Rise of a Phoenix

by Shannon Mayer

“We could burn the place down,” I said, frowning, but I already knew it wasn’t the right answer. But searching it from top to bottom would be dangerous and time consuming.

  Killian shook his head. “Messy, and it would take time and make it difficult to find the ring.”

  I agreed, noting that he had not once told me that the ring might not be there. Why did this man of all the men I knew, and of all the times in my life, have to be so damn perfect?

  I will help you, Martin said softly. This is why I am here with you. Or at least part of it.

  “If I could high-five you, Martin, I would,” I said. Killian lifted an eyebrow. “Martin says he can help us find the ring.”

  The house loomed as if it wanted us to come in.

  “Let’s get this done.” I pulled Dinah free and held her at my side.

  We stood at the front door which stood on an angle, the hinges partially ripped off. I touched the door, bent and sniffed at the handle. The smell of abnormal was strong, and it was layered with death and blood.

  “Magelores,” I said softly. “There is at least one here, and something else I don’t recognize.”

  Dinah snarled in my hand. I turned and kissed Killian, tugging him hard to me, biting at his lower lip which drew a rumble from him. His one hand snaked around my lower back, the other up to cup the back of my head. As good and blood pumping as the kiss was, this was not truly about a kiss. I didn’t have to tell him what I wanted from him.

  His electricity flowed over me and I absorbed it easier than before, not fighting it, but allowing it to course through me, gathering it to me and letting it pool in that spot in my lower back it seemed to like so much.

  His mouth was hot on mine, insistent when I moved to pull away. I kissed him deeper, let myself sink into the moment for just a flash, a moment to remind myself that besides Bear, there was another prize waiting for me at the end of this. He let me go, his eyes glittering with desire.

  “Into the lion’s den,” he said.

  I snorted softly. “I’d prefer a lion’s den to this shit.”

  He grinned and I grinned back. Other people would call this insane, but I’d never had so much connection to anyone in my life. Which in and of itself worried me because there was still that niggling feeling at the back of my head that told me death was waiting on me to make a mistake.

  Death had my coordinates and the bastard was trying to take me and those I loved in one fell swoop.

  “Abe, bewache.” I pointed him to the stairs, guarding our way in and out. He plunked his butt down and watched me with trusting eyes.

  With Dinah raised in my left hand, I pushed the door out of my way with the other. The floorboards beneath my feet creaked as I stepped through into the dim foyer of the mansion. There was a wide staircase in front of me that branched off to either side about ten steps up at a landing. Below each branch of the staircases the shadows seemed darker, as if they were being held there. Logically, I knew there should be doors in those shadows.

  “Martin?”

  There was a whisper of cold around my face and left side. Wait, I will look.

  “We don’t have time to wait. You go down, we’ll go up.” I didn’t look back at Killian but started toward the stairs. Because if there was a ruby ring, it would be somewhere Vivian considered safe. Not in a kitchen or servant’s quarters but in a bedroom, in a closet, somewhere hard to find. A hidden safe, something like that.

  I made my way up the stairs and took a slow breath. The smell of abnormals was stronger now, which in itself was odd. The weaker the abnormal, the stronger they smelled. But Magelores were not weak in any sense of the word. What the fuck was going on here?

  I waited for Killian to reach me and then leaned in to whisper in his ear. “They’re setting us up.”

  His eyebrow twitched. “Plan?”

  Vivian, the previous owner of the home and powerhouse Magelore, had nearly killed me. Which meant two Magelores coming for us was not a good thing no matter how I looked at it. “Time to call them out.”

  I did a slow turn on the landing of the stairs. “I know you’re here. I know you want to chitchat. So, either come the fuck out and talk or I’ll just burn the house down and wait for you to flee so I can kill you then. Your choice.”

  Laughter echoed through the walls and a cold wind shot through me as if ice water had been dashed over my head, far colder than the breeze that came with Martin. The hairs on my arms stood on end and seemed to freeze, and my skin rippled with apprehension.

