The Marked Girl (19 page)

“What are you saying, Joe
?
”

“I'm saying that you're special. You were born with a type
of . . . ability. A strange and rare ability. But one that could attract dangerous people . . .”

Joe's eyes searched Liv's face as she tried to process what he was saying. She yanked her hand from Joe's and looked down over the edge of the wall, at the ground and the people milling below. She couldn't focus on any one person . . . they all seemed to be spinning, going in and out of focus, as she stared. For just a moment it seemed as though the bottom of the world had just dropped out beneath her, and she was just seconds from tumbling down, down, down . . .

“You know?” she managed to whisper, tearing her eyes away from the ground and back to Joe. “You know what I am? What the tattoo does? Everything?”

“Liv . . .”

“No.” She pushed herself backward from him. “I almost died last night. We went looking for information and some Knight tried to kill me, and all this time you knew everything?”

Joe looked like he might be sick.

“They found you? The Knights of Valere?” He ran his free hand through what was left of his hair. “Thank God you're still alive.”

“I wouldn't have been in danger at all if I'd known. We would never have gone to the professor, never put ourselves in that position. Why didn't you tell me? And how . . . how did you know?”

“I only ever wanted to keep you safe,” Joe said, his whole body sagging like a puppet whose strings had been cut. “I promise, Liv.”

“Don't promise. Explain.”

“I don't even know where to start.”

“Let's start with the tattoo. Or the scroll, or whatever it is,” Liv said. “Did the Hannigans even have anything to do with it, or was that a lie?”

Joe looked at the ground for just a moment. “They didn't give it to you. It's not really a tattoo at all. You were born with it, although it was probably faint and small enough to pass for an odd birthmark at first. That's the way it works with all children of the scrolls. They're born with the markings, but they don't start to darken until the fifth or sixth year.”

Liv blinked furiously, trying to reconcile her own memories with this new truth. “So there's no way to get rid of it? The . . . marking?”

Joe shook his head, his eyes sad. “Your marking didn't really show itself until you were already with the Hannigans. When they found it, the way they treated you . . . they said you were ‘marked by the devil,' they called you ‘unclean.' I took you out of there as soon as I could, Liv.”

“But you let me believe it was just a tattoo, that they'd given it to me . . .”

“It was safer for you to blame the Hannigans than to know the truth.”

“I'm gonna have to disagree,” Liv said, unable to keep the acid from her voice. “But since you mentioned the truth, let's have it. Start from the beginning.”

Joe shifted slightly on the wall. “It's not a coincidence that I'm your social worker. I got into this job with the express
purpose of tracking down more scroll children, so that I might protect them before it was too late.”

“More children? So you've met people like me before?”

“Liv . . .” Joe said, his voice taking on a weary, resigned tone. “It's easiest if I just show you.” With that he turned on the half-wall so that his back was facing Liv. He reached up to the collar of his T-shirt and pulled it down just below his neck, so it showed a line of skin just above his collarbone. The skin was marked with thin, dark writing.

“I knew what you were because it's what I am, too,” Joe said, his face still turned away. “A child of the scrolls.”

J
oe turned back around to face a still-speechless Liv.

“You're . . . You . . .” Liv struggled to form a complete sentence. The sun beat down on the roof, and she could feel a bead of sweat drip down from the edge of her hairline.

“My parents discovered the markings shortly after I was born. My brothers, John and Eric, were born with them as well. At first they were faint, just white lines like you might see from a fading scar. The doctors didn't know what they were. No one knew. But the markings grew deeper and darker, and by the time each of us was six years old, they resembled full-on tattoos.”

Liv tried to picture Joe as a child, but it was impossible to see him as anything other than the fully grown, bearded, responsible Joe he'd always been.

“My parents weren't marked,” Joe continued. “The children of the scrolls are born randomly to one family in each generation . . . there are always three of them.”

Liv's breath caught in her throat. She saw the image of a skinny boy pushing her through a window, a toddler sitting on the grass as her house burned down in front of her eyes.

“Peter . . . Maisy . . .” She couldn't finish the sentence. Their names stuck to the side of her throat.

“Yes. Your brother and sister are marked as well. After your parents died, you were immediately taken into protective care, your information entered into a social services database. I had flagged the system to report any instances of children with unusual markings or tattoos. Peter already had full-fledged markings. I immediately signed on to take your case. Since the day I first met you, Liv, I've done nothing but try to keep you safe.”

Liv swallowed, looking away from Joe's concerned face. Her eyes scanned the empty roof. She thought she saw a slight blur of movement next to the nearest telescope structure that jutted out from the building, but the next instant, it was gone.

“I only wish I'd found your family sooner, before it was too late.”

Liv turned her eyes back to Joe. “What do you mean, too late?”

Joe reached out and laid one hand gently on Liv's arm.

“I know there's no excuse, Liv. I was looking for scroll children, but the Knights were looking, too. They've been doing this for years, centuries, and have more resources than I do. They find scrolls early, and they . . .”

