Unmarked Read Online Free Page B

involvement from the beginning. It felt like I was rubbing salt on my wrist and staring at my unmarked skin all over again.
    “At least we finally know why I didn’t get a mark.”
    Because I don’t belong.
    Even though I’d spent the last nineteen days repeating those words in my head, I wasn’t ready to say them out loud.
    “Listen to me.” Jared grabbed my shoulders. “You didn’t get your mark because the fifth member is still alive. It’s someone else in your family.”
    “But there’s no one—” The words slipped away as the realization untangled itself in my mind. If my mom wasn’t a member of the Legion… that only left one possibility.
    It can’t be him. Anyone but him.
    My knees buckled. “She can’t be dead because of him.”
    “Who?” Jared sounded confused.
    “My dad. He left when I was young and we never heard from him again.” The words came flooding out. “It killed my mom and broke her heart.”
    And mine.
    “Shh. Listen to me.” Jared cradled my face in hishands. “It’s not your father. My uncle said the missing member was a woman.”
    “There’s no one else, Jared. My aunt Diane isn’t capable of keeping a secret like this. There’s no way she’s part of a secret society. And my dad’s parents died before I was born.” I fought to hold myself together. But I felt the seams I’d stitched together so carefully over the past nineteen days tearing. “He’s the only family I have left.”
    “Your father has a sister.”
    It was another mistake. “If he had a sister, don’t you think I’d remember her?”
    “Not if you’ve never met her. You said he left when you were young, right? What if she’s been hiding all this time?”
    “Hiding from what?” I practically shouted.
    Jared glanced at the back of the building as if he was worried someone might hear me.
    “No one knows why the fifth member fell off the grid. But my dad used to say a person who disappears without leaving a trail is someone who doesn’t want to be found. Take a look at this.” Jared took something out of his pocket and handed it to me, along with his cell phone. “Use the light.”
    I held the phone over the page. It was a photocopy of a birth certificate.
    “Alexander Madigan Waters.” Jared recited the information from memory. “Born in the District of Columbia, to Lorelai Madigan Waters and Caleb Quinn Waters.”
    “A copy of my father’s birth certificate? That doesn’t prove anything.”
    “It does if you compare it to this one.” Jared handed me an almost identical sheet of paper. The District of Columbia seal was stamped at the top of this one, too. “Lukas searched DC public records to find out if your mom had a female blood relative she could’ve chosen as her successor. Turns out, your dad is the one with the secret family member.”
    I scanned the document and found the baby’s name: Faith Madigan Waters. Born in the District of Columbia, to Lorelai Madigan Waters and Caleb Quinn Waters, two years after my father’s birth.
    I held the proof in my hand, trying to reason it away. How could my father have a sister I’d never met? Did he abandon her, too?
    “If Faith Waters is the fifth member of the Legion, she might know how to stop Andras,” Jared said.
    No one wanted that to be true more than me. The last few minutes I’d spent in Darien Shears’ cell replayed themselves in my head every day. His story about a Legion member giving him the final piece of the Shift to protect. The look on his face as he lay in the Devil’s Trap, begging me not to assemble the Shift. I could still hear his voice.
    The Shift doesn’t destroy Andras. It frees him.
    It was the decision that would change everything—destroya demon, earn my mark, and save the world… or unleash a demon and his wrath.
    If only I’d made the right choice.
    “There’s something else,” Jared said. “While Lukas was hacking into school servers looking for you, Priest and Alara spent days reading the