The Other Side of Truth (The Marked Ones Trilogy Book 3) (10 page)

Come as You Are

Tuesday, November 6th

TRAVIS

I
t had been eating at
me all day, and by three o’clock I just couldn’t take it anymore. So I quickly marched down to Parker’s office, and pushed the door open.

“Hey, Parker, about what happened between us yester—” I stopped, the person standing in Parker’s office wasn’t Parker. “—day.” My assistant Akiko was standing in front of Parker’s desk, her black-blue eyes looking out at me from her pair of special thick-framed cat-eyed glasses.

“What are
you
doing here?” I blurted out as I just stood there frozen.

Akiko looked at me with slightly raised eyebrows. “I came to get today’s set of genetic profiles to add to KARA’s database. You know, like you
asked
me too.”

“Right…” I agreed as I shifted my weight uneasily. It would have been more than easy to just transfer the profiles wirelessly. However, since that would leave KARA potentially vulnerable to infiltration by the Kakodemoss, I had insisted that the data be placed on flash drives and secured in a safe until Akiko or myself personally carted them back to the tech labs. It might have been a little extreme and paranoid, but this time I wasn’t about to take any chances. Not with how easily KARA had been hacked before.

“Um…where’s Parker?” I asked nervously.

“You just missed her, she just headed off to her lab,” Akiko replied as she pulled a collection of flash drives out of a safe next to Parker’s desk. As she straightened back up she asked with a smirk, “So what happened yesterday?”

I just gaped at her, unable to stop the blush spreading across my cheeks. “That’s—
cough
—personal.”

“I’m
sure
it was,” she said with a crooked smile as she pushed the safe door closed. “I’d be careful with that one, she’ll eat you alive,” Akiko advised as she walked past me, still grinning like she found the whole thing unbelievably amusing.

I turned to follow after her. “I’ll have you know, I’m well practiced with that kind of gir—” I stopped mid-step. “Why am I even telling you this?”

“Because you babble when you’re nervous,” she answered with a snort as she walked out of the room.

“I do not!” I called after her indignantly. But she was right and I knew it.

I slumped into the chair that was against the wall, and ran my hands over my face. Maybe I just should have stayed in bed today.

Eventually, I got my nerve up enough again to go talk to Parker and tried to walk through the labs as casually as I could. But I was fairly certain I was sweating bullets.

“Hey, Travis,” Parker greeted me as she eyed me uncertainly, but I really couldn’t blame her. I’d basically been throwing her mixed signals since we’d made out in my room two and a half months ago. One, because I was so frakking confused about everything. Two, because she kinda scared me. And three because, well, I wanted her so
very
badly.

Parker leaned back over the microscope, her beautiful wavy blond hair twisted up into a bun with a pair of pale blue chopsticks shoved through it. My heart started to beat faster as I watched her, remembering how her hair, her skin, her lips, had felt against my fingers.

“Did you need something? ‘Cause you know you could have just sent Akiko to come get anything you needed,” Parker stated without pulling her eyes from the microscope.

But I like coming here, because then I get to see you
, I stopped myself from saying aloud.

“Are you busy?” I asked in an unsteady voice as I shoved my hands into my pockets of my white lab coat, and leaned against the table.

She finally pulled her face away from the microscope, and looked around the lab. “Well, yes actually.”

“Oh,” I said, and couldn’t help the tone of dejection that crept into my voice.

Parker just continued to watch me, waiting for me to either say something or leave.

Just fucking ask her already, you wuss!
“Will you go out with me?” I blurted out loudly. Parker seemed more than a little taken aback so I amended it quickly. “To dinner. Will you go out with me to dinner tonight?”

“Like on a date?” she asked cautiously.

“
Yeah
…” I answered uncertainly as I shifted my weight again.

A shy smile pulled at her lips. “Sure. You can pick me up at seven, okay?”

“Seven is perfect,” I agreed quickly before she had a chance to change her mind.

“Do I have to dress nice for this place we are going to dinner?” Parker asked, the smile spreading across her lips. Lips that I was dying to press mine against.

I looked at her and couldn’t stop myself from tracing her form with my eyes. The slate-gray pencil skirt she was wearing hugged the curve of her legs like a second skin. Really, I would be more than thrilled if she wore what she was wearing to dinner. Or anything really. Or nothing.

I swallowed hard, and took a steadying breath before I said or did something
really
stupid. “Um…uh…wear whatever you like.”

Dark Places

Tuesday, November 6th

TRAVIS

A
s I walked past the
couch, Patrick leaned over it, and looked at me. “Where you headed?”

