by Claire Davon
“I have no choice. I cannot go on.”
“You must go with Kamal and Rachel immediately.”
“There is nothing to ‘go’ to.”
Then he had no choice but to accept an image Sphynx forced into his mind. It had to be of the future, because she was still lying in front of him. It showed Rachel, her broken body bundled in a blanket, being borne to the wolf park.
Betrayal soared through him at the image. He had thought they would burn her. If there was an afterlife, he hoped he would meet Rachel in it.
“You must go with Kamal. Now. Rachel needs you. This is what must happen. You will understand shortly. Now.”
“Rachel is dead.”
“Go.”
Phoenix was confused, irritated and angry, but a thousand years of obeying Sphynx as their leader made him obey. He turned to Kamal. “Apparently we have to go to the wolf park.”
As if summoned, there was a burst through the tourists, and Fenley and his son Artur were there, yipping and growling although they were in human form. They motioned to Rachel.
“We have to take her. Now,” Fenley said, his tone urgent.
He didn’t know why Sphynx was so adamant, but the oldest Elemental did not do things without a reason. He didn’t know why the wolves were there, or why they had to go to the park, but it didn’t matter. He would resume his quest to die after he found out why Sphynx was insistent—and why Kamal and the wolves were taking Rachel to the ground instead of the pyre, where she belonged.
He would do this one last task the elder Elemental demanded, and then go to his death.
* * * * *
The gray was flashing with yellow and green, like lightning streaking across the nonexistent horizon. Rachel should have been curious, but she didn’t have any desire to go and find out why the gray was broken. It didn’t matter. Nothing did.
Would she be allowed to rest? She was tired. She had never been part of anything until the last few weeks, but she could be part of the death that eventually overcame everyone.
Something tugged at her, as if a far-off thread were pulling her to the distance. She ignored it, willing it to go away. Annoyance flooded her, the first emotion she had felt since she found herself in the gray.
Then she focused. Red eyes danced in front of her. Those she knew. Rachel saw the insubstantial people Phoenix had called shadow people, wavering on the edge of her vision.
“Come. Join us.”
Unlike the first time she had seen them, there was nothing between her and the wavering figures. Rachel took a step toward them. It would be easy. She could go with them now and walk into something else. All her troubles would be over. All her fears at an end.
Or maybe they weren’t. Rachel stopped moving her feet, realizing she was beginning to follow them.
“No,” she cried mentally and the figures took a step back. Her entire body shook, and the air waved as bright fire burst from her, aiming toward the shadow people. It seemed to arc from her in a way it never had before, and it struck in the flickering crowd. She heard a shriek and they vanished.
If she had said yes, she would have been lost to the world forever, doomed to become something else. Perhaps she would have become a shadow person, or perhaps she would have simply been lost forever. She would not, could not join the shadow people. But what now? She heard a short pop. Then there was a streak of yellow like she had seen before the appearance of the shadow people. She waited for several beats, but they did not reappear.
There was another noise. A staccato beating with a certain rhythm to it, like a drumbeat.
After a minute, she realized it was her heartbeat.
Her heartbeat? She shouldn’t have one. Not in the dark, not in the gray. Not in this limbo, this potential afterlife. Whether she was with the shadow people or not, she was still caught in this other place. She shouldn’t have been able to use her fire, but she had.
There was a path in the gray, like emergency lights on a plane aisle, leading into the distance. She couldn’t see anything else.
Rachel didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay right there. She could not have survived the fall. She did not want to be a ghost or some sort of shade haunting the world, and worse, haunting Phoenix. That was less of a life than the gray.
“Come, Rachel. Before it is too late.”
Fear flooded her, nearly paralyzing her. Still, she stepped forward, first one step, and then another, until she was moving through the gray at a fast pace, the path acting as a guide.
“Come.” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. She didn’t know the voice, but it was also familiar.
