Rise of a Phoenix

by Shannon Mayer

  Romano had taken Shaitan’s home as his own somehow . . . Shaitan did not seem like a man to allow for much wiggle room on loyalty.

  A blur of dark clothing and dark hair was all I saw as Shaitan leapt at Rooster, riding him to the ground which should have been impossible. Rooster outweighed Shaitan by a lot, but he buckled as if he’d been hit by a truck. Shaitan’s hands went around the big man’s skull, fingers digging into his face as if his flesh and bones were putty. There were no words or screaming or anything. Rooster didn’t so much as cry out as his facial bones were crushed under the strength of the other man’s hands.

  Rooster jerked once, twice, and then was still before I could so much as take a step to try to stop what was happening. I didn’t like Rooster, but I also knew he had tried to save me from my grandfather. Too little, too late, but he’d tried, and that had to be worth something.

  Far better than a death like having your face caved in by a madman’s bare hands.

  Shaitan sat hunched over Rooster, his body heaving as if he’d just run a mile at top speed, blood dripping from his hooked, clawed fingers. “His memories show him guarding you. Why was he guarding you? He belonged to Romano, did you also belong to him?” He turned his face so just the edge of one eye was showing, glittering a dangerous red that was no natural color. “Who are you to that son of a camel?”

  I could too easily imagine those fingers digging into my own skull, cracking it and opening my mind wide to him both literally and figuratively. Fear snapped through me and I bolted, energy flowing from a reserve deep within me. I went straight for the flap of a door.

  “Stop!” he yelled after me. I just kept on moving because there was no way I was going to let him get his hands on me. The sheet trailed out behind me into the heat of the desert. I couldn’t open my eyes to the brilliant sun. I ran without direction, letting my feet guide me, praying that it would be enough. I stumbled hard once in a rut and then was up again, the light still keeping my sight from me. I was running blind, using only my sense of sound and touch to guide my feet.

  I could hear him behind me, running after me. “Stop! I command you to stop!” The wind picked up, a swirling storm that tugged at me, drawing me back toward him.

  But I didn’t stop, and as I hit another dip in the ground, my foot snagged against something hard, and I was thrown forward. I put my hands out and they pushed through the flap of a tent as I fell into it, through it maybe was a better word. The light faded as I slammed into the ground flat on my belly. The wind rushed out of me and I lay there gasping like a fish. I blinked rapidly, and found myself staring up at a woman who was hidden behind layers of cloth. Only her eyes showed above the edge of a veil.

  Violet eyes rimmed with black makeup made them seem brighter, deeper. She bent down to me. “Is Shaitan scaring you, little one?”

  I managed to get a breath in. “He killed my bodyguard.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. I grabbed the edges of my sheet and rolled so that I could look at the doorway. No one came through, but I could see a pair of feet on the other side of the flap. “Why doesn’t he come in?”

  “Because he is afraid of me,” she said as she moved around the tent, gathering things. “All men are afraid of me. As they should be.”

  I swallowed hard. What had I gotten myself into this time? Out of the frying pan and into the open flames was what my dad had said about situations like this. I bit the inside of my mouth, thinking about how to get out of here.

  “My uncle Tommy is coming for me,” I said.

  “Is he now?” She turned toward me, a smooth wide, cream-colored bowl in her hand, steam rolling from it. I hadn’t even seen her mixing anything but the smell that slipped from it was heavenly. My mouth watered.

  “Child, do you know that I am the desert witch? No one enters my tent without my permission and lives.” She lowered herself to her knees in front of me. I couldn’t guess how old she was, maybe my mom’s age. There were no deep wrinkles around her eyes and her body seemed slim under the layers of floating cloth, but it was honestly hard to tell, and I didn’t dare take my eyes from hers. She lifted a hand, her wrist covered in bracelets that tinkled and chimed.

  “I didn’t know.” I spoke the truth. “I was running blind.”

