Blood of a Phoenix (The Nix Series Book 2) Read online

  I refused to look around because a small part of my brain knew this was a dream. A bad one, but still a dream, and I didn’t want to see who else was in the truck with me. I couldn’t take seeing them die again.

  “Mama!” Bear’s voice cut through my panic like nothing else. Despite my resolve to not look, I twisted to see my son, battered and bruised but alive and looking at me from the driver’s side backseat of the truck. His dark hair was damp, plastered to his head, and the water had reached his chin. He fought to keep his mouth above the surface as he stretched his hand out to me. “Don’t leave me, Mama!”

  I reached for him and as I did, the space between us widened until there was nothing but air between our fingers.

  “Bear, hold on!” I reached for my knife, but there was no knife, only one of my guns. Eleanor’s grip was hot under my palm and I shook as I brought her out, the black matte of her muzzle dulled in the light.

  Her voice was sad. “Kill him, Phoenix. It is better than living a half-life. It is better than the pain and suffering he will have as your son. Better than drowning in blood and becoming one of the monsters. You don’t want that for him, do you?”

  I screamed, my body jerking against the things that held me down, against the memories and nightmares. My mind fought desperately to wake me from the dream that held me so tightly, I couldn’t so much as open my eyes. I couldn’t watch my boy die again, not again.

  I refused.

  A cold nose jammed itself under my chin, startling me awake. I sat up, my heart pounding and my adrenaline rattling hard and fast as if I were in mid-fight. I reached for Abe and the big Malinois whined softly and then licked my cheek. He might have been trained as a guard dog, but with me, he was about as soft as any family pet. I was his entire world now, his pack and alpha, and he was the closest thing to family I had left after losing Bear and Justin.

  I blew out a big breath that was shakier than I liked hearing from my own mouth. The ceiling of the car was a blank, light gray slate, and I let my eyes just stare as my heart rate and breathing settled into a semblance of normal. The rumble of tires on the I-5 as we headed north, the soft intake of breathing from Simon as he took his turn driving, the music low on the radio.

  Normal, all of this was normal, and I was here, and not in the past where the flames and the water tried burning and drowning me. I was not in the past where I would have to watch Bear die again, where I could do nothing to save him.

  A tremor rippled through me, a sob fighting to escape, and I closed my eyes as tears filled the edges. The dreams were the worst when they came because he looked so real. As if I could reach out and touch him, as if I still had a chance to save him. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep the sobs at bay. Giving in to the grief was not an option, not when I had so much work left to do to bring his killer to justice. To make them pay for his death.

  Romano had been the one to call the hit in on my husband, Justin, and Bear had been caught in the trap meant for him. I’d lost them both in an accident that was anything but. I’d survived and now I was doing all I could to make Romano suffer. To take his power, to wipe out his business, and then at the end, and only at the end when he was stripped of everything, would I kill him.

  I adjusted my seat and immediately groaned. My body had taken a beating that was only a day and a half old. I’d faced down the first of Luca Romano’s three guardians from Hell, and had, with barely the edge of my skin intact, survived. The Stick Man might not sound like a terrible threat, but I’d felt the poison from his splinters, and the sheer fact that he was nearly impossible to kill meant he’d kept on coming no matter what damage I’d done to him. I ran a hand over my hair, forgetting for a moment that I’d cut it all off. I turned and caught my reflection in the side window.

  There were bruises under my green eyes and along my cheekbones, a bite wound in my shoulder that had been stitched but throbbed every time I so much as twitched, and then there were the spots where the fire had caught me. The singed tips of my black hair were invisible but I could smell them, and various parts of my body had first and second degree burns. That was what I got for having to strip down naked and run through the flames in order to get away from the Stick Man.

  “Hey, at least we’re alive,” Simon said from the front seat as I touched a gash on my cheek. I was too tired to even glare at him. After the fight in the warehouse, and shutting down Romano’s illegal magic dispensary, taking all his money, and killing more than a few of his cronies—including one of my brothers—I was spent. The adrenaline had faded and I knew I needed to let my body heal. I was a normal, and that meant there was no way around the healing process taking however long it wanted to.

  Simon grinned back at me. Despite his wounds, he’d already healed. Perk to being an abnormal, I suppose. They could take more damage and still come out grinning on the flip side, ready to go again after very little down time.

  I shifted my body to a more comfortable position and reached out to lay my hand on Abe’s head. The Belgian Malinois had been with me since the beginning of this, before I’d lost Bear and Justin, and he was my last connection to my previous life.

  “Alive, yes,” I finally agreed with Simon. My voice was raspy from sleep and I dug around in my bag at my feet until I found a bottle of water. Lukewarm and stale from being in the bottle too long, but I didn’t care. It would soothe my throat and I gulped it down.

  “So . . . where are we going?” Simon asked. “I mean, we can take I-5 all the way to the border if you want, or we can take a right-hand turn and head toward New York. Which is my vote if you want to know.”

