Awakened Abyss (Firebird Uncaged Book 2)

by Erin Embly

  She snapped her jaws and twisted her head as far as it would go—luckily not quite far enough to make contact with my face, which was pressed hard into the back of her neck. My instincts took over, and I let out a yell as I struggled to put more pressure on her throat.

  After what felt like forever but was probably only seconds, she relaxed in my grip, air failing to go through her constricted windpipe. Shifters needed to breathe just as much as their human and animal counterparts . . . yet another reason I preferred dealing with them over vampires.

  The back of my head went fuzzy as I released my hold on the unconscious cat. I had forgotten to keep breathing myself. I closed my eyes briefly to let the dizziness pass, and the eerie laughter rang in my ears again.

  A strong gust of wind pushed past me, knocking some of my hair out of its tight knot. The unconscious shifter tumbled back as if kicked by something much stronger than a gust of wind. Then she began to float, rising in the air like a damn kitty balloon.

  The laughter grew louder, bouncing around the tunnel haphazardly, no longer in any pattern resembling a natural echo. When the floating cat came to, she locked her eyes on mine and roared. And before I could even pull out my second knife, she hooked her claws into her neck and tore out her own throat.

  Blood spurted out, pooling in the air for an eerie moment before everything fell to the ground. The laughter died down as soon as she fell, and silence filled the space.

  I stepped forward and then stopped. I didn’t know how well “suicide by own claws” worked to kill shifters—unless one had a silver manicure—but even if this woman could be saved, I couldn’t risk touching her now.

  I couldn’t risk touching anything that might be dead or dying. Not after what had happened to my roommate Becca just a couple months ago, when I’d discovered that a rogue phoenix had somehow made my body half its home.

  The last thing I needed right now—or ever—was to boop the dead cat that’d just been trying to kill me and then watch her be reborn in fire.

  As I pulled out my phone again, a noise from behind me caught my attention.

  The train.

  It started up again and sped away from me, leaving me alone with the lifeless cat in the darkness.

  I closed my eyes and let out a quick breath before turning around and breaking into a sprint. Whatever I was going to do about this . . . about whatever had just happened . . . I couldn’t do it from here while Noah was still on that train.

  2

  The buzzing from my phone taunted me as I ran through the tunnel in the dark, chasing the train I’d been on just minutes ago.

  When I made it to the platform, the train was still stopped there. Right, I thought, remembering all the bodies the cat had left in her wake. The train would probably be there for a while. Which at least meant no other train would come through anytime soon.

  That was good, because someone who could safely touch dead things really needed to get in there and investigate the shifter’s body, preferably before it got run over.

  I stopped behind the train to catch my breath, shivering as I tried to process what had just happened. This wasn’t just a case of a shifter gone psycho—something else was in this tunnel. Something else had made her do what she’d done.

  And it was something I couldn’t see. I’d been there with it, heard its laughter, felt it in the unnatural wind in my hair . . . but it hadn’t been something I could stick my knife in, and that made me uncomfortable as hell.

  I took my phone out to check whether the buzzing was Noah trying to get a hold of me. The train had stopped at the station where we normally switched lines, so we had a designated meeting spot here he should be waiting for me at, but you never knew.

  The light from the phone made me squint, my eyes having adjusted to the darkness of the tunnel. And when I focused on the words on the screen, heat rushed to my face.

  Nope, not Noah. Adrian. Apparently I had managed to get a message off while the cat had been chasing her tail, despite the chronically spotty cell service underground, and apparently my impulse text had gone to him.

  He was the one cop I was still on friendly terms with and who might actually be inclined to help me deal with a crazed cat in a subway tunnel, so I supposed that was logical. But seeing his words flood the screen made me almost as uncomfortable as contemplating a killer I couldn’t stab.

  He was confused, asking where I was, blah blah blah . . . What had I even sent to him? I scrolled up to see that I’d actually called him. Well, fuck. So he would’ve heard the creepy laughter, a lot of running, me wrestling with a yowling cat, and then . . .

  Ugh. He’s not going to let me ignore him if he heard all that. Not that I should be ignoring him anyway. If he couldn’t be the one to go look at the dead body I’d just left, he’d know who to call to take care of it. But I didn’t want to talk to him. Didn’t want to hear his soothing voice and let it calm me down. Didn’t want to let him distract me for another minute from . . . from anything.

  Dead shifter in Metro tunnel between L’Enfant Plaza & Gallery Place. Yellow line, northbound. Weird shit.

  I sent the text and then stuffed the phone back in my pocket, climbing up onto the platform from behind the corner of the stopped train. The platform was still crowded, authorities not having been able to corral the peanut gallery just yet. But it looked like the passengers had emptied the train—the live ones, at least—so Noah should be upstairs.

  I pushed my way through the mass of onlookers, thankful no one had spotted me and stopped me. Did I want to talk to the train conductor and ask why they had started and stopped all those times? Yes. I also wanted to turn right back around and run through the tunnels until I could find whatever invisible laughing creature had caused all this. But Noah would kill me if I made him late for school, so I zipped up the escalator and put the mysterious violent episode behind me.

