Fury of a Phoenix (The Nix Series Book 1)

by Shannon Mayer

  “Get the fuck away from me!” I screamed the words, hurling them like the weapons I wanted in my hands. The nurse rushed out of the room with high spots on her cheeks, the needle clutched in her left hand. I leaned forward, watching her, suspicion slicing through me. Did she throw the needle out? Had she been told to give me that sedative? Was it even a sedative or something more dangerous? I put my hands to my head, rocking slowly. The killer I’d been reared up inside of me. The one that had been taught to survive no matter what. To be a weapon. I’d put her away and thought she was gone forever.

  Hard.

  Violent.

  Dangerous.

  I’d cast off those chains when I’d met Justin, when I’d found my first taste of love and safety. When I’d first felt Bear growing inside me and I had more reason than ever to fight for a life I’d never thought was possible. Whatever love I’d learned with Justin was nothing compared to what Bear’s life had brought to me.

  But he was gone. Dead. They both were.

  I threw up, the nausea hitting me so suddenly that I didn’t have a chance to even look for a bucket. I turned my head to the side, splattering the sheets and the floor with clear liquid.

  “I’ll get a bucket.” Someone said, I assumed a nurse. I didn’t even look up, couldn’t move from where I was.

  Despite the pain in my ribs and legs from the angle I lay, I stayed in that position.

  Pain was good, it cleared my mind like nothing else. It always had. It would allow me to set the mind-numbing grief aside long enough to make sure I was seeing what had happened clearly. That I wasn’t remembering wrong the things that had happened as the truck went out of control. That I wasn’t putting things into my memory because I wanted to blame someone for what happened. That my paranoia hadn’t got the better of me.

  I played the accident over and over in my head, looking at it with a calculating, experienced eye, avoiding the scenes of Bear and Justin and focusing on the feel of the truck as it slid, the way it had flipped, the man outside the truck. The color that had suffused the truck, the way the green swirls had held us in the air.

  The brakes had been tampered with, of that much I was sure, but that had only been the beginning of things.

  Three of the tires had blown out, which was impossible, unless there was a spike belt, which would have blown all four tires. They had to have been shot. Which meant there had been at least two shooters, and one of them had been able to work death magic.

  The explosion that had gone off under us had been powerful, yet directed. The only way to manage that was with someone who had great control over their abilities. Had the magic been under the truck, attached, or launched at us in the last seconds? I pulled the sensation of the explosion going off through me again. No, the magic had been in the bush under us, not on the truck itself, I was sure of it.

  That girl I’d been, all that training I’d thought I’d left behind, shoved everything else aside and showed me what I didn’t want to believe.

  Justin’s and Bear’s deaths had not been accidental. Not for one heartbreaking second.

  The past, who I’d been . . . I didn’t want to be that girl, and I’d run to escape what I’d been made into. There was no way my father had found me. Yet . . . the truth was in front of me.

  I needed to get out of here. Because the girl from my past was laughing maniacally, enjoying the pain I writhed in. She knew the truth and so did I. Someone had found me, and the deaths of the two souls I loved more than my own life was the result.

  Pain and grief rapidly shifted into dangerous territory inside me. Rage fired at the edges of the grief and burned away the emotion.

  Another nurse came in, this one with a bucket and mop. He cleaned up the mess at my feet, a sad smile on his face. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with a hairline that was already receding, and I knew just by the edges of his face he was an abnormal. The hair grew wonky along his jaw line, like a beard gone wild. But the hair was coarse, and multiple colors. I looked him over for the lines of a weapon under his scrubs but saw nothing. He didn’t notice my intense perusal of his body, or if he did, he ignored me. More like he was used to being checked out. Abnormals were rarely trusted.

  “You have a visitor,” he said. “Says he’s your uncle. You good with him coming in once I’ve got this cleaned up?”