“I know what they do,” Liv whispered.

“Unfortunately, they've gotten good at it. If any scrolls before me have ever slipped the Knights' notice and survived, I have not been able to find them. The Knights probably check schools or doctors' offices . . . from his medical records, I know Peter was taken in for consultations because of his markings. Your
parents must have been concerned, scared even, to not know what the markings meant or why they were getting darker.”

Doctor's visits? She searched her memories, but came up with nothing. “I don't remember that,” Liv said.

“You were so young,” Joe responded. “Your parents might not have told you. But they did see doctors, and one of them may have contacted the Knights, given them your address . . .”

Joe looked Liv in the eyes, and suddenly she knew what he was about to say. She shook her head in disbelief, even as the words fell from his mouth.

“Liv . . . they set fire to your house. Trying to kill you all—you, Peter, and Maisy. The Knights wanted you dead.”

Liv's shoulders fell, her muscles suddenly slack. She felt as though her throat was closing up, squeezing out all the air . . .

“I'm so sorry. So, so sorry,” Joe reached out to steady Liv, and she realized she was slumping downward.

“But it was me,” she choked out. “It was . . . I . . .”

With effort, Liv sucked in a breath around the apple-sized lump in her throat, and continued. “The candle. I lit a candle that night. That was why . . .”

Joe's eyes widened. “No! Oh, Liv, no . . . it wasn't you.” He looked at her with more pity in his eyes than she could handle.

“I lit a candle that night. I remember doing it. I remember.”

“Even if you lit a candle, the police found your house doused in kerosene and ruled it arson. It was the Knights. . . . I'm so sorry, Liv, I just—I didn't want you knowing your parents were murdered. You were so young, and I figured it would be best if you thought it was an accident . . . but you didn't. All this time,
you thought . . . oh God, how could I not have known?”

It wasn't a question Liv was meant to answer, but she could feel her head making a tiny, jerking motion anyway. “I didn't tell you. I didn't tell anyone. I couldn't.”

Liv thought of all the nights she had closed her eyes before going to sleep, trying to conjure up the images of her parents' faces in her mind so that she wouldn't forget them. She thought of all the other nights that she tried to scrub their images from the backs of her eyelids, so that she might.

“It wasn't your fault, Liv. Not at all.”

Something broke open inside of her. And she realized that it was too late and too hard to close it back up in time. The cry tore from her throat and muffled itself against Joe's shoulder when he reached to hug her. And once she started, she couldn't stop. Sobs built in her throat and exploded outward, seeming to rip up her insides as they did so.

It hurt.

She cried and cried, her eyes burning, mouth open against Joe's flannel shirt. Eventually, her breathing began to even out; the tears dried up on her cheeks. She had no idea how long she had been leaning against Joe, although it had felt like a long time, endless.

She pushed herself upright and wiped at her eyes, taking in one long, shuddering breath.

“Are you okay?” Joe asked.

Liv sniffed deeply and nodded. A new thought occurred to her then, one that caused a flash of fear to pulse through her body. She jumped up from the half-wall, looking down at Joe.

“The Knight who threatened me—he said he would kill me for being a child of the scrolls. Do you think he would go after Peter and Maisy? Are they safe?”

“After the fire, I split you up immediately and gave you new last names. I'd hoped it was enough to keep the Knights at bay. They would have known you survived the fire, but I made it difficult to track you down. Peter had recognizable markings by that point, so I sent him north. As a younger child, Maisy was adopted pretty quickly. You were trickier . . . but bouncing around from foster home to foster home has helped, I think. I kept your markings out of the system, and there's no sign they had any idea where you were.”

“Until now,” Liv whispered. Without thinking, she started to pace in front of where Joe was sitting. “I should never have gone to the professor. If I hadn't, none of this . . .”

“Why
did
you go there?”

Liv paused, conflicted. She glanced out over the green yard in front of the observatory, looking for Cedric. But he wasn't standing where he had been before. It wouldn't betray him, really, to tell his secret, would it? They needed all the help they could get. And Joe was a scroll, too. He would believe her.

Liv took a deep breath and launched into her story, starting with the day she first saw Cedric down by the riverbed. When she mentioned the LA River, Joe's eyes flashed briefly, as though he wanted to interrupt, but he let her continue until the end. When she finished, she sighed heavily and sat back down on the half-wall.

“I couldn't tell anyone,” she said. “I thought you'd think I
was crazy. I kind of still think I might be.”

“You're not,” Joe said. “But you may be in even more trouble than I realized.”

Liv snorted. “That should be the subtitle of my autobiography.”

“I've never seen a wrath before. Or a . . . what did you call them? Guardians?” Joe continued, looking down again at the sword. “The lore I've learned about Caelum and its origins was always murky. The only dangers I knew of firsthand were the ones that existed in this world—the portals, and the Knights, of course.”

“The portals? How are they dangerous?”

