Sacrificed (The Ignited Series)

by Dantone, Desni

As I thawed out next to one of the many fireplaces scattered around the enormous lodge, Alec tracked down some hot chocolate. I saw him approach after a few minutes, with Tenner and Sara. A girl with tight golden curls and a very expensive looking snowboarding suit with matching pink boots was with them, and had her eyes set coolly on me.

  Alec flashed me a fake smile visible only to me. “Look who I found,” he crooned.

  “Chelsea?” I whispered to him as he handed a cup of hot chocolate to me.

  A tight lipped, eyebrow raised expression on his face was my answer.

  There were others that joined us eventually, as they came in off the mountain, and before long, the loud obnoxious crowd had claimed their own corner of the lodge, having driven away the families with children and older couples. Drinks flowed freely. A lot of flirting was taking place all around me, but the most nauseating display was happening right in front of me. Really, this Chelsea girl had no shame. Nor could she take a hint.

  Alec had rolled his eyes more times than I could count. He’d barely paid attention to what she was saying half the time. It was obvious to everyone but her that he just wasn’t interested.

  I actually felt a little bad for her.

  Twenty minutes later, after one doe-eyed hyena-giggle too many, I got up from my seat and grabbed Alec’s shoulder. “I’m ready to give it another shot.”

  “Really?” He looked eager. Too eager, and I knew it had nothing to do with snowboarding.

  “We’re kind of in the middle of something here.” This came from Chelsea.

  I should have ignored her, let Alec handle the situation, but at the fake, high-pitched sound of her nasally voice, I was only reminded of how much I despised girls like her.

  “It didn’t really look like that to me,” I returned. Turning to Alec, I asked, “Where you in the middle of something?”

  His lips turned in as he tried in vain to mask the grin on his face. For the first time ever, I saw Alec at a loss for words.

  “What are you doing here?” Chelsea spat. “He dumped you. Move on. Stop being so pathetic.”

  Oh, so that’s what was going around Alec’s circle of friends?

  I faltered, surprised by her assumption. From the slight shake of Alec’s head and the look of confusion on Tenner’s face, I knew that he hadn’t told anyone that. Sara glared up at me from behind Chelsea’s shoulder, and I figured the two of them had come to that conclusion on their own.

  Only then did I notice that the low rumble of voices around us had dropped a decibel as they turned their attention to the impending cat-fight. My cheeks warmed under their stares, and I briefly considering tucking my tail and bolting.

  Fortunately, Alec saved me from further humiliating myself.

  “Actually,” he drew slowly to pull all the attention to him. “She dumped me, and she’s here because I want us to be friends. And maybe I’ll wallow around a little until she takes me back.” He turned to me then, upping the act by placing a hand over his heart. “I’m not really sure how to do that because I’ve never been dumped before, but I’d do anything for you, baby.”

  I hadn’t expected all of that, and stared at him dumbly before I realized that his ‘friends’ were watching me, waiting for a response. Adopting a flirty smile, I took Alec’s hand in mine. “Anything?”

  He faltered, eyes dropping to my mouth. His throat jumped as he stepped closer to me, keeping up the charade. “Anything.”

  Or maybe it wasn’t a charade?

  It was real nerves that rendered my voice useless now. Something about this, though it was all an act, was hitting a little too close to the truth. We shouldn’t be doing this, especially not in front of others, who had no idea just how complicated the history between Alec and me was.

  We needed to go. Now.

  Tossing a glare over my shoulder at Chelsea, I walked away. I heard Alec calling out goodbyes to Tenner and a few of the guys behind me before he followed.

  We didn’t go snowboarding again. The car ride home was quiet. Only made tolerable by the music filling the tightly charged space between us. I didn’t know what had happened back there, and didn’t know if I wanted to know. If Alec wanted to talk about it, he didn’t say anything.