  “Killian?”

  “Fucked if I know.” He put his back to mine, and the heat of his body was welcome as the air around us began to frost, puffs of steam rolling from my mouth. The air was so cold that the inside of my nose began to tingle as the hairs and skin froze. Yeah, this was not Martin.

  I reached back to Killian with my free hand. “Hang on.”

  Without another word, I called up my fire and drew it forward. The flames rippled outward over my body and I wrapped their warmth around the both of us. At the very edge of my fire the ice cracked and snapped as if it was pissed that it couldn’t get at us.

  “Is this a Magelore trick?” I blinked as the ice in my hair melted and trickled down my face.

  Killian tightened his hand on mine. “Look, top of the stairs both sides.”

  I looked to my right and saw something ghosting toward us. And I mean literally ghosting. Martin at least was nothing but a fuzzy indistinct blob when I did see him.

  Not this ghost. The person floated along as if there were no connection to his feet, and it was definitely a male. The short-cropped hair, the wider shoulders, the angled jaw. Even if that jaw hung at a strange angle. Even if there was an arm missing from the rest of the body.

  Even if the body and face were semi-transparent, gray with the age of death and eyes that ran with a black darkness that was nothing but an empty void.

  “Fuck.” I growled the word, my nerves reacting to the sight even though we were within the confines of my fire. The ghost—because fuck me sideways, there was no other word for him—floated down the stairs, black eyes empty of any sort of emotion.

  “I’ve got a male on my side,” I said.

  “Female on mine,” Killian said.

  I didn’t dare look away from the ghost in front of me for the simple reason that if I did, I suspected he would rush me. And I wasn’t 100 percent sure my fire would stop him.

  There was no thought, I just tightened my hold on Killian. I knew how to fight monsters, I knew how to fight mobsters. But I was no ghost killer. “Martin, some help here would be great.”

  There was no answer from our friendly ghost. Damn it.

  The male stared at me and then tipped his head to one side so far that his face touched his shoulder.

  “Where is the ring?” I asked the only question that mattered. “It’s mine by birthright.”

  Where the hell had that come from? I tried not to think too much about what I was saying, letting the words come as they would.

  The ghost lifted his head and it wobbled as if it sat on a broken spine. The edges of my flame tightened around us as the cold encroached. Sweat dripped down the sides of my face.

  “How long can you hold this up?” Killian asked softly.

  I swallowed hard. “Long as I have to.”

  “She’s at the edge of the fire,” he said. “I think she’s going to try and come through.”

  A wave of fear I’d never known crashed over me so strong, I was sure it wasn’t even my own. More like I was feeling what others had felt when they stood here, when they’d faced these monsters.

  There were so many things wrong with this, but I didn’t know how to stop any of it.

  I didn’t know how we were going to find the ruby ring with them on top of us like this either.

  “Shit!” Killian snarled, and I twisted around in time to see a transparent gray-skinned woman wrap her hands around his head.

  Electricity arced all over him, sliding through h
er, but it did nothing. At least, as far as I could see, because the electricity hit me and sent me flying up the stairs and over the head of the male ghost. His head swiveled around ninety degrees to watch me fall.

  I landed hard, bounced once and then was up and moving. “Killian, I’m going in! You get outside!”

  “No! It’s a trap!” he yelled, but I was already moving. I remembered roughly where Vivian’s room was, the place she’d taken Simon to fuck and feed on what seemed like a lifetime ago. A feeding room would be a place of safety for a Magelore, a place her victims would be too out of it to do any snooping.

  I bolted up the last few stairs as whisper of ice cold wrapped around my ankles and tugged at me. The sensation sent me to my knees at the top of the stairs and I couldn’t help but turn and look back.

  The ghost smiled at me, showing a mouthful of sharpened teeth inside a black hole. The ghost of a Magelore . . . a truly undead Magelore. That explained some of their power, but it didn’t make me feel any better. “Martin, little help!”

