Rise of a Phoenix (The Nix Series Book 3)

by Shannon Mayer

“Okay, Martin. I’ll take it. But let’s be clear, I am not your savior.”

  No, that you are not.

  His laughter rose and faded and the air around me warmed once more. Abe gave a snorting huff as if he’d scared the ghost away.

  I stood and went to the door into the cockpit. “Killian, how long to Jackson Hole?”

  “A couple hours, tops.”

  I turned to leave and he reached out his hand, snagging my wrist. “No, sit with me, here.”

  There was no reason for me not to. Except that it involved my feelings for Killian, and all those did right now were frustrate me and apparently produce tears, which other than for Justin’s death, I had never given to a man. But I sat and slid a headset on over one ear.

  I pulled out the diary and Dinah and laid them both on my lap. “Okay, sis. Let’s talk. Time to figure out what is going on with this deal, who the fuck Mancini is really after, and what the last two items on this godforsaken recipe are because I’m not sure Tommy is right.”

  Dinah wiggled on my lap as if getting comfortable. Abe snuck into the cockpit and sat beside me, his eyes tracking Dinah’s every movement. I flipped open the diary and pulled out the three sheets I had. The original deal, the translation the mad professor had made, and the list that had come from the code breaker.

  “This list of things for the bullet.” I pulled that sheet out. “A lot of it is herbs and things like that. Things that could be found anywhere, I think, but it will take time.” Which I was sure by the weight in the pit of my stomach we did not have.

  “Read me the list,” Killian said.

  I sighed. “Dried larkspur, essence of cassava, stem of belladonna, oil of basil, innards of a desert cactus, fern leaves, spit of a female demon—that’s rather specific—, Irish lightning, blood of a phoenix, grindings from a curse, a piece of the past,” I paused. Then I pulled out the new translation from the professor. He’d said that he’d already gone through it once so he’d done it quickly but . . . there were subtle differences.

  “This list, the one from your teacher,” I ran my finger down it, “it’s mostly the same except for these two. Skin of a female demon, a blood-soaked piece of the past.”

  Killian snorted. “Yeah, those be tough ones either way. How do you find something like that?”

  Dinah cleared her throat. “The skin that the deal is written on. Didn’t the professor say it was demon skin?”

  I stared at the pore-less skin. “Yes, he did.”

  “So, could that be what you need? It would make sense seeing as it is the actual deal. A lot of curses and counter-curses involve taking a piece of the original in order to work properly.”

  “Dinah. You’re a kickass smart woman,” I breathed.

  “Of course. It’s family genetics. The women get the smarts, the men get . . . well, I’m not sure what they get out of the deal.” She laughed and I managed a smile.

  “They’re just plain asses,” I replied.

  Abe shifted his face on my thigh and I put a hand on him, rubbing his ears.

  “That last bit on the list, read it again.” Killian adjusted something and then turned to look at me. His eyes were intense, and I had the feeling he was trying to read just what we meant to each other. I refused to give him anything but a working relationship. His memories had to come back on their own or not.

  Because I wasn’t sure I could lose him all the way and not feel it. So maybe this was better, for things to be over before they truly began.

  “A blood-soaked piece of the past,” I said.

  “That is specific . . . is there something from your childhood that could be soaked in blood?” he asked.

  I stared at the words. Piece of the past. It niggled at me, tugging at my mind, but I couldn’t piece it together. “No, nothing off the top of my head. Anything that was bloodied would have been hidden or gotten rid of to hide the evidence.” I circled that bit with a finger. “I think I know, I just can’t put it together right now. The grinding of a curse, though . . . that is something that I think I know.”

  Dinah wiggled a little. “What do you think it might be?”

  “Grindings of a curse . . . it makes me think of a stone being ground down and my father’s ruby ring that he had to keep the guardians in check. That ring is cursed.” Maybe Tommy was right about that much. I tapped the papers, certainty filling me as I spoke the words. One of the ruby rings . . . that was going to be damn hard to get.

