Too late I understood what a bad idea touching him had been, because when I tried to remove the cock ring, it was stuck.
“Sanducci,” I said in a low voice. “Get a grip.”
He leaned closer, and his lips brushed my ear, making me shiver. “I think the problem is that you’ve got one.”
I yanked my hand out of his pants. “Think of England or something. Paint chips. Wallpaper swatches.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Turn it off!” I swatted his swelling erection.
“It’s not that simple. This happens whenever you’re around.”
“I thought you hated me.”
“Hate. Love. Doesn’t matter to that part of me. You touch him and he’s lost.”
That we were talking about his dick with a pronoun was almost as weird as why we were talking about it at all.
“Listen, you have to—”
“Too late,” he murmured, and I glanced up.
Sawyer was right in front of me. I jumped so high I nearly knocked Jimmy’s teeth out when my head thumped his chin. Sawyer grabbed me by the arm and started to drag me toward the door.
“Wait.” I tried to dig in, but with revenant dust all over the floor, I only slid along like a water-skier being towed by a powerboat. “Sawyer. Sheesh. Stop.”
I couldn’t leave. I’d come here for the key, and I didn’t have it yet.
I looked back at Jimmy, whose pants were hanging open and his privates peeking out. He hurried after us, sliding along too in the dust strewn across the wooden floor.
Sawyer swung around, fist pulled back to punch Jimmy in the nose, then paused, gaze first lowering to Jimmy’s crotch, then lifting to my face. “What is wrong with you?” he asked.
“What’s wrong with you?”
He didn’t answer; I hadn’t expected him to.
There was something off about him. He was furious. Furious and Sawyer did not go together. Coldly homicidal maybe. Calmly murderous. Serenely dangerous.
Since he was still touching me, I closed my eyes and opened my mind. He shook me so hard my teeth snapped together, and said, “Stop that!”
“You’re a great black hole anyway,” I muttered.
His gaze narrowed; then he glanced at Jimmy. “Cover yourself, Sanducci.”
“I’d be happy to. If you’d just release me from these chains.”
With an impatient grunt, Sawyer strode forward. Keeping one hand around my biceps, he used the other to put Jimmy back in his pants. Or at least he tried.
Jimmy twisted, drawing his shoulder away, then slamming it forward, catching Sawyer in the chest and nearly knocking him down. If I hadn’t been attached, he would have. As it was, I had to take a couple of quick steps or be dragged along.
“Don’t touch me.” Jimmy’s voice was flat, deadly.
Outside the wind stirred, blowing in through the door, tracing patterns through the dust. I couldn’t tell if the distant rhythmic patter was incoming rain, the breeze through the trees or merely the cadence of my own heart.
Sawyer’s gray eyes darkened to smoke, and his nostrils flared as he fought to keep himself under control. The air seemed to crackle with fury and power. If they’d been dogs, their hair would have been standing on end. Mine was.
Then Sawyer’s gaze lowered, and his lips curved. “A cock ring? The Dagda is my kind of man.”
“Since he isn’t a man at all,” Jimmy snapped, “I can see the resemblance.”
“Glass houses,” Sawyer murmured.
“Listen,” I interrupted. “We don’t have time for you two to play ‘my dick’s bigger than your dick.’ ”
“It is.” Sawyer lifted an eyebrow in my direction. “Isn’t it?”
I was so not going there.
“We need—” I began, then paused as a singsongy voice from outside called, “Sawwwww-yerrrr!”
He dropped my arm, faced the door. I glanced at Jimmy with a frown, but he was staring at the door too. That distant patter had become a full-blown thud.
Revenants marched in. Brand-new ones from the looks of them. Tiny particles of dirt pinged lightly against the floor, mixing with the dust of their forebears.
“Guess we were right,” Jimmy murmured. “Mommy’s been raising the dead all over the place.”
My chest went tight; I couldn’t breathe. My gaze was glued to the doorway as I waited for my first true sight of my mother.
