by Lucy Auburn
"Hush," Ezra says, like he's the one in charge now. I guess he is; somewhere between getting to the top of the stairs and the knife sinking into my skin, I let go of the leash I have around our bond. The thought of him trying to die for me again terrifies me. "It's all gonna be okay."
"No." I crawl away from his grip, bat his hands off me and try to force myself to think, to be strong. "I've got to do the spell."
"Dani—"
"Let me do it or I'll make you."
His mouth thins out. "Fine. But let me support you at least."
I accept his help, because to be honest I'm already swaying back and forth. I can barely pay attention as Lynx ties up Lainey and Petra chews on her hand, which is somehow not attached to Lainey's body anymore—don't think about it too hard, Dani, or you'll puke. Ezra sits down on the floor behind me and leans me back against his chest, his breath skimming my cheek, his legs wrapped around me.
"Okay," he says, voice rough and choked with emotion. "It's gonna be okay. You can do this."
One more life. One more death. That's all it will take and this will finally be over.
It should get easier with practice, but if anything this is harder now that I know the pain and misery that's waiting for me. Now that I fear I might not make it through, after feeling the tug of the beyond during my last death.
But I have Petra here, and the guys fighting for me. There are reasons to return to my body. Surely my soul won't simply float away.
I put my hands against my heart in a triangle shape, forcing enough breath into my lungs to say a single sentence.
"I summon this life and give it to the power of the spell."
I'm here.
Then I'm gone.
Like last time, I'm not alone. Through the pain and agony, the oblivion and the darkness I'm surrounded by, I sense another presence. And then I see her.
A figure being taken aware on a stretcher. Men with concerned faces. A woman with a briefcase taking my hand. Before that, other things: strange men shouting, demanding money, their hands leaving bruises on her upper arms.
I don't know how I know it's her. The last time we were together—the last time she was alive—I was only two, nearly three years old. But they say that the brightest, most persistent memories are the ones that cause trauma, and my most traumatic memory is of the day my mother died of an overdose.
She has bright blonde hair. A heart-shaped face with a small, pointed chin. Thin eyebrows over wide blue eyes. Just like I remember.
Other things are not as I remember, though. Her frail body isn't scarred or pockmarked; she doesn't look tired or near death. The expression on her face is present and strong, devoid of the affects of drugs.
I wonder idly if my life would be different if someone had gotten to her with a dose of Narcan fast enough to stop what happened that day. But maybe that would've just delayed the inevitable. Everyone knows a junkie is always looking for their next hit. What's the value of life, after all, when living makes you feel everything. Drugs take the edge off. They take the pain away. She chased her own death until she got it, and I was the one left behind.
Now here we are again.
Together somewhere in the great beyond.
I wait for her to say something, anything. I wonder if this is really her, or just some fevered imagination of my dying brain, trying to make sense of the agony I've put my body through four times in a short span of time.
I want to stay with her. I want to hear her say that she's sorry, she loves me, and she wishes she had stayed with me longer, protected me from going into the system. I want to pinch her and kick her, then tell her that I should've been reason enough to keep her sober. If I mattered more, if I'd been better, if she hadn't been a single mother, if those men hadn't gotten her hooked in the first place–if if if, want want want. I am hollow, and she's a still statue who can't give me what I need, because this isn't the afterlife. This is just the in-between, and I can't stay here anymore than you can stay standing in a doorway, headed from here to there. Your feet have to come out in one place or another, backwards or forwards. We're never in the thresholds for long.
This must have been what Yohan warned me about when he said that I would need to keep my wits about me and concentrate to prevent my soul from leaving my body after so many deaths. But my fourth death was violent and frightening; my body even now is still healing itself, and I have a grisly task ahead of me.
Maybe I don't want to go back into the injured, battered thing that is the physical vessel for my soul. Maybe I don't want to have to put my hand in another person's chest and end a life.
