Read Online Dominion of the Star (Descendants of the Fallen Book 1) by Angelica Clyman - Free Book Online Page B

intersected with a
perpendicular line. “I took this willingly. I did what I had to. Kit always
found a way around it. But he’s not going to stop now… Fuck!” he cried out in
frustration.
    “Because she’s going to be an
Ophan…?”
    Jeremy let his head hang. “I
said it’s just an excuse. But I let it happen. If I didn’t kill my Ophan, she’d
still be here with me. I should have known he’d do this. She’s good enough to
have been an officer a long time ago, but he didn’t trust her without the
cross.” He looked up at Kayla. “He hasn’t tried to mark her for years. But
you’ve renewed him. Finding you…has driven him further.” His irises were hard
and translucent.
    Kayla tried to ignore his last
two sentences. “You’re afraid…because of what it did to you?”
    He laughed harshly. “This thing
I carry — I’ve been lucky. Each one of us that took this had to make a choice.
Lie down and die out in this world, or be a part of something that will win.
The answer is simple. And he even sweetened the deal. Let this ink and blood
pierce you, and who knows what new power you’ll obtain. It wasn’t a lie. But
never mind about your soul, if you have one. You’ll never be free of him…” He
stared into the sand, speaking to himself now. “Maybe I can dodge that bullet.
Even now, he can’t command me through this mark…”
    She tried to piece his words
together. “He hasn’t perfected his communication system with you…”
    Jeremy looked up at her
sharply. “He told you that?”
    Kayla didn’t answer him, her
mind racing. “He uses these marks…to send orders? He can talk to you through
them?”
    “That’s one way they’re used.
The thing is, that part doesn’t seem to work with me. It almost stopped me from
becoming an Arch. But I guess it can be overlooked when you’re some Saros kid…”
He must have seen the question flicker across her face because he paused,
sighing. “It’s a wonder you’ve survived so long, you know that? I bet you still
don’t even know about the Eclipse.”
    She shook her head and he moved
closer, his eyes still trained on the heavens. “Stars are all fire and
pressure, exploding ceaselessly in the abyss,” he whispered. “The world teaches
us that violence is natural, but the sky pretends it’s beautiful too. Stars die
like we do — victims of their own mechanisms of survival. We don’t notice when
it happens; we only see what we can’t avoid.”
    “The sun?”
    “Yeah, and it went dark once,
almost eighteen years ago. It was a simple matter of the moon moving into the
sun’s path — it’s happened before and it’ll happen again — but this Eclipse was
different. The world noticed. Less than eight minutes of darkness, and it
wasn’t the sun that exploded, but everything below. They say mountains sank
into the earth and oceans rose over cities…the ground shuddered and split open,
and the deserts expanded. The years that followed were worse. If there was ever
order before, it was finally gone. People didn’t rebuild, they destroyed. Some
acted out of fear, others embraced their primal impulses, while some just
seized opportunity. Kids like me didn’t know what the world really was like
before, but we were blamed anyways, just for being born at the wrong time.
Superstitious bullshit. It was the first total eclipse of this illfated Saros
series, so we were branded with that title.” He paused, shaking his head. “What
am I saying, ‘we?’ ” he muttered, “it was just me where I came from, and
the other Saros kids around the world are probably all dead now…”
    Kayla was afraid of the
desolation in his eyes. “You said it was going to happen again?” she managed.
    “In less than two months, yeah.
The next Eclipse in the series will be identical, but fully visible in a
different location. West. Little more than a week after my birthday.” His eyes
cleared and he looked back at her. “Hey, don’t be scared,” he scoffed.