Marked by Fate Read online

  Marked by Fate

  Tegan Maher

  ---Proof Copy---

  If you’re reading this, you’ve received an incomplete proof copy of this manuscript. Please contact the author at [email protected] or check for updates on your Kindle.

  I pulled in a couple of deep breaths and swiped a stray tear from my cheek as I cast one last look in my rearview mirror. My whole family and most of our friends stood in the front yard of our farm, watching as I took my first big step into adulthood.

  It had been all I could do to keep the tears at bay when I’d hugged my sister, Noelle, goodbye. She’d been holding it together by a thread, though, and if I’d started, she would have fallen apart. Don’t get me wrong—she’s the strongest woman I know, but we’re peas and carrots, and she worries about me. It doesn’t help that we’ve had some pretty messy scrapes with people trying to kill us. When you’re the most powerful witch family in the region, it only stood to reason that somebody was gonna feel froggy every now and again. Fortunately, we’d beaten the bad guys and come out relatively unscathed, but that didn’t do much to stop Noelle from creating all sorts of terrifying what-ifs in her head.

  I am, after all, her baby sister. It doesn’t matter that I’m probably more powerful than she is, or that I have my friend Emma, who’s also pretty handy with her magic, to watch my back. Noelle finished raising me when our Aunt Addy—the one currently hovering, translucent, beside her—had died, and she’d given up her own life to do it.

  As I rounded the curve in our winding driveway and my peeps disappeared from view, I sent out a wish to the universe that maybe now that I was off to college, she’d start doing a little living for herself again.

  She’d earned it.

  And I’d stretch my wings and find my place in this world, too.

  After all, an honest-to-God angel had once told me I was destined for great things.

  The thing about that, though, is that Destiny can be a real bitch.

  “What do you mean, there was a mix-up with my room assignment?” I growled at the lady responsible for giving us our dorm room assignment. “We sent in our requests weeks before they were due, and I called to make sure everything was in order. Twice.” I rolled my head on my shoulders, trying to stretch out the kinks from driving for four hours straight. I was hungry, tired, and still a little emotional from leaving my home. Change is stressful even when it’s good, and I was wrung clear out. All I wanted was to get to our room, unpack the bare essentials, and order a pizza, but apparently, Emma was listed on the assignment we’d gotten, but I wasn’t.

  The middle-aged woman sitting in front of me typed something into her computer, then clicked a couple times, stopping to run a coral fingernail down the screen as she did so. She shook her head, causing her platinum bob to swing around her face. “I’m sorry, Miss Flynn, but it says right here that you’ve been reassigned.”

  Emma shot me an exasperated look and rolled her brown eyes at me as the woman smiled pleasantly up at me as if she just given me a puppy rather than told me they’d screwed up. She clicked to another screen and scrolled down in for a couple of seconds, then glanced up at me, her smile accentuating the fine crows feet at the corners of her cornflower eyes. “It seems you’re not in the standard dorms. Due to lack of space in the dorms, you’ve been assigned to one of the apartment buildings instead. Apartment 434.” She rattled off the name of the building, then gave a vague gesture to the left in what, I assume, was the general direction of the building.

  “Apartment buildings?” Em asked. We’d looked at the apartment housing, but it hadn’t been available to us as freshman. Now it seems the tides had turned in our favor. “You mean we have a whole apartment to ourselves?” The glee in her expression was similar to the time a couple Christmases before when we’d filled the fountain in front of our high school with green dye.

  “Well,” the woman said, drawing it out as she clicked from one page to another, then back again, “not exactly. It seems Miss Flynn is in two bedroom expanded to double occupancy, which means, obviously, that there will be three other girls living there. However, there’s no fourth roommate listed yet. What was your name again?”

  “Emma. Emma Payne.”

  She shook her head. “No, the only girls listed here are Devin Dark and Breena Kellen, and they’ve both already checked in.”

  As the woman went to a homepage and typed in her name, what had begun as a small kernel of irritation was growing into a seedling of concern. Moving so far away from home had been stressful for us both, but knowing we’d be roommates had made it much less scary.

