Jared reached for my arm, and I backed away, determined not to let him touch me again.
“Kennedy, you don’t understand—”
I swallowed hard, struggling to find my voice. I didn’t want him to know how much he’d hurt me. “There’s nothing to understand.”
I started to turn away.
Jared caught my hand again. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I know what I want.” He bit his lip and stared at the gravel beneath our feet. “I just can’t have it.”
“Why not?”
Jared’s blue eyes drifted back up to meet mine before he let my fingers slip out of his.
“I screw everything up, and the people close to me are the ones who get hurt.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and nodded behind me. “Just ask Lukas.”
I stood there paralyzed, as Lukas and Priest jogged toward us.
Lukas’ smile faded, anger and jealousy warring in his eyes as he mentally calculated the distance between Jared and me. He had no way of knowing that we were miles apart in every way that mattered.
Priest didn’t seem to notice. “We know you’re one of us, Kennedy. I think we figured out why your mark didn’t show up.”
The mark.
Jared’s rejection had temporarily distracted me from the fact that the universe had rejected me, too.
“We need to compare notes to be sure.” Priest kept talking, but I was only half-listening. Jared wouldn’t look at me, and Lukas wouldn’t stop looking at his brother.
The words registered slowly. “Wait—you don’t know how they work?”
Priest paced across the asphalt. “Our families didn’t go into a lot of detail. It was sort of like ‘destroy a vengeance spirit and you’ll get your mark.’ ”
“That’s pretty self-explanatory.”
Lukas pushed his way past Jared. “There were lots of things they didn’t tell us about, like the Shift, or the fact that one of the members of the Legion had dropped off the grid. This is probably another one of those things.”
I thought about all the moments when the four of them seemed to be figuring things out as they went along. Their relatives probably never imagined they would all die on the same day, leaving the Legion in the hands of five teenagers who would have to ditch class to protect the world from a demon.
Lukas nudged my shoulder with his. “Come back and we’ll explain why your mark didn’t show up.”
He sounded so sure.
But what if he was wrong?
Alara was sitting in the back of the van with the doors open, her journal resting in her lap. “Did you tell her?”
“Not yet.” Priest hopped up next to her, buzzing with excitement. “So check it out. I got my mark after I destroyed Millicent’s spirit in the well with the bolt I made, right?”
Lukas continued without missing a beat. “Mine showed up after I took out a Lady in White whose patterns I’d tracked for months.”
Alara fidgeted with her eyebrow ring. “And my mark manifested because I used protective wards to take out the dybbuk—holy water to drive it into the cabinet, and fire to destroy it.”
“But I drew the Wall,” I countered. “I helped.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Priest said. “The fire’s what actually destroyed it. Think about it. The bolt I made, the spirit Lukas tracked, Alara’s wards…”
Jared’s eyes lit up. “It makes sense.”
“I’m glad it makes sense to someone,” I mumbled.
“Weapons isn’t your specialty,” Priest continued. “The mark didn’t show up because you shot the vengeance spirit with a gun.”
“I don’t understand.”
He turned to Jared. “How’d you get yours?”
Jared closed his hand around the place where his mark lay dormant. “A cold-iron rod. I had the spirit in a headlock, and I drove the rod through his rib cage.”
Alara rolled her eyes. “We wouldn’t expect anything less.”
I might still be one of them.
“But I don’t have a specialty.”
Alara raised her eyebrows. “You’re kidding, right? You drew the Wall from memory.”
My eidetic memory didn’t seem like an impressive weapon in a battle against deadly spirits.
Priest shook his head. “More than that, the ability to draw symbols is directly related to invocation. Summoning and commanding angels and demons.”
“I can definitely draw, but I can’t summon anything—let alone an angel or a demon.”
Priest looked right at me. “Then you’re in luck because you don’t have to invoke a vengeance spirit. You just have to kill one.”
24. THE ONLY ONE
I stood outside the coffee shop and watched Lukas through the window as he paid the barista. After sleeping in the van all night, I would’ve killed to sink into one of the leather armchairs inside. But the shop was tiny, and even though we were fifty miles from Sunshine, the possibility of someone recognizing me was too high.
Standing out here was still better than being stuck in the van.
Priest and Jared had headed into town to pick up supplies as soon as they woke up, while Alara scoured the journals, searching for a clue that might lead to another piece of the Shift. She’d only lasted twenty minutes before she insisted on a caffeine run, and we jumped at the chance to see something other than the inside of the van.