39. The Phoenix
39
THE PHOENIX
SAYAH
D arkness.
That’s all there is.
So dark it’s as if all the light has been swallowed whole, and not a pinprick of it remains.
When I open my eyes again, I’m on the floor in the main room, still surrounded by vampires. Dom’s face has a painted look; pure agony and loss and grief shroud his features like a veil of darkness.
“What happened?” I ask, but I feel light-headed again when I try to sit up. There’s the taste of blood in my mouth, and I swallow hard, knowing that one of them fed me their blood to get me back to consciousness.
“The mark,” Adaline replies, her voice a quiet sliver of worry and doubt. “We think the mixture of adrenaline and your voice activated it. But Bash pulled him off you on time, and we got him sedated again with Jasantha.”
“We have to get this curse broken, now!” Bash seethes through clenched teeth, his face contorted with fury, pacing about the kitchen to my right.
“We’re there,” Adaline declares, regarding him with a calm interest. “ We need your blood. And his. Then we think we can summon the warlock to get hers.”
Bash nods agreeably. “Okay,” he says, barring his teeth and ripping into his skin. “Where do you want it?”
“Here,” Scarlet offers, handing him a vial.
“Now you, Dom,” Jasantha demands, as her voice has to command him while he’s vexed by her.
Mindlessly, from where he sits on the ground with his knees pulled up to his chest, he languorously opens his mouth, bares his fangs, and bites into his arm.
Scarlet hands him the vial. The brilliant crimson drips into it while the other vampires watch; some of their faces slack and fascinated, while others have the appearance of blissful unconcern.
As the blood pools into the vial, all the happiness I had felt before this trip has fled. This is bad. And it is only going to get worse.
“Okay, that should do,” Adaline states, taking the vial as Bash’s wound begins to sew itself up. “All right, girls, let’s go.”
Scarlet and Hattie, in a whisp of blurred colors, vanish to the basement.
Dom is still heavily sedated, but the look on his face tells me that he’s reeling from the guilt he feels in his heart for what he did. He won’t make eye contact with me.
Peeling myself off the floor, I go to the kitchen for water.
That’s when the dread sets in.
The sensation hits as if all the air has been vacuumed out of the house, leaving an overwhelming surge of despair and sorrow. The sky darkens, the lights flicker within the mansion, and an oppressive silence envelops everything.
We all feel it.
The incursion commences through a veil of clandestinity. I feel them slipping into the location using the artistry of magick; their entrance is silent and elusive. The lights extinguish, plunging the cabin into an eerie darkness that steals away all the warmth from the air. A sudden chill takes over me, evident in the frosty breaths I exhale. I shrink into a cowering position, grappling to make sense of the unfolding events.
There’s a harrowing sound of beings rushing into the cabin, displaced air as the nefarious entities void of souls enter—reanimated corpses veilweaved by magick—nine or ten of them at first. They’re grotesque looking; some have features, while others have no faces other than rows and rows of sharp fangs, shadows marking the gaunt hollows of their cheekbones. Those with faces have distended veins spiderwebbing across their cheeks and temples, glowing red eyes, and skin as gray as the sky before it snows.
Amidst the chaos, the vampires in the cabin snap to immediate attention. Their white eyes blaze, fangs fully exposed, as the scene transforms into a kaleidoscope of color and a clash of battles unfolds in the blink of an eye. The vampires move with lethal grace, starkly contrasting to the grotesque invaders, their predatory instincts on high alert as they prepare for the impending confrontation.
Allison’s subdued from the back of her, the grimspawn biting into her with a loud and sickening crunching sound, and cries of her anger and pain waft over me.
Ollie flashes to her side and seizes the being off her, pulling at the hood of the creature gnawing on her neck. Not only is the being hooked into her by way of its rows of sharp teeth, but it’s also ripping pieces and chunks out of her and eating them. Ollie tears it away from her, using his elemental power of air to heave the being to the other side of the room, where it collides with the wall and rumbles the house upon the impact.
As Adaline reenters the room, holding the still un-glowing artifact, the other two sisters crash into the commotion. Hattie collides with the creature about to return to Allison while Scarlet races toward one, closing in on Jasantha. It’s apparent that Adaline had vamp flashed away to retrieve the artifact from the spell room, her sudden reappearance marking a pivotal moment in the unfolding chaos.