  The phone rang for the third time while she was waiting for the page to load, and two linebacker looking guys in line behind us started to grumble.

  “Just get your assignments and apply for a change,” the blond refrigerator said, his tone impatient. “The rest of us would like to get our assignments before the semester ends if you don’t mind.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, then turned back to the woman, who was talking on the phone with one finger plugged in her ear to drown us out. She gave me an apologetic smile, then braced the phone against her shoulder and held up one finger to indicate it would only be a minute. My mind whirred. I had no roomie assigned, and she hadn’t gotten a chance to look at Emma’s file yet, or at least I didn’t think she had. I cast a worried glance at Emma, who was chewing on her lip and shifting her weight from one foot to another like she did when she was upset.

  That did it. I made a snap decision—a habit I’d been doing my best to temper for the last year. But desperate times called for desperate measures.I pulled out my phone and put it to my ear so it wouldn’t look like I was talking to myself, then uttered a quick spell and shoved a little bit of magical intent into it.

  The woman hung up and turned her attention back to the screen just as the warm sensation that always accompanied my magic ebbed. I mentally crossed my fingers, hoping it had worked. I didn’t have the best luck with doing magic on the fly.

  Her forehead wrinkled in confusion as she switched to the tab that held my information, then flipped back again. “There seems to be some kind of mistake,” she began.

  “Seriously,” the guy behind me snapped, “we have a team meeting in an hour. We’d like to get to our rooms before then.” I cringed when I noticed there were several others in line behind him, and we were getting the stink eye from a few of them, too.

  The woman gave me the side-eye as her gaze flickered to the growing line behind us, and I stepped to the side so I could look at the screen. “Oh,” I said, trying to use just the right amount of surprise. “Look, it says in her file that she’s in the same apartment as me. They must have just forgotten to link us or something.”

  That sounded like a crock even to my ears, but the woman glanced from me to the impatient goons behind me, then to Emma.

  “So it seems,” she said with a smile so stiff I was afraid her face was gonna crack. “Apparently, Miss Payne, you’re Miss Flynn’s roommate after all.”

  I gave a mental happy dance, both that I’d done the spell correctly and that Emma and I were roommates once again.

  “Thank you,” I said as she pulled a set of keys from a locked box on the wall behind her.

  She thrust them at me, then gave Emma the fakest apologetic look I’d ever seen. “I’m sorry, but I don’t seem to have any keys for you, Ms. Payne. Check back tomorrow.”

  She gave me one final, weighted glance as the muscle heads behind us started to get restless. “And Ms. Flynn? You’d do well to remember that survivors learn to play the cards they’re dealt. Manipulating reality to suit yourself is rarely an option in real life.”

  Before I could formulate a response, she’d turned her attention to the gu
ys, dismissing us.

  “Well that was weird,” Emma said once we were out of earshot. “Did you do something? I thought I felt a whisper of magic while she was on the phone.”

  “I did. But just a little. It was no big deal. It’s not like I had a roommate already.” A little niggle of doubt worked through me as I said that, though. That level of arrogance had gotten me into serious trouble once. So serious that had it not been for angelic intervention, I wouldn’t have made it through to tell the tale. I pushed it aside, though. It was spilt milk.

  The heat smacked us in the face as we left the comfort of the air conditioned building, and I found myself wondering why I hadn’t put more serious consideration into the school in upstate Washington that had accepted me. Anybody who chose to stay in a place so hot and humid that you practically needed a scuba tank to breathe needed their head examined. Then I remembered I felt the same way about snow, but to a much greater degree.

  “This place is massive,” I said, referring to a map that had come in our welcome packets. I stepped into the shade of a giant oak and unfolded it.

  “Okay,” Emma said, pointing at the map. “We’re here, and our apartment’s there.”

  I groaned; it was all the way on the other side of campus. “Let’s just go and get it over with,” I said, climbing into my car. “Please tell me you don’t feel like going out to explore tonight, though.”