She flew in—not literally, though I guess she could have—shoving aside revenants like the nuisance they were. Every time she touched one they cringed, scrambling as far away as they could get, though stopping just short of the door.
The chandelier’s yellow light made her skin glow like gold. Her curly dark hair shone. She’d found better clothes—a bright red sheath, yellow sandals, with turquoise bobbles at her ears, wrists and throat.
I stared at her and felt nothing, remembered the same. How could that be? This woman—loose term, I know—had given birth to me. Shouldn’t there be some connection? But when I saw her I only experienced a sense of the bizarre. That someone could look so much like me yet not like me. That we could share the same blood, yet without the similarity in appearance she could be any other being on the planet.
“My love,” she purred, her voice lower than mine, with that thick accent that brought to mind sand dunes and the pyramids of Giza. “What did you do?”
I opened my mouth to answer—who else could be her love?—and Jimmy elbowed me in the ribs. She wasn’t looking at me, didn’t even appear to have noticed me in the room, which was downright disturbing.
Hey! Long-lost daughter here.
I remained silent as she laid her palm against Sawyer’s dust-strewn chest. When she lifted it, she left her handprint in the grit like a brand.
“They disobeyed,” he said simply.
“So you killed them all.” She licked her lips. “You’re so deliciously vicious.”
I blinked. I’d just been describing Sawyer with similar contradictory terms. Was that an inherited trait? Or could she read my mind without even touching me? If so, we were all dead.
She drew her fingernail—long, spiky, very Fu Manchu—beneath the mountain lion tattooed on his chest. Rubbing her hand in the blood that welled, she expressed the delight of a child who’d just discovered finger paint, before she pressed her palm to his stomach, leaving behind a more colorful, more gruesome brand.
“Mmm.” She tilted her head as if listening to someone, though the room was quiet as the eye of a storm. “More.”
She’d cut his neck before my eyes tracked the movement. Blood spurted, and she stuck both hands beneath the flow, then began to finger paint in earnest, all over Sawyer’s body.
Sawyer, who’d been standing still as a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights, grabbed the Phoenix. I figured he’d toss her through the window, smack her against the wall, throw her to the ground and do a rain dance on her head. And we needed her—at least until we had the key.
My mouth formed, No! But I never got the word out. It caught in my throat, choked me so badly I couldn’t quite breathe, as Sawyer put his hand at the back of her neck. One quick snap and—
Instead he lifted her onto her tiptoes and kissed her more passionately than he’d ever kissed me.
“You see now why I always think it’s Sawyer?” Jimmy murmured.
CHAPTER 25
“What the hell?” I demanded, stepping forward.
Jimmy muscled me back with his shoulder. “He’s one of them.”
I stilled. “A revenant?”
Sawyer didn’t look dead, risen or otherwise. He looked like Sawyer. Hotter than hell. Even when he was kissing my . . . I swallowed thickly.
Mother.
“No,” Jimmy murmured. “Not a revenant.”
And it wasn’t until the relief flooded me that I realized I’d been devastated at the thought of Sawyer dying.
Although death just wasn’t what it used to be.
“We sh
ould have known when they said there was a spell on this place,” Jimmy said.
“Just because there’s a spell we should automatically think our favorite sorcerer cast it?”
“Not my favorite,” Jimmy muttered. “But . . . hell yeah.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off of Sawyer and the Phoenix. The two of them were really going at it. Kissing, touching, rubbing against each other like cats in a field of catnip. His neck wound had clotted, but the blood all over him, all over her, made them seem like characters in an Anne-Rice-before-she-found-Jesus book. I wanted to glance away, but for some reason I just couldn’t.
The Phoenix lifted her mouth from Sawyer’s. “Raising the dead makes me so . . .” She leaned forward and ran her crimson tongue around Sawyer’s lips as if she were catching the last droplets of an ice-cream cone. “What’s the word, lover?”
“Horny,” Sawyer said.
“All right,” I practically shouted. “I come here to change sides in the war to end all wars, bring along the best general I’ve got, and you’re dry-humping in the front hall?”
“Make it shut up,” the Phoenix ordered.
