Rise of a Phoenix Read online

  But it was Strike that sent the sharp spike of fear through me. His body came into focus slowly, walking toward me.

  He said, “Bea thought I would like you, and she was right. I do. I’d hoped you’d turn to me after Justin was gone, but you aren’t like that, are you?” He shook his head as he rolled something in his hand. The golden bullet. “You’ve done well so far. But my master wants you stronger. So please realize I do not want to do this, it is not my choice.” His eyes were almost sad as he spoke to me. He lifted a hand to my face and caressed it gently. “Would have been easier if you’d turned to me, Nix.”

  I woke up hard, my heart beating so fast, it thrummed in my chest. My face and lower back were slick with sweat.

  Killian slept beside me, oblivious to my dreams, which was good. I stood and made my way to the lavatory, letting myself into the overly small space. I splashed water on my face and stared into the mirror, something I hadn’t done in a long time. I’d lost weight, leaned out even further until there was nothing but the burning of my eyes staring back at me under a fringe of my short black hair, peeking through the bangs.

  I splashed a bit more water on me and below my feet the plane shivered. “Strike, you fucking bastard,” I muttered. What the hell was it with all the planes I’d been on lately? Perfect traps, that’s what they were. And Strike was using the fact that I was forced to travel at a rapid pace against me. As if the thought brought it on, the plane bucked and dipped.

  I was out of the lavatory in a flash and Patty was right there, a smile plastered on her face. “Please take a seat, we’ve encountered some rough weather.”

  Rough weather, my ass. I hurried to my seat and Killian didn’t so much as blink. In fact, he continued to stare out the window, which did not bode well. “What is it?” I whispered. I glanced at Noah but he was not in his seat. Where the hell had he gone now?

  “Not sure, but I wouldn’t bet on anyone but you and me to survive them, Lass.”

  I leaned over him and looked out at the wide-open space. There were no clouds, so my view of what was causing the problems on the plane was clear as a summer day. Still, I struggled to comprehend what I was seeing. Killian unbuckled his seat and stood. “We need to land this plane now or everyone is going to die, us included.”

  I didn’t stop him. I couldn’t look away from the things—creatures—that scuttled over the wings of the commercial airliner. They were humanoid with wings, but they were small, and their feet and hands were tipped with claws and hooks that dug into the metal as they scrambled around the plane. Their skin was a solid black that reflected the light into a million different colors, like a crystal. One launched himself at my window, his belly and face flat to the thick plastic. Two of the hooked claws dug through so the tips came right into the interior. There was no screaming, though, from the other passengers. Were they not seeing this? I stood and peered back at the passengers. A few looked back. A few smiled at me.

  And then a few teeth fell out of rotten mouths. I scrambled out of my seat. What fresh hell was this? That, I didn’t know, but I did know who was the cause of it. “Fuck you, Daniel.”

  This was my brother’s doing then, and I had to give him props on working with Strike. Neither Killian nor I had noticed that the entire fucking plane was made up of dead people. Hell, even Abe hadn’t reacted then. Freshly dead, then, they had to be.

  “Abe, hier!” I leapt into the aisle, Abe with me, and raced to the cockpit where the two pilots were arguing with Killian. Two other humans beside us, then? Where was Patty? I turned around and she lunged toward me, a bullet hole through her head. A bullet? Who had shot her? Noah?

  I slammed the door on her face and slid the lock on it. “We have bigger problems than the little rat bastards that are trying to eat their way into the plane.”

  Both pilots stared at me and then they were yelling at me to get out. For Killian to get out. And then the first body—Patty’s, most likely—slammed against the door and the smell of flesh rotting and bursting open slid through the vents.

  “Daniel filled the plane with dead people,” I said. “Strike helped him somehow.”