  I folded the papers and stuck them inside the diary, then put the diary inside my shirt under the Kevlar. I picked Dinah up and stood, and almost put a hand on Killian’s shoulder for balance. Or maybe just to touch him for a moment. To take a little comfort from him just being there. But I withdrew it.

  I stepped out of the cockpit. The cabin was quite roomy, and there was a bench seat that would work as a makeshift bed if I wanted to lie down. Abe followed me quietly, his hip bumping into my leg here and there as if to remind me he was still with me.

  “Dinah,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you, for . . . everything.”

  She was quiet a moment. “You are my baby sister. Even though I didn’t show it, I was always looking out for you. For both of us.”

  I lay down on the bench and Abe jumped up and settled between my knees, his head on my thigh. He gave one jaw-cracking yawn and closed his eyes. I felt the same, but I had too many questions. “Did you really love the guardian, Strike?”

  She let out a heavy sigh and I put her on my chest. “Well, yeah. At least, I thought I did. For all I know, he manipulated me. He’s not just good at pain, as his other name implies. He can control people through the pain receptors in their brains. Can make them believe that what they are seeing is real. I was safe if I was with him. Father wouldn’t dare touch me. And that was worth it to me. Our talents together meant we had the potential to take everyone out around us.”

  I frowned. “Then why kill yourself?”

  “Mancini. He wanted me dead because I’d turned him down after he helped me, and Strike . . . he said that if Mancini called in the hit, there would be no stopping it. This way I had the chance to live on right under his nose.”

  That didn’t make sense. “Strike and the other guardians could have protected you.”

  “Not by what Strike said. He believed that if Mancini ordered it, that even he couldn’t protect me. Looking back, I wonder just who he was working for. You know that the three guardians resented having to work for Father? They hated him, hated that they were under the thumb of someone they called a mewling pawn.”

  I snorted. “That’s a good one. I’m going to use that the next time I see him.”

  She snickered. “He hates it when they call him that.”

  “So, he knows they don’t like him?” I tucked an arm under the back of my head. “You think that’s why he threw them at me, to finish them off? Or do you think it’s like Mancini said and it’s to push my abilities into overdrive?”

  “Which also makes no sense. Father doesn’t even know what you are. The only one who seemed to really know was—”

  “Vivian, but she’s dead, which just leaves one person. Mancini,” I said softly. The pieces were all there, threads and bits of a story I couldn’t put together. The words just didn’t fit. “Dinah, we are missing something.”

  “I know. It is rather galling,” she grumbled.

  “Hey, I have a question.”

  “Shoot.” I smiled as she said the word and she laughed. “Though, not literally.”

  “No, not here. That would end poorly. Though, the last time I got thrown out of a plane we did okay,” I said. “My question is, why did Zee hate you and Eleanor? I mean obviously, he didn’t know who you were, but . . .”

  She sighed before she answered. “I think it’s because we were both so angry and the curse bound us in ways we couldn’t possibly have predicted. Because I knew Eleanor before. We didn’t realize she was bound by constraints, as I ended up being bound too
. Zee wasn’t wrong. We were egging you on to kill more. At least, back then. We both had so much pain and anger, it had to come out somewhere.”

  I wondered what Zee would have thought to know that the love of his life was trapped inside a gun. He’d loved my mother fiercely and he’d loved me like the daughter of his heart. I doubt he would have cared. He would have loved her still.

  “You care for Killian,” Dinah said with great tact. “Do you love him?”

  I thought about the question for a solid minute before I answered. “Maybe. I don’t know. And I honestly don’t want to think too much about it until I have Bear back and Romano dealt with. There is nothing safe in this world if I love it. You saw that even with Abe. Now with Killian’s memory gone, how can I explain to him everything we’ve been through together?”

  The Malinois lifted his head, his eyes sleepy, and I ran a hand over his head. “Romano will use anything he can to try to control me. I have to take that away from him. I can’t and won’t stop loving Bear or Abe. I can hold back on Killian.”

  “Smart,” she mumbled. “But you don’t want to.”

