Death was close. Closer than it had ever been. It beckoned him with alluring peace. It promised an end to the tortures of the liquid agony of his blood. But he had to make sure his Diana was safe. He became fire. The serpent ignited immediately. They became one falling brand that crashed to the stony incline. Weedy plants clung to this precarious ground. The fire that was both Pierce and Venom spread a hundred tiny brush fires. Smoke billowed heavenward.
* * *
High on the hill, Diana stood between two burly, gray-haired strangers and gazed down in horror at the ball of fire as it turned the rock chips red. “What is it?” she cried. She tried to go down the hill, but the men caught her arms and held her back.
“Too dangerous,” said the one with the gun.
“The stones are loose. You’ll fall before you’ve gone three feet,” said the bushy-browed one firmly.
Diana tried to pull away. “Who are you?” she demanded hotly.
“Friends,” said Ames. He let her go. “I’m Ames. He’s Gardiner.” He holstered his pistol.
“Should we call the fire department?” asked Gardiner pulling out his cell.
“No need. The fires are burning themselves out.” Ames shook his head. “D’Angelo picked the right spot. Can you see what’s happening?”
“Hell, no.” Gardiner put his cell away in his jacket pocket.
“What’s happened to Pierce?” asked Diana frantically. “Where is he? Did I shoot him?”
“He’s down there with the snake,” said Gardiner. “He should be okay. I mean, phoenixes have an affinity for fire.” His authoritative voice seemed roughened with doubt to Diana’s ear.
“Phoenixes?” she heard herself ask. “What are you talking about?”
The two men exchanged glances over her head. She looked between them. Their hard faces were difficult to read and the further away the fire got the less light there was. The blaze was still rolling down the loosely packed stones. A continuous shower of stones was extinguishing the blazing weeds.
Gardiner shrugged. “Maybe we should wait in the house?” he said uneasily.
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me where Pierce is.” Diana dug in her heels.
Ames pointed to where the ball of fire was burning out. “That’s him there. I don’t know what’s happening.”
As he spoke flames shot up into the air so high it was impossible to guess how high. Diana heard the two men gasp. On the hillside itself all was dark. The stink of burning creosote and sage drifted up to them. Above them the stars were dimmed by a shooting star so bright it obliterated those pinpoints of light. Diana tried to focus on the bright streak but her eyes couldn’t make out what she was looking it.
The swooping light made a circle overhead and then was gone. Diana put her head into her hands and wept. Pierce was dead. He had to be. No one could have survived what he had experienced. If she hadn’t seen Pierce’s clothes explode with her own eyes she would not have believed it. In fact, she wondered if she had been hallucinating. Surely she must have imagined that her naked assailant had become an eight-foot rattlesnake fighting with an incandescent enemy?
Ames and Gardiner didn’t look like the sort of men who dealt in fantasies. But they didn’t seem very talkative. She tried again. “Who are you? And where is Pierce?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I’m over here,” he said out of the darkness.
Diana rushed towards Pierce’s voice and jerked to a halt. He was wearing clothes similar to the ones he had worn on their hike, but she had seen those clothes disintegrate. He was Pierce and yet ... not. He seemed taller, broader. Luminous. Was he a ghost?
Ames and Gardiner didn’t seem to notice the changes that were so obvious to her. They passed on either side of her and indulged in the sort of back-thumping hand-shaking that in men signified elated reunion.
“Well done, Phoenix Three,” Gardiner said joyfully. Just as if it were all a game.
“You got the bugger,” said Ames just as cheerfully.
“Diana?” Pierce said above the masculine rejoicing. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Her voice was a croak. Pierce’s inner glow seemed to be dimming slightly.
He no longer seemed to shine more brightly than the path lights beyond him. Her eyes and her overwrought brain had to be playing tricks. Then he was clutching her tightly against his hard body. He smelled of smoke — and incense. His arms were strong and solid. He was no specter.
