Read Online Unmarked by Kami García - Free Book Online

onto the porch, her face hidden beneath the folds of a hooded olive parka. She was holding a shotgun, the barrel pointed directly at us. “This is private property. I suggest you leave before he gets agitated. Or I do.”
    The dog barked louder, and Elle scooted behind Lukas.
    “I don’t see you moving.” The woman stepped off the porch and froze when she saw me. She lowered the gun and pulled down her hood, her green eyes familiar and haunting.
    My father’s eyes flashed through my mind—a deep green flecked with gold, which had always reminded me of Christmas trees when I was young. The woman’s eyes were the same unusual shade and almond shape.
    “Bear. Come.” She called the dog without taking her eyes off me. He stopped barking and padded over to her.
    “Do you know who I am?” I asked.
    She gave a small nod. “You look exactly like Alex.”
    My father.
    Any lingering doubts about whether she was related to me disappeared.
    “I don’t know how you found me, but you shouldn’t be here.” The woman, who had to be my aunt, turned back toward the house. “Your mother wouldn’t be happy about it.”
    “My mother’s dead.”
    Faith stopped short, and her hand tightened around the gun hanging at her side. “Does anyone know you’re here?”
    I shook my head. “No.”
    Her eyes darted between us. “Who are they?” she asked me.
    “My friends.”
    “They can wait out here.” She scanned the property before turning back to me. “Get inside if you’re coming in.”
    “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for them,” I said.
    “She’s not going anywhere without us.” Jared pulled our intertwined hands out of his pocket so Faith could see them.
    The Doberman growled. Faith snapped her fingers, silencing the dog, and gestured at the door with the shotgun barrel. “Don’t touch anything.”
    At the top of the steps, a hand-painted symbol stretched across the floorboards—a tribal-looking eye.

    Alara stopped at the edge of the white paint and looked at Faith. “How do you know about the Eye of Ever?”
    “I know about lots of things, and I’d like to forget most of them,” Faith said, holding the door open for us.
    Priest nudged Alara. “What is it?”
    “The Eye of Ever is an abating symbol,” Alara said. “It weakens evil in any form.”
    Faith followed us inside and locked a dozen dead bolts that ran down the inside of the heavy door. She shrugged off her parka, sending a cascade of chestnut waves, exactly like mine, down her back.
    From the entryway, the house looked normal enough—meaning it wasn’t full of salt rings and wind chimes. The foyer faced a steep oak staircase that reminded me of the one in Lilburn Mansion, and I looked away. To the left ofthe stairs, a long hall stretched in front of us, with open archways leading into a series of rooms. Faith dropped her coat on a claw-foot bench and rushed into the room on the right.
    Elle followed, stopping cold in the doorway. “Maybe someone should suggest curtains.”
    My aunt stood next to a huge bay window covered in garbage bags held together with long strips of silver duct tape. A pine table stacked with newspapers was the only piece of furniture in the room. Built-in bookcases lined the walls from floor to ceiling. More books littered the floor; some lay half-opened or piled in crooked towers, while others formed pedestals to support larger volumes.
    I examined the nearest stack. Grimoires with crumbling spines, balanced on top of seventeenth-century atlases and texts with strange titles like
The Codex Demonotica
,
Documents of Illumination
,
Papal Seals and Ciphers
, and
The Amadeus Code
, as well as a copy of
The Complete Works of Hieronymus Bosch
.
    Faith slid one of the shiny bags aside and peeked through the window. “How did you find me?”
    “The map,” Priest said. “Altering the poem was a smart way to hide it.”
    “Alex’s idea. I move every few months, back and forth between several houses. We needed a system so my