on all the time.
“It’s not you that’s the issue, it’s the situation I don’t trust. I don’t trust them,” Knox defends, his arm gesturing out the window in the direction of wherever Enoch and his coven are right now.
I throw my head back and release a frustrated yell. “Okay! I fucking get it. You’ve said it a million times! You don’t trust them, which is why you’re pissed at me and acting like an asshole! Can we move the fuck on already?” I ask as I scan the kitchen for food. I need something other than frustration and insecurity in my stomach if we’re going to try and tackle this shit again. Valen tosses me an apple, and I snatch it from the air and practically bite it in half as I continue to scan for more.
“Bruiser, we’re not pissed at you. We’re pissed about whatever the fuck they did to get those runes,” Bastien tells me.
“But what if they didn’t do anything? What if this is another case of my magic highjacking others just because it can?” I ask him. “I mean fuck, Bas, it’s not like we have any clue why half the shit that happens around me does, but I thought you all were cool with that.” I swallow down the rest of the apple as we all stare at each other in awkward silence. “You don’t trust them, fine, but if you trust me, then it’s time to Sentinel up and get to fucking work.”
Bastien shakes his head dismissively, and frustration burns through me.
“Okay, so you think somehow they stole my magic and marked themselves?”
“Yes,” Bastien agrees.
His words send a shiver of unease through me. I know he said something similar on the plane when everyone was fighting, but then that whole getting stabbed thing happened, and I never circled back to what he was accusing. Fuck, could they have forced this somehow? I picture Enoch, Kallan, Becket, and Nash, and try to process if I think they’d be capable of this kind of fucked up violation. But what if it wasn’t even them that did it?
I struggle to accept that Enoch and his coven could do something so wrong, but I sure as fuck can’t say the same about Elder Cleary or Elder Albrecht. They’d definitely have something to gain if their sons had my power. Then again, if Elder Albrecht knew how to force a marking, wouldn’t he have done it when he had me and Sabin at his mercy? It’s all just more questions I don’t have the answers to, and I shove away the worry and the frustration.
“Okay, fine,” I announce. “We put this shit aside for now and start to train. If we find out at some point that they somehow stole their markings, then you can kill them.”
Ryker snorts out a chuckle.
“We can kill them? Just like that?” Bastien mocks.
“Yeah, why not?” I shrug. “I don’t distrust them. I think I’ve seen sides to them that you haven’t, but if they forced me to mark them, then it’s a horrible violation. If somehow they’ve figured out how to do that, then it’s on us to make sure it never happens again. Which means we should kill them.”
“You’re hot when you’re ruthless,” Knox teases, a cheeky smile on his face, and its appearance almost makes me want to cry. Knox has always been supportive no matter what, so to have him distance himself from me the way he and Bastien have, fucking hurts.
“She’s hot all the time,” Torrez corrects, and the others chuckle and bob their heads in agreement.
The tension in the room lessens infinitesimally, and I let out a relieved breath. “Okay now that the Enoch issue is on hold until further evidence one way or another surfaces, let’s move on to the Torrez issue,” I announce, and Torrez’s eyebrows drop in confusion, and his body goes stiff.
“You going to off me too, Witch?” he asks, and even though he’s wearing a smile and has a glint in his eye, I sense the layer of seriousness beneath it all.
“Of course not, Wolf, I’m talking about whatever the glitch is that put all of our runes on you and none of your runes on us.”
With that, he starts looking over the others’ hands and then studies his own again. He looks up at me, and before he can put a voice to the question in his gaze, I cut him off.
“I have no idea what this means or why it happened,