Page 27 of Irreverent (The Marked Saga #7)

Locking my bedroom door behind myself, I leaned back against the door and met Gabriel’s puzzled gaze. With only the short trip from the kitchen to my room at my disposal, I hadn’t had enough time to come up with an actual plan yet, but I knew I needed to do something. What that something was, however, I was still working out.

While Jaqueline hadn’t been any help in regard to teaching Gabriel how to use his compulsion, she did help with one thing. She gave us insight into why he hadn’t been able to compel me up until now and the whole thing kind of made perfect sense the more I thought about it.

Revenants required an innate desire or need to control their subordinates. To manipulate them or bend them to their will. Gabriel clearly didn’t have either of those traits and trying to compel me to hop on one foot or remove my jacket was a futile, useless task. It served him no purpose and that was precisely why he couldn’t make it happen.

What he needed was to really mean what he was asking me—to burn with need for my compliance. But how was I going to force that need out of him? Especially when he had never felt or required that need before and had no idea how to access it.

“Will you please explain to me what we are doing in here?”

asked Gabriel, the confusion in his eyes turning to apprehension as he watched me quietly brainstorm.

I could always use Jaqueline’s method. The animalistic beatings worked wonders for summoning my buried abilities, but something told me that they wouldn’t have the same effect on Gabriel. He was a martyr, a soldier through and through and would likely take every hit like the warrior he was. No. With Gabriel, I had to think outside the box because hurting him would never be enough to elicit that need. But perhaps hurting someone he loved might.

Like hurting Tessa.

Or possibly even myself…

My lips curled up on one side as a diabolical plan took form in my mind. Pushing off the door, I marched into the bathroom and then ransacked the cabinets, opening and shutting drawers as I frantically searched through each of them like our lives depended on it.

“Are you going to answer me?”

he asked, appearing in the doorway, his eyebrows bunched over his green eyes as he tried to make sense out of my strange behavior. “What are you doing?”

Finding what I was looking for, I pulled out an unused razor from the multi-pack and then straightened with it in my hand. “I’m fixing our little problem, once and for all.”

“With a razor?”

he asked, even more confused.

“Yes, with a razor,”

I answered and waggled my eyebrows. “I’m going to make you need to compel me like you’ve never needed anything before,” I said as I separated the thin blade from the plastic razor.

“Jemma, you do realize I’m a Revenant, right? The wounds caused by a blade that size will heal within seconds,”

he said, looking wholly unimpressed with my weapon of choice.

“Thanks, Captain Obvious. But the blade is not for you.”

Before he could utter the question that was plastered all over his perplexed expression, I swiped the blade against my inner forearm. A thin line of red blood blossomed on the surface of my skin like a row of blooming roses.

“What the hell are you doing?”

he hissed, his gaze flicking to the blood rising up from under my skin as his pupils stretched over the green of his iris’. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Maybe.”

I slashed another line against my arm—not hard enough to be dangerous, but deeper than a surface scratch.

He reared forward, trying to grab a hold of my wrist, but I quickly shoved him back out the doorway. “That’s enough, Jemma. Give me the blade. Now.”

“If you want it,”

I said as I sliced another, deeper gnash against my arm, “you’re going to have to make me stop.”

I knew even before his fangs descended that he was going to strike, to use his venom to subdue me. He moved across the bathroom like a blur, almost too quickly to track with the naked eye, but I knew him better than that. I knew all of his moves before he even made them.

Summoning my magic, I envisioned a force as strong as a hurricane wind and used it to push him out of my personal space before throwing up a protective wall around myself. The sheer desperation and need to make this work fueled the wall of energy around me and I slashed at my wrist again, the burning sting barely perceptible through the spike of adrenaline pumping through my body.

He rushed toward me again but was promptly pushed away by the protective force encircling me. His frown darkened into something more. Anger. Fear. Desperation. I felt them all flowing out of him like a geyser.

“Give me the blade or I’m calling your sister up here,”

he threatened, gritting out the words through clenched teeth.

“Go ahead and call her,”

I said and pressed the blade against my skin before swiping across it again, harder this time. “She can’t stop me anyway. The only one who can end this is you, Gabriel.”

He kicked off his feet and rammed into my protective wall again, as though brute force might do the trick. But it was futile, and he had himself to thank for that. Because despite all my protests and threats, their weeks of brutal, bone-breaking training had given me near-perfect control of my ability. Thanks to the two of them, I could now bend it and shape it at will, like a churning storm in the palm of my hands.

“You won’t get through my barrier, so do us both a favor and stop wasting our time.”

“I’m begging you to stop this, Jemma.”

He pushed his hands through his hair as his gaze flicked down to my wounds. “This isn’t going to work. You’re hurting yourself for nothing.”

“We’ll see,”

I said and then wiped the tiny beads of sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand before slashing another harder, deeper cut against my forearm.

“Goddammit, Jemma!”

His voice was gruff and vibrating with rage.

“Are you just going to keep standing there and doing nothing?”

I taunted, using the same tone he and my mother had used with me during my training. “Make me stop.”

Growling, he shoved into the wall again at full force, this time with the hard edge of his shoulder, but just like before, his attempt was met with failure.

“Next is my vein,”

I warned calmly, slicing another line as I descended my forearm, getting closer and closer to my wrist. “I won’t have much time once I cut that open. Are you going to stop me, Gabriel, or are you going to stand there and watch me die?” I pressed the blade against the protruding greenish-blue vein on my wrist and waited for an answer.

I desperately needed to move this thing along since I was already feeling the effects of fatigue setting in, making it increasingly harder for me to keep the wall up. The longer this went on, the more drained I became, and the more drained I became, the closer I drifted to that dark place inside of myself. The place that housed all the nameless shadows that called out to me whenever I ventured there and touched my magic. Every positive had a negative and magic was no different.

