Inception (The Marked Book 1)

by Bianca Scardoni

  “It’s school,” I shrugged impassively. “What else is there to say?” I’d moved around enough to know that most schools fell into the “once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all” category, but I didn’t bother saying that part out loud. Maybe he thought his school was more special than the rest of them. I didn’t want to burst his bubble.

  “Did you go to a private school before, too?” asked Carly. She was twirling a strand of her shoulder-length, chestnut hair around her finger, seemingly disinterested, though her wide set caramel eyes pined me with their full attention.

  “No, it was public.”

  “I went to a public school once.” She said it proudly as though it were this incredibly rare event only few experienced.

  “You did not,” barked Morgan.

  “Yes I did,” she insisted. “For like half a semester, before we moved here.”

  Silence.

  Awkward.

  “That’s nice,” I said, unsure of how else to respond.

  Nikki stared at me across the way before bringing her elbows onto the table and interlocking her fingers under her chin, feigning interest. “So where do you hail from, Jenna?”

  “It’s Jemma.”

  “Jem-ma,” she repeated, exaggerating my name as she said it. It sounded like she was making fun of me, and worse, she was using my own name to do it.

  I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and pretend not to notice. “I was living in Cape Coral before. It’s a little coastal town in southwest Florida,” I answered nervously, then glanced around the crowd, trying my best to appear friendly—nonthreatening. I wasn’t particularly in the market for any more trouble than I already had.

  “Why’d you leave?” she asked. Her eyes were a sharp, almost translucent aqua that kind of gave me the creeps. “I mean, you must have been all the rage back in Cape Whatever.”

  “Nikki,” said Trace, reproaching her. It was the first time I heard his voice—smooth and deep, with sort of an edge to it.

  “What?” she asked innocently. “I just want to know what brought her to Hollow. I’m sure we all do, right guys?” Her phony tone was starting to grate on my nerves.

  My eyes darted around the table. I noticed Hannah stopped making eye contact with me altogether now. It looked as though she was unsure whether or not she could still be friendly with me now that Nikki was clearly on the offense.

  “My father passed away. I’m living with my uncle now.”

  “Don’t you have a mother?”

  “Jesus, Nikki!” This time it was Taylor who called her out. “Give the girl a break.”

  “It’s okay,” I assured her and then turned back to Nikki. “She left when I was two. I don’t have any memories of her. I also lost my grandparents before I was born. Both sets. Would you like me to go into my extended family as well?”

  “Saw-ree,” she snipped as though I was the one being the rude bitch all day. “Didn’t realize you were so touchy.”

  “Sorry about your dad,” said Carly, tucking a piece of her hair behind her ear and looking wholly uncomfortable.

  “Thanks.”

  She wasn’t the only one who was uncomfortable. I felt Nikki’s negative energy all around me, billowing in the air and suffocating me with its weight. She wanted me gone—away from her, or him, or maybe all of them—and at this point, I wanted nothing more than to oblige. I just hoped my legs could get me out of there fast enough.

  “Well it was really nice meeting all of you,” I lied, rising from the table with my tray in hand.

  “You too,” said Carly, half smiling.

  “You haven’t even touched your food,” noted Taylor, the disappointment heavy in her eyes.

  “I guess I wasn’t that hungry,” I told her and left out the part about how Nikki had all but pulverized my appetite. “I’m late anyway. I have to meet up with some teachers to see if I have any chance of getting caught up on all the work I missed.”

  “Well hang on a sec, I’ll come with.”

  “You don’t have to do that, honest. Enjoy your lunch. I’ll catch up with you later,” I said and jetted off before she had another chance to protest.

  By the time the final bell rolled around, I was completely drained, dejected, and ready to get as far away from Weston Academy as I possibly could. The day had been long, the stares exasperating, and the catch-up homework demoralizing.

  I crouched down at my locker, struggling to get all my new textbooks into my schoolbag, and realized fairly quickly that it wasn’t going to happen. No matter which way I worked them (vertical, sideways, horizontally stacked), the result was always the same: too many books, not enough space.

  Eff my life.

  I gave up and straightened out, holding the remaining textbooks cradled in my arms just in time to be on the receiving end of a bony shoulder-slam. I stammered back into my locker hard, dropping all my books in the process.

  “Watch where you’re going,” snapped Nikki, her indignant eyes daring me to say something back to her. “What a total spaz!” I heard her say to Morgan as they walked away laughing.

  If I had any doubt before, it was definitely official now: Nikki Parker hated me. I leaned my head back against my locker door and sighed. This was going to be a long semester.

  Seconds later, Trace appeared in front of me. His arresting blue eyes spiking my temperature as he bent down before me and picked up my books from the ground, one by one, and then handed them back to me without saying a word.

  He didn’t even wait for a thank you.

  I stood there, dumfounded, with my mouth slightly unhinged, staring at his delicious broad-shouldered back as he disappeared down the hall.

  “I love watching him walk away, too,” said Taylor who was now standing beside me. I hadn’t even noticed her walk up.

  I blushed. “I wasn’t looking at his, I mean, I wasn’t—”

  “Sure,” she laughed. “You don’t have to defend yourself around me, babe. Nikki, on the other hand...”