“Where did you come from?” she faltered. “I thought you were dead.”
“We’re going to let you two debrief. We have to make our — um, report.” As suddenly as Ames and Gardiner had burst into the cabin, they slipped into the darkness. By the time Pierce led her back to the house, an engine had started. A large white vehicle bumped slowly down the drive.
“What’s going on?” Diana demanded more loudly.
“It’s a long story. Let’s go inside the house,” Pierce said.
“What happened to your hair?” she asked as soon as they were in the entryway. His short crisp hair had become a tumbled mass of profuse, glossy curls that covered his collar and made him look like a dark angel.
He ran his hands through the ringlets and laughed a little. “It’s part of the process,” he said with resignation.
“What process? Pierce, just tell me what happened. Tell me why no one is calling the police when I was attacked right here by a naked guy bent on rape or worse? Tell me why two guys burst into your house with guns, and just walked away?” Diana pointed to the overturned furniture and to her face, which was starting to throb now that she had time to concentrate on the blows she had received.
Pierce touched her cheek and her neck. She flinched. He dropped his hand and drew her past the overturned furniture into the kitchen. “That bastard cut you, honey. I’m so sorry. I didn’t see him coming. How did he get into the house?” He opened the freezer drawer and pulled out a bag of peas. He let go of her to find a dishtowel.
“I left the door unlocked for you. He just burst in. One moment I was looking in the fridge, the next he had me by the hair and was dragging me around looking for a knife.” Diana took the wrapped peas and pressed them gingerly to her left cheekbone. Pierce smoothed her hair away from the cold pack.
“Which I left handy for him in the knife block on the counter.” Pierce’s eyes were fierce. But his arm around her shoulders was tender.
“Everything after that seems like a dream,” she said slowly. “Or a nightmare. The kind where twelve impossible things happen.”
“You didn’t have a dream, sweetheart. Lots of bad stuff happened tonight.” He steered her to the dining table, picked up a chair and eased her down into it.
Diana looked at the twisted rug, at the blood on the fringe and floor, at the broken hall table that they had had to detour around. “What happened?” she asked again. She was starting to get mad.
Pierce picked up the hall table, discovered one of the legs was wobbly and turned it upside down against the wall. “Have you ever heard of shifters, honey?”
“Like on a transmission?” she mumbled behind the peas. Where was he going with this?
He folded back the carpet to get it out of the blood, shook his head and walked over to the broom closet. “No. Men — humans who can turn into animals.”
“You mean like werewolves?” Her voice rose in frustration and anger.
“Yeah. Like werewolves.” He filled a bucket at the sink and brought it over to the rug. “I’m going to have to send this to the cleaners, aren’t I?” he asked.
“Probably. But it’s wool. You might be able to sponge the blood out.” Why were they discussing bloodstain removal?
He was staring at the liquid puddle. “Damn,” he said. “This is full of venom.”
“What?” It came out a shriek that made her throat hurt.
Pierce rose from his crouch and went to the sink. He came back wearing skin-tight pink rubber gloves.
“What is it?”
she asked.
“The snake venom is keeping my blood from clotting, and it’s taking the color out of the rug and the varnish off the floor.” He began to blot up the glistening pool.
Diana looked at the dark hardwood. As the blood came up, it revealed a dull patch of pale, bare wood. She shivered and took the ice away from her face. “How is that possible?” she croaked.
“That shit is full of anticoagulants and enzymes,” Pierce said wryly. The water in his bucket was pale pink and his gloves were blotched with cream colored patches. “The carpet is a goner.”
He got up again. Moved towards the kitchen, shook his head. “You sit tight. I’ll dump this on the scree.” He grabbed a paper towel to open the front door. “Don’t move,” he said. “I don’t want you walking in that.”