With reluctance, not wanting to move from the gray nothingness, Rachel nonetheless obeyed.
* * * * *
Phoenix didn’t want to see Rachel’s dead body. He didn’t want to be reminded that the only woman he had ever truly loved would never be his to hold again. He wanted to remember her as he had seen her for the last time, vibrant and alive with her fire power, a woman who he thought would always stand by his side.
He wasn’t sure why he had obeyed the command, but almost without being aware, he found himself at the park. The werewolves bore Rachel between them, Kamal close behind. Phoenix observed the tableau like a spectator. Numbness laced his body and froze his spirit. He stumbled over a tree root and shrugged. Small injuries didn’t matter. Nothing did.
He would have to fly commercial to Alaska. So what? He had the money, and it didn’t matter how it was spent. Nothing mattered.
“Phoenix, quickly.” He didn’t know the voice.
Movement to the left caught his eye, a four-legged body pointing to the trees. The wolf howled and with his muzzle gestured to the forest clearing in the middle of the stand of pines. The wolf trotted toward it, pointing with its muzzle and yipping three times. With slow movements, dragging his feet with every step, Phoenix went to the clearing.
The wolves had formed a semicircle around Rachel’s still form on the ground. Kamal was hovering when Phoenix came to rest beside him. Kamal studied Phoenix, his features unreadable.
Brienne, still in human form, stepped forward. There was an elongated crunching noise as Artur changed from wolf to human, but nobody moved. The young werewolf retrieved a satchel and handed it to Brienne.
Phoenix felt drained, empty of all emotions. Rachel’s broken body was motionless, the wounds gaping and as ugly as he remembered. Blood, caked and crusted, was dried on her clothes in a hideous reminder of her mortality. She appeared deflated, her body malformed, bones sticking out at impossible angles. He’d seen crushed and dismembered people many times before, but they had never been his one true love.
“Why did you call us here?” Phoenix forced himself to look at her lifeless body. It would eliminate any lingering doubt about perishing in the volcano.
The grass around her began to wave. The wolves straightened her out, and Phoenix winced at the grinding of bone. He was surprised they bothered to concentrate on putting her body back together, but perhaps it was a wolf tradition.
He had lost everything that mattered, even though he had won his Challenge. The evidence lay in front of him.
“Phoenix, we are not so easy to kill. A part of Rachel lingers,” Kamal said as if schooling a child. “I tried to tell you earlier.”
Brienne examined her. Her gaze went first to Fenley, then Kamal and finally Phoenix. “You are assuming Rachel is dead. Do you have any more tears in you?”
His brow furrowed. “Why?”
“Tears of a Phoenix,” Brienne said. “They have the power to restore life.”
“Myth,” Phoenix said. “I’ve cried before and it’s never restored anything.” His body shook as he struggled to contain hope.
“Try,” Fenley commanded.
Try reverberated in his head, dancing around his skull.
; Phoenix shrugged. It would be futile, but he would do anything if it meant even a smidgen of hope of restoring Rachel to life. Digging deep, he pulled the desolation out of his mind. Stepping forward, he forced himself to kneel in front of Rachel. As the tears fell, he let them roll off his chin and onto her still, pale face.
There was a faint shimmer in his mind as if someone was trying to probe him.
Brienne spared him a quick glance. “She is caught between staying and going. Her injuries were grave, but she is Ifrit. She tries to remain even now.” She removed several items from her bag.
The shimmer in his mind grew stronger as Rachel’s body heated. “I don’t understand,” he cried in desperation. She wasn’t cold yet, but soon she would be. Cold, colder, coldest. Forever cold. Dead and gone. His only love, cruelly snatched from him. “She’s broken beyond repair. Not even a paranormal could survive that fall.”
“Support her head,” Fenley said. Kamal muscled forward and took Rachel’s neck, carefully inserting his hands under the spinal column. Phoenix cradled her head gently. The squishiness of her broken skull made him wince.
