36. A Tribrid
36
A TRIbrID
SAYAH
W e watch the sun break the horizon and melt the stars, sitting quietly with each other, enjoying our last moments while he’s still him. The gentle rocking motion of the hammock lulls me, and his arms are tight against my stomach. His shirt is rolled up to reveal the mark on him, a little more red flecks within the white raised skin. I wonder if that has anything to do with him going dark a few hours ago.
There’s no way to tell how much time we have left until the mark ignites him again.
“I overheard your mom and Jasantha discussing something interesting when you were gone.” I had almost forgotten the conversation with the unfolding of the latest events.
“What?” he sounds interested.
At least it will keep our minds off our impending doom.
“They were talking about how Bash is a tribrid.”
His weight shifts under me, and I can tell by his tone he’s surprised at this information. “A tribrid?”
“Yeah,” I say, leaning up to look at him. “Your mom thinks that’s the curse he’s trying to break. She said he’s part demon, and since she’s a witch, you all are too. And then, of course, the vampire curse she put on all of you. That would make him a tribrid.”
“And she thinks that’s the curse he is trying to break?”
“I guess so.”
“But if he is part demon, that would make him?—”
“Not your father’s son.”
He turns the corners of his mouth down and nods. “That would clear a lot of things up, honestly. About him and about my dad’s hatred toward him.”
“But how could you all have not known this entire time?”
“My mom is a vault when it comes to things that will protect us.” He studies me with piercing scrutiny.
“So why do you think he needs his sibling’s blood to break the curse?” I ask, folding my leg up under me.
“I’m not sure,” he says, rolling his sleeve down. “And I’m not sure how his way differs from Hattie’s.”
“Do you think we need to bring this up? To talk about it?”
“I do. But I don’t see how.”
“Get Bash up here. Ask him. He obviously knows the truth about himself.”
“I don’t want to hurt my mom.”
“I know you don’t. But we need information. Maybe this will help the spell they’re weaving downstairs. Who knows? But if ever there was a time to get all the skeletons out of the closet, I would say that time is now.”
“You’re right,” he says, and he arises from the hammock. “Let’s go.”
I take his hand and stand. “I’ll be right by your side.”
He nods and leads me into the house.
We reach the lower floor. Hattie, Adaline, and Scarlet are busy with the artifact and their spell.
“How’s it coming?” Dom asks, and the three women look up.
“It’s ancient, and the writing was almost indiscernible,” answers Adaline, staring fixedly at the object. “But we’re getting there.”
“Where’s Bash?” Dom questions .
“I don’t know,” says Hattie, her strange pale eyes skimming over me. “Haven’t seen him since before we left. How are you feeling?”
“I’m doing all right,” he returns, fidgeting with a button on his sleeve. “Fighting a crazy voice in my head, but I have it under control.”
“Keep fighting that,” Scarlet swings her restless gaze to him, then back to a book before her. “We’re getting there.”
I walk up to where the three women are sitting around the table in the spell room. The artifact is on the table before them. It’s a large stone that looks like it had fallen from outer space a millennia ago. It’s a rusty brown with holes, but it has bright fluorescent blue lines across it. In between the lines is ancient writing, some in characters that look familiar—like runes—and others that look entirely foreign.
“What do you think the writing means?” I ask timidly.
“It’s a spell,” Adaline responds. “To break a curse. It’ll help with the lycanthrope spell.”
“Because it’s older than any of our spells, it’ll be powerful, but it should break a warlock mark. If it breaks a formweaver link with the moon, it can work on a warlock.” The conviction in Hattie’s voice quells some worry but not all.
“Speaking of warlocks,” Dom says, and my heart faints. Should he bring this up now, Adaline will know I told him the information.
“You wanna know why I am asking for your blood?” Bash is in the room with us without us having heard him.
Vampires are slick like that.
“What are you not telling us?” Dom chides.
