Phoenix Freed

by Elise Faber

  His lips twitched. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t sound sorry,” she thought. “But since I’m letting you slide…”

  “I’ll make it up to you tonight.”

  She couldn’t hold back her grin.

  John made a retching sound. “I thought they were passed the honeymoon stage,” he told Morgan.

  “Seriously,” Morgan said. “Come on, Romeo.” He hitched a thumb in the direction of the Colony. “I’ve got people to do, things to see.”

  “You’re an idiot,” Cody said, but he straightened and stood close enough to Morgan so the other man could place a hand on his shoulder. “This may be the first time ever that I miss Monroe.”

  “I’ll tell him you said that.” Morgan clasped his other hand on to John’s shoulder and a moment later, the three of them were surrounded in threads of brown, green, and gold magic. It looked like a miniature tornado, except the power was completely silent as it lifted the men into the air.

  Morgan made the process look effortless, but Dee knew it wasn’t. Using—and controlling—that much magic was beyond challenging.

  “If you need me, call,” Cody thought. “I’ll always be there.”

  She blinked, and they were gone.

  The quiet in their wake was almost deafening.

  “Are they always like that?” Alex asked, sounding awestruck.

  Dee chuckled. “Yup. Pretty much.”

  Alex was silent for a long time, which wasn’t surprising. Hardly twenty-four hours had passed since her arrival, and she’d spent most of it unconscious. But aside from the short conversation they’d had in the hospital room, Alex had spent more time observing than talking. She hadn’t protested when Daughtry had explained they were taking her away from the Colony, didn’t blink when they told her it was both for her own safety and for the rest of the Rengalla. Alex had accepted it all with a placid mask that did nothing to reveal the inner workings of her mind.

  What had been done to her that caused a teenager to keep her emotions so close to her chest?

  The notion made Daughtry sick.

  But she also knew a bit about keeping things close.

  If Alex proved to be truly innocent, then the Rengalla would wrap the girl up in so much love and acceptance the demons of her past wouldn’t seem so frightening.

  She held on to that truth and waited for Alex to speak, not pushing as her sister worked through whatever was stoppering her words.

  Finally, Alex said, “You’re happy.” The two soft words were a sucker punch to Daughtry’s gut.

  Dee forced a breath and a smile. “Yes.”

  “I . . . I didn’t know it was possible to be happy.”

  Crack. A fissure cut deep through Daughtry’s heart at the tentatively hopeful words. Hadn’t known—?

  With a shake of her head, she sank to the ground, leaning back on her elbows and crossing her legs. When Alex didn’t follow, she patted the patch of grass next to her. Her sister sat after a barely perceptible hesitation.

  “I don’t know about you,” Daughtry said. “But my childhood wasn’t filled with much happiness.”

  Alex snorted. The first sign there might be a teenager under the calm front.

  “In fact, I have had more happy memories in the year I’ve spent here than I had in my whole life,” she said. “I can truly say that while the Rengalla fight occasionally, gossip horrendously, and meddle constantly, they are happy.”

  “But . . . how? The Dalshie attack them. Kill them. How could they ever be happy?” The incredulity in Alex’s questions was sad. So damned sad.

  Daughtry told her sister the truth. “When you’ve been in the darkness, it’s easy to grasp for the light.”

  Alex’s face smoothed out.

  “That makes sense to you?” Daughtry asked after a moment.

  “Yes,” Alex whispered. “Yes, it does.”

  They waited a few minutes more, and Daughtry checked on Cody’s progress via the bond. He was far enough away that they couldn’t communicate telepathically, but he was safe and . . . north.

  “What was the brown-haired one doing with the ball of magic?”

  Daughtry turned her gaze to Alex. “Morgan? He was teleporting John and Cody to the cabin.”

  Her sister frowned, the wheels turning so loudly that Daughtry couldn’t help but ask, “What’s the matter?”

  “That’s not teleporting,” she murmured and touched Daughtry’s hand. “This is.”

  They blipped out of existence.