"Mom," I say, because the silence has stretched, and she isn't speaking—doesn't seem to speak. "I forgive you."
She doesn't have an answer for that.
Maybe when you die there are no more questions, and no more answers either. Doubt is a thing for the living.
I sigh. And let go.
Oblivion leaves—or my soul does; I can't tell which part of what's around me does the going or the staying. A moment passes, then I'm feeling pain again, the agony of a soul jammed back in a body. Meat and gristle, organs and bones, grinding up against each other in awkward harmony. Human, here, and only regretting it a little, because I'm not alone.
I'm alive, my heart beating, the warmth of Ezra's chest against mine, all the pain and confusion that comes with life flooding back to me. He makes a small, wounded sound and breathes, "Thank you, thank you," against my hair, his lips edging close to but never quite praying.
I make myself shake off death and return back to life. I look away from her, the mother who wasn't my mother, and force myself back to agonizing reality.
One of the first things I see when I open my eyes is Lainey's face. Staring at me from across the room, tied up but somehow still defiant, she's propped up against the wall in a position mirror to mine.
It's as if I'm looking at myself, but different.
She's in rough shape, bleeding sluggishly from a wound in her stomach, missing a hand that refuses to regenerate, eyes dull and weary from losing so much power from her dying phoenix heart. By now she must regret not settling for a "normal" heart like Reena's instead of aiming for another rare phoenix heart—but if the desperation in her cruel eyes is any sign, she's not going to stop until she's gotten what she wants. Even wounded and weakened like she is, she still poses a threat. I can see as much from the look in her eyes and the marks she's left on Lynx and Sebastian's arms, and the fact that Petra has gained a new limp.
She won't stop until everyone I love is dead or close to it.
So it's time to open up her chest and pull the stolen heart out from behind her rib cage.
"I've got this," I tell Ezra. He helps me to my feet, his arms cradling my elbows, his green eyes watching me protectively. "You can let me go."
"Never," he vows, lips brushing the edge of my forehead. He steps away, but stays close enough that I can still feel his warmth. I'm grateful for his closeness, his defiance.
Lainey is one foe I could never face alone.
I approach her, the energy of my fourth and final death settling inside me. Licking my lips, I stare at her chest, which now glows with faint energy to my eyes. The powers that let me see others' magic and abilities can nearly see her stolen heart, its beating weakened by so much misuse, the rib cage that keeps it safe battered and broken from being cracked open again and again. No wonder Lainey put a spell on her chest to keep the heart in its cage—if she hadn't, even the weakest of Grims would be able to reach inside and take it out.
She may be Risen, but she's still dead. And now she's really going to die—forever. At my hands.
Those eyes of hers look up at me. There's hate in them—so much hate. And for some reason, even though I could just perform the spell now, I pause and study her. Something about her calls to me, and I can't tell if it's the shared symmetry of our abilities, or the phoenix heart inside her reaching out and begging to be freed from its prison.
&nbs
p; It doesn't matter. Kneeling in front of her, I place my palm on her chest and steel myself to do what I must.
"It's funny," she says, her voice a bitter twist of anger, "that my father's second-born child would be the one to kill me."
Chapter 38
"What did you say?" I ask, though some part of me is screaming that I should have seen this coming. "So the man who raised you from the dead and put a phoenix heart in your chest..."
"Wilhelm is such a kind and caring man," she says mockingly. "He couldn't bear to see his little girl die and succumb to the family curse, so he found another way to curse me forever." Her eyes feverish, she leans forward, pressing her chest against my hand. "You should kill him when you're done with me. Or he just might escape and do to you what he did to me: curse you with tortured immortality."
"You're the one who chose to put those hearts in your chest," I point out, disgusted to think that any of the blood pumping through her veins flows through mine as well. "It was a choice."
"You'll see." She snaps her teeth together like a feral animal. "You won't want to die forever either when you learn what's waiting for you. It's coming for you, blasphemer, and the only thing I regret is that I'll be dead before I get to see your doom."