Hattie unleashes her power of sight to make the grimspawn see things that aren’t there, a few swinging and missing beings with no form.
Contemplating what the fuck I can do against these horrid beings, I summon that new power and thrust it at the beings with the hoods. The orange netting falls over them and evaporates, but there’s no reaction. None of them seem to be hastened by their fears.
In a terrified state, all that is left for me to do is wait for them to come after me.
Everett pierces the one attacking Ollie through the middle with the fireplace poker, and that gut-wrenching, skin-crunching sound befalls my ears again. He morphs into Ollie, confusing the grimspawn, getting it to chase him a few feet away from the actual Ollie.
Bash has yielded a giant shard of glass from the pile of the remnants of the table that had shattered earlier and slits one’s throat, the sight of which causes me to almost vomit. I bite back the bile and watch as the grimspawn falls to the floor, its head wobbling entirely too far back behind himself to recover. Bash then stomps his foot and embraces the Earth’s vibrations, using it to shove one with his power across the room and into a wall.
“Dom, up now!” yells Jasantha.
Dom is still in his siren trance, watching nothing but the floor.He lurches up and shoots for one about to bombard Scarlet, but as he does, another grimspawn shoves a long sword through his back, which runs him through to the hilt, dripping blood.
His scream pierces the air, echoing through the cabin, as an intense burst of light engulfs the space, reminiscent of imprisoned lightning breaking free. Concurrent with the grimspawns’ unrelenting onslaught, a hiss of smoke begins to snake upward. Amidst the chaos, the thick white smoke swirls, creating a gust that tousles my hair.
A pungent scent of sulfur lingers within the billowing fog, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. Emerging from the haze, a colossal figure materializes, defying the limitations of mere malevolence. Seven feet tall, at least, she exudes a sinister presence, an embodiment of darkness. Her hair, a river of white, flows down her back, crowned with a dark circlet that frames her foreboding horns jutting from her forehead and adorned with intricate black embellishments. Eyes devoid of color gaze into the depths of me, and a word that doesn’t exist in the realm of terror takes over me. Pointed black nails with dark jewels punctuate her eerie presence. Draped in a black dress, her unnaturally pale skin radiates an otherworldly luminescence, surpassing the confines of the ordinary. Describing her as the epitome of evil feels insufficient for the darkness she embodies.
As the smoke dissipates, Bash rushes upon the warlock, jumping on her back and biting down on her neck in such a murderous, animalistic fashion that he looks like a rabid wolf attacking a bear three times his own size. Black blood rushes down her white skin, and yet she makes no motion like she’s in any pain or that his bite is hindering her in any way whatsoever.
Abruptly, he stops his rabid attack. The lights flicker, and when they do, black blood covers his face and drips down his neck, and his eyes take on the same hue, drowning the blue completely. As he slides down the warlock and focuses on me, what’s beyond his eyes terrifies me more.
My death.
Hattie extracts the sword from Dom, and his blood, saturating his shirt, trickles down his front and pools on the floor in front of him. Pressing his hand over the wound to staunch the bleeding, he limps over to Everett. Three assailants are closing in on Everett, who wields an enormous axe I hadn’t seen before, viscously hacking one’s head off.
As Adaline chants her magick words, trying to get the artifact to come to life, wind whipping her hair around furiously, Bash arrives at me, and when he kneels down to pull me up, I know it’s my turn to die.
I stagger to my feet at his hands, yanking me upward, and the last thing I see before I die is the fragments of his shattered blue eyes in the black depths the warlock summoned in him.
Barring his fangs, he turns my head to the side, bites into my neck, and the agony comes.
The searing blaze starts at my toes and rapidly spreads this time, faster than it ever had in the dreams. Quickly, I’m engulfed in flames, seething up before my eyes. The smell of charred flesh and burnt hair flares up my nose, and the unendurable pain ravages my every pore, every sinew of my life, the very molecules that make me burn. Bash backs away before he burns, too, the fractured blue of his eyes coming back together to form the most agonizing look as he becomes aware of what he did.
“ No! ” Dom’s scream echoes as he rushes to me as fast as his injury will allow, the wound made by the grimspawn not yet healing in his chest. The flames have risen so much and are so intense and hot he can’t get any closer to me.
