gabriel. “Look, I have a plan. He’s been on my tail for weeks now and he hasn’t caught me yet. I have him exactly where I want him. If you just—”

  “And where is that?” interrupted Gabriel. He stood in the kitchen with his hands flat against the counter. “We’re talking about Engel, Tessa. Four generations of Slayers have tried and failed to vanquish him. Does that even register with you?”

  “Tried and failed?” I recoiled, trepidation filling every cell in my body. My sister was going up against a vampire that four generations of Slayers have tried and failed to vanquish and she thought I was the one that needed the Protective Hedge?

  What in the actual hell! I reached up and pulled the Amulet off from around my neck.

  “What the hell are you doing?” snapped Tessa, spotting me from the corner of her eye. “Didn’t I just tell you not to take that necklace off until I tell you to? What part of that didn’t you understand?”

  I shook my head. “There’s no way I’m wearing this when Engle the Slayer killer is after you!” I waved the necklace in her direction. “You need this more than I do. I can handle Dominic.”

  “You couldn’t handle a goddamn handlebar let alone Dominic Huntington.” There wasn’t a thread of humor in her words. “I have enough going on without the added distraction of having to worry about whether you’re safe, too.”

  I hadn’t considered that. But still—

  “Put the necklace back on now. I’m not going to ask you again, so help me God.” The homicidal twitch in her left eye really drove home the point.

  I slipped the necklace back on and cowered into my seat before she could say another word to me.

  She turned her attention back to Gabriel, cornering him in the kitchen. “I need you in on this with me.” Her voice was low, stringently even. “This is our chance, Gabriel. Our one shot.”

  He shook his head. “It’s suicide.”

  “Not if we go in it together,” she insisted.

  He still looked unsure.

  “We’re holding all the cards right now. He’s been tracking me for weeks for a reason. He’s scared to make a move. All we have to do is make it first.”

  “Get him before he gets you,” he noted, crossing his arms.

  “Exactly. He’ll never see it coming.” Her mouth took on a diabolical curl. “I’ll lead him to an isolated location outside of town, make him think he’s got me cornered and that I’m out there all alone. He won’t be able to resist. He’ll show himself and we’ll be waiting to take him out when he does.”

  Ga
briel considered it. “That could work.”

  “It will work. It has to.” She took a step closer to him and raised her hand as though she were going to touch him but then decided against it. “I’m tired of running, Gabriel. This is my chance, my way out, but I need you. I need you in on this with me. Will you do it? Will you help me?”

  “Yes.” He answered without the slightest hesitation or concern for his own well-being. “Whatever you need. Whatever you want. I’ll do it.”

  31. DETAINED

  “You’re late, Miss Blackburn,” croaked Mr. Gillman as I strolled into detention Tuesday afternoon. “Surely you appreciate the irony given your current circumstance.”

  I glanced up at the wall clock. “Sorry,” I muttered, sitting down in the first seat by the door.

  “As I was communicating erstwhile your interruption,” continued Mr. Gillman. “I have a prior engagement that requires my immediate attention, however, I will return periodically to check in on you. I expect silence in my absence and will not hesitate to further extend your punishment should any of you feel the need to leave the room without permission.” He picked up his briefcase and gave one final look around the near-empty room. “Questions?”

  I shook my head and watched as he whisked out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him.

  Curious, I glanced over my shoulder to get a better look at my cellmates and immediately spotted Trace in the back corner of the room. Our eyes met briefly, once again igniting those irritating butterflies in my abdomen. I straightened out, opting to lay my head on my desk and indulge in some much needed R&R rather than contend with the pesky swarm in my belly.

  Less than a minute later, I heard a chair pull out behind me followed by a gentle poke on the back of my shoulder. I held my breath as I twisted around and found Trace sitting in the desk behind me. His dimples pressed in on both sides, though there was no real smile accompanying them.

  “Hey,” he said, sounding weary.