“I was going to—” He looked bad—
really
bad. There was death on the other side of those eyes. The destruction left behind by a raging storm. And I knew I just couldn’t leave him alone. Especially when I saw what he was flipping through on his phone. Pictures. Pictures of him and Nualla. Pictures of him and Nualla at their wedding. And then I noticed the mostly empty bottle of alcohol resting on the floor next to him.

Frak.

“I was going to go get some food,” I half lied.

“Oh,” he said with a heavy sigh.

“Did you want to come?”

He looked at me for a moment and then at the door. And I knew what he was going to say. He was afraid to run into her—Nualla’s
doppelgänger
who had turned out to be her previously-believed-dead cousin. Kira. So afraid because although she was Nikki’s twin, Kira was nearly a perfect copy of Nualla. And though I didn’t know the whole story, I was also fairly certain he had loved her once. And that the part of Aku that was still inside him might love her still. And now she was living in the same apartment building as us. Three floors below and four doors down. Which was why I had only convinced him to leave the apartment a few times outside of his required assessments with Kiskei.

But what scared me more than his reluctance to leave the apartment was that he hadn’t been drawing. Not one thing in over two months. Which, if it were anyone else, wouldn’t have been so alarming. But with Patrick… Well, he was the type of person who had to compulsively draw nearly every second he was awake. And the fact that he hadn’t picked up a single pencil or pen since the day he woke up in that hospital room terrified me. Because I had absolutely no frakking idea what to do about any of it.

Patrick was in such a dark place. A place I had been myself so many times before. And I knew just how hard it was to claw your way out of it. And I didn’t think he had the will to even try.

“No, I’m not really hungry,” he said as he looked away from me.

“You’ve got to eat
something
, Patrick,” I pleaded with him. “You look like death warmed over.”

“I feel worse,” he said morosely as he rolled over on his side, and curled into a ball.

I sighed, and ran my hand over my face. “I’m getting pizza.” He didn’t answer. “Chinese?” Still nothing. “Japanese?” He stirred a little and I knew I had him. I leaned against the bookcase the separated the living room from the entryway. “Chicken
katsu
with rice and extra soy sauce?”

“Fine…” he finally relented with a heavy sigh.

I walked down to the elevator before I called Parker.

“Hey!” she said cheerily into the phone. “I’m running a little late so if you’re already waiting outside my door, I’m sorry.”

“
Yeah,
about that… Um, I can’t make it tonight,” I said as I pushed the
Lobby
button. And the second the words left my mouth I wanted to kick myself for doing this to her. “Patrick’s…not doing so good. And I think… I think I should stay home with him tonight. I’m really,
really,
sorry.”

She was quiet for so long I thought she might have hung up on me. “No, it’s okay, I understand,” she finally said in a defeated tone.

“You are so unbelievably awesome,” I breathed into the phone, and I meant it.

“I’m letting you slide
this
time. But next time, I get to pick the place and activity, and you don’t get to say no.”

“There’s going to be a
next
time?” I blurted out in complete and utter disbelief. “I’d have thought by now you would have given up on me and gone for someone who was actually
worth
it.”

“What can I say, I’m stubborn,” Parker said with a huff. “Oh, but by the way, if you cancel on me next time, they will never find your body.”

“Duly noted,” I said with a nervous laugh, because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure she was joking.

Hidden Doors

Wednesday, November 7th

PATRICK

S
ometime at oh-my-gods early, I
threw up the chicken
katsu.
And the alcohol. And then I just curled up there on the floor, because getting back up just wasn’t worth the effort. And I let my eyes slide shut again.

Sometime after that, I opened my eyes again to see Travis standing in the doorway in a ratty old
Firefly
t-shirt and gray pajama bottoms.

He walked into the bathroom, and put his back to the wall as he slid down to the floor. “Hey,” he said as he looked down at me.

“Hey,” I replied weakly.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked as he draped his arms over his knees.

A time machine. A do over. A blow to the head
, the voice said sarcastically.

“Do we have any ginger ale?” I asked as I sat up slowly, my head spinning.

Travis gave me a knowing smirk. “Let me go check the hangover emergency kit.”

The wind whipping across the roof swirled and twisted Kiskei’s hair around like a basket of black snakes. He was standing out in the open, his hands in the pockets of his white lab coat, just staring out at the city. The wind rushed past him, lifting the bottom edges of his coat up into the air behind him like it was a cape. And there was something in the way he was standing that told me that if I wasn’t there, he might have stretched his arms out to the sides and let the coat rise up, unhindered.

