Birthmarked

by Maria Violante

  “It’s hard to say. The text is in old Greek, and it was translated from an even older language—in fact, how far back it goes, we don’t know. All of the translating could account for the fact it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. All it says is that one day, there will be an unlikely Marker, which the text names as the Lily. And the Lily will be the child of the Tower, or a Lighthouse, or some kind of building, we don’t really know—and the Scorpion. He rubbed a finger under his nose. “Lilies are difficult—a flower is feminine, but the lily is actually a traditional symbol for something male. Something male and female together, you know?

  I felt all of the blood rush out of my body. Markers were always male, and yet, here I was, decidedly female. “These guys think I’m the Lily?”

  He shrugged and his hands rose, palms up, floating as if filled with helium. “Well . . . opinions on whether you are or aren’t the Lily are kind of divided right now—”

  “But I’m not the Lily! I’m not anything! My God, I shouldn’t even be here—”

  “Look!” The bellow was loud enough I could have sworn it fluttered my hair.

  I sat back. Buckner’s first swear word, and now the first time Bucker ever yelled at me. It was turning into a regular day of Buckner firsts.

  “I know you’re not the Lily. I knew it the moment I laid eyes on you. If I had thought you were the Lily, I wouldn’t have ever agreed to apprentice you, because. . ." His gaze fell again, and my skin prickled uncomfortably, but I wasn’t in the mood to let him get off easy.

  “Because what?”

  “Well, kiddo, the Lily is supposed to bring about the end of the Markers.”

  “What?” I sputtered like a car trying to start. Pieces were floating together, all of the niggling questions I couldn’t quite figure out. The hateful glances, the weird discomforts—the way Chris refused to meet my eyes—the way Shawn stared me down—the way I was such a big deal at all—

  And here I was thinking that everybody’s problem with me boiled down an X chromosome. Nope, it was less “you have a vag” and more “you’re going to end everything we stand for.” Great.

  “When were you going to reveal this little tidbit to me?”

  “When I thought it was the right time. I didn’t want to tell you before your first mission—I needed your head in the game. And then after Chris died—how well would you have taken it then?”

  “I would have taken it fine.” Well, that’s a lie.

  Buckner sighed and rolled his eyes. Of course, I couldn’t blame him. “Look, kiddo, if I had told you, do you think you’d have felt better about it? Do you think you would have been able to concentrate on anything? Do you really think it would have made a difference? It’s a stupid prophecy, made in a time that was so superstitious that you couldn’t say five words without one of them being taken as some kind of portent.”

  I opened my mouth, ready to shoot back barbs, but nothing would come out. Defeated, I paced back to my bed and flopped down next to Diesel. He, at least, wouldn’t be playing any word games with me any time soon.

  “Okay, so what happens now?”

  “What happens? Nothing, I guess. Unless you have questions I can answer. I’ll answer as many as you can ask, and then when you feel like everything is settled for you and your head is nice and clear, you go back to training.”

  “What? I can’t go back!” I jumped up, almost tripping as I slid down the edge of the mattress. “He hates me!”

  He rolled his eyes again. “He doesn’t hate you.”

  “Easy for you to say. Look, I know hate when I see it. He hates me.”

  Buckner pursed his lips together and whistled slightly, his eyebrows jumping. I had a hard time seeing where he was going with this. “What if I told you that there was another reason he’s been harassing you?”

  I snorted. “Besides the fact that he thinks I’m the beginning of the apocalypse? I’m pretty sure he flat out hates me. Let’s just say he’s definitely not in love with me.”

  Buckner’s eyebrows dropped, but the twinkle in his eye didn’t fade. “That good of a guesser, are you?”

  I squinted at him. “What are you talking about?”

  He wiped a finger under his nose. “Well, I suppose love is a strong word. I have a belief that his attraction to you is more physical than anything else, although the fact that you’ve got enough moxie to stand up to him couldn’t hurt, and the idea that you might be the creature of a prophecy is certainly interesting—”

  His implication hit me like a thunderbolt. “Will you stop? There’s no way a guy like that has the hots for a girl like me.”

