Page 13 of Irreverent (The Marked Saga #7)

“I can imagine what you think of me,”

started Jaqueline as I suppressed the urge to sneer in her face.

She couldn’t possibly fathom how very low I thought of her, or how seldom I thought of her at all.

“You probably think that I abandoned you, yet again. That I don’t care for you or your sister and that I only care about myself. Maybe you even think that I up and left you because pretending you don’t exist was easier than trying to be a mother to you after all these years.”

Well, damn. That sounded pretty spot on for a hypothetical.

“But you couldn’t be further from the truth,”

she said and for the first time in a long time, I looked deeply into her eyes and was surprised at what I found there. Emotion. Real, unvarnished emotion.

At least that’s what it looked like from where I was standing.

“Isn’t that exactly what you did though?”

I asked, still not moving from the kitchen island. Still refusing to accept her words into my heart. “The Council set you free months ago and not once did you ever try to reach out to us.”

“Only because of where I had gone, not because you weren’t both still in my heart,”

she said, sharing a look with Tessa before returning her full attention to me.

“And where exactly did you go? Because I seriously can’t wait to hear all about this magical telephoneless place,”

I added sardonically. “Must be a real paradise in this modern age of technology.”

“It’s not a matter of where I went, but when,”

she clarified. “I was in the past, Jemma. The very distant pass.”

I blinked, trying to wrap my mind around that one. Nope. Didn’t work. “Oh, so you can time travel now?”

More skeptical sarcasm. Apparently, it was my lipstick shade of the day.

“No,”

she answered plainly. “I had help from a very dear old friend of mine.”

Alright, so Mother Dearest had a Reaper friend of her own up her sleeve. I briefly wondered if he was a Revenant like her, but then quickly tossed the thought away. I didn’t need to know anything personal about her life. Knowing would lead to caring and that was the last thing I wanted to do for her.

“Lucky him. So, how does any of this concern me?”

“I went to the past in search of answers for you, Jemma. It was only by travelling back to a time when The Order of the Rose was still in its infancy that I was able to find someone willing to talk to me. It was there that I found a young woman, a distant ancestor not all that much older than you, that had the same active Morningstar blood as you do.”

Holly hell. My ears were ringing. As much as I’d wanted to brush her off or say something cold and snarky, I was far too taken in by what she was telling me. Too consumed with the possibilities.

Could it be true?

Had she really found someone just like me? Had she finally found the answer to a question that had plagued me since I stepped foot in Hollow Hills and discovered the truth about who I really was? That I wasn’t even almost human, but instead, a distant relative of the Devil himself?

“Her name was Elspeth, and she was a force to be reckoned with. In a lot of ways, she reminded me of you,”

she said thoughtfully, her tone softening as she made the comparison. “It was only in meeting her that I finally realized that the blood in your veins didn’t have to mean damnation for you.”

Damnation? Wow, thanks mom.

“That it was okay to finally tell you the truth about where you really come from.”

Well, halleluj—wait. What? My racing heart joined my ringing ears as I gripped the counter in front of me to steady myself. “Where I really come from?”

I repeated breathlessly, positive that I hadn’t heard her right. “What are you talking about? I already know where I come from.”

“You know what we wanted you to know,”

she corrected.

My eyes rounded in horror. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you don’t know the full truth about your bloodline, Jemma. About your very short bloodline.”

Her expression grew somber as she stood up from her chair and walked over to me, stopping when she was directly in front of me from across the kitchen island. “When you brought me back from the Sacred Necropolis and I told you how everything came to be—why I left you and the reason I had Turned—well, that wasn’t the whole truth. There were parts of that story that I had to leave out for your protection. For your own good.”

My grip tightened on the edge of the counter as my legs weakened beneath me. “What parts, Jaqueline?”

