Unmarked (16 page)

Just like it did when Darien Shears tried to cross one.

But she wasn’t as strong as Darien. As she struggled to get up, her form began to fade. She pointed a bloody finger at me. “I’ll see you in hell.”

The spirit cried out in pain, and her body flickered one last time before it exploded into millions of tiny particles.

Don’t wait. It’ll only make it harder.

I reached into my pocket and scooped out a handful of salt and rubbed the crystals over my wrist. I stared at the scuffed toes of my boots. The next few minutes would change my life, one way or another.

What if the mark didn’t show up and I wasn’t the fifth member of the Legion? Would my friendships vanish like the tiny bits of the vengeance spirit I had just destroyed? Who else would Faith have chosen? My deadbeat of a father?

I kept my eyes fixed on the concrete, my boots, the edge of the Devil’s Trap—anything to avoid my friends’ faces as they waited for the moment that would determine my fate.

It’s been long enough.

I turned my wrist over and flexed my fingers.

The moment was here.

I
raised my eyes slowly, wanting to know the truth and not wanting to know at the same time. I stared down at my wrist.

Unmarked.

I held my breath, afraid to move.

I’m not one of them.

This time there were no loopholes left.

I’d drawn the Devil’s Trap that destroyed the spirit in the War Jar, and I’d watched Jared and Lukas bury my aunt, the fifth member of the Legion.

I remembered waiting for my mark inside the West Virginia State Penitentiary. I’d been so sure the lines were carving themselves into my skin.

But they weren’t.

That night broke me. At least, I thought it did. But it was nothing compared to how I felt right now—shattered, empty, and alone.

Please let this be another nightmare. Let me wake up.

“Kennedy?” Jared sounded nervous, which meant he saw it, too.

“I’m sorry, kid,” Gabriel said.

I spun around, still cradling my wrist. “Are you?”

Dimitri lit another black cigarette. “You needed to know the truth.”

The truth.

“Even if she isn’t the fifth member of the Legion, that doesn’t prove her mother was Illuminati.” Jared wasn’t giving up on me.

The fifth member.

Faith must’ve picked my father, her only other option.

Dimitri rubbed his temples. “Your mother didn’t have much family, did she, Kennedy? Just one sister, and I’m willing to bet they weren’t close. The Order of the Enlightened never chooses operatives with close family ties. It’s one of the criteria for selection.”

“What did you call them?” Alara sounded stunned.

Dimitri flicked his ash on the floor. “The Order of the Enlightened. Do you recognize the name?”

Alara tensed behind me. “No. I thought you said something else.”

She was lying.

“The Order of the Enlightened operated outside the laws of our organization,” he continued. “They were engaged in dangerous behavior, which the Illuminati weren’t even aware of. After your father left, we sent someone to speak with your mother and try to reason with her.”

I squared my shoulders. “I don’t believe you.”

Dimitri turned to Gabriel. “Please confirm that Elizabeth Waters was one of us.”

“She was part of the Order, but I wouldn’t call her one of us,” Gabriel said.

“A shepherd is responsible for all his sheep, Gabriel. Even the lost ones.”

He threw Dimitri a hard look. “Some sheep want to stay lost.”

“Tell Kennedy how you knew her mother,” Dimitri said.

Every muscle in my body tensed. I was still trying to figure out what was wrong with my memory. The last thing I wanted was to hear about how Gabriel supposedly knew my mom.

Gabriel didn’t move for a moment, and I thought the conversation was over. Then he took a deep breath. “I was a member of the Order of the Enlightened, until I figured out what they were really up to, which had nothing to do with the garbage they were feeding us. I told the Illuminati what I’d learned, and they welcomed me back. Eventually, I convinced the Grand Master your mother was worth saving, too.

“So I went to your house in Georgetown, the one with the green door. Your father was gone by then.” He smiled to himself, as if recalling a fond memory. “Your mom cooked me dinner a few times. She made a killer lasagna, and the best marinara sauce I’ve ever had in my life.”

Marinara. Mom’s signature recipe.

“Anyone can drive by Kennedy’s house and see what color her door is,” Elle said, her tone venomous.

Gabriel’s smile faded. “I knew that house inside and out. Elizabeth lived there before she married Kennedy’s father.” He turned to me. “I stained those wood floors and built the shelves in the library. Are they still there?”

I didn’t react. Anyone who’d ever set foot in my house would know about the floors and the library shelves.

“I also built a few things you probably never saw,” he said. “Your mom had this hidden door in the back of her closet.”

The words slammed into me, and I couldn’t catch my breath.

The crawl space.

I’d never told anyone about the tiny crawl space in my mother’s closet, or the night I spent hidden inside. Not even Elle. My friends knew about my crippling fear of the dark, but no one knew how it started.