Delightful.
Lynx offers, "I can gag her mouth."
"Don't listen to her," Sebastian warns. "It's probably just another trick."
It is, but that doesn't mean it's not true. On the other hand—true or not, it doesn't have to matter. If Lainey is my half sister, then she's not the kind of family I asked for. And if I kill her, well, she tried to kill me first.
But that doesn't mean I feel good about any of this. My voice trembles as I say, "Open the lock, throw wide the door. I've given four lives, and I'll give no more."
The spell ricochets through Lainey's body in an instant. Her eyes glaze over and her chest arcs towards my hand. I try to pull away, but my palm is stuck to her, the power of my fourth and final death flowing through me like a fast-running river through a narrow riverbank.
"Fuck.” I wince at the sudden warmth beneath my palm. Her rib cage begins to spread open, skin splitting over her stolen heart, even as her open eyes stare at me mulishly. "If you have any last words, now is the time to say them. Because your life is about to be over forever."
She bares her teeth, white hair wild around her head, blue eyes pale and creepily lifeless despite the necromantic animation keeping her body ticking. "See you in Hell, Sis."
I guess I should have expected that. "I hope you find peace," I tell her, as her chest opens wide enough that my fingertips slip in. "But I also hope I never, ever see you again."
"Good luck," she rasps, as my fingers grasp the edges of the muscle pumping power and blood through her veins. "Our family's curse will ensure you and I wind up in exactly the same place when we die. You can outrun death, but you can't escape Hell."
Then her eyes slip closed, her stolen heart's beat sluggish against my fingertips. There's still power holding it in her chest, though. Licking my lips, I reach for the bond with my quartet and murmur, "Release this heart from its necromantic hold. Let its stolen life beat no more."
Lainey almost seems to sigh. The spell keeping the Red Phoenix heart in her chest loosens, and its warm, wet weight falls into my palm. I grasp it and pull it out, feeling a stirring of something otherworldly against my skin.
There's a piece of a soul still living in this heart, forced to keep another's life going long past the death of the body that once kept it safe and warm. As the soul slips loose from its reins, it brushes against me and whispers its thanks. There's a stirring of my own heart in my chest, a calling of like to like. Some part of my phoenix soul knows this other phoenix, just like it knew the phoenix heart sliver I used the night Meyer attacked, and the sliver of Victoria's heart as well.
Then it's gone, free and at peace. A feeling of doneness, of rightness, passes through me. I get the sense that the phoenix whose heart this was is now at rest. As the soul leaves, the heart in my hand crumbles into dust and leaves nothing behind. Lainey is dead and the evidence of her life–or unlife, as it may be—is gone forever.
Which is good, even though it leaves me with a sticky, blood-coated hand, and the distinct sense that I've just become a cold-blooded murderer.
"It's done." Standing up, I look around at the empty room. "She's dead. So why do I feel like things are about to get much, much worse?"
"Because you're paranoid." Ezra puts his hand on my shoulder, pulling me back from Lainey's body. "It's done. You did it."
Petra shifts back to her human form, shakes off the dust, and places her hand on my other shoulder. "You really did. I'm impressed, Carpenter—and you know how hard it is to pull that off."
"Oh, I'm well aware. Congratulations to me for impressing the one and only Great and Majestic Petra."
"See? Things are looking up already."
But I can't shake the disturbed feeling in my gut that this isn't over. Even worse, Lainey spent her last moments giving me a feeling of unease that has stayed behind—something she has in common with Meyer. I can't stop myself from reaching out to close her eyes, ignoring the way it feels to press her dead eyelids down. She deserves at least that much, even if she is a homicidal maniac.
"There." I straighten up, wiping my hand on my clothes, desperate to get the blood off my skin. "It's done. I guess we should go now."
But something feels... off. Wrong. So it doesn't shock me at all when Mateo comes bounding up the stairs, an expression of urgency on his face.