  Buckner pursed his lips back together, but he didn’t whistle, and the unexpected silence hung uncomfortably between us. Already, I regretted saying anything, because the follow-up question was going to be—

  He cleared his throat. “What do you mean, ‘a guy like that, a girl like me’?”

  I shrugged and stared at the floor, trying to ignore the way my face suddenly felt like it was on fire. “You know.” Wasn’t I too old for this crap? Did we really have to drag me through the mud of my humiliation?

  “I’m sure I don’t.”

  Crap, he’s going to make me spell it out. “Well, Shawn is. . ." I flexed my arms in the classic weightlifter pose, sucking in my gut and pursing my lips for good measure. “And I’m. . ." I patted my belly twice, before rubbing my hand in a small circle. “Know what I mean?”

  Buckner nodded. “Ah. Well . . . I would venture that some men prefer a woman with a little extra on her.” He shrugged. “Of course, what do I know? I’m an old man. But to settle this issue, no, he doesn’t hate you. He hates me, and he doesn’t know what to make of you.”

  “Why would he hate you? Is it. . ."

  A warm tingle flowed over my skin. My brain was working the same way it had back at Elijah foods, analyzing little details here and there—

  “It’s the last apprentice, isn’t it? The one you had before me? What happened to him?”

  Buckner stared at the door. For a moment, he was so still, I would have sworn his heart had stopped.

  “What is it?”

  “Fuck it,” he muttered, before pulling a cigarette out from his shirt pocket and sticking it between his lips. I pictured Malone again, doing the same thing. The similarity in their movements was like a dissonant chord, and I shuddered. “There’s no smoking in here but if they want to finish me off over a goddamn cigarette, then I’m ready to go.”

  That, too, struck me as something Malone would say. I felt my heart constrict at the thought, and then there was a quick burst of light, and my nose stung with acrid smoke. Funny, after not being exposed to it for a few days, the scent was so much more pungent—almost as if it had taken on a life of its own.

  “Until you walked along, I’ve never really seen him entranced by a member of the opposite sex.” He grinned at me, but I couldn’t find it in myself to smile back. He took a drag on the cigarette and held it, and I knew he was buying time.

  “The three of us—that is, Shawn, my last apprentice and I—were hunting a bubbler, the same kind of creature we were hunting the night you—”

  “I remember. Go on.”

  Buckner swallowed. I saw the cigarette in the corner of his mouth bob, the light dancing up and down ever so slightly, like a lightning bug. “Kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time, didn’t have his head on straight. Bubbler solved that for him. Ripped it clean off. We got the bastard in the end, but there was nothing to do for Kenneth but bury him.” He shook his head and took another deep drag, and I could almost make out the lines of the burden that pressed into his shoulders.

  “You know, something like that, it can happen to any one of us, at any time, and we all know it.” He rubbed his chin. “Did you know we don’t allow homosexuals? And it has nothing to do with morality, or right and wrong—at least, it doesn’t anymore. It’s for the same reason that we don’t allow women to become initiates—it’s just unsafe. Two people fall i
n love, they lose their focus, and then we lose two members instead of one.”

  I couldn’t find the crack in his logic, but something about his statement rankled me.

  “To be honest, our numbers have been dwindling. Not enough sons being born, the ones who are born just aren’t suitable, can’t pass the initiation rites.” The weathered hand that had been rubbing his chin trailed up to his temples and then his eyes, massaging out some unseen pain. “The point is, Shawn was already angry and bitter when we found you, and then I stuck my neck out for you and added to all of that. He finds you attractive—which to a young, inexperienced man like Shawn, is confusing in its own right—and then with the news about the prophecy, he’s probably a little afraid for you too. And above everything, he’s loyal to the Order—which makes it kind of hard to be your friend.”