Joe once again ran a hand through his hair. “I told you that I was one of three brothers, each of us children of the scrolls. When our markings darkened, our parents were confused and scared. They took us to specialists. And that drew the attention of the Knights.

“The Knights picked up Eric and John as they walked home from school. I was out sick that day.” Joe paused, his eyes dark and far away. “They just drove by in a dark van and swooped my brothers up, so quickly that no one on the block even noticed. John, my older brother, managed to escape when the van stopped at a red light. He couldn't get Eric out, and he just ran. We never saw Eric again.”

“Oh my God,” Liv whispered. “I'm so sorry, Joe.”

Joe nodded, but seemed eager to move on with his story. “John was convinced the Knights would come back for him. He'd heard them talking and knew they would never leave
him alone. My parents and the police thought the people who kidnapped my brother belonged to a fanatical cult, and I guess in some ways that was true. But my brother shared with me the truth that my parents couldn't accept. Because the Knights had told him what he was, and what he could do.

“We ended up moving to Los Angeles to start over. My parents wanted to grieve for their lost son and get on with their lives. So did I. But John could never get past what had happened. When the hunt for Eric stopped, he grew angrier and more obsessed with the Knights. He devoted his life to learning about the organization. What little information I have about them, I got from John.

“Once he was out on his own, John finally found a way to use the scrolls on our backs to open a portal. As far as he could tell, no portal had been opened on Earth in hundreds of years, and he was determined to give it a try. He said it's what we were born to do.”

Joe paused and took a breath, shielding his eyes as he looked out over the edge of the observatory wall at the hills rising up beyond. While he looked out, Liv's gaze drifted back over to the opposite wall of the roof. Behind the small building that housed the telescope, she once again saw a blur of movement. Only this time, it didn't move quickly enough. She saw exactly what—or rather, who—was listening to her conversation with Joe. Cedric hadn't been content to watch from a distance, after all.

Joe sighed. “John was always . . . persuasive. Especially when he was passionate about something. And it was exciting to think we might have some kind of power, that we had been
chosen for something bigger. We were both so young, barely in our twenties, then.”

“Did you manage to do it?”

“Yes. Though I wish every day that we hadn't.” Joe sighed. “John had to go to a lot of shady people to find the right documents to translate the markings . . . and when he did, he used them to open a portal on the banks of the LA River.”

“The river . . .” Liv murmured, remembering the night Cedric and his friends had come through the portal. Could it be the same place? The very same portal?

“Yes, when you mentioned it earlier, I thought it was quite the coincidence too,” Joe said, with a sigh. “We wanted to find somewhere out of the way. I really only half believed opening the portal would work, but John never had any doubts. For him, it wasn't a matter of if he could travel to another dimension, but when.”

Joe exhaled in one long, shaky breath. Liv realized it was possible that he'd never told this story to another person before; she wondered how different things might have been if she and Joe had been honest with each other from the beginning. How much less alone they might have been.

“The portal itself was terrifying, a giant black hole that opened up right in the middle of the concrete wall under a bridge. It scared me, and I changed my mind, right then. Not John, though. I'll never forget the way his eyes looked when he stared into the portal. He was hypnotized. I asked him to stop, to think about what he was doing. But John didn't even turn around. I watched him walk into the portal as easily as if
he were walking into another room. And then I saw it swallow him. And then I heard him scream.”

Joe closed his eyes, as if he was trying to shut out the image once again.

“I ran to the portal to try to pull him back, but I was too late. I couldn't see him, but I could hear him crying out. I could hear the sound of bones breaking. . . . I yelled after him, but I'll never know if he heard me. Because that's when the bridge came down.”

“What?”

Joe opened his eyes, but they were far, far away. “The ground began to shake, and the foundation of the bridge began to split. It was so old, it smashed to pieces when it hit the ground. Emergency workers searched through the rubble, but they never found John. He was just . . . gone.”

“Oh.” Liv wanted to apologize or say something comforting, but before she could think of the right thing, Joe grabbed her shoulder.

“You have to listen to me, Liv. You and I were born to open portals, but the portals aren't meant
for
us. They're meant to use us, to chew us up and spit us out. Wraths and apparently even the Guardians might be able to cross through them unharmed, but not us. Do you understand? That earthquake . . . I don't think it was a coincidence. What John did was against the laws of nature, and the earthquake was a reaction to that.”

The laws of nature . . . something in Joe's words reminded Liv of the professor, and how he spoke of the Quelling Theory. He had said magic didn't belong in this world anymore. But
where did that leave Cedric? She remembered the way his face looked whenever he talked about his home.

“Cedric and his friends don't belong here,” she finally said, her voice quiet. “They need to go back.”

Slowly, Joe shook his head. “I'm sorry that your new friends are stuck here, but I won't risk losing you. Not that way.”

“You won't, Joe. But they've saved my life—more than once. What if I just open the portal for them—if you show me how to open it—but not go through it myself?”