The Mephisto Mark: The Redemption of Phoenix

by Trinity Faegen

  My brother slumped back in his chair and glowered at me. “You got a better idea?”

  I didn’t. Yet.

  “It’d be different if she was . . . if there wasn’t something wrong with her.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s had some bad shit in her life, but that doesn’t make her wrong. It makes her wounded. And I think bullshitting her, in some stupid misguided attempt to protect her, is the worst possible idea. Jesus, that’s cruel. Protecting her means helping her understand what she is and what her options are, not lying to her.”

  “Are you going to tell her?”

  “Of course not. Jordan should tell her.”

  “Well, she won’t and Key won’t, and no one else is going to tell her and risk getting his ass kicked, including me. I’d have been furious if anyone had interfered with Sasha and me.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Since you’re not taking the lead, it’s got to fall to someone. Key brought her, so he’s ultimately responsible for her.”

  “He’s completely biased on Jordan’s behalf. I think this calls for a war room meeting and everyone should have a say in how to go forward.”

  Jax’s gaze slid away from mine and I already knew what he was going to say. “We just had a meeting, and everyone agreed it’s best to wait to tell her.”

  Before I could tell him I was pissed that they’d met without me, Key appeared just inside the foyer of the suite and focused on Jax. “I need to talk to him alone.”

  Jax got to his feet and said to me before he left, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  I assumed he meant, Don’t tell Mariah she’s Anabo, which only served to prove that his definition of stupid and mine were not the same.

  After Jax was gone, Key wandered around the sitting room, peeked through the drapes, reached out to touch one of the roses, picked up a porcelain figurine and bounced it in his hand.

  “You’re nervous. And you’re bugging the hell out of me. Say what you came to say.”

  He set the figurine down and came to stand behind the chair Jax had just vacated. “I didn’t tell the others, but I think you should know something about Mariah.”

  “Emilian?”

  His shock was obvious. “How do you know?”

  Suddenly feeling way too exposed, I stood and went to the window, opened the drapes and willed off the lights in the sitting room. Watching the cars and pedestrians on Brook Street down below, I told Key about the way Mariah woke up and what I’d learned at Gustav’s.

  When I was done, he said, “I had my suspicions, but Jordan verified it.”

  “Did Mariah tell her?”

  “No, she wouldn’t talk about anything of her life after their parents died, but when that guy busted into her apartment and assaulted her, Jordan says she made no move to fight. She just . . . laid there.”

  The drapery wand my hand was wrapped around snapped in two.

  “After she left Mariah with Mathilda, she came to get me so we could go collect the lost soul. Cried so hard, it took me a while to understand her. She thinks Mariah has insulated herself so completely, she won’t let anything affect her, good or bad. She says it’s not unusual for survivors of sexual abuse to remove themselves from what’s happening to them. They can also be self destructive – cutting, drug abuse, sleeping around. And depression is almost universal.”

  “What does sexual abuse do to an Anabo?”

  Key didn’t answer for a long time. I counted twenty cars before he said, “Evidently they wrap themselves in cotton and avoid any kind of emotion.”

  “Avoiding it doesn’t make it go away. It’s all inside, waiting like a sleeping volcano, isn’t it?”

  “I . . . she . . . yes. To keep it asleep, her mind takes her somewhere else when she perceives a threat or something upsets her. Sasha said she checked out last night after you and Zee got into it. For over twenty minutes, she sat there eating a pear as if nothing at all was happening. Didn’t seem aware of the end of the fight or Deacon cleaning up. When Sasha took her upstairs, she said she needed to become invisible. Sasha asked what she meant and that’s when she came back. Looked embarrassed and said she was just tired.”

  She’d tried to be invisible when she was with Emilian. I wanted to know exactly what he did to her. I wanted to fix it. “Do you think she killed him?”

