Fury of a Phoenix (The Nix Series Book 1)

by Shannon Mayer

  “Did you have much to do with your sister, the Phoenix?” Justin sat next to me on the bed, his chest bare.

  I shook my head. “No. We ran in different circles. She was the killer, I was the girl being groomed to be married off.”

  “So, you didn’t like her?”

  I shrugged, going for casual. “I didn’t have anything to do with her, why?”

  “I did a little digging after I met you.” He shrugged. “I heard some bad shit about her. That she’s a psycho barely leashed by your father. That she killed a bunch of kids for kicks. Just to prove she was a bad ass.” He shook his head. “I have a hard time believing you are related to her.”

  I closed my eyes and laid down on the bed, pulled the covers up and faked a yawn. “Don’t believe everything you hear, Justin. She probably wasn’t all that bad.”

  He snorted and flicked out the light. “Killer’s never change, Bea.”

  I put a hand over my face. I’d done enough online psychology courses over the years to be able to self-analyze my ability to compartmentalize.

  Or maybe I was the cold calculating bitch I’d been accused of being more than once. That was a distinct possibility too. Psychopath had been a taunt thrown at me on a regular basis.

  The monsters didn’t like me killing them.

  The normals feared me.

  My family hated me.

  I slid from the bed and to the door that led down the hall to the kitchen. Each step I took sent a shot of pain along my hip. Each breath was a slow burning heat through the broken bits in my chest.

  The smell of bacon drew me forward. I wasn’t hungry, but I had to eat if I was going to gain my strength back. There were rules to healing. Food. Rest. Slow training. More food and rest. I had time, there was no rush on this job. No one had hired me to find the killers. I wasn’t on a deadline.

  Even so, I itched to move, to get after whoever had done this and string them up by their innards. But I knew I had to be patient, as much as I wanted to run off after them and smile as I cut their hearts out, I had to be strong enough and that would require things like sleep, training, and food.

  The kitchen was designed around a classic farmhouse style with pale blue cabinets and a barn board on one side of the oversized island. The ceiling was marked with dark timber beams and more grayish barn board. I hadn’t picked out those colors, that had been all Justin.

  I put a hand on the dark gray granite of the island. “Zee. You give me Percocet again without my permission and I’m going to sic Abe on you.”

  Abe gave a soft woof from my side in agreement, his eyes locking on Zee.

  Zee didn’t look up from the stove, and did nothing but grunt. With one hand, he waved a spatula at the far side of the island. “Crash is in the paper today again. Chief of police said it was faulty brakes, of course.”

  I slid around the edge of the island and grabbed at the paper. Already open to the page where Bear and Justin smiled up at me, their heads pushed together as Bear hugged his dad around the neck.

  I looked away from their faces, to the words highlighted in bright yellow. Zee’s doing, no doubt.

  “Accident. Frozen brakes. Dead on impact. Lone survivor lucky to be alive.” I crumpled the paper as I spoke. “The police are in on it. They have to be.”

  “Of course they are. Or at least one or two of them are. But are they abs or norms on the take?” Zee did look at me then. His eyes were tired around the edges, and something about his movements made me watch him a little closer. Stiffer? No, there was a tremor in his hand holding the spatula. Maybe he was just overtired, but I didn’t think so.

  “Stayed up while I slept?” I tossed the paper aside as he slid a plate of food to me.

  “We have to take shifts at night, at least until we know for sure who did this.” He sat on a barstool across from me and we ate in silence except for the clink of cutlery on the china. The food tasted like nothing to me and I almost had to poke it down to make myself eat it all.

  Food and rest. I needed to heal to be strong enough to hunt.

  Zee finished ahead of me. I handed the last of my bacon to Abe who took it carefully from my fingers. Abigail lifted her head from the living room, her ears perked forward. She’d always been more of Justin’s dog. Her eyes slid to the front window, waiting for him.

  “There is something you haven’t considered.” Zee took my plate and his and put them into the dishwasher.

