Carrier of the Mark

by Leigh Fallon

  I looked around at them. “I think that Knox guy was in my room on Tuesday.”

  Everyone looked at me in shock.

  “When I got home on Tuesday afternoon, I went up to my room and my Mark started stinging and I heard the whispers. I stood at the door, but I felt like I couldn’t walk into it, so I just sat downstairs until my dad came home.”

  Adam took a breath behind me. “How did this happen?” He spoke quietly and slowly. He let go of me and stepped back from the table.

  Fionn stood away from the counter. “Calm down, Adam. Now is not the time to lose it.”

  I turned to him. Adam’s eyes were already black, with vivid blue swirling around them.

  “Adam, I need you to focus. I don’t know how this happened,” Fionn said.

  “The Order must have blabbed,” Adam growled through gritted teeth.

  “They wouldn’t. They would never do that. This guy might just have been following your residuals to her house. Adam, think about it. It makes sense. Megan hasn’t evoked. Her residuals wouldn’t be readable yet.”

  “Someone was in her room, for Christ’s sake. In her room!”

  “But I don’t think he was still there when Megan got home. If he had been, he would have acted right then and there. I’d say her Mark was sensing that he’d been there earlier.”

  Rían shook his head. “How is he getting around our senses? We’ve always known when the Knox are close. This is bad.”

  Adam was pacing back and forth behind me. I reached out to him, catching his hand as he passed, and pulled him close, forcing him to wrap his arms back around me. I hoped it would calm him, and it worked; I could feel his heart slowing and his breathing evening out.

  “I have to look into this,” Fionn said. “Adam, you keep close to Megan. Stay as long as you can tonight. I will take over when you leave.”

  I felt Adam nodding behind me. “It’s getting late; I’ll take her home now.”

  Rían stood up. “I’ll drive ahead of you to make sure everything is clear.”

  At the front door Adam held me back and let Rían go first. Rían was already on his bike, his eyes scanning the yard, before Adam would let me go to the car. Rían nodded up to Adam and he set off down the driveway with us behind.

  I looked up at Adam’s frowning face. “What’s going to happen? What do we do?”

  “We keep calm and you lie low for a while. This will blow over. They’ve been close before, but what saves us every time is that they don’t really know what they’re looking for. So we keep our heads low and they move on to the next town. It’s been years since we have even seen a tracker in Ireland.”

  “Is that what the guy in the theater was? A tracker?”

  “I think so. We can’t be sure at the moment, but he fits the usual profile. There’s something different this time, though; he’s getting around our defenses. We just don’t know how he’s doing it.”

  “But why would he come after me?” I said, still upset. “I haven’t even evoked my power. I wouldn’t be much use to them, would I?”

  He looked at me with a pained expression in his eyes. It was a look I had seen before. He knew something that he wasn’t telling me. I put my hand on his. “Please tell me.”

  “If they do know about you, and I’m not sure they do, you’d most likely be their first choice.” He took a deep breath, letting his words sink in. “You’re only just learning about your powers, so you can be molded into what they want. And you’re also still figuring out how to control your powers, so you’re not in a position to fight back or put up much resistance. And, of course, there’s the fact that you’re a Carrier of the Mark. It’s what they’ve always wanted.”

  “Adam, I’m scared. I wish I could be stronger. I wish…” I didn’t know what I wished. I just wanted life to be a little simpler, easier.

  “Only over my dead body will they ever get to you. Just trust us and let us take care of you,” he said, rubbing my leg. “Look, we’re at your house, and your dad’s not here. I’ll stay with you until he comes, and then Fionn will be on the night shift. He can camp out in the Discovery and keep watch from a distance. You will be perfectly safe.” He started to get out of the car, but I grabbed his arm in a panic.

  “Don’t leave me here.”

  “I’ll be right back. I promise.” He got out of the car and walked over to talk to Rían, then came back to me and opened the door.