  Where was he? He’d said he was here for this moment, then why wasn’t he actually here?!

  I scrambled forward, using a burst of fire on my lower legs to burn off the sensation around my ankles.

  With a heave, I was up and stumbling forward, racing down the length of the catwalk that wrapped around the foyer entrance. There was a door partially open near the end of the walkway and I could see the color of the room. The yellow and reds that had been in Vivian’s feeding room.

  I put everything I could into picking up speed, into getting to that door and slamming it behind me. Part of my brain tried to calm me, to tell me that ghosts couldn’t hurt you. Sure, they could scare the shit out of you, they could haunt you if they wanted, but they couldn’t hurt you.

  Except I could feel the ice cold burn around my ankles, and the sensation of my lungs slowly freezing as I breathed in the arctic air that the dead Magelore had produced. These were not normal ghosts in any sense of the word—these were the souls of powerful abnormals whose strength seemed not to have diminished in death.

  Just what we needed.

  I was two steps from the door and I reached my hand out to push it open, to leap through.

  The male Magelore flashed in front of me and I fell through his body. If I thought the cold was bad before, it was nothing to the sensation that ripped through me now. Daggers made of icicles, of sharp pain, sent me tumbling. Only it wasn’t just my body that tumbled down but my mind too.

  I saw the first kill I made, saw the horror in my mind as I took the life of an abnormal as he begged for mercy. So many of my kills had been male abnormals. I saw each of them flash through me, one right after another, and I felt my horror lessen as each death happened. I could see how my heart hardened, how my conscience allowed me to do the unthinkable because it meant I was safe; I was surviving. There was nothing I could do about the images, nothing I could do to stop them, not even when I got to the very last kill I made for Romano.

  My mark was simple, a thug name Hector who thought he was going to start his own mob and step in on my father’s turf. He’d gathered a group of drug addicts who wanted funds for their various addictions and had handed them weapons. The result was that a lot of people were dying, a few which had been my father’s underlings. To be clear, my father was not protecting lives, just protecting his assets.

  Hector had no idea what he’d put his foot in.

  I snorted to myself. “Fool.”

  I sat on the top of an apartment building, the flat roof giving me a perfect position to see my mark as he approached. The hum of the city flowed through me like a living thing, the lights and sirens, the blasts of a multitude of horns like some sort of awkward symphony. The noise might have been just noise to some people, but the city spoke to me in its own way.

  A dark blue sedan pulled up to the curb and I settled into position. Much as I was good at the up close and personal killings, this would be my last for my father and I knew it. And for some reason, I didn’t want to see Hector’s eyes as he realized who’d come for him. There was no need. There would be no one for him to tell as he’d be dead. Besides, I’d placed the note my father had written on Hector’s bed. The note that warned everyone that the Phoenix would come for them if they crossed Romano.

  I let out a slow breath. “Not much longer, Father. Not much longer will you use me as a tool.”

  The scope pressed into the edges around my eye as I sighted down it. Eleanor wriggled in her holster. “You think you can really get away from Romano?”

  “I have to,” I said softly, something I wouldn’t have said to anyone else. “I don’t want this anymore. He doesn’t need me. He has his three guardians.”

  Eleanor snorted as if she knew I was stating only the obvious. The deep-down part was that the death and killing was too easy now. The last vestige of my conscience had clawed its way upward and said now was the time. If I ever wanted to be free of this world, to escape my life and all that had been forced on me, I had to do it now or I would never leave.

  “I want out, Eleanor,” I said as I adjusted my seat again. Hector was taking his time in the sedan. Waiting was the hard part, pulling the trigger was not.

  “You’re good at this, though.” She didn’t sound so certain. “And what will happen to us?”

  To us. To her and Dinah. I shrugged. “I didn’t say I’d be putting you two down.”

  There was a pair of relieved sighs that made me smile. My mentor Zee thought I put too much stock in the pair of sentient guns, but the reality was they were the closest thing to friends I had. Which was a sad fact in and of itself.

