Page 159 of A Bond with the Dark

Stowing my phone in my back pocket, I get up and run back into the greenhouse and into the spell room.

They’re hovering over a table with a map on it, whispering words of magick to a drop of blood that has coagulated on top of it.

“Dom!” I call.

Seeing my face in utter shock and elation, he peels his eyes away from the map and looks up at me.

“Yeah? Is everything okay?”

“We have to go to Washington. Right now.”

“Now? Why?”

“My aunts have been doing magick and were able to channel my mom. They said she has a message for me but they need me to complete the knot. They want you, me, and Bash on a plane right now.”

“All right,” Bash says calmly from the table he sits at. “Looks like we’re going to Washington.”

“Did you guys figure out if Scarlet is alive?” I ask, going over to look at the map.

“She is, but barely,” Dom answers, pointing to where the blood traveled.

“Do you think your aunts will know how to save her?” Adaline asks, the desperate plea in her eyes softening her complex Viking-like features.

“I hope so,” I say. “In the meantime, try to do the research and find another artifact. There has to be another one like it in the world. Hattie, can you do what you did to find the last one?”

Hattie nods, her face finally softer toward me—just a smidge. “I can try.”

“All right, we need to go pack,” Dom says, turning to leave.

“I’ll grab my shit too,” Bash says, standing. “It’s with Talora’s in…” He hesitates on the mention of her name.

She is dead.

And only a little has been said about it due to all the events of the past evening.

I can see now the grief creep into his handsome features; the sadness injures the hard lines of his face, and his blue eyes nearly shatter.

“We’ll take care of it, son,” Adaline speaks softly.

Bash nods and looks away, but not before I’d seen a glimmer of a tear resting in his eyes.

“Why do all three of you need to go?” Hattie asks flippantly, unmerited annoyance dripping in her tone.

“Because they were both marked,” I say. “My aunts said there is something about the marks we need to figure out. It’s best to have them both there if we can break it. But you two can continue to try as well. The more people we have working on it, the better the chances of bringing Scarlet home, saving Bash and Dom, and getting my son out of this story altogether.”

“We will, Sayah,” Adaline says, and for once, her eyes are lighter toward me, a genuine affinity for the witch who saved her sons.

Dom grabs my hand, tugs me away from the spell room, and holds it up the stairs.

As we’re packing, his green eyes collide with mine a few times, and the anguish now harbored there has worsened, as bad as I’ve ever seen it.

At times, I’d seen the anguish and hopelessness linger about in his soul; the whole thought of being a vampire for him was something he hated. But now there’s more to it than that. Now, there’s the fact that his existence has brought me here to this precipice, and he blames himself for all the pain I’m in. The peace I’d brought him is now fragile.

I can sense it.

“I’m so sorry, Sayah,” he says, and that anguish shatters his gaze.

Something twists inside me at the sight of him so sad. “Please don’t apologize, Dom. There’s no reason for you to be sorry.”

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