by Lucy Auburn
This is when I realize she’s not talking about the lives of those among us who die and stay dead—or, like the demons, come back in new bodies with the same souls and none of their old memories. She’s talking about the phoenix, who come back to life.
Not that it makes me feel much better. Coming back to life is one of my least favorite memories.
“Oh, Yohan.” Headmaster Towers sighs and shakes her head. “I can’t say that I don’t understand why you did what you did, but it puts us in a bit of a pickle. I only have one life left before I’m on my final cycle. And Dani is a student—the spell I know to voluntarily sacrifice phoenix lives requires temporarily dying. I can't put a studying through that.”
Raising my chin, I point out, “A student with eleven lives left. So I have to die a few times to make the spell work—I can take it. Especially if it's the best shot we've got.”
There’s a grumbling behind me, and I glance down to see Liam peeling his lips back from his teeth. Sam’s tail is twitching, too. Clearly neither shifter approves.
“I don’t know.” Headmaster Towers looks troubled. “It doesn’t sit right with me, Dani, letting you sacrifice yourself like this.”
Ezra chimes in to add, “What happens if one of those Grims takes your heart out of your chest while you’re regenerating?”
“What happens if they burst through the doors and attack us again, until they’ve got us cornered?” I counter, though Ezra’s words do ring a bell of warning through me. “It'll be hard, but we can do it. You guys will drive back the Grims, while Sam and Liam stick close to protect me while I’m out. I don’t see any other way to do this. If we don’t kill Lainey we don’t stand a chance—period.”
My quartet exchange uneasy glances, and I sense something running beneath the surface of their expressions. They’re quiet—too quiet, because there’s something on their minds. Suddenly for the first time in months I feel like I’m on the outside looking in, the way I felt after we first met, when they were keeping secrets from me—including the fact that they knew nearly from the start that I was a Grim.
“Well?” I stare at them, feeling out of sorts at their sudden secrecy. “Are we gonna do this thing or not?”
It’s Sebastian who answers. “Of course, Dani. Anything for you.”
Mateo quips, “Let’s tear her chest open and take her out.”
“We’ve got it,” Ezra reassures me, taking a moment to smooth back my hair and press his lips to the top of my head. “We’ll pull this thing off. Together.”
I glance over at Lynx, who just looks away from me, brown eyes staring off into the distance.
Wanting to say more, I open my mouth to ask them what’s going on, what it is that they won’t tell me.
But before I can the doors at the end of the hallway give way, letting a dozen murderous Grims, their leader, and her next wave of demons through.
Time for talk is over.
We’ve got shit to do and Grims to fight.
“I’m going to go turn off the dampeners in the third quadrant. We can fight them from there and hold them on the other side of the line so they can’t use their powers.” Headmaster Towers nods in Yohan’s direction. “Protect the students.”
“Got it.”
I watch her disappear down the hallway to the utilities room, her steps sure and confident, silhouette strong beneath the overhead lights. The Grims in the cells she passes by watch her hungrily. I wonder how much of what we’ve said they can hear from inside, and if they know one of their brethren has arrived to break them from their prison.
“They’re coming,” Lynx says, dark brown eyes moving to the entryway. “Get ready.”
“Fan out.” Yohan points us into positions. “Sam, Liam, stay behind me. Defensive maneuvers only. Dani, use your black fire when you can. When the dampeners go off, you and I are going to fall back to the third quadrant and burn as many of them as possible. Until then, I’ll show them what I’ve learned in all seven of my lives here on Earth.”
He pulls a short, thin stiletto knife from a hidden sheath in his pants, eyes fierce despite—or because of—his age. Looking at the demons, Yohan adds, “I won’t pretend to order you four around.”
Ezra raises a sardonic brow, sword expertly held at his side, ready to twist his wrist and make his move in an instant. “We’ll get in formation around Dani—leave room for her fire attacks. Ready?”
The other three nod. Mateo loads his gun. “Ready.”
