41. A Fathomless Choice
41
A FATHOMLESS CHOICE
SAYAH
H eavy is the unendurable assignment I have been tasked with to choose.
Turning to walk back to the fodder, approaching them is slow and rigorous, my choices heavily weighing me down.
Walking up to Adaline, there’s a deep anguish in her eyes, but one that tells me that she understands what my choice must be to keep my child safe.
Dom’s eyes have returned to normal, and he and Bash’s face have stern looks, telling the tale that they’d heard the whole thing.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“You give him the artifact,” Dom surmises, his posture rigid. “There’s no other way to save Scarlet.”
“And what of the marks?”
“I’ll take the activated mark,” Dom answers quickly.
“No,” Bash interposes, his voice dredging smoothly through me. “Sayah, choose me. I already condemned my brother’s soul once; I’ll not do that again.”
“What if I don’t want to condemn yours?” Dom asks grudgingly, shoving him on the shoulder.
“You guys spent your lifetime hating each other, and now, when time is of the essence, you two can’t decide which one of you wants to be condemned?” Everett asks harshly.
“Sayah, choose me, okay? Let me do this for my brother.” Bash’s eyes bore into mine, the supplication in them deciding me. “C’mon, I’m used to the dark. I’ll run it. Choose me.”
As Dom has said, Bash is always one befitting of the darkness. He thrives in it; it’s becoming on him. Dom belongs to the light more than Bash does. He’s the good one.
It makes sense to me.
And thus, the psychic’s words never rang truer in my mind : “When the time comes, you must choose which love you want. The love that ends you. Or the love that revives you.”
Although I didn’t have any time with Bash besides my dreams and a few brief moments on the shore, I still have a love for him I don’t quite understand yet.
Though it’s nothing like the love I have for Dom.
He has made me feel safe and loved, and like I’m somebody when I’d been on the narrow edge of darkness after losing my parents.
I will choose Dom.
I nod.
“Sayah, no!” Dom says as Adaline presses the artifact into my hand. “Wait Sayah, don’t . . .”
“J, do your thing,” Everett says, and Jasantha’s eyes turn purple.
“No, Jasantha, don’t!” Dom begs.
Tears spill down my face as I walk back toward the warlock.
“Dominic, calm,” comes Jasantha’s capricious voice behind me, lulling Dom to let me do this.
As I walk by Bash, his lucent blue eyes tell me it’s all right.
The warlock, his garish eyes aglow with red, awaits me patiently.
“Have you made your choice then, phoenix?”
I nod. “Where is Scarlet?”
“I will tell you the location,” he begins.
“No. Bring her here now. I will not give you the artifact or make my choice until she is here.”
“Very well,” he intones, his aura smoking around him.
Tilting his head back, he spreads his arms and mumbles idioms that do not register in my vernacular. A few seconds later, dozens of wings flapping echo throughout the dark space. From the fireplace, smoke-like crows enter, swirling around the ground and rising upward like a dark inverted tornado. Slowly, Scarlet’s body appears, from toe to hip to head.
The gaunt appearance of Scarlet is unnerving. She’s bloody and beaten, chunks of flesh missing from her arms and legs that aren’t healing. Her skin is almost gray.
Her appearance doesn’t make sense for only being gone a few hours at most.
Adaline glances over her quickly, pulling up her chin to check her eyes, and nods at me to finish the deal.
The warlock holds his hand, and I place the artifact within it.
“And your choice?”
“Dom to have the inactivated mark. Bash to have the other.”
“Your wish is my command.” And the grin he gives me is so awful; his teeth are black save for one gold tooth, but the evil that emits from it freezes my blood.
Evaporating, pieces, and parts of him become those black smoke crows, each flying up and out of the fireplace until he is gone.
For a moment, I stand there, staring into the darkness, contemplating what I’d done. Although I know nothing of the phoenix blessing bestowed upon me, I’m sure that condemning one man’s soul to darkness is not part of it.
The shaking in my arms and legs makes it impossible to stand. I’m so lost as to what I’m supposed to do now.
Dom is not marked—or it’s inactivated—and that’s the only good thing that’s happened. But being the phoenix means I’m supposed to restore the balance, and I had thought that meant killing the warlocks who spell the grimspawns.
I can’t turn to anyone and ask the mounting questions in my mind.
Except for my aunts.
Hilda and Maggie have to know something, or at least have a way to figure out what my purpose is with this whole new life.
