Iniquitous (The Marked #3)(84)
“Engel’s dead?” Her silver eyes darkened into an icy tempest.
This probably wasn’t the best time to tell her that I’d smoked her boyfriend into his next life.
“The Order vanquished him after he broke down the barriers,” answered Trace, quickly covering my butt for me.
I was going to have to thank him for that later—repeatedly.
I crossed my arms and looked her dead in the eye. “So? Are you going to help us or not?”
She stared at me for a moment and then narrowed her eyes again. “How old are you now?”
“Seventeen. Is that a yes?”
She appeared to be appraising me. “You’re too young to be on your own.”
My eyes peeked at the ceiling. Was she really trying to give me the third-degree right now?
“Who’s your guardian?”
“My guardian?” I was about to say Julian, the lanky giant with the big mouth, but that turd wasn’t my anything so I didn’t bother mentioning him.
“Yes, your legal guardian. Who is charged with taking care of you?”
Oh. That. “My uncle Karl, but I’m working on fixing that as we speak.”
“Karl Blackburn is your guardian?” The way she said his name made my skin crawl. It was almost as though she hated him as much as I did. As much as he hated her. “And he let you do this—he allowed you to bring me back?” The way she said it let me know she didn’t believe that for a minute.
“I didn’t ask for his permission. Our relationship’s been a little strained ever since he tried to kill me—twice.”
“Then…” Her eyes slammed shut. “They know about your blood,” she surmised.
The fact that she knew about my blood should have surprised me, but somehow, it didn’t.
As a child, I’d always wondered if I was to blame for her leaving us. Wondered if me and Tessa had done something to drive her away from our family. After finding out the truth about my blood, about what I really was, my childhood fears had come crashing back down on me and suddenly it all made sense.
She knew what I was all along, and she left me behind because of it.
The sobering confirmation made my eyes sting with tears but I refused to let even a single one fall in front of her. Instead, I cursed each one away just like she cursed me away with her necrotic bloodline.
“Yes,” I answered icily. “Everyone knows I’m the Daughter of Hades. It’s been in the town newsletter for weeks.”
“We’re in Hollow?” She shut the door behind herself.
“The one and only.”
“And the Dark Legion?” Her eyebrows rutted together as though she gave a damn.
“Hot on my tail.” I shifted on my feet, my irritation prickling under my skin. “What’s it to you anyway? We both know you don’t give a flying—”
“I’m so sorry, Jemma.” She breathed the words out so softly that her lips barely moved.
Words that had smacked me in the face and stole my breath right out of my lungs.
“I never meant for any of this to happen to you. It was supposed to be me—I thought it was but…” Her words drifted off into nothingness as her haunted eyes stared not at me, but through me, to some other time and place.
I wanted to ask her what she meant, to demand she explain herself. But her ghostly eyes stunned me silent. I knew the truth was coming. I could feel its static charge crackling in the air, and I knew the truth was going to be far worse to take than any lie could have ever hoped to be.
38. BLACKBURN FAMILY VALUES
She took a step towards me, but this time it was me backing up. The rain continued to beat its hands against the house as we stood silently in the entrance of Huntington Manor, the place where dreams came to die.
“Thomas and I were over the moon when I first found out I was pregnant with you,” she began, placing her hand against her stomach as though she could still feel something inside her womb. “I was going to have my two girls, just like I’d always dreamed of, and everything was perfect.”
I stumbled back another step. Her soft tone was lulling me towards her, but I refused to go willingly.
“Like with all Descendant pregnancies, the Council was thrilled to be welcoming a new heir into the mix, and as per protocol, they ran their usual tests on me. Only this time, they had developed new ones—blood tests that I hadn’t done when I was pregnant with Tessa.” Her eyebrows creased at the memory. “I later found out that the tests were meant to map my bloodlines, to see if the Morningstar line was dominant in me. And of course, it was, and your father and I knew what that meant for me, for our family,” she said gingerly and then shook her head. “We tried to fight them, to find some kind of way around it, but there’s no place to run to when you’re running from yourself.”
I knew exactly what she meant. I’d been chasing my tail in circles, trying to run away from it since the moment I found out what I was.
“The Council gave me until your birth to get my affairs in order. And of course, your father refused to accept that. In his maddening search for a way out, he even went as far as to suggest the unthinkable.”
“The unthinkable?”
She motioned to herself as the living example. “You see, there was only one way to eliminate my threat to the Council and that was to make my blood of no use to the Dark Legion.”