  Funny, I didn’t hear Noah asking for help. Yelling to be let in. Maybe he was in the lavatory. I hesitated, thinking that maybe I should help him. Or try to. I put a hand to the doorknob and stopped, slowly drawing it back. No. I wouldn’t sacrifice myself for a man I knew I couldn’t trust. A man who put us on this fucking plane. A man that Martin said was a demon.

  A truth of what was going on tried to work its way into my head but I shoved it away. Not now.

  Killian’s jaw ticked and he gave me a sharp nod. “Like I said, Captain, we need to land or we are going to die.”

  “We’re not far from the airport, we can land, we can make it,” the captain stuttered.

  I shook my head and grabbed the edge of his seat as the plane listed to one side. “We aren’t going to stay up in the air much longer if those gremlin things start taking out the engines, or we lose pressure, correct?” Even I knew that much about flying.

  Killian pulled the co-pilot out of his seat and took his place. “There.” He pointed at a long smooth chunk of highway. “That’s our landing strip.”

  “People are going to die!” the captain yelled. “We can’t do this.”

  I didn’t look at Killian, I just put the captain into a headlock until his struggles stopped and then I pulled his now-unconscious body out of the seat. The co-pilot yelled at me and I whipped around with Dinah out. “He’s not dead.”

  “Oh.”

  I waved at him to move to the captain’s seat. “Help us land this plane. Now.”

  Several more thumps reverberated against the door between us and the dead mob. Abe whined and pressed himself against my legs. He’d protect me. I knew he would be scared. I felt it all the way through his lean body.

  I recalled all too well the feeling of the dead bison coming for me, of their unwavering desire to end my life. This was not going to be any better than that if we didn’t get away from the dead people in the back.

  “I really wish I could just get a little airsick and call it a day for shitty flights,” I muttered as the two men took the big plane toward the highway.

  “Ah, but what’s the fun in that?” Killian threw back at me as we dipped suddenly and my feet left the floor for a brief moment. Abe yelped and I grabbed hold of his collar, steadying him and me.

  “It would be nice for a change,” I grunted as I settled into a crouch. On the other side of the door came several heavy thuds. The dead ones had been thrown off their feet by that move.

  A squeal of metal being torn echoed through the cab and the plane dipped on its own.

  “The wee gremlins are in, I think,” Killian said. “We’ve lost air pressure.”

  I agreed with him but kept my eyes on the door. That was where they would come through if we didn’t land soon.

  “Get us down. We need to be able to get the fuck away from this.” As much as I wanted to fight, I knew this was a stall tactic. I didn’t understand why Strike’s master thought this was a good idea. And did he mean Romano or Bazixal? Didn’t matter at the moment, either way it was pushing me to make a dangerous move. One that could end my life.

  Nails scratched on the metal door and I took a slow breath. Those nails shot through the three-inch-thick metal as if it were nothing. “Dinah, can you shoot through?”

  “Not unless you have some ammo I’m not aware of,” she said.

  The door began to peel away and the plane listed hard to the left. I rolled with it and ended up against the unconscious pilot, Abe sprawled on top of me.

  “We’ll be done in two minutes,” Killian said.

  Done could mean a number of things, so his words were not exactly comforting. I kept an arm tight around Abe’s middle. “Stick with me, buddy.”

  The air pressure shifted and my ears were full of it, making the sounds around us muffled as if I were under water. Killian yelled something, and then t
he door was ripped off. I let go of Abe, somersaulted across the floor and came up with Dinah in one hand and a knife in the other. The first gremlin that came at me was about the size of a poodle and had hair on the top of its head that resembled that breed of dog.

  I slashed at it with the knife and the blade snapped in half.

  Well, that was unexpected. I had Dinah up and shot at the little bastard, nailing it in the chest. It flipped over backward, but there was no blood, no kill shot. I’d essentially shoved it back hard, but done no damage. It spread its wings and shot forward. I shot it again, it was all I could do.

  And then its friends joined. Like a swarm of angry bees, they buzzed and chittered as a unit, and I could hear them through the pressure plug on my ears.