Diana put the compress back on her cheek. It was starting to swell. She touched her throat. The nick had left a trail of dried blood. Her shaking increased. It had to be a bad dream. Pierce reappeared with the bucket. He left the door open and filled the pail at the sink and returned to the bloody patch. He scrubbed at it and shook his head.
“What the hell is going on, Pierce?” Diana tried again.
He looked at her. His blue eyes were even more intense than usual. He smiled ruefully. “You were attacked by a snake shifter. But I’m a phoenix shifter. I jumped him in my lesser morph. He bit me and pumped venom into my body. The blood that dripped from my wound has lifted the varnish from the floor and bleached the rug and these gloves.”
Diana’s throat felt tight and swollen. “But that’s crazy.”
He gave the floor one last pass with his wet cloth. “Shifters are like ramped up animals. Bigger. Stronger. More powerful. Makes sense that snake shifter venom is more corrosive.”
“If were-snakes were actually a thing!”
He just looked at her as he rose to his full height. “Welcome to my world, sweetheart. We’ll talk, I promise. But I have to get this crap out of the house.” He vanished with the bucket.
Diana noticed that she had curled her feet around the crossbars of her chair. Her body believed him, even if her mind refused to.
“Those are just fairy stories and folk tales, aren’t they?” she said when Pierce reappeared. He had left the bucket outdoors.
“Can you really say that, sweetheart, when you watched me take phoenix right in this house tonight? And saw that son of a low-bellied rapist turn into a rattlesnake?” He looked down at the rug and shook his head. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to roll the rug and the under pad up and then I’ll move you to the living room and get the furniture off the rest of it. I want this out of the house tonight.”
“You act as if cleaning up is the most important thing here. What about that that — that man?”
Pierce stared at her. “Dead,” he said flatly. “You saw that conflagration. He has to be dead.”
“Why don’t you call the cops?” she asked.
“And tell them what? That you were attacked by your stalker who turned into a rattler. But I saved you by becoming a bird and hauling him off?” His voice invited her to laugh.
“I guess not.”
“Shape shifters are a cross between a closely guarded secret and superstitious nonsense. When Mrs. Benoy said the guy she saw smelled like a shape shifter, the cops smirked. And nobody put it in the report. If I called the police in, they would find alternative explanations for the evidence. Because everyone knows people can’t transform into animals.”
“Mrs. Benoy said that? What did she mean?” Diana gasped.
Pierce shrugged. “How should I know? She’s old, she’s blind, but she has all her marbles. Moreover, her culture is open to the possibility that evildoers are witches or shape shifters. But even the Navajo cops thought she was either mad or superstitious to believe a man could change his form.”
“But you can?” she asked.
He nodded. “I can. And I did. Don’t look like that. Not all shifters are villains.”
“Just were-snakes?” she asked.
Pierce began to roll the carpet up with his rubber gloved hands. Every turn emphasized the colorless splotches on the palms and fingers. Diana had worn those gloves all week. They had been new out of the package. No bleached places at all.
“I don’t say all snakes are villains,” Pierce said thoughtfully, “But I’ve never met one I trusted.”
“And you’ve met snakes before?”
“And I can turn into a phoenix whenever I choose to.” He grinned at her. “Time for you to go to the couch.” He stripped off the damaged gloves and went to the sink to wash his hands. He came back and lifted her out of her chair.
His arms felt good, despite her uneasiness. “And the rest of your family are phoenixes too, I suppose?” she asked doubtfully.
“Well, sure.” He kissed her temple and set her on the couch. “I became a bird to deal with that guy. He had a knife on you. I never was so happy as when you read my mind and dropped to the ground.”
“My self-defense instructor always says that an attacker can be destabilized by having to deal with keeping his balance while two hundred pounds is toppling him sideways,” she said primly. Reading minds indeed!
“You don’t weigh two hundred pounds,” he objected.
“One eighty-seven,” she insisted.