Bash is lithe about his movements, entering the lair and traipsing around the table the three women sit at, eyeing his mother. “That would be a question for her, I believe.”
Her look is unchanging. She keeps her calm Viking demeanor and returns his glare to him.
“What is he talking about, Mom?” Dom asks, a questioning expression lingering on his face.
“There’s something you all need to know,” Adaline replies, her shoulders never slumping. However, the tone of her voice should have given her an appearance of being bested. “I have kept it from you for a long time to keep you safe. I knew there would be a time when it would come to this, so I shall divulge my secret. In this dark time, the secret I’ve been living with may help repair a bond between brothers as they face the same darkness.”
All eyes look from Bash to Dom. Bash doesn’t look at his brother. He merely sits down in a chair by the fireplace.
“How is it that you came to know of this secret Bash?” Adaline asks, her feline eyes scrutinizing him.
“Because the warlock came to me. After this mark appeared.”
He pulls down his collar, and there’s the same mark on his neck that’s on Dom’s arm.
“What?” Scarlet says, arising from the chair and looking more closely at the mark. “How are you both marked by the same warlock when living separate lives in different states?”
“There’s always a deeper line drawn between things than we realize,” remarks Adaline, a pensive expression washing over her face.
“But how were you marked, Bash?” Hattie asks, her dark and pierced brows knitting together in confusion.
“It appeared the other day. And when it did, she came to me in a vision right when it happened, saying that I’ve always been hers; it took a bloodline getting marked for me to.”
“So, because Dom was marked, that is why Bash is too?” Hattie inquires of Adaline. “So, are we next?”
Adaline shakes her head. “No. It’s because Bash has always been promised to her. It was a deal I made with her to have children.”
There’s a palpable wave of shock that reverberates throughout the room.
“What?” Bash questions, leaning forward on his knees and glaring at her again, his face wholly unguarded.
“I couldn’t have children,” she begins, the truth pouring out of her in a devastating sieve. “So I went to see a Shaman. I was desperate. I saw a few of them. One gave me the spell to keep my babies safe in the womb, which turned into your vampire curse. And the other—” She stops and takes a deep breath as if summoning the strength to say the following words. “The other I had summoned a demon to give me a child.
“The demon was both male and female. The male part offered to give me a seed that would pave the way for other children, but when that child turned twenty-one, I would have to give him over to the female part for a lifetime of servitude. See, me being part witch and him being a hybrid, part witch and part demon, would give them the power they needed for their grimspawn spells. I agreed, knowing I’d do whatever I could to change that.
“Your father didn’t know I’d made a deal with the demon, so I didn’t tell him at first. But when Bash was born, it was clear he was not a mix of Everett and I. Before we lost Ollie, the first vampire, I did more spells to keep Bash from being marked, and it seemed to be working. I thought I had it beat. He turned twenty-one, and nothing happened all the way until he was thirty-nine, when he died and became a vampire.
“Worried that I was dealing with something beyond my comprehension, I consulted the Shaman again; she told me that the vampire curse, which started as a protection spell, kept him safe from the warlock’s magic. She couldn’t touch him because he was a tribrid. But she did warn me that vampires are their deepest desires because being linked with a vampire makes them immortal, too, and that one day she will come for Bash. She will find a way, which will come as unexpected as it did. Through a human witch.”
Every single pair of predatory eyes falls on me.
What do I have to do with this?
“Even though the warlock didn’t have her eyes on Dom or any trackers on him, she used events to bring him to her, mark him, and get to Bash. And now she has them both.”
“So, Bash is a witch, a vampire, and a demon?” Hattie examines.
“A tribrid,” Adaline explains.
“And that is why Dad hates me and why I don’t look like any of you,” Bash snarls.
“Or act like any of us,” Dom replies curtly.
“Yeah, I’m a monster. Everyone knows. ”
“He doesn’t hate you,” Adaline pacifies.