  Say what you will about kids, but at least they make you get your priorities straight. My life span had probably gotten a lot longer having Noah around, what with all the walking away from crazy danger I was doing on his account. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it wouldn’t be getting at me anytime soon.

  I took a deep breath when I got to the upper level of the station. After the tunnel I’d just been running around in, this felt like open air. Gallery Place was one of the biggest stations in DC, right in the center of the city, and from the upper platform it felt far bigger than any subway station should feel. The domed ceiling was so high it made the space look cavernous, like it had been made for something far bigger and grander than trains.

  I made my way to the end of the Red Line platform where Noah and I usually switched lines on the way to his school. There was a big round column here that I’d told him to stand by if we ever got separated—and sure enough, he was there now.

  He was facing the column with his back to me, his nose probably deep in that book he was obsessed with this morning. I walked up to him and put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Come on, kid. We should—”

  He turned around and I gasped, jerking my hand away from him.

  The skin on his face was sagging, wrinkled, shriveled. So distorted it didn’t even look like him.

  It wasn’t him.

  An old man’s head on a child’s body, his smile slowly growing until it was inhumanly wide, and then a familiar laughter . . .

  The phone buzzed again in my pocket, and in a blink the man was gone. Flies buzzed in wild circles in the space where he’d been standing as the eerie giggles faded out of earshot.

  I stood frozen for a moment, my insides churning from disgust and horror in a way they hadn’t minutes ago when I’d witnessed the death of a stranger. This wasn’t bloody or violent, but it was Noah.

  Had someone cursed him with accelerated old age in the short time we’d been separated? Had he stumbled into some kind of fae decay nightmare world?

  My breath quickened, heart racing again. I never should have left him. Not even if it
meant more people would have had to die without my help.

  The buzzing in my pocket seemed to get stronger, and I snapped back to my senses. It might be Noah calling me.

  I nearly declined the call by accident with my frantic, fumbling fingers before I managed to answer it and put the phone to my ear.

  “Ma’am?” The voice of the woman on the other end was sharp and filled with disdain. “Did you hear me?”

  “I . . . who is this?”

  “This is Doreen Jackson from the Metro Transit Police Department. We have your son in our custody.”

  “Noah?” I asked, relief washing over me.

  She didn’t bother to answer me, just said, “You have fifteen minutes to collect him at our 5th Street location. After that I’m calling CPS.”

  The phone clicked, and I was left with my pulse pounding and my eyes still focused on the empty spot where I’d just thought I’d seen Noah.

  “5th Street,” I said to myself, then turned on my heel and pushed through the masses waiting for the next train to get to a station exit.

  I ran up the lengthy escalator and emerged into the sunlight with burning thighs. Only stopping briefly to check for directions on my phone, I hurried across the few short blocks to the office.

  When I pulled open the door, my t-shirt was damp underneath my jacket and sweat was dripping down my neck. A woman I assumed was Doreen sat behind a desk with her eyes raised to me in a condescending glare.

  Shit, was I bleeding? I’d been so distracted I hadn’t bothered to check. A quick glance down had me cringing. No blood, but my jacket sleeves were torn to shreds. They’d done their job protecting me from the cat’s claws.

  Possibly even worse, the t-shirt I was wearing underneath displayed the logo for the strip club I’d been working at for a year and some change: Bawdy Baz’s Bits & Bats. I wasn’t ashamed of it or I wouldn’t be working there, but I’d been on the receiving end of enough glares like Doreen’s to know other people had some crazy opinions on what this said about my ability to take care of a child.

  I opened my mouth to offer her a greeting, but Noah tackled me before I could, wrapping his arms around my waist in an uncharacteristic show of affection.

  The corner of his history textbook dug into my side, telling me he’d been studying right up until the second I walked in. He was only happy to see me because it meant I could take him the rest of the way to school, but I didn’t care. I put my hands on his shoulders and let myself enjoy the immense relief of knowing for sure that he was okay.

  He looked up at me. “Can we go now?”

  “Yeah,” I started, but Doreen let out a loud huff that made me pause.

  “I’m going to need you to fill out some forms,” she said.

  “Sure.” I cringed again, wondering just how much of a pain in the ass this was going to turn into.

  As I walked over to the desk, a high-pitched sorrowful wail erupted behind me, interrupting my thoughts.

  I turned to see a woman gaping at me between sobs as a Metro officer awkwardly tried to comfort her, patting her on the back with one hand while leaning away with the rest of his body.

  Her face was streaked with tears, and she let out another shriek when my eyes met hers.

  “It’s like you don’t even care!” she whined at me. “You left him all alone and I brought him here for you—and you don’t even care! Do you know what could have happened?”

  I clenched my teeth, willing myself to not lash out at her. This woman had done me a favor if she’d gone out of her way to make sure Noah was safe, and if she wanted to scold me about leaving him in the first place I would be the first one to agree that it was probably a bad call.

  But instead, she was scolding me about my emotions, and how dare she even presume to know how much I cared? Turning into a sobbing mess had never helped anyone in any situation, and there was no way I would do that even if the kid died. Even though just thinking about that possibility sent a hollow feeling through my insides.

  “Thank you for looking after him,” I said, just trying to get this over with. “It won’t happen again.”

