Phoenix Everlasting

by Rebecca Royce

  “I do.” Chase looked away.

  “Got it.” Victoria called out. “Everyone come see if we can figure out what the mirror showed.”

  We surrounded her, staring at the image. It was an office building—clean, sterile. Empty. The postman, whose body would soon be laid in the ground after the shadow left it, walked to wherever he was headed.

  “How long will this last?”

  The postman turned left.

  Henry answered for Victoria, who concentrated on the scene. “A few minutes, if we’re lucky. Seconds if we’re not. Nothing exact about any of this.”

  “Anyone know where this is?” Victoria asked.

  Chase sucked in his breath. “I got nothing.”

  “Me neither.”

  The postman turned right, and I stared harder at the mirror. The offices he passed each had nameplates on them. The more distance he travelled, the surer I became of what I already suspected. I kept quiet. I had to be certain before I opened a door I wouldn’t be able to close again. Office 323, Levi Yates.

  “Did that just say …?” Henry’s voice broke into my horror. “Are they using Levi’s office building?”

  “Looks that way.” I took a deep breath. Why shouldn’t my completely defenseless ex-husband be working in the building where the shadows had their meetings?

  ***

  I stared out into the darkness through my bedroom window. It was almost midnight. Everyone except Malcolm had finally left. They’d all stared at me like they wanted a reaction. What was I to think? The shadows could have picked anywhere to have their meetups. The local HEB grocery store. Neiman Marcus at the Domain. Home Slice Pizza. They’d chosen instead Levi’s office building where he worked on his array.

  I’d stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago.

  Malcolm placed his hands on my shoulder. “I know you’ve been dealt a blow. We don’t have to …”

  I whirled around, hitting him square in the chest. He blinked but didn’t stumble or even flinch. It would take a lot more than a tap from me to harm Malcolm. “I don’t want you to be kind to me. Since when did you start treating me like I was going to fucking break? I’m tougher than you. Or have you forgotten?”

  Malcolm raised a dark eyebrow but didn’t otherwise comment. Fury travelled along my spine. Silence? After all that he had nothing to say?

  “Aren’t you going to deny it?”

  “Say something I disagree with and I’ll deny it.”

  I shoved at him again. “Condescending asshat.”

  “Language.”

  “Prude.”

  He swung me around until I landed flat on my back with him over me on the bed. “You want to have mad sex? We can have mad sex.”

  I struggled against him. “Do you want me or not?”

  His lips were gentle on mine. Nothing he could have done would have cooled my temper more than the way his lips embraced my own. I kissed him, matching his gentleness. He raised his eyes to look at me. “I know you’re hurting.”

  “Not when you kiss me.”

  His mouth met my own. Over and over. I didn’t chase him to keep up; his rhythm met my own. Two people who had kissed each other many times. We remembered how.

  “Kendall.” He breathed against me. “My own.”

  I sat until I could pull at his shirt to get it off. He helped me, yanking it above his head. I touched his chest, and he breathed in, his eyes never leaving mine.

  He had tattoos all over him. We didn’t have the ability to do that in the other dimension. On his arms were dates. I touched them gently. “What is all the ink?”

  He touched my fingers where they sat on his arm. “The first one was the date we died.” Yes, of course it was. How could I not have recognized it? “The second, the date we came back.” Again, I should have known. “The third one was when I finally got to America.” Eight years later, so he’d been twenty. “The fourth was the day I took over Austin and San Antonio from the moron running them. Fifth was when I found you.” Even though I hadn’t remembered him. “I’ll probably ink today’s date. The day I finally have you.”

  I poked at his chest. “You can’t get happy.”

  “Miserable. I get it.” I smoothed my hand over the ink on his chest. “These?”

  “It’s a dragon.” He bit my bottom lip, and I squirmed. “I like them. They breathe fire.”

  I shook my head. “In some lore.”

  He kissed me, hard. I ground my hips into him, loving the feel of his hardness at the movement. He groaned against my mouth and tugged at my shirt. I pulled it over my head for him. His eyes caressed me and heat hit my face.