He shrugged and turned back to the dining area where he began to shift the chairs. He set the one with the broken leg on top of the upside down hall table. “When you fell, it gave me the opportunity to attack him. Only he made a lightning change to snake before I could get a grip on his neck.”
“Does a snake have a neck?” she asked. Out of nowhere she was feeling better.
“If I had had a grip on his nape, he would have been unable to bite me.” Pierce began to roll up the carpet. He stood with the unwieldy bundle. “I’ll be right back.”
She watched his departure resentfully.
“You were bitten by a rattler? Why aren’t you dead?” she demanded when he came back in. This time he locked the door and set the bolts. He fiddled with the security box.
“I’m a phoenix,” he said moving the table back into position. “I became fire. I immolated that serpent and took greater phoenix and regenerated from the fire. You could say I died and came back to life.” He glanced across at her as if to see how she was taking it.
She’d show him how. “Just like the legend?” Her voice rose in fury.
“Just like.”
She felt hysterical. Pierce was yanking her chain. She launched herself off the couch at him. “No, really, Pierce, what happened here tonight?”
“Diana,” he said catching her close and holding her tightly. “Look at me. Don’t I seem a bit different? Not just the hair. All of me?”
She looked, she really looked. “I think it’s just a trick of the light.”
He chuckled. “How am I going to convince you, my little skeptic? You saw the snake.”
“Maybe. Why did Ames and Gardiner take off like that?”
“They knew I was going to be caught like this — trying to explain that I am a shifter to a traumatized woman. They probably had to park before they got to the highway — they were probably laughing so hard it was too dangerous to drive.”
“I suppose they’re phoenixes too?”
“Cats. Ames is a mountain lion. Gardiner is a lynx.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Believe. I can’t prove it tonight. Regeneration is an exhausting process. The first spurt of adrenaline has gotten me this far, but I’m about to crash.” His eyes were wolfish.
“Before supper?”
“Screw supper.” He hauled her into his arms and his mouth crashed down on her in a most un-Pierce-like fashion.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
He knew he should have kept his hands off his mate. He had been through this before. He had been aware that once the crisis was past that the volatile cocktail of hormones in his blood would make him randier than a fourteen-year
-old boy at a Playboy Bunny Convention. Not that he wanted a bunny. His mate was quite sufficient for his needs.
It was his needs that were the problem. He had been cautious in his courtship. But he was fresh out of caution tonight. He wanted Diana with a fierceness that made his usual state of arousal seem like watered milk. He didn’t want to take time to build her desire. He just wanted her. He wanted to take her so thoroughly that she would be his forever after. He needed to sink into her and become one.
Her poor bruised face looked up at his. She was going to have a black eye, he noted absently. “If you don’t want to fuck,” he ground out, “Say so.” He elbowed his way into their room.
“Who says I don’t want to?” she demanded hotly. Her hands began to rip at his buttons.
They fought each other’s clothes off, leaving them in messy heaps on the floor. Pierce picked Diana up and threw her onto the bed. She bounced slightly and grappled with his body when he flung himself on top of her. He kissed her with all the pent-up frustration and hopped up emotions he had been feeling since he had seen Venom with his hands on his mate.
Her mouth seized his tongue and sucked hard. Like she wanted to swallow him alive. He was cool with that. He found her butt with both hands and moved her mound into position so it ground against his cock. But the relief was only momentary. She rolled her hips in a rhythm that matched her ravishment of his tongue. And then she began to buck.
“I’m going in,” he said.
“Hurry up,” she snapped.
He lifted her legs so that they twined around his hips. Her heels pressed hard into his ass. His cock found her pussy and slid all the way home. She was hot and slick and tight. He yanked his tongue out of her mouth and made to leave her body. “Shit,” he said. “I’m not wearing a condom.”
“I don’t care.” She grabbed his neck and brought his mouth back to hers. This time he took control of the kiss.
Phoenix Ablaze (BBW / Phoenix Shifter Romance) (Alpha Phoenix Book 1) Page 13