  I shrugged. “He knows me better than anyone else in my life, maybe, except for Bear. Not even Justin knew who I was. If he had, I doubt he would have loved me. He thought I was you, Dinah. He thought I was the beautiful sister forced to run away. The beauty who needed saving from her beast of a father.”

  Dinah let out a sigh. “Killian’s a good match for you, far better than Justin ever was.”

  “You barely knew Justin,” I pointed out.

  “But I did see what a fool he was trying to take on Romano, and almost getting you and Bear killed. Bear is my nephew, and I want to meet him for real,” Dinah said.

  I put a hand over her. “I want you to meet him too. Though that’s going to be something of an explanation as to how he’s related to a gun.”

  She laughed and I closed my eyes, though I didn’t really sleep so much as let my body rest. Weird to think that the re-emergence of my sister—albeit in a strange form—could bring such a level of comfort to my battered heart. But I’d take it for the momentary respite it was, knowing we were far from done with the violence.

  10

  Bear

  I sat cross-legged inside the tent of a beautiful woman in the middle of a desert, waiting for my uncle Tommy to show up to take me back to my mom. Weird, this was too weird. Reminding me of a fever dream like when I’d been sick as a kid.

  Despite the heat, a fire had been lit in the center of the tent, the flames dancing and licking upward. Sometimes I thought I could see shapes in the fire, faces of people I’d known. Twice I was sure I’d seen my mom. Shaitan had been one of the faces too.

  I’d been given a pair of loose pants that tied around my ankles, and a top made of fine, light material that felt as though I wasn’t wearing a shirt at all.

  To be fair, I didn’t know from one moment to the next if I was hallucinating, and that made it easier in some ways to accept the current state of my existence. Because if I was just dreaming, then the weirdness could be tolerated.

  “Man child,” the woman said softly, “we will begin now to work on your control of the fire inside you. It can both heal and harm, cure and make ill, burn and cool.”

  I frowned at her. “Are you really not going to tell me your name?”

  Her lips curled upward into a smile that made her dark eyes sparkle. “Perhaps one day you will know my name. But not now. Not this day.”

  I frowned harder, my brows tight. “Okay. You know that’s kind of strange, right?”

  “Names have power, man child. Power that can be used to control you with the right spell.” She turned and cupped her hand into a bucket of water and tossed the liquid onto the flames of the fire we sat beside. The water steamed and the scent of a sweet flower followed.

  “Jasmine is a powerful flower. It opens us to our abilities when we are at the beginning of them.” She wove her hands through the steam, cupping it and pushing it toward my face. I took a deep breath, knowing intuitively that was what she wanted.

  The smell stuck to the inside of my nose and I drew it deeply into my lungs. The tent wobbled a little and I wondered if there was something besides the flower in the water.

  “Desert witch,” I said, “why are you teaching me if you don’t want a man to be strong?”

  She laughed at me. “Not all men are bad, just the ones who believe they are superior. They are not, not any more than I am superior to any other person. You will learn this, or you will die.”

  Another time that would have upset me, but in that moment, her words made perfect sense and I completely agreed. I gave her a nod, my head a little fuzzy inside. “Okay.” She smiled again and I smiled back. “Now what?”

  “Your fire will protect you when you are in danger. That is the first way you will connect with the flames.” The desert witch pointed at the fire. “Put your hand in the flames. Your own fire will rise to protect your skin.”

  I hesitated. That was more than just learning how to control my fire, that was totally doing something my parents had always told me not to. Don’t touch fire, fire burns. But I’d felt the fire inside me and I didn’t doubt the desert witch knew what she was talking about. And again, this could be just a dream. I took a deep breath and thrust my hand into the fire.

  My skin prickled and there was a bloom of flames that raced from my elbow all the way down to my fingertips. Blue and green; there was nothing but a pleasant warmth that made me think of my mom for some reason. As if she were there with me, hugging me. Tears prickled at the edges of my eyes as I thought of her.

  “Pain?” the desert witch asked.