  He took another drag and went back to rubbing his temples. “Do you have any other questions? I’m starting to lose some of my own moxie here. Maybe I need to borrow some, eh?”

  I wasn’t intending to smile, but a slight quirk trailed itself up at either side of my mouth. “What’s the purple hoop—the door? How does it work?”

  He held up a single finger, the look on his face and odd tilt of his head clearly those of a man listening to a difficult sound. I glanced down at Diesel. Already, I was learning to trust his senses more than I trusted my own. My scrappy mutt rested with his head down on his paws. One of his ears flicked once and turned a lazy circle, but other than that, he didn’t move.

  After another tense moment, Buckner relaxed and took another drag. “We only use the doors when we have a creature we can’t kill through normal methods, like burning, electricity, brute force, etc. They’re risky, unstable, and incredibly costly to open. Once through, the creature is pushed into an alternate plane—back home, if you will, since we think it’s where they actually come from. We didn’t always used to have that kind of understanding, mind you—used to just think it was magic.”

  “I don’t understand any of what you are talking about.” That wasn’t exactly true—since “understand” and “believe” are two different things.

  He chuckled. “I don’t really, either. It’s something the egghead department takes care of. Our job is to just get them through the door and close it—and we can do that any way our abilities allow. We have specialists in everything from illusion casters to kiters who are fast enough to use themselves as bait. Anyway, it’s a dangerous game.”

  Should I ask him about my light?

  Before I could work up the nerve, he ran over my thought with another stream of explanations. I decided to wait.

  “We can only keep the doors open for a week or so. All of them are opened in Texas and Michigan—those are the only two places in the country where we have facilities with the right technology and energy to pull them open. We have to use our own electricity—wind in Texas, water in Michigan—so we don’t alert the whole populace to the drain.”

  “So, then how does it work? I mean, we’re pretty far from Texas, aren’t we. . ." I realized I had no idea where we were. I mean, I knew we weren’t in Ontario anymore, because everything was marked in miles instead of kilos, and the roads on the way to the last mission didn’t look anything like the ones I was used to. Why hadn’t I thought to ask for my exact location?

  “We call in, they open it, and then we run it by refrigerated truck all of the way there. We figure out the best angle for the creature to come in, and we bait it through. It’s a hard job, though. Time is always working against us, and we have to stay small to stay under the radar—although we’ve got so few men now that staying under the radar isn’t as hard anymore.”

  I nodded, slowly. “Where are we? And why don’t you just recruit more?”

  “I’m not sure management would like me to answer that first question yet, so we will just jump to the second. A lot of reasons, but I can fill you in on the two biggest ones. First, like I said, we have to stay under the radar. Can you imagine the amount of panic that would ensue if the common public became aware that every single nightmare creature you could imagine was real and running rampant around the countryside, and the only people who stood in the way of them wiping us out was not an army—but instead a group of truckers? Recruitment raises your visibility—a lot. Second, the Markers holds their traditions and vows pretty dear. Your appearance as a female who was already initiated has caused a lot of trouble in the upper ranks—trouble that might come back to us someday, but we will deal with that when it happens.”

  Those were some pretty good points. “What do you mean, come back on—”

  “And then there’s the fact that these creatures would chew the average man up and spit him out for dinner. Every generation, they evolve to be stronger, craftier. Our bloodlines were all originally chosen for their strength. Many, although not all, of us have special abilities—everything from psychics to masters of illusion to elemental powers. Granted, it’s not like it is in the movies—we’ve all got very real limits on what we can do—but the fact is, the bloodlines of the Order were chosen from the best of the best. You can’t start sticking normal people in there, soft from lives of sitting on their asses and crying over toilet paper commercials. It just wouldn’t work.”

  “Then what about me? I’m normal.” My voice sounded soft, even to my own ears, and I had to fight through a sudden lump in my throat.

  He shook his head. “No, you’re not. No matter what, you’re one of the blood. Another urge burned through, to tell him about my light. But I wasn’t ready to do that yet.