  “Ah. So, the desert spirits led you to me?” She blinked a few times. “That explains it. Shaitan tolerates my presence because he knows what I am capable of. Like so many men, he fears a woman of power. But I believe you are in danger if you stay with him. His war with another demon will soon implode on us all.”

  I nodded. “I agree.”

  She lifted a hand to the side of her face and lowered her veil. I looked away, vaguely recalling something about it being improper to see a veiled woman’s face. She laughed lightly. “So proper. You may look on me. Consider it an honor for one such as yourself. A man child.”

  I turned back slowly. She was very pretty, and I almost blurted it out.

  She laughed again. “I see you have strength and you have fire in you. Who is your mother, young man?”

  I frowned, wanting to tell her, the smell of the broth overcoming some of my better senses. “I don’t know if I should tell you. Some people hate her, or fear her, and they want to use me against her.”

  Her eyes fluttered to half-mast and she tipped her head to one side. “Ah, I see. Another powerful woman then. The child of a powerful woman is a both a weapon and a curse to the one who has borne him.”

  My frown deepened. “I am not a curse.”

  “Perhaps not, if you have the strength to protect yourself. You found your fire in the desert, your near death awakened it to you as is so often the case with those like yourself.”

  Her words touched a truth inside of me and I nodded. “Yes, I think so. I thought I saw my father. He’s dead, though.”

  She smiled. “Those who have passed will sometimes come to us, to show us the way back to the living if it is not our time.”

  My shoulders slumped.

  “Perhaps I will teach you a little so you can protect yourself. All powerful women are sisters, and I would see your mother survive. If she is who I think she is, she has it in her to change our world. Or, at the very least, cleanse it of some of the evil it carries.”

  “You . . . you’re going to help me?” I stared at her, hope burning through me. Everything about this woman screamed danger and yet . . . unlike the sheik, I knew in my belly I could trust her. A calm sensation floated through me. Yes, this one I could trust, at least for now.

  From outside the tent, Shaitan snarled and said something in a language I didn’t understand.

  The woman stood and strode to the flap, flipped it open, and the earth around us rumbled. She spoke softly and the ground quieted, but again, the words were lost to me as they flowed in a foreign tongue.

  “What did he say?” I asked as she came back and sat once more in front of me.

  She smirked. “He thought he could intimidate me. I told him to be gone by the setting of the sun or face my wrath, and yours.”

  My jaw dropped. “I have no wrath.”

  Her smirk turned into a wide smile, her violet eyes sparkling with what could only be called joy. “Not yet, man child. Not yet, but you will. And when you do, your enemies will tremble in fear at your feet as they tremble at mine.”

  6

  Phoenix

  Killian drove us to his secret airport outside Savanah, Georgia, while I read my sister’s diary. Twice, actually, seeing as the diary was not that long, and not all that detailed. A part of me was grateful since it had chunks about her sleeping with the man she fell in love with. The man she knew as Strike, my father’s third and final guardian from Hell. There was nothing about the deal our father had made with the devil, not even a subtle hint. So why the hell had Mancini even bothered to give it to me?

  I gritted my teeth against the frustration of not finding anything useful and snapped the book shut.

  “How exactly did it start between them?” Ki
llian asked. “You said the third guardian was reclusive and that Romano used the Stick Man and the Shadow for the most part.”

  I nodded. “And he didn’t use them that much when I was around. He leaned on me mostly.” I opened the diary and paged through to find the entry I wanted. “Bea says she was snooping through Romano’s bedroom and that is where Strike found her. I knew him as Pain, but he went by both names, to be fair. He grabbed her and she just knew that he was the one for her. That it flooded through her.” I shook my head. “But Bianca was never the love-struck kind of woman. She was a hardass with only one thing in mind: taking over Romano’s business one day. She even told me once she would run it far better than any of the boys and planned to take over as soon as she could.”

  Dinah snorted. “A monkey could run it better than your brothers.”

  I agreed but didn’t respond to her. “What I can’t figure out is why Strike killed her? If Strike took Eleanor from her and pulled the trigger, the question is why?”