  As I got out, Rían flashed his lights at us and headed down the road.

  “Where’s Rían going?”

  “He’s going to do a quick sweep of the area, and he’ll check in by phone if there is anything to report.” Adam walked me to my front door, watching over his shoulder as I dug out my keys. “Do you sense anything?”

  “No. Everything seems fine,” I replied, opening the door and stepping in.

  “Just let me have a quick look around, all right?” He left me in the hall and ran upstairs. When he came down a few moments later, he was smiling. “It looks like we’re all good.”

  It was a relief to hear that, but it set me off. The tears came and they just kept on coming. I couldn’t stop them. It was panic, fear, and confusion all rolled into one. I thought I had finally come to grips with my new life and all the dangers that came with it, but I was wrong.

  Adam pulled me to him and sat down on the couch. He said nothing; he just held me, cradling me gently, letting the tears run their course. When they eventually dried up, I clung to him, afraid to let him go, not wanting him to leave.

  The ringing of the phone broke the spell. It was my dad, apologizing for being so late and wondering if I would be all right if he went home with Petra and I stayed on my own tonight.

  I was secretly relieved. That meant Adam would stay here with me. I told my dad not to worry, and I turned back to Adam to tell him the news.

  “I’ll stay here with you then; there’s no need for Fionn to do a night shift tonight.” He opened his phone and dialed. “Hi, it’s me. Everything is clear here. Look, Caleb isn’t going to come home tonight, so I’m going to stay with Megan. Let me know if you find anything out.” There was a pause at the other end while Fionn spoke. “Okay. Talk to you tomorrow. Bye.” Adam threw the phone onto the table in front of him and pulled me back into his arms.

  “I’m so sorry about before, all the crying. I don’t know where that came from,” I said, pressing my face into his shirt.

  “Don’t apologize. I hate to see you hurting like that. Please believe me when I tell you that I will make you safe.”

  “I do believe you. I just hate being so weak and needy.”

  He pulled away from me so he could hold my face between his palms. “You are one of the strongest people I have ever known. Look at what has been thrown at you over the past months. And with each thing you rise to the challenge. It leaves me breathless sometimes. You leave me breathless.”

  “I love you,” I said as I gazed up into his magical green eyes. I’d felt the words coming. They’d been building for a while, but I was still shocked when I heard them come out of my mouth. I did love him. I loved him beyond any elemental attraction.

  “I love you too,” he whispered back, his eyes sparkling.

  I knew then, at that moment, that I was not going to evoke my element. My love for Adam was real and true, and I could not accept the idea of anything standing in the way of our future.

  We sat there all evening. I closed my eyes as he traced patterns on my face, and his touch calmed me with every stroke. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew he was tucking me into my bed and climbing in next to me.

  “It’s been a while,” he murmured into my hair. “I nearly forgot how good this feels.”

  “Happy birthday,” I whispered.

  He smiled. “Thanks.”

  I fell back into a deep and comfortable sleep in his arms.

  The next morning when I woke up Adam was gone. I jumped out of bed and was about to run downstairs when I heard a noise co
ming from the kitchen. My heart pounded, and I crept down quietly and peeped around the corner.

  “Megan? You slept late.” My dad was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee.

  My brain was struggling to catch up. Where the hell was Adam? I peeked out the window to where his car should be, but it was gone.

  “Yeah, I guess I’m, uh, really tired. Did you have a good night?”

  “It was great. We had dinner in that new restaurant on the waterfront. What were you up to?”

  “The girls and I went to a movie in Douglas, then got some dinner.”

  “That’s nice. Oh, it looks like Adam is here. Another date today?” he casually asked.

  “Oh, yeah! I completely forgot. I’m not even dressed yet.” I ran to open the front door, suppressing a somewhat hysterical giggle. “Hey, Adam.”

  He winked at me. “Still in pajamas?”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “Yeah, I guess I slept in. I’m going to get dressed. My dad’s in the kitchen,” I said, my tone heavy with meaning.