There was a long silence while it seemed as if nothing were moving, not even the leaves on the trees. His tears slowed, but the evidence of them lingered through the wetness on her face. He had thought the myth of Phoenix tears disproven, but perhaps he was wrong. His heart soared at the possibility.
“It is happening.” The voice echoed as if from a distance.
There was a far-off presence, almost too faint to be detected. Then it grew stronger, a little stronger, and finally…
A shriek roared into Phoenix’s mind, coming in on waves of pain.
“A…Al…Ale…Aleric?” The mental voice was feeble and quivery but unmistakably Rachel’s.
“Love?” he called and heard an answer, as if far in the distance. It was dim and faint, but it was there. A flutter of movement, a tic, twitched in her leg. Phoenix grabbed for her hand. He squeezed and could have sworn there was a return squeeze, almost too soft to detect.
“No time for niceties.” While Fenley’s tone was harsh, there was a thread of relief through it.
“Blood. We’re going to need blood. You.” Brienne pointed to one of the nearby wolves. “Three pints. O-positive. And an IV.”
“Take mine,” Phoenix said, already rolling up his sleeve. “Take it all. Rachel, Rachel, it’s not possible.”
“I think your tears are enough out of you for today,” Brienne said sharply. “I don’t know what your blood would do to her.”
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard a plaintive mental cry.
“I hurt.”
“Start the IV. Keep her body straight. She is Ifrit. If she heals too quickly, we may have to reset any bones that don’t knit properly. We may have more wounds to contend with,” Brienne said.
Brienne started the IV, feeding blood into Rachel’s arm, although her chest wounds were still large and gaping. It seemed as if the blood would just pump right out of her body again. Heat shimmered around them, her body rising in temperature.
“I’m here, love. Don’t fight it.”
Wounds began healing, closing like a shutter on a camera. Bruises faded and cuts mended. She seemed to lengthen, blackening the grass in an outline around her. Closer and closer the wounds came together, and finally sealed. They appeared as an angry red pucker before they smoothed out, leaving no visible signs of trauma.
Several smaller cuts on her arms and body knit back together, and Rachel’s eyes fluttered.
“Tell her to keep still. I think it’s almost done.” Brienne’s relief sang through her words.
Heat poured off Rachel’s body. With a series of crunches that made Phoenix flinch, Rachel’s bones healed, one by one. Her hand sought his.
“I don’t think she’s going to burn up,” Kamal said, but he seemed hesitant. “This is so far back in legend, I don’t know what truth is and what was added to over the years.”
“Stay still, my love. Just a little while longer.”
Phoenix wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or not, but it seemed to him the air was cooler than it had been a second ago. Then he noticed the heat shimmer lessening and the florid color of her face fading to normal.
Rachel tried to rise to a seated position, but Brienne held her down.
“Not yet,” the woman warned. “Your body is still quite fluid. You need to be completely still for a little while longer. First, let me check you and make sure you healed properly.”
She ran her hands over Rachel’s face, making small adjustments to the bones and skin. Phoenix winced as she realigned a cheekbone that had started to knit a little crookedly, but smiled when the familiar contours of Rachel’s beloved face returned. Brienne moved down Rachel’s body, adjusting here and there as she went, and then beckoned for the wolves to turn Rachel over.
“Gently. Very gently,” Brienne warned and motioned to Phoenix to release Rachel’s hand. “You’ll have her soon enough. She’s my patient right now.”
Nodding, Phoenix released Rachel’s hand despite her mental plea not to.
“I want you perfect, love. It’s only for a little while.”
Brienne checked Rachel’s neck and spine, making adjustments and alignments as she went. After what seemed like forever, it was over. Her spine was straight and mended, the bones solid. The wolves rolled Rachel back to her original supine position.
The Ifrit approached, a smile of profound relief on his face. Phoenix smiled back, the movement uncertain. He had kept himself apart from all others for so long, he didn’t know what the right behavior was.
