Page 36 of Inception

“He left Hollow Hills the week after Jacqueline left us,” he said, his voice cracking on my mother’s name. “He swore to keep all of this from you and Tessa, to protect you from the truth. You were only a child then, not even three. I thought it was his anguish speaking.” He shook his head, visibly affected. “I thought he would come to his senses once he had time to mourn his loss. But he never came back. Not until Tessa.”

“When she moved here,” I remembered aloud.

The move happened right after Tessa’s school placed her on academic probation. My father had been worried sick about her. About her future and the road she was headed down. In the end, they decided it was best if she went to live with my uncle. New town, new school, new rules. It was what she needed, he’d said.

Dammit, was any of that true?

“Tessa waschanging,” explained my uncle. “She was having the dreams, the visions,sensingthe Revenants. It was much too dangerous to keep her in the dark. He had no choice but to send her back here where we could protect her—train her. And that is what we did. However, he refused to give you up, too. He said he still had a chance tosaveyou, as he put it.” He shook his head, clearly upset with his brother’s decision. “It was then that he sought out the help of a Caster.”F

The conversation I overheard that morning came back to me. “To put a spell on me?” I asked, my throat burning from lack of moisture, my head spinning from lack of blood flow.

He nodded. “A Cloaking spell that would suppress your powers, keep them locked away. He’d hoped it would protect you.”

I could certainly believe that part about my father. If any of this was true, I knew my father would do everything in his power to protect us, to give us the best life he could. And up until his death, he had done just that.

Which begged the question: “Why are you trying to break the spell if it’s protecting me?”

“It’s much too dangerous,” he said as he motioned for me to sit down again.

I didn’t hesitate as I was growing increasingly unsteady.

“Now that you’ve reached the age of maturity, I’m not sure the spell is strong enough anymore or the safe choice for you,” he said, removing his glasses. “By suppressing your true nature, you’re also suppressing your abilities...abilities that could mean the difference between life and death for you.”

“What abilities?” I asked, my voice rasping.

He hesitated to answer the question. “Well, such as being able tosensea Revenant,” he offered finally. “You must know that once a Revenant marks you, as a mere human, there’s little you can do to deviate the attack. They are predators in every sense of the word. They will hunt you, drain you, and leave you for dead with no recollection of what transpired. There is no mercy there. No humanity whatsoever.”

My mind flashed back to the attack eight months ago—the terrifying, relentless attack that still haunted my dreams at night—and I believed him.

“As a Slayer,” he went on, “you have certain advantages over them, such as your ability to sense them. This allows you to track them and vanquish them before they even have a chance to mark you, virtually turning the hunters into the hunted.”

Sense them? Track them?Vanquishthem?

This man was off his freaking rocker. I had absolutely no desire to do any of that—none. There wasn’t a single part of my being that was even remotely interested in getting involved in what he was going on about.

“No. That’s not happening.” I shook my head fully decided. “I don’t want to sense them, or see them, or kill them, or know anything about them. I just want to make it through high school, graduate, maybe go on a road trip somewhere nice, and just—”

“Jemma,” he interceded. “This is what you were born to do. This is your Calling.”

“My Calling?” I repeated incredulously. “The hell it is.”

A calling implies I have a choice, doesn’t it? That I could answer the call, or not. That I have a choice in whether or not I accept this as my destiny? Well, I don’t. I don’t want anything to do with it. And Idon’taccept the call. Matter of fact, this line is no longer in service.

11. THINGS THAT GO BUMP

I called Tessa sixteen times that night, my hands trembling as I held the receiver and listened to it go straight to voicemail each and every time. I needed her to be here, to be my family, to be the one to tell me everything was going to be okay. But like usual, she wasn’t here.

Nobody was.

I sat by myself on the floor, curled up in the cold shadowy corner of my lavish bedroom, when it finally occurred to me that nobody was coming for me. Nobody was going to make this go away. There would be no soft words of comfort from my mother, no protection from my father, no guidance from my sister.

It was just me, andmewasn’t nearly enough right now.

A hot tear ran down my cheek as I gave up and left her a message. “You lied to me, Tess. You all lied to me.”

I spent the next couple of days fully immersed in all things normal. I sat attentively in class (taking actual notes), going the extra mile at work, and evenreallylistening when Taylor went on about the latest Weston Scandals—something I usually couldn’t be bothered to care about. This week, I was all about it—all about everything—so long as it had nothing to do with Angels and Demons, or the like. Denial was funny that way.

For months, I wanted nothing more than for someone to believe me; to accept that Ihadbeen attacked by something that wasn’t human—to tell me I wasn’t crazy. I longed for the validation, for the answers. Well, I got my answers and I got my validation and they only made me long for the days when I was blissfully unaware of it all, proving the age-old adage that ignorance really was bliss. By the time Wednesday rolled around, I was praying for full-blown amnesia to strike.

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