  Thirty-Three

  Daughtry came awake to shouting . . . and a pounding head. She groaned, reached up to cover her ears. “Shh.”

  The yelling cut off.

  “Cowgirl.” Cody peeled her fingers back. “Are you okay?”

  Her head felt like it might explode. Even her own voice hurt her brain. “Shh. Please.”

  “Here.” He put his palm on her forehead, and she felt his magic seep into her skull, ease the pain of her headache. “Better?” he murmured a moment later.

  “Yes. Thanks.” She shoved a hand beneath herself and pushed up. It was only then that she finally comprehended what she was seeing, who she was with.

  They were at the cabin. How were they at the cabin?

  Her eyes tracked to Alex, sitting on the porch steps, a miserable expression on her face. “You did this?” she asked, more curious than angry.

  “I’m sorry,” her sister said, her gaze falling to the ground.

  “Sorry?” John hissed, not lacking on the anger scale. “You could have killed her. You—”

  “Enough,” Daughtry said and stood. Cody’s hands steadied her when she wobbled. “You’d better call the guard at the Colony. I guarantee he’s freaking out.”

  Cody held her eyes for one long moment. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he thought.

  She took mental stock, felt his mind trail alongside hers as she conducted the appraisal. “I’m fine.”

  He nodded. “Okay.” His phone was out a moment later, and he was relaying what had happened to the Colony.

  While Cody spoke to the powers that be, Daughtry made her way over to the porch and sank down next to Alex. She remembered her first teleport with Morgan, how she’d felt disoriented and nauseous. Thanks to Cody, her head no longer pounded, but just like getting off a really fast roller coaster, her brain was fuzzy, her limbs a little slow.

  She grinned, locked stares with Morgan who was standing, arms crossed, against the porch railing. “She’s even faster than you.”

  He raised a brow. “Seriously?” he asked, but the concern in his expression faded away and his hazel eyes twinkled with humor. “She practically gives you brain damage and all you can say is that she’s faster? Rude, Dee.”

  “I wouldn’t have harmed her brain,” Alex said quietly. “I shielded it before we moved.”

  “Oh?” John bent, towering over her. “Then why did Daughtry arrive unconscious?”

  “I-uh—” Alex swallowed hard. “I—”

  “John?” Daughtry asked and stood, walked a few feet away. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

  He hesitated.

  “Please?”

  Sighing, he crossed over to her. “What?” he asked, his tone sharper than she’d ever heard it.

  “Not here.” She turned and started for the trees. “Cody?”

  “Gotcha.” Through the bond, she sensed him finish up the call then lead Alex into the house.

  John brushed by her.

  “Say bye to Morgan for me.”

  Cody gave a mental snort. “Always the other men.”

  “You’re not jealous,” she thought. “You know it’s only blonds for me.”

  “True.” A beat of silence trailed across the bond. “Her magic?”

  “I know. Off the charts. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  “No,” he thought. “We’ll talk about it when you return.”

  John stopped and whirled to face her. “You done talking about me behind my ba
ck?”

  Daughtry frowned at the hostility. This wasn’t like her friend at all. “Whoa, dude. Pump the brakes.” She put her hands up in surrender. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He sighed then spoke as though she were an idiot. “With Cody. Across the bond.”

  Eyes flicking heavenward for patience, she sucked in a breath of the crisp mountain air. It always felt lighter here, filling her to almost the point of buoyancy. There was something about being so isolated in nature that freed her.

  “For once,” she said, “you’re wrong.” At his scoffing noise, she added, “Well, not wrong about talking along the bond, but about you. We were talking about Morgan and magic, not you.”

  “Oh.” He stood stiff as a statue and didn’t say anything else.

  She crossed to him, tugged on his hand until they were both sitting on the ground. “What’s going on, John?”

  “I”—he thrust the fingers of his free hand through his closely shorn locks —"don’t know.”

  “Bullshit.”

  His laugh was brittle. “Okay fine. It is bullshit. The truth is, I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t like what?”