“Why did you want our blood?” Hattie interjects before Bash can argue with Adaline. “What would that do?”
“I thought if I drank your blood under the full moon and chanted some witchy-woo, it would put the protection spell back on me. I didn’t have any idea that Dom here had been marked too. When she said bloodline, I assumed it was about you all. Hence why I figured your blood would work to break it.”
“Well, that was a nice idea,” comments Adaline, her motherly tone breaking through the surface of her guilt. “But this should work for you both. We can get the mark off both of you.”
“Who does she want you to kill?” Dom asks, and Bash glares at him, his eyes narrowing.
“Talora,” he says.
“Why does she want you to kill Talora?” Dom questions.
“Well, she wants you to kill Sayah,” offers Scarlet. “It would seem that she wants them to kill the closest person to them. To get rid of their earthly connections.”
“She wants you to kill Sayah?” Bash asks, and his eyes graze mine for a moment.
“Yes,” replies Dom, and he looks at me with that same guilt Adaline has on her face in his eyes. “She called her the phoenix.”
“The phoenix?” Bash queries.
“Yes,” Dom answers. “Why, does that mean anything to you?”
“No. Just wondering why she said that word is all.”
But there’s a telling in his eyes that says he knows more than he’s admitting to.
“So where are we with this mark breaker thing you all got going on?” Bash asks, his night-black hair in disarray.
“We need more time,” Hattie answers a little defensively. “And concentration. So, if you guys can just go the fuck away?—”
“Hear ya loud and clear, sister,” Bash yells, getting up and flashing to the door. “I’ll be in my room if anyone wants me.”
Clearly abashed, this time he departs with a palpable huff .
“Let us know if you need anything,” Dom offers the ladies. “But please, hurry.”
“We’re hurrying as fast as we can,” Adaline replies.
Dom leads me out of the room.
As we enter the main floor, Bash is alone in the living room, sitting with his hands on his chin, a look of disquiet on his face.
I look at Dom to see if he’s going to talk to his brother, but he makes no motion like he’s going to.
He pulls me up the stairs when Bash speaks to him, halting us.
“I bet you’re happy to find out we’re not full-blown brothers.”
“No,” Dom replies despondently, not turning to face him. “I’m not happy about it. I’m not surprised. But I’m not happy.”
“Well, it makes it easier to hate me, I’m sure.”
“You want us to hate you. Everything you do, you want to be a monster. So, we treat you like one.”
“The thing with Sadie, it’s not what you think.”
“Don’t. Ever. Speak. Her. Name. To. Me,” Dom says, the imperious quake of his voice jostling.
I can feel the rage catching fire in Dom’s bones, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to tempt that kind of emotional change in him. Who knows how close that curse is, teetering him on the edge, and something—anything—could push him over it, like jostling a leaf.
“I’m just saying, it’s not what you think.”
“I said, don’t speak of it to me.”
His voice takes on a rage that I’ve never heard in him before. I watch the change happen and although it happens fast, it seems it was in slow motion. His eyes grow white with green rims, not black—which tells me it isn’t the curse taking hold of him but his vampire rage—his skin turns almost translucent. The cat-like nature of his eyes glower into me, like I’m the target. Quickly, I dive out of the way, and with a speed as I’ve never seen, he stampedes at Bash in a murderous rush and flies into him, landing them both on top of the glass table and shattering it to bits.
Bash spins back onto his feet and pile-drives Dominic into one of the windows. Luckily, they’re the tapered, double-paned windows because they don’t break. Dom grunts and punches Bash. It’s unlike a normal punch. The house shakes.
Unfazed, Bash’s head merely turns a little sideways at the blow, but then he grabs Dom by the throat and, with that same speed, propels him into one of the beams, rumbling the house again. The breath is knocked out of him, and he takes a beat.