  “I think she knew when the bed caught fire and did nothing to stop it, or save him. What he did to her is eating away at her, but this is what’s destroying her. I asked M, and he said Emilian wasn’t a lost soul. Just an evil fucker who enjoyed beating up on little girls. When M took him to Hell, he didn’t cry and beg for another chance like most of them do. He shouted all the way. The thing is, Mariah didn’t do it because she hated him, or to get rid of him so he’d stop hurting her. It was to protect Jordan. He was planning to extort money from President Ellis in exchange for keeping quiet and not taking her back.”

  “How did Jordan wind up in an orphanage in the first place?”

  “Mariah took her there. They’d been living with Nadia and Emilian a week when he broke Mariah’s arm. He locked her in a closet for almost a week.” Key continued telling her story and I wanted to pick up the furniture and hurl it through the window. Mariah had been six years old, still practically a baby, and she was wandering the streets of Bucharest with her four-year-old sister. Once Jordan was safe, Mariah went back to Emilian to make sure she stayed safe.

  I came dangerously close to losing my shit. “Mariah told you this when you found her?”

  “Yes. And she never said out loud that Emilian raped her, but I knew as much from what she didn’t say as what she did. I don’t think she’d have told me jack if she hadn’t been so desperate that I not tell Jordan about her.”

  I tapped the broken drapery hardware against my palm. “So why did you tell Jordan? Doesn’t Mariah matter? Why did you take it on yourself to bring her to the mountain? Now, she’s stuck, and she’ll hate it, and not only because I’m an ass or because we’re all sons of Hell or because we spend our days killing people. Don’t you see? She’s had no say in pretty much anything that’s happened in her life. She’s finally making her own calls, then there you are, screwing it up for her. And this is a permanent screw-up, Kyros. You’ve completely altered the trajectory of her life, and she’s sitting in Colorado trying to make the best of being talked into staying a week.”

  “I’m aware it’s an epic clusterfuck, and all my fault, but continuing to apologize and wring my hands isn’t going to fix things. All we can do is move forward.” He came to stand beside me and looked down at the street. “There is a solution to the problem.”

  I broke the wand again. Now I had two pieces of it. “It can’t happen, Key.”

  “It won’t be easy. It was impossible for Jax, and I screw it up with Jordan daily. I have no idea how things will turn out between us. For you, it’s . . . she’s so broken, and you’re so fucked up, but she can’t leave, and you need her. Can’t you try?”

  My anger settled and I huffed out a breath. “It’s not that I don’t want to try, it’s that I can’t. So leave it alone. It’s never going to happen.”

  I expected him to pick at it, but instead, he said quietly, “Then the only other solution is for her to lose Anabo. We could tell her what she is and give her that option. If she went for it, she could go back to Bucharest after Jordan is with us permanently, and Jordan could visit her without worrying about Eryx. If she’s no longer Anabo, she can’t become Mephisto, so he’ll lose the motive to kill her, and Jordan will be out of reach, so he won’t want her for leverage.”

  My insides twisted. She’d be lost to me forever, extinguishing all hope. In spite of everything, even knowing I could never have her, there was still the promise of hope, and I wanted to hold on to it like a fugitive clings to dreams of mercy. But what I wanted didn’t make a damn bit of difference. “She deserves to know, Key.”

  “Then tell her. We all think it should wait, but it’s your call, your decision.�
� He looked up from the street and grasped my shoulder. “I’d do anything to change it, Phoenix. All of it – Jane, Eryx, Mariah.”

  “I know.”

  He disappeared, and I was alone again.

  Chapter 6

  ~~ Mariah ~~

  After Viorica was gone, Mathilda insisted I sleep some more, but I felt like I’d barely drifted off when she woke me and said it was time for breakfast. It was worth having to wake up. So many things to eat, all of them delicious, and I made a glutton of myself once again. Zee watched me take a second helping of Eggs Benedict and laughed. Ty joked that his chickens were going to demand overtime pay for all the eggs they’d need to lay to feed my appetite. I went along with their teasing and didn’t alter my plan to eat as much as I wanted. I even tried kippers, but decided I’d skip those next time.