  He stood, and I could tell that he was feeling antsy. I wanted to thank him, but I wasn’t sure how—or even what I was thanking him for—answering my questions? Saving my life? Making me feel like I was special?

  “I’m feeling tired.”

  “That so? I should go then. You’ve still got your training, though.”

  “I feel sick.”

  He scowled. “This training is serious. It’s the difference between life—”

  “And death, I know. I promise, I’ll go back tomorrow.”

  He paused by the door on his way out and took one last drag on a cigarette that was now mostly filter. “If you ever doubt that you’re supposed to be here, remember one thing. You came face to face with a bubbler, and for whatever reason, you survived. You shouldn’t have. That thing should have punched through the glass and ripped you apart before you had the chance to breathe.”

  He was already halfway out the door before the question tore its way out of me. “Why didn’t it, then?” I was surprised at how quickly the tears had risen to my eyes, stinging my eyelids with heat.

  He turned back enough for me to see his face. It was washed with a blank yet thoughtful expression, one I wasn’t likely to forget soon. He rubbed his chin. “You know, I don’t know. It could have been fate, or luck, or the beginnings of an ability that has yet to manifest. Maybe it could sense that you were an initiate, and it thought better of attacking you. Maybe, before the rest of our team managed to chase it down and shoot it, it had time for a few last thoughts of gratitude, that you hadn’t attacked it.”

  I snorted. I honest to God, piggy-nose-full-of-phlegm, snorted.

  “Either way, kiddo, you’re here now. The universe brought you to us. Is it to find yourself? To help us hunt down creatures? To stir up our Order enough that something gets put into motion? I don’t know. It could be all of them or none of them. But you take care of yourself, you take care of that dog, and I’ll tell Shawn to expect you in training tomorrow morning.”

  He disappeared through the door. Diesel’s head lifted for a moment after it shut, his ears twitching. I pet his back, and he snuggled his way up into my lap.

  “Thanks for saving me,” I said, but Buckner was long gone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  By the next morning, Diesel and I had shared a mountain of cuddles. He wowed me with fetch, which I didn’t know he knew, and we tried some tug-of-war and “monster hand.” Finally,
when I couldn’t think of any more games, we walked around the halls a bit. Nobody really wanted to talk to us—although a few guys shot Diesel a longing glance. But if they weren’t going to come talk to me like a human being, they didn’t get to pet my dog, either.

  When we returned, we found dinner waiting for us. It was still bland and maddeningly healthy, but my stomach was grumbling, and judging by the way Diesel ate, he was hungry too.

  I hadn’t expected to fall asleep shortly after, but I woke up with half my face covered in crusty drool, and his warm body curled up on my chest. The rest had done me good, and my bed, for once, felt soft and warm. I nestled in, content to drift back into dreamland.

  Eventually, an alarm went off in the back of my mind. With effort, I pried an eye open and glanced at the clock.

  Ten o’clock . . . I was going to be late for training with Shawn.

  Crap. Was I ever on time? Seriously?

  I bolted out of bed, rustling Diesel enough that he gave me a glare before curling back up. I froze. Should I change? My clothes would just get dirty anyway, what with sweating and being thrown on the ground. So instead, I wiped the crust off my face the best I could and sprinted in the direction of the weird stairs and tunnel room.

  It was like trying to find a small side street at night when you have a line of cars behind you. I was running, not completely sure where I was going but afraid to slow down—and the quick sidestep maneuvers I performed to keep myself from slamming into anybody were not helping my sense of direction. Finally, by more blind luck than anything else, I stumbled into the door I was looking for. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I couldn’t figure out how to get my light glowing, so I just banged around in the dark, using my blunders into sidewalls to find my way. It was painful, but effective.

  Still, I was too scared to open the door.

  Come on. You can do this. Why are you so afraid of this guy?

  Because he whipped the crap out of me yesterday. Because he’s dangerous in ways I don’t completely understand. Because he’s complicated, and I don’t know what he—I almost peed myself when the door opened of its own accord.