  The nose of the plane suddenly dropped and the gremlins all shot out, away from us.

  I spun around in time to see the highway coming up too fast, at too sharp of an angle. There was no sound of engines, and then the plane twisted as if something was lifting the tail over the nose, spinning us. Like a horde of gremlins doing their damndest to slam us into the ground.

  There was no time to think. We were seconds from an up close and personal visit from death none of us would walk away from if I didn’t do something.

  My fire could kill and it could heal. But could it protect?

  I managed to get a hand on Killian and one on the pilot. “ABE!” He shot to me, jamming himself under my legs. It was the best I could do. I opened myself to the fire with only one thought: to survive a fall that was meant to destroy us.

  The purple and blue flames licked up around me, the heat a warmth that was security, safety and a sense of home. I clung to Killian’s hand and he did the same. The co-pilot reached up and wrapped his hand around mine. Of course, he probably thought we were all going to die.

  I wanted to believe he was wrong, but as the highway reached for us, as the plane twisted one last time in a death roll, I wasn’t sure he was.

  18

  Free falling through the sky, not for the first time, I wondered if I would see my life flash before my eyes as so many people said they saw as they died. I didn’t want that. If I was going to die, I wanted to see only one thing.

  Bear’s smile.

  I wanted to see him as he grinned at me, laughing about something that was funny to only him and me. I held onto him as we fell and the flames shifted around us. The color trembled on the edge of a soft pink rather than the more usual sharp purples, blues, and reds. The color suffused our bodies and the world around us seemed to slow.

  The plane’s nose slammed into the concrete and exploded, shards of twisted metal and bursts of fire coming for us. But none of it touched us.

  We were flipped over and over and I hung onto the men, and kept my legs as tight as I could on Abe, knowing that it was our only chance. Flame and metal, the scream of the plane being pulled apart a piece at a time, the crunch of the concrete erupting underneath us.

  And then as quickly as it happened, we were no longer moving and the crash landing was over. There were still flames licking out of the place where the control panel had been, and I had to drag the co-pilot back. He’d passed out at some point.

  “Killian, help me.”

  “On it,” he grunted as he scooped up the body of the captain. “He’s still alive, but I’m betting he’s going to be bruised tomorrow.”

  I’ll admit, my jaw dropped as I scooped the co-pilot under the arm and hauled him out through the wreckage. How was this even possible? I didn’t have time to consider anything else. Abe had never stuck so close to my side.

  “Martin?” Could a ghost be shoved away from all of that?

  Still here. Going to take more than that to get rid of me.

  There were bodies stirring even as we stepped over their twisted limbs. The undead were not going to be deterred by a mere plane crash. They reached for us as we passed and I kicked several, snapping more bones. Still they came on, moving toward us with an inexplicable motivation given to them by my brother. It made me wonder if the bison at the bottom of the cliff had risen on broken legs and backs and plodded after us. I shivered, seeing the image all too clearly.

  We dragged the two men out and several bystanders rushed forward to help us. We handed the men off and then we were running through the completely stopped traffic. I let Killian lead mostly because my mind was on fire with the implications that Daniel’s creatures would not stop. That he was strong enough that distance wasn’t an issue at all.

  And that Strike had to have helped him, if those gremlin things were any indication.

  Killian crossed the highway to where the traffic was still moving and flagged down a cab. We slid in and then he looked at me. “Where to?”

  “Cherry Lane,” I said. The house that didn’t belong in the outskirts of Seattle, the house that looked like it had been plucked from the Southern bayous right down to the flora and fauna.

  The cabbie drove without question. In the distance behind us I could see the flames of the plane burning. I didn’t realize I was shaking until Killian touched me on the knee.

  “It wasn’t the crash that bothers you, is it?” He took his hand from me, giving me space.

  “No.”

