Birthmarked Read online

  The old man shrugged. “So shoot her.”

  I would have screamed, if I hadn’t been busy coughing and choking on my own spit. Had everybody gone crazy?

  “I can’t.” Shawn tapped me on the collarbone with the gun, a move that almost made me pee my pants. “Look.”

  The old man grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me. At the sight of my birthmark, his eyebrows went up. “Interesting.”

  “I still have to kill her, don’t I?”

  I tried to protest, but my voicebox had frozen shut.

  “What? You can’t kill an apprentice.”

  “But she’s a girl.”

  Yep. That’s going to be on my headstone.

  “So? You can see the mark clear as I can, don’t you? You know the rules.”

  “She’s not an apprentice though. She doesn’t have a master. Her father disappeared a long time ago.”

  Master? Apprentice?

  My father?

  The old man nodded. “Well, she’s an initiate, and you can’t kill one of those either. Not unless she presents you with a clear and present danger.” He smiled, laugh lines crinkling at the edges of his eyes. “Guess you’ll have to take her as an apprentice.”

  Shawn’s mouth fell open, exposing a set of perfect, white teeth. “Jeff, are you crazy? It’s forbidden to apprentice a woman.”

  The old man—Jeff? Like Malone?—shook his head. “No, it’s forbidden to initiate a woman. She’s already been initiated—you can see the evidence here, clear as day.” He tapped my collarbone. “The rules don’t say anything about apprenticing a woman. And then she’d be afforded the same protections as a full Marker, and you wouldn’t have to kill her.”

  Shawn scowled, a dark shadow passing over his face. “No.” I held my breath at the waggles of the gun in his hand. “I’m not taking her on as an apprentice, and you shouldn’t either. Not after what happened to. . .” He glanced up at my face. “The last one. She’s better dead this way than that.”

  Jeff not-Malone nodded. “Yeah? I can’t control what you do, but as for me. . .” He turned to me, addressing me for the first time. “What say you, kiddo? You want to be my apprentice and risk a gory death? Or does Shawn here shoot you?”

  Any mention of the “last one” and “dead” creates a Houston, we have a problem situation for me. At the same time, my general sentiment of the moment was—just tell them what they want to hear. You can run away at the first opportunity.

  And what did they know about my dad?

  What if they knew where he was? Or they could find him?

  If I regretted this later, this would be the moment where that all started. “Um, I think I’ll go with potential gory death in the future.”

  “Good, then that’s settled. I’m Jeff Buckner.”

  Shawn shot me a scowl. My brief flash of triumph was overturned as the old man pulled a gun out from his coat—oh God, they’re both crazy—and waved me down the ladder. “Looks like you’re coming with me. Now listen and listen good, because I’m about to tell you the most important thing you ever heard.”

  Chapter Six

  “For centuries, millennia even, humanity has been fascinated with a number of secret orders and societies. You hear about them from time to time—Masons, Knights Templar, that kind of crockery—” He shook his head. “Although the Templars, I mean, they started out as part of us. Would you believe that? But then they got all obsessed with religion and protecting us from more human threats, and forgot all about the things that are actually going to kill us.”

  He cleared his throat and pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. The gesture was incredibly familiar, and for the briefest of seconds, I wondered if this was some kind of bizarre joke, if my Jeff had hired this guy to call himself Jeff and play an insane character actor. They were so much alike, from their laugh lines to the way they trailed the cigarette out of the corner of their mouths. I got the feeling that in another life, they’d have been great friends.

  Of course, the idea of a harmless prank fell apart the second I started considering the “why.” And there was no way Jeff Malone was heartless enough to trick me like this—especially not so soon after my breakup with Luke.

  “Anyway,” he said between puffs, “we’re sort of a last defense, as it were, and our numbers aren’t doing so hot. But we’ll never forget history, and as long as certain prophecies stay in the library where they belong, we’ll keep on truckin’.” He gave me a wink. “Now come with me.”