When I turn back around, something’s not right.
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.
Nodding, I lift my arm. “Is his mark on you yet?”
Rolling up his sleeve, I watch for it to change.
Slowly, the embossed mark grows darker and darker, the mark on Bash’s neck going faint.
Dom pulls the stake out and stows it again in the back of his pants. I bite into my arm, shed the tears that had already welled up in my eyes, and let it fall into Bash’s wound.
The same light swims up and down him before he wretches again. His eyes shoot open, the white darkens to blue, and he heaves a heavy air intake.
He sits straight up and grabs Dom by the collar of his shirt. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I’m saving your disgustingly dark soul,” he shouts back and wrenches himself free of the grip. “Now get up. Let’s go see if our sister is still alive.”
“We need to put this one in a cell,” adds Everett, grabbing the thrashing fake Scarlet from Adaline.
“On it,” Ollie says, helping Everett maneuver the mindless grimspawn who wears Scarlet’s face toward one of the cells.
A rushing sound fills my ears, and my vision turns bright white. I see my aunts in a dark room, lit only by candlelight. Maggie is leaning into the flame; it dances beneath her breath.
Sayah . . .
It’s a gentle rush of a whisper that prickles and my hairs stand on end.
The aunts are summoning me.
This may be part of my new abilities.
“While you do that,” I say as my vision returns to normal, “I need to make a phone call.”
“Who are you going to call?” Dom asks, helping Bash up from the floor.
“I have to call my aunts. They are summoning me, and I feel that they know something.”
“Summoning you?” His brows furrow in curiosity.
“Yes. I had a vision just now.”
“Okay,” he states simply, as though he already knew this is the new me, an all-knowing and vision-having phoenix.
Dom nods and comes to me, kissing me swiftly before heading back to the spell room.
Hearing him say that he’s confident in me to find a way to break this curse, to save my son’s soul in the interim, and to kill the warlocks makes me feel a little better, even though I’m still littered with that self-doubt I carried with me before my fire.
Now, though, a voice that’s louder than my doubt is fighting against it, growing louder with every second.
Still, what if, when we locate Scarlet, we’ll encounter more grims and warlocks to get me, and I’m unable to kill them, even though I’m the only thing I know of that can?
Sayah! The voice shouts at me now. You are the phoenix! You are the most powerful being on Earth!
It will still take a while to get used to this heavy new burden I carry.
Blindly, I walk through the dungeon by them all without saying a thing, eyeing the fake Scarlet in the cell Ollie and Everett had thrown her in, and float up the stairs, through the spell room, into the greenhouse, and out the door to the lake.
Pulling out my phone—which I’m surprised is not shattered or burned from all the shit I’ve been through—I sit on the bench down by the boat dock.
Finding my aunt’s contact, I take a deep breath and hit call.
It rings three times.
“Sayah?” answers Hilda’s voice.
“Hi, Aunt Hilda.”
“Sayah, we were trying something out to summon you. Did you get our message?”
My aunts and their powers are still baffling to me. “I did. You have no idea what the hell happened. I don’t know where to begin.”
“If it’s about the vampire you’ve been hanging out with, we already know.”
My heart drops. “What? How?”
“You don’t know many things about us, Sayah, including that we’ve known our fair share of vampires. Maggie was brokenhearted by one. But that’s neither here nor there. Just know that we wear Lapis Lazuli dipped in Nightshade. It makes it impossible to be veilweaved by vampires. ”
“So, you remember the whole thing with Dad and Dom?”
“We do.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t?—”
“Know how to tell us? We know. What I want to know is what has happened now?”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Start at the beginning.”
I spill the entire story to Hilda, leaving nothing out. Right up until the part that I’m at now.
“I don’t know what the hell to do, Aunt Hilda,” I sob, kicking a rock into the lake. “I am at a loss.”
“Sayah, listen to me. I need you and Dom and Bash to get on a plane and arrive soon. There is something about the marks we need to figure out. It’s best to have them both here if we can break it.”
“Why? What do you know?”
“We’ll go over it all when you get here. I also may know of a way to get someone else to help.”
“Who?”
“Your mom.”
My breath catches in my throat, and my blood drains from my limbs. “How?”
“Maggie and I have been dipping into our own magick since we came across your vampire. There are things in Grandma’s grimoires, and we found a way to channel her. She has some things she needs to say to you, Sayah, and you have to come here for us to do it. We need the blood knot, which is a generational knot. We’ve gathered bits and pieces of what she’s been trying to tell us, but we need you here to finish it.”