The revenants started forward.
“Oh, sheesh,” I said. “Do you really want us to dust them all when you just got done raising them?”
The Phoenix, mouth poised again over Sawyer’s, paused as if listening. But not to me. Her eyes went distant, and she nodded once, shook her head, then murmured, “Yes. All right.”
I turned my attention to Jimmy, who lifted his eyebrows and twisted his lips, the facial equivalent of a shrug.
The Phoenix let go of Sawyer, but instead of turning to us, she moved into a spare corner and continued to have a nice long talk with herself. Most of it we couldn’t hear, because it only existed in her mind; the rest she whispered too softly for even our super-duper batlike senses—until she lost her temper.
“No,” she shrieked, the sound rattling the windows, making the revenants freeze, then fall to the floor with their hands over their heads. “I want to play now!”
She lifted her hand. The earth-toned flesh began to glow a dull orange.
“We can play,” Sawyer murmured, his gray eyes watching her like a wolf might watch a much bigger wolf. “No need to get—”
Fire suddenly erupted from the fingertips of the Phoenix, hitting the wall and rolling upward to dance across the ceiling.
“Upset,” Sawyer finished.
She spun toward me and Jimmy. I leaped in front of him just as he was leaping in front of me. We conked heads, then began to push and shove.
I expected fire to consume us both. We wouldn’t die, but being burned is excruciating. I don’t recommend it.
When nothing happened, we stopped mid-tussle and shifted our attention to her. The Phoenix stared at me; her lips formed an O of surprise. “It’s you,” she breathed, and clapped her still-flaming hands against her cheeks.
I waited for the shriek, but instead of being burned, her face merely took on the same orange-yellow glow, making her dark eyes appear surrounded by hellfire.
“Uh, yeah,” I managed, moving away from Jimmy.
Skipping forward like a child, this way and that, she sang an off-key tune beneath her breath, then paused halfway between Sawyer and me. At least her hands and her face had stopped glowing. I was starting to think she was nuttier than a Payday candy bar.
“Nefertiti,” she whispered.
“I’m Elizabeth,” I said slowly. “Or Liz if you like.”
She shook her head, scooted closer, and I tensed, thinking she was going to hug me. Instead she slapped me across the face—palm to my left cheek—then she backhanded me on the right one. I stumbled first in one direction and then the other but managed to keep my feet. Without even looking his way, I gave a quick shake of the head to stay Jimmy, but I kept my eyes on the Phoenix.
“Nefertiti,” she said again.
“Ooo-kay. I guess you named me Nefertiti.”
“It means ‘the beautiful one has come,’ ” Sawyer translated. “She didn’t name you. She didn’t know about you until she rose from the dead.”
The Phoenix scampered over to Sawyer, cuddling up to his side as he draped his arm over her shoulders in a casual gesture that spoke of a long association. Watching them made me want to puke for so many reasons.
I was trying very hard not to dwell on Sawyer’s total betrayal. What kind of a leader was I? I hadn’t seen this coming. I’d had no inkling at all that Sawyer was anything but loyal.
Oh, sure, Jimmy always said Sawyer had been bought by the federation and what could be bought by one could be easily stolen by another for the right price. But I hadn’t believed it. I still didn’t.
Sawyer wouldn’t change sides for money. He had no use for it. But he did have use for other things. I just wasn’t quite sure what they were. It appeared my mother was.
I took a deep breath, trying to calm my pounding heart and my dancing stomach. If I started to think about what could happen if Sawyer’s power was against us instead of for us, I really might puke. I had to concentrate on other things, anything, or lose my mind.
“She never knew about me?” I blurted. “I haven’t been pregnant”—praise every saint ever named—“but I still can’t see how anyone could give birth and not be aware of it.” I frowned. Unless . . . “Did they tell her I was dead?”
That would explain why she’d abandoned me.
“No,” Sawyer said shortly.
“I’m a phoenix.” My mother moved her hands like the wings of a great bird. “Only when I die is another born.”
“I was born when you died?”
“How else?”