Gabriel was still talking, but the memory was already taking over.

“Someone’s in the house,” my mom whispered, pulling
a board away from the wall to reveal a small opening in the back of her closet. “Stay here until I come back. Don’t make a sound.”

Don’t make a sound or the bad guys will hear you. That’s what she meant.

I squeezed inside as she replaced the board, drowning me in darkness. Not the kind of dark where you could see silhouettes, but a blackness that swallows everything. I closed my eyes and tried to pretend I was still in my bed.

Then I heard the sounds—the stairs creaking, furniture scraping against the floor, muffled voices. I wished my dad hadn’t left us. He would’ve scared away whoever was in the house. I held my hand against the board, praying for my mom to come back. Eventually, the wood gave beneath my palm and a thin stream of light flooded the space.

Black splotches exploded in front of my eyes as they adjusted to the light again. I saw the closet floor through the opening—my mom’s red high heels and her fuzzy bedroom slippers. Then her face peering into the crawl space and her arms reaching for me.

And something else…

I fought to hold on to the memory I’d spent my whole life fighting. Usually the memory ended the moment my mom pulled me out of the closet. But there was more—pieces my mind had repressed.

As she pulled me out, I glanced back at the terrifying
space. An image blurred past—painted on the wall, black like the darkness.

Don’t look.

But I already had, I just never remembered until now.

A medieval cross with a hawk in the center and Latin script running down the bottom—the letters I thought I’d seen on Gabriel’s arm, before I realized he was standing too far away for me to actually see them. The rest of the tattoo—the part I
had
seen—must’ve broken through whatever wall my mind had built around that night.

Which means they’re telling the truth about my mom.

The realization was worse than not being a member of the Legion. My mom’s whole life was a lie.

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. “We shouldn’t be the ones telling you this. I wanted your mother to leave the Order and start over.”

Elle pushed past us and strode up to Dimitri. “Even if your friend here did wax Kennedy’s mom’s floors and raid her fridge, it doesn’t mean she was Illuminati.”

“Maybe they were friends, and Kennedy’s mom had no idea Gabriel was a member of the Order,” Jared said. “None of this proves anything.” He didn’t believe Gabriel’s story. But he didn’t know about the crawl space or the symbol.

He didn’t know they were telling the truth.

“Maybe you were a spy like that guy Archer,” Lukas said. “And you just pretended to be her friend.”

My mom lied to me and betrayed my dad. She was a member of the Illuminati.

Jared stormed across the room and grabbed my hand. “She’s not one of you,” he told Dimitri. “She’s one of us.”

I glanced at my friends’ faces. Lukas and Elle were staring at Dimitri like they wanted to kill him, but Priest’s and Alara’s eyes were fixed on the ground.

They know I’m not one of them.

Jared tightened his grip on my hand. “You’re wrong.”

My knees buckled. I felt myself falling, the room and the darkness closing in on me.

Jared caught me and eased me down to the floor. “Are you okay?”

“Of course she’s not okay,” Elle said. “Look at her face. She’s as white as a ghost.”

I looked up, and Gabriel was staring at me. “You know I’m telling the truth, don’t you?” he asked.

“Kennedy?” Jared’s eyes searched mine.

I couldn’t lie to him—not now.

“My mom was one of them.”

I
’m going to check on our guest,” Gabriel said, heading toward the containers.

Dimitri nodded. “Never underestimate—”

“What an animal will do to free itself from a cage,” Gabriel finished. “I know.”

Jared ignored them and pulled me up. “What’s going on?”

“Gabriel’s tattoo.” I could barely get the words out. “The cross.”

Elle rushed over and threw her arms around me.

“What about it?”

“I remember seeing the same one on a wall in my mom’s closet.”

Priest and Alara hung back, but they were listening.

“That doesn’t mean—” Jared began.

“Don’t say it doesn’t mean anything.” I shook my head. “You think my mom just happened to have a cross with a hawk and Latin writing on the wall of a secret room in her closet?” Tears burned my eyes, but I didn’t let them fall. “It means everything.”

“Dimitri.” Gabriel’s voice called out from behind the containers. “I need help in here.”

“We can talk about this later,” Jared said, watching Dimitri.

Without another word, all of us followed Dimitri as he ran between the rows. At the end of the aisle, I caught a glimpse of the dockworker Andras had possessed. He was chained in a corner of the cell, drenched in holy water.

Dimitri slipped on his sunglasses and held out his arm, stopping us. “Don’t look the demon in the eye, whatever you do. That’s how he jumps from one body to possess another. He needs to be close to make the switch, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, I wouldn’t take any chances.”

