Page 156 of A Bond with the Dark

Scarlet’s staring off into nothingness; Bash, Dom, and everyone else are around her.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s not Scarlet,” Dom answers solemnly.

“What do you mean? How do you know?”

“She’s my twin. I can feel her soul is not in this body.”

“So, the warlock tricked us?” I state the obvious.

“Yes,” answers Adaline, her stoic face grave. “And now they have the artifact, and we don’t have Scarlet.”

“Then who is this? And where is she?” I query, sitting on one of the chairs.

“A grim,” Dom says, leaning on the back of my chair. “Remember when I told you that they can take on whomever they—” His voice trails off.

“Whomever they eat enough of,” I answer morbidly. “Does that mean she’s dead?”

“Not necessarily,” says Bash, walking to the table to get the bourbon. “They could have used dark magick and taken enough of her to not kill her but to become her.”

“And how do we find out?” I ask, nervously worrying at a string in my jeans.

“I can do a locater spell,” remarks Adaline, tugging the fake Scarlet’s hands behind her back. “See if her soul is still on this plane.”

“What do you need for that?” I ask as Dom rubs my shoulders.

“Dom’s blood,” Adaline answers, the fake Scarlet hissing at her.

“Have as much as you want. Let’s go.”

“But how are we going to get her back?” I query, utterly lost now.

“We’ll find a way,” Dom says.

“Did the marks appear?”

Dom rolls up his sleeve and shows me the faint crescent moon mark.

I look at Bash.

He pulls down his collar and shows me his.

His is entirely black.

“About that,” Dom says, and before any of us can realize what he’s doing, he jumps up, pulls out the stake from the front of his pants, and drives it into Bash’s heart.

Bash falls back, the bottle of bourbon shattering on the cement floor, as he had done before. With sorrowful questioning in his eyes, they go from light blue to white, blood pouring out from them. His skin turns that awful white again, and his mouth falls open, agape with blood.

“Dom!” I scream, jumping up. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t want to condemn his soul more than it already is, Sayah. Tonight is the first time I’ve heard my brother being human, talking about what he did for Sadie. This whole time, I thought he was a monster, and he let me believe that; he let all of us believe that.

“In time, you’ll find a way to save us. I know you will. There has to be another artifact somewhere, and I know you won’t rest knowing what that warlock said about your son. I know you enough to know that you’ll find a way to kill him, to kill all the warlocks that threatened Gauge. But for now, until we can do that, save Bash and let me keep his mark, and he takes mine.”

There’s a pleading in his eyes that I’ve never seen before. I’ve known he’s good all along, but never enough to take his brother’s place in hell.

I’d seen nothing but anger and hate between them, and to see this love between brothers, enough for one to take a spot in hell for the other, or whatever hell means to them, is genuinely endearing and heroic. There’s more light to these dark creatures than I could have imagined. My eyes well up with tears again for him, for his brother’s dark soul, for all of them.

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