by Lucy Auburn
Phoenix Academy: Freed
Lucy Auburn
Contents
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Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
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Also by Lucy Auburn
About the Author
Copyright 2020 Lucy Auburn.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
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Author’s Note
This book contains some violent scenes, and allusions to child abuse, drug use, and other adult situations.
Phoenix Academy contains a reverse harem romance. I hope you enjoy!
Chapter 1
Fuck it if I'll let everything end this way, after the way it started: with a severed dick, four demons who called to me, and my body reborn in flames. I'm not going to just roll over and let the soulless beast take everything away from me. And I won't abandon Petra, even if she's already dead.
I have to fight. I have to get up. To work through the pain, track down the man who did this, and protect the academy I love from the enemy they don't even know is coming for them.
It's hard, though. I feel so alone. And so guilty. None of this would have happened if not for me. I was foolish—I wanted easy answers, more power, a way to free my guys. And I let myself be led around by the nose because of it.
I freed the necromancer's son, the one who was revived and lost his soul, giving him immortality and immense power. Now he's out there with a bracelet that has the power of six immortal deaths flowing through it—and there's no telling how many people he'll kill with that power.
I drag myself out of the fog of pain and confusion caused by the poltergeist. Get a hand under me. Try to use that hand to push myself up off the ground. Focus my eyes on Petra. Grit my teeth and move my feet, trying to make them take my weight.
They shake beneath me.
The pain is so overwhelming that it tips me forward. Something is off—something vital has been taken from me. Fear fills my chest, and I instinctively reach for the bond I have with my guys, needing them here, but that part of me is empty.
It's like the Husk's soul moved through me and stole what was most important to me all at once, in one foul and terrible move. My strength. My fire. My quartet.
And without my guys around to laugh with, lean on, and love, I don't know how to navigate through this cruel and terrible world. I would do anything to free them, anything to have them by my side—and I'm reaping the consequences of those desires now that they've led me astray.
"You need to get up." The voice in my ear is male, but isn't any one of my quartet. It's the familiar voice of a long-dead Grim, Gaugin my half-brother, his spirit hovering over me like a worried mother. "There's strength in you yet, I know it. You can't let him get away from you. But he's still nearby—you can catch him if you try."
Through gritted teeth I mutter, "I can't. There's too much pain." Swallowing, I add, "I wish I were dead."
The spirit chuckles bitterly. "No you don't. Though for you, at least, death would bring relief from the pain—and rebirth. There's no time to wait for you to regenerate, though. You need to summon your phoenix spirit and get your feet beneath you. Only fire and magic can cleanse the soulless Husk from this earth."
"I don't have much spirit in me right now." I grunt, pushing up from the ground only to face-plant again, despair in my heart. "I fucked up. Completely, totally screwed up everything."
"Maybe you did, maybe you didn't." There's a soft tone in Gaugin's voice, but it turns firm as he adds, "But you need to get up, and go help your friend over there. She's bleeding pretty bad. If no one does anything for her soon..."
His words light a fire beneath my feet, one that's not phoenix fire related but purely made out of force of will. Thinking about Petra—her snappy comebacks, the way she tosses her blonde hair over a shoulder, how she's vowed to give her life to protect me—I push past the pain remaining in my body from coming so close to death and having an evil poltergeist dive beneath my skin. Even though it feels like every nerve in my fingers, toes, and in between is burning with agony, I make myself get up off the ground and stumble towards Petra.
It hurts to move, but I do it anyway. Petra put her wolf shifter ass between me and danger—the least I can do is shake off a little mortal agony to return the favor. Stumbling towards the mouth of the cave, I go down on my knees near her prone body, reaching my blood-coated palms towards her wounds.
She breathes shallowly, but with difficulty, beneath my touch. Her pale cheeks are even more drained of color than usual. I can feel her fight to stay alive. Even a shifter, with their regenerative abilities and supernatural strength, can't fight through every injury. If no one does something soon, she'll breathe her last breath.
"Hey asshole," I tell her, sucking back the tears that fill my eyes, desperate for her to look up at me and say some insult in response. "You said you weren't gonna die on me. So rally and wake up already, you weak ass bitch. Otherwise I'm going to kick you off my superhero team."
For a moment, no response. Then a weak groan leaves her lips, and those eyelashes peel open to glare at me, blonde brows drawn together in annoyance. "I'm in so much—fucking... pain, but I swear to fuck I'm gonna bite your ass."
Relief fills me, and two tears tumble down my cheek to nestle in my collar. "I'm going to figure out some way to save you. Otherwise you'll haunt my ass, right?"