It was time to find out. With his love by his side.
Rachel’s eyes opened. She observed the gathered crowd blankly.
“I don’t understand. I died. I fell…the Transamerica Pyramid…nobody can survive that.” She looked at her chest, at the blood on her clothes, and then at her healed body. “There was nothing, just gray. It was quiet there. Peaceful. I felt…nothing.” She flushed. “I wanted to stay.”
“You didn’t survive,” Kamal said gently, still kneeling next to Phoenix. “I was with you when you died. But you are Ifrit. We are hardy. You went to the gray?”
Rachel swallowed, making the barest motion of assent with her head. Brienne picked up a bag of recently arrived blood and inserted a tube into the IV.
“I don’t understand.” Rachel said.
“You need more blood. You lost most of yours.” Her growling tone didn’t give Rachel any room to argue. “Your man brought you back. There is a legend that the tears of a Phoenix can give life. But only if the Phoenix’s heart is at stake. Wolf lore doesn’t go back to the last time it happened.” He glanced at Kamal.
Kamal’s face jerked in a rueful smile. “We have never believed such a legend. I am happy that in this, the Ifrits were wrong.”
Rachel tried to rise to a seated position again. Firmly but inexorably, Phoenix held her down with a hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t rush it,” he said and found to his dismay that his voice was barely above a whisper. “Is she still in danger?” His question was directed to Brienne, although he didn’t move.
Brienne felt Rachel’s chest, apparently checking her heartbeat. She examined Rachel’s skin for any wounds and then, with a satisfied smile, shook her head, stepping back. “She is healed.”
“You brought me back,” Rachel said in wonder. She looked over at Brienne. “Thank you. I… Thank you.”
Brienne said nothing. After a moment she crossed one foot in front of the other and bent her knees in a curtsy.
Rachel blinked but raised a hand in acknowledgment.
Phoenix bowed to Brienne from his seated position and then turned his attention back to Rachel.
“I love you,” Rachel said, her voice breaking.
“I love you.” He said i
t simply, his heart swelling in his chest.
Nobody moved except Brienne, who, with a nod, backed away from Phoenix and Rachel, joining Fenley a few feet away.
Phoenix slipped a hand under Rachel’s body and helped her rise to her feet.
Unsteadily, Rachel gripped his waist, seeming to feel her legs under her again.
“Thank you,” she managed, her voice still shaky. “All of you.”
“Habibti,” was all Kamal said.
* * * * *
Rachel kicked aside her tattered and bloody clothes with distaste. With a gesture, Fenley had sweats brought forth, and Artur handed them to Phoenix. He blocked the rest of the onlookers and helped Rachel into them. She would need a shower. Her body still felt unfamiliar and her mind strange. The events, all of them: the assassin, Farouk, the tower and finally the gray whirled in her mind until she thought she would collapse under the weight of it all. She died. She had died.
“You came back to me.”
Rachel leaned against Phoenix, and his arms went around her.
Remains of tears were still evident on Phoenix’s cheeks when he pressed his face to hers. The tears tingled and then seeped into her skin. Rachel felt like she had absorbed something into her body that would last a long time.
Something was different, and it was marvelous. Flexing her arms, Rachel concentrated, and in a moment power surged through her body. She had no aches or pains. It reminded her of when she had been a child and thought she was unbreakable.
“I was going to a volcano. I didn’t want to continue,” he said. “Not without you.”
“Oh,” she said simply.
Phoenix slid his arms down until his hands linked with Rachel’s. “I am going to tell the other Elementals they will have to find another Phoenix in the future. When you die, I go, if I have to will myself onto the pyre.”
“Aleric!” she exclaimed, turning her head to look at him. “No. You are an Elemental. You have a job to do. You can’t give up immortality for me.”
“I am not immortal, just long-lived. I can and I do give it up.” His eyes glittered, leaving her no doubt he meant what he said.