  She shook her head. “Not even a little. I have to call Mom to let her know we made it, then I’m ready to chill. I’m dreading just hauling our stuff up.”

  My phone dinged with an incoming text and I glanced at my phone. Cody, my boyfriend of two years, was letting me know he was all checked in, but that his advisor wanted to talk to him. Since he’d ridden his motorcycle, all his stuff was in my car. I texted back to let him know about the change in plans and told him to meet us at our place when he was done.

  “I guess that’s one of the benefits of the apartment,” Emma said, reading something in a pamphlet the registrar lady had given us. “They’re coed, so Cody will be able to visit whenever he wants.”

  “Bonus, then,” I said. “Now if we wanna do a binge session of Supernatural, we can, without watching the clock.” We’d reached the parking lot where we’d parked, and just looking at the full load I was carrying made me tired.

  “I’ll follow you,” she said, climbing into her own car. I laughed when she pushed her giant stuffed Pikachu out of the way. Her car was packed tight. Unlike me, Emma was [not a light packer, and I was pretty sure she’d brought close to everything she owned with her. I had two suitcases and a couple boxes of stuff, plus my laptop and tablet, of course. The smile fell off of my face when I realized how many trips it was going to take us to carry all of that stuff up. As tired as I was, I saw a little witchy business in our immediate future. We couldn’t leave it in her car, but I was pretty sure I’d die if I had to make too many trips, especially if our apartment was twenty miles from the parking lot and up ten flights of stairs.

  I backed carefully out of my parking space and waited for Em to get behind me, then guided us toward our new home away from home.

  I checked the address twice when we pulled up in front of a large, fancy-looking brick building. It looked more like another academic building to me than something that would be student housing, but we were at the right address. I pulled around to the parking area in the rear of the building and knew for sure we were in the right place when I about ran over a kid who walked right out from behind an SUV and in front of me carrying a laundry basket piled so high with stuff that I couldn’t even tell if it was a guy or girl.

  The momentum from the sudden stop slammed my watered-down convenience-store Coke out of the cupholder and into my floorboard, where my purse and a duffel bag holding my toiletries were just waiting to absorb the sticky, caramel-colored mess. I muttered a string of curses that would have made any sailor proud as I made a valiant attempt to grab my bags before too much damage was done. There wasn’t much I could do, though, considering every available bit of space was already occupied by either my belongings or Cody’s. I loved my bug, but a viable U-Haul, it was not.

  I grabbed a black towel off the top of a pile and dropped it in the floor, then plopped my dripping purse and duffel on top of it. It would do until I could find a parking spot. Luck was with me, though, and there were two side by side right near what looked like a side entrance. I pulled in, shut the car off, then did my best to wipe my bags off so I wouldn’t be transferring sticky soda to everything they touched, including me. I hated doing laundry at home, and we had a washer and dryer in the house. The thought of carrying it up and down steps to do it was enough to give me hives. I’d go out of my way to keep my jeans clean for a few wearings. Honestly, we had magic for pretty much everything, but nobody’d come up with a way to magic clothes all the way clean or cure the common cold. It defied logic. Maybe I could just do a quick drying spell since nobody could see in my car—

  “Thanks for not killing me and stuff,” a voice said from outside my driver’s window. I glanced up, startled, and a muscular girl with long, teal hair and black winged eyebrows was smiling at me. I recognized the black motorcycle boots as the ones the walking laundry basket had been wearing and swallowed back a surge of irritation. It was as much my fault as it was hers; I’d been looking at my map and hadn’t had all my attention on the road like I should have.

  I gave her a lopsided grin back. “My pleasure. The paperwork would have been a nightmare. Sorry if I gave you a heart attack.”

  “Ah,” she said, mischief sparkling in her near-black eyes. “You’re assuming I have a heart. Cute.”

  “Benefit of the doubt and all that,” I replied, still smiling as I climbed out of my car. “Shelby Flynn. Nice to meet you.”

  I held out my hand, and she hesitated for the space of half a second before she took it.