“One last thing, Dani,” Yohan adds, as the pounding of footsteps gets closer and closer to us, the chaos of cells being torn up ringing out, “try not to die until it’s time.”
“I’ll make an effort.”
We don’t get much time before they’re on us, their number swollen by the Grims they’ve freed down the hallway. My eyes flick to the entrance to the quadrant Meyer is in, and I promise myself that I won’t do anything to stop Lainey if she finds him.
Let her finish his life if that’s what she wants. He has plenty of centuries under his belt. I won’t feel a damned thing when he dies.
Lainey’s demons are on us. She’s summoned a pack of grunfelds—dog-like things with giant feet, rats’ heads, and tongues that droop out of their mouths, each of them about the size of two chihuahuas standing on top of each other.
They’re disgusting, with razor-sharp teeth and mouths full of bacteria. It’s not their bite that kills as much as the infection that follows. They swarm towards us at hyper speed, two taken out by Sebastian’s knives, another by Yohan’s stiletto, crazy fast and yipping like the tiny dogs they aren't.
I hate them almost as much as I hate actual Pomeranians.
“Fire would come in handy now!” Lynx points out as he kicks one of the damned things out of the way.
“I’ll try!”
Summoning my black fire, I throw fireballs at the grunfelds. They’re small and cold compared to the black-and-orange fire I have when my phoenix powers are working, but they do the job. The nasty little things grunt and squeal as I hit them. Sam and Liam tear through them with their teeth and claws, Mateo shoots a few of them with his gun, and Ezra takes out the rest with a few fast swings of his sword.
We’re barely done killing them off when the Grims come around the corner.
They’re not running, and that’s the most frightening thing of all.
Many of them are carrying broken pieces of pipe, while others have knives, guns, and swords. They’ve drawn their weapons and they’re ready to fight—really fight, hard. Leading them from the front, a smile on her face, is Lainey.
“I know what you are. You’d be better off giving your heart to me right now,” she calls out, stopping a good twenty feet away, hands on her hips. “You’re an abomination. A phoenix and a Grim. It’s disgusting.”
I throw a black fireball at her, knowing it’s useless but needing to see her hurt even if only for a moment or two. She just laughs as it hits the side of her arm, shaking her head at me. “Pathetic.”
I hear a door slam behind us. Headmaster Towers’ voice calls out, “Now!”
Yohan steps in front of me. “I’ve got this.”
“No way.” Ezra grabs the back of his neck, pushes him behind him, and steps up in front of the Grims, shoulder-to-shoulder with Mateo. “We’ll stall them. Now!”
I can’t bear to leave them behind facing so many enemies, but I’ve got no other choice. As long as my phoenix powers are stolen by the dampeners I’m half useless. With Sam and Liam at our heels, Sebastian and Lynx in front of us, Yohan and I run in the direction of the headmaster so we can use our phoenix flames.
“Remember what I taught you,” he says, breathing perfectly even as he runs full-out. “Deep breaths. Center yourself. Concentrate.”
“I passed my finals. I think I can do it.”
“It’s not the phoenix fire I’m worried about.” We both skid to a stop at the mouth of the hallway to the third quadrant, the headmaster beside us, turning to face the inevitable. “
When you die more than once, it’s risky. Your soul can forget what body it belongs to. You might not come back if you’re not careful. You need to keep yourself focused the whole time."
“Great. I’ll keep that in mind.” Yet another shit piece of news on top of everything else.
Mateo and Ezra fight off the crowd of Grims, shooting and hacking, slicing and punching until they’re pushed back and it’s clear the odds are against them. Then they turn and sprint towards us, sliding into the quadrant and shouting, “Now!”
No need to tell me twice. My phoenix flame feels like it’s itching to come out, burning beneath the surface of my skin, a crackling heat that desires air and fuel outside my body. Lana, Yohan and I spread out at the mouth of the hallway and let our wings unfurl.