I turned my head away from Kiskei and peered through the stained glass down into the temple. Even though I had spent a few months living at The Embassy after I had been shot in the chest, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was roof access. I mean sure, now that I thought about it, of
course
there had to be for maintenance reasons. But unlike a lot of places at The Embassy—or almost all of it really—I got the distinct impression that this roof didn’t get a lot of foot traffic. Mainly because the door to the roof wasn’t sitting out in the open, and it wasn’t labeled either. It was tucked away at the end of a corridor that was far from impressive.

There were no windows along the corridor; in fact, the only thing that decorated the plain white walls was a single glass case with a fire extinguisher and a few doors labeled
Storage
.

About a hundred feet after it started, the sparse corridor turned to the left and then ended abruptly at a door. However, this door wasn’t like the other doors that had been set into the corridor. There was no doorknob or handle of any kind, just a thin line in the shape of a rectangle cut into a cement wall. Frankly, I was fairly certain that most people would have missed it completely unless they were looking for it. Almost as if someone had purposefully tried to hide it so it would stay a secret.

Normally, when I met Kiskei for my weekly assessment, we sat in his temporary office in the building across the street from the south side of The Embassy. And by the constant buzzing of his cell phone, it was obvious that he was swamped with work, but he always gave me his undivided attention as he asked me questions. The attention should have been comforting, but something about it was unnervingly familiar in a way that put me on edge. But today, instead of sitting in that office, we were standing out on the roof of The Embassy in the cold November wind.

“How do you feel about the Protectorate Academy?” Kiskei asked from right next to me.

I whipped my head back, caught off guard by how close he had gotten without me noticing. “What?”

“I was wondering if you had considered joining the Protectorate,” Kiskei asked casually. I just blinked at him for a moment; this was way off from his normal line of questions.

I folded my arms across my chest and looked down at my feet, watching a stray pigeon feather as it swirled past. “It’s not for me, I’m not a warrior.”

Kiskei’s weight shifted, and he struck out swiftly and violently. On pure instinct—as if it was second nature—I dodged his strike. The snap movement of my body, flawlessly smooth and as natural as breathing.

Kiskei looked over at me, his fist a fraction of an inch from slamming into a pane of stained glass. “You sure about that?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

I scowled at him. “Just because they made me into a monster doesn’t mean I have to continue to be one,” I stated sourly. As cool as my new found abilities should have been, I hated them. They reminded me that I wasn’t normal, even by daemon standards. That even among them, I was different. An experiment. A freak.

Kiskei looked back at me with equally hard eyes. “Your mother was
not
a monster.”

I sucked in a sharp breath and then let it out. “I never said she
was
.” I had forgotten, for maybe the hundredth time, that my mother—the mother I had barely even known, the mother who had been murdered by the same people who had taken me—had been Protectorate.

Kiskei looked at me with an exhausted, sad look in his eyes. “You were born to protect, Patrick. You can deny it all you want, but it won’t make it any less true.”

“I don’t believe in fate,” I spat as I glared at him.

Kiskei looked at me like he was holding back a bitter laugh. “You could stop believing in gravity, but it wouldn’t get you any closer to flying.”

I just glared at him harder, and he sighed. “I can see I’m never gonna convince you, you’ve got too much of her stubbornness in you,” he stated as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny package wrapped in brown kraft paper. “But if you change your mind…” he said as he placed it next to me on the edge of the wall that jutted out before it became the stained glass ceiling of the temple. And then he walked away, toward the door that lead back into the corridor.

As he lifted the plastic shield and pressed his hand to the biometric reader, he looked back in my direction. “It is not enough to protect only those who lay claim to your heart,” he stated in that simple, profoundly serious calm of his, before he walked through the door.

I watched him until the door slammed shut, and then I looked down at the small package that he had left. It was smaller than a cell phone—about three inches square and an inch thick—with a black wax seal holding it closed instead of tape or twine.

It is not enough to protect only those who lay claim to your heart
, the voice echoed in my head.

I grabbed the package, nearly crushing it in my hand.

“But I couldn’t even protect the two people I loved most!” I shouted into the wind as I leaned back and prepared to chuck the tiny package as far as I could over the side of the building. But as I swung my arm forward—right before I let go of the package—I dropped to my knees. I let the package fall out of my hand, and I slammed my fist into the ground, letting out a savage, anguished cry of rage.

When I had no air left in my lungs, I flopped back onto the roof and stared up into the sky, letting all my anger and frustration out in ragged, raw breaths. All I had wanted—all I had
ever
wanted—was to create. But the world seemed so fucking bound and determined to force me to be a destroyer instead. A killer.

There is always a choice
, the voice whispered, sounding sad instead of mocking for once.

I laid there staring up into nothing until the sky filled with gray colorless clouds and icy drops of rain pelted my face. And then I pulled out my phone, and dialed the number.