  “Your sister.”

  Daughtry sighed and started to lie back on the forest floor. John stopped her.

  “Wait,” he said, and blue sparks of magic fluttered in his palm. “You’ll get dirt in your hair.”

  She snorted. But since bugs lived in the dirt, she called on her own magic. “I can do it,” she said then hesitated. “Earth or Air magic?”

  John’s face softened, and the blue sparks in his hand poofed out of existence. “You tell me, Ms. Secondary student.”

  Her lips quirked up. She had passed her primary exams, just twenty years later than the typical Rengalla, whose magic normally appeared by the age of five or six.

  Of course, the story of her magic wasn’t a typical one. Her powers had been bound—constricted in her mind under magical lock and key—and her memories altered to remove any knowledge of her abilities. She hadn’t even known she possessed magic until she’d begun getting visions from random contact with strangers.

  But now the blocks on her magic had been removed—or had disintegrated—and she was able to fully access her powers.

  Her memory was a different story.

  She didn’t know if it would ever fully recover after all the manipulations her mother had done to it. And aside from the occasional recollection creeping to the forefront of her mind on its own, no one even knew where to begin on the snarled pieces of her past.

  Daughtry was okay with that. Her past might have affected her, but it was her present, her future that shaped her now.

  Her power fluttered in her palm, twinkling sparks of emerald and violet dancing over her skin.

  “Are you done being mesmerized by the all-powerful Bond Magic?” John asked, his tone tart.

  She blinked then smiled ruefully at him. “Sorry.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Air. Earth will call dirt and the critters that live in it into your pad.”

  “Got it.” Daughtry stretched her neck, shook out her fingers. “And I don’t think we can say Bond Magic is all-powerful anymore. Not after Alex walked through the shield like it was nothing,” she said and called on the air surrounding them.

  The sparks in her palms gathered, grew larger, coalesced into strands that she directed beneath them. They twisted and wove together, forming a thin membrane of air that separated her and John from the ground below.

  “Ouch,” she muttered when the air prodded into her bottom. Too hard, too much like invisible plastic. With a thought, she told the strands to relax—made the magic more air mattress than stiff plank—then lay back and sighed.

  “It’s nice being able to do magic without wanting to kill everyone in the room,” she said.

  John huffed out a laugh before stretching out beside her.

  “Good job, Dee,” he said. “Only one problem.” He waved a hand in the direction of his feet.

  She sat up, frowned. “Dang.” The strands of magic made it so she floated off the ground, but the platform was too short for John. His feet and head would stick off either end. “You’re too tall.” With a sigh, she called on more magic.

  “Leave it.” He tugged the end of her ponytail, and she let the magic slide away. It went back into the recesses of her mind without a fight, and that more than anything illustrated how far she’d come since her powers had initially manifested. Before, her magic had fought against the barriers in her brain, always demanding, always wanting more—more release, more violence, more . . . darkness.

  “But if I was your teacher,” John said with a smile, “I would remind you to remember whom you’re doing the magic for.”

  “Noted,” she murmured. Then she couldn’t help it, her lips twitched.

  A six-foot-plus man relaxing on a blanket of air created for a five-foot-nothing girl. So his head wasn’t on the ground, John had to scoot down, and his legs hung off the end.

  They didn’t speak for a long moment.

  Then John rolled to face her. “I don’t like Alex.”

  Thirty-Four

  “Reading that loud and clear,” Daughtry said. John had made it pretty damn clear back at the cabin. But— “Why?”

  “I don’t like her.” John shrugged, lips pulling down. “I don’t trust her. I don’t—”

  “She’s my sister.” Daughtry’s shot at a family. A real one, not something she’d had to cobble together of friends and Cody.

  No. That didn’t sound right.

  Cody and Suz, John, Mason, and Gabby and so many others were her family—shared blood or not. They were real. They were important. Alex . . . was just another thread in the tapestry. A thread Daughtry wanted desperately to fit, to be woven in.

  She guessed time would tell whether it would or not.