The eerie part about it is I make no sounds.
As the flames ravage me, there’s a pulling at my soul that lifts me up out of my body. Watching myself burn from above, I can observe the rest of the battle omnisciently.
Feelings of utter sorrow almost plunge me into darkness as I’m being held aloft in that cloud of heat from my own being.
I’m never going to see Gauge grow up.
No pain on Earth can compare to the agonizing thought of not being there for my son. Knowing the loss of a mother to a child, I can’t bear the thought of Gauge having to go through that, too. Sadness rips me apart and I feel that more than I feel myself burning.
But why am I not disappearing?
Down below, Everett is pulling the axe out of the grimspawn on the floor and viciously hacking another one, savagely pulling it out and repeating this action a few more times, spattering blood all over the walls and himself. He truly gives his Viking image that barbaric, brutal, and ferocious air he has about him.
Jasantha parts her lips, releasing her wail; that piercing melody reverberates through the air, and two of the other grimspawns crumple to the ground, subdued by the haunting sound. Adaline remains steadfast, continuing her incantation, her gaze locked into the warlock, who observes the unfolding events with a detached fascination.
My body has finished burning and is all but ash when Dom finally gets to me, bleeding onto my ashes from the wound in his chest that has not yet healed. I feel sad, like the wind on the ocean, cold and lost with nobody around to feel me. No one knows I’m still here, floating above the chaos. I wonder if I would soon see my mama. That thought gives me hope.
Unaffected by the siren song, Bash, with black eyes once more, advances toward Talora. Swiftly, he snaps her neck and begins the gruesome task of draining her blood.
That’s when the strangest thing happens.
As the drop of blood from Dom’s wound descends onto my ashes, an intense pull seizes my soul, drawing my essence back to the charred remnants of my former body. The flames flare back to life, distorting my perception with swirling waves of heat as my body undergoes a mysterious transformation. As my bones and muscles and tissues and fibers sew themselves back together, the swirling notion is euphoric; there is no searing pain; instead, I sense my form expanding, and I find myself standing on my feet once more.
Standing there before them, unharmed and unburned, I examine my hands, my arms, my legs. My skin is glowing, fissures of golden cracks slither all over me, and power is buzzing. It feels like I can shoot my hand out, send lightning into the crowd, and burn everyone within my gaze. I feel drunk, like I drank a hundred margaritas; my body is warm and tingly, my neck feels rubbery, and my head feels like it’s still floating above them all. Not only that, but there’s now clarity about my thoughts. All fog has been lifted. Memories of everything in my childhood come rushing back, released like birds from the protective cage my mother had placed over me in toddlerhood. Visions of my sister, my mother placing a protective shield on me, Laureya’s face, my aunts, and their magick instantly flash through my mind.
I am the phoenix, and power drips off me; I feel it in the molten marrow of my bones.
I know without any shadow of a doubt that I’m the most powerful being in that room.
No one moves, not even the warlock, as I’m more potent than her now .
It’s so clear what I have to do. It’s as though the thought of it has always lived in me; it was hiding this whole time.
Plunge a heated sword into water, and it’ll break, but drench it in blood and fire, and it hardens.
How had I not known before?
The fire that lives in my bones now extends outward from my being in wings of fire, and as I try to grasp this moment and wrap my mind around what this means, time simultaneously moves with urgency and stillness; everyone else in the room but me freezes in place.
It’s as though something else entirely is controlling my movements; the alliance I had with gravity to keep me grounded shatters, and I soar into the air, flying up above the fray in the high rafters of the ceiling. Fiery tendrils slither out from the depths of me and extend toward the warlock as the lassos of my fire wrap around her, binding her from the ground up. The ropes tether her arms and extend them outward while another wraps around her neck, pulling her face to the sky—the blackness of her eyes pointed directly at me as I fly above her. They are unfathomable, and yet I feel no fear, even though she stares at me as though she’d devour my soul and harvest every ounce of my being.
There’s a slight tingling in my mouth on my gums, and this razor-sharp stinging makes me wince, and yet I know that they are fangs as I feel them elongate from my mouth.
