Page 42 of Irreverent (The Marked Saga #7)

My feet hit the floor in rapid, backward succession as I scrambled to put an entire bedroom of space between me and the carbon copy version of me casually staring back at me like this wasn’t some whacked out edition of Freaky Friday.

“WHAT THE F—”

“Keep it down or they’ll hear us!”

she hissed, pumping the air brakes as she slowly began approaching me.

“Stay the hell back,”

I warned, whisper-yelling as I jabbed my index finger in her general vicinity.

She stopped mid-step, putting a hand on her hip as she shook her head at me. “Quit being so damn dramatic. You act like you’ve never seen an Alt before.”

My mouth popped open, but it took me several tries before I finally remembered how to work it. “You’re…you’re my Alt?”

“No, Jemma. I’m actually Gabriel’s Alt. You just can’t tell due to my very clever disguise.”

I wrinkled my nose at her. “Huh?”

She blinked at me like I was the village idiot, back for another tour around the town. “Yes, I’m your Alt. Who the hell else would I be?”

“How the hell should I know?! Maybe you’re some shape-shifting demon from Hades, riding into town to—”

“Would you let it go already?”

she cut in, taking several greedy steps toward me. “I don’t have much time, and we need to talk.”

Just hearing that sentence ‘we need to talk’ sent a stomach-turning wave of anxiety through my body. In all my time living in Hollow Hills, that sentence had never once brought anything good with it.

“It’s kind of a bad time. I have a meeting with—”

“The Council. I know.”

She gestured to herself in an attempt to remind me that I was speaking with the future version of myself, who would obviously know what I had planned today. “You can’t go to that meeting.”

My head jerked back in surprise. “Why not?”

“Because,”

she started slowly as she closed the distance between us, stopping when she was just a foot away from me. “It’s a trap.”

“A trap?”

I repeated, staring back at her with wild eyes; like I was looking at myself through a mirror. So. Freaking. Weird. “I don’t understand.”

“They don’t have a cure for Trace. There is no cure for him. He’s dying and they know it,”

she said calmly as though she hadn’t just doomed my soulmate—our soulmate—to death. “They’re using Trace to manipulate you into going there with your guards down. One last time.”

“Why would they do that?”

Her gaze turned icy, like she was reliving some gruesome scene from a time and place I never wanted to know. “For starters, they know you’re onto them—that you found out what they did to dad.”

My head was spinning like a possessed merry go round. “So, it’s true then? The Order was behind the attack?”

My Alt nodded. “Not only did they Sanction it, they set the whole thing up, right down to the Rev that did it.”

I bent forward, trying to stop the rush of blood from leaving my head. “I’m going to kill them with my bare hands,”

I ground out, a quiet promise I intended to make good on. They would not get away with what they did to my dad. What they did to me. I wouldn’t let them.

“Not today you won’t.”

I straightened out and gawked at her. “And why the hell not?”

“Well, for one, there’s over a dozen High Casters waiting for you at Temple. This meeting they called…it’s just a ploy to get you there. They know you’re desperate and they know you don’t have the Amulet anymore.”

She dropped her head in regret, in shame. “They never had any intention of helping us. Never.”

“So, what then? They’re just going to try to kill me when I get there?”

I asked, trying to scrounge up as much information from future me as I could.

“Worse,”

she answered grimly, the shadows playing against her face as though they were alive. “They’re going to force the Anointing spell on you.”

My eyes all but bulged out of my head. “The one that’s supposed to turn me into the Fourth Horseman?”

She nodded. “It’s what they planned to do all along. To get rid of us—once and for all. And it’s going to work.”

“Are you saying you’re…one of…that they…”

I couldn’t even get the words out.

She tipped her head in another nod. “I’m basically running on borrowed time.”

“No.”

That couldn’t be my future. How had things ended up so majorly screwed up?

“It gets worse.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears and then let out a sharp breath. “The spell they cast has basically tethered my soul to the other Horseman, which means, the minute the Son of Perdition is gone, War, Famine and Death will go back to wherever the hell they came from, dragging me right along with them.”

I was sure my windpipe was closing just then, like literally trying to strangle me to death.

Her forlorn gaze travelled to the bed. To where Trace was peacefully sound asleep.

“And Trace?”

I asked, despite myself. I was petrified to hear the answer, but I needed to know.

Her gaze circled back to me and I knew the answer by the shattered look in her eyes. Trace was dead.

“This is why I came back. I had to make things right. I had to stop you from making the same mistake I did.”

She started to back away from me and I resisted the urge to shadow her retreat. “There’s only one way to bring Trace back and we need to do before it’s too late.”

“You know how to help him?”

I took another hopeful step forward. “How to bring him out of this?”

She nodded and then glanced over her shoulder into the guest bathroom. “And so do you.”

She turned on her heel and disappeared into the unlit washroom as I shook my head in total confusion.

So do I? What was she talking about? I didn’t have the slightest idea how to help him except for what Dominic had said, which was—

My Alt emerged from the bathroom, dragging what looked like a dead body behind her. All the color washed from my face at the scene unfolding before me. I was just about to call her out for the homicidal maniac that she obviously was when I saw the distinct wooden stake protruding from the petit brunette’s chest.

“Is that a Rev?”

I snapped, horrified as I rushed in to get a better look. My heart hammered in my chest as I took in the desiccated skin and still-protruding fangs, as though the vampire had been incapacitated mid-attack. “You’re not actually going to do what I think you’re going to do, are you?”

“It’s the only way to bring him back,”

she said without looking at me as she hoisted the body up onto the bed beside Trace and then yanked out the wooden stake from the Revenant’s chest without even so much as a fucking warning.

My pummeling heartbeat came to a dead stop as I watched the vampire come back to life; her famished eyes pooled into liquid blackness as she cut a look at the two of us before driving up from the bed toward my Alt. Future me grabbed the vampire by the neck and angled her face down to Trace, guiding her and her protruding fangs right into Trace’s neck.

This was all kinds of messed up.

I winced as she tore into my soulmate’s neck, wiggling and shaking her head as though trying to dig in deeper, as though trying to rip his neck wide open. I lurched forward to stop her—to tear her head clean off her body, but was stopped by my Alt before I could make contact. It took every ounce of mental strength I had to remind myself that she was helping him—saving him from certain death and that I needed to let this happen.

It was this or his death, and I would never again choose death.

Chewing my bottom lip, I watched as my future-self grabbed the Revenant’s arm and then held it up a few inches from Trace. She produced a silver and white pocketknife from her jeans and then jerked her wrist in a fast outward motion, causing the small blade to snap out. She brought the knife to the Rev’s arm and then sliced it across her wrist. Thick, red blood immediately poured out from the wound as she rushed it over to Trace’s mouth, parting his lips with her fingers and then settling the vampire’s wrist against his mouth.

She pulled back slightly and then pressed her hand against the Revenant’s head, pushing down against it to make sure that she remained attached to Trace’s neck.

“Drain him,”

she ordered hoarsely and my stomach all but emptied itself on the floor of the guest bedroom.

I couldn’t watch this. I couldn’t stand another minute of the moans and gulping noises or bear witness to this vampire slowly draining my soulmate to death.

I stumbled backward, covering my ears with my hands as I hit the wall and sank to the floor. Rocking myself back and forth, I squeezed my eyes shut and pretended none of this was happening.