  The tremor in my legs and arms was nothing I could control. If it was my uncle, all was good. But that was what the hitmen I used to work with would say to get close to their marks. They could be your uncle, your godfather, your cousin. Anything to get within striking distance. And if it was a magic user, I was royally screwed. I had none of my tools to block the magic, none of my weapons to stave off a power that I’d never had, nor ever would have.

  Adrenaline surged, and the pain faded from me like the edge of the nurse’s hairline from his face.

  “Give me a minute,” I whispered, doing my best to go back to the quiet wife I’d pretended to be in public. The orderly’s face softened further and he wiped up the last of the vomit with the mop, offered me a cool rag, and then went out into the hall.

  I wiped my face down, but kept the cloth over my mouth, partially hiding my face as I went over my options. I didn’t have much choice but to face whoever was coming in, and the state my body was in didn’t give me much in terms of a hand-to-hand fight. Surprise would be all I would have on my side.

  A part of my brain tried to tell me this was crazy, that things like this didn’t happen. But I knew better.

  I knew the dark underbelly of the world of normals and abnormals better than anyone.

  There was the soft murmur of voices, the quick give and take of words. I had fifteen seconds at best to get ready.

  Gritting my teeth, I pushed myself up straighter and hissed through the pain. I couldn’t stop the tremor in my hands as I put my left hand over the IV that was attached to my right arm. I pulled it out, not even feeling the sting of the needle sliding from under my skin, not caring that the blood dripped down my arm. With my left arm in a cast, it was hard to move fast. I tossed the cloth the nurse had given me over the bleeding wound from the IV, then tucked the needle into the palm of my right hand.

  Improvisation. If the man with the gun came back, I wouldn’t have more than a split second to use the needle on him and grab the gun. If he was an abnormal, I would have even less time. Going for the eyes would be best, or the neck if he didn’t bend down far enough.

  My heart . . . God, my heart wanted to shatter. It wanted to give up. I wanted to grieve for my boy and husband and lie in bed and cry until there were no tears left in my body. A part of me wanted to lie down and die right there, to let whoever was coming in finish the job they started. I used to think tears and grief were weakness, but already I found a new truth.

  Grief was not a weakness. It was fuel for my anger. Grief was a luxury I did not have and that left me nothing but anger to run on.

  If I was right—and I was sure I was—the accident wasn’t an accident, and someone was at fault for my two boys’ deaths.

  Which meant someone was going to pay for their lives with their own, piece by piece, if I had to.

  The door to my room creaked open and I lay back on the raised bed, closing my eyes until they were open a mere slit. A man slipped into the room, the door shutting with a shush behind him. Silent as a shadow, his footsteps didn’t squeak once on the clean floor. The dark pants were the same as those the strange man had been wearing, and I kept my small amount of vision on his legs as he walked toward me, carefully. As if he didn’t want to wake me.

  The legs stopped at my bedside, close to where I clutched the hidden needle.

  I let a slow breath out, readying myself for the pain it would cost me to sit up fast and jam the needle into one of his eyes.

  “You ain’t sleeping, doll face.”

  My eyes sprung open. “Zee.”

  It was my uncle and not some unnamed hitman. Or at least, everyone knew him as my uncle, and even Justin
had believed that for the first few years of our marriage. A necessity to keeping my husband safe. Or so I’d thought. When I’d finally told him about who I truly was—or at least who I was related to—and that Zee was uncle in name only, he’d not only taken it in stride, he said it didn’t matter. That it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been Lucifer’s daughter, he would love me still. At the time, I’d laughed, and cringed because I’d not been able to tell him the rest. That I was about as close to being Lucifer’s daughter, or at least as close as one could get on this side of the grave, in more ways than one.

  I looked over Zee, trying to see if he’d been hurt while I’d been away. To see if he’d had to fend off some sort of attack on the ranch. While his neck was scarred from an attempt on his life years ago, and his face was as craggy and rough with a half-grown beard, I couldn’t see any new injuries. Long before I’d met him, he’d been a special ops man overseas, and that was where he’d learned much of his training and skills that he’d passed onto me. One of those skills was the ability to push all your emotions away, to not show a drop of compassion, empathy, or caring, even if you were shattered inside. To keep going, even when you wanted to lie down and die.