“I’m coming as soon as I can.”
“Let us know when you land. We’ll come get you.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“I love you too, sweetie. Bye-bye.”
“Bye.” I hang up and about drop the phone.
My aunts found a way to channel my mom? And there are things Mama needs to tell me ?
I’m both elated and saddened at the same time.
There have been so many times that I’d wanted my mother to come to me in a dream or as a ghost or something, anything, to give me advice or tell me what I should do or say, the list goes on and on.
Stowing my phone in my back pocket, I get up and run back into the greenhouse and into the spell room.
They’re hovering over a table with a map on it, whispering words of magick to a drop of blood that has coagulated on top of it.
“Dom!” I call.
Seeing my face in utter shock and elation, he peels his eyes away from the map and looks up at me.
“Yeah? Is everything okay?”
“We have to go to Washington. Right now.”
“Now? Why?”
“My aunts have been doing magick and were able to channel my mom. They said she has a message for me but they need me to complete the knot. They want you, me, and Bash on a plane right now.”
“All right,” Bash says calmly from the table he sits at. “Looks like we’re going to Washington.”
“Did you guys figure out if Scarlet is alive?” I ask, going over to look at the map.
“She is, but barely,” Dom answers, pointing to where the blood traveled.
“Do you think your aunts will know how to save her?” Adaline asks, the desperate plea in her eyes softening her complex Viking-like features.
“I hope so,” I say. “In the meantime, try to do the research and find another artifact. There has to be another one like it in the world. Hattie, can you do what you did to find the last one?”
Hattie nods, her face finally softer toward me—just a smidge. “I can try.”
“All right, we need to go pack,” Dom says, turning to leave.
“I’ll grab my shit too,” Bash says, standing. “It’s with Talora’s in…” He hesitates on the mention of her name .
She is dead.
And only a little has been said about it due to all the events of the past evening.
I can see now the grief creep into his handsome features; the sadness injures the hard lines of his face, and his blue eyes nearly shatter.
“We’ll take care of it, son,” Adaline speaks softly.
Bash nods and looks away, but not before I’d seen a glimmer of a tear resting in his eyes.
“Why do all three of you need to go?” Hattie asks flippantly, unmerited annoyance dripping in her tone.
“Because they were both marked,” I say. “My aunts said there is something about the marks we need to figure out. It’s best to have them both there if we can break it. But you two can continue to try as well. The more people we have working on it, the better the chances of bringing Scarlet home, saving Bash and Dom, and getting my son out of this story altogether.”
“We will, Sayah,” Adaline says, and for once, her eyes are lighter toward me, a genuine affinity for the witch who saved her sons.
Dom grabs my hand, tugs me away from the spell room, and holds it up the stairs.
As we’re packing, his green eyes collide with mine a few times, and the anguish now harbored there has worsened, as bad as I’ve ever seen it.
At times, I’d seen the anguish and hopelessness linger about in his soul; the whole thought of being a vampire for him was something he hated. But now there’s more to it than that. Now, there’s the fact that his existence has brought me here to this precipice, and he blames himself for all the pain I’m in. The peace I’d brought him is now fragile.
I can sense it.
“I’m so sorry, Sayah,” he says, and that anguish shatters his gaze.
Something twists inside me at the sight of him so sad. “Please don’t apologize, Dom. There’s no reason for you to be sorry.”
I drop the clothes into the suitcase and walk over to him, sitting on the edge of the bed front of him.
His eyes are bleak and sightless. “It’s my fault you’re in this mess. And poor Gauge.”
“I will dismantle the world before I let anything happen to him,” I say savagely. “And it’s not your fault I’m in this mess. This is, somehow or another, my destiny. You led me to it.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“I know. But despite all that is going wrong right now, I feel that everything will be okay.”
“We have no idea how much time we have until my mark starts making me do things, Sayah. I’m afraid of what I might do to you.”
“I’m not.” I catch his eyes and hold them, trying to get him back from the ledge on which he walked out. “Dom, I’m not.”
He nods, and I know he doesn’t believe me. There’s a darkness in him that lingers harder than before, and I will have to fight like hell to keep him from submerging himself within it.
I’ll have to get Bash to help me with that, too.
“Dom, we’re going to find a way to save you. I’m going to find a way to save you. To save you and Bash and my son, especially my son, and Scarlet. And I’ll also find a way to kill those warlocks. Every. Single. One of them.”