Her mouth pinched as she pulled in a sharp breath, as though answering my question was causing her physical pain. “What happened that night by the lake,”

she began shakily, and I knew what she was referring to—the night Lucifer took Trace as his vessel. “It wasn’t the first time something like that happened. We faced a similar battle over eighteen years ago. Me, Thomas, Karl, and…their brother Nathan.”

“Their brother? What brother?”

My brows drew together as confusion and shock battled for supremacy on my face. “Dad and Uncle Karl didn’t have another brother,” I said emphatically. “I would’ve known about him if they had.”

Water gathered in her eyes as though she were holding back tears. “He died before you were born.”

“O-kay…but my father would have still told me about him,”

I insisted, not understanding why that would’ve been something he’d keep from me.

She shook her head. “Losing Nathan was one of the hardest things Thomas ever had to live through. It was just easier for him to erase his existence rather than have to acknowledge what happened.”

“That doesn’t sound like something my father would do,”

I said, feeling as though her explanation was too vague for me to take in and digest. I understood not wanting to talk about something that was painful—I’d been there, done that, and started the fan club—but to deny his brother’s very existence? That made zero sense to me.

That wasn’t my father.

“We were all very different people back then. But tragedy changed us all,”

she said as a single tear dribbled from her eye like a testament. “Had it not been for that summer, Nathan and I would’ve been married by the end of that year.”

“Nathan?”

I repeated aghast, certain that she’d misspoken; that she’d said the wrong name and meant to say my father, Thomas.

“Nathan was my first love, Jemma.”

Her pained gaze slid to Tessa. “And he was Tessa’s biological father.”

My legs dipped and rattled beneath me as I gaped at my sister in disbelief. This had to be a lie. Tessa did not have a different father from me. It couldn’t be true. My mouth popped open to say as much, but nothing came out upon registering Tessa’s calm, unsurprised reaction. This wasn’t news to her.

“How is this possible?”

I asked on a breathless note, though the question was directed more at myself than anyone else. “I don’t understand.” I didn’t understand any of it.

“Eighteen years ago, we learned of a prophesy that spelled the end of Nathan, and it brought our entire world crumbling down around us. At the time, neither one of us had the capacity to believe it, much less accept it. Until it was staring down the barrel at us. Until it was too late.”

Her eyes darkened as though she were reliving the moment, being haunted by very the memory of it. “We were all so young and stupid, so na?ve, and in our quest to do the impossible, we made a deal with the Devil.”

My eyes bulged because I knew she didn’t mean that figuratively.

How could she be so careless? So stupid?

“At the time, I would’ve sold my own soul to bring Nathan back,”

she said as her dark lashes swopped down over her eyes. “And in way, I suppose I did.”

The room swayed viciously around me as I gripped the counter tighter, needing it to help keep me upright.

“But our terms were too simple—our hearts too desperate,”

she continued, as though the world wasn’t bending and contorting around me. “In exchange for bringing Nathan back, we would give Him anything he wanted. Anything,” she said, her voice dropping so low against the buzzing in my head that I had to strain my ears just to hear her. “Even my soul.”

I gasped. “Please tell me you didn’t.”

She shook her head regretfully. “That wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted…was children. An heir.”

Firm hands gripped my waist just as my legs became boneless beneath me. I leaned back into Gabriel for support, instinctively knowing he was there without even needing to turn. Inside, everything was churning over onto itself as something dark and sinister formed in the pit of my belly, clawing its way through my entrails, fighting for a chance to rise from the smoke and speak—to eviscerate me with its truth.

“Naively, we accepted the terms, but only because I was convinced that I would find a way out of it later—after he made good on his side of the deal and returned Nathan to me. But the devil was in the details, and we were fools to ever think we could out trick the master of trickery.”

Her hands came down against the kitchen island, splaying against the granite as though she too needed something to brace herself with in order to carry on. “Nathan was indeed returned to us, but as the vessel for Lucifer’s essence, and unfortunately, none of us knew that until it was much, much too late.”