  The woman let out a groan and dropped her head and shoulders into her lap, and I gave Noah a questioning glance. Had he done something to her emotions? This was not the kind of reaction I would expect from a Good Samaritan witnessing the happy ending she’d just brought about.

  Noah shrugged at me. But he was already bouncing from foot to foot, clearly eager to get out the door and back on his way to school.

  I probably should have left well enough alone, but something made me walk over to the sobbing woman and kneel down in front of her. I touched her shoulder lightly, and she looked up at me with puffy eyes.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Why are you so upset?”

  With a sniffle, she pulled her phone out of her purse and held it up so I could see a picture of a young boy around Noah’s age. He had darker hair than Noah, but they had the same chubby cheeks and the same sweet smile.

  “My Brady’s still missing,” she whispered, and then it all made sense.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Six days.” She lowered her voice even further. “They stopped looking after two.”

  I jerked back at her words, not sure why anyone would stop looking for a missing little kid so soon. “Who’s they?”

  “The police. Of course, they tell me they’re doing everything they can, but I know he’s not their priority anymore. They haven’t called me with an update since Monday.” She shook her head at me, face swelling as another sob built up in her throat. “No one even cares. He’s lost and alone and he’s going to miss his piano recital and he’s allergic to eggs—what if they try to feed him eggs?—and no one even cares.”

  She was getting frantic again, and I shook off the moment of wonder that piano and eggs were the biggest things she was worried about. They weren’t, though. These were just the worries she was distracting herself with to keep her mind away from the more likely horrors of abuse and murder.

  I touched her knee this time to get her attention. “I care,” I said. And I did. The panic I’d just felt at the thought of losing Noah made me care a lot more than I normally might have. “What’s his full name? Brady . . . ?”

  “Lee,” she said. “Brady Lee.”

  “Got it,” I said. “I have some friends who might be able to help. I’ll ask them to look into it for you.”

  She stared at me blankly for a moment, and I didn’t blame her for not jumping for joy at my offer. Too many people had made her false promises already, and I’d just been proven neglectful in leaving my own kid alone. But I hoped I could help her anyway. Even though Noah should have been fine without her, I was grateful she had cared enough to step in.

  And for her to see him abandoned, a little boy around the same age as hers . . . her emotional breakdown for today at least was clearly my fault.

  “Can I have your number?” I asked. “In case I find anything?”

  She nodded without saying anything, and I handed her my phone to add her information to.

  “Ma’am?” Doreen piped up from her desk, sounding even less amused than she had the first time.

  “Forms, yeah,” I said through gritted teeth, my patience wearing thin. I took my phone back from the sniffling woman and walked up to the desk, where Noah was almost running in place in his anxiousness to get going, his book clutched to his chest.

  Doreen piled a stack of papers as thick as my thumb in front of me and placed a pen atop it, giving me a smirk as she did.

  “All those?” I asked, eyes wide. “I’m picking up a kid, not buying a house.”

  I regretted it as soon as I said it and saw Doreen’s face harden. This woman could report me and probably have Noah taken away from me if she felt like it. If there was one damn time to be polite no matter what, this was it, and I couldn’t even manage that.

  I tried not to groan as I said, “I’m sorry.”

  But before I could even pick
up the pen, Noah said, “We don’t have time to buy a house, Darcy.”

  He handed me his book and I took it without thinking, then watched him walk around the desk so he could get close to Doreen.

  Lowering his head, he pushed himself forward and bumped up against the arm of Doreen’s chair with his skull. “Baaaaaaaaa,” he bleated, then stood up and erupted into a fit of giggles.

  It was his goat impression, which Becca had taught him originally when he’d first learned what a “kid” was. Doing it always made him laugh, and he’d been busting it out more often lately now that he’d been spending more time with Carina and her livestock.

  Normally I thought it was cute as hell, but what was he thinking doing this now?

  It didn’t take long for me to find out.

  In mere seconds, Doreen had thrown her head back and erupted into laughter along with him. A crazed-sounding wheeze made me turn around to see the previously sobbing woman overtaken with laughter as well, along with the man who’d been trying to calm her down.

  I could maybe understand Doreen finding Noah’s display hilarious. Who knew? She might have a great sense of humor when she wasn’t dealing with neglectful parents like me.

  But the two behind me hadn’t even seen what Noah had done. They couldn’t, not from where they were seated and with him behind Doreen’s desk.

  Feeling like I’d been dropped into crazy town, I let the creases in my forehead deepen as the laughter only got louder around me. Then suddenly Noah was tugging on my hand, and I looked down to see a heavy dose of sobering impatience on his cute little face.

  “Come on, it won’t last long,” he said as he pulled me to the door.

  And if I hadn’t felt like enough of a horrible parent yet today, I certainly did now, with the little kid I was supposed to be taking care of using his manipulative fae magic to get me out of trouble.

  Bats. I’d spent so much energy trying to make sure this kid wouldn’t kill people to eat their souls that I’d completely neglected the dangers of his other capabilities. Honestly, I hadn’t even known he’d learned to control this shit, and now I wondered if he’d been using it in other ways he shouldn’t.