  “I’ve had three kids.” I hadn’t thought I’d be uncomfortable. “Maybe we could think of my stretch marks as my tattoos?”

  He thumbed my bra. “More like battle wounds. Listen to me, gorgeous, you are the most beautiful woman in any room you enter. You’re the reason …” His voice trailed off. “I don’t want to hear another word where you worry. Okay? You are gorgeous to me. I’m going to worship your body.”

  I leaned on the headboard. “Then worship away.”

  He grinned. “This is the first time this skin is going to feel your skin. Our memories of each other? That was another body. I don’t know you in this one yet. I will. I take direction really well.”

  “I actually don’t have much experience in this body.” Such a weird conversation.

  He ran his hand down my chest, stopping at my bra. With a flip of his finger, he took it off. “Then I guess we’re going to figure it out together. Be fun learning you.”

  His mouth pressed against my nipple, biting gently while his hand caressed my other one. He sucked lightly, moaning while he did. My muscles jerked, bringing my hips against his again. I didn’t know where to touch him or how I would ever get enough. I ran my hands the same way he did, letting my fingers gently scrape him as I went. He growled against my breast, tugging me tighter against him. I could feel his hard cock through his pants.

  I pulled at his pants, releasing the zipper and the button. Soon we’d both discarded all of our clothing. I didn’t know what I needed until his body covered mine. Yes, this was what I’d been missing. Malcolm’s warmth, his total attention.

  “I love you.” He kissed the tip of my nose. “I love you so damn much. Fuck.”

  I reached between us. Words didn’t seem to want to form in my mouth. I stroked his cock, and it jerked beneath my fingers, lengthening. He moaned. I lost the ability to think. We were arms and legs and feelings, nothing more. Who cared what bodies we wore? I knew this man. He wanted me panting for it, and I was already was. He slipped a finger inside of me, then another one. How did he find my spot so easily when even sometimes I couldn’t?

  My muscles clenched around his hand.

  “Fuck, baby.” He kissed me again and again. Then he was inside of me. He was so big, and it had been a long time since I’d done this. I stretched eventually, my fingers digging into his back. Malcolm liked a little pain to go with his pleasure, I could tell. Truthfully, I did too.

  He moved, slowly at first, so ridiculously tender I wanted to scream. Holding my gaze with his own, he told me without words he wasn’t going to be rushed. I held on, kissing him when he wanted to, breathing with him until he picked up his pace. The muscles in his neck clenched, and his kisses became frantic.

  I would have hit the headboard behind me if his hand hadn’t caught my head. I wanted to scream, but we couldn’t. He seemed to remember, too. This was the hottest, quietest encounter of my entire life. It might have been minutes or a year before I finally exploded, my head thrown back, every nerve ending in my body rejoicing that he was inside of me and he was, at last, my own.

  He followed me into oblivion, and he was the most beautiful sight in the universe.

  I came to slowly. Malcolm had pulled me against him. One of his arms was my pillow, the other behind his own head. His head turned slightly from mine, he snored lightly. Lines under his eyes spoke of
his exhaustion. I hated to wake him, only I’d told him how it had to be.

  We couldn’t be happy. We couldn’t be comfy. He couldn’t wake in my bed in the morning with my kids running around. That kind of happy happened to other people, not to me.

  I rolled toward him, swinging my arm across his chest. In a kind world, we’d never have died. We would have gone off together, been the kind of story where I would have told people we’d been in love since we were nine.

  “Hey.” I brushed his hair off his forehead. “Time to wake.”

  He breathed deeply for a second before his lids opened. “Hey beautiful.”

  “You have to go.”

  He sat, rubbing his eyes, and I readjusted myself to not lean on him. “I know.”

  “You know what we talked about?” I hated to even bring it up. But the fact remained he was going to battle the shadows. He couldn’t feel the laziness that came from being satisfied.