"Those Grims that disappeared regrouped and came back. The academy is under attack." His eyes flick to Lainey's limp body, to my bloody hand, and a feral grin breaks out on his face. "I had the feeling you'd gotten her. Way to go, Dani."
"I'd feel better about it if we weren't about to go into round two." I rub my hand back and forth on my clothing, flakes of dry blood flying off. There's something unsettling about knowing it's my half sister's blood. "Let's get this over with—completely."
We head down the staircase together, collecting Sam, Liam, and Yohan on the way, looking for the next fight. But when we get to the doors of the Great Hall, our energy flagging, there are no Grims left to fight—mostly because the headmaster, together with all the well-trained Phoenix Academy students, have driven them away for good. The shifters transform back into their human forms, and confirm that their animal noses haven't found any traces of nearby Grims.
"They're just... gone," Sam says, an uneasy expression on his face. "Can it really be that easy?"
"Nothing tonight was easy," the headmaster says, "but I'll feel more comfortable about letting the students out when we're sure the Grims are gone."
She puts a whistle in her mouth and lets out a sharp, short series of notes. There's a hawk cry overhead, and Olivia swoops down, shifting into her human form and throwing her arms around me—then Sam, and finally Liam, her greeting to him finishing in a kiss.
"Report?"
"Right." Pulling breathlessly away from Liam, who is a bit crisp at the edges but seems okay, Olivia faces the headmaster. "I watched the Grims head out for about a mile before I circled back around. It looks like as soon as their leader made it to the top of the watchtower, they decided to head out in a hurry. It was almost like the spells forced them out, even though they weren't working when they came in."
My mind racing, I fill in the blanks. "I killed Lainey a few minutes after she made it to the top of the tower. Maybe it was her magic that was letting them through the wards—she has to have been powerful after centuries of study. She could've tricked the spells into thinking she was a phoenix, using her stolen heart."
Olivia gives me a wide-eyed look. "Sounds like you'll be catching me up later."
"You have no idea."
"I'm calling the mage council," Headmaster Towers says, an uneasy expression on her face. "We're going to redo the spells on this place from the ground up, to make sure no one—and I do mean no one�
��can get on campus without being welcomed here. Until then, I'm recommending all the students find a safe place to stay outside the academy's grounds." Her eyes flick to me. "Including all the phoenix students."
I bite back a groan. "Let me sleep in my own bed for another night before you kick me out and force me to find a homeless shelter that's open."
Before the headmaster can respond to my grumbling, Petra hip checks me, an annoyed expression on her face. "You're not homeless, dumbass. You're my friend. If you can't stay in the dorms this summer, then you're staying with me and my family at our vacation house in Montauk—assuming, of course, the headmaster is okay with it."
"Three generations of wolf shifter Shields?" She raises her brows, a bemused smile curving her mouth. "I think Dani will be safe there."
Ezra adds, grumpily, "She's safe anywhere we are."
"And comfortable," Sebastian tacks on. "Because anyone who crosses her will find their food has been secretly poisoned."
"Or their face punched in." Lynx flexes his fists. "No one comes for our girl."
"No one who doesn't want to get blown up," Mateo adds. "Which reminds me—"
He doesn't finish his sentence.
Before he can, an explosion rocks the academy grounds.
One that takes the entire watchtower, and half the land around it, down in a blaze of fire and fury.
"Right." He shoots us a sheepish grin. "Oops?"
Next time, someone stop me from putting the demon formerly known as Bomber in charge of a solo task.
It turns out Hell's favorite champion is a little overeager with the gunpowder.
Chapter 39
"You lied about Lainey." Staring at him in his cell, I'm struck by the fact that Meyer looks even older after just a few hours away. "Somehow, you left out the part about how she was your daughter, and you're the idiot who gave her immortal life—not that you need to worry about that anymore, though, since I killed her."