The headmaster’s wings are a bright, dark red that burns with impossible heat, the sparks that drip from the feather-like flames scorching the metal beneath her feet. Yohan’s are a giant orange color, cooler than the headmaster’s Red Phoenix wings but no less impressive, their size—and his control of them—making him one of the most powerful phoenix around.
Mine are a dark black that spreads and soaks up light, twined with flashes of orange, the darkness of my Grim powers merging with the heat of my phoenix flame. They’re not as impossibly hot as the headmaster’s wings, or nearly as big as Yohan’s, but they burn relentlessly, eating through air and scorching the life out of things.
This last semester I’ve used my full fire on many targets, but none of them have been living and moving—or trying to kill me. Thankfully I have the guidance of two phoenix to either side of me as we face off on the countless Grims heading this way and throw fire in their direction.
They shoot bullets back. A knife whizzes past my face; I wince as it slashes through my ear. My healing powers start to regenerate the missing flesh, but the pain is still there. Scowling, I find the Grim who threw the knife and throw a fireball at him, letting anger and frustration sizzle down my arm in the form of black-orange sparks that turn into a flame.
He screams as the fire hits him and turns him into a walking flame, then drops down to the ground for a stop-and-roll. It’s useless; my fire burns hot and cold, sears and sizzles. He’s dead, whether he knows it or not.
Something else I’ve never really done: killed like this, turned a life—no matter how despicable—into a body. But there’s no time to dwell on the moment. More of his kind are coming at us, all armed, and no matter how much fire we throw at them they’re gaining ground by the second.
Lana winces as a bullet rips through her right shoulder and pings off the wall to her back left, sending everyone behind us ducking for cover. She switches her fire-throwing arm to her left, and calls out, “We’ve got to do something to stop this completely before they get through! Once they do they’ll be able to let out the rest of the prisoners.”
“We should build a fire wall,” Yohan suggests. “Everyone flammable, get back. We’ll take them down all at once.” His eyes flick to me. “You remember your lessons, Dani?”
“Fire big. Big fire. I think I got it.”
“Let’s do this,” Lana says, voice full of exhilarated energy, eyes reflecting the glow of her fire despite the still-healing hole in her arm.
Stepping forward, we throw up our palms at right angles and let fire pool down our arms and drip off our fingertips. The headmaster’s red wall goes up in a flash, stretching towards the ceiling and pushing back the Grims efficiently. More than one of them turns and runs down the hallway to escape, causing Lainey to scream at their cowardly backs.
Yohan’s wall forms second, a smaller, humbler thing that stretches out wide, covering the whole right third of the open room. He ushers Grims away from a hallway towards another quadrant with a few prisoners, and shepherds them towards the middle of the room.
Which is where my wall should be, but the black streaks of fire shooting out of my fingers refuse to cooperate and form into a barrier. I can feel Yohan’s frustration with me, the headmaster’s building tension as she’s forced to take power away from her wall to throw fire at their feet and keep them from rushing us. But my wall just won’t go up; my black-orange fire burns wild, twisting and puffing out into the air.
Maybe I should just give up.
Before I can I feel a hand on my shoulder, squeezing gently. Ezra murmurs in my ear, “You got this.”
“Concentrate, Dani.” Mateo barely seems to feel the heat of my phoenix fire wings. “You’re a badass who can build a wall of fire. Fuck shit up and make it burn.”
“Thanks,” I tell them, adding, “but you should probably step back so my wings don’t burn you into crisps.”
As they move away, leaving their words of support with me, I reach into the deep well of power inside me and feel the four-piece bond I have with each of their bright, strong souls. Energy races through me, bright and electric, unfolding into the wings at my back and pulsing out from my hands.
Concentrating on the space between Yohan’s wall and the headmaster’s, bit by bit I build up a black-orange wall that closes the gap between theirs. My fire isn’t straight and steady like the others, but it does the job. The Grims that aren’t already dead turn tail and run, apparently satisfied with breaking out of the prison. No doubt they’ll head back to campus to try to steal a few hearts on their way back to whatever hole they crawled out from—which means our battle isn’t over.