  I ran upstairs and heard Adam say good morning to my dad. By the time I got back to the kitchen, Adam and Dad were discussing some upcoming event down at the yacht club. I got some breakfast while they chatted. I offered Adam a bowl of cereal, but he shook his head and said he had eaten earlier. This all made no sense.

  “Are you ready to go?” Adam asked, as I put my bowl in the sink.

  “Sure. See you later, Dad.” We moved quickly to the door.

  “Bye, guys,” Dad called, and we walked out and got into the car. We didn’t speak until Adam had reversed out of the driveway.

  “Where the hell did you go?” I eventually asked.

  “Áine rang and said Randel had seen your dad on his way home, so I parked down the road and out of sight for a while to give your dad time to get in.”

  “I freaked out when I woke up and you were gone. You could have let me know,” I said indignantly.

  “Ah, but you’re so beautiful when you’re asleep, and you seemed to be having a nice dream. I couldn’t have woken you.” He smiled at me. “I’m starving, by the way. It was torture watching you eat your breakfast there.”

  “Why didn’t you have some?”

  “I didn’t want to give your dad any room for suspicion.”

  “That’s silly! He’d never have thought you’d stayed here.”

  “I wasn’t risking it, just in case. Come on, let’s get back and see if Fionn has any news.”

  When we got to his house they were all there waiting for us.

  “Anything?” Adam asked.

  Fionn shrugged. “Nothing. My contacts in the U.K. said they hadn’t seen any Knox activity for at least eight months. They were as surprised as we were that the Knox could have come so close without being detected.”

  “Do you think it might be a false alarm?” Adam asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s worrisome that your senses aren’t picking him up, but at least Megan’s seem unaffected. We need to trust them for the moment, to be on the safe side. Áine has been scanning the wider area and she’s also coming up blank, but I’m not convinced we’re in the clear.” He shook his head and his thoughts seemed far away. “I won’t rest until we are safe.”

  Twenty-one

  THE HACK

  After that scare, things calmed down. The strange man didn’t appear again, and nobody in the Order had any information on any current Knox activity. As the weeks passed, a sort of strange normality settled in. We tried to put the theater incident behind us, and though we remained cautious, we resumed our old lives. One thing that had changed, though, was that we had discontinued training. That was fine with me. I wanted to put distance between me and my element.

  The New Year started with Hugh figuring out a new section of the Scribes. He was sure he was close to cracking the key. With that news, Adam began spending weekends in Dublin, working with the Order. Progress was slow and Adam was very unhappy with the evocation date fast approaching. He began retreating back into his research, spending most of his time either in Dublin or scanning through photocopies of old texts. He marked each passing day on his calendar with a black “X,” and with each one his mood sank further. It wasn’t just me he was withdrawing from now, but his family too. He let his schoolwork slide and didn’t even bother attending most of the time. Fionn was covering for him, but the school was beginning to ask questions, and Fionn was running out of excuses for Sister Basil. But Adam didn’t seem to care, and when Fionn pressed him on it, Adam just snapped that he was eighteen and Fionn was no longer his legal guardian.

  With Adam so wrapped up in text translations, I had plenty of time to myself. And the more time that went by, the more I realized I could not live without Adam. Since the day on the boat when I’d felt my own love for Adam exist alongside my elemental attraction for him, I knew our love could survive beyond the elements. And I had heard it in Adam’s voice the night he told me he loved me. I was going to make myself fail to evoke at the ritual planned for February, and I would continue to fail until it was too late. I hated myself for being so selfish, and I knew that letting go of my element would be like killing a part of me, but it was a sacrifice I had to make.

  This meant that I had to learn how to channel the excesses of my power, which kept struggling to exist, into something else. So I focused on control. Since I’d made my decision not to evoke, I saw my power with better clarity and found it easier to manage. Despite the element’s best efforts to free itself, it no longer slipped out accidentally. More recently I actually felt like my power had given up the fight. I slowly became confident that I could avoid evocation. Now I just had to work on my acting skills so that it actually looked like I was trying to evoke during the ritual.

