“Abe.” I was close to Dinah and Eleanor. If I dove for them I had no doubt I’d have them in my hands, but it would be Abe that would be first to die.
“Going to kill him, too?” Bear threw at me. “Just like you killed my dad?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Bear
It killed me to speak those words to my mother, to make her hurt any more than she already was. But Tommy had been clear in his final words to me.
“Make them believe you hate her, that I twisted your memories of her. That will buy you time and freedom. It might save you both.” And then he’d let me go and Luca had him chained back to the wall.
I’d gone along with Luca, quietly, well behaved. Because that was what he expected, what I had to pretend, for at least a little while.
I held the knife my mother had given me and stared out at what she faced, what we both faced. I didn’t trust Luca would pull me out of here.
“Kid, get ready to fight if you want to live,” Linx said.
I tightened my hold on him. “Okay.”
“Don’t think,” he coached, “just go with it.”
“Dinah, now!” my mom yelled.
A snarl and a gunshot snapped me out of the freeze and I was suddenly staring at something from out of a movie.
My mom had lunged for her guns and yelled—but how had I heard a gunshot when they weren’t in her hands?—and had scooped them both up. She fired at Abe, and I went to my knees as a piece of my heart stuttered.
“NO!” Not Abe. I couldn’t lose him, too.
He tackled her to the ground and I stayed on my knees, unable to look away. She flung him off her body with a strength I’d never seen in her before.
I saw my mother as the Phoenix, in her black assassin’s suit, guns firing shot after shot, dogs falling, collars falling, abnormals pushing through to get to her with their arms no longer arms but swords and clubs of flesh and bone. Weapons—they’d all been turned into weapons.
“Stay back, Bear!” She spun a roundhouse kick, driving her boot into the jaw of a creature that had gotten too close. She looked up then, away from what she faced.
What was she looking for? I didn’t realize I’d whispered the question.
“I heard her say something about a cure in the sprinkler system. They have to set the sprinklers off,” Linx said.
A breath whooshed out of me. There had been a sprinkler right over Luca’s head on top of the platform. I could do that. I could set it off.
“Grandfather, get me out of here!” I turned and screamed up at him. “I hate her. I don’t want anything to do with her or Uncle Tommy! He’s a coward just like her! I wish I hadn’t met either of them.”
His laughter flowed down. “Throw the boy a rope.”
A rope dropped to me and I grabbed ahold of it, tucking Linx into the back of my pants. I was hoisted up and I couldn’t help a last look down at my mother as she fought for her life, as she fought for my life.
Would she understand one day? Would I be able to explain that I was doing all I could to help her? Did she remember Tommy? Know that he was trying to help?
A hand reached over the railing and pulled me onto the platform. I fell to my belly and quickly pushed to my feet.
Luca stared down at me. “Tommy did a good job.”
I frowned as if confused. “Tommy is a complete failure at everything. That’s why I’m here.” He turned to watch my mother fight and I backed up a few feet so I was right under the sprinkler.
“Linx,” I whispered as I put my hand to him, “can you break it? Set it off?”
Luca still had his back to me, but to his right the Shadow stood and turned his cowled face my way.
“What are you doing, boy?”
“Yup, little boss, I can do it,” Linx said.
The Shadow took a step and I whipped Linx out and threw him upward into the sprinkler head. He jammed into it, wriggling in deeper, and there was a click a split second before the water sprayed out.
Linx dropped and I caught him, running to get to the side of the platform, but the water sprayed over me. Red water, like blood, and I swiped it away, but it stung a little.
I pinched my mouth shut and closed my eyes, but not before some of the spray got past my lips. It tasted like red punch with a bit of a sour tang in it. I wanted to open my mouth and drink it in and my mother’s voice seemed to come to me.
Don’t drink it.
I curled around myself, let the water spray on me and kept my face covered as best I could. Shouting erupted around us, gunshots, and then a hand scooped me up and threw me over a shoulder. I was being taken away from my mother, again.
