Inception (The Marked Book 1) (4 page)

“Sure, why not,” I finally said. I had the sneaking suspicion she wasn’t going to let up until I agreed anyway.

She squealed and interlocked her arm through mine. “We’re going to have so much fun!” she announced, hopping around like an excited bunny. “I can’t wait to show you off.”

My own smile, however, was short-lived. “So when you say everyone goes there, does that mean like...
everyone
?”

She hesitated before answering. “Okay, alright, so
yes
, Nikki and Trace will be there. But maybe that’s a good thing.”

I raised a brow at her. “How do you figure?”

“Think about it. Maybe this is your chance to show her that you’re not interested in Trace. We can totally scout out some new hotties and flirt with them until she doesn’t even remember you exist. It’s the perfect opportunity for you to get off her radar.”

I wasn’t sure if it was the lack of sleep or hysteria from my first day of school, but Taylor’s plan was actually making sense. Maybe this was my chance to show her I wasn’t a threat to her and that I had no interest in her boyfriend—well, none that I intended on following through with.

Maybe this was exactly what I needed to get her off my back and salvage whatever chance I had left for a nice, peaceful, below-the-radar existence at Weston Academy.

Maybe
.

4. DANGEROUS CONNECTIONS

There was a lineup halfway around the building by the time I got to the bar. No velvet ropes or carpet runners, just a messy line of bodies and a single bouncer at the front door, presiding over who gets in and who doesn’t. The building itself looked like it might have been a warehouse at one time but had that chic refurbished feel to it along with a lit-up retro sign plastered across the front that boldly exclaimed this was
ALL SAINTS
, lest anyone forgot it.

I sent Taylor a text message as soon as I got there. She was outside within two minutes, waving me to the front of the line.

“She’s with me,” she said, smiling at the tall, bald-headed bouncer who was manning the front door. 

He was dressed in fitted black clothes and stood dauntingly with his mammoth arms crossed over his chest. “I.D.”

I wasn’t sure which cards he wanted so I pulled them all out and presented them to him like some sort of weird offering.

He made a face at me and took one from the bunch. “Hand.”

“Hand?”

“Give me your hand so I can stamp it,” he repeated, obviously annoyed with my rookie mistakes.

“Right. Sorry.”

His hand descended over mine. When he pulled it back, the word
underage
was stamped across it in thick black ink, branding me with my own little mark of ageist shame.

Inside, the bar looked just the way you’d imagine a warehouse-turned-bar-and-grill might look. A large, open space painted in sinister colors with dark furniture, stained-glass windows, and floor-to-ceiling brick walls that lent themselves to the whole industrial motif. There was plenty of tables and seating all around the place, pool tables in the back corner, and a space in the middle where people were dancing.

As vast as it was, the place was packed, humming with the reverberations of live music, prattle, and the distinct sound of clinking glasses.

Taylor grabbed my hand as soon as the crowd thickened around us and began towing me through the swaying bodies. We found a spot next to a banquet table filled with purses and personal effects, and of course, that one lone girl—the designated purse sitter. Satisfied with our location, we hung back as people trafficked around us, back and forth to the main bar stationed just a few feet away from us.

Taylor searched the dance floor for the friends she ditched when she came outside to meet me, though she didn’t seem particularly concerned with finding them and was mostly just dancing to the music. I stood idly by her, leaning against a brick pillar watching all the faces in the crowd.

It was a sea of uninspiring mugs. Some I recognized from school, but the majority were just nameless strangers I never met before with too-happy faces, glazed eyes, and gyrating body parts that only every so often matched the beat of the music. The whole thing was hard to watch, in an annoying sort of way, because they were all having a great time. And I wasn’t. I was just some outsider looking in on them.

“There they are,” said Taylor, ticking her head into some non-specific part of the crowd. “I’ll be right back, I’m just going to let them know where we are.”

I nodded, and went back to contemplating my overall discomfort level when I thought I heard my name being called. It was too loud to really hear anything, and yet, it was as though the entire room had quieted down just long enough for me to hear it. A few moments later, I heard it again: 

Jemma.