“How else?” I muttered. “How ’bout how?”
She lowered her hands with a flutter. “I wasn’t there.” She pointed at Sawyer.
“What would you know about it?” I asked; then as a terrible, nasty thought occurred to me I bent at the waist, afraid I might throw up again.
“Oh, get ahold of yourself,” the Phoenix said. “He isn’t your father.”
It took several minutes to wrestle my stomach and my brain under control. Then I lifted my head. “You’re sure?”
“Me?” She put a palm against her chest. Lucky her dress was already red. Her hands still glistened with Sawyer’s blood. “No. But he insists such a thing isn’t possible.”
I turned my gaze to Sawyer’s implacable face. “Impossible physically or impossible because you don’t want me to puke until I die?”
Something flickered in his too-light eyes, something that made them suddenly appear dark and entirely savage. “Impossible because I would not do—”
The fury overcame him. His hand clenched on Mommy’s upper arm so tightly I thought she might break. Instead of wincing, she drew in an ecstatic breath and arched as if in the throes of pleasure.
I coughed. The gag reflex was back.
“I would not do—,” he tried again.
“Me?” I offered helpfully, and was rewarded with a growl from so deep in his throat I half-expected his wolf to burst free.
“That,” he spit between clenched teeth. “I would not do that.”
“But you’d do just about anything or anyone else,” Jimmy murmured.
Sawyer ignored him, though the flash in his eyes made me think there would be payback later. There always was.
“Elizabeth,” Sawyer continued, “you, of all people, should know better.”
He’d called me Phoenix in the past. I figured now that would be redundant.
“I don’t know what I know anymore,” I muttered, my gaze on his hand, still wrapped around my mother’s arm as she practically had an orgasm from the exquisite pain.
Freaking nut bag.
I guess Sawyer and I had something in common. Our mothers were on the far side of crazy.
“Does it have a name?” I asked. Two could play the “it” game, and in truth I didn’t want to think of her as anything other than sub-human.
She narrowed h
er eyes. “I am the Phoenix.”
I glanced at Sawyer. “Tell me you didn’t call her Phoenix.”
His face was as tight as my own. He understood what I was asking. Had he called us both that? Had he been pretending that I was her?
“No,” he said. “Then she was known as Maria.”
“Maria,” I repeated. “Spanish for Mary.”
“It was her name.”
I didn’t like that one bit. Mary as the mother of Christ. Maria as the mother of me and, if she had her way, the vessel for the Antichrist.
Names were important. I’d learned that much.
Maria Phoenix, bored with the conversation, tapped Sawyer’s hand like a nun with a ruler, and he let her go. Then her dark, mad eyes met mine. “Tomorrow will be time enough for you to prove your allegiance.”
Prove? I didn’t like the sound of that any more now than when Geek Boy had said “test” before. But when was the last time I’d liked the sound of anything?
I glanced at Jimmy; he appeared as thrilled about this conversation as I was.
“I’m your daughter,” I said. “I’ve been searching for you all my life.”
Basically BS, but pretty convincing BS. Didn’t all lost kids search for their parents? Or at least all lost kids except for me. Sure, I’d wondered; I’d asked, but I hadn’t looked. I’d had Ruthie, and she was all I’d ever really needed.
According to her, I’d been dumped, no record of my birth, my family, anything, until I’d entered the system. Although the more I discovered, the more that seemed like BS too. If that were truly the case—if no one had known anything about my parents—then how had I become Liz Phoenix?
“Now that I’ve found you,” I continued, “why wouldn’t I want to join you?”
“You were as unaware of me as I was of you until just a few days ago.”
“And how did you become aware that you had a daughter?” Jimmy asked.
“How do you think?” Her gaze went to Sawyer.
Jimmy’s gaze followed hers, as did mine. Sawyer shrugged. “Someone had to tell her.”
“A Judas excuse if ever I heard one,” I murmured.
“The federation is losing members by the minute,” Sawyer said. “The Nephilim are increasing at the same rate. I saw which way the tide was turning. I like to back a winner.”
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