Iniquitous (The Marked #3)(88)

A hard push against my arm startled me awake. I turned to my side, expecting to see Trace there, but instead I found Arianna leaning over me. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her eyes were screaming with alarm.

I bolted upright as a wave of nerves punched through my stomach. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“She’s gone!” she shouted in a panic, shaking her head frantically. “She took him with her!”

“Who’s gone? My mother?” I tried to blink the sleep from my eyes, but I couldn’t seem to make sense of her words.

“Yes, your mother! You need to get up. Get dressed!” she ordered, pulling me up from the bed.

“Where’s Trace?” I said as I grabbed my jeans from the dresser and shook them out once.

“He’s gone! Dominic and Gabriel were unconscious when we got back and Trace and your mother are both missing.”

I tripped on the pant leg and fell to my knees. “What do you mean he’s gone!” The words tore from my body like a hurricane. I jumped back onto my feet and flicked on the light switch, searching for clues. There had to be a note. Some kind of explanation. He wouldn’t leave. She wouldn’t take him. This wasn’t happening!

“There’s blood,” she said, pointing to the spot where Trace had been laying.

I crawled onto the bed frantically and pulled back the blankets. There was blood on the pillow and blood on the sheet. He was hurt. Bleeding. Maybe worse.

I couldn’t get my thoughts to run straight.

“This doesn’t make sense! Why would she do this?”

Arianna clamped her mouth shut, but I could tell she was keeping something from me.

“Tell me!” I demanded.

Her eyes closed briefly before she said, “She may have heard us talking about Engel last night. About how you vanquished him. It slipped out. We didn’t realize—”

“No,” I shook my head, not accepting her explanation. “She wouldn’t do this to me. She knows how much he means to me. She told me she wanted to help me.”

“He sired her,” she whispered the words like a dirty secret.

The pieces fell together slowly and then everything crashed down on me at once.

She took him.

She never had any intention of helping me, she was just trying to save her own ass from being put back in that box. And now that she found out I was the one that killed her precious dead boyfriend, she was going to return the favor by killing the one I loved.

But not if I found her first.

My cold eyes turned to her as an angry fire surged through my heart. “Can you track them?”

“I think so,” she said with a nod. “We can try a locator spell with his blood.”

“Then do it.”

“Okay,” she agreed, but she still wasn’t moving.

“Do it right now!” I shouted and then watched as she grabbed the sheet from the bed and scurried out of the room.

I stifled down a scream that wanted to tear out of my body and rip the entire world apart. Rage broiled in my blood like lava as I threw on the rest of my clothes and snatched the shoulder holster Gabriel had given me from the settee.

I could feel a murderous itch in my palms as I opened the pocket and made sure I had what I needed.

One wooden stick with Jaqueline Morningstar’s name on it.





40. ANGEL’S PEAK


The rain fell from the sky like knives, stabbing the windshield with fury as we barreled down the highway towards Angel’s Peak. The sisters said they were confident that their Locator spell had worked and that my mother and Trace would be at the lake. I’d never been there before and had no idea why she would’ve taken him there, but I didn’t intend on asking her either. I should have known better than to trust a vampire. One of Engel’s vampires, no less. There would be no more small talk. No questions or niceties. Just payback, raw, just and swift.

“How much further?” I asked, my voice cracking with adrenaline.

Arianna was sitting up front with Gabriel, navigating the route as I sat in the back seat wedged between Dominic and Anita, with Annabelle on her other side.

“Five minutes at the most,” answered Gabriel through the rearview mirror.

“Are you sure they’re still there? What if she moved him? What if he’s already—” I couldn’t even finish the sentence, let alone the thought of it.

“They’re there,” said Arianna. “If he moves, I’ll see it on my map.”

I leaned forward and looked over her shoulder, but I didn’t see anything special on the map. Then again, I hadn’t seen anything on it when they’d done the spell back at the Manor. Apparently, you had to be one of them to see their magic.

“You’re trembling,” whispered Dominic, staring down at my shaking hand. His wounds from the apparent attack had already healed, but the look on his face told me that the memory of it hadn’t. He wanted to settle the score.

Unfortunately for him, he was going to have to get in line. I clasped my hands together and buried them between my thighs. Every second that ticked by us felt as though it were dragging on for eternity.

“Tell me again what happened?” I asked no one in particular. It still didn’t make sense to me, not to mention I needed something to keep my mind occupied with so that I didn’t completely crack before we even got there.