  “Devin Dark. I believe we’re roommates.”

  “We are,” I said, looking around for Emma as I slung my purse and duffel onto my back and pulled out a box full of random stuff. She was climbing out of her car, her backpack slung over one shoulder and her purse over the other. I waited a few seconds for her to make her way to us. “And this is Emma Payne. She’s in our apartment, too. Em, this is Devin Dark.”

  Devin tilted her head toward Emma. “Nice to meet you, but they told me there were only going to be three of us.”

  “We were supposed to be in dorms,” I explained. “When the woman looked it up, they had Emma assigned here, too, but had forgotten to add her to the actual room roster or something.”

  Devin cast us an appraising gaze for a second, but then smiled again. “Looks like we’re roomies, then.”

  “At this point, I don’t even care if there’s a bed,” Emma replied, skipping back around to her car and pulling a box out of the back seat. “Give me a couch or even a half-decent beanbag chair, and I’m golden. It’s been a long day, and we still have to unload our stuff, yet.”

  “Where are you two from?” Devin asked as she picked up the over-stuffed basket she’d left on the sidewalk.

  “Keyhole Lake,” Emma replied. “It’s a little over three hours southwest of here. What about you?”

  One side of Devin’s mouth curved into a sardonic half smile. “I’m from a little bit of everywhere, but most recently, Colorado. Right outside of Colorado Springs.”

  “Oh,” I said, “it’s probably cooler there right now, right?”

  She huffed and wiped the sweat from the side of her face on her shoulder as she lugged the basket up the three steps to the entrance then set it down to pull out the key to the building door. “I’m pretty sure Hell is cooler than here right now. And it’s [so humid. I feel like my clothes are glued to me.”

  Emma hummed in agreement, but shook her head. “Sorry to tell you, but it’s not gonna get any better for a couple months. October should be better, but right now, welcome to late summer in Georgia. Drink a ton of water and try not to move any m
ore than you have to if you have to go outside.”

  I was elated when a cool draft whooshed out when we opened the door. I’d never lived in an apartment building before, or even really been in one, so I’d been a little worried the AC wouldn’t be up to par. That wasn’t one of the things I was willing to compromise on if I had any say-so at all. And if I had to go without AC, you can bet your little blue booties—to use my Aunt Addy’s phrase—that I’d have had a say-so.

  I rolled my shoulders to adjust the weight of the duffel I’d slung over my back and got a better grip on the box I was carrying. I’m inherently lazy, so I prefer to load myself down to the point of ridiculousness rather than make an extra trip, but I was afraid I’d been a little too ambitious this time. Our apartment was on the fourth floor, and I was getting cramps and losing my grip before we’d even made it across the lobby. There was no way I was going to make it all the way up the stairs without a little magical intervention. It was almost enough to make me not care about using magic in public. Almost, but that was rule numero uno for a witch.

  Still, even though I couldn’t outright levitate my stuff up—or better yet, apparate with it—I did still whisper a few words to help at least a little. I sighed with relief when the bags got lighter. That was a handy spell my sister, who worked with a lot of heavy furniture, had taught me. The only bad part was I still had to sorta pretend they were heavy, though I was relatively sure Emma had done the same thing, and Dani was focusing too much on carrying her own basket to worry about me.

  Devin stopped right as I was getting a good head of steam, and I almost crashed into her. “What’s up? Why are you stopping?”

  Amusement flitted across her face as she motioned to a set of sliding doors in front of us. “I don’t know about you, but I’m waiting on the elevator. Feel free to take the stairs if you want, though.”

  I hadn’t even thought about an elevator. My face got warm, but I shook it off, thankful I was already flushed from the heat. I was gonna have to work harder at the whole [not being a bumpkpin thing, because it was a rare thing to be able to hide the blush that was the curse of a redhead. The doors dinged and slid open, and after we waited for the people on it to get off, we loaded up. Once the doors slid shut, I crinkled my nose. The smell of old socks and cheese was so pervasive that it was all I could do not to gag.