Page 116 of This Blood that Bonds Us

My grandmother would have loved Kimberly, and she’d take good care of her favorite ring. There was no one better to carry itand to take on the Calem name that my grandmother had been so proud of.

I thought about it another minute. “I wouldn’t wear it in front of Presley though, unless you want my brother to freak out.”

“You’re right. Ourharmlesssecret. I’ll only wear it in the cabin.”

Kimberly held her hand up to the ceiling while the stars shone beyond the skylight. The opal twinkled in the lamp light. It felt official, and I couldn’t wait for the world to know Kimberly Burns was mine forever.

Fifty-One

Presley

“Are you sure you don’t want to come out?” Mom called through my bedroom door. “We can do whatever you want today . . .”

I’d shut the blinds and turned off the lights, with only the fire illuminating my room. She didn’t know what day it was, or she’d be bedridden too. The day of the eclipse, a.k.a. Doomsday.

“No,” I called, and she sighed and walked toward the kitchen.

We were making a mistake. While Aaron and Kimberly were playing “ring around the dagger,” Zach and Luke were about to be offered on Hell Bitch’s altar. They could be making them slaughter animals for all I knew—the horror.

I tried to tell my brother.

“So you want us to do . . . nothing? The weird witch lady in your dream tells you they’re getting inducted into The Guard, and none of us are going to try to stop it. We’re just pretending it isn’t happening?”

Aaron gritted his teeth.“That’s not what I said.”

“Oh, it sounds like you’re saying we’re going to do nothing, and we still have no idea when we’re going to Ireland, and you want to listen to everything the mystical dagger says.”

I felt like a terribly angry husk of my former self. A dried-up tumbleweed drifting around in the wind hitting people occasionally because it had nothing better to do. There wasn’t anything funny about it.

“That’s not fair.”

“You don’t get it. You don’t care! You never get sad.”

“Because I don’t want to sit around and be sad, I want to fix it. Every minute of every day, that’s all I want to do.”

“Fine, I guess. Don’t talk to me unless you’re telling me it’s time to go.”

I stormed away . . . then apologized a couple hours later because Aaron’s worry was making me sick to my stomach and I couldn’t even enjoy my normal crying movie time. The bond had to have been getting stronger.

Grief and anger were good friends . . . no,best friends. Twin flame soul mates.

I sighed. Rubbing dog Sarah’s ears as she lay at my feet by the fire.

Or maybe it wasn’t our fault.

Maybe it was Zach’s and Luke’s fault. All our suffering was because they couldn’t just say how they were feeling. They couldn’t even write it out on a note or something? Drop it on an etch-a-sketch? Did it all have to be one big secret?

I found the crumpled picture of them next to me and studied the glow of the fire.They did this to me.

I took it in one last time before I held the edge of it next to the fire. Watching it crack and peel was supposed to make me feel better. The secret address was etched into my mind. Hopefully, it would fade before I needed that clue to find them. No more secrets. Secrets did nothing but tear us all apart.

Closing my eyes, I focused on them and the place they were. I imagined the castle, there were likely some obnoxious patterns and furniture, and it would smell old, like a thrift store smell. Then I imagined how they felt. And after a few minutes, the word to describe the growing agony came.

Abandoned.That’s how they felt—no one was coming for them, and they were giving up.

My older brothers.

My heroes.