But now, she thought I hated her.
Phoenix
I fired at Abe as he tackled me to the floor a second time, his double jaw snapping at me, blood dripping from him already. I jammed Dinah up against the collar he wore and squeezed the trigger. She blasted the collar off and he immediately shook his head, his rage gone.
I rolled to the side with him. I couldn’t save them all, not the dogs or the abnormals and I knew it. I fired into the seething mass of creatures that were climbing over one another to get to me. To get past me to Bear.
“Smoke!” I yelled and Dinah and Eleanor both clicked over. I shot into the dogs and the smoke burst up through and around them, but their drive to kill me overran anything else, even though they struggled to see or smell me through it.
“Stay back, Bear!” I yelled at him, stepping back a foot at a time, doing all I could to keep the monsters at bay. I was fast. I was good, but there would come a point and I knew it.
A point that something would slow me.
“Grandfather, get me out of here!” Bear screamed. “I hate her. I don’t want anything to do with her or Uncle Tommy! He’s a coward just as she is. I wish I hadn’t met either of them.”
My throat closed over and the tears pooled in my eyes and escaped to run down my cheeks.
“I love you, Bear,” I whispered. “I always have, from the day I knew I was pregnant.”
Something latched onto my foot and yanked me backward. But I stared at Bear, unable to look away as he was pulled upward toward safety. At least, he was alive.
“I remember when you first started walking. How determined you were. You kept falling, but you never cried. You just pushed to your feet again,” I said.
Teeth dug into my calves and thighs, the spider silk suit holding my skin safe but the pressure was unreal. I kept back the screams and kept talking because this was my goodbye. This was the last moments I was ever going to have with him.
Bear didn’t even look back at me, not once.
Abe whined off to the side and then shot in, fighting to pull the other creatures off me. I sucked in a sharp breath when one bit into my right hand, unprotected by the suit.
“Pull the trigger, damn it!” Dinah screamed and then she went off, shooting two dogs within her trajectory. Eleanor was next, following suit, and I just let them go, dropping them because this was it. “Bear, do you remember movie nights? Do you remember hiking and taking the horses out on long trail rides? I do. I remember them every day. You saved me. You saved what was left of my heart and soul. Be happy, Bear. No matter what, know that I love you. I will always love you. Dinah and Eleanor will look after you.”
“What, no!” Eleanor screamed. “Fight, you are the goddamn Phoenix, fight!”
But I couldn’t. Bear hating me . . . it was impossible to get by, to think past it. He was the reason I’d come this far, and he could be the reason I stopped fighting.
“It’s a lie. Your brother must’ve wiped his memory!” Dinah screamed. “We know all your siblings’ abilities. We’ll tell you but you have to fight; you have to survive!”
Wiped his memory . . . that was what Tommy meant. Bear said he wished he’d never met my brother. Tommy could have, then. Not that he’d wiped Bear’s memory, but that he’d pretended to. Which meant . . . Bear didn’t hate me. He was doing something he
thought would help.
A set of teeth wrapped around the back of my neck and bit down, cutting off my air with the pressure of the jaws. I scrabbled at the face and tried to get my fingers into the eye sockets as a surge of new energy shot through me. Like a fish caught on a line, I fought and twisted, and somehow found Dinah in the melee. I snapped her up and fired twice into the creature’s head. The explosion of bone and hot flash of the bullet’s metal hit my bare skin and I went to my knees, breathing hard. A warm body pressed against mine, supporting me where I knelt, giving me his strength once more.
“Abe. Huten.” Guard me.
He whipped around me, snapping and driving the other creatures back from where I gasped for breath. “Eleanor?”
“Here, to your left,” she called, and I saw her between two red-skinned beasts that I realized were a single dog split down the middle, but not quite finished, still connected in the middle by flesh as if they were conjoined twins.
I raised Dinah and shot the connection between them and they scattered to either side, howling in pain.
