Awakened Abyss (Firebird Uncaged Book 2)

by Erin Embly

  My thoughts raced with all the horrifying possibilities before I remembered that he was still studying in frustration to get smarter so a girl would like him when apparently he could just as easily do something like this to make her feel whatever he wanted.

  Simeon’s face took shape in my mind, his dark eyes and intoxicating smile that had made me feel so many things I shouldn’t. With one look full of vampire magic, he had taken away the control I’d worked so hard to cultivate in my training, made me prioritize our fun over the work I’d chosen for myself so carefully, stolen my identity and then had the audacity to die on my watch.

  I blinked myself back to the present. I was letting my past color my fears. Noah hadn’t crossed any truly horrible lines yet, to my knowledge. I’d just need to sit him down and explain the importance of . . . emotional autonomy, I supposed.

  I was so lost in my thoughts that it wasn’t until we stepped into the shade near the down escalators that I realized Noah was leading me back to the Metro.

  I stopped short, squeezing his hand to make him stop with me.

  He turned to me with an exasperated sigh. “Come on—I’m going to be late.”

  “No you’re not.” I pulled out my phone. “We’re taking a car the rest of the way.”

  His face brightened immediately, and he actually hopped up and down in his excitement. “For real?”

  “Mmm hmm,” I said, although I could practically hear my bank account bitching at me as I requested the ride on the app. “But we need to have a talk on the way about what just happened.”

  That would be a fun conversation for our lucky driver to overhear.

  It wasn’t ideal, but it needed to happen. And there was no way I was going to take Noah on another train until I knew just what I had witnessed down there with the giggly murder ghosts and the creepy doppelgänger.

  3

  I took my ruined jacket off as I jogged home from the Metro stop nearest my apartment. After all the running around I’d done this morning, it felt nice to let the cool spring air rush over my damp skin.

  With Noah safely at school and probably acing his test, I’d almost hoped to see something weird underground on my way back. Anything to help me make sense of what had happened with the out-of-control shifter and the awful Noah doppelganger would have been welcome.

  But nothing out of the ordinary had happened, unless you counted the wacky old man I’d sat next to who had snuck his pet lizard on the train and fed it crickets while it curled up under his sweater. No one had paid him any mind.

  Just a regular Friday morning, apparently. Whoever had said weirdos only came out at night had it backwards, as far as I was concerned.

  When I got to my apartment, I rushed up the steps and tossed my jacket over the sofa, kicking my shoes off and leaving them wherever they landed as I made a beeline for the shower. I only stopped to plug in my phone, which had died during one of my many failed attempts to get it to pick up a signal from deep underground on a moving train.

  Annoying that the spotty service had only worked when I’d been too distracted to make use of it.

  When I stepped out of the steaming shower not five minutes later, the phone’s screen was bright and filling up with missed calls from Adrian.

  Groaning, I decided to walk away from it just long enough to put on some clothes. I wanted to hear whatever Adrian had to say, of course—especially if he knew something about what had happened. But that didn’t mean I wanted to talk to him.

  I’d been trying hard to avoid this man ever since he’d let it slip after the debacle in January that I didn’t need to use magic to make him want me. Not that I’d ever done that intentionally in the first place. But it had happened . . . and worse, my own physiological responses whenever he was around were clear evidence that I wanted him too.

  I still barely knew the guy, and I had no idea if he had any sort of actual feelings for me. But I didn’t want to find out. I could feel the danger with every tingle of warmth that ran through me at his touch, with every moment I caught myself staring as I tried not to imagine running my fingers through his sandy hair and pressing myself into his strong chest . . .

  That was how it always started. I knew the signs. So if I had to talk to this guy, I at least wasn’t going to be naked while doing so.

  I finally answered his latest call as I was slipping on my boots, putting him on speaker and then dropping the phone beside me.

  “What’s up?” I said flatly while I attempted to lace up the boots with hands that were shakier than they should be.

  “Not much,” he said after a brief pause. Even through the shitty phone speaker, his voice sounded rich and warm. And even though I could tell he was frustrated with me, my hands steadied and my heart slowed a little when I heard it. “Just trying to figure out how you managed to get a shifter to tear her own throat out.”

  “Didn’t you get my text?” I asked.

  “What? Was ‘weird shit’ supposed to mean something specific?”

  “It means something weird was going on, and I don’t know what.”

  “Right, of course. That’s great. Maybe you could have elaborated on that an hour ago so I could have convinced the transit police to rule you out as a suspect.”

  I pursed my lips, glad he couldn’t see my annoyance. I should have at least sent him another text, true, but I’d been kinda distracted by losing Noah and then trying to teach him not to hijack other people’s emotions without getting consent first. And then my phone had died.

  “What do you mean?” I said instead of apologizing for my lack of communication. “Isn’t your department working the case?”

  “No. Not unless I can find a connection between this and the bodies I found yesterday in the basement of the mall just outside the Pentagon City station in Virginia. I don’t have jurisdiction in DC proper, and even if I did, the Metro crosses state lines and has its own police.”