  “Yeah. I got it,” I said knowingly, pulling my blazer out from the locker and then securing it with the assigned lock.

  “So anyway,” she said, flipping her hair to the side as we started down the hall together, “I’m glad I caught you before you left. We’re going to All Saints tonight, and you’re coming with. I’m not taking no for an answer.”

  “All Saints?”

  “It’s this bar everyone goes to. There’s tons of hot guys. And pool tables, and dancing, and decent food if you get there early enough. But did I mention the hot guys?”

  “I don’t have a fake ID.” Besides, I had vampire-research to do and phone calls to make. Mainly to my inaccessible sister who was refusing to cooperate with me.

  “You don’t need one,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “They’ll just stamp your hand at the door.”

  “Oh.” I scrambled for another excuse. “I don’t know,” I told her, shaking my head. “I’m pretty tired, and I still have a lot to unpack.” A whole, entire duffle bag.

  Her face scrunched up. “You can so do that tomorrow. I’ll even help you if you want. C’mon, you have to come. Everyone’s going to be there. And you know what they say, when it Rome…something or another.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh at her misguided logic.

  “Pleeeease!”

  She was making it extremely hard to say no. And did I really want to shut down the first friend I made here?

  “Sure, why not,” I finally said. I had the sneaking suspicion she wasn’t going to let up until I agreed anyway.

  She squealed and interlocked her arm through mine. “We’re going to have so much fun!” she announced, hopping around like an excited bunny. “I can’t wait to show you off.”

  My own smile, however, was short-lived. “So when you say everyone goes there, does that mean like...everyone?”

  She hesitated before answering. “Okay, alright, so yes, Nikki and Trace will be there. But maybe that’s a good thing.”
>
  I raised a brow at her. “How do you figure?”

  “Think about it. Maybe this is your chance to show her that you’re not interested in Trace. We can totally scout out some new hotties and flirt with them until she doesn’t even remember you exist. It’s the perfect opportunity for you to get off her radar.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was the lack of sleep or hysteria from my first day of school, but Taylor’s plan was actually making sense. Maybe this was my chance to show her I wasn’t a threat to her and that I had no interest in her boyfriend—well, none that I intended on following through with.

  Maybe this was exactly what I needed to get her off my back and salvage whatever chance I had left for a nice, peaceful, below-the-radar existence at Weston Academy.

  Maybe.

  4. DANGEROUS CONNECTIONS

  There was a lineup halfway around the building by the time I got to the bar. No velvet ropes or carpet runners, just a messy line of bodies and a single bouncer at the front door, presiding over who gets in and who doesn’t. The building itself looked like it might have been a warehouse at one time but had that chic refurbished feel to it along with a lit-up retro sign plastered across the front that boldly exclaimed this was ALL SAINTS, lest anyone forgot it.

  I sent Taylor a text message as soon as I got there. She was outside within two minutes, waving me to the front of the line.

  “She’s with me,” she said, smiling at the tall, bald-headed bouncer who was manning the front door.

  He was dressed in fitted black clothes and stood dauntingly with his mammoth arms crossed over his chest. “I.D.”

  I wasn’t sure which cards he wanted so I pulled them all out and presented them to him like some sort of weird offering.

  He made a face at me and took one from the bunch. “Hand.”

  “Hand?”

  “Give me your hand so I can stamp it,” he repeated, obviously annoyed with my rookie mistakes.

  “Right. Sorry.”

  His hand descended over mine. When he pulled it back, the word underage was stamped across it in thick black ink, branding me with my own little mark of ageist shame.

  Inside, the bar looked just the way you’d imagine a warehouse-turned-bar-and-grill might look. A large, open space painted in sinister colors with dark furniture, stained-glass windows, and floor-to-ceiling brick walls that lent themselves to the whole industrial motif. There was plenty of tables and seating all around the place, pool tables in the back corner, and a space in the middle where people were dancing.

  As vast as it was, the place was packed, humming with the reverberations of live music, prattle, and the distinct sound of clinking glasses.

  Taylor grabbed my hand as soon as the crowd thickened around us and began towing me through the swaying bodies. We found a spot next to a banquet table filled with purses and personal effects, and of course, that one lone girl—the designated purse sitter. Satisfied with our location, we hung back as people trafficked around us, back and forth to the main bar stationed just a few feet away from us.

  Taylor searched the dance floor for the friends she ditched when she came outside to meet me, though she didn’t seem particularly concerned with finding them and was mostly just dancing to the music. I stood idly by her, leaning against a brick pillar watching all the faces in the crowd.

  It was a sea of uninspiring mugs. Some I recognized from school, but the majority were just nameless strangers I never met before with too-happy faces, glazed eyes, and gyrating body parts that only every so often matched the beat of the music. The whole thing was hard to watch, in an annoying sort of way, because they were all having a great time. And I wasn’t. I was just some outsider looking in on them.

  “There they are,” said Taylor, ticking her head into some non-specific part of the crowd. “I’ll be right back, I’m just going to let them know where we are.”