“Hey Connor, do you have class today?”

“So how’s Sara?” I asked as I flipped disinterestedly through a manga magazine I had pulled from the stack on the low, lime green wall that jutted out next to our table. Connor had eyed my bloody knuckles when I’d met him at On The Bridge at the Japantown Mall, but he hadn’t asked about them. And I wasn’t about to bring it up, either.

“Fine, I guess,” Connor said with a shrug as he pushed the tapioca balls around his bubble tea with the straw.

Movement on the TV screen above Connor’s head caught my attention and I let my eyes drift from the magazine. The TVs in the manga cafe seemed to be on a continuous Miyazaki movie loop, and this one was currently playing
Howl’s Moving Castle
at the moment. Ironically, it was at the part in the movie when everything started falling apart and the lead character, Sophie, was crying in the rain.

“We broke up two weeks ago,” Connor stated in an emotionless voice.

“
What
?” I yelped, my eyes darting back down to him. “What
happened
?”

“Nothing,” he said with a shrug as he leaned back in his seat and sucked on his bubble tea.

I just stared at him, open-mouthed.

“
What
?” he said defensively. “It was
bound
to happen, Patrick. She’s on the other side of the fucking country.”

“Well yeah, I knew
that
. It’s just…
wow,
” I babbled, more than a little stunned. They had seemed so good together. So to have it just end like that—like it was no big deal, like it was nothing—was a little jarring.

“She wasn’t the one I guess,” Connor continued nonchalantly in a way that practically screamed that it
did
matter. “Most high school relationships are doomed after graduation anyways. I mean, not
everyone
can be as lucky as you and Nualla.”

I just sat there frozen, unable to let the air out of my lungs as what he had just said hit both of us.

“Uh… Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring her—” Connor said in a rush, his black-brown eyes wide.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said in a toneless voice as I stood, and shoved my hands into the pockets of my hoodie. And then I just walked out the doors of On the Bridge before I lost it.

I walked past the
taiko dojo
and through the double-doored archway back into the the mall proper. Then I stepped to the left, out of eyesight of the manga cafe, and slumped against the wooden railing that lined the wall. Taking deep breaths, I ran my hands back through my hair. I didn’t catch my thumbs on my horns anymore, either because they were about five inches now, and it was harder to forget they weren’t there, or because I was finally getting used to them.

I might have been overreacting by storming out of the cafe, but I just couldn’t take it anymore. It was like the universe was screaming at me that it was over between me and her and I was just too stubborn to let go.

Because it is
, the voice said derisively. Much louder than its usual whisper.

“Shut up,” I growled back under my breath. “I don’t care what you think.”

And that’s when I realized that I was arguing with the voices in my own head. And that anyone watching me would think I was a fucking crazy person.

“Gods, Patrick, you need to get your shit together,” I admonished myself as I leaned my head back against the wall, blinking back tears.

I shifted my weight and my right hand bumped into something within my hoodie’s pocket. I looked down, pulling the object free. It was the small package Kiskei had given me. Only a small fragment of the black wax seal was still stuck to the brown kraft paper. I had probably cracked the seal open when I had crushed it in my hand back on the roof.

With a quick glance around me, I pulled the edge of the kraft paper free from the last fragment of the seal, and unwrapped the small package. Inside was a piece of black, pear-shaped hard plastic with a five-petaled black lotus inset into the center. Like a key fob without the key.

I ran my finger over the lotus, unintentionally pressing it down. A silver thing shot out from inside the black plastic object like a switch-blade, and I dropped it. The object bounced off the floor between my shoes, spinning in a circle as a small folded note fluttered to the ground next to it.

I crouched down to get a better look at the object and my breath caught. Kiskei had given me a—
key
?

I picked the key up quickly, and shoved it back into my pocket. Then I unfolded the note.

Saturday, November 10th 9am

512 Nymphaea Street

That was all it said. A date, time, and place. No explanation—no instructions—just that. I stared at it a moment before I shoved it into my pocket, and stood back up.

I walked back into On the Bridge, and Connor quickly swallowed his mouthful of
unagi don
. “Hey, Patrick, look I’m
really
sorry I—”

“You want to go check something out with me?” I asked abruptly, cutting him off as I ran my fingers over the mysterious key in my pocket.

Connor blinked at me for a moment before he answered uncertainly, “
Sure
…”

Connor and I stood across the street from what appeared to be a plain gray door set in a blank wall. Okay, maybe the wall wasn’t
exactly
blank. The wall was unadorned, corrugated cement that ran the entire length of the block—which wasn’t that long really, maybe only three to four building lengths—with thick green ivy covering the left half of it.