  “And that is?” I arched an eyebrow and leaned back on my chair in an attempt to ease the pain in my hip.

  He shut the dishwasher and turned it on. “That their deaths had nothing to do with you or me. That this happened because of something not at all tied to the Romano family.”

  Those words hovered between us. My family thought of themselves as mafia because of their connections with them. They thought of themselves as untouchable because of my father’s deals he made with someone far more dangerous than the human mafia.

  I frowned. “How is that even possible? Why would we be targeted otherwise?”

  Zee put his fists on the granite countertop. “Tell me again what the man from the hospital said.”

  I drew a breath. “He asked if he should finish off the wife.”

  “Exactly.” Zee leaned toward me. “Clearly if it was you he was after, even if he decided to hold off for some reason, they’d have used your name. One of them anyway. Bea, Nix. Something. But you are just the wife.”

  I sat there thinking about what he’d said, letting the words sink in. “Then . . . they were after Justin all along?”

  Zee’s face was grim. “That’s what I’m guessing. And if you didn’t have the Percocet in you, you’d have beat me to that conclusion.”

  I mulled over his words. You didn’t refer to targeted hits as the wife. You used their names. Or you called them the mark. Or the hit. Or any number of other things, but nothing so generic as the wife.

  “Could it be a rival skier who wanted him bumped? That next sponsorship, he told me it was a gold mine. Could it have been enough to put him in danger?” Zee kept cleaning the kitchen as he spoke, letting me follow my own threads.

  I shook my head. “No, he was friends with everyone he met. You know that. He and Noah . . . they were like the good guys. The ones everyone wanted their picture with, the ones everyone wanted to party with.”

  Zee nodded, but I knew he wasn’t convinced any more than I was. Reality was, hits didn’t happen for no reason, they were never random, and there were so few mistakes that I couldn’t chalk this up to that.

  I rubbed my good hand over my face.

  “I don’t want a funeral for them.”

  His shoulders hunched. “About that. I didn’t, but . . . Mary-Ellen took it over.”

  My jaw twitched hard and I swallowed the words that fought to spill out. “When?”

  “Tomorrow. The chief of police . . .”

  “What?”

  “Shit, don’t shoot me, Nix,” he muttered. “The chief had Bear and Justin cremated. To be fair, Mary-Ellen fought him on it, on your behalf.”

  Cremated.

  I couldn’t even say goodbye. Mary-Ellen was an interfering busybody, but I had no real anger for her.

  It was the chief of police I wanted to skewer. Cremation meant there was no way to prove the gunshot to Justin’s head, no way to detect any of the death myst on the clothing. Whoever had done this was covering their tracks. I’d give them that.

  “Autopsies aren’t done that fast,” I said. “Not two days after an accident.”

  “I know,” Zee said. “They’re pushing this through hard.”

  I closed my eyes. A funeral, I was going to have to go through that regardless now. Of course, Mary-Ellen would think she was being helpful. There was a choice; I could either go into town and flip out on her and shut the whole thing down, or I could go through with it and have it done. I didn’t want to plan a funeral. I didn’t want people’s pity or sympathy.

  I wanted to start hunting w
hoever had done this to my boys.

  Without another word, I slid from the barstool and hobbled back to my bedroom with Abe on my heels. I dropped a hand to his head and let him take some of my weight. “Good boy. You stick with me now, okay.”

  He pressed a little harder against my leg, giving me his silent and unwavering support. Back in the room, I fumbled out of my pajama bottoms and into my jeans, tugged on a couple pairs of thick wool socks, then an undershirt and thick sweater that barely fit over my cast.

  I caught a glimpse of my face in the large mirror next to the bed and over the dresser. My normally tanned skin was pasty, pale, and my dark roots were showing through the blonde.

  The contacts I wore made my eyes green. I reached up and popped them both out. Dark eyes looked back at me now, dark with flecks of amber in one of them. I turned away from the mirror and Abe matched his pace to mine as I headed to the back of the house. Zee didn’t try to stop me; he knew me well enough to let me be.