  The moment we walked into the house, I attempted to make a beeline for the bathroom. Alec grabbed ahold of my hand to stop me. When I spun around, I found him just a tad too close for comfort. That twinkle in his eyes certainly didn’t help.

  “I know what happened back there,” he said.

  I didn’t need to ask what ‘back there’ was in reference to. But in order to avoid a conversation I really didn’t want to have, I played dumb. Alec wasn’t fooled.

  “You know what that was all about?” he asked me. When I didn’t respond, he continued, “You were jealous.”

  “I was not,” I responded automatically.

  “Could’ve fooled me.”

  “I was not jealous.” I hesitated, thinking about my words. I hadn’t been. Not really. However, another feistier part of me may have been, and that part was getting louder and more prominent every day. “I can’t control what Skotadi-Kris does most of the time.”

  “Blaming it on your alter ego?”

  “Well, yeah, I am.”

  Alec grinned as I attempted to snatch my hand from his grasp. He wasn’t about to let go. Not yet. He had more to add, and he pulled me closer. “I like knowing at least a part of you wants me.”

  This time when I pulled my hand away, he let it go. “I’m going to shower,” I announced with enough force to let him know I considered this conversation over. He was too close to a truth I wasn’t ready to acknowledge.

  “Is that an invitation?”

  I stifled a laugh, and shot a glare over my shoulder as I walked away. “Not in a million years, Alec.”

  I hurried to the bathroom, needing to put distance between the two of us fast. I couldn’t be certain, but I was pretty sure, in that moment just before I shut the door behind me, I heard him mutter something that sounded suspiciously like, “We’ll see about that” under his breath.

  The days passed uneventfully. For the most part.

  Living with Alec, frequently alone since Tenner was gone more than he was home, proved to be my greatest test. He grinned, he flirted, he tempted. He did what Alec did best, but this time, he didn’t get the girl. I knew what he was thinking: Not yet. He wasn’t the type to shy away from a challenge, and I had a feeling he was only biding his time.

  I busied myself as I had before, reading the books on Incantation I had brought with me. When I wasn’t doing that, Alec helped me work on my control. He’d learned some tricks along the way and shared his methods with me.

  Basketball. That worked for me. When I felt my temper rising over the raised toilet seat, constant visitors dropping in unannounced, or stares from girls who didn’t understand my relationship with Alec, I thought about basketball. Anything to do with basketball. It was my innocent distraction.

  Alec’s was snowboarding. When he’d first suggested that to me, we’d learned that thinking about snowboarding only fueled my anger. A broken lamp had been the outcome of that trial.

  I hadn’t lost it—really lost it—since I’d been here. He was right. Being surrounded by humans was easier. If I could stay in Alec’s room, busy myself with reading, and avoid his more annoying visitors, I would be okay. For a while longer anyway.

  It was nighttime that worried me. That was when Micah pulled me into his dream worlds.

  During the dreams, I was fine. I liked Micah then. It was when I woke up, and I remembered how I really felt about him, that I got mad. He knew the dreams were my weakness and tried to use that knowledge to trick me into telling him where I was. So far, I hadn’t slipped, but I’d been close to changing my sleep patterns so that I could avoid sleeping at the same time as him.

  Then I found something in the spell book that looked promising. I made Alec drive me to the rare gems shop in town to pick up a black tourmaline cryst
al. Apparently, it had a blocking effect on psychics, so I figured it was worth a shot.

  I put it under my pillow that night before I went to bed and, for the first time in a very long time, I experienced Micah-free sleep. When it happened again the next two nights, I was convinced it wasn’t a coincidence.

  I’d done my first successful spell. Feeling good after that, I threw myself into the spells with more confidence and the belief that I could do it.

  I found a list of stones and gems that were thought to have other blocking and healing abilities. I wondered what the chances were that they could help. Could they sort of…block my soul from turning evil? Or heal the souls of those that had already been changed?

  I hadn’t a clue as to what they might be capable of, but after the success I’d had with the tourmaline crystal, I was excited to try others. I decided it wouldn’t hurt to get them…and see what happened.