In a movement as fluid as water, I fall downward toward her, like a volcano incarnate, and submerge my new fangs into the warlock’s neck; the sound of skin breaking and feeling a crunch is almost satisfying. The taste of her black blood is acrid in my mouth, but I do not drink it. The moment I bite down, the fire in me rushes through me and spews into the warlock, turning her white body black with red fissures of lava. The lava grows so intense that the room’s dark is as bright as a forest fire, and the burning body looks like its metal is being melted until it detonates into flames. Ear-piercing screeches like some sort of banshee of the night make even me wince, and I float upward and watch the creature burn .
The flames that shoot out from her become bright doves made of fire; they explode outward and dive toward the grimspawns—hundreds of them piercing the rotting flesh of the terrible beings. They, too, burst into their own flames, emitting sounds of terror, smells of burning flesh, and tempered agony amongst the vampires floods me.
When time resumes and my feet find the ground again, I see one grimspawn remaining.
Why did he not burn?
He’s standing by the fireplace, and as though he knows his death is subsequent, he runs up to Scarlet and tackles her to the ground; they both implode into a murder of crows made of smoke as they fly away.
“No!” screams Dom, who goes after them, vamp flashing out of the door in their wake.
Bash’s eyes return to their standard, glorious blue, standing with his mouth agape at me as I stand over a pile of ash, nothing but black jewels twinkling from it.
Lights return to normal, the air in the mansion resumes its average temperatures, and I remain frozen, unable to fathom what the hell just occurred.
Allison’s dead, her eyes unmoving and blank; the gaping hole in her neck is thrashed open, bits of flesh frayed where the creature had been eating her. Beneath her head, her brown hair is matted and thick with the pool of blood she lies in. Talora is still as well, paler than she had been before, her neck bent at an incongruous angle, her eyes utterly white as though she had tried to turn her vampire on while fighting for her life against the man she came here with.
Dom returns without Scarlet, his face contorted in rage and fear. “She’s gone. They have her.”
“Who has her?” Adaline asks, coming up to stand beside Everett, who has blood covering him from head to foot. “Sayah killed the warlock that spelled them.”
“There has to be another one?” he asks ,or tells- I’m not sure.
“I need to sit down,” I say, blustering, examining my hand. My skin is still lightly glimmering, but it’s fading back to normal as I head over to the bar stools.
Dom is there beside me in an instant, hesitant to touch me.
“Does someone mind explaining what the hell just happened?” Jasantha says, eyeing all the bodies around.
“Ollie’s dead,” Bash murmurs, kneeling next to Ollie.
He’s lifeless and still by the fireplace, a stake laced with silver driven through his heart. His eyes are wide open, blood seeping from all points of his face. The irises of his eyes are completely white, his skin mirroring that same hue.
Bash is crouched over Ollie, a tender vulnerability in his hardened jawline. He’s touching the silver stake that’s protruding from his heart, the thing that rendered him lifeless. Violently, Bash rips it out and tosses it aside, where it flings with a force a wooden stake shouldn’t have and shatters into a million pieces on the wall.
Adaline flashes to Ollie’s side and scoops him up, shattering her hardened demeanor. “No, not my Ollie.”
I can’t move, can’t think. All that’s in my mind is what just happened.
I’m the phoenix now, as I literally rose from the ashes.
And I have fangs?
What the hell is that about?
The psychic’s words are suddenly in my mind again : “One love will rise you from those ashes. And one will put you in them. Your heart will want the pain. The burn. The fire. That is the love that will consume you. The other is safe. It won’t take you to the ends of the Earth, but it will protect you and keep you safe. When the time comes, you must choose which love you want. The love that ends you. Or the love that revives you.”
It had been Dom’s blood that dropped onto my ashes and ignited the flame. So, Bash is the one who put me in the ashes, and Dom is the one who rose me from them.
Literal pain swells up in my mind when trying to figure out what this means.
What am I supposed to do now ?
Am I the savior of the damned? Or the destroyer of them?
Tears again flow from my eyes.
“My mark is gone,” Dom says and when I turn my head, I see him examining his arm. I move silently over to him.
“Is mine?” Bash asks, pulling down his collar.
No one speaks.
“What?” he asks, his black brows like checkmarks, “Is it bad?”
“It’s darker,” Dom reports.
“What does that even mean?” questions Bash incredulously.
