Page 157 of A Bond with the Dark

Nodding, I lift my arm. “Is his mark on you yet?”

Rolling up his sleeve, I watch for it to change.

Slowly, the embossed mark grows darker and darker, the mark on Bash’s neck going faint.

Dom pulls the stake out and stows it again in the back of his pants. I bite into my arm, shed the tears that had already welled up in my eyes, and let it fall into Bash’s wound.

The same light swims up and down him before he wretches again. His eyes shoot open, the white darkens to blue, and he heaves a heavy air intake.

He sits straight up and grabs Dom by the collar of his shirt. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“I’m saving your disgustingly dark soul,” he shouts back and wrenches himself free of the grip. “Now get up. Let’s go see if our sister is still alive.”

“We need to put this one in a cell,” adds Everett, grabbing the thrashing fake Scarlet from Adaline.

“On it,” Ollie says, helping Everett maneuver the mindless grimspawn who wears Scarlet’s face toward one of the cells.

A rushing sound fills my ears, and my vision turns bright white. I see my aunts in a dark room, lit only by candlelight. Maggie is leaning into the flame; it dances beneath her breath.

Sayah . . .

It’s a gentle rush of a whisper that prickles and my hairs stand on end.

The aunts are summoning me.

This may be part of my new abilities.

“While you do that,” I say as my vision returns to normal, “I need to make a phone call.”

“Who are you going to call?” Dom asks, helping Bash up from the floor.

“I have to call my aunts. They are summoning me, and I feel that they know something.”

“Summoning you?” His brows furrow in curiosity.

“Yes. I had a vision just now.”

“Okay,” he states simply, as though he already knew this is the new me, an all-knowing and vision-having phoenix.

Dom nods and comes to me, kissing me swiftly before heading back to the spell room.

Hearing him say that he’s confident in me to find a way to break this curse, to save my son’s soul in the interim, and to kill the warlocks makes me feel a little better, even though I’m still littered with that self-doubt I carried with me before my fire.

Now, though, a voice that’s louder than my doubt is fighting against it, growing louder with every second.

Still, what if, when we locate Scarlet, we’ll encounter more grims and warlocks to get me, and I’m unable to kill them, even though I’m the only thing I know of that can?

Sayah!The voice shouts at me now.You are the phoenix! You are the most powerful being on Earth!

It will still take a while to get used to this heavy new burden I carry.

Blindly, I walk through the dungeon by them all without saying a thing, eyeing the fake Scarlet in the cell Ollie and Everett had thrown her in, and float up the stairs, through the spell room, into the greenhouse, and out the door to the lake.

Pulling out my phone—which I’m surprised is not shattered or burned from all the shit I’ve been through—I sit on the bench down by the boat dock.

Finding my aunt’s contact, I take a deep breath and hit call.

It rings three times.

---