  “Shared DNA doesn’t make a family.”

  Of course, John was right.

  She rolled to her side, mirroring him, and propped her head under her palm. “I don’t disagree with you.”

  “So why is everyone just accepting her? Why aren’t we interrogating her? Why coddle around and tread so softly?” John sighed. “We could be walking right into another trap.”

  “Maybe.”

  His eyes, a beautiful bright indigo, flicked toward her, raked her from head to toe. “Maybe?”

  She gave an awkward one shoulder shrug—given her position—and said, “Yes, maybe. We might be walking into a trap, we might be falling into some nefarious plan of the Dalshie’s. But . . .” Her teeth pressed into her bottom lip before she took a deep breath. “But what if we’re not? What if we have a girl who’s been through hell that needs help? What if, John?”

  Letting the words soak in, she flopped to her back and stared up at the canopy of trees. The leaves fluttered, dappling sunshine throughout the forest floor. When she spoke again, her words were quieter. “We’re taking precautions. We’re investigating and we will sure as hell figure out what’s going on with Alex’s magic before we go back to the Colony.” She touched his shoulder. “Everyone’s always told me to trust my instincts.”

  He grunted.

  “They say Alex is good. That here”—her hand went to his heart—“she’s good. Will you trust me in this?”

  John was quiet for so long Daughtry was certain he’d refuse. Then he sighed and sat up. “I will,” he said. “I don’t like it, but I will.”

  She rose and threw her arms around his neck. “Thank you.”

  John hugged her back. “Come on, let’s get back to the cabin before Cody skins me alive for daring to touch you.”

  She slid off the air magic and waited till he had done the same before directing her powers to dissolve back into the atmosphere.

  They walked down the path toward the cabin. “And Cody wouldn’t skin you alive.” Her eyes flicked to his, a wave of mischief coursing through her. “You’d already be dead.” A pause. “Then he’d skin you.”
/>
  John’s lips twitched. “You’re getting violent in your old age.”

  Daughtry held up a stack of DVDs—romcoms for Cody, action for her and John—then hesitated. She, Alex, and the boys were gathered around the living room of the cabin, sitting in relatively contented silence after a dinner of frozen pizza and salad.

  After looking at the prepackaged box of food as though she’d never seen such a thing before, Alex had eaten nearly an entire pie herself—though she’d forgone the leafy greens. Carbs and cheese were more her speed, apparently. Not that Daughtry blamed her. She’d only eaten the salad because she thought as an adult she should set a good example for her sister. But she couldn’t shake the frown that Alex had given the pizza, couldn’t help but wonder about her sister’s childhood. Had she missed out on so much that she’d never seen a frozen pizza?

  What had the Dalshie done to her?

  Daughtry wanted to push for details, but she knew what it was like to be forced to relive the pain of the past. She wanted Alex to share on her own terms.

  Except they needed to know. Everything.

  She sighed. Just not tonight.

  For tonight, they could pretend this was a family vacation. Minus the long car rides and constant arguing.

  Her eyes flicked to John’s. He’d been polite to Alex since their powwow in the woods, but the skepticism and barely contained hostility were still there.

  No arguing . . . or at least not yet.

  The point was that as much as she wanted to let Alex reveal everything on her own terms, if it didn’t happen soon then Daughtry was going to have to prod her for details.

  “Patience, cowgirl,” Cody thought to her.

  She glanced at him, saw the compassion on his face, felt his support across the bond. “Easy for you to say.” Her lips flattened into a mock-frown, but her mind went serious. “I’m surprised that you’re not mad at her . . . for the teleportation,” she added at the unspoken question flitting around in his mind.

  “You didn’t see her face when you both arrived. She was smiling, like a child wanting to show off her drawing to a parent. Then she realized you were unconscious. And the concern, the fear on her face.” His thoughts coated their link. “I was worried about you, of course. But so was she, and you can’t teach that. If it’s missing in a person—empathy, an intrinsic concern for another living thing—I’m not convinced it can ever be taught.”