“What does any of this mean?” Dom queries.
“There must be another warlock.” That is Hattie.
“What do we do about Ollie?” Adaline laments, her voice cracking as tears threaten to fall from her eyes. Everett’s rubbing her back.
As I crouch down to see the mark that’s missing from Dom’s arm, a tear falls from my eye that drops right onto the wound the stake had left behind in Ollie’s chest.
The tear that fell creates a spark that lights the entire wound up, the charred and bloody flesh glowing red but then the light turns bright, bright white. The blazing light pools until it’s blinding. The wound seals up, and his skin returns to the typical pale peach color, the blood staining his face and eyes fading. His eyes were that ghastly white suddenly turn to green and when he takes a deep breath in, a shock wave like thunder without sound emits from him and ripples out into the world, awakening something ancient that has been slumbering until now.
He begins to cough up blood.
“Ollie!” stammers Adaline, quizzically looking from him to me.
This is too much for me.
I run from them all, out of the back door and into the night. The psychic Quinlyn’s voice reverberates in my mind, and I hear it as I run toward the water : “Even though your choice will hurt you, you have something in you that will save a lot of people. Your pain will end other’s suffering, and so this path that you’re on is one that you’re meant to be on. Others before you could not rise from the ashes as you have, and you will have to keep rising out of those ashes. For you are like a Phoenix. And your blood is powerful. There’s a reason that you’ve been dealt the things you have. Your pain and suffering will not go unrepented. You have a magick within you that’s unlike any other kind of magick the world has ever seen. Take caution when honing your power, but hone it all the same. Conquer it. And seek the advice of others who walk your path, for they will guide you to where you need to be.”
Reaching the water’s edge, I fall to the sandy shore and scream.
“Who is it that walks my path that could possibly help me with what all this means?”
“It seems as though there’s magick that you’re playing with now that’s stirring something ancient and powerful. Something is happening in your eyes that tells me you know exactly what I’m talking about. Just be careful with it. And that man you are seeing right now is part of that darkness that’s seeping into your soul . . . I would leave him behind if I were you. Something in his energy is attaching to you and seeping into you. Careful if that’s the darkness that will consume you…”
It’s Dom who’s at my side as I wallow in my sorrow and grief.
“Are you all right?” His concern is genuine for me. When I look at him, his green eyes are agonized, harboring a grief I know nothing about.
“Are you?” I ask, wiping my tears away.
“I don’t know how to be,” he says sadly.
“I hear that,” I reply, my voice shaky and unreliable. “I don’t know what the hell I am now.”
“Well, I would say that you, clearly, are a phoenix.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
It’s not anger I feel for him; it’s anger at the situation that seethes through me. There’s no one to tell me what I’m supposed to do now. I’d risen someone from the dead with my tears. I fucking glow! I have fangs. What the fuck am I? What does this mean? What am I supposed to do now? I am screaming inside.
“I don’t know.”
“I brought your brother back from the dead with a tear! What the hell is that? ”
“It was mixed with a little of your blood. I don’t know if that means anything at all. But it would appear—to me—you are magickal now. And your bite kills the warlocks that spell the grimspawns. Bash killed you—” His voice trails off with his eyes, somewhere to the depths of the lake before us. “Why did Bash kill you?”
“Why did your blood rise me?”
His eyes are back on mine. “What?”
“I rose up out of my body when I was burning. I watched the rest of that all go down. You ran over to the ashes of me; you were bleeding. The moment your blood dropped onto my ashes, the fire rose back up, and I was pulled back into them with my body.”
Blinking wildly, he rubs his hands over his face, massaging his eyebrows, furrowing them, and then relaxing them again. “What?”
“Bash put me in the ashes, and you rose me out of them.”
“I have no idea where to begin to figure out what that is.”
“Do you think your mom would know?”
“I doubt it. But we can see.” He hesitates, then his eyes lighten a bit. “What about your aunts?”
Thinking of Hilda, Maggie, and the grimoires they’d said they had at their house, that may be what we need to try to put all of this together.
“I can call them tomorrow. At least we can leave here now, knowing you’re not marked anymore.”
“But my brother is. We have to help him. And find my sister.”
“How can we find Scarlet? And help your brother?”
“I don’t know. But you are the key to breaking the curse. We have to help him.”