  Justin would have tried to baby me, to tuck me back into bed and tell me he’d take care of me. Look at where that had gotten us. I’d hidden away from the world, trusting him and Zee. And now something he was into had gotten both Justin and Bear killed.

  Bundled up in boots and a heavy coat that again barely fit over my cast, I headed out to the barn and the quiet refuge of my horses. They nickered to me, their soft muzzles reaching for my hands, looking for my touch. There were four mares in foal, and one young stallion in the barn, and I took my time with each of them before I let them out into the bigger pasture for the day.

  Moving hay, cleaning stalls, filling water buckets, grooming the pregnant mares and checking on their progress took hours, and tired me out physically even if my mind was far from exhausted. So much for letting myself rest. I should have known I couldn’t just stay inside and sleep.

  I kept pushing through until I could do nothing but sit on a bale of hay, sweat running down my face.

  Abe lay on the floor in front of me, his ears and eyes alert as he constantly scanned the area. I drew a breath, pushed to my feet, and headed to the tack room at the back of the barn. The smell of leather enveloped me as I stepped in, the warmth of the heated room cutting through the chill on my limbs. I stripped off my heavy coat and tossed it to the side, then walked to the far wall where the saddle racks hung.

  I stood there, staring at the wall, seeing the perfectly etched lines where the door into a hidden room had been placed on one of Justin’s first skiing trips after we’d moved here. Because I didn’t want him to know he’d married a freak who couldn’t give up her weapons entirely.

  I went to my knees and stuck my hand under the lowest saddle rack, feeling for the spring mechanism with my fingers. I found the small, cold steel lever and tugged it once, unlatching the door.

  The rack of saddles opened outward. I pushed to my feet and stepped around the door and down into a narrow room. There was a dangling light cord somewhere, and it took me a moment of grasping in the dark to find it. I pulled the string and the hundred-watt light came on in a blinding flash. Abe sniffed at some of the gear piled up near the floor.

  There was a rustling, the sound of a yawn inside the room. I drew a slow breath. “Ladies, you awake?”

  A mutter, but nothing else.

  The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with guns of all shapes and sizes, from a variety of handguns to long rifles to AK-47s and even an Israeli Galil. There was a rocket launcher at the top of my reach, not that I’d had to use it, but it was a nice backup weapon. Knives, grenades, flash bangs, tear gas, and then my rack of poisons. I ran my hands over the tools of my trade. I had my favorites, of course, and they were in the center of the wall in their own sheaths. My two best guns were Beretta style in shape and look, but they were custom-made handguns with a few quirks.

  And there was one small feature that set them apart from the rest.

  “Oh, look who shows up after how many months?” Dinah all but bounced in her holster as she threw the words at me.

  None of the other weapons talked, only Dinah and Eleanor had been cursed with a strange kind of sentience. They didn’t think it was a curse—yes, I’d asked them—but I wasn’t so sure. Sometimes I wondered if they were real people, whose souls had been trapped inside the inanimate weapons as punishment.

  Mostly though, I chose not to think about them as anything but weapons.

  Matte black and threaded for silencers, they had their names etched into each smooth metal grip. Eleanor on one and Dinah on the other. I picked up Eleanor and ran my thumb over the etching. “Long time, bitch,” I said softly.

  “Screw you,” she muttered.

  Eleanor had earned her name because of something my mother had told me as a child. She said when you died, you saw a bright, shining light coming for you and that was death. Eleanor was my preferred killing gun, and since the name meant bright, shining one, I’d always felt it fit. I frowned and continued to feel the edges of the name. I’d thought I’d left her behind for good.

  “What made you come back to us now? Haven’t seen you for months.” Dinah’s voice was lilting almost, what you’d think of from a fairy in a kid’s movie. She was also the chatty one.