  I opened my notebook to make a list of gems I wanted to look for, only to discover that I had no more blank pages left. Every page was filled with my notes. Tossing the notebook to the side, I glanced around the room, hoping Alec had something I could write on.

  I zeroed in on the small computer desk in the corner of the room. I moved a few of Tenner’s books out of the way, uncovering a thick blue folder. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but my hands lingered. Hoping to find a few blank pieces of paper inside, I flipped it open.

  I immediately spotted my name sprawled across the top of the first page, in Alec’s choppy handwriting. Every cell in my body turned to ice as I continued reading, flipping through the pages like they were on fire.

  Adoption…protection…murders…disappearance…

  My life looked up at me from the pages in my hand. Things I’d known, things I’d never known. Things I didn’t know how, or why, Alec had filed away in a folder in his room.

  My blood boiling now, I gathered up the papers and marched out of Alec’s room. He was in the living room, watching television. I tossed the file on the coffee table in front of him. Pointing to the scattered papers, I demanded, “What is this?”

  He looked up slowly, calculating his response. “Kris…”

  “You have a file on me, Alec!” I yelled. “Why? What is this all about? And you had better start telling me the truth, or we’re about to find out which one of us is stronger.”

  He took a deep breath, and thought about his words carefully. “After I left, I started wondering about some of the things Micah mentioned before, about you being descendent of Hecate. When I came here, I didn’t have anything else to do, so I started looking into some of his theories.”

  “And this is what you found out?”

  He nodded. “I have a few Skotadi friends who haven’t turned on me,” he explained cautiously, like he was afraid one wrong word would send me on a rampage—with him as the target. “I had them dig into your past.”

  “I was adopted by my family when I was six months old? That’s what you found out?”

  I’d known from the day I first started development that my family, that had been murdered when I was three, could not have been my birth family. They’d been human, incapable of having a hybrid baby. But seeing the truth in print felt like a knife twisting in my gut.

  He nodded solemnly. “The orphanage you were adopted from…” He searched for the paper with the information he was looking for. Finding it, he handed it to me. “It’s a Skotadi-run orphanage. It’s where they put the kids born to Skotadi parents, so that the parents can return to the field without having to worry about raising kids. It’s the same orphanage I was placed in.”

  The thought left a sour taste in my mouth. Those poor kids. Dumped in an orphanage by their parents so that they could continue to fight this silly war. While that didn’t make any sense to me, something else had me even more confused.

  “If it was a Skotadi-run orphanage, why did they let me get adopted by some human family?” It was how they had ultimately lost me after all, when Nathan came along.

  “Well,” Alec said slowly, and I knew that he had the answer, but was hesitant to share it with me. “The family that adopted you was apparently one of the many human families that are in alliance with the Skotadi. They do things like this to help the Skotadi out.”

  “Humans in alliance with the Skotadi.” I said the words slowly, digesting them. Ultimately, I decided I didn’t like the sounds of it. “Why would any human want to do that?”

  Alec shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s got to be something in it for them, but I can’t guess what. The fact that humans are working with the Skotadi is a heavily guarded secret, too. They don’t want anyone knowing about it.”

  I had the nagging suspicion that this had something to do with the kidnapping of humans we had witnessed in West Virginia, and I really didn’t like where my thoughts were headed.

  “Alec, those girls they took…”

  “I know. I was thinking the same thing.”

  “Incantation? Could they be using Incantation to…” I trailed off, struggling to complete the thought. It was too much, too horrible, to fathom.

  “Force them?” Alec paused to read the aghast look on my face. “That’s the only explanation I can come up with.”

  Sick, sick bastards…

  But was that all? Was that the only reason they were using the humans—to help them raise their abandoned Skotadi children? Or was there something far worse, far bigger than that going on?

  The Skotadi’s words played over in my head again.

  They are our pawns…

  Only the beginning…

  What were they planning? What were we missing?