  As I stuck to my plan, Adam grew more and more distressed about the Druid Scribes. I didn’t want to tell him that I wasn’t going to evoke—I knew he wouldn’t agree to it. But I hated watching him suffer. And, of course, if he found a solution, I would be overjoyed to be able to keep my power and keep Adam. In the meantime, even when I didn’t hang out with Adam, I knew his moods were just getting worse and worse, because of the storms and floods that ravaged Kinsale throughout December and early January. I suspected that much of the freakishly bad weather was caused by Adam’s black mood, and I wished I could press fast-forward to get to the summer.

  I was back to spending a lot of time with Caitlin, which was great. We studied together in the evenings, filling the void the boys left in their absence. Caitlin and Killian had tried getting back together, but Caitlin couldn’t get the image of Killian cheating on her out of her head, and so she ended it … again. Poor Killian was devastated. But something told me that she still had feelings for Killian and that his suffering would be short.

  One evening after we finished our homework, we started talking about our plans for the summer. Caitlin informed me that she was stuck working at the bed-and-breakfast from spring right through to the fall, so she wouldn’t have a lot of free time.

  “We should do something this weekend. In fact, we should do something each weekend up to when the tourist season kicks off.” She sighed. “I’ll smell like a full Irish breakfast until the end of the summer.”

  I laughed at her. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “You haven’t smelled me during the summer months. I’m telling you, I won’t be able to even look at a sausage until Christmas.”

  “So what do you want to do this weekend? I was actually thinking it would be fun to take a ride at the stables. We haven’t been down there since the whole Killian disaster went down.”

  She looked out the window. “In case you’ve missed it, we’re sort of in the middle of storm season here.”

  “I’m predicting good weather this weekend.”

  “Oh, you are, are you? What have you got, some kind of magical barometer?”

  I grinned. “Yeah, something like that. Look, I’ll take care of the weather. You acquire the horses.”


  “I’m not sure, Megan. Things are still awkward with Killian. I don’t know who has the harder task: you in appeasing the rain gods, or me in coercing Killian into giving me his horses.”

  “Something tells me it won’t be a problem.”

  “Oh, fine. You’re on.” She sounded reluctant, but I could tell by the gleam in her eye that she was secretly glad to have an excuse to talk to Killian.

  “Great!” I finished my tea and started gathering my stuff. “I’d better get home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She waved me off and I headed home, spying Randel on the tree across the road. I waved discreetly to him. Even though there no longer seemed to be a threat, he still kept a constant watch on me. While the rest of us had moved on, Áine had told me Randel was still unhappy. So he shadowed me, a constant and reassuring presence that I was now well used to.

  I was walking for about ten minutes when Adam pulled up and rolled his window down.

  “Want to let your inattentive boyfriend give you a lift?”

  I looked into his tired eyes and smiled. Despite the fact that he had been hard to talk to lately, I was thrilled to see him.

  I leaned over the window and gave him a kiss.

  “You’re far too forgiving,” he murmured, as I climbed into the passenger seat.

  “No way. Maybe I should be thanking you,” I teased. “Your absence from my life is what’s going to get me into Trinity. I’m going to whip your butt in the exams,” I joked.

  “And what makes you think that?” He tapped the side of his head. “This brain is a lean machine; I’ll whip your butt, hands down. All I need is a few nights of cramming.”

  I ran my finger along the purple rings under his eyes. “All you need is a few nights’ sleep.”

  He sighed. “I can’t sleep these days. My brain won’t shut off. I told you, lean machine.” He tried to laugh, but it didn’t quite come out.

  I cupped my hand under his chin. “What you need is another night with me. I’d make sure your brain shuts off. It’s been a long time.”