Phoenix Freed

by Elise Faber

  “I’m not insinuating anything,” Alex said. “You should have been insane or turned with the amount of dark magic my mother injected into you. Not to mention the many times Elisabeth siphoned off the happiness in your mind. It was like a fucking drug to her. Anytime you had the smallest bit of joy, she had to suck it out and consume it.”

  Daughtry’s breath caught.

  “You’re not insane or bad or turned,” Alex went on. “And you know why? Because at your core you are inherently good.”

  The resulting silence was resounding, so quiet that Daughtry heard the soft hoots of an owl in the distance, the whisper of the wind through the pine needles.

  “Take your hands off me,” John finally ground out, what felt like ten minutes later.

  Cody shook his head. “Not until you chill the fuck out, bro.”

  “Let go.”

  “Not happening,” Cody told him.

  One side of his mouth turned up, and faster than Daughtry could have imagined, he shot a bolt of magic at Alex, vibrant blue and hardened to steel. She deflected it away with the merest brush of her hand.

  “Here’s your tip, and just this once, it’s on the house,” she told him. “Learn to fight dirty.”

  Then she turned, took one step, and teleported out of sight.

  Thirty-Nine

  Dee held a pan in one hand and a package of eggs in the other. Cody had the resigned expression of a man who knew he was going to lose a battle.

  “Even I can’t ruin eggs.”

  With a few quick steps, Alex crossed the room and snatched the eggs from Daughtry’s grip. “Um. Yes, you can.”

  “Hey!”

  Cody blew out a breath. “Agreed,” he muttered before leaning down to kiss Daughtry’s cheek. She glared but allowed the contact and at the touch of his lips to her cheek, she melted. Or at least relaxed enough in Cody’s arms to drop her guard.

  He snatched the pan and tossed the skillet to Alex. “Catch.”

  “Hey!” she said again, indignant.

  Alex deftly caught the pan before making a shooing motion at them. “Out. Out. I’ll cook breakfast.”

  Cody had been grinning until she mentioned cooking. Then his face fell with almost comical swiftness. As if ruining food was a genetic trait. Daughtry poked him. “Maybe I should—”

  “I didn’t inherit the burn-everything-I-come-into-contact-with gene,” Alex said with a smirk. “Trust me.” Opening a few cabinets, she extracted a bowl and whisk, then began cracking eggs. “Eggs and toast coming up.”

  “I—” Dee began.

  “Seriously, go.”

  Daughtry sighed. “Younger and already making me look bad.” She gave Alex’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Don’t overdo it, you’re still recovering.”

  Alex froze, but before Daughtry could ask her what was the matter, images began tearing through her mind—

  “It’ll be okay,” Daughtry whispered and wrapped an arm around Alex’s shoulders.

  Alex nodded, the barest whimper of pain emerging from her lips.

  It was the same every time her sister came. Once the blocks were removed on Daughtry’s powers and memories, Elisabeth would see everything she could do and push Alex that much harder.

  “I’m not good like you.”

  “You are,” Dee said. “Alex you—”

  “I’ll stay strong,” Alex said. “I won’t let Elisabeth turn us against each other. I promise.”

  “It’s—” she began.

  “I’m fine,” Alex said. “We just have to survive long enough to escape. We’re getting older and stronger. We’ll be able—” Her voice broke, a wave of pain stiffening her spine and arms.

  Daughtry’s eyes filled with tears. “Shh. Just breathe.” She helped her lie back until she was flat on the floor, convulsions of pain wracking her body.

  “I’m . . . fine . . .” she gasped.

  She gently brushed her fingers across her brow. “Just breathe, Alex. I’m here.”

  Her sister’s eyes slid closed, a small smile curving her lips at the corners.

  Dee’s voice was carefully calm. “We’ll be fine. I know it—”

  “Isn’t this a cozy scene?” Elisabeth’s cold, emotionless voice flowed across the room, bathed Daughtry in fear. She scrambled up, standing between Alex and their mother, panic swelling.