  “There’s more,” Alec murmured, breaking into my panicked thoughts. I stared at him and waited. “Ninety-nine percent of the Skotadi have gone through that orphanage at one time. They keep records on all the kids. They keep files on everything there. If anyone has the details of your creation, it’s them. If we can find your file, we’ll know exactly who you are, where you come from, and what makes you so different from me.”

  “And who my creators were.” If I were really descendent of Hecate. And if I were, maybe I could find clues to help me break the unwanted soul mate connection she’d handed down to me.

  Knowing the details of my creation might help us determine how to put an end to everything, once and for all. Explain the link I have to Micah, tell us if his theories were right. While a part of me wanted to continue living in denial, a bigger part of me wanted to get to the bottom of everything, to know who I was and where I came from. Especially if that information might help us.

  “We have to find those files, Alec.”

  “I was looking into it when you showed up,” Alec said. “I meant to tell you about all of this. I just got distracted, and I guess I didn’t really know how to tell you.”

  “It’s fine.” I brushed it off with a wave of my hand. “But we can’t waste any more time.”

  Alec nodded hesitantly.

  “What’s wrong, Alec?” I asked.

  “Aren’t you afraid of what we might find?”

  Of course I was. In fact, I was downright terrified. But this was too important to run away from.

  Instead of answering Alec, I asked another question of my own. “Where is this orphanage anyway?”

  Alec grimaced, and I imagined he was about to tell me that it was in the Himalayas or some impossible location like that. If it was going to take us awhile to get there, we needed to start making plans now. Surely, he realized the importance of that.

  “Alec, how far is it?” I pressed.

  He sighed heavily and met my gaze with a hint of reluctance. “About an hour outside of Aspen.”

  My mouth dropped open. Really? Could it really be that easy?

  An hour away. The buried secrets of my past, the truth about who and what I was, were so close. And I was ready to uncover them.

  CHAPTER 19

  Alec wasn’t exactly eager. Not like I was. In this case, he was the cal
m, collected, calculating one, and I was the spontaneous daredevil ready to jump into the lion’s den without considering the consequences. It was a little weird—our roles being reversed.

  “We’re not doing this tonight,” he repeated for the fifth time since we’d left the house. His hand hesitated over the Tahoe’s door handle, and he looked at me, waiting.

  “I know.” He didn’t move, didn’t look away, forcing me to add, “I got it, Alec. We’re just scoping it out. I promise I won’t try to talk you into breaking in tonight…again.”

  At my promise, he finally got out and rounded the front of the vehicle to meet me on my side. He had pulled off the side of the road half a mile from the orphanage, hiding the Tahoe behind a large snowbank where no one could see it. The road dead ended at a gate. Beyond that lay the orphanage.

  We walked the remaining distance. Not on the road, but rather a few yards inside the line of trees that surrounded the property. The lights of the orphanage supplied us with just enough visibility as we approached. From what I could see, it looked like a small college campus. Five wings branched off of a large central building, like a large star. Each wing branched off into two or three more wings. The place was huge.

  “How many kids are housed here?” I whispered to Alec.

  He shook his head. “Thousands.”

  I scoffed. “Sick, selfish bastards.”

  Even in the dim lighting, I could make out Alec’s smile as he glanced down at me. I shrugged as if to say, well, it’s true!

  A gate kept us from waltzing right up to the front door, not that we were going to do that anyway. However, as I took in the high fence wrapped around the entire property, I was curious as to how he planned to get in. The fence wasn’t something I would want to scale, not with the barbed wiring at the top.

  We stopped, still hidden in the trees, several yards from the fence. Alec was looking at the building, placed back from the fence line about a hundred yards. He was the picture of calm.

  “Alec? How are we going to get in?”

  He glanced at me. “There are ways.”

  “Considering we’re about to do something highly dangerous, with a good probability of getting caught, maybe you should elaborate on these ways.”