Unbreakable by Kami García Read Free Book Online Page B

worn cover. My mom’s silver bracelet slid down my wrist. “I wish I had something like this that belonged to my mom.”
    She would’ve known what to do in this situation. I missed sitting on the counter while she cooked, complaining about school and guys and the current drawing that wasn’t meeting my standards. My mom always had the answers, or at least the brownies.
    Lukas tucked the loose pages inside the book. “I inherited it when my uncle died. Every member of the Legion records their experiences in a journal and passes it down to the person who replaces them. Your mom probably had one, too.”
    They still believed she was one of them—that her attack wasn’t random, but retribution for our ancestors’ involvement in summoning a demon over two hundred years ago.
    It was probably the reason they hadn’t left me back at my house. “She wasn’t a member of the Legion.”
    Jared rubbed the back of his neck. “Your mother died exactly like the other members, and a vengeance spirit tried to kill you the same way. You need more proof than that?”
    I didn’t have any proof, but it made me wonder if hedid. “Was my mom’s name on a list or something in one of your journals?”
    Jared shifted in his seat and pretended to concentrate on the road.
    “There’s no list,” Lukas said. “Each member of the Legion only knows the name of one other member. They don’t have any information on the remaining three. It was a safety precaution to keep something like this from happening.”
    There was no list, nothing conclusive to link my mom to this group. They were making this up as they went along. “My mom never mentioned any of this to me, and I just finished packing everything she owned. There was no journal.”
    “Maybe she hid it somewhere,” Jared said. “Our dad used to do that.”
    “Okay. Then why wasn’t she training me?” I turned to Lukas, hoping he would be more reasonable. “You guys have known about all this since you were kids, right?”
    “More or less.” Lukas rolled the silver coin over his fingers.
    “Maybe you weren’t next in line,” Jared offered. He had no way of knowing how cruel it sounded to me. My mother was the only family I’d ever had.
    What if she had something else out there—something more than me?
    With so little left to hold on to, I couldn’t let myselfthink that way. “There’s no ‘next in line.’ My mom wasn’t part of this. The demon must have made a mistake.”
    Lukas tossed the coin in the air and caught it, closing his hand around it. “The only mistake he made was leaving us alive.”

9. LIABILITIES
    W e rode the rest of the way in awkward silence. I couldn’t reconcile my life with the secrets Lukas and Jared were convinced it held. The all-night movie marathons and catastrophic cooking classes that left our kitchen draped in homemade pasta we never ate—those were the things my mother and I did together. There were no discussions about ancestry or religion.
    My father had abandoned me, taking our shared heritage with him. I didn’t know anything about him except that it destroyed my mom when he left, and I knew even less about his family. Church was equally alien, a place where my friends were trapped on Sundays while I ate chocolate chip pancakes in front of the TV. If my momwas a member of a secret society charged with protecting the world from vengeance spirits, then the world was seriously screwed.
    Three unmarked streets later, Jared pulled over in an alley behind an overflowing Dumpster. Black fire escapes loomed above the doors. It looked like the kind of place where you’d find an underground club.
    Why were we stopping here?
    Jared grabbed a duffel bag from behind the seat and held the door open. It took me a moment to realize he was holding it for me. I climbed out, misjudging the distance between my foot and the step bar, and slipped. Jared caught my arm to steady me.
    “Thanks.” I smiled without thinking. Something registered in his