  “It’s okay—” Alex said.

  “Lessons are over.” Dark magic knocked Daughtry to the side as effortlessly as a feather.

  A heartbeat later, she was gone . . .

  There hadn’t been a good-bye.

  Elisabeth hadn’t brought Daughtry to the house again.

  There weren’t any more movies or spending time in the brightly lit rooms above ground.

  There had only been cold, dark cells. Hard stones. Pain.

  “I think you’ve beat those eggs into submission,” John murmured, pulling Daughtry out of her head and back into the present. Cody’s mind was concerned, but she straightened, pushing the memories down to focus on the now.

  Her eyes flicked down to the bowl Alex was mixing, saw the perfectly whisked eggs. She dumped them into the pan then rotated toward the breadbox for the bread, pulling out a whole loaf of sourdough.

  Daughtry’s stomach rumbled.

  Carbs. Seriously delicious.

  “You all right there?” The amusement in John’s tone snapped her back into herself.

  “It’ll just be a few minutes,” Alex said.

  “A few too many according to Daughtry,” he teased, much more the normal John she knew. “Nice knife skills,” he told Alex as she quickly portioned the bread into perfectly sliced pieces.

  Alex tossed a glare over her shoulder. “Are you just going to stand there all day and watch me?”

  “Yup.”

  A sigh from her sister. “Did someone shove sunshine up your butt?” she muttered.

  John laughed. “No.”

  “Then why are you being nice?”

  “This is my normal personality.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  John chuckled, but didn’t respond. Instead, he plunked into a chair and crossed his legs in front of him.

  “I realized something while you were on your midnight stroll through the forest.”

  “Oh? What was that” Daughtry asked, and they both glanced at her then back to one another. Hmm. Cody brushed her shoulder. “Should we sit at the table?”

  She nodded, still studying her sister and John, wondering why her subconscious was suddenly telling her she was missing something obvious. Cody’s mind blipped and she turned.

  “What is it?”

  He shrugged. “I suspect we’ll find out in time.”

  “But you do have suspicions?”

  “More like a working theory, but I’m not ready to share that with the class.”

  She opened her mouth to comment but was distracted when her sister asked, “Going to tell me what it is?”

  “Nope.” A beat. “Or at least not yet.”

  With a sigh, Alex turned her back on him and began popping the pieces of bread into the toaster before turning back to the stove to finish the eggs. Less than five minutes later, four servings had been dished up. Daughtry’s stomach growled loudly.

  She started stacking dishes on her arms, trying to get them to the table all in one trip.

  Daughtry started to stand. “I’ll help—”

  “Here.” John said, stepping in front of her. “Don’t want to ruin that hard work.”

  Inhaling sharply, Alex pulled free and shoved two of the dishes into his hands. “Put these two on the table,” she snapped, picking up the others and stomping toward the round table where Cody and Daughtry were sitting.

  “Thank you,” Daughtry murmured when Alex plunked a plate down in front of her. She glanced down, started to rise again. “Forks,” she said. “I’ll grab them.”

  A thread of Alex’s magic, pale blue and threaded with black swept across the kitchen and snagged four forks
from one of the drawers.

  It wasn’t until they were in her hand that Daughtry realized exactly what her sister had done.

  Holy shit.

  Three Rengalla started wide-eyed at Alex.

  Cody was the first to speak. “Can you do that with napkins too?”

  Forty

  “My earliest memory is of my mother pumping dark magic into me. I remember the smell, the burn, the pleasure of it.” Daughtry shivered as she sat next to Alex on the porch steps. “My magic hadn’t even developed yet,” Alex said. “But it never seemed to matter. Regardless of how much power she shoved into me, it always flowed right back out.”

  “She hurt you.”

  “Elisabeth hurt a lot of people.” It was a prevarication and Daughtry knew it.

  “But she hurt you,” she pressed. “When you were just a baby.”

  “Cowgirl, you have to let her tell the story,” Cody thought gently.

  A long pause. An extended silence fraught with tension.

