Page 14 of Illusory (The Marked Saga #8)

Conscious awareness stirred me awake as my lids fluttered open to a darkened room and the feel of a soft comforter wrapped snuggly around my body. It took me several beats to reorientate myself and realize that I was laying down in my bed, tucked safely beneath the warmth of my blanket.

“You’re awake.”

My heart jumped at the unexpected sound of Gabriel’s voice. He was sitting in the chair by my desk, leaning forward with both elbows pressed against his thighs, staring at me, like he’d been sitting there watching me for hours, waiting for me to wake up.

“What…what happened?” I asked, my brain feeling muddled as though my thoughts were swimming in a cloud of fog. I pushed up from my pillow and sat up, unease crawling under my skin like an army of ants had invaded my body as I slept unsuspectingly. I hated finding Gabriel in my room like this. Too often it meant that I’d done something stupid or dangerous.

Usually both.

And then the memory of what happened with Trace flooded back in through my scrambled thoughts, and I cringed, because I had in fact done something stupid and dangerous. Fuck .

“Never mind. Don’t answer that,” I rasped as I shook my head, trying to chase away the image of Trace’s loveless eyes as he ripped into me and took what he wanted. I really didn’t need to live it over again in my mind. Once had been more than enough.

“What were you thinking going down there alone like that?” he chided, rising from the chair and walking over to me, his presence looming over my bed like a sentinel. Even in the lightless state of the room, I could still see the crease between his brows from the frown he was directing at me.

He wasn’t happy about this, and clearly, he wasn’t going to let me off that easily.

“That wasn’t my intention—I’m not a moron,” I defended, more so for my own benefit than his. “I was looking for you .”

“In Trace’s cell?”

“No.” I rubbed my temples, searching for the words that would prove my earlier point about not being a moron. “I meant to leave when I realized you weren’t there, but when I saw him, I guess I thought I could talk to him. I thought that it would somehow…help.”

“He’s not in any condition to have a normal conversation right now.”

“I’m well aware of that.” I paused and then added, “ Now . I just realized it a few seconds too late.”

He stared down at me for a long beat, like he wanted to say something else. Something more.

“I’m sorry I made you worry,” I said, trying to save him the trouble of chastising me.

“You can’t keep doing this.”

“I know.”

“I thought you were dead,” he said, his voice low and choked with emotion.

“So did I,” I admitted lowly and then glanced back up at him, my gaze magnetizing to the worried line between his brows before dropping back down to my wrists. My bandaged wrist. “Something tells me I have you to thank for that. For not being dead, I mean.”

“We can thank the bond for that.”

My head popped back up at his words. “Oh. So…you felt me through the bond again?” I wasn’t sure why that had surprised me. We were still bloodbonded after all.

His nod was curt but telling. “I could feel your panic and distress almost as though it were my own, and then suddenly, there was nothing at all. Not even an echo of it. I knew something was wrong. Had I come down there even a minute later, I’m not sure we’d be having this conversation right now, or any conversation at all .”

I swallowed against the thickness in my throat, remembering how close to death I’d felt in those moments. Trace had lost complete control over himself, and I’d never felt more distant and disconnected from him than I did in that basement with him.

“Is he okay?” I asked, because despite his total loss of control and regard for me, I knew this still wasn’t his fault. He was only in this position because of me and my asshole Alt.

He eyed me briefly as though considering how best to answer my question. “It hit him pretty hard once the bloodlust wore off and he realized what he’d done.”

My own guilt—part torpor, part nausea—descended over me like a dense fog rolling in over the coastline and smothered all the air from my lungs. As if he didn’t have enough to deal with right now. As if I hadn’t caused him enough pain. Now he had this to contend with.

I buried my face in my hands. “Why do I keep hurting him?”

“Jemma, you aren’t in control of what other people do. He isn’t even in control of himself right now. This isn’t anyone’s fault. It was an accident that was bound to happen with all of us living under the same roof.”

I tried to absorb his words, to allow them to make me feel better, but I still couldn’t shake the guilt I felt or the worry I had that Trace was down there right that moment still blaming himself. “I need to apologize to him,” I said and threw the covers off myself. “This is all my fault, and he needs to know that.”