  I shook my head. “Just . . . it makes me think of my mom. And I worry that she thinks I don’t love her because I said that to keep her safe, but I didn’t mean it.” The words poured out of me and I snatched my hand out of the flame but the blue and green didn’t fade. I lifted my hand into the air in front of my face. The connection was simple, and directly tied to my brain. Like a video game without the controller, I could make the fire bigger or smaller with a single thought.

  “You are a natural.” The desert witch raised her hands and waved them through the smoke once more. “It is not uncommon when a child finds their abilities early and uses them instinctively when they have been pushed to the brink.”

  I bit my lower lip and pulled the flames back. “So, I don’t need training then?”

  “Oh, I never said that. There is much you can do with your fire. Like healing. You could be a healer instead of a fighter like your mother.” Her eyes didn’t so much as blink as she said those words, and I felt it in my belly that she would weigh my response.

  I settled for honesty. “I don’t know yet.”

  She shrugged. “You have time to decide.”

  “Can’t I be both?” I shifted my legs and found myself reaching out to put my hand back in the fire, to run my fingers through it as if it were water and not flame.

  “Perhaps. But it is not so easy. You will train the fire in you to be one or the other; to be both is . . . quite difficult. I am not sure if you will have it in you.”

  I twisted my lips and bit the bottom one as I thought on her words. I didn’t want to hurt people, but as I’d learned recently, there was always someone waiting to hurt me. To hurt those I loved, and I would want to protect them. And I’d want to heal my mom or Abe if they were hurt, or Zee. I sighed. “I want to learn both.”

  She clapped her hands and a tinkle of bells rippled through the air. “Good, that is the right answer.”

  The bells faded and were replaced by the sound of an engine roaring, drawing closer. I twisted around in my spot and looked at the front flap of the tent. “Is that Shaitan?”

  The sheik had until the morning to leave, according to the desert witch.

  “No, I do not believe it is.” She stood and went to the tent flap and peeked out. A sigh slid from her. “Man child, this is all the time you and I wil
l have together. For now.” She turned and held a hand out to me. I took it and she helped me stand. “I will oversee you healing your friend who came with you and then you must go. Our paths diverge, but they will come together again. Someday.”

  She stepped out of the tent and into the bright sunlight. There was the sound of rapid gunfire and screaming and then several explosions that sent rock and sand high into the air like water geysers.

  I found myself hanging onto her tighter. The wind snapped around her body, flattening her skirt to her, and it was only then I saw the bulge of her belly. She was pregnant?

  The desert witch glanced at me. “Yes, I carry my daughter in secret. Her power will rival yours, man child. Remember that when you meet her as an adult.”

  I couldn’t look away from the desert witch. “I doubt I’d ever meet her.”

  Her smile was genuine. “You will. But for now, you will heal your friend and . . . protector.”

  I looked in the direction we were headed. Rooster’s body lay out on the sand, face up. His broken face—what was left of it—had been scorched by the sun’s heat, nearly blackening the remaining skin. A few vultures hopped about, but they seemed reluctant to get any closer to his body.

  “Shaitan killed him,” I said, hesitating. “I saw it.” I did not want to go nearer to his dead body.

  “He injured him gravely and he will die by nightfall for the final time if you do nothing, for this is his last life,” the desert witch said softly. She crouched beside Rooster as if he didn’t stink, as if his wounds weren’t still oozing and as if there wasn’t a blitz of weaponry going on around us. I flinched as a particularly loud blast of gunfire went off close enough that I wondered how much danger we were in.

  I made myself crouch beside her while my gorge rose. “What do I do?”

  “Put your hands on the injury. Your flame can heal. You only have to command it to do so and give it some of your strength. This is where you must learn on your own. I can open the door; you must walk through and find the right path.” She took my hands and laid them against Rooster’s face. Though I wasn’t sure it could even be called that anymore. Face implied eyes, nose, mouth. There was nothing here but a broken and caved-in skull with a tongue sticking out of the lower portion, swollen from the heat.