The demon thrashed against the chains, and Gabriel looped the bone whip around the demon’s neck. Barbs jutted out from the dozens of vertebrae, teeth, claws, and other small bones that formed the whip. The moment the bones touched Andras, the barbs burrowed deeper into his skin, pulsing and twisting on their own.

The demon roared in pain.

I shuddered, and the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

“Is that thing alive?” Priest watched, transfixed.

Gabriel jerked the whip, and Andras fell to his knees. “We don’t have time for twenty questions.”

The dockworker struggled to lift his head. “Help me.” The raspy tone and the Russian accent sounded nothing like the voice the demon used earlier.

I grabbed Gabriel’s arm. “He’s trying to say something.”

“I don’t give a crap what he says, as long as he says it in hell.” Gabriel shrugged me off.

The man’s head lolled to the side as if he were drunk. “For the sins I have committed, I ask to be forgiven,” he said in the same Russian accent.

“Why does his voice sound different?” Elle asked, keeping her distance.

“I think the guy Andras possessed is trying to break through,” Lukas said.

Dimitri waved his arm. “Stay back.”

Gabriel didn’t even acknowledge Lukas. His attention was focused solely on Dimitri. “We need to kill Andras now.”

“You mean exorcise him, right?” Priest asked.

Gabriel looked confused. “There’s no way to exorcise a demon as powerful as Andras.”

“Then how do you kill the demon without hurting the guy he possessed?” Elle asked.

Dimitri looked her in the eye. “You don’t.”

“You can’t kill an innocent man,” I said.

Dimitri strode over and yanked on the dockworker’s shirt collar, exposing a tattoo on his neck. A knife—with drops of blood on the blade. “Do you know what this is? It’s a Russian prison tattoo. It means this
innocent man
is a killer for hire. And those blood droplets represent the number of people he’s killed. Do you want to count them?”

I shuddered.

Lukas stepped in front of me. “Why don’t you take it down a notch? She missed the chapter on prison tats in criminal history class.”

Alara glared at Dimitri. “Obviously you didn’t.”

Dimitri ran a hand through his sandy hair and lit a cigarette. “You don’t understand the way this works. Right now, Andras needs to possess a body at all times.”

“Which means if we kill the body, he dies with it,” Gabriel added.

“The body you’re talking about is a
person
,” Alara said.

Dimitri crossed the room and bent down to pet Bear. The dog growled and Dimitri backed off. “Once Andras consumes enough souls, he’ll be strong enough to take his true form.”

“And then there will be no way to kill him,” Gabriel
finished. He looked at Lukas, Jared, Priest, and Alara, one by one. “If you want to be Legion members so badly, you’d better start acting like it. Because none of your family members would ever let that guy walk out of here with that monster inside him.”

Alara raised her chin. “My grandmother would figure out another way.”

Dimitri put his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder, a calming gesture, and Gabriel turned away.

“Imani Sabatier would’ve killed Andras with her own bare hands if that was the only way to destroy him,” Dimitri said.

“You don’t know anything about my grandmother.” Alara’s voice cracked.

“I know more than you think, about all of your family members.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the wall. “I’m not saying this is easy. But the Legion of the Black Dove and the Illuminati share one purpose above all others: to defend the world from a demon that is desperate to take it over. If one man’s life—one murderer’s life—is the sacrifice to save millions, I can live with that.”

Which only left one question.

Could
we
live with it?

As much as I didn’t agree with Dimitri, I’d seen what Andras was capable of on a small scale. I couldn’t imagine what he might do if he grew any stronger.

If he opened the gates of hell, how many demons like him were waiting?

Hundreds?

Thousands?

We had barely stopped Andras, a demon temporarily weakened after being trapped for centuries. How would we stand a chance against him when he grew any stronger?

Jared crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “Dimitri’s right. We can’t risk it.”

“So you’re okay with killing someone?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Haven’t enough people died already?” Lukas asked him.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Jared said.

“He’s saying we don’t have a choice,” Alara said, sounding unsure.

“There’s always a choice,” I said, repeating the mantra my mom had drilled into my head since I was a kid. They sank like a rock in the pit of my stomach.

She chose to lie to me and my dad.

My mother had made the wrong choice, whether or not she knew it.

Just like I did.

“This is
so
not what I signed up for.” Elle turned to Jared, her features hardening. “What are you gonna do? Whip out a buck knife and stab him in the heart?”

Seeing her standing there triggered a wave of guilt inside me. Elle should’ve been at a party, stringing along one of the guys desperate to get a date with her. Instead, she’d been attacked by a paranormal entity and chased by a demon. Now an unstable chain-smoker and a guy carrying a whip made from demon vertebrae were asking her to stand by and watch them kill someone.

Jared frowned. “I’m just trying to figure this out before anyone else gets hurt.”

Dimitri took something out of his coat pocket and held it between his fingers.

A syringe.