  I didn’t need to say more than that. We’d survived a crash because of the myst in my blood, the abnormal part of me, and I’d saved two people. But the truth was we weren’t out of the woods by a long shot. Daniel was obviously still coming for me and his creations were getting tougher to evade and survive. I managed to pull my shit together.

  “Noah wasn’t in that plane. How did he get out?” I asked.

  “Fuck me. I don’t know.”

  Demon, Martin whispered again, and Killian seemed to hear him this time if his face was any indication, the way it drained of color.

  “Please tell me you heard that.”

  I snorted softly. “That’s Martin. He came with us after the professor yelled at him.”

  “He just said—”

  “Yeah, I know what he said. That’s what he thinks Noah is.” I rubbed a hand over my face, the last bits of my thoughts coming together finally. “If he is . . . I think . . . I think he might be someone else we are dealing with.”

  “What do you mean?” Killian frowned at me. “I don’t understand.”

  “I dozed and I had a dream that Strike spoke to me again. He said he didn’t want to do this—I assume he meant the gremlins now—but that his master asked him to. When I came to, Noah was gone. What if Noah isn’t Noah? What if he’s Strike?”

  Dinah let out a low groan. “Oh my God.”

  We weren’t far from Vivian’s place, having crash-landed outside Seattle. I suppose that was good. I started to laugh, and once the laughter caught me I couldn’t stop. Killian’s rather worried face only made it worse, and then I tried to explain between gasps for breath. I’m not sure he caught what I was trying to say, but in barely a moment he was laughing too. Contagious, who knew laughter could be contagious? Not me.

  But maybe that spoke volumes about how much laughter I had in my life before.

  “Here you go,” the cabbie said, and we tumbled out. Of course, we had no money on us, everything was lost in the crash.

  The cab driver followed us and I started to pull Dinah on him, my laughter gone. Killian dropped a hand on my wrist and pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of his back pocket. “Always have something on me, just in case.”

  The cabbie took it happily and left grinning.

  I tucked Dinah away, noting again that she was quiet. At least for her. “Dinah, you good?”

  “I just feel like we aren’t only running out of time, but chances,” she said. “I don’t like it. And I think you are right about Noah being Strike. But why would he be helping?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I’m feeling all that too, and I don’t know. He said that he wanted to help us kill Romano. But that makes no sense, he’s supposed to be protecting Romano.”

  That was the thing. Noah be
ing Strike made sense. But then Noah had been helpful occasionally.

  Oh, shit. It hit me then how much my brain had been affected by Noah all those years. He’d made me love Justin. Every time I’d started to think that maybe I should break it off with him—before Bear, at least—Justin had Noah come around and then . . . then we’d be better.

  He’d manipulated me into a life that had made me weak.

  Horror and anger swept through me and I stood shaking with the realization. Killian reached out. “Lass?”

  “We have to keep moving.” I led the way down the long tree-lined driveway that would open into the front of Vivian’s lush mansion. I couldn’t stop and think about all these things. There was just too much. Too many revelations in too short of a time for my mind to handle.

  I focused on the task at hand. Vivian was dead, but that didn’t mean her house was safe. Much as I wanted to believe that with her death whatever myst she had created would be gone too, I wasn’t going to bet on it.

  The gravel crunched under our feet as we walked side by side.

  Killian let out a deep breath. “What are we going into here?”

  I quickly gave him a rundown of the place, of the security, and the surrounding creatures. “The only one I dealt with was a crocodile that was already dead and had me in its sights.”

  “You mean alligator,” Killian said. “There are no crocs native to the bayous.”

  “No, I mean crocodile. I had an up close and personal look at that thing.” We were at the end of the driveway now and the house and parking area opened to us. The house no longer looked like the immaculate mansion it had been only a short time before.

  “It looks like shit,” Killian said. I nodded.

  “Her myst must have been holding this place together.” I drew a breath and started forward. “The ring will be inside.”

  “How are we going to find it?”