solid stone, and I’m shocked by the venom in Knox’s tone and the finality in his statement. I can’t really blame him for feeling that way. I did just try to rip Enoch apart too. I probably would have if Torrez hadn’t pointed out my shitty attention to detail. “You don’t want me to tell you that they’re not Chosen? Is that what you don’t want me to say?”
Knox opens his mouth to argue but stops as my words register.
“Wait, what?” Bastien and Valen ask at the same time.
“The runes are on the wrong finger. They’re not Chosen runes. They’re not even my runes from what I can tell.”
All of the guys drop their gazes to my hands, and then their eyes flit behind me to take in the marks on Enoch and the others.
“These aren’t mate marks?” Enoch asks, confused, and Knox takes a step forward to go after him again. Sabin stops his advance, but Knox stares daggers at Enoch, and his whole body vibrates with anger.
I turn to face Enoch and step in front of Knox slightly. He’ll have to go through me to get to them, but hopefully it won’t come to that. Enoch’s eye is swelling, and from the look of Kallan’s bruising cheek and the cut on his eyebrow, he clearly took a couple of hits to the face, too. I suddenly feel like shit about the fuck-ton of attack first, ask questions later that’s floating around the room.
“No,” I answer.
I step toward Enoch and his coven, and I don’t miss when Kallan tenses at my approach. I look at him and hope that my lapse in judgement hasn’t fucked up our friendship beyond repair. I’m not sure what the standard time for friendship-recovery is when one person tries to kill the other, but I don’t push him. I stop a few feet away and hold up my hand, my fingers splayed and my palm facing me.
“My Chosen runes all run down the lines of my ring finger. Your runes are on your middle fingers,” I point out.
Kallan and Enoch aren’t the only ones to look at their hands, and I try not to feel even more unsettled when I see that Becket and Nash are marked too. They all stare at their runes, and the room grows quiet for a couple of seconds.
“Wait, but these ones look the same,” Enoch announces, and he twists his hand so that I can see the side of his middle finger and the small symbols etched there.
I step closer to him and grab his hand, moving it so I can see the symbols that run up one side of his finger and down the other side. Sure enough, I have the exact same runes there. Well, that sure as fuck complicates things. I guess there goes my I didn’t do this theory. I look at the others’ hands to double-check. The runes on each side of their middle fingers match the runes I have in the same place, symbol for symbol.
For whatever reason, I’m just missing the symbols that they have running up the center of their fingers. The first rune, the one that starts just below Enoch’s nail, is a black circle. Inside the circle, it looks as if an eight-pointed star has been cut out. Below that mystery rune are four others that I’ve never seen before. My thoughts drift to Torrez and the same issue we seem to be having of missing runes.
Is this the same problem? Did I somehow mark them but do it wrong?
I’m not sure why I keep asking myself any questions; it’s not like my magic has a habit of explaining anything that it does. I reach for Kallan’s hand, and a surge of relief washes through me when he doesn’t flinch away or stop me. I run my eyes over the same marks on his hand. Oddly, he has an extra mark on the side of his palm. It’s a twin to the mark that showed up on me when I magicjacked Elder Kowka the day the elders took me away from Lachlan. I hold up his hand and then look at his coven.
“Anyone else get this rune?” I ask, pointing at it, and they all double-check before answering no.
“We all have more marks on us, but each of them is different,” Enoch informs me, and a new wave of frustrated confusion flashes through me, but I mask it. What the fuck does he mean that they have more