  He stood to my side, his arm behind me, as if to guide me, and pushed me forward toward his truck. I tripped, and his pistol was close enough to the small of my back to jam into my spine. Every few seconds, I glanced around to either side, looking for an out, but there was none. Shawn seemed curiously resigned to whatever was going on here, and he trailed to one side, just far enough away to catch me if I tried to bolt.

  And from the look of that man’s body, he would catch me—he or that gun he was waving around.

  The square face and distinctive mid-roof clued me in right away that Jeff Buckner’s truck was an older Kenworth. Even here, on the brink of my own bloody murder, I shivered with appreciation for the bad boy, an impressive masterpiece of chrome and fiberglass that truly was a beautiful piece of Americana. The body had been buffed to an artful shine, the paint properly maintained. It could have been a show-truck—but I could feel its intrepid nature. It was a working vehicle.

  Jeff opened the passenger door and waved at it with his gun, and I gulped. They always told you not to go with your kidnappers. Then again, both men had had an excellent chance to just shoot me, and not taken it. I had no guarantee of the same treatment if I made a break for it.

  And I had the feeling that this was some kind of turning point. Once I crossed this threshold, there was no going back. That said, my decision had already been made. If I kept second guessing myself, I was going to go crazy.

  My collarbone warmed slightly—a flush of nervousness, maybe?—and my brain settled on Luke. A wave of anger and rejection spit through me with sudden venom. I had gone from feeling used up and powerless, to being literally held at gunpoint. Things were not going to go my way.

  And maybe, niggled a little voice, there’s more to it than that. Maybe you know that you shouldn’t have acted the way—

  I told my inner voice to shut up, gave the empty seat a brief once-over, and clambered in.

  Immediately, I regretted my decision. What in the hell was I doing? I thought about dashing over to the driver’s seat and trying to drive away, but the gun was in the window, pointed at my face, before I could even get out of my chair. How such an old man had raced around the truck so quickly, I didn’t know, but there he was, suspended on the driver side running-board.

  He dropped down, swung the door open, and continued his story as if our transition had been a meaningless segue between scenes.

  “The thing about all of these mystical legends is that they’re all ridiculous. None of them even begin to scratch the surface of the truth. There’s only one secret shadow society out there, one system of knights unknown that protects the world from untold dangers.” His head rose slightly, and I realized that he was standing up higher. An odd, zealous light came over his eyes, and his jaw tightened with impressive resolve.

  “There is only one order, and that is the Markers.”

  I couldn’t stop myself. Was it the nervousness of the situation? Tension boiled through me—and that name was so cliché—and before I knew it, I had dissolved into a fit of giggles. He gave me a sharp glare, and I bit my lip as hard as I dared. I swallowed and tried to steady my breathing. “So . . . the name of your super-secret society is the Markers? Are you sponsored by Crayola or something?”

  He grinned, revealing teeth that were slightly stained with age and tar. “Not very creative, is it? But it didn’t have to be, you see, because we were the first.” He waved his hand through the air, dispelling the implied gravity of his previous sentences. “Now shut up
, kiddo, here comes the important part.” He cracked his neck and took a deep puff on his cigarette. “We think of humanity as the dominant species, and that’s true, to a point. But the fact of the matter is, we have more competition than we’d care to admit. There are creatures, shit out of our wildest nightmares—actually, the exact things that are in our wildest nightmares, because, you know, that’s how they got there in the first place. Someone saw them and passed them down the road.”

  “Like the thing outside of my windshield tonight.”

  He nodded. The fact that he knew what I meant without being told set off alarm bells through my brain.

  “That’s a bubbler. Did you get a good look at it?”

  Even worse. I shuddered. “Not really.”

  Buckner nodded. “Well, if you had, you’d have seen a creature that, in a lot of ways, matched some of the ancient legends about were-people—you know, human animal combinations, but with a twist. You see, bubblers are, but they aren’t, and that discrepancy is what makes them bubble. It’s hard to hold onto a shape in this world.”

  I nodded sagely and looked again for an exit path. This man was insane.

