Marked For Death: A Dark Urban Fantasy Novel Becca Blake (fiction novels to read .txt) 📖

his trench coat, right up against his chest. I thought I’d found all his pockets, but as I pulled it aside, I noticed a torn seam along the edge. Inside the hidden pocket, I found a small journal, thin enough that I could have easily missed it and burnt it along with everything else.

I flipped through the pages, which were all filled with his elegant script. There were pages and pages of notes about Raxael, but very little about the other demon lords. There were only two other names listed, though I was sure Orion had said there were five of them.

Zoaznar and Tzezuzal.

Once we finished recovering, we’d have to get to work researching them. If Raxael could be killed, so could they.

I continued flipping and found a page with Carolyn Collins written in dark ink. There were notes about my mother’s death—starting with the story I’d been told dozens of times about how she died at the hands of demons. Below that, there were more notes about Marcus Thorne and the Council.

About how they found my mother guilty of using dark magic and executed her in the field.

A year ago, I would have never believed this.

I turned the page and saw my father’s name, though there were only two words beneath it:

STILL ALIVE

The rest of the notebook was empty. My heart raced as I stuffed it in my pocket. Maki had been right about everything so far. Was it so crazy to believe he was right about this?

“What’s going on?” Orion asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just cleaning out Maki’s pockets.”

We’d just been through hell, and we all needed rest. There would be plenty of time to talk about Maki’s notes later.

“Anything useful?”

“Some cash.”

“Yeah, that’ll help.” He looked down at the pyre I prepared with an unreadable expression.

“Do you want to say a few words?” I asked.

“Let’s just get this over with.”

I lit a match and tossed it onto the pyre. The flames spread slowly, creeping up the wood before setting the body alight.

Orion cleared his throat and recited the funeral rites.

He didn’t have it in life, but I hoped that Jay Maki found peace in whatever afterlife he found himself in.

***

The hospital wanted to keep Celia and Orion for a week to recover. The doctors asked too many questions about how they’d gotten their injuries, and they didn’t seem satisfied by our insistence that we’d been involved in a car crash.

They’d never seen anything like those wounds, and we didn’t have any good answers for them.

Ayla suggested we stay at her apartment while we waited, but since the Arbiters now knew where she lived, we found a nearby hotel room instead. It almost felt like old times, when we would travel across the country together on hunts. Just the two of us against whatever demons we encountered.

It was a sad reminder that things would never be that simple again.

Over the course of the week, Ayla began to recover from whatever sickness had taken her, but her magic didn’t return. By the weekend, my magic was back to normal, though as far as I could tell, I no longer had any of the emerald’s power. Whether or not the amulet would ever work again was a question for Ed, but without returning to Haygrove, we had no way to ask him.

The orb was another question we couldn’t answer on our own. We’d been keeping it wrapped up in Orion’s jacket, buried in the trunk of Celia’s SUV, but the trance it had put me in back in the church still terrified me. We needed to learn how to destroy it.

If we even could.

So far, the Arbiters hadn’t found us, but it was just a matter of time. We were Oathbreakers now, and as soon as they realized we were still alive, they would send hunters after us. We would spend the rest of our lives on the run.

I wondered if they’d heard of Raxael’s death yet.

Part of me wanted to call Jacob to tell him what had happened, to beg for him to leave Haygrove and join us, but I wasn’t that desperate. And even if I was, I wouldn’t let him know it.

On the day Celia and Orion were set to be discharged, I sat on my bed in the hotel room. Ayla sat across from me, chugging another energy drink while she read a book.

I had no idea how those damned things hadn’t killed her yet.

This was exactly the way I always remembered her. I still found it hard to believe sometimes that she was still alive.

“You don’t have to stick around if you don’t want to, you know,” I said.

Ayla rolled her eyes. “So you’ve said. About a hundred times this week.”

“I know. I just don’t want you to feel like we’re forcing you to stay.”

“No one can force me to do anything.” She set her book down on the nightstand. Crossing her legs, she turned to face me. “I really respect what you’re doing. And I’m amazed you actually, you know, did it.”

“So am I.”

“But,” she said, drawing out the word, “there are four more of them. We know nothing about the others, so we have a lot of research to do. I can’t in good conscience leave that job to you and Orion, so you’re stuck with me.”

“No more faked deaths?” I asked.

“Promise.” She moved her finger above her chest, crossing her heart.

“Good.”

“You’re not going to like what I say next, though.”

My smile fell away, and a sense of dread pooled in my stomach. “What is it?”

“The others don’t want to, but we’re going to have to go back,” she said.

“There’s no way we can do that.” I stood up and paced across the hotel room.

“We need help from the alchemist. You know it as well as I do.”

“We can’t exactly walk right into Haygrove and sit down for a chat,” I said.

Ayla leaned back against the headboard and considered that. “Maybe we can.”

“What?”

“How many hunters in Haygrove would be disgusted by what the Council has