Page 9 of A Bond with the Dark

“It was a month!” Hattie replies childishly. “And it’s also to help us figure out this problem. You guys don’t have that much of a problem since you have endless supplies of blood, but we”—she circles her fingers around at Ollie, Scarlet, Jasantha, and I—“still have to worry about dining on a human who’s been marked. You don’t want us to get marked, do you?”

“I’m not even entertaining that with an answer, Hattie,” my mom responds, adding some herbs to her spell that she’s babying on her old wooden butcher block.

“Guys, c’mon,” Ollie pacifies, picking up the poker and stoking the fire. “We’re all on the same side now. Hattie, you need to stop?—”

Hattie scoffs, “But he?—”

“No!” Ollie scolds her. Being the middle sibling but the eldest vampire, he often plays the role of putting Hattie in her place when she is acting like a bratty teen, even though she is eternally twenty-six.

“Adaline,” Dad says to my mom, “would you like a drink, darling?”

“Yes please, my love, thank you.” She moves from the spell to the grimoire lying open on the table, taking up half of one end of it.

“Anything interesting in there, Mom?” I ask, making myself a bourbon on the rocks. The bar is in a corner of the expansive space that takes up almost the entirety of the west wing of their home.

“No, nothing we didn’t already know.” A smile reaches her eyes, which is rare for my mom.

She is a hardened warrior woman who wears her tragedies on her skin like armor against the rest of the world. Each and every scratch and scar and catastrophic event meant to kill her molded her into the fierce protector she is today. It’s the softened edges that hardships haven’t whittled down where she keeps her tenderness for her family.

We all hide our love for each other underneath our sharp actions and jagged words.

“Is there no one you can talk to back in England?” I inquire, “Maybe your old coven that you haven’t seen in ages?”

Before moving to the States, we lived in England for a long time. It’s why everyone in my family has a British accent except me. It wasn’t something I held onto. Once we came to America, I shed the accent like an old skin.

“Esmerelda is consulting a shaman there, and Isobelle is working on tracking down another vampire who’s lost his whole family to the grims. But so far, nothing.”

“It may come down to us leaving the area,” my dad says.

My mom’s face falls. She loves living here.

“I won’t be driven out of my home by monsters,” she replies tersely and takes the wineglass filled with blood that Dad hands her.

“We are monsters,” Jasantha adds, a sinister glimmer in her purple eyes.

Jasantha is our adopted sister. She is part siren, so her jagged words hold more weight than ours. When her temper flares, we don’t just have to worry about how her words can cut us. We have to worry about where her anger will send us, often waking up outdoors with little to no clothing. Her siren’s sunder is not just something that can lure soldiers to their doom, but entrance someone so they have to do whatever she says, and not remember it until later.

“Yes, but,” my mom replies stolidly, “we aren’t the kind of monsters that suck the souls out of other monsters and walk around like zombies feasting on the flesh of the mortals.”

“And if we don’t do something about it soon,” Dad adds, sweeping Mom’s hair to one shoulder and rubbing her shoulders, “we will all become extinct one day, and those fuckers will run the Earth.”

“We can’t let that happen,” Ollie says.

“This is dire,” Mom adds, her gaze flitting around the room to all of us. “Two of my friends were marked and now are mindless grimspawn. And if you lot aren’t careful out there, you could be next.”

“I’ve never seen it this bad,” Dad adds, still rubbing Mom’s neck, the muscles in his own shoulders tense and locked through the black T-shirt he wears.

“They’ve been around for centuries, but never like this.” The tone of Mom’s voice fades into a desperately somber one.

Scarlet’s eyes lock with mine and our psychic twin connection buzzes.

I’m worried about this Dom. It’s getting scary.

Retaining our eye contact, I move over to her on the brown leather sofa.

I know. Me too.

It’s easier for us to talk like this rather than whisper. With everyone’s excellent hearing, this is the only way we can have private conversations when we’re around other vampires.

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