Shattered Promises 02 - Fractured Souls by Jessica Sorensen (motivational books for students TXT) 📕

can say. Not because I’m angry with him, either. I actually feel very sorry for him. Beaten up by his father and taught to be unemotional. No wonder he’s so complicated.

I turn to my mother. “What’s the point of all of this? I don’t understand.”

“The point is that all of you are connected,” she says. “And that connection is why you’ve all had such messed up paths.”

“What’s the connection?” Alex asks, looking at me and not her, as though he’s trying to see into my thoughts.

My mom takes a deep breath and glances up at the starry sky. “The star.”

Chapter 31

“The star,” Alex, Aislin, and I say simultaneously while Laylen opts to stay quiet, his eyes locked on the space of deck in front of his feet, his expression undecipherable.

“How does that connect to all of us?” I question. “It’s only in me, so…” I trail off as a gut-wrenching thought occurs to me. Electricity that flows between two people. Sparks. An irrational, overwhelming, obsession with each other. Always melting into each other’s arms. Every time I’m around Alex it’s there. I can feel it buzzing right now, a gentle current flowing off his fingers and onto mine as he holds my hand.

“Does… Does Alex have a star’s power in him, too?” I ask and I feel his fingers tremble.

Alex’s head whips in my direction. “Are you crazy?”

“Maybe,” I say and then hold my breath as I wait for my mom to answer.

She reluctantly nods. “Not a separate star, but the same one.”

Alex shakes his head in refusal of accepting the ugly truth. He tugs his fingers through his hair, forgetting to let go of my hand and my fingers end up going with his hair too. “No… There’s no way.” He stands to his feet and pulls me with him, then sits back down and I fall back into my chair. I think about taking my hand away from him, but I’m worried he might break apart if I do. He looks so defenseless and lost right now. After a lot of heavy breathing and cursing, he collects himself and says, “How?”

“Because what happened with the star wasn’t an accident,” my mother explains, gesturing at all of us. “None of this was. All of this—all of you—happened for a reason. The star being split up and placed inside you two, Aislin learning black magic, and Laylen turning into a Vampire. None of that was an accident.”

My heart thuds in my chest as I remember what Nicholas said in the forest. I glance over Laylen and his head is hung low, his elbows stationed on his knees. He almost looks like a statue cut from marble, created to portray the definition of anguish.

“So what you’re saying,” Laylen says, looking up, and the lack of emotion on his face is frightening, “is that I was changed into a fucking monster on purpose—that Stephan had me turned?”

Pressing her lips together, my mom nods. “Stephan has been planning for years, ever since he found out the portal could be opened… He’s been looking for a way to free Malefiscus almost forever because of the mark. No one knew about his mark, though, because his parents cut it off and tried to keep it hidden. I didn’t even know he had it until it was too late.” She swallows hard. “Stephan is a descendent of Malefiscus, but I’m not sure how it’s possible.”

“Why have all the Keepers thought the mark died with Malefiscus?” Alex asks.

“Because there are no records saying he had any offspring to pass the mark to,” my mother replies gravely.

“Maybe it just appeared on him,” I say. “Like it did on Malefiscus. I mean, marks have to start from somewhere.”

“No, he has the bloodline,” my mother insists. “I heard him talking about it right before he… he threw me into the lake.”

“Well then, Demetrius is a descendant of him, too,” I tell her. “I saw it in a vision.”

“I know,” she says and I wonder just how much she does know, not to mention how she learned about it. How did she find all this out? “But the question is: how? We need to find out so we know what we’re going up against.” Her blue eyes momentarily flick to Alex. “And we need to find out how the marks surface without Stephan putting it on them.”

Alex slips his hand out of mine and starts anxiously tapping his foot against the floor. “I still don’t get it, though. You say all of us play a part in this, but play a part in what exactly? Opening the portal?”

My mom nods. “And freeing Malefiscus,” she explains. “He’s been trapped in the portal since the sentencing.”

“But I thought he died.” I scoot forward in the chair. “I thought he was hung.”

She shakes her head. “Not a lot of people know this, but during Malefiscus’s reign, it wasn’t just the Death Walkers who were terrorizing people. There were Witches, Vampires, Fey, and even a couple of Foreseers who had joined his reign of terror because Malefiscus has Fey, Witch, Vampire, and Foreseer blood in him,” she says, recapping most of what Nicholas has already told me. “When his brother, Hektor, finally captured Malefiscus, the Keepers had to come up with a way to make his followers surrender with him and be free of their Mark of Evil, so they put Malefiscus in a portal and sealed it with the blood of three individuals; a Keeper who also was a Vampire, a Keeper who was also a Witch, and a Keeper who was also a Faerie. That way the Fey, Witches, and Vampires who followed Malefiscus would be bound to the portal as well, without the Keepers having to track them all down.” She gazes up at the luminous moon. “The final step was to seal the portal with the energy of a fallen star.”

“So there was another fallen star once?” I ask, glancing at Alex. He meets my eyes and the electricity ignites between