Marked By Novels & Stories

Amelia slowed when she reached a row of doors she recognized. Or thought she recognized. Room 317 waited halfway down the hall. Relief loosened something in her chest. Then she saw the mark. It had been burned into the center of her door. Not painted. Not scratched. Burned. The symbol was crude but deliberate: a small human outline surrounded by a broken circle, with a slash through the middle. The edges were blackened, though the wood around it remained untouched. No smoke. No lingering heat. Just the mark, ugly and sure of itself.

The smile on its face was mine. The malice wasn’t. My eyes—new, aching, overwhelmed by too much light and too much truth—snapped to my mother’s throat. There, half-hidden beneath the iron collar and the shadows thrown by the seal, was a mark I had not noticed before. Not a bruise. Not a wound. A brand. Crescent-shaped, ringed with old silver scarring and lines that looked less like injury and more like writing forced into flesh.

He had claimed her and for the rest of her life she would wear his mark just above her collar bone. She'd hardly noticed that her fingertips had trailed upward and were lightly touching the barely healed scars that fell a bit below the circular scar that wound about her neck. At least it had healed as it should, she thought with a sigh once she realized what she was doing, tilting her head back against the seat and allowing her eyes to close, her hand still pressed against the mark while Luca was apparently lost in his own thoughts.

"always, but I'll be fine." We start walking home. The sun is low, shadows stretching alon the sidewalk. Mathias jumps over the cracks in the pavement like it's a game. Me, I just want to lie down right there on the concrete and not move anymore. My stomach growls. I barely ate this morning, but there are still three days before payday, and what's left has to be for them. Elhoïme gives me a worried look. "you're bleeding" I look down. My arm is scraped- probably from work, a badly lifted box. I hadn't even noticed.

It wasn’t his fault that it ended so poorly. After a moment, she spoke. “And you think this… mark is real?” “Yes,” he said flatly, a little irritated. “It’s a mating mark. I know what they look like.” For a moment they just stood in silence, the implications of his words hanging heavy in the air.

“It was just a one-night stand. That’s all.” But as I moved toward the mirror I froze. There, on the curve of my neck, etched into my skin was a mark. My eyes widened in horror. Azrik marked me.

Paul and I take only a few steps before Mark stops us and sends one of his companions to get a car. I am embarrassed at how pathetically grateful I am not to having to walk. It's only a short trip, no more than a couple of minutes. Goldhawk territory looks no different to the streets we have been driving through. That has to be intentional. It's sensible to blend in. Mark points out the pack tags spray-painted onto walls along with other random graffiti, marking the territory boundaries, which is helpful.

"Uh… what?" "Crescent to the left or the right?" Neil asked. "The right." "Ringing any bells, Bearer of Benevolence?" Neil asked. Dominic hissed and Neil smirked. "The Mark of Judgement," Dominic said. "And… I have that mark on my chest… but there's something else.”

Although Mom says she has no ulterior motive, I’m not convinced. After Zara exhausted her resources trying to figure out what Orli’s unusual birthmark means, we recruited Marco. He says he has unlimited resources, so we send him the picture of the sideways M on her ribs, just below her armpit. The sigma symbol has two angled lines resting on the top. Zara says it looks like a letter ‘A’ combined with the sigma symbol. It’s small, the size of a penny, where most sigma birthmarks we’ve ever seen are the size of a dollar coin.

Ivy came up beside her and looked down at what had stopped her. A char mark. Black against the gray dirt, small and deliberate, ringed at its edge in a way old ash never settled — the kind of mark a fire made when someone wanted it made, contained and controlled, and not the kind the woods made on their own. Newer than the doorway. Newer, Ivy thought, than anything else down there had a right to be. Nobody said what that meant. Nobody had to. Marrow’s hand found the strap of her pack and tightened once, and that was the whole conversation, complete without a word in it.