"For eternity."
Looking to my right, I find Gaugin's spirit hovering near me, a grim expression on his face. "What do I do? She's in pain, and I don't have the right kind of magic to fix it. I'm a demon-summoning phoenix, not some kind of healer." The helplessness that fills my chest is undeniable. "This isn't something that can be fixed with brute force."
"Even flames can be cleansing," Gaugin says, as Petra's eyes close weakly, her breathing growing shallow as her consciousness drifts away
. I press down on the gouges in her chest, heart twisting at the blood I feel pulse out of her body beneath my touch. "The effects of a poltergeist's touch only last so long. Summon your strength, Dani."
He's not talking about my emotional or mental strength. What he means are my demons. I'm afraid to search for the bond and find it missing again, which always feels like taking a step forward only to find the earth yawning wide beneath my feet. For Petra, though, I'll do anything. So I reach for my guys again, and this time I can feel them there, the bond as weak as it was the day it was formed but still undeniable.
Because I'm still weak, I only have room for one small summoning. I choose Sebastian, who has dominion over pain and its shadow, pleasure. He arrives first in spirit form, two poison-slick knives in her hand, eyes wide and wary. Tugging on the bond with my jaw clenched, pain surging as I use the last bit of my strength, I make him corporeal so he has hands that can touch and soothe.
"Take her pain away," I tell him. "I'm going to... what can I even do? My phoenix fire is useless."
"It isn't," Gaugin gently coaxes me. "You'll have to hurt her to save her, but we both know that you can. Cauterize her wound."
As Sebastian's blue eyes flit to mine, and he kneels by Petra, wordlessly sheathing her knives, I voice our shared concern. "I'm more likely to burn her alive than heal her. I don't think I have that kind of control yet."
In a firm voice, Sebastian points out, "There's no time for training or studying anymore. It's do or die, my darling. Time to figure out what you're made of." He presses a curved, gentle palm to Petra's forehead and murmurs, "No pain, no pain, no pain."
His words echo the same mantra I woke to that fateful day in my foster mother's house, a hole in my chest caused by a White Phoenix's grasping hand, my heart nearly stolen right out of my rib cage. Sebastian's powers were the only thing that kept me from going insane from the pain alone while my body regenerated himself. As he passes the same gift onto Petra, her face clears, a little color returning to her cheeks.
It's not enough to heal her. But taking the pain away lets her body focus on one thing only: healing itself. All I have to do is help it along by stopping the bleeding, and her shifter physiology will take care of the rest.
My mind flashes back to the night I met Petra, when she was the tiny badass blonde between me and a Grim who wanted me dead. I had no idea what I'd been reborn as, and I was used to living on the streets alone, street rat that I was. Now I'm different, and it's all because of her and the other students at the academy.
I've got to save her. Taking a deep breath, I steady my hands, hovering them just above her chest. My eyes meet Sebastian's blue gaze; his expression is steady and calm.
"You can do this, Dani," he says, sounding so sure of me, while I'm full of nothing but doubt. "It's just a matter of closing the wound with enough heat. I'm taking her pain away, so she won't even feel anything."
"I can do this," I echo, almost believing it. Determination fills me. "And once I've saved her, I'll take out that asshole so he can't hurt anyone else."
Anger gives me confidence, and that confidence stokes the fire of the phoenix inside me. I almost died—almost lost another of my few and precious lives—but I managed to rise from the ashes, just like I have every time before. Remembering Yohan's lessons and everything I've faced already, I focus my power in my palms until I'm holding a pure white blade of heat.
As Sebastian pulls the pain from Petra's body, I press the tip of the phoenix fire knife I'm holding against her wounds. Sweat beads on her forehead, and the smell of burning flesh wafts in the air. Sebastian guides my hands with a low voice, telling me when to move the knife, and when to press it against her. Soon her veins are no longer spurting red blood, and there are three angry roped slashes of burn scars where the wounds were.
Petra is going to be so pissed at me for fucking up her bikini body. But at least she'll be alive to be pissed. Letting go of the phoenix fire, I let it subsume into my body, feeling the furnace inside me grow as I gather back my strength.
Looking to Gaugin, I ask him, "Why do I feel so weak? It's like he took everything from me with that blasted soul of his."
"The Husk has turned his free-roaming spirit into an impossibly powerful poltergeist over the decades. It has the power to take spirit energy from supernatural beings, which is surely what he did to you." Gaugin's mouth thins into a line. "He shouldn't be alive, shouldn't even exist—his creation was the fault of a grief-filled necromancer and a powerful witch with too much ego. As long as he and his spirit are roaming this earth, untethered from each other, he'll be immortal and impossibly powerful."