  Dinah shivered in her holster. “Maybe she knew she was going to die anyway. Maybe Strike loved her enough to help her die with some sort of dignity.”

  I frowned and cast a glance at Killian. Dinah’s words were far too detailed to be just a guess. Killian arched an eyebrow at me as if he suspected the same thing.

  I dropped a hand to my gun. “What exactly do you know about Bianca’s death, Dinah? You were there. I know you were because I retrieved you from under the bed.”

  “I can’t tell you,” she said. “Part of the spell that put me in this gun makes it so I can’t reveal certain things. What I can tell you is that Mancini was out to kill Bianca. She’d turned him and his advances down and he was furious. Strike knew it too.”

  “That’s why you blamed him for her death?” When I’d met with Mancini before, when he’d told me he’d help with taking out Romano and getting Bear back, Dinah had freaked out. She’d screamed that he’d killed Bianca and I’d almost shot him for her outburst.

  “Yes. He manipulated her just like he’s been manipulating you,” she said. “She didn’t want this life for you, Phoenix. She wanted you to be safe.”

  I sighed. “As wonderful as that is—and it is wonderful that she cared for me—there are no safe places anymore. Not while Romano is alive.”

  “I know.” She sighed. “I know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try, right?”

  Which brought me back to the other papers, the coded ones. Like the diary, I’d not had more than a second to look them over.

  I pulled them out from where I’d tucked them into the back of the diary. Two sheets with a list of things that were part of what was needed to make the final blow on Romano. The items that would create a spell that would undo his immortality and allow him to be killed. I skimmed the list, frowned and read it through twice more.

  “Killian, listen to this. The ingredients list is long, and you have a part in it, but it’s the method of creating the spell that I can’t get over.”

  “Lay it on me,” he said as he parked the Humvee at the edge of the airstrip.

  “Melt the ingredients using the fire of a Phoenix, melt them down then dry them thoroughly and grind them into a powder. Mix the resulting fines with black powder. The shell casing must be made of the finest of gold. Then it must be shocked once with a bolt of lightning to charge the bullet with enough power to kill him.”

  I looked at him. “It’s a recipe for a magic bullet that will kill Romano. And there is no way Tommy has all this. No way at all.”

  “Holy shit,” Dinah breathed. “Gold would melt in the barrel of any ordinary gun, you know that.”

  I pulled her from her holster. “But not you?”

  “No, both Eleanor and I run on a cooler temp, just under the heat that would melt gold,” she said. “It finally makes sense. But you’re right, I don’t think Tommy would have all this. Which means he either doesn’t know, or he thinks that this is all bunk. I’d bet money he thinks a gold bullet on its own will do the trick. Idiot.”

  Her words tinged inside my head. How could she say “it finally made sense”? How could this mean anything to her?

  I closed my eyes and let my mind work it over. I pulled Dinah out and cupped her in my lap. “Dinah, who created you? Who truly created you?”

  She groaned. “I will try to tell you, but it may not work.”

  I waited quietly while she shivered in my hand. Killian looked at me and I shook my head, keeping him quiet.

  Her voice was hesitant as she started to speak. “Mancini gave Bianca the way to create us. It was part of the deal. He gave her the way to make sentient guns and then when she was of age, he would get to marry her.”

  She cried out and there was a creaking sound as if her stock was peeling apart from the inside out.

  “Shit, Dinah!”

  Her parts were literally cracking under some unknown pressure I wasn’t sure how to stop.

  She screamed and I held her with both hands wrapped around her. I don’t know what made me do it, but I reached for the fire deep in my body and pulled it up and along my arms, down and into my hands. I wasn’t trying to hurt her. I was trying to melt away. . . whatever it was doing this to her. I was trying to burn away the pain.

  The flames licked blue and purple, dipping into a pink color along my skin, and I ran my fingers over her stock and barrel as if smoothing away the hurt. Heat waves rolled off the metal of her body, and off my fingertips, but no smoke flowed.

  Slowly, Dinah’s shaking eased and her scream slid away with a gasp. “Phoenix, what did you do?”