  “Now, bubblers are almost as smart as people, in their own way, and pretty familiar with our culture and even our technology by now. That one managed to kill a man at a deserted gas station and steal his pickup truck. He wasn’t as good of a driver as he thought, though, which is how he knocked the tandems out from under your rig. Shawn had been tracking it for at least a mile.”

  My world spun so hard I almost fell over in my seat. I shook my head, trying to catch my breath. “Whoa. Just, whoa. You’re saying that a bubble-man wrecked my truck?” I held a hand to my forehead, trying to steady it.

  “Well, not exactly. He caused the initial blow, but I think if you had been a better driver, you could have avoided the accident.” He gave me a lopsided grin.

  I felt my hackles rise, but the gun in front of me put out that fire. Probably best to just let that one go for now. “So, what happened to him?”

  Bucker looked almost disappointed at my non-aggression. “Shawn shot him.”

  My mind flipped back to my gunpoint conversation with Shawn. He did say the driver was dead. He just hadn’t informed me of his personal involvement in that turn of events. Buckner waited while my mind worked through its paces. “It’s the job of the Markers to keep our world safe—”

  His speech was interrupted by my phone. It beeped with a shrill ring that I only used for one person—Lynn. “I have to answer this.”

  He snorted. “No.”

  “It’s my DM.” I shrugged as if they explained everything.

  He started to lean toward me. “Kiddo, you’re not going to even think—”

  By the time he pulled the gun up to the level of my head, I already had the phone up to my ear. “Yes, Lynn. What’s up?”

  “Are you sitting down?”

  I shot the old man a glare, daring him to shoot me. I’m not sure where I got those balls. “Yep.”

  I heard the catch in her voice, and my sudden bad-ass attitude sank back into wherever it had come from. “It’s Jeff.”

  Instantly, my stomach crawled with a bad feeling. He hasn’t been answering your calls. “He’s . . . oh God, Charlie. . .” Her voice devolved into a fit of sobs.

  I saw Jeff Buckner’s cold eyes as he climbed off of the running board and the rest of the way into the truck, and I knew I didn’t have a lot of time before he ended this conversation for me. “Out with it, Lynn.”

  “He had a heart attack on the 401.”

  It was my trailer flipping all over again, my world crashing to a halt. I shut my eyes and pressed my lips together. The gun pointed at me, it didn’t matter. Luke didn’t matter.

  I had been a selfish, selfish bitch.

  “And?” I knew what would come next, but if only I could be wrong—

  “He died in the hospital a few hours ago.”

  And there it was. There was no taking it back, no undoing it, no reknitting together the unraveled mess that was hanging all around me like a shredded tapestry. If I thought before that I would wake up from this and think it was a bad dream, Jeff’s death punched a hard stamp on it that couldn’t be denied.

  “Thanks, Lynn. Stay safe.” I hung up before she could say anything else.

  The old man was inches from my face now, his aura of cigarette smoke and diesel cloaking around me like a poncho. They were scents that I would have given half my life for, if only it was another Jeff, a different Jeff—one with a fedora, one who had trained me and taken care of me when I took ill and had watched over me better than any other friend I ever had, even if it had only been for a short time.

  “You realize that if you ever do something like that again, I won’t be able to keep from shooting you? That saying the wrong thing would have literally just jeopardized the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands of people?”

  “I’m sorry.” I didn’t follow his reasoning, but I didn’t have to. I didn’t care, in fact, I couldn’t even bring my eyes up to meet his. A crazy idea was running through me—that if I did look up, instead of Jeff Buckner, I’d see Jeff Malone, his hand clutched to his chest in the throes of a heart attack.

  I shook the image out of my head before I hyperventilated. “What happens next?”

  “What?”

  I looked up at him. My face felt so tight that it might peel off, but there was a calm inside of my chest I had never experienced before, a perfect, in-the-moment meditation that I knew I probably would never feel again. I squinted at him through the mask of his surprise.

  “I said, what happens next?” I wasn’t explaining myself—any part of it. I was ready to cut to the chase here. “I get it. Monsters, crazy evil creatures, werewolves. It’s dangerous, we fight them, save the world. I already said I was in. What happens next?”