I hurried forward, picking off the creatures where I had to. Abe drove them back and guarded my flank. I scooped Eleanor up and spun around. I needed to find a sprinkler and set that fucker off, but I had to make sure Bear was clear first. God only knew what the reversal would do to him.
I didn’t know what I was going to do, and before I had to think too much about it, the sprinkler system went off.
“Bear, get out of the spray!” I yelled as I spun and ran for the slight overhang of the platform. It was the best I could do. Abe moved as if to follow me and I pointed at the center of the arena. “Bleib!” Stay. Stay where you are, Abe, and hope to all that I ever had prayed to in my life that the reversal worked on him and the others and didn’t hurt my boy.
Abe froze where he was and the red spray rained down on him. He lifted his head and licked at the drops, and I watched in fascination as the other creatures and abnormals did the same. Licking at the rain, they one by one fell to the ground, twitching.
“Fuck, are they dead?” Dinah breathed out.
Above me, the sounds of fighting broke out, and in my head the Yakuza took up arms against Romano’s men, driving them from the compound. Driving them into the ground, cutting off their heads, slicing them open with their weapons. A rope dangled down from the platform and I ran for it. Abe was laid out on the ground. If I could, I would come back for him.
I jammed Dinah and Eleanor into their holsters and leaped for the rope, climbing up as fast as I could. The red rain slicked the rope but the spider silk suit had some stick to it giving me good grip.
A shot zipped by me, clipping my right arm like a punch but didn’t cut through the suit. I yanked out Dinah and shot back at the asshole while I spun on the rope.
He screamed as the bullet caught him in the dick, clutched himself, and went over the edge into the arena.
“Bullseye!” Dinah yelled. Good enough for me. I put her back and started up the rope again. I reached the top and pulled myself over, landing in a crouch on the floor.
And that’s where he was waiting for me.
The Shadow.
He spoke no words, yet I knew he was not the minion I’d faced. His presence was . . . darker, for lack of a better word, and that darkness swelled toward me. I clenched my hands around Dinah and Eleanor and connected with the pooled electricity I had waiting for me.
I breathed out and let the electricity soar along my hands and through both guns as I squeezed their triggers. They screamed with me as the bright blue-white arcs danced along my skin and wrapped around the Shadow, lighting him up from within, showing me a skeleton within the darkness.
The electricity faded from me and the Shadow still stood. “You think I could be so easily destroyed? I think not, Phoenix.”
His cloak swirled over my head and an image of Tommy’s face, of his missing eyes and chunks of flesh, filled my mind. I ducked, flattening myself to the floor, but there was nothing.
My world had gone black.
“Do you know what my ability is yet?” The Shadow’s voice rippled through the dark to me.
I clenched my jaw tightly and held onto my guns. Did it matter if I answered him? It did not.
Eleanor squirmed in my hand. “You have the power to defeat him, Nix. You are the Phoenix. The fire in you is real. Very, very real.”
“Darkness, you create darkness like the dirty fucker you are.” I didn’t move from where I’d flattened myself.
“True, but I create it in you. In your soul. I take the strongest abnormals and make them my minions. Like your sister.”
I shot up and fired into the darkness, blind but unable to hold my ground. “Filthy fucking liar!”
“Ah, she was so sweet,” he whispered from behind me and I spun, trying to find him. But he was the shadows themselves and I was caught in his spell. Part of my mind knew he was just playing with me. He had me in his arena and I was caught.
I screamed at him, anger making the sound a wordless howl. His laughter encircled me and his hands slid over me. The spider silk suit disintegrated and he touched my skin. Each point of his finger scored me, driving his mind into mine like railroad spikes. I clutched at my head, my hands digging into my own flesh as if I could claw him out.
Tommy’s sightless eyes floated through my mind. He’d done it himself, in an attempt to stop what the Shadow did to him.
“See yourself,” the Shadow whispered.
An image of Justin came to me, his smile fading as he saw me. “You . . . you were the Phoenix?”