It’s a good thing Dom is showing emotions for his brother.
“Okay,” I say tenderly.
Rising up from the ground, he offers me his hand. When I’m at eye level with him, he holds me still, and his eyes taper toward me.
“I wanted to tell you how sorry I am.” As he says this, he moves my hair from my neck where Bash bit me and caresses where the two puncture holes should have been.
“Your bite,” he says, and there’s a questioning in his voice .
“What?”
“The marks, where there should be holes. They’re gone.”
I shake my head, unable to process any more of anything else. “Well, considering I just rose from ashes, it makes sense, in a weird ‘you’re a vampire’ sort of way. Six months ago, and I wouldn’t have believed any of this.”
He kisses me like I’m as fragile as glass, and my heart swells. My feelings for him have not abated after all. These past few days, they’ve been hard to recognize with everything that has happened.
Pulling me by the hand, we walk back into the house.
Bash is pacing again in the kitchen, and the rest are in the living room around the couches.
As I approach, they all have coveted eyes for me now.
Ollie, who looks worse for wear but is up and sitting on the couch, rises and draws up to me.
“Thank you,” he says sternly, his green eyes strong in their gaze on me. “For bringing me back to life. The place I went to was not somewhere I’d want to stay. Or to ever go back to.”
I nod. “You’re welcome, Ollie.”
He hugs me, and it’s a remarkably expressive hug.
None of them seem the hugging type.
“So what does this make you?” Jasantha says grimly, and her tone is imbued with a dislike for me.
“You’ll have to excuse my sister,” Bash retorts as he joins us in the living room. “She dislikes anyone that can out-power her.”
Jasantha huffs and shoots him a disgruntled glare, her eyes flashing purple.
“Doesn’t work on me, sister. I thought you knew that.”
Her head cocks sideways as though this confuses her.
“I’m not sure,” I say, ignoring their quarrel and sitting on one of the couches. “A phoenix, I believe, but I don’t know what that means.”
“Have you ever heard of anything like this, Mom?” Dom asks.
“No,” Adaline says darkly. “I mean, I’ve heard of a phoenix before, but never what Sayah is here. ”
“Are you immortal now?” asks Everett, his gray eyes searching, his face and hair spattered with blood.
“I have no idea what I am,” I answer honestly. “All I know is that Bash was marked to kill me. I burned. Dom’s blood saved me. I rose. There was a power I felt within me; I knew I could overpower the warlock. I knew if I bit her, she’d burn. I could feel the fire in my bones. I feel it in them now. I did not know that my tears would rise Ollie. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”
“You’re our new secret weapon,” says Bash. The sinister twinkle in his eyes rattle me. “You can get this, this thing off me now.” He pulls at his collar in annoyance to show what he means.
We all knew what he meant.
“But,” Dom says, “how are we going to get the other warlock here for Sayah to kill her and find out how to get Scarlet back before she does?”
“How did it come to be that the other warlock came here the last time?” Hattie asks, sitting next to Ollie and looking pensive.
“Bash and Dom were marked,” I say, fidgeting with my fingernails, “they were fighting, and they were each ordered to kill me and Talora. My voice is what made him snap, what got Dom’s mark to activate and want to kill me. I can only assume it has something to do with me.”
“If we try to activate it now,” Everett offers, cracking his knuckles, “by using Bash’s mark, it may not work to summon the next warlock connected with it because it might call the grimspawns here. Since Dom was marked to kill Sayah, the phoenix, that may work. But Bash doesn’t have any connections with Sayah.”
Looking at Bash at that moment, the look in his eyes tells me now is not the time to bring up the dreams, even if it means linking us and maybe working to summon Bash’s warlock.
“Well, I’ll take his mark from him,” Dom says, sitting on the arm of the chair.
“How will you do that, brother?” Bash asks disbelievingly, the tone somewhere between skepticism and curiosity. He sits down on the edge of the lazy boy.
“Kill you,” he says with a smile and a wink at Bash. “Relax,” he says to his mom, whose mouth has fallen open. “Sayah can bring him back. All we need to do is have me stake him with silver, take the mark, have Sayah bring him back, and then I’ll be marked again.”
“Dom—”
“It’s to get her here so you can kill her.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Bash counters, his mouth falling into a stern line.