  I nodded, and went back to contemplating my overall discomfort level when I thought I heard my name being called. It was too loud to really hear anything, and yet, it was as though the entire room had quieted down just long enough for me to hear it. A few moments later, I heard it again:

  Jemma.

  I looked up into the crowd searching for the source; a waving hand, a raised eyebrow, something—anything that would indicate somebody was trying to get my attention, but I saw nothing like that.

  And then everything came to a dead-stop.

  Without any warning, the entire room appeared to freeze right before my eyes. The music cut, the light-changes stilled, and every single person in the room stood motionless, completely immobilized as though I were looking at a life-size picture of them and not actually standing in the room myself.

  The only sound I could hear was my own ragged breath as my eyes circled the room, frantically trying to blink everybody back to life. It was as though time were actually standing still for them—for everyone. Except me.

  “What the—”

  My voice was swallowed up by the sudden reanimation of the room. Everything around me resumed without missing a beat.

  So, apparently, I was losing it, and for real this time because I was certain that what I had just witnessed wasn’t actually possible, and therefore could not have happened, which would mean I just hallucinated the whole thing. Perhaps my little stint in the hospital left me with some long-term side effects...like actual insanity.

  Or maybe I was just suffering from some kind of sleep deprivation by-product from the night terrors, mixed in with first-day-of-school hysteria. It definitely sounded like a recipe for disaster. I decided I was holding fast to the latter and thinking maybe it was time for me to get home and get some rest.

  “Looks like you picked your first apple,” said Taylor, appearing beside me again. “And what a yummy pick he is.”

  I looked back at her, blank-faced.

  “Directly across from us.” She spoke into my ear without gesturing, her voice soft as honey.

  I redirected my eyes and saw him right away, leaning back against the wall just across the way from us. He was impossible to miss in his head-to-toe black clothing and contrasting short blond hair. There was something about the way he was watching me—unapologetically, without reserve—that threatened my inhibitions and jumbled my ailing thoughts.

  “Who is that?” I asked her, never taking my eyes off of him.

  “That’s Dominic Huntington,” she said, leaning into me.

  “He’s so—”

  “Smoking hot?” she cut in, beaming. “I know.”

  “Does he go to Weston?”

  “I wish,” she laughed. “He just moved back a couple weeks ago. Heard he got kicked out of college,” she said and then tweaked her eyebrows mischievously.

  Her implications were understood—bad boy.

  He looked about nineteen, maybe twenty. I was about to ask her why he got expelled when the girls suddenly appeared beside us, jumping up and down around Taylor as some bubblegum pop song came on that apparently meant something to the lot of them. It only took a few seconds before they were all latched onto her and collectively floating back to the dance floor together.

  My eyes went back to Dominic who ticked his head sideways, signaling for me to go over to him. My heart raced at the idea of meeting him, of losing myself in the distraction. Maybe that was exactly what I needed to get my mind off my troubles.

  “You don’t want to do that,” said Trace, crossing his arms over his chest as he rested his back against the column beside me. I hadn’t even seen him walk up.

  I turned to him slowly, remarking his arm lightly touching my own. “Why not?” I asked, dragging my fixated eyes away from the pulsating link.

  “He’s trouble.”

  “He’s trouble? What does that even mean?” I scoffed, my eyes darting back to Dominic who was gliding through the crowd.

  “It means, he’s trouble,” he repeated impatiently as he locked eyes on mine, making no attempts to explain his warning. “If you were smart, you’d stay aw
ay from him.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I had no clue what this was about. Was he alluding to the supposed school troubles? Or maybe the age difference? Or was it something entirely different and potentially serious?

  Whatever it was, he wasn’t saying, and I was fast not giving a crap because the truth was, I didn’t want to stay away from Dominic. Not in the slightest.

  My eyes raced back into the crowd in search of him, but he had already disappeared from the herd, leaving me with this unsettling feeling that I had just missed out on something big, something exciting, though I wasn’t even sure what that was.

  “You shouldn’t even be here,” Trace went on, barely audible.

  My eyes slipped back to him easily.

  “And why is that?” I asked, narrowing my eyes as he stared back at me intensely. It was as though he were trying to read me—to speak to me with his eyes. I didn’t understand them but I desperately wanted to know their language.

  Before I had a chance to get an answer, I felt someone pluck me off the pillar and shove me backwards, landing me hard on my backside a couple of feet away.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” screeched Nikki, advancing on me as though she were going to kick me while I was already down. “Stay the hell away from my boyfriend!”

  “I didn’t do anything!” I defended, scooting backwards on the floor, scrambling to widen the gap between us.

  “Did you really think you could just show up here out of nowhere and move in on him?”

  “What?” I shook my head, completely stunned. This chick was certifiable. “That’s not what I’m doing, I—”

  “Listen to me carefully because I’m only going to tell you this once, Jem-ma.” She reached over and grabbed someone’s drink off a nearby table. “Trace is mine, you got that? Stay the hell away from him or I swear to the heavens, I will make you regret the day you were born!” She turned the glass over and dumped its contents in my lap.

  “Shit, Nikki, what the hell are you doing?” yelled Trace as he pulled her back by her waist, drawing her away from me.