  He kissed me on the lips. “This is where you piss me off?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Malcolm raised his eyebrows in a challenge before he got out of the bed. “Then don’t. I can be happy and kick ass. It is possible. Michael’s just full of shit.”

  “Michael has seen a million years. Maybe more. He’s not full of shit. He’s not kind. There’s a difference.”

  He swung around, pulling his clothes on when he did. “So, you’re what, now? A huge fan of them? You’re going to take their side in things?”

  This was not an argument I’d imagined having with him. The furthest from anything I’d anticipated. “Sometimes. I have a lot of them in my head. You’ll have to excuse me if I can see things slightly differently.”

  “No, I won’t excuse you for that. They took you from me. They didn’t even tell me they were going to. They sent me back to Egypt because that’s where my father was. He beat the living shit out of me every day until I left when I was twenty. He thought I knew where my mom was. She’d fled him and taken me to America where she died of pneumonia her first year here.”

  I’d never heard him speak so openly about his birth parents in any lifetime. “Malcolm …”

  He didn’t let me finish. “You were and are my whole world. So fuck them and the horse they came in on. I’ll finish this shit with the shadows because that’s what I do. It’ll save you and the others. But make no mistake. I’m not fighting an epic war for them. I hate everything about them. Damn it.” He stopped before he slammed out of the room. “We’re having a fight. And it’s not even one you wanted to have, right? What were you going to remind me of? That I can’t stay here? That I don’t like kids, so I can’t be part of your life, not really. I know that, too.”

  I got out of bed, clutching the sheet to my breasts. I didn’t want to be naked while we yelled at each other. “I wasn’t going to say that either.”

  He breathed hard. “What were you going to say?”

  “Drive safely. It’s dark out there.”

  He stormed over to me, kissing me with the anger I’d wanted from him earlier and he’d refused to provide. I drank him in, letting him take from me what he needed. Finally, he pulled away. “We really might be the death of one another. You always come close to killing me. And I know if I’m not careful, I’m going to destroy you, too.”

  He left me to lie in the dark with those words for the next five hours until it was time to get my kids up. We might destroy each other. But like the phoenix buried somewhere that Malcolm still hadn’t told me about, I had a tendency to come back to life. Squirming on the bed, I could practically feel my wings that weren’t there. Like the bird, I rose from the ashes. But would Malcolm?

  Chapter Nine

  I dragged through the rest of the day. I needed to meet with the others to decide what we were going to do about Levi’s office building, if anything, and I had to decide what to do about Levi in general. I’d had sex with Malcolm. That changed things. I’d been divorced long enough now that it couldn’t be in any way considered cheating. Still, Levi and I had never behaved exactly the way divorced people did. He still wanted to be in my life; he told me all the time he wanted to come home.

  Even all that considered, I didn’t know what to make of Malcolm and me. We were never going to have the relationship Henry and Victoria did. They could finish each other’s sentences, and I only needed to look at them to know how much they were connected. Choices I’d made had determined that our destiny was not to be them.

  I rubbed my eyes. I had a job to do that Malcolm had scheduled for me the week before. He’d thought it was funny when he’d texted me the information. He wanted me to sage the house. I’d been self-employed doing so when I’d finally gotten the guts to approach him about a job doing bigger stuff. He didn’t have a lot of respect for sagers.

  Giving me the job had been a challenge of sorts. He wanted to see if I’d still do it, even with me being so completely overqualified for the work. I took down demons.

  Work was work, and if it paid, I’d do it. I didn’t ever want to get into the situation where I had to worry about how I was going to keep the house.

  My father had taken Dex to the Texas Museum at the University to check things out. They were studying history.

  I watched my mother as she hummed to herself and folded laundry. We’d spent so many years in the van I’d had no idea she liked housework as much as she seemed to.

  “Mom.” She looked at me, smiling. “You know you don’t have to do my housework. I’m not the best at it, but I’ll get it done.”

  She shook her head. “‘Not the best at it’ is putting it mildly. How did you manage when this was what you did? When you weren’t working?”