“Why not? It’s to get the warlock here for Sayah to kill her,” Dom repeats.
“If it doesn’t work, then I don’t know what I’d do.” The seriousness instilled inside of his voice leaves his throat and seems to level the rest of the vampires in confusion.
Collective looks from around the room give dubious glares to Dom, gaping between him and Bash. The two brothers that hate each other.
“Look, I’m the reason that you became a vampire to begin with. I condemned you to vampirism. It’s my fault. And you taking this from me and taking a chance it doesn’t work and condemning your soul again…I don’t know if I can handle that.”
The monster fa?ade in Bash seems to fade. Sensing that his monster mask is crumbling, he fidgets with his fingernails.
“I didn’t think you cared,” Dom sneers.
“He didn’t kill Sadie,” I interject sharply. Bash shoots me a glare that could have ended me. Again. “What? They need to know.”
“Need to know what?” Dom asks, anger raising his voice a few octaves.
“Tell them, Bash. They need to know,” I say again. I know this is the right thing to do.
Keeping it a secret from Dom is wrong, anyway. There’s no easy way to explain it, but they need to know Bash is not as much of a monster as he lets them believe.
He sighs and looks at Dom.
Retelling the tale he’d told me on the lake, I watch in rapt fascination as Dom’s expressions rearrange from confusion to anger to sorrow and back to confusion again. All attention is on Bash as he weaves his tale of Sadie and her suicide and confesses to the dreams, to not killing Sadie, to not being susceptible to Jasantha’s power—all of it.
“I let you all think I was a monster to keep my promise to Sadie,” he concludes, pouring himself a rocks-glass of bourbon.
“And you two have been having these dreams of each other?” Dom asks me, his eyes pinched.
“Yes,” I admit in a hushed voice. “I’ve been dreaming of him before I met you.”
“And what happens in these dreams?” The way he looks at me tells me he’s more concerned with the nature of the dreams rather than their message.
I look to Bash, who shrugs.
“He kisses me, okay? He kisses me, then he bites me. Then I burn.”
“I knew you knew him when he walked in last night. He wasn’t reading your mind when he called you by your nickname.”
Dom is agitated. And it’s pissing me off he’s more concerned about this than of his brother baring his soul to him.
What the fuck is wrong with you! I want to spew.
“Dom,” says Adaline, stealing my thoughts. “I think you’re missing the point here.”
Thank you, Mama Vampire.
“Right!” Hattie says. “I’m more interested in the fact that these phoenixes are being drawn to Bash and what that means.”
“That,” I say, “and Bash never killed Sadie. She killed herself. And she was being conditioned, but what does that mean? And am I Sadie reincarnated?”
“And that my blood arose you,” Dom says, seemingly over the dreams, for now.
“Your what?” Adaline asks, her aquiline eyes beseeching.
“My blood. It dropped onto her ashes, which pulled her back.”
“Well, that’s curious,” murmurs Adaline .
“Mean anything to you yet?”
She shakes her head. “Not that I am aware of, but once we get Bash’s warlock killed, I can look into it.”
“So, my siren song doesn’t work on you?” Jasantha asks almost timidly, as though knowing there’s someone her song doesn’t work on grates on her.
“Nope,” Bash chides, inhaling a sip of his bourbon. “But it has been super fun making you think it has all these years.” He laughs, and her eyes turn purple.
“All right, I’m ready to kill you now,” Dom says, rising from the couch. He walks over and retrieves a silver butter knife from the kitchen.
“Dom,” I say, standing as well.
“You can bring him back, Sayah. And this will be fun. For me.”
Bash shakes his head, and his dark eyes bore into Dom. He sets his glass down and walks over to the table. “All right. Just hoping this works, and she can kill this one too.”
“Ready?” Dom says, holding the butter knife close to his heart.
“Wait!” Adaline says, stepping in between the two of them. “Because Bash dreams of Sayah, wouldn’t that make him connected to her and able to bring the warlock here with that?”
“We can’t trust that,” Dom says. “It’s safer this way; we know she’ll come.”
“Sayah, how exactly did you bring Ollie back?” She asks me.
“I didn’t mean to. A tear fell into his chest wound.”
“It was mixed with your blood,” Dom reminds me.