  When breakfast was done, Sasha took me on a tour of the house, and we started in the library on the ground floor. To a booklover, it was paradise. Two stories tall, with a catwalk that went around the middle and several library ladders, it was elegant and comfortable with deep wingback leather chairs, low cushioned sofas and two desks. Wide, tall windows looked out on snow covered mountains and a glorious blue sky. A portrait of a woman in a Regency era gown hung above the mantel of a huge fireplace. “That’s a Lumina named Mirabelle,” Sasha said. “She’s in Washington right now, pretending to be Key’s aunt.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s going to school with Jordan until it’s time for her to be here, so to make it all look legit, he rented a townhouse and Mirabelle is there as his aunt, and Brody as his brother.”

  Across the grand hall from the library was a living room large enough to host a huge party. I was wondering who would come to a party since humans weren’t allowed, when Sasha said, “The Luminas come sometimes, after a particularly difficult takedown or one that required them to do a lot of extra work. We also have weddings here.”

  That struck me funny. Holy matrimony in a house of Hell. “Who officiates weddings?”

  “A guy named Samuel. He was a Quaker.”

  “What is he now?”

  She looked as if the question surprised her. “A Lumina.”

  “How many Luminas are there?”

  “One hundred twenty two. In a couple of months, it’ll be one hundred twenty three. Cora and Miguel are expecting.”

  “Luminas have babies?”

  “It’s rare because they have to get a specific dispensation, but yes, for sure.”

  I wondered who gave them dispensation – God, or the Mephisto? What a strange place this was.

  Over the next several hours, I saw the rest of the house. It was enormous, with winding corridors, a turret, and multiple staircases; beautiful, with priceless artwork and lovely antiques; a little spooky, with twenty unoccupied bedrooms on the third floor. I didn’t ask, but I assumed they were for children, when and if the brothers had any. Did they have to get dispensation?

  We bypassed the second floor, where there were six suites. For six brothers. The fourth floor was a finished attic, most of which held lots of shelves with storage boxes neatly lined along them, random pieces of furniture, and old trunks from back in the day. A smaller area was enclosed as Sasha’s studio. Two skylights and three windows bathed the room in light.

  “I’ve always loved art,” she told me, “and planned to study restoration. There’s a Lumina named Andres who’s a very accomplished artist. We passed several of his pieces in the hallways, and he painted the portrait of Mirabelle in the library. He’s been teaching me different techniques for my own work, and he lets me help clean the artwork in the house.”

  I didn’t comment on what she said, that she’d had to give up her plans in order to be here. I felt bad for her, but she seemed okay with it, so who was I to judge? I had plans, and maybe they were too big and unreachable, but I was determined to try. I looked around the studio and saw hundreds of pencil sketches and a dozen half-finished oils – all of them with the same subject. “Are you getting Jax just right before you move on to something else?”

  She laughed. “Andres says I have art ADD, so he’s making me finish Jax before I can start anything new.”

  “I took an art class in school once. My teacher told me to stick to literature.”

  “It’s very relaxing. Maybe I could teach you? We could come up tomorrow morning.”

  “That’d be nice, thank you.” I would be lousy at it, but it was a way to pass the time until Viorica came to visit.

  Lunch was yet another smorgasbord of deliciousness. When we were almost done, the cook, Hans, came out of the kitchen to meet me. He was short and stocky with blond hair, blue eyes and spoke German. He wore an army uniform I was certain was from World War I, and I wondered what his story was, but didn’t ask. He seemed pleased by my praise of his cooking, and said, “If you’d like to have something Romanian, you have only to ask.”

  Intrigued all over again by my ability to understand a language I didn’t know, I thanked him and said, “I’m sure you’d do Romanian food a favor, but it’s enjoyable for me to try new things.”

  He smiled and sketched a short bow before he went back to the kitchen.

  Sasha had picked up on my love of the library, and suggested we spend the afternoon reading, but there weren’t any titles in Romanian. “No worries,” she said. “Tell me what you’d like to read.”