  I blinked a few times, uncertain. “I don’t know. Are you . . . are you okay?”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “Yes, I think I am. I think you burned it out of me.” I had the sensation she was shaking her head, or would have if she’d been able.

  “Burned what out of you?” I asked.

  “The curse that held me from saying everything I know.”

  Killian leaned across the seats and spoke carefully. “Mancini gave Bianca the information on how to make sentient guns. Which meant he knew it would take a gun like that to kill Romano. Mancini has been playing a long, long game. Just as he accused Romano of doing.”

  I didn’t take my hands from Dinah. “Anything else you can tell me now, without hurting yourself?”

  She was quiet a moment. “I think I can tell you who I am. I had bindings placed on me when I was stuffed into this gun. Those bindings kept me from telling anyone anything about me before I was this.”

  A chill swept through me. “You mean . . . who you were before?”

  There was a hitch in her breath and then she let out a sob. “I tried so hard to protect you, because your blood is part of the recipe in that list, and I knew Father had to die. I knew he had to. He is evil, Nixi. Evil, and I was trying to keep us both safe and then Strike told me what Father was going to do to you. That he was going to have you killed because he thought you were a normal, Mancini is wrong about that part.

  “He didn’t know you were abnormal like the rest of us. And I couldn’t let it happen. I had to do everything I could to protect you, but he was going to offer your soul to the devil in place of his own, and then he was going to kill you. Because he didn’t think you had any value to him. So I went to Mancini, he helped me get the guns, he told me how to put souls into them.”

  She sobbed on the words and they hammered into my skull like nails driven with a mallet. “The deal between Father and Bazixal . . . it’s in the layers between the pages of the diary. I don’t even know what it said because I knew he’d be looking for it. And if he found my body, he’d know I’d made my soul transfer into the gun.”

  I didn’t drop her, though I was more than tempted. The shakes had me, rocketed through me over and over and I just sat there. Killian didn’t say anything, didn’t so much as touch me.

  I swallowed hard a few times. “Are you saying . . . that you’re my sister, Bianca?”

  “Yes,”
she whispered. “I am your sister. And I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you better. I tried so hard, Nixi. I tried so hard and I failed.”

  I closed my eyes and bowed my head, pressing it against the gun that held my sister’s soul. “Bea. God, what a mess we all are.”

  A burst of hysterical laughter escaped her. “Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? I don’t know what you did with your fire. But you burned part of the curse off me, I think. I can help more now, I can speak my mind. I can help you figure this out.”

  I wanted to hold her close, but had to settle for putting her back in her holster. “You always did speak your mind. Right now, we have to get on that plane and we still don’t know where we are going.” Though I was leaning toward wherever this Shaitan was. All the evidence—minimal as it was—pointed to him. “And then we can talk some more.” I paused. “Do you want me to call you Bianca?”

  She was quiet a moment before she answered. “No. That part of me is gone. I’m Dinah now, there is no going back to being Bianca.”

  My heart began to hammer a staccato I didn’t like, one that told me there was another truth coming I wasn’t going to like. “You put the soul in Eleanor then?” I asked.

  “She was my practice run. She knew what she was doing. She knew that it was a chance to protect you no matter what and she was dying already, and she was terrified Romano would use her against you,” Dinah said, her voice careful.

  “Are you going to tell me who she is?” I asked, afraid I already knew the answer. Afraid I was wrong, afraid I was right. Before she could say anything, I pushed forward.

  “Dinah, is Eleanor . . . is she my mom?”

  The silence in the Humvee was long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. That maybe it was some leftover bit of the curse that had been laid on her.

  “Yes,” she said softly, “Eleanor is your mom. She didn’t just die, Phoenix. She . . . she let herself die. She could have healed the disease, but she didn’t.”

  I couldn’t breathe, my eyes fogged over, my vision blurred so I gave up and closed them. There was nothing I needed more than to move, to get my body out of the closed space of the vehicle. Abe whined at me, picking up on my distress, but he stayed where he was in the backseat.