The Other Side of Truth (The Marked Ones Trilogy Book 3) by Alicia Kat Vancil Read Free Book Online Page B

“Well do tell, Mr. Scrooge, how is it that you hate Christmas?” I said in a playfully mocking voice, because the idea of someone hating Christmas was just ridiculous.
    Travis looked up at me with an expression that was somewhere between unfathomable sadness and defiant fury. “Christmas is all about family. And it’s kinda hard to be so frakkin’ cheerful about it all when you don’t have one. Because they were murdered …on Christmas Eve.”
    I froze, and just stared at him. I had known they had died. And I had known that it had been winter. But somehow I hadn’t thought the universe could possibly have been cruel enough to allow anyone to die on Christmas Eve.
    But apparently it was.
    Christmas should have been a wonderful thing, full of laughter, and family, and all that TV-special goodwill bullshit. But for Travis, it was a reminder that his family had been taken from him. From us. And that was probably the saddest thing of all.
    “Oh,” was the only thing I could manage to get past the lump in my throat.
    Travis looked away, back out at the bustling people and double decker tour buses, and stuffed another large bite of burrito into his mouth. The two of us were so very, very broken, and we knew it. However, we also had no fucking clue what to do about any of it. If the universe was trying to test the endurance of the daemon psyche, it was doing a pretty fucking good job of it.
    I picked up my soda again, sipping it as I scanned the square with my eyes. For November, it was surprisingly warm. A perfect cloudless blue sky, and just enough of a breeze so you weren’t sweating in the late fall sun.
    I let my eyes drift to the cable cars traveling up and down the steep hill of Powell Street, packed full of tourists, and the occasional unfortunate commuter. And then I saw him , and I couldn’t help the small smile that crept across my lips. He was there—the man with the top hat and the duck—arguing with the cable car operator again. Trying to assure the operator that it was a service duck. But from here, even I could tell that the operator wasn’t buying it. And before I knew it, I was grinning like a lunatic, because even with as much as my world had been turned upside down in the last year, this was still unchanged. But the fact that I was finding comfort in the repeated antics of a crazy person probably didn’t say good things about my own mental state.
    “So it’s gonna be on Saturday,” Travis blurted out abruptly.
    “What is?” I asked as my brain rushed to what he could possibly be referring to.
    “The award ceremony,” he clarified.
    “Award—? Oh, the one for you ?”
    “And the reopening of The Embassy,” Travis said as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his white lab coat. Even though he couldn’t get into his labs because of The Embassy closure, he still wore his lab coat to work everyday.
    He avoided looking directly at me as he continued. “Look, Patrick, you really don’t have to go, you know.”
    “Why wouldn’t I go?” I asked in confusion. “They’re giving you like, what, the highest honor our people have.”
    Travis fiddled with something in the pocket of his lab coat, something he did almost constantly lately. I wanted to tell him that the coat bothered me. That it dredged up the horrors of my past that haunted my dreams. Memories that I was trying so desperately to keep shoved down. But I just couldn’t. Because he wore that coat almost like it was armor. Like it was the only thing he could do to keep the world at bay around him. And I just couldn’t bring myself to ruin that small bit of comfort for him.
    “Because she’ll be there. In fact, they both might be,” Travis said in an uneasy voice.
    I paused. I didn’t have to ask who Travis meant by she . Nualla. Nualla would be there—of course she would, she was an arius —and Kira might be there too.
    I swallowed hard. “I’m still going.”
    “Okay,” Travis said with an inflection in his voice that