He rams Bash into the fireplace, taking the poker and thrusting it into his middle section. Blood seeps everywhere, and when Bash looks at me, his blue eyes are unchanged. He opens his mouth unnaturally wide, and his incisors grow two times their size, revealing the pearlescent ivory daggers in his mouth. He pulls the poker out and then clamps down on Dom’s shoulder, more blood spewing from the wound.
Yelling with anguish, Dom yanks free of the bite, Bash has blood staining his white teeth, and it’s thick and pooling at the sides of his mouth, dripping down onto the hardwood floor. Dom wrenches Bash’s head into the mantle where his skull cracks open, again more blood, bones shining in the shimmering wetness.
The caveman-like grunts coming from the living room, the rumbling of the house as they fight, and the crashes and spills are enough to get Everett to come flying in and separate the two.
When I catch a glimpse of Dom, his incisors, too, are fanged out and gleaming, his eyes blank and scary.
“Enough!” yells Everett with enough force in his voice that the house quakes. “What the fuck is wrong with you two? Get the fuck over it. It was two hundred years ago.”
The displacement of air in whooshing gusts lets me know the women are now in the room, no doubt speeding upstairs to the sounds of the commotion.
“Oh, for gods’ sake,” Adaline quips, the anger in her face like summer lightning. “It’s about a girl, you idiots. Get over it. You have women of your own already.”
Talora’s here too now, as is everyone else in the house.
Neither Bash nor Dom acknowledges this, but their fangs retract, and their eyes return to normal.
Dom walks toward me, grabs my hand, and pulls me up the stairs.
As we’re almost to our room, there’s a blood-curdling scream, a sound like bones breaking, and all the voices of the people at once in the room we just left.
When we run back into the room, we see Bash hovering over Joe, drinking his blood. His eyes have gone black; the warlock has obviously come for him and has taken over, commanding him to kill Joe. Jasantha is trying to tear him away, screaming, Adaline’s trying to keep her from intervening, and the entire room is in chaos.
“What the hell happened?” Dom asks, running to pull Bash from Joe.
“He killed him,” Jasantha cries, her voice a mixture of anger and unmitigated devastation. “He’s a monster. I’m gonna fucking kill him.”
The red of her hair almost darkens, the medallion she wears around her neck glows, and she tilts her head back. Opening her mouth, unnaturally wide, the highest pitch and most ear-piercing wail accosts all my senses, rattling the windows—if they weren’t as tough as they are, they’d have shattered.
The sound that emits from her is unlike anything I’ve experienced. It’s like the worst sound I’ve ever heard—nails on a chalkboard terrible—but ten times worse, that crawls into my skin and sinks into my bones. I’m able to clutch my hands over my ears to muffle the sound. When I look around, all the vampires are doubled over with their hands on their ears or succumbed to their knees with the fatal litany.
Jasantha’s eyes turn a beautiful amethyst color, the fangs sprout from the top and bottom of her mouth, and she clambers onto Bash, clamping down on his neck, causing an awful crunching sound that rends through the air. He screams in pain, and his flesh begins to boil at the puncture wounds from the toxic bite, bubbling up all over.
The only one not nearly affected by the siren call is me.
Now’s a time more than ever to use the power Adaline gave me.
Extemporaneous rage courses through my veins, and as I think about all the things these people have caused me, I dive through my bones and find that power, scooping it up and thrusting it upon all of them. I don’t care. The carcinogenic rush of electrical current leaves my fingers in a fiery orange wave, hitting each vampire with a malignant rush.
A large black cloud flits to blot out the sun, and as it does, each vampire reacts differently to their own worst fears. Dom, Ollie, Allison, and Hattie are engulfed in angry red flames, and I can see them this time. Sounds of fire and flame and screaming cause me to bite back on relinquishing the power, but I do not lessen it. Wailing around, they try to put out the flames but cannot.