  Finally, Dee blew out a breath. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m making this harder than it has to be.”

  Alex shrugged. “Elisabeth realized fairly quickly that I was a waste of time,” she said. “So instead of the experiment, I became the placebo.” She met Dee’s eyes. “That’s when she began bringing you to the stronghold. She would conduct the same tests on both of us then study the results.”

  “And?” Dee asked when Alex hesitated. “What were those results?”

  “The dark magic behaved differently. It flowed out of me, but your body absorbed it.” She blew out a breath. “Elisabeth thought it was because I was a null. But since I’m not really one . . .”

  “She never found out?” John asked quietly.

  “There was nothing to be gained from telling her the truth.” Alex ground her toe into the dirt. “I didn’t know what it was called, or what it meant to her for me to be a null. I only understood that me not having magic meant she left me alone more frequently.”

  “It was really clever of you to think of it,” Dee offered.

  “More like dumb luck.” She shrugged. “But now that the Master is in charge, things have shifted again.”

  “What does the Master want?” John asked.

  “Everything.”

  Forty-One

  “Come on,” Dee said as she led Alex through the corridors of the Colony. Tyler and Suz had met them at the cabin, after Alex’s initial blood tests came back negative. Suz had taken another, just to be safe, and, as the strongest telepath—as well as the one with the most experience of dark magic, having been tortured with it—Tyler had searched Alex’s mind.

  When everything came up clear, she was able to return to the Colony on a trial basis.

  “Yuck.” Alex’s eyes were on the walls and Dee knew all she saw was bland brown paint, the carpeted floors a hideous beige.

  Except—

  Alex stopped, squinted. Daughtry’s skin prickled as her sister’s magic flared. “I’ll be damned,” Alex murmured.

  “You can see it?” Daughtry asked. “How?”

  Alex ran her hand over a mural. “I don’t know. It’s like my mind knew it was there.” She bit her lip. “It’s beautiful.”

  Daughtry smiled. “It really is. You should see some of the other hallways. They’re almost gallery worthy.”

  Alex reached out as though to touch the wall then jumped, yanking her hand back. “Oh God! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  Daughtry frowned, then realized what had her sister so upset when she saw that the mural had been marked by a stripe of magic, blue tinged with black streaking across the rendition of an open field.

  “It’s okay,” she hurried to explain to Alex. “Your magic will be absorbed into the murals. The Colony uses it for power.”

  “I ruined it.” Soft words. Sad words.

  “You didn’t ruin anything,” Daughtry said. “Look, see? My magic does the same thing.” She pointed at her purple and green streaks. “See how it is already fading? That’s the Colony using your magic.”

  “Oh,” Alex said. “I didn’t realize.”

  “It’s really cool.” Dee began blabbering about how the Colony worked and her favorite murals. “There’s this one that has a really realistic—” But her words broke off when her stomach soured.

  “You okay?” John’s voice made both of them jump.

  She nodded, placing her palm over her abdomen, hoping it might help the churning. “I think I ate something that doesn’t agree with me.”

  This was different from her Dalshie detector, less ants under her skin or nape prickling and more . . . stomach flu.

  Great. She had better not be getting sick.

  John and Cody had left as soon as they’d all returned to the Colony, barely an hour before, to see, Dante. Though they hadn’t said so, Daughtry knew it was to discuss everything Alex had told them.

  But apparently their debriefing hadn’t taken long.

  “Wait,” he said when Alex rubbed at the stained wall in dismay, hoping it would make the streak fade faster, but finding it only made things worse. “Just watch.”

  Alex stiffened, but she watched and waited as the stains disappeared.

  “The color is your excess magic. It usually bleeds off and dissipates into the atmosphere, but the Colony is designed to absorb it.” John touched his hand to the mural, leaving an indigo handprint. It faded slowly away. “Our powers fuel the lights, the heating, and air conditioning—”

  “The flat screens,” Daughtry interjected with a smile. “I gave her the brief before you so rudely interrupted.”

