Page 140 of A Bond with the Dark

“Why? What will that accomplish? I’m in a house full of murderous vampires, as a weak witch who is trying to save my boyfriend, and there is a warlock demon lady who wants me dead! How does what you have to say help me at all?”

“I don’t know! But it might; just listen!” He grabs my hand, and that searing feeling sends a shock wave through me. I pull back my arm.

A part of me wants to hear what he has to say, and a part doesn’t. I don’t know how much of what I feel for him is of my own pound or his allure. Bash is a monster, and I should fear him. But in all of those dreams, there’s a look of absolute agony every time he burns and kills me. There are also dreams where he decides to burnwithme.

“I didn’t kill Sadie,” he absolves, and instantly, he has my full attention.

“What does that have to do with me?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest.

“Dom met her first. She was a witch. But I didn’t tell him I’d been dreaming of her for years. The same dreams that I’ve been having of you. And she’d been dreaming of me, too. When he brought her home, I was immediately drawn to her, and she to me. When he discovered that Sadie and I had dreams of each other, we got into one of those fights you witnessed. But, I’d turned and didn’t know my own strength yet. I killed him, igniting his vampire curse. I’m the one who turned my brother into a vampire.”

The features of his face crack as though this was still fresh like it’d happened last week instead of hundreds of years ago.

“I was overwhelmed with the guilt I felt at this,” he continues stonily. “I was going to take my own life. Everything about you becomes heightened when you become a vampire. So, all the guilt I was feeling was tenfold. You learn to control it over time, but I was a new vampire. I decided to leave and sit in my darkness. Sadie was still drawn to me and couldn’t let me be alone; she didn’t want me to die. So, she fled with me, knowing it would break my brother’s heart.”

Bash walks along the banks of the lake, and I’m entranced by his tale, picturing what he’s telling me in my mind as though it was happening right before me. I follow him quietly, willing him to continue.

“Dom thinks that I wanted to turn Sadie into a vampire because that’s what I told Ollie one night, when they thought I was subdued by Jasantha’s siren power. But because of my dreams, I knew if I bit her, she’d burn. I refused her time and time again. She was so mad; she didn’t care about the burning, she wanted to be with me forever and begged me to turn her. I still refused, so she went out and found another vampire to turn her.

“Because she was born only a witch, her body couldn’t handle the vampire curse. To be a hybrid—or tribrid, in my case—you have to be born or die as one. When she returned to me, she was going mad with the mixture of the two bloods, talking of the goddess beckoning her to a forest and telling her she was supposed to be the phoenix, but she messed up by trying to become a vampire. Laying with madness in her mind, drenched in sweat and burning up from the inside, she told me how someone named Freya told her the balance of nature had been thrown off kilter, and she couldn’t fulfill the duties she’d been conditioned for. She made me swear I would never tell a soul of this because Freya had told her that the phoenix would rise again one day and it had to restore the balance. She begged me to kill her, saying that since she had failed Freya, the grimspawns had already come for her and marked her, and she didn’t want to live like that. She told me she would return to me one day in another life, and that I would know by the dreams.”

He pauses here and looks at me.

The vast ocean that opens with this information storms inside me, and I find myself on the precipice of knowledge, trying to wrap my mind around all that Bash is telling me.

“She killed herself, Sayah,” he goes on softly. “And if she didn’t, she would have gone mad with rage anyway. She drove a silver stake through her own heart and burned. I told them all that I had killed her and the man she had run away with to keep my promise to Sadie. But after she died, that’s when I gave myself over to the dark.”

I realize we have stopped walking, and my mouth is agape, but my hand is covering it.

Questions lurch and sway like a ship in the storm of my mind; I reach for them as though grasping for light in the dark but none would come to fruition with my voice.

So, I’m supposed to be the phoenix?

What does that mean?

What is the phoenix supposed to do?

Am I Sadie reincarnated?

And then that would mean I was with Dom in another life, and Bash, too?

And Bash isn’t the monster they all think he is, yet he still makes them believe that.

“I know so many questions are running through your mind, and I don’t have the answers for you. I wanted you to know that I have lived this before and don’t want you to suffer the same fate as Sadie. For whatever reason, you were put in our lives to fulfill a destiny bestowed upon you by the goddess. I want you to continue following that path, whatever that may be.”

“But what is that path?”

“Sadie said to restore balance. I can only think that so many lines have blurred with us supernatural beings. The hybrids, the tribrids. The grimspawns and the warlocks. I think you may be conditioned to be the undoing of us all.”

These last words hang before me and latch onto something deep within me.

The undoing of them all?

I don’t want that.

With Dom, even though it has gone awry, I had found a way for him to kill people who deserve to be killed, people who hurt other people and children, and to keep him alive and around for as long as I can.

The luminous part of me found a way to balance his dark with my light, which I found can be done.

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