“Then we need her to bleed a little bit, don’t we,” Jasantha says in a lofty voice she uses when wishing to wound, a devilish grin playing at the corners of her mouth. “I can make that happen.” As she rises from the couch, her eyes turn purple, she holds out her hand and her fingernail grows, fangs protruding as she does. She hisses on her way up to me.
“J, stop,” Everett commands.
The look on her face is that of disappointment. Her eyes return to green, and her fingernails and fangs return to their normal length.
An idea sparks in my mind, and I remember the way it had felt when my own new fangs protruded from my mouth. Wondering if I can simply wish them out or if there’s some more profound force behind it, I say, “Let me try something.”
Feeling a subtle tingle in my gums, the new power that lives in my bones is almost alive with buzzing, like I had swallowed a live wire that’s now lodged in my veins. Beginning to pull at it, I focus on the fangs, squinting my eyes to force them to come to the surface. Feeling the razor-sharp pang of those sharp new teeth extracting from me somewhere, I open my mouth and gasp a little at the pain.
“I got this.” I smile and bite my arm, feeling the terrible crunch. My skin tears open, and the taste of my blood spills into my mouth. “Ready?”
“That’s hot,” Bash says, and Dom is ready to kill him again.
Dom plunges the butter knife into Bash’s heart, and Bash gasps with horror. Bash’s dark crystal blue eyes go from light blue to white; his skin turns white and pale as a sheet, and blood pours from his eyes, his nose, and his mouth. It’s horrific watching Bash die. A piece of me feels like it’s dying with him. Falling to the ground, he writhes in pain for a second, and then he’s still holding the knife that pierces his heart.
Dom extends his arm, anticipating the mark’s appearance. However, the mark on Bash’s neck remains, refusing to vanish. With each passing moment feeling like an eternity, Dom keeps a vigilant gaze on his forearm, hoping for the mark’s manifestation, yet it stubbornly eludes him.
“It happened right away last time,” he says with hesitation.
“Do you think it went somewhere else?” I ask, bleeding still, concerned about Bash and bringing him back.
“I don’t feel it anywhere.” He lifts his shirt, and there’s no mark on his rippling stomach. Lifting his pant legs, there are no new marks, only tattoos.
“Dom?”
“I don’t know. It’s not showing up. ”
“We need to bring him back soon,” Adaline pleads, her face panicked.
“Let him stay dead,” Everett retorts, Adaline’s gaze at him seething.
“Ollie was gone for a while before Sayah saved him,” Hattie replies.
“Just do it, Sayah, save him,” urges Adaline.
“Mom, the mark hasn’t shown up yet.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to risk losing Bash!”
“There,” Dom says, showing them his arm.
The faint crescent moon brand rises on his arm, faintly but enough to give me the green light.
Dom yanks the knife out, and I try to force myself to cry, but my eyes remain dry and unyielding of tears.
Dredging up events of the past few weeks to try and entice the tears as the family watches me, I feel more pressure to cry, and yet the tears will not come to me.
Do they have to be genuine and unbeckoned?
I think of my son, missing him and wanting to return to him.
Is it just the pressure of having to cry on cue?
I think of me having cancer and the baby I had to send back to the heavens to begin chemo.
Deep down, I know the thing that will bring my tears is the memory of my mom, and I don’t want to reopen that raw wound, but the tears aren’t coming on their own.
Closing my eyes, I remember everything about my mama, circulating through memories like a slideshow. Her laugh, the storms, unconditional love, the hard times, my cancer, her health scares, our bond. I think of all of it.
They come.
Tears pool in my eyes and down my face; I wipe the tears away and smudge them into the blood, smearing it over the gaping wound in his chest.
Again, the wound lights up and burns brightly within his skin, but this time, the incandescence scatters throughout his whole body, looking like fireflies that are alive and flittering beneath the surface of his skin. As they flit about, the awful white pallor of his flesh dissipates and returns to the color of apricots. The blood dries up from his nose, mouth, and eyes, and the wound in his chest diminishes and evaporates. Bash wretches forward, eyes alight with that glorious blue, and takes a long, deep, invigorating breath.
“Did it work?” he almost stammers, his voice sounding as though he’d been sucking on cotton.
“Yep,” Dom answers, offering his hand and pulling him up.