  John laughed. “Yes. Those. Glad Dee was giving you the rundown. I’m surprised you can see it, though. Usually you need a special piece of magic implanted into your mind to be able to see through the glamour.”

  Alex stepped away from the wall. “Well, that’s one win for my fucked-up magic,” she muttered.

  “It’s nothing special,” Dee said quickly. “It’s just a simple piece of magic and my mind kept trying to see past it too.” She forced a smile. “You just saved us a step, is all.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And plus, it’s really only to keep the humans away. The Rengalla sort of painted special magic over the Colony’s surface. Just in case someone who isn’t supposed to be here stumbles in. It makes the building look abandoned.”

  “And beige.”

  Dee relaxed mildly at Alex’s droll tone. “Exactly. Hard to find your way through when all the corridors appear the same.” She nodded. “Now let’s hurry up and get you settled. You look exhausted.”

  Alex looked like she was going to drop dead, but when she moved to follow Daughtry down the hall, John stopped her.

  “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Alex lifted her chin. “I’m just not fine with you being so nice.”

  “I’m usually nice.” Alex snorted and one side of his mouth turned up. “Plus, I’m not being nice. I’m being realistic.”

  “Less than twelve hours ago you were worried I was corrupting everyone with black magic.” Alex slapped her hand to the wall. “Well. It’s already there. It’s always been there.”

  John’s eyes flicked to the mural, the ebony filaments in her magical handprint so starkly visible in the brightly lit corridor. “You said the black magic your mother implanted flowed out of you.”

  “Yes, because it’s already inside of me.” She shook her head. “I’m not good. I’m already corrupted.”

  Daughtry’s heart twisted when she realized how Alex saw herself.

  A lost cause. Contaminated.

  “If you’re corrupted then why are you here now?” John asked and not kindly necessarily. Which was probably good in truth, Dee had been only sympathetic and while Alex could use all the sympathy she could get, sometimes soft and nice and kind just made a person feel worse. “Why did you risk yourself trying to get word to us?”

  Alex glared. “I didn’t.”
<
br />   “You did,” John pressed. “I saw your wounds, and they sure as fuck weren’t self-inflicted.”

  Alex poked him in the chest. “Maybe I was already injured and hoping you’d save me. Maybe I didn’t get hurt trying to reach the Colony. Maybe I was already—”

  He grabbed her wrist. “But you weren’t, were you?”

  “John,” Daughtry began.

  Alex threw her hands up. “No, dammit, okay? They only came after me when I was caught spying.”

  “Spying on what?” Daughtry asked.

  “The Master. I wanted to find out his plan, but I was caught.”

  “What was he doing?”

  A sigh as Alex paced away from them then turned around and strode back. “I could have teleported away from the Dalshie the moment I felt Elisabeth die, when the magical leash she had me trapped with dissolved.”

  Dee leaned back against the wall. “So why didn’t you?”

  Alex froze, eyes darting anywhere but Daughtry’s. “There was a Forgotten in the dungeon, and I tried to get him out.”

  John made a triumphant noise. “I knew it.”

  “Shut up,” Alex snapped.

  “No.”

  “God,” she said through gritted teeth. “You’re the most annoying man on the planet.”

  “Maybe.” He grinned.

  “I—”

  “John.” Daughtry raised her brows. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked pointedly.

  For a moment, John seemed as though he’d protest. Then he nodded. “You’re right. I’ll check in with you guys later.”

  “I’m confused,” Alex said.

  Dee gave her a squeeze. “Join the crowd,” she said. “I have no idea what the hell is going on in that mind of his.” She tapped a finger to her chin. “The testosterone. The cycling emotions. It’s almost like—”

  Alex glanced over. “Almost like what?”

  “Never mind,” Dee said. “I’m talking out of my butt. Let’s get you to your quarters.” Daughtry began rattling off directions to the infirmary and the cafeteria and any other important place she could think of and by the time she’d run out of things to say, she’d took a breath, Alex was at her quarters.