Page 26 of Irreverent (The Marked Saga #7)

The next couple of weeks passed in a haze of broken bones and endless bloodshed. With every day that came and went, Jaqueline, Gabriel, and even Tessa increased the duration and intensity of my training while coming up with unique ways to make me wish I was dead. When closed fists and booted kicks stopped working, they moved to brass knuckles and iron crowbars. And when even those stopped working, it became knives and all of their assorted cousins.

It didn’t really matter what the weapon of choice was. Every strike was served up with the same purpose: to bring me closer to reaching the impregnable abilities buried somewhere deep inside of me.

As much as I viscerally loathed every one of them on daily basis, especially at the end of the night when I had to walk my battered, bleeding body up the long flight of stairs, I knew they were doing it to help me.

And it was working.

Within the first week, I’d managed to learn to control my Time Manipulation ability, calling upon it just when I needed it the most. Unfortunately, that stopped being useful after a while since my training would simply continue on even after I’d frozen them in place and exacted my revenge on them. Necessity being the mother of invention, I quickly figured out how to use my Power Blocking ability and Telekinesis instead, controlling enough of both of them to stop their incoming attacks on me and even disarm them using nothing but my will.

But all of that came with its own set of problems. It seemed like the more I called upon my abilities, the more effort and energy it took to use them, leaving me in a weakened, trembling state after each use. Jaqueline had explained that using magic in that way came with consequences. For one, we didn’t have an endless supply of it. The body and mind needed time to recharge in between each use, though they were certainly hopeful that the more I practiced, the stronger I would become and the less affected I would be by the fatigue. In the meantime, though, it was kicking my ass.

In the process of all that madness, Gabriel and I continued our bloodsharing session rigorously, increasing the number of times from once a day, to twice and then finally three times a day. Not only did it help restore me fully by the next morning, but it also strengthened the connection that had clearly developed between us.

Unfortunately, while we both had no trouble feeling the growing link between us (or the emotions that easily flowed back and forth through it), there still hadn’t been any progress on the compulsion front.

Jaqueline guessed that the reason was simply because I was still bonded to Dominic, though we had no real way of knowing for sure.

As the days turned into weeks and nothing improved, I had begun to lose hope that maybe my theory about breaking the bloodbond was ill-fated from the start. Nothing more than a pipedream. Mix that in with the fact that Tessa had made zero progress in regard to finding a cure for Trace’s eternal sleep-state and I was rolling into mid-December with a full-on depression.

The fact that my birthday was right around the corner only made matters worse. A time that was supposed to be filled with excitement and celebration only brought me dread and misery. The very thought of celebrating my eighteenth birthday with Dominic and Trace in a permanent state of unconsciousness made me want to vomit until my stomach bled. I wasn’t doing it. As far as I was concerned, I was going to be seventeen until.

A gentle knock sounded at my door, rousing me from my sleep. Not having had nearly enough rest, I growled at the door and then turned over, pulling the blankets up over my head as I did.

I already knew it was Gabriel anyway, and I knew what he was here for, and frankly, I wasn’t interested. The truth was, not even the thought of bloodsharing got me excited anymore. Everything just felt tiresome and pointless.

“It’s time to get up,”

he said as he opened the door and trekked into my room, stopping at the foot of my bed like a damn prison guard. The sound of leather stretching noisily let me know he had crossed his arms, and no doubt, he was staring at me in full-blown disapproval.

“Go away. I’m still sleeping.”

I felt his irritation even before he said a word to me. Thanks to the connection, I always felt all his dang emotions. I groaned again, louder this time. “Stop looking at me like that!”

“How would you know how I’m looking at you when your head is buried under the blankets?”

I threw the covers off my face and glared at him. “I can feel it, that’s how.”

“Oh, you feel facial expressions now, do you?”

My glare intensified. “Yes, I do. Especially when they’re as loud as yours.”

He shook his head at me. “You’re being absurd,”

he said, watching me as I clumsily stumbled out of bed and then stormed across the room to the bathroom. “I get that your frustrated with the situation but—”

“The situation?”

I repeated half-laughing, half-hissing as I turned on the faucet and then cupped my hands under it, splashing my face before turning off the water. “That doesn’t even almost cover it. I’ve been bleeding myself dry for how many weeks now? And for what? This is going nowhere, and we both know it.” Grabbing the towel, I quickly dried my face, hoping to hide the fact that my eyes were getting teary.

“If that were true, there would not be any sort of connection between us, and we both know there is,”

he argued.

I tossed the towel on the counter and turned to face him. “Then why can’t you compel me?”

“I don’t know.”

His mouth opened and closed, as though he wanted to say something else, but all that came out was a weighty feeling of guilt being passed to me through our connection.

“Why do I feel like you’re not telling me everything,”

I said, trying not to sound accusatory.

He crossed his arms again. “We just need more time, Jemma.”

Screw that. We’d had more than enough time. Much more than Dominic and I ever had to form our bloodbond. Something wasn’t adding up here.

“That’s not it. You’re keeping something from me,”

I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He clenched his back teeth, exhaling sharply through his nose.

“I swear to god, Gabriel, if you don’t spit it out right this minute, I’m going to—”

“I’ve never compelled anyone before.”

I blinked at him and then shifted my weight onto my other foot. “Okay, well, that makes two of us. What’s your point?”

Did he want a pat on the back of something?

“You’re not getting it. I’ve never used compulsion before,”

he said again as though that were somehow a different statement.

I stared at him for a long, hard moment before his admission finally registered. “Wait. Are you saying you don’t know how to use compulsion?”

His expression twisted with regret. “I’ve never had the need to use it before.”

“Seriously?!”