  The door of the sedan opened and a man who was not Hector stepped out of the driver’s side. He moved around the car, his head swiveling as if he could see the danger before it killed his boss. But he didn’t look up to the rooftops. Rookie mistake.

  He opened the back door of the car and Hector rose out of the backseat. There was a flash of his blond hair and then his head was in line with his driver’s.

  “Two for one,” I whispered as I squeezed the trigger of the long-range rifle. A report of the gun and I watched through the scope as the back of the driver’s head exploded and he fell to the left away from the car. With him gone, I could see Hector as he swayed on his feet, somehow still standing upright, clutching not his chest, but what he held in his arms.

  I couldn’t stop the gasp that escaped me or the words as he twisted to one side. “God, no.”

  In his arms, he held his son, a child I knew from my research had just turned six . . . blond like his father; the blood on the back of his head was as bright as if I stood there in front of him. They went down then after standing for what seemed like an eternity.

  And I sat there, shock slamming through me in waves. I’d killed a child. A little boy who had no reason to die.

  I didn’t even pack my things, I left them there on the rooftop. Dinah and Eleanor tried to get me to tell them what had happened but I couldn’t say it, not even to them. Not later to Zee.

  But my father knew. Of course he did, and he crowed it from the rooftops, praising me in front of his men.

  “Cold-hearted bitch that she is, she killed the boy too! Three for the price of a single bullet!” He’d hugged me then, the first time I’d ever been hugged by my father as far as I could remember. Because I’d killed a child. There could be no more revulsion in me for him or myself than in that moment, and it was later that night I’d run from my father and everything I’d lived up to that point in my miserable life.

  The memory fled and I fell to the floor in a heap just inside the room. I looked back, my eyes one of the few things that seemed to still obey me.

  The ghost stood on the threshold, his mouth partially open and those black eyes unblinking as he floated there. I opened my mouth, to say what, I was not sure, and it took me a moment to see through the tears that had filled my eyes. “Like what you see?”

  The ghost’s mouth moved and wor
ds flowed out at a pace that did not match the movement. “Your soul is torn. Easy to take.”

  Once more the cold seeped around me but I didn’t pull from it, nor did I call up my flames to combat it. There was a very large part of me that knew a punishment was due for taking the life of a child, and for the first time, I wondered if my rage at losing Bear had some small connection to the loss of that other child’s life. As though I’d always feared that I would have my own child taken from me to pay for the loss of that other’s life.

  I didn’t answer the ghost. I couldn’t. Instead I pushed to my feet while the ice flowed and formed around me. The fear the dead Magelore had induced had been washed away in a memory I could not escape, the one memory I’d buried deeply and let myself forget so I could keep moving.

  I stumbled around the room, my fingers and face numbing under the flowing air that tightened over me. Every time I moved toward the bed in the center of the room the cold went deeper into me, like it was trying to freeze the marrow inside my bones. I had an image of my bones bursting, unable to contain the expanding liquid as it froze. I went to my knees with the pain of my teeth chattering so hard, I thought they might crack against one another. I refused to give into it, though, refused to let it take over my body which meant I kept moving, kept pushing toward the bed.

  The ghost Magelore floated to stand—if stand was the right word—until it was in front of me while I was on my hands and knees. My limbs were freezing in place with a cold so deep, it burned. I knew I should stop it, that I should call on my fire, but I deserved to be punished for that last death. The death of a child.

  Child. There was something about a special child, but my brain seemed to have frozen along with the rest of me.

  I stopped shivering. I stopped feeling anything and that was bad. I knew it was bad. I would be near the end when I stopped feeling the cold. I let it pass through me and I was at peace and I knew I was dying. I was dying and the cold didn’t hurt me anymore because I stopped fighting it. Maybe in death, I would find some sort of redemption for my torn soul.

  I covered my ears from a screeching noise beating against my skull. A nails-down-a-chalkboard pitch not going away.