  “Someone killed my boy,” I said as I opened the chamber on Eleanor, checked it, took a clip and slammed it home. Unlimited rounds—a perk of the girls—with a laser sight, was deadly at a lot of ranges. I flicked the laser on and slowly turned, letting the red dot dance on the wall and across the other weapons, flicking here and there before turning it off.

  “Your son?” Eleanor asked quietly.

  I nodded. They didn’t have eyes but they seemed to be able to “see”, for lack of a better word. Or maybe they sensed the world around them. I wasn’t truly sure.

  Dinah was just as much of a bitch as Eleanor, though technically, Eleanor had more kills. I put the clip into Dinah just as hard. She gave a shiver in my hand.

  “I want to kill something. Tell me we are going hunting,” she whined.

  Dinah was named after an old biblical character and her name meant judgment. More often than not, I used Dinah to inflict wounds, and slow people down, much to her displeasure. Not to say that she didn’t ever kill people, just that I preferred Eleanor for that. She was less . . . needy about the blood being spilled.

  “Yes, Dinah. We are going hunting.”

  “Yippy, it’s about damn time!” She all but squealed the words.

  I took the black leather holster from the side wall, stripped down to my thinnest shirt and put it on, weaving my cast through the loops. I tightened the straps, adjusting them to my shape so they hugged my body tightly, then slid both guns into their spot. They fit in my custom shoulder holster, over my lower back, which meant they were perfectly hidden if I wore the right coat.

  Extra magazines and ammo for the guns went onto the shoulder holster’s straps made specifically for that. The two guns wouldn’t be enough, but if I was going back to being that woman I’d left behind, I would start with the guns that had protected me the best, despite their attitudes.

  Eleanor shimmied in her holster, settling in. “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.” I looked over the rest of my gear I had put together in the last twelve years.

  Even out of the business, I’d never stopped thinking I might need to protect my family at some point. Knives adorned a whole section, tactical gear, survival gear, climbing gear . . . camouflage, dark clothing, bulletproof vest and riot gear. Even riot gear for Abe and Abigail, which consisted of thick leather dog coats edged with Kevlar. All of it just in case.

  I shivered in the sudden realization that all that prep had not done me any good, because ultimately, I had let my guard down. All it would have taken was a simple check of the brakes before we left the Christmas party.

  “Whoever did this was at the party.” I whispered the words to myself.

  An image of the Santa, all dressed up in red outside the house, slamm
ed into my brain. It was him. He had been the one to do this. I was sure of it in a way I could not explain.

  My body heaved, and the last of my breakfast fought its way up my throat. I clenched my teeth and held it at bay.

  Someone at the Christmas party. The flickering lights, the whisper of green myst through the house. While the lights had been out, Santa had been outside, and that’s when the brakes had been tampered with. I knew it without a shadow of a doubt with the gut instinct that came from being trained in the business.

  I took my cell phone from my pocket and dialed Mary-Ellen.

  She picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Who was the Santa at the party?”

  “Who is this?” Her tone was anything but nice. Which was odd for her. I gripped the phone harder.

  “It’s Bea. Who was the Santa at the party?” Perhaps my tone finally reached through to her. Then again, maybe not.

  “Oh, Bea, I’m so sorry your sweet boy—”

  “Who was the goddamn Santa?”

  There was a huge intake of breath. “I’m sorry, I can’t have you talking to me like that.”

  I bit my lower lip to keep from screaming at her, and I clenched the edge of the doorframe to keep from storming off, driving to her house and putting Dinah to her temple.

  Dinah sniffed, her voice muffled from my back. “I’d shoot her in the face if it was me, then she’d start talking.”

  I swatted my hand to my lower back to shut her up.

  “Who. Was. The. Santa?” Every word was quiet, but full of heat. It was the best I could do at staying polite.

  “I hired him. He was here visiting family. Said he had played Santa before.”

  “Did he have a name?”

  “John Smith. But it doesn’t matter, he never came in, never even gave the kids their toys. He just took my money and left.”