  “Damn,” I said, a tiny bit of dread starting to build in my chest. Whatever it was down in the tunnels, it was no joke. And if Adrian was talking about more bodies he thought were connected, it probably wasn’t a one-and-done kind of thing. This wasn’t the kind of case I wanted to see hampered by jurisdiction nonsense. “What about the DSC? Any of their people on it?”

  “I brought Miriam to the crime scene you fled. She was my ticket in, but besides her I didn’t see any others. Doesn’t mean they’re not on it, though.”

  “They work in aggravatingly mysterious ways, right.”

  More like aggravatingly incompetent, I thought to myself. But then that was probably why the Department of Supernatural Crime had started stationing their agents, like Miriam the psychic Barbie swamp monster, with local police departments. There was too much on the line politically for them to disband, but they just didn’t have the organizational structure or strategical skills to effectively do their job. That was what happened when you hired people based on their supernatural abilities rather than their aptitude for the work, which the DSC was notorious for doing. It was why Adrian, a mere human, hadn’t been able to get a job with them. And it was why the Guardians, the private security company I’d started out with, had a much better track record when it came to protecting people from all the things that went bump in the night . . . or the day.

  “So are you going to tell me what happened?” Adrian asked. “Or am I going to have to come over there and make you coffee first?”

  My lips creased in something that wanted to be a smile. He knew I was avoiding him, and this was his way of pressing me into some kind of corner. Coffee sounded nice, but I’d rather make it myself. “There was something down there in the tunnel,” I said. “Something I could hear but not see.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “It had a strange sense of humor. One minute, innocent old lady sitting there making eyes at Noah like they all do. Next thing I know she’s growing claws, slicing into herself, then runs wild and starts tearing up anyone who gets in her way. Something made her do it whi
le it watched and laughed.”

  “Did it say anything?”

  “Just creepy giggles. Like horror-movie doll-child creepy. And after I cut off her air supply to knock her out, she started levitating.”

  “Is that when . . .”

  “Yep.” I made a croaking noise in my throat to signal that it’d been the end of her.

  I could hear Adrian scribbling it all down, probably eager to start researching. He loved that shit, whereas a good mystery just made me want to throw a grenade at it. That’d be a bit difficult to do in this case, which was why I was a little glad my non-thinking self had accidentally called him.

  “Is that it?” I prompted, uncomfortable with the warm fuzzies I was feeling not even five minutes into a phone call with the guy. “I’ve gotta go to work.”

  “Isn’t it a little early for you to go to the club?” he asked.

  Yes, it was, theoretically. It was barely nine am right now, and if I had my way I’d still be asleep. But Noah was a morning person, and the school he went to started early, so I’d started opening the club early to make our schedules align. “I’m trying to get a day shift going, bring in more business,” I said. “Got any coworkers who could use a nice view on their lunch break?”

  “Dirk’s on leave, so probably not.”

  Ah, Dirk . . . Adrian’s asshole of a partner who was also now secretly my Guardian handler. Not my favorite person to be around, and apparently also a shit handler since he hadn’t said anything to me about taking leave.

  “Well, ask around,” I said awkwardly, fighting the urge to tell Adrian to come by himself.

  “Um, okay.” He paused, and my fingers twitched as I tried to decide whether to just hang up on him. “I’ll call you if I need anything else,” he said, his voice hardening. “Answer your damn phone. It’s not cute making me waste so much time listening to your voicemail recording.”

  “I’m not trying to be cute,” I snapped back, but he said nothing. And when I looked at the screen, the call had ended. He’d hung up on me.

  Heat rushed to my face and my fingers clenched tightly around the phone before I realized it was ridiculous for me to be angry. Everyone had their limits. It made no sense for me to be a jerk to him and not expect the same in return. But I had less sense than I should whenever he was involved, and that was the whole problem.

  After dating the vampire I was supposed to be protecting and letting him turn my mind to mush in the process, I wasn’t interested in feeling anything similar ever again. Or at least not anytime soon. And honestly, even now it was hard to tell just how much of the mind mush was because of Simeon’s magic and how much of it was because, like everyone else on the planet, I got dumb when I was in love.

  I shook my head as if it would shake loose the troubling thoughts and headed into the kitchen to make coffee.

  The cabinet creaked when I opened it to get my travel mug. I’d been having coffee out more often these days, and a layer of dust had built on the animal mugs Becca had gotten for me and Etty. Yet another thing I didn’t want to think about. It was great having Noah around, but I felt a hollowness inside me whenever I remembered the roommates—the friends—I’d lost in January.

  Somehow it was worse knowing that neither of them were truly gone. Theoretically, Becca’s soul was resting happily inside of Noah, and Etty was still alive in the fae realm. But they were both gone from my life, even if they still existed somewhere. And that made me feel even lonelier than I would have if they’d just been dead.

  I filled my plain travel mug with coffee and took it out the door, letting the steam keep my face warm in the air of the cool spring morning, which felt significantly cooler now that my heart rate had lowered. Tiny pink buds were starting to form on the cherry trees outside my building, and the signs of life moving on made the hollow pit in my insides feel a little deeper. It shouldn’t, I knew. I should be strong enough to look at those buds and see hope or new beginnings or some shit like that. But apparently, for today at least, I wasn’t.