  He cleared his throat before taking a few more puffs of his cigarette, his gaze flickering over my face as if it held lines of text. Finally, he nodded again, rubbed his temple, and sighed in a voice that held notes of resignation and exhaustion. “Well, all right then. Next, we kill you, legally speaking. We make everyone think you died in this accident. You get new documents, although you’ll probably never use them. You say goodbye to your old life, and you become my apprentice.”

  “All right.”

  He shook himself, as if stunned. “All right? That’s all you got? You realize that this means you can never go home?”

  Home?

  I could have snickered.

  What home?

  Was home the little house on the other side of North America, a tiny shoebox yard and a garden that had gone to seed since my mother passed away? Was it the apartment that Luke and I had shared—and that I could never go back to?

  Was it the Husky fuel stop most frequented by the Canada fleet, where the old Pakistani couple yelled at us not to drop our trailers and leave them unattended?

  I thought about my father, how his name wasn’t even on my birth certificate. You didn’t want this for me. That’s why you left. And yet, here I was—and I couldn’t deny it any more. I was looking for him—or if not him, then some answers. He had abandoned me—and now, so had Jeff—and Jeff . . .

  What had it been like, in his final moments, alone and hundreds of miles from home?

  Was he afraid?

  Did I have a right to be?

  What was the significance of a new Jeff, an old trucker that smoked out of the corner of his mouth, passing into my life at the same time that the first Jeff left?

  I took a deep breath. “I’m in, but I want two things. First thing—can I call you Buckner? Jeff feels weird.”

  He nodded in slow-motion. “Sure, I guess. What’s the second?”

  “I’m bringing my dog.”

  He drove, but we didn’t go far—just up to the road, and he motioned for me to get out. Ten minutes later, three other trucks pulled up. Like Buckner’s, all of them were at least twenty years old. It was hard t
o tell from the glare and shadows of headlights, but I thought one was a dark-green Kenworth, and one might have been a navy Peterbilt. The other had stuck to the shadows so completely that I couldn’t make out any details—wait . . . an old Cascadia?

  Even with their age, all three of them looked like they had just driven off of the lot.

  The drivers slunk out. Each was dressed in the same black outfit. They circled the wreck, surveying the damage. One of them, the tallest of the three, made notes on a black clipboard.

  I pointed at the little group, a light bulb going off in my head. “How is it that the cops aren’t here yet?”

  Buckner smiled. “We put up a road-block a little while back. We’ll move it in a second.”

  “A roadblock?”

  A light glittered in his eyes. He waved at the tall note-taker, who waved back. “Yeah. Apparently some tanker overturned on the highway about a mile in front of here. Giant chemical spill. Nobody hurt or injured, but dang if they aren’t going to have to do some cleanup before they can open up that stretch of the highway again.”

  I swallowed. He didn’t actually say they were involved, but it sure sounded like . . . These people overturned a tanker? On purpose? The uncontrolled roll of my trailer popped into my head, and for a moment, all I could hear were the shrieks and groans of twisting metal and glass.

  To do that deliberately? The logistics were mind boggling. It was harder to believe than the bit about the secret order—or the bubblers.

  After another glance at Jeff, I sat back and watched as the new arrivals began their work on my truck. My chest hurt, seeing her like this—while I hadn’t driven her for long, she had been my home for the last few months, and a good one

  My mind went back to the point that just wouldn’t compute. “You . . . overturned . . . a tanker.”

  Jeff chuckled. “Hey, thieves do stuff like this all of the time. Don’t you think it’s about time the good guys had access to this kind of stuff?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I doubted the validity of that statement, though—what kind of thieves could do something like that? And if I had to admit it, I wasn’t really sure who the good guys were right now. Judging by the nervous flutter in my stomach, the fact that two men had just held me up at gunpoint was starting to sink in—not to mention the fact I might have just signed my life away. I mean, what were the chances of getting away from some guys who can do this?