Page 129 of A Bond with the Dark

So, Bash is trying to break his curse, but what curse would that be? The warlock curse? Does it mean he is also marked to become a grimspawn?

So many questions are running through my head again, and I want to talk to Dom to pick his brain and see if he knows what this means.

The new information I’d just acquired—the fact that I now know that Bash is a real person and has been having dreams of me too—everything that has happened in the last forty-eight hours must have wiped me out because the next thing I know, I’m waking up to Dom and Scarlet stumbling into the room.

“Dom!” I exclaim. Scarlet walks him over to the bed, one of his arms draped around her. “What happened?”

“He blacked out,” Scarlet says tonelessly as Dom dangles from her arms haggardly, at an unnatural angle. “The warlock has started to come for him.”

Scarlet lays him on the bed, and the look of worry that passes over her face dissembles the toneless words she’d spoken.

I sit up and examine him, looking at his face and anything else that may be out of sorts.

“Did you get the artifact?” I ask, getting closer to him.

“Yes. Mom is working on it now; I’m going to go help her. Come when you can. We need to get this done soon.”

Scarlet’s gone, but Ollie remains in the doorway.

Dom is barely coherent, but I need to know what happened from someone who doesn’t look as though he got hit by a truck.

He’s pale and sweating. The look of distemper on his face is almost flagrant, as though if he breathed on me it would smell like bourbon.

The depravity of his appearance is disarming.

“We had Scarlet calm him and gave him some bourbon as well,” Ollie says, the abeyance of his own voice calm and relaxed. “It’s kind of like being drunk for a vampire. He’ll recover soon.”

“What happened?”

Ollie comes all the way into the room and sits on the chair in the corner. “We got there and got Hattie spelled. She went in, and everything was fine. Suddenly, Dom’s eyes went black. He began mumbling, talking to someone who wasn’t there, speaking in tongues. I’m a vampire, and it scared me to my core.”

His words grate on me and cause a panic that I bite down on as hard as possible. “You have no idea what he was saying?”

He shakes his head. “No. He started acting possessed, trying to get out of the car. I had to use all my strength to get him to stay in the back. Scarlet came round to the back and got him spelled enough to get him to calm down. When he finally came to, the only thing he was saying was that he was supposed to kill . . .” Ollie stops and looks down.

“Supposed to kill who?”

His soft eyes are on mine, and they grow cold quickly. “You.”

My heart skips, the rubatosis unmooring me. “Me? Why me?”

“He didn’t know. He didn't remember any of it when he was all the way himself again.”

I look back to Dom, now asleep, his brown lashes resting on his soft face like a dark curtain of mystery.

“Sayah,” Ollie says hesitantly, “For whatever reason, the warlock wants him to kill you first. He won’t be able to control himself soon. It’ll keep getting worse and worse.”

“So, what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” he says rigidly, pulling a stick off his pant leg. “Until this curse is broken, you may have to run.”

“Run? Run where?”

“Somewhere where he wouldn’t know you to go. Go home. Get your child. And run.”

This doesn’t make any sense. I can’t run right now; I need to help fix him. Even if I entertained the thought of running, I have a life back home, and so does Gauge. How am I supposed to just run away? Then there’s the split custody thing. If I take Gauge out of the state, Derek will have me arrested and, worse, have Gauge taken from me.

“I can’t run yet, Ollie. I need to help them to break this curse.”

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