Gabriel grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back down before I could make it off the bed. “I will take care of that. Right now, the only thing you need to do is rest. In fact, I’m going to insist on it.”

An overwhelming feeling of distress washed over me just then, spreading over my skin like a thick coat of paint. It took me a few beats to realize it wasn’t my emotion. It was Gabriel’s.

I tilted my head to meet his eyes again, noting that his frown had deepened. “What aren’t you telling me?” I asked, immediately nervous and suspicious.

He swallowed noisily, his throat bobbing as he searched my eyes fruitlessly, possibly trying to buy himself some time. Possibly trying to come up with a lie.

“Gabriel. Tell me .”

“I don’t want to worry you, but it took a lot more blood than usual to heal you today,” he informed, his voice sounding nearly as distressed as his face looked. “It was almost like your body was fighting against me—fighting to stop me from bringing you back.”

A cold shiver pricked the back of my neck. “Why the hell would my body do that?”

“That’s exactly what I was wondering.”

I shook my head, hating the way I could see the fear brimming in his eyes when he looked at me. I didn’t like when he worried about me. “It’s probably just because I was already in bad shape before Trace bit me,” I offered, searching his face to see if that eased his concern.

His brows furrowed. “Bad shape?”

“I invoked fire earlier today with Caleb and got hit with a bad case of the bends,” I explained, forcing out an easy smile. “That’s probably what you were feeling.”

He considered it for what felt like a long while before finally nodding. “Yeah. That’s probably what it was.”

Phew. Crisis averted .

I breathed a sigh of relief and tried to shove the entire conversation out of my mind…except the weighty feeling of unease never left me, and this time, I wasn’t sure if it was his emotion I was feeling, or my own.

* * *

For possibly the first time ever in my short Slayer life, I’d done what I was told and spent the next hour resting in my bed. Granted, I’d spent it combing through the Macarthur family codices, but at least I was still technically in bed .

Unfortunately, even though the grimoires were written in plain English, I hadn’t gotten any closer to my end goal of porting myself into Temple. The more I read through them, the more I realized Jaqueline had been right. Teaching myself to port wasn’t going to be an easy task. Mostly because the whole porting thing read like stereo instructions and by the end of my session, I’d gained nothing but a throbbing migraine.

If I had any chance of learning how to teleport, I was going to need someone to guide me through it. And by someone I meant a Reaper, and since Trace was fully off the table and out of commission, I needed to think outside the box. Sadly, I knew of no other Reapers in Hollow Hills besides the Macarthur family and most of them were either dead or indisposed. Then again, that didn’t mean there weren’t any others. Just that I hadn’t found one yet.

On a hunch, I cracked open the grimoires again and started scouring the pages—this time for any mentions of relatives or acquaintances from the same faction as the MacArthur bloodline. After a little digging around, I discovered that Trace’s father Peter had a sister that he no longer spoke to as well as a niece about the same age as Trace. Unable to find any current information on Lena Macarthur or her daughter Layla in the grimoires or online, I did the next best thing. I called up Ben to see if he knew anything about them, seeing as he grew up with Trace.

According to Ben, Layla used to visit Trace and Linley every summer when they were all kids but stopped after some sort of falling out between their parents. Trace had never told Ben exactly what had caused his father and aunt to stop talking, but Ben suspected it may have had something to do with Trace’s mother.

Last he’d heard, they lived a couple of towns away in Hanover, though he wasn’t exactly sure where.

“Have you ever met them personally?” I asked Ben through the phone, cradling it between my ear and my shoulder as I continued flipping through the grimoire.

“Yeah. We all used to hang out during their summer vacation back in the day,” he answered, his words sounding garbled around whatever it was he was chewing on. “Why? What’s this about?”

“Is it true what they say about Shifters?” I asked him instead of answering his question. “That once you catch someone’s scent, you recognize it for life?”

“More or less.”

“So, you’d be able to track them if you were ever in their general vicinity? Like say you happened to be in Hanover?”

“I mean, I’ve never put it to the test, but yeah, that’s basically how it works,” he said in between chews and then swallowed his mouthful. “What’s this about again?”

“How do you feel about road trips?”

A long pause wafted through the line. My stomach clenched as I was sure he was about to tell me he wanted no part of whatever demented thing I had planned.

And then he finally answered. “Fine, but I’m picking the music.”