  I lowered my head away from the trees as I made my way down the stairs. Only then did I notice the streaks of blood on the white railing near the bottom.

  I stopped, lifting my foot and pretending to adjust the laces on my shoe so I could listen to my surroundings without tipping off anyone who might be watching me.

  It was quiet, not even much wind rustling through the branches, so I looked up as I kept walking and slowly slipped my fingers under the sleeve of my jacket where I had a knife at the ready.

  When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I spotted a few drops of blood on the pale yellow petals of the daffodils in the flower beds.

  Well, that certainly couldn’t be a good sign when it came to new beginnings and hope and all that.

  I walked up to the flowers and peered over at a limp arm sticking out from behind the tall bushes. Crouching down, I carefully stepped around the plants to see a mutilated severed head that couldn’t be human. Its tongue looked human enough, except that it was hanging out the side of a mouth rimmed with long, pointed teeth. They seemed more like vampire fangs than fae teeth, as they were fewer and thick at the base—like a whole mouth full of canines. And the jaw was unhinged, with massive lips that were just as plump on the sides as they were on the top and bottom, creating an evenly round opening.

  I tried to resist the urge to nudge it with my foot because just next to it, Dirk was lying either unconscious or dead, his blood slowly seeping into the mulch.

  “Fuck,” I whispered. “This is your idea of a vacation?”

  My fingers found a weak pulse at his neck, which would have been more reassuring if not for the deep puncture wounds just above his clavicle. Probably a bite mark from the severed head, before it’d gotten to be severed.

  He was losing far too much blood—and who knew how long he’d been in this state? He might have been here when I’d gotten in twenty minutes ago; I had probably been in too much of a hurry to notice.

  I closed my eyes and gently placed my fingers around the wound, trying to feel for magic to close it. But the daylight was too bright for me to get a good hold on any of the ambient magic around me, and the magic inside me . . . Well, the magic inside me wouldn’t even begin to play nice unless Ray was around, my other half when it came to the phoenix whose invisible talons were perpetually clutched around my scrye these days.

  With a sigh, I took off my t-shirt and pressed it to Dirk’s wound as I pulled out my phone to call my evil half-brother.

  “Ray,” I said when the phone stopped ringing. “I need you at my place, now.”

  I hung up before he could say anything, knowing he would come without asking questions. He might not be happy about it, but he would come. And the faster I could get Dirk inside, out of the sunlight, the better a chance I had to save him.

  It was a good thing this nutjob wasn't as tall or as bulky as his partner. Or as sexy. I slipped my arm underneath his shoulders and lifted him into a sitting position, then bent over so I could sling him over my shoulders fireman style. It would have been easier if he were conscious, but as a woman who’d worked as a bodyguard protecting men for four years, lifting unconscious bodies bigger than my own was one of the things I had spent far too long training for.

  Blood dripped down my shoulder and onto the steps as I carried Dirk up to my apartment. I took him into Etty’s room, which was still just how she had left it, and dropped him onto her bed as gently as I could. Feeling better already behind the drawn curtains and out of the sun, I set my hands to his wound again and lost myself in the effort of trying to patch it back together.

  Something like this would have been easy for me to heal before I’d met my long-lost brother, but I’d basically had to relearn magic from the ground up since he’d come into my life. And with only two months plus a full-time job and a kid to take care of, I hadn’t had much time to dedicate to the relearning.

  By the time Ray rang the doorbell, I had mostly given up on healing Dirk’s wound and was
just applying steady pressure to keep him from losing any more blood. That was the most important thing. With Ray around, I would be able to close the wound, but I couldn’t magically create blood out of thin air if Dirk lost too much, and I didn’t keep a fridge full of O negative lying around for transfusions. I had IV fluid we could give him once he was patched up, but that was about it.

  I could always take him to a hospital, but I didn’t want anyone else asking questions before Dirk could tell me how he’d ended up bleeding in my flowerbeds.

  “Come in,” I yelled from Dirk’s side.

  Luckily, I felt Ray’s presence as soon as he walked through the door, like a tingling spark in my scrye. The magic inside and around me slowly started to flow through me again, waking up my nerves and clearing away the fog from my mind.

  The part of me that controlled magic was just like any other muscle in that when it was strong, I couldn’t remember the way it felt when it was weak, and vice versa. I’d always thought this was a product of how gradually those changes usually occurred, but the effect of my brother’s presence felt just as inevitable and just as baffling every time I experienced it.

  “In here,” I yelled so he wouldn’t wander through the apartment looking for me.

  He popped his head in from behind Etty’s door and frowned, probably wishing that just once, his new-found sister would call him for a game of cards instead of a medical emergency.

  “Ay,” he said as he sped over to us, shaking his head at me.

  I held out a bloody hand to him without saying a word, and he knelt down beside me to take it. As soon as his fingers touched mine, the spark in my scrye ignited into an effusive inferno—not so much hot as it was overflowing with energy. With life.

  Using the methods I’d learned from my adoptive coven to channel magic for healing purposes, I let a small bit of it flow through my other hand into Dirk’s skin, and the tissue repaired itself in just a few seconds.