Daemon’s Mark by Caitlin Kittredge (web ebook reader .TXT) 📕

only lasted for a second before I brought myself back to the real world, where there are some secrets you just don’t share, no matter how understanding your boyfriend appears.

“I see things,” I said. “Well, not forever, but lately. Istarted seeing Lily Dubois. Not dreams, I swear. Really seeing. ”

Will cocked his head. “That’s not something you had to be afraid to tell me, Luna.”

“I don’t know why, or what I did, or why this victim, out of the hundreds, decided to start visiting me,” I said.

“But I don’t think it’s going away, so I just wanted to warn you.”

“Warned,” Will said with a smile. “Not running scared. But you should talk to your cousin, figure out why you suddenly have this ability…”

I held up a hand. “Later. There’s plenty of time for that later, when I’m not eating my first bacon-cheesy slice of heaven in weeks.” Sunny had cried on the phone when I called to tell her I was home, but there was time. Time to see her, time to be nicer about her and Mac. Time to be a human being and not a human with a monster digging claws into her back.

Be that person, starting now. For such a bratty kid, she made some damned good sense. I dug into my burger, and Will shifted in his seat, bringing something out of his jacket pocket. “I had hoped for a slightly more romantic way to do this, but…”

He popped open the velvet box and I gasped involuntarily at the square-cut diamond and white-gold setting inside. “Oh gods, Will. That’s beautiful. And huge. Are you on the take?”

His mouth crooked. “No. It’s something I’ve had for a while. I got it in Paris in the 1920s. Just never found the right girl to give it to.” He extended the box toward me. “But I have now.”

Before I could say anything, Will was down on one knee in the middle of the Devere Diner, in front of the gods and everybody. “Luna Joanne Wilder, I love you and I need you in my life. I don’t even care that I had to ask this question twice: Marry me?”

A million things went through my head at that moment, a million in a second and a half. Will would be with me when I phased. He’d see me for what I was.

He’d know what I’d done.

But in that moment, I felt worry wash away like a tide. My life might constantly be in ruins, but the part with Will Fagin was right. Had always been right. Could always be right. Was that enough to give my life over to completely?

“Yes,” I said, softly. “Yes, Will.”

He jumped up and hugged me, and the other diners broke into applause, and the whole thing was a scene I never thought I’d get to play in a thousand years. Not me. Not Luna Wilder, who attracted the wrong kind of men and inevitably screwed everything up, anyway.

“Thank you,” Will said quietly. He gave me a wide grin. “I was going to feel like a real ass if you said no. Male ego and all, you know.”

“I wouldn’t have,” I said, looking down at my uneaten cheeseburger. I still didn’t have my appetite back, but for entirely different reasons.

What had I just done? Will loved me and he had absolute faith in me and I’d looked him in the eye and lied that I had the same sort of faith, in him and in myself.

This was going to blow up in my face, just like every other time I’d tried to be normal, to keep the were inside …

I took a breath. It wouldn’t, this time, because I wouldn’t let it. Above all else, I was a survivor, and survivors didn’t let the tide drag them down. They kept their heads up, and they forged ahead.

“This is going to be great,” Will said. “We’ll get married in the fall; I mean, we will if that’s all right with you. Just, try to keep Bryson out of the wedding party, okay? Somehow, I think that can only end badly.”

He saw the look on my face and trailed off, going serious. “Doll, what’s wrong?”

“Will,” I said, taking his hands in mine. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

Epilogue

The courtroom in Kiev wasn’t ventilated, windows shut up tight, and the air was oppressively thick in the midsummer sun that was beating down on the square outside.

I sat in the witness box, feeling the sweat slide down every piece of skin that didn’t already have my blouse stuck to it. Red-faced and soaked. What a great impression on the court.

The translator, a small trim woman with a librarian’s bun, black hair and black eyes, looked to the prosecutor and then to me. “Please describe your association with Mr. Belikov.”

Grigorii and Ekaterina were at the defendant’s table. Ekaterina looked sour as ever, Grigorii green around the gills and skinny, radiating sickness. He had an antibiotic IV hooked up even in the courtroom. Yesterday, his defender had gone into great detail about the infections, the surgeries, the pain Grigorii had gone through as a result of my moment with the scissors, as if that somehow excused everything Lola and the parade of other victims had testified to suffering at his hands.

No one in the courtroom besides Ekaterina seemed particularly moved by his plight. I was just marveling that the slimy bastard had even survived.

“I met Mr. Belikov when I was transported to his compound in Kiev,” I said, the translator speaking along with me. “He told me that I was a whore now, and that I would either have sex with the men who chose me or that I’d be beaten and sent to their blood-sport arena to be used as bait.”

I paused for the translator to finish and continued, “When I resisted, I was indeed thrown into the arena, where I managed to fight my opponent to a standstill. Then Mr. Belikov sold me to a man who had