Iniquitous (The Marked #3)(90)

Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

“Trace!” My guttural cry was muffled through the unrelenting rain. I reached out and slicked his hair back, gently touching his head-wound with my thumb. Diluted blood poured down his face in crooked streaks.

“Can you hear me? Please talk to me!”

There was no response; no reaction—no life inside his beautiful pristine eyes.

“What’s wrong with him?” I yelled as the sisters filed onto the rocky shore behind me. Even though the rain was pouring down on us in barrels, neither one of them were wet.

“I’m not sure,” answered Gabriel who was standing shoulder to shoulder with Dominic. Wet strands of his dark hair clung to his forehead in chunks, his expression despairing.

“Maybe she fed on him?” offered Dominic, knowing that a Revenants bite, like his, can do strange things to us.

I looked back at Trace and searched along his neck and then his wrists for puncture wounds, but there were none. “I don’t see anything!” The panic in my voice was elevating with every passing second.

The Roderick sisters moved in closer, forming a line behind me as they continued to stare down at me and Trace as though we were at the scene of some horrible accident and they were just some unwitting bystanders. I thought they’d come here to help? Why the hell weren’t they doing anything!

“What’s wrong with him? Why isn’t he answering?” I asked them, my voice scared and pleading.

“He’s spelled,” answered Annabelle. There was a faint smile on her face that made me flinch back.

“What do you mean he’s spelled?” I jumped up on my feet and whipped around to face them.

The remnants of Morgan’s words came to just then. Her vision of him dying. His body frozen. His blood on my hands. You told him you loved him and then he died.

Had she been telling the truth all along?

Had I just signed his death certificate?

Had that been the reason I could never say the words to him before?

No! I shook my head violently.

I couldn’t accept it. I wouldn’t. My eyes snapped to the sisters again. I needed them to put him back together again—to make him whole and full of life just the way he was meant to be. “Can you undo it? Can you fix him?”

“We can,” answered Anita, still staring down at Trace, her head slightly tilted to the side.

“But we won’t,” added Annabelle as her smirk pulled into a grin.





41. BODY SNATCHERS


Terror slashed through my insides as the line in the sand became horrifyingly clear.

“Why won’t you help him?” I didn’t want to say the words out loud and make it real. But it was as plain and clear as day. I took a step back from them. “You did this, didn’t you? What did you do to him?”

“We did what we had to do to get you here,” answered Anita as though we were discussing a surprise birthday party and not the abduction of the love of my life.

“And that’s not all we did,” added Annabelle, her laugh morphing into a cackle.

I covered my ears. I didn’t want to hear the sound. I didn’t want to hear any of it.

Dominic and Gabriel were moving up behind them, stalking them like prey.

“Take one more step and you’re dust,” warned Anita without glancing back at them. She didn’t need to. The sisters could see and hear us without even trying.

Gabriel and Dominic froze mid-step. They were strong and they were brave, but they weren’t fools. The Roderick Sisters were stronger than all of us combined and had more demonic magic in their pinky fingers than all of Hollow Hills combined. Rushing them was futile. They’d simply swat us away like flies.

We had to be smart about this. We had to appeal to their senses—to their wallets.

“Who commissioned you?” I asked Anita, the fiery red-headed leader of the pack as I took a cautious step towards them. “Whatever they’re paying, we’ll double it.”

Anita laughed.

“Triple.”

“You’re seriously too stupid to live,” spit Annabelle, glaring at me with her venomous eyes as she pulled a silver dagger from behind her back.

My fists balled at my sides, ready to sock her in her miserable face the minute she even flinched my way with that thing.

“She doesn’t need to flinch your way,” boasted Arianna, the traitorous wench. “She just has to think it.”

“Transfodio!” The blade shot from Annabelle’s milky hand like a bullet spraying out of a glock.

I had no idea what just happened until I looked down at my stomach and saw the handle of the knife protruding from my abdomen. A bloom of blood swelled around it and my knees knocked together at the sight of it.

I’d just gone from being screwed to royally screwed sideways.

How the hell was I going to stand a chance against them if I couldn’t even form a thought without them knowing about it. They were three steps ahead and I was ten feet in the wrong direction.

My eyes snapped to Gabriel and Dominic. “Run!” I yelled at them, desperate for them to save themselves before it was too late. “Get out of here!”

They started running alright, only it was towards us instead of away from us. Their fangs were out and their faces were twisted in determination as they pounced off their feet and soared through the air in two blurs.