  To be fair, though, Zee was also the only abnormal I’d met that I trusted. He was a Hider. One who could make things vanish, disappear even though they were right in front of you.

  The only reasons I’d ever trusted him to begin with were that I’d known him since I was six years old, and my mother had loved him dearly.

  He held out a rough knuckled hand and I took it, holding it as my last lifeline, as a sob slipped out of me, horrifying me. His eyes were shiny with tears, but not one dropped from him.

  “Shit, this doesn’t seem real,” he said. Not I’m sorry, he would never say that. Because he knew, like I did, this was not his fault.

  I sat up and leaned into his one shoulder no matter that the movement cut through my injuries. “Tell me they’re alive, Zee. Tell me this is a bad dream and that Bear is going to walk through that door. Tell me if he is gone, that you can bring him back. Please.” My voice cracked on the last word, my last attempt at continuing to be the woman with the normal life. The woman who knew nothing of the darkness the world held.

  “I never lied to you yet. You think I should start now?” He carefully tightened his hold over my shoulders. “You survived this accident, let’s try and keep it that way.”

  I lifted my eyes to his, looking for the confirmation of what I already knew, but didn’t fully want to believe. That the accident was anything but. He gave me the faintest of nods, his eyes incredibly sad, but also hard. Hard and understanding, and . . . angry.

  Closing my own eyes, I worked to push the tears away, to cap the grief that would consume me if I let it. I could be a sobbing mess, and I deserved that time. I deserved to grieve for Bear, for Justin . . . but if I let that take me over, as I knew it would, that would leave me unable to do what I had to do. Something I’d trained most of my life for, something I’d run so far and fast from that I thought it would never catch up to me.

  How very wrong I’d been.

  I bit my lower lip and sucked in a sharp breath. “Get me out of here, Zee. I want to go home.”

  “Already done. Have your discharge papers here . . . three broken ribs, cracked pelvic bone, severe bruising across both femurs, broken left wrist, concussion, and then the usual cuts and nicks.” He flipped a file folder at me, open wide. I glanced over it, noting no signature under the discharge section. So, I had not been discharged, but it didn’t matter. I was leaving, and no doctor was going to tell me otherwise.

  I had work to do, work that would keep me from thinking about my boys, thinking about Bear reaching for me, crying for me, as he died. Thinking about how much pain he must have been in as he’d died—

  My throat tightened and I swallowed hard over the sudden growing lump. Zee crouched in front of me. “You aren’t me, doll face. You’re allowed to let it out.”

  I glared at him, letting the anger carry me. “And if I can’t stop letting it out? Then I’m useless, and I won’t be that, Zee. I refuse that option.”

  He gave me a smile that I knew would send chills through any other person. “You think they’ll get away with this? You think I believe you—of all people—would let them? You grieve, and while you grieve, we’ll prepare for what’s coming.” He slid a hand over my head, cupping the back of my neck. “I know you as if you were my own blood, and I know your heart is too big to not let this pain out. It’s why you had to get out of the business. It’s why you could find a way to live a normal life for so long. It’s why you loved that boy more than your own life when everything you’ve been through pointed to you being unable to love.”

  I should have known he would understand me better than I knew myself. He got up and went to the cracked cupboard across the room. “I brought you clothes yesterday when I came to check on you.”

  He pulled out a pair of light gray sweatpants and an oversized hoodie. He helped me dress, as comfortable with me as if he had been my father, his hands gentle on my wounded body.

  I wished he had been my father. Maybe I wouldn’t be here now if that had been the case.

  No, I would have been an abnormal like him then, and hiding from the world. Running for my life, or working for the tyrants of the world to make a living, tyrants like my father.

  A hiss slipped out of me as I lifted my right leg. I could barely get it a few inches off the floor. Zee bent without a question and maneuvered my foot into the leg hole. “Haven’t had to help you dress for a good twenty-five years. When you took a tumble off the obstacle course, and broke both your arms. Remember that?”