I looked up into the crowd searching for the source; a waving hand, a raised eyebrow, something—anything that would indicate somebody was trying to get my attention, but I saw nothing like that.

And then everything came to a dead-stop.

Without any warning, the entire room appeared to freeze right before my eyes. The music cut, the light-changes stilled, and every single person in the room stood motionless, completely immobilized as though I were looking at a life-size picture of them and not actually standing in the room myself.

The only sound I could hear was my own ragged breath as my eyes circled the room, frantically trying to blink everybody back to life. It was as though
time
were actually standing still for them—for everyone. Except me.

“What the—”

My voice was swallowed up by the sudden reanimation of the room. Everything around me resumed without missing a beat.

So, apparently, I was losing it, and for real this time because I was certain that what I had just witnessed wasn’t actually possible, and therefore could not have happened, which would mean I just hallucinated the whole thing. Perhaps my little stint in the hospital left me with some long-term side effects...like actual insanity.

Or maybe I was just suffering from some kind of sleep deprivation by-product from the night terrors, mixed in with first-day-of-school hysteria. It definitely sounded like a recipe for disaster. I decided I was holding fast to the latter and thinking maybe it was time for me to get home and get some rest.

“Looks like you picked your first apple,” said Taylor, appearing beside me again. “And what a yummy pick he is.”

I looked back at her, blank-faced.

“Directly across from us.” She spoke into my ear without gesturing, her voice soft as honey.

I redirected my eyes and saw him right away, leaning back against the wall just across the way from us. He was impossible to miss in his head-to-toe black clothing and contrasting short blond hair. There was something about the way he was watching me—unapologetically, without reserve—that threatened my inhibitions and jumbled my ailing thoughts.

“Who is that?” I asked her, never taking my eyes off of him.

“That’s Dominic Huntington,” she said, leaning into me.

“He’s so—”

“Smoking hot?” she cut in, beaming. “I know.”

“Does he go to Weston?”

“I wish,” she laughed. “He just moved back a couple weeks ago. Heard he got kicked out of college,” she said and then tweaked her eyebrows mischievously.

Her implications were understood—bad boy.

He looked about nineteen, maybe twenty. I was about to ask her why he got expelled when the girls suddenly appeared beside us, jumping up and down around Taylor as some bubblegum pop song came on that apparently meant something to the lot of them. It only took a few seconds before they were all latched onto her and collectively floating back to the dance floor together.

My eyes went back to Dominic who ticked his head sideways, signaling for me to go over to him. My heart raced at the idea of meeting him, of losing myself in the distraction. Maybe that was exactly what I needed to get my mind off my troubles.

“You don’t want to do that,” said Trace, crossing his arms over his chest as he rested his back against the column beside me. I hadn’t even seen him walk up.

I turned to him slowly, remarking his arm lightly touching my own. “Why not?” I asked, dragging my fixated eyes away from the pulsating link.

“He’s trouble.”

“He’s
trouble
? What does that even mean?” I scoffed, my eyes darting back to Dominic who was gliding through the crowd.

“It means, he’s trouble,” he repeated impatiently as he locked eyes on mine, making no attempts to explain his warning. “If you were smart, you’d stay away from him.”

“
Excuse
me?”

He didn’t answer.

I had no clue what this was about. Was he alluding to the supposed school troubles? Or maybe the age difference? Or was it something entirely different and potentially serious?

Whatever it was, he wasn’t saying, and I was fast not giving a crap because the truth was, I didn’t
want
to stay away from Dominic. Not in the slightest.

My eyes raced back into the crowd in search of him, but he had already disappeared from the herd, leaving me with this unsettling feeling that I had just missed out on something big, something exciting, though I wasn’t even sure what that was.

“You shouldn’t even be here,” Trace went on, barely audible.

My eyes slipped back to him easily.

“And why is that?” I asked, narrowing my eyes as he stared back at me intensely. It was as though he were trying to read me—to speak to me with his eyes. I didn’t understand them but I desperately wanted to know their language.