My hand came up with Eleanor in it and I squeezed the trigger, blowing his face off. Blood and bone, the heat from the gun splattered my face.
I turned and Zee crawled across the ground, reaching for me. “Help me, don’t make me Hide you anymore. The pain, Nix, the pain is always.” I bent to him and put my hand on his and words that did not seem to be my own flowed from my lips.
“Your suffering is my joy.”
He bowed his head and I left him there, walking away from him. I could have killed him, put him out of his suffering and yet I didn’t.
Part of me was screaming, and there was intense pain all over my face and I knew I was doing it to myself, and there was something . . . something touching my bare skin.
I struggled to pull myself out of the Shadow’s snare but I stood in darkness, a darkness of my own making. I could take it, I could hold it at bay.
“You think you are stronger than me?” the Shadow whispered in my ear as he ran his hands down my arms and around my waist like a lover. “You think you can hold onto your soul when I call it forward? You are made of darkness; you were made for me.”
Ice flowed over my skin, slowing my thoughts, slowing my reactions. I couldn’t speak, not even to say no. I was . . . dying. He would have my soul.
“One last thing,” he said. “One last piece.”
A dark-headed boy stepped out of the shadows around me, his eyes on me. “Mom? Why? Why did you let him take me? Why did you kill me?”
My arm shook as I raised Eleanor. My entire body fought the motion, my heart and soul bucked against what I was doing.
“Kill him, and let your soul come to me.”
From far away, Eleanor spoke to me. “Be the flame, Phoenix. Embrace your power and who you really are.”
Shaking, it took everything I had to lower my gun hand. With jolting, jerking movements, I turned and stared into the darkness. My voice was weak, and tremulous, though I was giving it everything I had. “You want to dance, Shadow? Then let’s tango, shithead.”
The tiny blue flame I’d found when lying concussed on the floor outside the arena reached for me and I reached back, accepting it and what I was. Only this time, I didn’t try to slow it, to stop it from exploding along my skin in a veritable bath of flames.
My body lit up, surrounded by brilliant blue flames. The heat scoured away the ice and frost, and the hands that had held me against the Shadow’
s body snapped back.
“Your flame cannot stop the darkness,” he snarled.
“Then bring it, bitch.” I threw the words, my fire giving me strength with each passing beat of my heart. “Let’s see who kicks better ass, fucktard.”
He stood across from me, cloak flowing away from him as the rush of hot air blew off me. The black of his power and the brilliant blue-white of mine clashed between us, throwing sparks.
The ice crept to my feet once more, anchoring me to the floor.
“You are not strong enough.” He laughed. “But I will take your power gladly, and now that I know what you are, I will take your son, too.”
I glared at him, anger shaking me to the core. “No.”
He laughed. “You think defying me will stop me?”
I let all of my beliefs go, of abnormals, of normals, of right and wrong, and I let my love for my son engulf the flame.
As if a supernova erupted, the blue-white flames roared from my body, slammed into the Shadow and shattered his darkness.
I shot a hand out, and grabbed him around the wrist. My flames raced down my arm and up his. He fought and bucked against me, twisted and writhed as the fire dispersed his shadows and showed me his true form.
A man, nothing more than a man if you discounted the horns and cloven hooves. A devil then in his own right.
“Go to Hell,” I said, as the flames around me burst upward and outward and his body was immersed in a flash like an atomic bomb. The moment froze and then his body turned to ash and the darkness around me was gone, as were the blue flames.
I stood there, breathing hard, the heat of the flames still kissing my bare skin. Once again, I was naked.
I twisted to look out over the pit and the Yakuza and Romano’s men who’d been fighting on the upper platform.
As far as I could see, there was nothing but bodies. Bodies that had been burned to a crisp, their clothes, skin and hair charred.
Holy fucking shit, had I done that?
“Yes,” Eleanor said softly. “This was your doing.”
Blood of a Phoenix (The Nix Series Book 2) Page 30