“No one is cutting out any hearts. We aren’t monsters.” He depressed the plunger and a few drops of clear liquid squirted from the needle. “We’re trying to stop one.”

Andras, or the Russian criminal—it was hard to tell which one of them we were looking at—moaned in pain.

Lukas gestured at the needle. “That’s not the way to do it.”

“Please—” the criminal pleaded.

Gabriel cracked the whip, and the ivory bones coiled around the criminal’s leg. “Shut your mouth.” Gabriel yanked the handle, and the bones tightened.

The prisoner’s head snapped up, and his body straightened. It began in his feet and traveled through his torso like a current was shooting up his back. The demon’s
midnight eyes stared back at us, the corners of his mouth curving in a wicked smile.

“Be careful, Gabriel,” Andras said, the Russian accent gone now. “When I break free, I’m going to cut out your tongue.”

Gabriel released the whip and cracked it again. This time, the narrow bones snaked around Andras’ neck. “Hurts, doesn’t it? Took four hundred and forty-seven demon bones to make Azazel.”

Azazel? He named his whip?

Gabriel’s mouth twisted into a cruel smile. He was enjoying this. “Want to know where I got them?”

“I know you are not the one who made it, Gabriel, Champion of God. I know your name and its meaning,” the demon said.

“I paid for every bone, and watched while each was extracted from one of your kind—while the demons were still alive.” Gabriel had a white-knuckled grip on the whip handle.

“What was the price?” The lilt in Andras’ voice made it seem like he already knew the answer.

“We both know the price, and when I die, I’ll pay it. And my name means ‘strength of god.’ Be sure to remember it so you can find me in hell.”

Dimitri cringed. “Enough. He’s buying time we don’t have.”

Gabriel flicked his wrist, and the whip slid from the demon’s neck.

Dimitri’s gaze fell on Jared, Lukas, Priest, and Alara. “Practice is over. You’re the Legion now, and you vowed to protect the world from Andras.” He held out the syringe to them. “Are you going to honor that vow or not?”

When no one responded, Dimitri bent down and placed the syringe on the floor in front of us. “It’s easy to call yourself a hero. It’s much harder to be one.”

The syringe lay on the floor like a grenade. No one uttered a word. Speaking felt too much like volunteering. Bear sniffed it, then trotted over and lay at Alara’s feet.

“I’ll do it.” My tone lacked any real conviction.

Priest swooped in and snatched it. “You can’t. One of us should do it.”

Us.

He was drawing a dividing line—the one I had always believed was separating me from the four of them. The line I wasn’t sure existed. Until now.

Hearing Priest say the words destroyed me. He was the one person who accepted me from the beginning. Now he wouldn’t even look at me.

“He’s right,” I said. “You don’t want my Illuminati blood tainting your execution.”

“He didn’t mean it like that, Kennedy.” Jared’s hand slid underneath my tangled hair, and he rubbed the back of my neck with his thumb.

How long before he turned his back on me, too?

“Right, Priest?” Jared sounded confused.

Priest stared down at the cracked concrete floor, silent.

Lukas’ shoulders stiffened. “Priest, what’s your malfunction? It’s Kennedy we’re talking about.”

Priest shoved his hands into the front pocket of his hoodie. “I’m not saying she’s Illuminati, but she’s not part of the Legion. That’s all.”

Jared’s hand slipped from my neck. In the space of three strides, he was towering over Priest. “You weren’t worried about whether or not she was one of us when she saved your life.” He turned to Alara. “What about you? Do you agree with him?”

She had been unusually quiet, and I braced myself for the rejection headed my way.

Alara picked at the loose threads on her cargo pants. “My grandmother didn’t trust the Illuminati.”

“But I’m not one of them.” Anger tore through me. It dulled the pain and the questions, the fear and the doubt. “I didn’t know about any of this. My mom lied to me, and I can’t even ask her why because she’s dead.”

Jared reached for me, but I twisted away.

Gabriel’s cell phone chimed. He scanned the message and nodded to Dimitri. “The sanctuary’s ready, and you owe me ten bucks.”

“We weren’t betting.” Dimitri swept past us.

“I’m always betting.” Gabriel walked over to Priest
and snatched the syringe. “Playtime’s over, kids. It’s time to move him.”

“Move him where?” Alara followed Gabriel. “You said we had to kill him.”

“We do, but not here,” Gabriel said, with his back to Alara. “Andras can only be destroyed within the walls of a sanctuary, in the presence of a cross from a church altar.”

She grabbed Gabriel’s arm and jerked him around to face her. “Then what the hell was that crap you fed us about sticking a syringe in the guy and honoring our vow to the Legion?”

“A test.” Gabriel looked down at her hand and brushed it off his arm. “In case you’re wondering, you all failed.”