The Mark of Fate: Book 3 of The Marked series by Ford, Rinna (romantic love story reading .TXT) 📕

“Hey. Fine. Why?” I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion.

Alec’s smile dropped.

“Well, I… I saw your mates take you upstairs. You looked to be in pain.”

It was strange. How did he see that? He was long gone by the time Matias, Xander, and I left the dining room after breakfast.

“Yeah, it was just a headache. Dev fixed me right up,” I replied, warning bells going off in my head. “He’s a wiz when it comes to healing potions and salves.”

Okay, I knew I was overdoing it, but all of a sudden, Alec made me nervous, and not a good nervous. Why else would I use a word like ‘wiz'? Sensing how uncomfortable the situation was, Devlin gently nudged me away from the stairs and toward the hallway where Amos’ office was.

“Sorry, Alec, but we need to get going,” my uncle said and gave him a tight smile.

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” Alec replied. I got a few steps away when he spoke again. “Emelia, I’ll be out back if you want to train later.”

His smile was dazzling and I could see exactly what my mates had been so angry about. He was charming for sure, but there was something more in his smile. I smelled the air subtly with my vampire sense and I could smell something else coming from his direction. Something… sweet.

He was using magic to try and influence me. That sweet scent was a spell being woven in with his intention. I didn’t know how he was doing it, but I was going to ask Devlin as soon as I got him privately again.

Trying to hide the panic, I smiled at Alec.

“I’ll let you know,” I told him and waved goodbye as my uncle and I rounded the corner and hurried down the hall.

“That was weird,” Devlin smiled at the uncomfortableness of it.

“You have no idea. I picked up on something back there and I want to talk to you about it later, if that’s okay.”

I pinned him with a serious look that made the humor vanish from his face.

“Of course,” he replied and held up his hand to knock on my grandfather’s office door.

Amos opened the door and ushered us inside where he, Ingrid, my two mates, and a few of the rebel leaders were gathered. They were in the middle of discussing something, but stopped when Dev and I entered the room.

“Sorry we’re late,” Devlin told them and found an empty place at the table.

My mates had saved me a seat between them, so as easily as possible, I slid down and smiled my apologies to my grandfather. Ingrid sealed the room with magic and then she continued with what she had been telling the others.

She tapped the large disc-like device in the middle of the table and a video of what looked like the rebellion’s most recent raid on a detention facility began playing. It displayed as if a hologram in the middle of the table, making me once again marvel in the magic that casters could do. This was straight out of sci-fi movies, and casters had somehow made it real.

The rebellion had taken out three more detention facilities in the United States, counting the one we were watching since that very first one, all thanks for Chei Yun Liu and the information he gave us. I often wondered how he was getting the information without making others suspicious of him, but it wasn’t my problem. At least, not yet.

My biggest concern was that there were many more detention centers all over the country that we hadn't gotten to yet. Our missions took days to plan before being able to carry them out and in the time it took to get it all together for a raid, we’d learn about even more from Chei Yun. We weren’t even making a dent in the sheer amount of places we needed to hit.

“One of our casters allowed me to see his memories of the raid, which I am showing you today,” Ingrid said as we watched it all unfold in front of us. She used magic to display his memories for us to see. “Forty-six supes were rescued and moved to rebel cells in Texas, Arizona, and Georgia to heal. This was by far the largest institution we have raided and I’m saddened to say that even more supes were too far gone to be saved. The Council is getting closer and closer to achieving their goal of creating super soldiers.”

Ingrid paused as we watched the raid play out until we got to a point in the memory where the caster who’s eyes we were seeing out of, came upon a supernatural in a cell. The supe was a shifter, and I could tell this because he was half shifted into a tiger and he was pacing back and forth, ready to spring. His skin had taken on orange, black, and white stripes and there were large tufts of hair around his face and neck. But his eyes… they were feral.

When the tiger shifter saw the caster, he stopped pacing and ran directly at the bars of his cell. He hit them with such force, the walls surrounding them began to shake and bits of plaster fell down from the ceiling. The shifter backed up as he prepared to do it again when the caster shot him with a type of tranquilizer dart. The shifter loudly growled and pulled the dart out of his right leg but I could see that it was beginning to do what it was meant to do. He wavered on his feet, but then reared back to charge at the bars again. The caster shot him with two more darts quickly before the tiger was able make a run at them again, making him stumble and fall, where he passed out.

“We took that shifter into custody,” Ingrid told us and tapped the memory-viewing device, turning it off. “We were unable to reverse the effects of