The Illusion (Book Two in The Illusion of Certainty Series)

Not Listening...

I changed and went to bed. I was hoping to sleep but it never happened. I laid there for hours trying to figure everything out. I’d slept with Aidan. I love Aidan. But I couldn’t be with Aidan. For all the reasons I’d outlined when I broke up with him. And in the long run he would end up hating me, if he didn’t already hate me. I was a marked Slayer, in more ways then one.

I couldn’t use any of those reasons to explain why I couldn’t be with Michael. He’d never worry about me and more often then not he’d follow me into whatever dangerous situation I found myself in.

The real problem was I loved them both.

How the hell had that happened?

 I rolled over and looked out the window. I pulled the curtains aside before I got into bed so I could see the night sky. But at that moment I could spot soft light touching the horizon. I wasn’t going to get any sleep so I decided to shower. That usually calmed my thoughts, calmed the part of me that was always restless. My mother told me once that Slayers never stayed still very well. That part had to be learned, adapted to the new situation of the Slayers existence. While in school, they trained us to fight but they also made us learn how to change the nature we were born with. They tried to make us calmer and some of the time it worked. But for the rest of us, the ones that still had the itch to get up and kill something, there was Guild life.

That was the part where Slayers died young and it was the track I was on, even though I wasn’t sure if I wanted it. Sometimes I thought my mother wished that part of me could be tamed but I believed that was something you couldn’t get rid of.

That’s what happened with her, she was tamed. It didn’t happen to a lot of us and since my mother was considered the last of her line…some thought she was dishonoring her heritage by choosing a different life. I figured that’s why she left, if they couldn’t accept her then why stay in a world where they don’t want you.

She played an artist on the outside world, a good one. She told me once that one of her painting sold to a private collector for millions of dollars. She didn’t need it, she said, so she gave it to a local charity. Some of her paintings were still hanging in our apartment. I envied the few years of freedom my mother got. She chose to come back.

Me?

I would never get that chance. I would be locked in the prison that was my destiny till the day I died, which, depending on who you talked to, could be sooner rather than later. All I knew about the future was I would be alone and I knew that mostly because I could feel it. Even if I didn’t want it, I was stuck with the hand someone had chosen to give me.

I got out of the shower and dried my hair and straightened it. I put on my gear and tied my hair into a ponytail. I know fixing my hair and then proceeding to put it into a ponytail was defeating the purpose, but I didn’t fight with wet hair. My father had always told me I would catch pneumonia. My mother told me I would just get split ends.

I walked back into the bedroom and heard a knock at the door. I was doing a buckle when I told the person to come in. Luke stood in the doorway, fighting gear on, looking at me with anticipation.

“What’s up?”

“I just got off the phone with your parents.”

“How are they?”

“Worried. They don’t like the fact that you’re here. They asked how everything was progressing.”

“Slowly.”

“Your dad also wanted to know if you’d put on his…present.”

I slapped my forehead. “Shit. No.”