Using it was always a double-edged sword.

“You’re not thinking clearly, Jemma,”

he said, raising his palms to me in a calming gesture. “Please put down the blade and we can talk about this. We can figure out another way—we always do!”

But I was thinking clearly, and I was done talking. We’d been talking and bloodsharing for weeks and where did it get us? Nowhere. It was time to take matters into my own hands and this was the only way I knew to do it. “Is that a no?”

“Jemma, please, listen to me—wait!”

But I couldn’t do that. Not for him, and not even for myself. I had waited far too long already.

“Time waits for no one, Gabriel,”

I said as I pressed the thin blade deep into my skin and then dragged it over my vein, slicing it wide open with purpose. Blood immediately spurted out from the wound and my eyes widened, shocked that there was so much more blood than I had anticipated.

Shit. Guess there’s really no turning back now.

“Dammit, Jemma! What did you do?”

growled Gabriel as he shoved his hands into his hair and then left them there. “You’re going to bleed out! Do you hear me? Retract your magic and let me heal you!”

I shook my head, watching the blood rush out from my vein and trickle off my arm like a running faucet. “There’s only one way you’re getting through this barrier, Gabriel. Either you make me take it down or it comes down because I’m dead.”

My gaze shot up to his. “Which one is it going to be?”

He cursed again, slamming his hands against the protective wall encircling me. “Take it down!”

he yelled, as though raising his volume were going to sway me from my mission. “You’re losing too much blood!”

Well, he was right about that part.

My sightline tightened as black dots peppered my peripheral, making me sway a little. “Tick tock, tick tock.”

Splaying his palms against the invisible wall, he squeezed his eyes shut as though trying to rouse something out of himself. That or he couldn’t handle watching me bleed out. I prayed it was the former. When he opened them again, he met my gaze head-on and wide-eyed. “Put down the barrier,”

he ordered lowly, and while his tone was concise and calm and filled with effort, there was no magic behind the demand.

“Try again.”

Holding my wrist up with my other hand, I lowered myself to my knees, watching as the blood pooled on the floor in front of me. “Come on, Gabriel. I know you can do this.”

He squared his shoulders. “Put down the barrier,”

he demanded again, though the tinge of desperation in his voice made it obvious he was still asking and not telling me—the exact opposite of what compulsion entailed.

My vision narrowed further as the room began to bend and twist around me, making me feel woozy. “You’re still not meaning it.”

“I am!”

he roared back, his voice somewhere between a growl and a hiss as he smashed his fist through the wall beside the door. “Jemma, put down the barrier,” he commanded again, and just like before, his frantic request did nothing.

I shook my head, the room spinning wildly around me as I struggled to keep my wall up. “Come on, Gabriel. I don’t think I can hold on that much longer.”

I tried to look up at him, to show him how serious I was, but my head felt as though it weighted a hundred pounds on its own.

“Dammit, Jemma! You’ve already lost too much blood—let me heal you before it’s too late!”

he pleaded, panic riding his voice like an eerie echo. “Do you hear me? Jemma? Jemma!”

I wanted to tell him that I could hear him, though barely since my ears were buzzing something terrible, but I couldn’t seem to get my lips to move anymore. My body was giving up way too much blood and I was expending far too much energy. Something was about to give, and I was pretty sure it would be me.

“JEMMA!”

A ruckus of noise exploded in the peripheral of my awareness as the sound of my name being called mingled in the air with the fury of fists crashing into drywall and furniture being thrown across the room, but it all seemed so far away from me then, as though I were listening to it all underwater.

Damn, I probably should have thought this through a little better, I realized as darkness chased my vision relentlessly, making my field of view tighter and tighter until all I saw was darkness. I should have made the wound a little smaller. Maybe a little less life threatening, I went on pointlessly, because hindsight was always twenty-twenty, and unfortunately, that cowboy had pretty much already sailed off without me. Or was it a boat? Whatever.

And then, out of nowhere, a crystal-clear sound pierced through the black void.

“Jemma, look at me,”

demanded Gabriel, his voice a deep-rooted tickle inside my brain that made my head shoot up and my eyes dart to him as though they had been magnetized there. “Put down the barrier.”

My magic came down at the same time as my body did, though Gabriel was right there to catch me before my face could hit the marble tiles. Within the blink of an eye, he had turned me around, cradling me in his lap as my own arms flopped to my sides limply.

My lids fluttered for a beat as I watched Gabriel bite down into his wrist before bringing it down over my mouth. Drops of his blood trickled against my lips, but I didn’t even have the strength to swipe at them with my tongue.

“Drink, Jemma. You need to drink.”

The weight of my lids became impossible to hold up. I needed to rest my eyes for a moment. Just a tiny little moment.

“Stay with me,”

he said as he slapped his palm against my cheek, desperate to wake me up.

I tried to tell him I was right there and that I wasn’t going anywhere—that I just needed a moment to close my eyes and rest, to recharge my battery, but my mouth remained uncooperative and unresponsive.

His cool hand came down around my wounded wrist as he lifted my arm up and then hissed out another curse. “I need to stop the bleeding,”

he said frantically, his voice so mumbled and low I could hardly make out the rest of what he had said. Before I could attempt to decode the riddle, I felt his mouth press down against my forearm, though I had no idea what he was doing.

Wait. Was he feeding on me?

No. That wasn’t it.

Was he…was he licking me?

I chuckled inwardly thinking that couldn’t be right, and yet I definitely thought I felt some tongue. It was the last thing I cohesively remembered before I surrendered to my sleep.