Before I had a chance to get an answer, I felt someone pluck me off the pillar and shove me backwards, landing me hard on my backside a couple of feet away.

“What do you think you’re doing?” screeched Nikki, advancing on me as though she were going to kick me while I was already down. “Stay the hell away from my boyfriend!”

“I didn’t do anything!” I defended, scooting backwards on the floor, scrambling to widen the gap between us.

“Did you really think you could just show up here out of nowhere and move in on him?”

“What?” I shook my head, completely stunned. This chick was certifiable. “That’s not what I’m doing, I—”

“Listen to me carefully because I’m only going to tell you this once, Jem-
ma
.” She reached over and grabbed someone’s drink off a nearby table. “Trace is
mine
, you got that? Stay the hell away from him or I swear to the heavens, I will make you regret the day you were born!” She turned the glass over and dumped its contents in my lap.

“Shit, Nikki, what the hell are you doing?” yelled Trace as he pulled her back by her waist, drawing her away from me.

Her boreal, aquamarine eyes diced into me before she turned her insanity on him, the vein in her forehead bulging as she assaulted him with a barrage of words I couldn’t make out.

Holy freaking shit.

The stench of alcohol stung my nostrils as I sat there with my mouth agape, soaked and shell-shocked. Taylor ran to my side and helped me up to my feet while the other girls lingered around in the vicinity looking wholly uncomfortable.  

“Oh my God,” cried Taylor, grabbing napkins off the table and handing them to me. “I can’t believe she just did that.”

Neither could I. I couldn’t even speak.

I took the napkins from her and started patting down my wet pants, trying to dry them as fast as I could as though that might erase what just happened. It
so
wasn’t working.

“Let me get some more napkins,” she said and ran off in the direction of the bar.

Still in a state of shock, I looked up around the room and realized how many people had just witnessed that. Half the room was still staring at me with wide eyes, o-shaped mouths, and slanted smiles. It was amusing to them.
I
was amusing. Suddenly, I knew the pain of a carnival side-show freak.

My eyes welled up with humiliation, though the idea of crying in front of all these people after what just happened was just too much to take. I threw the wet napkins on the table and bolted for the nearest exit.

The wind bit at my cheeks as I pushed through the doors and started down the empty street, leaving All Saints and all of its
unsaintliness
behind me. The crowd from earlier had all but disappeared with most of the people already inside now, probably having just bore witness to one of the worst nights of my life.

A tear trickled down my cheek as I walked, and then a dozen more fell, and before I knew it my cheeks were soaked with the hurt and frustration of a really bad couple of months. The loss of my father, the hospital, the move, the new school—the new
enemies
—it was just too much to take. Something had to give.

I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand and crossed over to the other side of the street, desperate to find a main road or boulevard I could call a taxi from. I needed to put this place in a rear-view mirror. Shivering in my damp clothes, I searched up and down the stretch of barren avenue for some kind of street sign or saving grace amidst all the darkened buildings and empty warehouses. And then I saw
him
again.

A faceless figure in the distance, leaning against a building with his foot kicked up behind him—nearly unrecognizable if it weren’t for that familiar blond hair and that familiar lean. There was something about him that called to me, something enigmatic, and tempting. 

Before I could work out the equation, my legs were moving themselves toward him, walking with what seemed like a mind of their own. My stride weary but considerable, each small step taking me closer and closer to him. I could feel my heart begin to pound as Trace’s warnings replayed in my head, and yet, I knew none of that mattered now. I had already made the decision to ignore all of it the moment I saw him standing there, without even making the choice.

What did Trace know anyway? Anyone who could date someone as vile as Nikki Parker—stupid, psycho Nikki Parker—obviously didn’t have the sense of a green apple.

Screw him.
No
. Screw them both.

I walked on undeterred and resolved to meet him when a metallic blue Mustang with two white racer stripes pulled up next to me, decelerating to a steady crawl as it kept pace beside me. The sound of its powerful engine growling obscenely as it sliced through the stillness of the night.