My eyes slammed shut, blocking out this cruel new world as my old one disintegrated spectacularly around me. As real as touch, I could feel the storm coming, hear the hissing of the shadows inside me beckoning for the revelation that would finally set them all free, and all I wanted to do was curl inside myself and pray to disappear.

“Please stop.”

My demand came out so soft and feeble that I wasn’t even sure I’d uttered the words aloud. “I don’t want to hear this.” I couldn’t. It was too much to take in. How many times was my life going to shatter and be put back together around me? How many times until the fragments were too broken to fit back together again?

“You need to hear this, Jemma,”

insisted Tessa, her raspy voice sounding as though it were coming from a million realms away. “You need to know the truth,” she said and then nodded to Jaqueline to continue.

Jaqueline paused, eyeing me as if to assess whether I could even handle it. Whether she made a mistake unearthing her deepest, darkest secret. I wanted to shout in her face that she had. That I wished it had been left buried right along with her. Because I already knew. I knew what she had done and what was coming, and I hated her more than ever for it.

“I’m his daughter, aren’t I?”

I rasped; my entire body numb to everything but that darkness trilling under my skin. “Lucifer is my father…isn’t he?”

The look of remorse on her face was all the confirmation I needed. A rush of air left my lungs, and I was certain in that moment that they had finally succeeded in breaking me for good. That I was never again going to be able to put the pieces back together.

“By the time I figured it all out,”

she went on, oblivious to my agonizing death at her hands, “I had already been intimate with him, seeing only what he wanted me to see: The man I loved. Nathan.” Her sadness and regret transformed into something else then. Something darker and more dangerous, but it didn’t hold a flame to what was building inside of me. “Much like you, I was forced to send him back to Hell and that meant that Nathan too had to be sacrificed, only he didn’t get to come back to me the way Trace did for you. I lost him forever that night,” she said as tears spilled onto her alabaster cheeks in streams.

Seeing her cry over losing the man she loved and not over what she did to me, what she made me into, ignited a firestorm of hatred inside me that I had never felt before in my entire life. My hands balled at my sides as the lights flickered in the kitchen as though feeding off of my emotions.

The bright side? I no longer felt that unrelenting numbness paralyzing my knees anymore, or tasted the pungent bile at the back of my throat. No. All I felt was burning, broiling rage. Inside me. Around me. Through me.

It was everywhere.

A lightbulb from the pendant light fixture hanging over the island exploded suddenly, sending shards of glass all over the kitchen counter. Jaqueline gasped, lurching back to avoid the spray.

“Jemma, take a deep breath,”

urged my sister, as though she thought I were responsible for breaking the bulb.

Who the hell knew, maybe I was?

“How could you keep something like this from me?”

I seethed, my eyes stinging with bitter tears, screaming for relief from the unbearable pain that had no outlet. “How could my dad…Thomas—” I cut myself off, not even knowing how to refer to my own father anymore. Gabriel’s grip tightened on me as I cursed them both to hell. “You made me into a fucking abomination and then abandoned me.”

“No,”

she breathed. “I didn’t abandon you. Everything I did from the moment you were born was to protect you. To keep you safe from the Order.” She stepped forward, her shoes crunching against the broken glass. “You’re not an abomination. You were wanted and you were loved.”

Her words felt like a poisonous gas in my lungs. Suffocating and traitorous. I couldn’t bear to breathe them in for a second longer. “Fuck you and the lies you rode in on,”

I snapped at her, pushing Gabriel’s hands from my waist. I didn’t need their support anymore. I didn’t need anything but to not be in her presence anymore.

To not be breathing the same air as her.

I shoved from the counter and blasted out of the kitchen; the sound of Tessa calling out my name trailing after me like a vampire with a taste for blood.

“Leave her be,”

said Gabriel; the sound of his heavy boots shuffling across the kitchen as though he’d moved in to block Tessa from following me. “She needs time.”

It was the last thing I heard before I slammed the front door shut behind myself and took off running.