Free The Marked by Inara Scott Page A

grinned, slipped my phone into my backpack, and headed for the library.
    After my fight with Cam, I realized direct questions weren’t going to get me far. Instead, I started spending more and more time in the Program library. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but I had the feeling that there was more to the Governing Council and the Watchers than they were telling me. So I went hunting for information, studying all the history books I could find. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much. I thought there would be huge tomes filled with hundreds of pages on the Governing Council. Nope. Just a few scattered books, one of which was about Maria Salvoretto, whom Mr. Fritz had told me about on the first day of class. Maria, I learned, had a gift for foresight, and after having a vision of a school for students with extraordinary powers, she decided to go out and create one.
    Maria sounded pretty smart. She didn’t tell anyone what she was doing, so her little traveling band didn’t get burned at the stake or anything. But everywhere they went, they did good things. They healed people, used their physical gifts to plow fields and build houses and to rid towns of plagues and dangerous animals. All this in a secret way so that no one knew exactly what had happened. After her death, lots of people wanted her to be made a saint.
    Apparently, things had gone on like that for hundreds of years, with the talented roaming the world doing good deeds and learning how to cultivate their skills. It wasn’t until World War I that things started to change. The talented got organized and became involved in governments and politics. They formed the Governing Council to centralize the operation of the schools and the efforts of the talented across the globe. They realized that with the proper training, some Level Two Talents could be turned into Level Threes.
    The numbers of talented grew.
    And then, about ten years ago, Mr. Judan began building his army of professional Watchers. Watchers had been around in some form for a long time. Maria “watched” her pupils for a year to avoid developing the talent of someone who couldn’t be trusted. Once the Governing Council realized they could turn Level Two Talents into Level Threes, they started watching likely candidates. But Mr. Judan’s Watchers were different. The books I found didn’t say the Watchers were killing people, but it seemed obvious to me that that was going on. I just didn’t understand why things had become so violent.
    Most of what I found in the library described talents and how to use them. In one book there was an account from the seventeenth century by a person with a talent very similar to mine, describing how she had learned to move objects in every direction just by playing with the forces around them. There were detailed lesson plans describing how to move a Level Two Talent for persuasion up to a Level Three, and how to teach a shape-shifter to move smoothly from one form to the next. Seeing that helped me understand exactly why they’d been so worried about Jack’s stealing books from the library. If Jack had taken any of these books, he, or whoever ended up getting a hold of them, could have become very powerful, very quickly. It was like handing someone a loaded gun.
    A really big, magic gun.
    Despite my best intentions, I was too consumed with my research and classes to hang out much with Hennie and Esther. Any free time I had in the evenings I spent with Cam, and my classes were so hard I spent all my study time actually studying. Hennie was joined at the hip to Yashir, so she didn’t notice, but I knew Esther wasn’t happy that I was never around. Things only got worse after she developed an interest in a sophomore named Matt, who was in her drama class. He asked their teacher for a different partner for a scene from Romeo and Juliet after Esther had maneuvered for them to be together. She was crushed. I texted her every chance I got, and we talked on