  I kept my silence, but appreciated that he was trying to distract me. I stood as he slid a pair of my oldest runners on my feet, then waited as he laced them up. “Haven’t done this for about the same length of time either.” He patted my calf when he was done, then stood, head and shoulders above me.

  I slid an arm around his back and leaned into his body, letting him help me stand as I let myself acclimate to the pain. “Let’s go.”

  Zee walked at a pace I could keep up with, but even so, by the time we reached the front doors of the hospital, my breath came in hard gulps with the exertion and sweat rolled down my face. Broken ribs . . . they would take time to heal. So would the pelvic bone issue and the wrist. But none of that mattered. Zee understood that I had to take time to heal, and in that time, I would make my plans.

  He got me into his truck and strapped me in. I let him do it for me, because the feeling of sitting in a vehicle so like Justin’s old Ford froze my body . . . I couldn’t stop the flashback from happening.

  Flashbacks were not new to me and I gritted my teeth as this one washed over my senses.

  I could see the inside of the old Ford, could feel it rumble under me. The sensation of being in the truck as it careened down the hill, and then when the first tire had blown, to be followed so closely by the second and third. I made myself focus on that part, the stark details of the accident that had been set up, and ignored the rest of what had happened. I would not think about Justin and Bear.

  I put a hand over my eyes as Zee started the truck up, my spine tingling with a rush of adrenaline that had nowhere to go.

  “You going to be sick?” Zee didn’t put the truck in first gear.

  “No. Just get me home.” I wanted my bed. I wanted a place I was familiar with, away from the hospital. I should have known things wouldn’t be that easy.

  I should have known that Zee . . . that he was trying to help in his own way.

  We were ten minutes into the drive when he cleared his throat. “The doc sent home some good sedative painkillers to help you sleep. Percocet by the looks of it.”

  I didn’t look at him, just kept my hand over my eyes, trying to keep my mind blank, nothing. “Anything else?”

  He cleared his throat again. “I got the initial police report. There was no tampering on the brak
e lines. Nothing. And there were no tire blowouts. I know you want someone to blame, and I know your past is the easiest place to do that.”

  What was left of my emotions froze over in slow sections so that my body felt like it was being pushed through ice, piece by piece. My silence only seemed to encourage him, when all I wanted was for him to stop talking. Because he was wrong. I hadn’t told him about the gunshot. Or the man at the truck, or what I suspected was the same man at the hospital.

  “Bea—”

  “No.” I threw the word at him. “That is not my name.”

  “That has been your name all these years. You going back to Nix now?” The weight of his eyes flickered from me to the road and back again.

  I nodded. “Yes. I never stopped being Nix. No point in hiding it now.”

  He let out a slow breath. “Look, I get it. I do. When your mom died, I wanted to blame them all, every last fucker I’d ever dealt with. I wanted them to be the reason she was gone. They weren’t. She was sick and no healer would touch her because of your father, and so she died. Just like this was an accident. The reality is your family and your past has forgotten about you. The way you wanted, the way we planned.”

  My stomach rolled, his words acid drops in my belly. “In the hospital, you said . . . they wouldn’t get away with it. You said—”

  “I said what I said to get you moving.” His tone was hard. “I said what I said to get you up and out of that bed, Nix. I know this pain. I know it well. It will consume you if you let it, it will drive you crazy if you let yourself sink into a belief that this was no accident.”

  I put my hands over my eyes and leaned forward so that my forehead was on my knees. My back and hips protested the movement but I barely noticed. “It wasn’t an accident. I know it wasn’t. What about the report on Justin?” Why was he even arguing? He knew my family, and he knew their reach and the lengths they went to protect their money and power.

  I was a loose cannon they’d never tracked down, a weapon they’d lost somewhere in the wild that had taken a large sum of blood money right out from under their noses. I’d avoided all the hunters they’d sent after me, both normals and abnormals, and there was no reason to think that Zee wasn’t right.