The Other Side of Truth (The Marked Ones Trilogy Book 3) by Alicia Kat Vancil

I couldn’t place. We sat there in a slightly uncomfortable silence before he spoke again. “I wish I didn’t have to be there.”
    “Because there will be a lot of people?” I asked as I crumpled up my burrito wrapper. Because of his empathic ability to sense and be affected by other’s emotions, I knew Travis generally avoided being in large groups of people. That, mixed with his agoraphobia was like an antisocial cocktail served on the rocks.
    “Yeah,” Travis answered in a small voice. “And because I’ll have to face them all.”
    “The people you saved?”
    “The ones I didn’t .”
    I just stared at him. “Travis, no one could have saved them all. Hell, everyone would be dead if it wasn’t for you,” I pointed out.
    He looked at me like he wanted to argue, but couldn’t find the right words. So instead he folded his arms across his chest, and leaned back against the black granite stone of the steps, staring off at the holiday prep.
    We fell to silence and I finished my soda, watching the people on the sidewalks rushing about. Either the man with the duck had given up or the operator had, because he was no longer on the street.
    “You said ‘our,’” Travis finally said in a quiet voice after nearly fifteen minutes of silence.
    “What?” I asked in confusion as my head jerked in his direction.
    “You said, ‘our people.’ You’ve never said it like that before, like you were one of us too.”
    I just kinda stared at him a little taken aback, because he was right. I wasn’t sure when it had happened, but somehow, in the last few months I had stopped thinking of myself as formerly human, and started thinking of myself as a Marked One. A daemon.

Never Let Them See You Cry
    Friday, November 2nd

    NUALLA

    N egative.
    I stared down at the digital read-out on the blue and white plastic stick. It was negative .
    I had bought the test yesterday, but I had been too afraid of the results to run it until now. But now, after one-hundred and eighty seconds of staring at the digital screen of the pregnancy test not daring to breathe, or even blink, the results were spelled out clearly in black. Negative .
    I slid slowly down the wall to the floor, because my legs were shaking too badly to continue standing. And then I burst into tears. But I didn’t know if it was because I was so happy it was negative or heartbroken that it wasn’t positive.
    I dropped the stick to the floor and doubled over, sobbing into my hands. This was what I had wanted—right now a baby was the last thing I needed. But it was my duty as an arius —as Karalia’s only arius —to produce a new heir, and hoping the test would be negative felt dishonorable. Because regardless of how much of a fucked up mess my life was at the moment, the fact that I wasn’t pregnant felt like I was letting all of Karalia down.
    And then another fear crept in with a sickening twisting in my stomach. What if I couldn’t get pregnant? They—the doctors—had said that I would be just fine. That nothing important had been damaged. That there would only be a scar. But what if they had been wrong? What if the infection—the mutation—had done something to me. What if I was broken? What if I could no longer produce a—?
    Oh gods.
    I covered my sobs with my hands, shaking so badly. The bloody war of 1341 had been sparked because the Chancellarius of Macedonia had died without an heir. And though we liked to think of ourselves as more advanced than humans, we were still a deeply superstitious people. And I knew—just knew —that more than a few would see it as a bad omen from the gods that I wasn’t pregnant yet. And with the drastic changes to the law that Alex had made, and the numerous attacks, there was already dissent in Karalia. This would just add fuel to the fire. Give them more proof that the gods no longer favored the Galatheas.
    As these thoughts raced through my head I had started to suck in deep gasps of air past my hands, my chest