And the war is far from won.
Because there’s still one Grim left on the battlefield.
She strides through our triple wall of fire, the flames consuming her flesh and turning it raw for mere moments before her undead body heals itself. The white hair that flows from her head dances with sparks, dead and untouched by the warmth of the fire. But nothing is colder than her pale blue eyes, devoid of life and full of anger.
For a moment that gaze of hers meets mine, and I shudder with revulsion. There’s something about her—the powers she wields, the stolen heart in her chest—that’s off, but I feel the wrongness of her power calling to me even as it fills me with nausea.
It’s as if we share a kinship, one driven no doubt by the fact that phoenix hearts beat in both our Grim-born chests.
She takes a single step towards us.
We let our walls of fire drop, knowing they’ll do us no good.
I hear Ezra say, “Almost time,” and wonder who he’s talking to—almost time for what?
Lainey pulls power from her center, readying a wicked attack.
But before she can do anything—summon a demon, bring back to life one of the charred bodies around her, turn down the corner and let out even more Grims—a piercing, distant sound breaks through the air.
It’s the watchtower alarm, giving three short blasts of warning.
I’ve heard that sound once before: last semester, when the new phoenix was born. It was a sound that drove me out of bed and sent me cursing into Petra's room demanding to know why I was being tortured.
Lainey cocks her head. A smile spreads across her mouth, wicked and cruel. “I know what that means.”
The headmaster makes a noise low in her throat, and when I look over, her eyes are wide with more fright than I’ve ever seen on her face before. “You can’t.” She grabs my hand and squeezes, looks over to Yohan. “We can’t let her."
Dropping the black energy around her, Lainey turns—not away from us, but towards something else, another, easier goal.
Because the alarm in the watchtower just announced the location of a freshly created, newborn phoenix—a special phoenix, if the headmaster's pale face is any indication, her eyes darting helplessly in Lainey's direction as the Grim manipulates time to move impossibly fast.
"We have to stop her," the headmaster says. "That wasn't just any heart. My niece's induction ceremony was tonight, and if the alarm went off, that means another Red Phoenix has just been born."
Chapter 33
We run so fast I think my lungs might burst, ushered along in the time
slipstream I create with my Grim powers. Our path takes us past the charred remains of the Grims we killed, the Risen with their mangled bodies, destroyed Grim cells, and a few hapless-looking prisoners still stuck behind bars.
I can’t stop thinking about what Meyer told me. Four lives. An unfair sacrifice to demand just to kill one murderous woman—a sacrifice we wouldn’t have to make if no one had ever put that phoenix heart in her chest in the first place.
Her father must have been a truly evil or hopelessly naive man to resurrect his own daughter with the flesh of another’s life.
But then again, Grims have never shown themselves to be anything but bloodthirsty. Which is why we have to end this invasion right now, or the bloodshed will be unimaginable.
“Almost there!”
“I’ve got my grenades ready.” Mateo pats his hip, a fierce look on his face. “Let’s blow this chick wide open.”
“Let me do the spell first,” I remind him. “We’ve got four lives to sacrifice.”
Three of my own, and one of the headmaster’s. Let’s hope it goes more smoothly than everything else has so far tonight.
As we reach the exit of the prison complex in my time stream, slipping along as fast as we can go, I feel a twinge of danger at the center of my rib cage. My senses tell me that Lainey, a powerful Grim with hundreds of years of experience, has beaten us to the punch.
She's gotten to the campus.
And it won't take her long to get to the watchtower, find where that newborn phoenix is, and head in their direction—taking out countless shifters on her way, maybe even a spare heart or two for her dark spells.
I force my powers to their absolute max, knowing that this is our one and only chance to stop Lainey from getting a powerful, newborn heart that will no doubt last her an impossibly long time. As long as she's out there, with her influence over other Grim clans and ability to use dark magic even on campus, this place will never truly be safe.