My head was spinning at all the possible implications. “Okay, so hold up a minute here. Does that mean we could potentially already be fully bloodbonded and not even know it?”

“Potentially.”

“Jesus, Gabriel.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Why didn’t you say something about this sooner?”

“It only recently occurred to me. I assumed when the bond formed, I’d be able to compel you, but seeing as how that hasn’t happened, I started to wonder if maybe I simply wasn’t doing it right.”

“Okay, alright. It’s fine. It’s totally fine. Let’s not panic,”

I said, mostly talking to myself as I tried to make sense of all the thoughts running through my head. “I mean, this is good news then, right? All we have to do now is figure out how to fix you and we’re golden!” I could practically feel the hope bloom in my chest that maybe, just maybe, this crazy plan of mine might just work after all.

He shot me a surly look.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,”

I said, waving him off as I stormed out of the washroom.

“Where are you going?”

he called out after me.

“Where do you think?”

I answered over my shoulder. “If I’m going to be stuck living under the same roof with my vampire mother, I might as well make some use of her.”

***

Jacqueline and Tessa glanced up with matching looks of confusion on their face as I thundered into the kitchen wearing my boxer shorts, a tank top and some kind of bird’s nest type bun at the top of my head. In my rush to get downstairs, I’d completely forgotten the concept of taking a shower or even getting dressed. Not that pajamas and morning breath really mattered in the grand scheme of the bombshell Gabriel just dropped on me.

“What’s going on?”

asked Tessa as her gaze slid from me to Gabriel, who had barely been able to keep up with my mad dash down the stairs, before circling her eyes back to me.

“I think we figured out why it’s not working!”

I announced excitedly.

Tessa’s stare went blank. “Why what isn’t working?”

“The bloodbond—or more accurately, Gabriel’s complete inability to compel me.”

Tessa glanced at Gabriel as she took a sip of her coffee. “And the reason is…?”

“He’s never compelled anyone before!”

I shrieked, bouncing my wild, excited eyes between her and Jaqueline.

Neither one reacted.

“Did you even hear me? He doesn’t know how to use compulsion. That’s why it’s not working,”

I explained, emphasizing each word so that the two of them could catch up. Apparently, I had to spell the whole damn thing out for them. Freaking buzz kills. “For all we know, we’re already completely bloodbonded.”

Tessa’s gaze skirted to Gabriel for confirmation. “Seriously?”

He frowned at her. “It’s not an ability I’ve ever had the need to use,”

he answered, almost defensively.

“For obvious reasons,”

I said, since we all knew Gabriel had never been that kind of Revenant. Up until me, he’d never even fed off a human before, let alone bended one to his will. “All we have to do now is teach him how to use it and voila!”

“And how are we going to do that?”

asked Tessa, her brows pulled together in question.

“Well, not us, per se. You,”

I said, looking at Jacqueline now. With the shades drawn as they were, she looked even younger than she normally did, passing merely as Tessa’s older sister and definitely not as anyone’s mother.

Least of all ours.

Jaqueline still hadn’t responded and didn’t appear to be all that impressed by my revelation.

“Hello? Earth to Jaqueline,”

I said, planting my hands on my hips. “Have you heard a word of anything I just said?”

“I did,”

she answered simply.

I furrowed my brows, searching her face for clues. “Then why do you look like a lump on a rock? This is good news.”

Scratch that, this was fantastic news.

“Sure, except for the fact that compulsion isn’t something you can teach a Revenant,”

answered my mother, popping my balloon of joy right before my eyes. “Compulsion is a necessity, an innate desire to control your subject. If he hasn’t been able to do it up until now, he probably just doesn’t have it in him yet.”

I gawked at her. How could she utter something so astonishingly devasting and manage to do it without a lick of emotion on her face? “That’s…that’s not good enough. There has to be a way to teach him. You’re a Revenant for crying out loud! Just show him how to do it.”

“It doesn’t work like that,”

she answered frostily, not even bothering to elaborate.

“So, that’s it then? We just give up on the whole thing?”

My head was spinning from how fast my hope had come and gone, leaving me with nothing but a bad case of whiplash.

“Of course not. But it’s not something I can help you with. Gabriel is the only one who can figure out how to want to use his ability. So long as that need is not there, he won’t be able to do it.”

I whirled around on Gabriel; my fists balled at my sides as I narrowed my eyes on him. “Why don’t you want to compel me?”

His eyes rounded nervously. “I wasn’t aware that I didn’t want to.”

“Well, clearly, you don’t otherwise it would have already happened. There has to be a reason behind it.”

His mouth faltered around several failed replies.

“Is this about Dominic?”

I asked, desperately reaching for anything that might make sense of this. “Do you not want him to come back?”

The affronted look on his face gave me my answer before he uttered it. “Of course, I do. He’s my brother.”

I exhaled a breath of relief. “Then what is it?”

His eyes briefly wandered over my shoulder to Tessa and Jaqueline as though he were embarrassed to be having this conversation in front of him. Well, that made two of us. “I…don’t know, Jemma.”

How was he ever going to figure out how to use compulsion if he wasn’t even sure what was stopping him in the first place? The whole thing suddenly felt like an impossible task. The only thing we knew was that he was lacking a sense of need or urgency around his ability—possibly afraid of what using it would mean for himself. Unfortunately, I really didn’t have time to psychologize his reasons behind it. I just needed him to get over it, like yesterday.

Grabbing him by the lapel of his jacket, I whirled past him and hauled him out of the kitchen behind me.

“Where are we going?”

he asked, confused, but following me, nonetheless.

“Back to my room,”

I said evenly as I stormed across the hallway. If a burning need to use compulsion was what was lacking in this equation, then I was more than willing to give it to him. “And we’re not coming out until you figure out how to compel me.”