  I laughed, despite myself. “Badly.”

  “We’re living here to help you with the kids during this time. You’ve got a lot on your plate. If we can help, we will.”

  I walked over to her and wrapped my arms around her neck. “Do you want to go sage a house with me and get some lunch?”

  Her eyes brightened. “Actually, that sounds like a great day.”

  We ended up inside the house, me holding the sage as the black, burning smoke travelled to all the corners of the house. There were no ghosts to clear, no energy needing to move on. But the house had been infested several times. For some reason, it seemed to draw the energy to it. Malcolm wasn’t really sure why. The owners seemed fairly normal. It was, of course, possible they had a past life problem.

  None of us were really sure if this was a ‘real’ thing. Other than my fellow shadow-fighting freaks, I wasn’t exactly sure of anyone who had been reborn. All we knew was, occasionally, we encountered people who seemed to be burdened with a lot of stuff. Clearing their bodies of the energy around, which most of the time seemed very old, helped.

  Malcolm didn’t think that was the case here, at least as far as he could tell. The house itself seemed like an energy beacon.

  Right then, it was clear. A week or so later, it wouldn’t be, and the family living in it would once again start suffering from headaches and mood swings. The husband was sensitive enough to believe there was something in the house and to call for help. We needed a more permanent solution other than to keep clearing it over and over again. Not that Malcolm minded the money …

  A weekly sageing was worth a try.

  I wandered slowly though the house. The owners had decorated with care, and I was careful not to bump or move anything when I made my way through.

  My mother trailed slowly behind me. “We never got to see places like this with you. The travelling lifestyle meant we only got called in when things were really bad.”

  “Hmm.” I knew of what she spoke. I’d lived a huge portion of my life thinking most houses were old, damp, and falling apart. “There’s something to be said for staying in one place.”

  My mother nodded. She leaned over to look at one of the many pictures on the wall that showed a cat and some birds. “We didn’t have places like Austin when we started out. There was no locat
ion with Malcolm, Victoria, and the others. Brokers were lucky if they had two people to call on.”

  Before my ninth birthday, my mother had been sharp as a tack. The distance in her eyes had come after I returned at twelve. It was like she’d been made to handle some danger, some otherworldliness but the disappearance of her daughter pushed her over the edge. I hadn’t noticed it because I’d chosen to have my memory messed with, but I could see it now.

  “You know, other than Malcolm and me, the others don’t do this. Victoria has her shop.” I’d taken my mom there. “Henry is an artist. Chase is a private detective. Block is a freelance writer for several magazines. He does some work with Malcolm too, but he’s really a tech guy. They don’t come and clear houses. Malcolm’s contractors are the same as they were when you worked.”

  She smiled at me, and I wondered if she was listening. “It’s a lovely group of friends.”

  I took a deep breath. “Sure. Okay.”

  My father understood what was going on. Did my mom? She seemed to when we were at home, but now here? She hummed slightly. I stared at her light; it shone but not as brightly as I was used to. What did that mean? Was she … sick? Dimmed in some way?

  I took her hand. “Mom, are you okay?”

  She nodded. “Shouldn’t you spread the … sage … upstairs?”

  Okay, that was it. She didn’t remember the word. Something was definitely up, and we needed to go to the doctor. I set down the sage and blew it out. I’d come back and finish tomorrow. Malcolm didn’t need to pay me. I had to take care of my mom.

  I picked up the phone to call my father. He answered on the first ring, as always. “Kendall.”

  “Something is wrong with mom. We can meet at the ER. She can’t remember things. I’m not sure if she’s had a stroke or if there is dementia …”

  He interrupted me. “We know, honey. It was one of the reasons why we were so glad everything happened now and not later. They can’t really define what she has. It’s not Alzheimer’s; it’s not dementia. It’s just … something. Her mind is slipping.” He sighed loudly, and when he spoke again, his voice caught. “Can we talk about it when I get home?”