  I shook my head. “Where are we now?”

  “Medford, Oregon, is coming up.” Simon tossed a folded map back to me. I flipped it open. Medford was about halfway between Hollywood and Seattle.

  “We’ll stop at Medford,” I said.

  He gave me a wink and I closed my eyes. Simon thought he was quite the ladies’ man, and his charm would’ve made it easier to deal with him if not for one thing. He was an abnormal, a hired assassin not unlike myself.

  But I didn’t fuck abnormals.

  I killed them.

  Abe lay down with his front legs and head across my lap. I rubbed him behind his ears as my mind fully woke up. Seattle was my destination, and I was looking for a specific person, and that was about the only reason I still had Simon with me, though I wasn’t sure he’d make it all the way there for the simple reason that he irritated the shit out of me. His ability as an abnormal was in finding people, and that was what I needed. I could do it on my own, but Simon could speed the process up in finding Talia Lovstark.

  She was a code breaker who dealt in magic, and I had a set of coded papers. They were twisted with magic so tightly, I’d not been able to make even a dent in them. The papers had belonged to my late husband, Justin, and his partner Noah Black, or should I say, Noah Lancaster. They’d been prepping a big score against my father, Luca Romano, and thought they could blackmail the miserable bastard. Only Romano had caught wind of what they were doing and had struck first.

  The papers were the key to the reason Justin had been killed, and I intended to use them to bring Romano down. Thoughts of Romano led me to thoughts of my son.

  I had to work to keep my breathing even as I thought about Bear, about how young he’d been, and how he’d not deserved to have his life cut short. Instead I focused on how grief had turned into a rage I used to keep moving, to propel me forward. Taking out a single factory and stealing a few million dollars from Romano was not even close to being enough to make him pay for what he’d done.

  The coded papers were key in my plans; at least, that was what I was banking on. The papers were valuable enough that Noah had burned my house down to keep them safe. The bastard had also shot and killed my dog Abigail, and had shot Abe, almost killing him, too, in order to stop anyone from finding the papers. To say Noah was on my shit list was an understatement.

  “Hey, what’s going on out there?”
Dinah barked from her holster on my thigh. I reached down and slid her out a little, running my thumb over the worn and smoothed stock.

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep. We’ve got hours of driving ahead of us,” I said.

  The two guns were styled after a Berretta, matte black, and threaded for silencers. Other than that, they bore no resemblance to anything normal. Both spoke and had distinct personalities. Both had a love for killing. Both were, as far as I knew, cursed in their own way, but I didn’t have details on what had happened to them to have their souls shoved into an inanimate object made for one thing—death dealing.

  “Eleanor, wake up. I want to talk to you,” Dinah barked.

  I rolled my eyes.

  Eleanor was silent. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who got irritated with Dinah’s incessant need for chatter when there wasn’t a fight or lives on the line.

  From the front seat, Simon tapped the dash with his knuckles, drawing my eyes to him. “Medford coming up. You want to stop and eat then?”

  I gave him a nod and nothing else. I put my hands over both guns, quieting Dinah immediately. She knew as did Eleanor that there were times to shut your mouth, and this was one of them. Something in the air had shifted, and I could feel it on my skin.

  Eleanor shivered under my hand and I knew she wanted to tell me something, but she didn’t speak. Interesting. Something she didn’t want Simon to hear, then.

  I looked at him and the way his hands tightened and relaxed over and over on the steering wheel.

  Simon was up to something, then, though I couldn’t put my fingers on it.

  “How long were you an assassin?” he asked, breaking the silence with probably the worst question he could have chosen.

  I leaned back in the seat, letting my eyes drift so they were almost closed. “You mean you don’t know? You were sent to bring me in.”

  I watched him through my eyelashes. He shrugged as he steered us onto the off ramp. “I’m not a details kind of guy.”

  “No shit,” I said. His lack of detail orientation had almost gotten us both killed back in Hollywood. After a little thought, I decided to answer him. “I started training when I was twelve. Made my first kill at fifteen. Got out when I was twenty-two.”

  He snorted. “Twelve. That’s messed up. But seven years, damn, that’s a good record. Most normals don’t make it to three before some abnormal chomps them in half and shits out the rest of them.” Simon smiled as if he were giving me a compliment. Which in the past, I would have taken it as such, but now, not so much. I wasn’t hunting abnormals anymore. I was hunting the man who’d started me down this path. My father, Luca Romano.

  “Simon,” I lifted a foot and put it against the door frame to take some pressure off my injuries, “I don’t want to talk about my past.”

  His eyes flicked to mine in the rearview mirror. “You sure? Because I’m thinking it’s your past you’re hunting down as much as vengeance for your kid.”

  The muscles in my jaw tensed, and I kept my hands still on my thighs. Though I could use him in Seattle, and I knew he could potentially speed up my hunt, this was why Simon would not be coming with me farther than Medford.