  I’d seen a translated version of a Stephen King novel in a bookstore a few weeks earlier. I mentioned the title and she said, “I’ll be right back,” then disappeared.

  I wandered around and looked at the books, some of them very old, some leather-bound, some barely published, they were so new. I wished I could read English. I could stay here forever and still not read all of them. Reading was my favorite thing to do. I loved to dive headfirst into a book and live someone else’s life for a little while, and it made no difference if their life was fiction, or real. Novels, history, biographies – I read anything and everything. The Bucharest public library, with its quiet stacks and tucked away chairs, was where I usually spent my days off. I couldn’t imagine living here, with this library right in my own home. It would be glorious.

  Barely ten minutes after she’d left, Sasha returned, looking very pleased, the King novel in her hand. “I’m terrible at transporting,” she said. “On takedowns, I usually wind up in the wrong place and Phoenix has to come get me to take me to the right place. But just now, I went exactly where I wanted to go.”

  “It’s a strange thing to do.”

  “Very strange.” She grinned at me. “But awesome.”

  After she handed the book to me, she took a seat on one of the wingback chairs by the fireplace, which now had a crackling fire, courtesy of Deacon. Her book, I noticed, was a paperback with a picture of a woman in a Victorian dress, which was coming off of her shoulder, and a guy standing behind her in a pirate shirt. “What is that book?”

  “A romance novel. Don’t tell the guys. They’ll give me grief and strike copy-cat poses and tell me all the reasons this is an entirely inaccurate portrayal of how it was in the olden days.”

  “Is it?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care.” She slipped off her boots, curled her legs beneath her in the chair, and settled back to read. “It’s marvelous and racy, and I’m dying to find out if the earl killed his first wife.”

  “Is he the guy in the pirate shirt?”

  “No, the earl is the heroine’s husband, and he’s one spooky dude. The guy in the pirate shirt was accused of killing the wife, so he went on the run and masquerades as a thief, but really he’s the rightful earl, and he’s trying to out the bad guy as a murderer so he can clear his name and reclaim his title.”

  “How do you know so much about aristocratic titles?”

  “From romance novels.” She looked over the top of the book at me. “You want me to read it to you? I can translate as I go.”

  I wanted it more than I wanted to know what was for dinner.

&nb
sp; Which is how I ‘read’ my first romance novel.

  ***

  Hours later, Sasha was almost to the very end. Other than a quick bathroom break and Mathilda delivering tea at mid-afternoon, we’d remained in our chairs while Sasha read and I stared up at Mirabelle and listened, completely enraptured.

  The bad earl had been executed for murdering his first wife. The rightful earl was back in society’s good graces, and he proposed to the heroine. I wanted her to say, maybe later, and retire to the country to grow her favorite roses and ride her beloved horse and have the vicar over for tea. She had a lovely house where she could do all of that. But she didn’t. She said yes, and the earl carried her off to bed.

  Sasha didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed when she read that part. I’m certain I was as red as a beet. On the other hand, it was absolutely fascinating, and I was so intrigued, I decided I’d find romance novels in Romanian as soon as I was back in Bucharest. The idea of sex as something wonderful was completely foreign to me and I wondered if the author of that book made it up like she’d used inaccurate history. Sex was scary and horrible and painful. I couldn’t in my wildest imagination consider it something a woman would ever want. I’d had friends in school who I’m certain had sex – I knew because they got pregnant – but I assumed they’d been forced into it. I assumed all women were forced or coerced, or they suffered through it to make babies, or ensure they received something in return, like food, or a roof over their head, or a husband, or money, or even just a steady boyfriend.

  But what if I was wrong?

  I wished I knew Sasha better. She seemed okay with reading about it. Was she okay with having it with Jax? But I didn’t know her well at all, and even if I did, I didn’t think I could ask. I’d have a hard time talking about it without disturbing certain boxes, and that was to be avoided. Always.