The fire in my bones stirs when I think, firstly, of Gauge and then of all the others, I’m going to save. The inferno that now lives in me that became alight when I became the phoenix has mixed with the storm that’d already made a home in me. The hurricane, mixed with a volcano, surges up and crashes into me and devours all the doubt that had seeped in when Mederio threatened my son. I’m going to save them all.
And be that savior of the damned.
“I believe you, Sayah,” he whispers, putting his hands on either side of my face, caressing my cheek with his thumbs, “and I love you for it. But if there comes a time when I threaten you again, like I did earlier, I need you to kill me, okay?”
I’m not saying anything to this; I wonder if he’s a threat to me now? I still have no idea what I am nor what would happen should any creature of the dark try and kill me.
“Sayah?” he asks, his eyes questioning where I’d gone.
“Yes, I will.”
“I mean it. Earlier, when Mederio came to me in my head, told me his name and took over, I had no power over myself. He wanted you dead, and that is what I was veilweaved to do. From what he said earlier, I’ll be myself but have to do his bidding; I imagine that’s exactly what it’ll be like. And I don’t know who he’s going to want dead and when. If we get to Washington and I threaten your aunts or anyone you love, take this.” He pulls out the stake he had driven into Bash and puts it in my hands. “And drive it through my heart. I need you to promise me you will; I’ll not be able to live with myself knowing I hurt you or anyone you love.”
Reluctantly, I take the stake. “I will.”
“Promise me?”
“I promise.”
“Thank you.”
“Now we have to figure out how you’re gonna get that through airport security.”
I laugh, and it feels good to have some light-hearted feelings bubbling up inside me in what seems like a long time. The dissolution of sadness abating even a fraction is calming.
“I’m sure they won’t think anything of it if I put it in my suitcase. It’s not metal. They’ll think it’s some sort of?—”
“Some sort of what?” The devious smile he gives me tells me he knows exactly what I’m thinking.
“Sex object,” I breathe, laughing at the way it feels to say it.
“Oh, if only we had time to explore that idea,” he says, falling into me and kissing my neck, jawline, and lips.
Heat engulfs me and I kiss him back passionately, suddenly wondering if the throes of passion would be different now that I’m of the fire.
There’s the sound of Bash clearing his throat at the door.
Dom slips off me sideways and eyes him .
“Yes?” he asks in a semi-mocked tone.
“I have a question for Sayah.”
“Yes?” I ask more nicely.
“Ollie and I were thinking—wondering, really—if you could bring both of us back, wouldn’t you be able to bring back Talora and Allison?”
I look to Dom questioningly. “I don’t see why not?”
“They’ve been dead a lot longer than you two were,” Dom offers, “but it’s worth a try for them, I’m sure.”
“We would be more than appreciative if you brought our girlfriends back from the dead,” Bash sneers.
“Sure. I can try.”
I rise from the bed and follow Bash back down the stairs to where Talora and Allison are.
The house is in complete disarray. Boughs are splintered, glass is shattered, and piles of ash where the grims burned lay savagely at our feet. Remnants of a battle.
Ollie’s crouched over Allison, stroking her face, tears falling from his eyes. When he looks up at me approaching, there’s a slight hope in his eyes, and I’m hoping too that I can revive their girls.
Arriving at Talora’s lifeless body, her skin a pale white, I kneel down to her and look for her wounds. Realizing she had been drained of blood by two puncture wounds in her neck, I summon the tears again. Then, biting into my arm, which had healed from last time, I wipe the tear from my eye, drag it through the new blood on my arm, and smudge the two holes with the mixture.
Waiting for what seems like minutes, Bash has that hopeful look in his eye that his woman would wretch and come back to life as he had.
But nothing happens.
“Why isn’t it working?” he asks desperately.
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I did the same thing for the two of you.”
“Maybe she’s been gone too long,” says Dom consolingly.
“But Ollie was gone for a while too, and she still got him to rise.”
“I don’t know, Bash. I’m sorry. ”
“Please try it on, Allison,” Bash asks resignedly, so dejected my heart breaks for him.
Slowly walking over to Allison, I do the same thing.
Allison doesn’t stir, either.
Why could I save two male Vampires and not two female ones? Does it have anything to do with gender or something more profound?
Feeling that these are questions that my aunts may know, I push them down within me, wishing we could teleport to Washington.
Does Vampire power work like that?