"Great. I love it," I snark at him, staring down at Petra, who has warmth in her cheeks even as Sebastian drains the pain from her body. "We've got to be able to defeat him somehow. But as long as he can just snap his fingers and make that poltergeist of his steal all my powers, I won't be able to do anything to face him. No one will. He'll slaughter everyone in his path without stopping."
The threat the soulless Husk presents is bigger than my half-sister Lainey ever was, even bigger than my bastard of a bio father Meyer. He was created by Grims messing with the line between the living and the dead, just like Lainey, but unlike her he doesn't have a fleshy heart that can be taken from his chest and crumbled. From what I've seen, and read about him, he's just like Ari's father—an unstoppable soulless killer without remorse.
To think, there are two of them roaming the earth now. If the Husk is what the Heretic will turn into one day, I have to figure out how to face them both—and teach Ari what we do to shitty dads.
"I know he was created by a necromancer," I tell Gaugin, "but what can you tell me about that thing? There's got to be a way to stop him. A way to face him, and make him mortal again. Otherwise we're all doomed."
"There may be a way," the spirit says, sounding reluctant. "But it won't be easy. And it may take more of you than you're prepared to give. When a soul is severed from a body for so long, the result is far from normal."
"But you know something you're not saying," Sebastian says, narrowing his eyes at Gaugin. "Spit it out."
The spirit sighs, then reluctantly nods. "I know his story. And I can tell you more of it, to help you face him, and give you some magic as well. But you have to know, Daniella, that killing him won't mean slaying the monster. It'll mean murdering the man."
"Tell me. I'm ready."
I shoved my hand into my half-sister's chest, pulled the stolen phoenix heart from her body, and watched the light leave her eyes. I've gone into the spirit realm and faced twisting mazes that led to immortals on the other side. Dying has become like dreaming to me—and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to free my guys and protect the academy that saved me from certain death.
This is something I can do. Something I have to do.
No matter what it takes from me.
Reaching inside, I find my bond with the guys, and summon the other three: Ezra, Lynx, and Mateo. They start as spirits standing around me, then coalesce into their corporeal forms, all ready to fight.
But our enemy has already escaped us. In order to track him down, we need information first. "I'm okay," I tell them, as Ezra hugs me tight and Lynx presses a kiss to my forehead. "Petra is alive, too. But we have something important to do, and Gaugin is going to tell us how. Right?"
The mage looks around at the five of us, then at Petra on the ground, her wounds healing slowly with the help of my powers and Sebastian taking away her pain.
"Of course," he says. "You might want to take notes."
"I'll get it all up here." Lynx taps the side of his head, staring at the spirit. "Whatever we have to do to get this asshole and take him down, tell me. I'll strangle him with my own bare hands for what he just pulled."
That's my Lynx. There's a relief to having my guys back with me. For a moment there, I thought I would never see them again.
I never want to lose them like that ever. And I don't want to see Petra prone
on the ground bleeding out into the earth. This soulless immortal will pay for what he did, that's for sure.
"It all started with a father's grief..."
Chapter 2
Some of what Gaugin tells me, I already know, because Ari showed me the passage in that book she found that she thought might be about her father, the Heretic. It was called A History of Dark Magic's Follies, and it told stories that ended predictably poorly, because bringing the dead back to life isn't exactly the smartest thing. Who knew.
Basically, it goes like this: a long time ago, but that not long ago, a Grim lost his son. In his grief, he found a witch who practiced dark magic. Together they joined their two powers to reanimate the boy's flesh and bring his spirit back from the spirit realm.
As Gaugin tells it, though, something went wrong. "The witch didn't know what she was doing," he says, shaking his head, his mouth thinned disapprovingly. "I researched the event when I was apprenticing under my master, Mage Graves, and it was clear that she had only a rudimentary understanding of the runes she was using. There's a reason why us mages keep runic knowledge to ourselves—their power can be used to do great magics, good and bad.
"While she summoned the boy's soul, she wasn't able to put it back in his body. And she'd yanked him out of the spirit realm so thoroughly that he wasn't able to return and seek his afterlife in the Great Beyond. So he turned into a spirit doomed to walk the earth, and eventually, a poltergeist. In the meantime, the boy grew without a soul—his name was Frederick, but after he joined the army, people began to call him the Manslayer, because of how well he killed, and the legendary blood-soaked smile he would sport in battle. Eventually, he grew into the same powers of his father, and became a Grim with necromantic abilities. That was where things got worse."