Scarlet’s body has flipped to a horizontal position in the air. It is frozen there; she's flailing her arms and legs violently and screaming like she’s falling to her death. Everett bleeds out of his ears and eyes, toppling to his knees as though struck by some imaginary axe. Jasantha’s clutching at her neck, a lariat pulling her from behind, causing her to fall to the floor and be ripped off Bash. Adaline’s cradling a baby in her arms, the blue blanket dirty and riddled with holes. She strokes the babe’s head as tears roll down her cheeks. Bash’s face and neck eschew; he suddenly sees someone lying dead next to him—though no one is there—ineffable sadness controlling his movements as his hands tamp down whoever’s hair he’s seeing.
Lightning flashes and lights up our dark, as though the universe tells me they’ve had enough. Calling my power back to me, it evaporates off them and seeps back into me.
Jasantha takes a deep breath and coughs, crawling back and collapsing onto Joe, commencing her mourning. “You killed him,” she sobs. “Oh, Joe. Oh, my sweet Joe. You monster!” she shouts at Bash.
Bash crouches on his knees before Joe, blankly looking at the ground.
Something tells me that he’s not here anymore. There’s a vacant look in his smoldering eyes, and I don’t know him well, but even I can tell he’s fighting a battle within himself.
He rises slowly from the ground, and I notice that the mark on his neck is a shade darker, his eyes turning as black as the darkest night.
As Bash keeps his slow, monotonous gait toward me, as though he’s not controlling his movements, Adaline rushes off toward the basement.
Dom, his eyes turning that vacant black as well, rises from the floor, his eyes locked on mine.
Fear paralyzes me.
Is he gone too now, then?
I summon the power again within me and urge it to come forth, but nothing is coming.
Maybe I used it all up the last time I did it.
As Dom strides toward me, Bash turns his course and goes for Talora. Talora, seeing this, vanishes down the basement steps in a trace of light. Bash follows, but at a slower pace.
I don’t have that gift of speed. I turn to run, and before I do, Adaline’s back again, holding out the artifact, chanting words I don’t understand.
The house shakes again, and there’s a peculiar sound of high-pitched ringing. Dom stands still, as does Bash, and the ringing grows louder with the chanting.
A seismic wave explodes from the artifact and hits Dom, then Bash, and they collapse to the ground.
The ringing stops, and Adaline ceases her chanting.
A stillness engulfs the room, and nobody moves, waiting to see what the two brothers will do.
Dom’s shark eyes evaporate, his green eyes now locked on mine. “What happened?”
“The curse,” I answer on a breath.
“Is it broken?” Hattie asks from where she fell by the table.
“I don’t know,” Adaline mutters, still grasping the artifact. “We weren’t finished with the rest of it. I panicked, and it was the only thing I thought of.”
Dom lifts his shirt sleeve. “I don’t think it’s broken. The mark is still here.”
Jasantha resumes her sobbing, cradling the dead Joe’s head in her arms. He’s lifeless, blood pouring down the side of his neck, pooling on the floor.
Bash is at the basement door. He turns around, a look of confusion taking over his expression as he sees Jasantha rocking Joe.
“You did this,” she glowers, shooting him a disgusted glare.
“It wasn’t him,” offers Adaline, that motherly aura trying to keep the peace with all her children. “It was the curse.”
“So it would appear,” Scarlet says, sitting up from where she fell and cradling her knees, “as though the curse strengthens when adrenaline runs hot. That’s my guess.”
“And how do we keep it at bay until we break the curse?” Ollie asks, sitting on the marble floor.
“Keep those two apart,” Scarlet scoffs, crossing her legs.
Dom looks at Bash, who’s still eyeing Jasantha and Joe.
I can see a look of remorse written all over his face, but I’m the only one who seems to see it. When they all look at him, they see a monster.
Dom makes his way toward me. I’m scared and hate that I’m afraid of him now.
There’s no telling what will set him off.
Is it only adrenaline that turns that dark mark on? Or could it be anything that’ll turn off his switch and let him walk like a zombie?
Like a grim.