  He talked too much, he wanted to be my friend, he wanted to analyze me and figure me out. And occasionally, I think he wanted to fuck me. And the last thing I wanted when I was hunting Romano’s business, money, and power, and doing all I could to take them from him, was a nosy abnormal with tracing abilities, questionable loyalties, and a hard-on for my body.

  Time to cut him loose. There were other ways to find people.

  “This place looks good.” I pointed at a big truck stop coming up fast. A greasy spoon that would have food, bathrooms, and give me a break from Simon and his questioning. Shit, I’d been awake less than thirty minutes and I needed a break from him. Something had changed, because this was not our first road trip together.

  What had happened while I’d been asleep? Again, Eleanor shivered under my hand. She really wanted to talk. I pressed against her and spoke low. “In a minute.”

  “What?” Simon looked in the mirror.

  I shook my head. “Talking to Abe. Just get us parked. I need to stretch.”

  He did as I asked and pulled into the truck stop parking lot. I leaned forward and held my hand out. “Keys. I’ll drive next and you can sleep.”

  Without a single protest, he handed the keys to me. I kept my eyes away from his so he wouldn’t see any hint of the duplicity I was planning.

  Whatever had changed with Simon while I was asleep was the final strike that got him an early ejection from my life. Simon’s time with me was done. He just didn’t know it yet.

  I slipped Abe’s collar and leash on and adjusted Dinah and Eleanor so they sat in the shoulder holsters hidden by my loose jacket. The strap of the holster dug into the bite in my shoulder, reminding me I was far from done healing. Fuck, it would be nice to have Zee with me. My mentor was good at reminding me to take things at a doable pace.

  Abe limped along next to me, both of us battered and bruised. But alive, which was more than I could say for those I’d faced down. We’d survived something where the odds had been stacked against us.

  I didn’t want to think too hard about what I’d done to make that happen. Killing people was one thing, and I didn’t mind that. But drinking down a vial of magic that had amped up my speed and strength and made me something close to an abnormal, even for a short time . . . that was something else entirely. Three of the vials full of Diva, to be exact.

  To be fair, the effects had disappeared, leaving me a mess of slow healing, slow moving, all normal assassin. The thought made me smile. Or grimace, if the look on the trucker’s face I walked by was any indication. The dude was massive, built as if someone had been stacking bricks and brought their creation to life. With his tiny eyes, he looked a bit like a rhino.

  “Talk to me, Eleanor,” I said as soon as we were clear.

  “He took a call while you were asleep,” she said. “I don’t know who it was but he was whispering and nervous.”

  “Fuck, did you get any names, any words?”

  “No, I couldn’t hear. Dinah?” Eleanor said.

  “No, I got nothing other than he took a call,” Dinah said. “You think he’s going to turn on you?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’re not with him from here on out.” I adjusted my hold on Abe and kept moving.

  I headed to the side of the diner where a pay phone sat empty. I stepped up to it and slid a few coins in, then dialed Zee’s cell phone number. Zee was the last of my family, even though he was not blood related. Not only had he been the man who’d trained me to fight and kill, he escaped my father and hid me for years at the cost of his own health. Zee had been there and seen the evidence of Justin’s and Bear’s murders. He’d helped me prep, and now he was holding down the fort back in Jackson Hole. He believed that one day I would go back.

  The phone clicked through and he picked up on the second ring. “Nix?”

  I smiled, even though it hurt my face. “Yeah, I’m here. We cleaned out the studio, burned it to the ground, took all the money and Gabe is done.” Had to be careful with the words. Didn’t want to have someone overhear me talking about killing my brother.

  A sigh slid from him, and I waited for his praise, for him to tell me I’d done good. Because I knew he wished he was here with me, but he had the shakes that came with using his magic too much. He was the only abnormal I’d ever trusted, the only one I believed was worth trusting.

  “I got something couriered right to my place,” he said, his voice carefully monotone. “I’m going to tell you right now, I think it’s bait. I don’t think it’s real. But I don’t hold back from you, and you don’t hold back from me.”

  My hand clutched at the phone. “What is it?” Mind racing, I could come up with a dozen possibilities from body parts, to something less inconspicuous like a threatening note, or maybe some old jewelry of my mother’s to try and tempt me i
nto a goose chase.

  “It’s a picture,” Zee said, and I heard the crinkle of paper on the other end of the line, as if he were sliding it out of an envelope. “Of a boy who looks an awful lot like Bear.”

  Whatever spit I had left in my mouth and throat dried up. I stood, concentrating on breathing for a moment. “It has to be a fake.”

  “Of course it is, and it came from Romano, which only solidifies that it’s a fake. What that means, though, is he’s trying to draw you to him. He’s trying to get you to show yourself so he can kill you out in the open.”

  I wanted to see the picture. My mind said it was so I could disprove the image, so I could point out all the things that would show it wasn’t my boy at all, and that it was just Romano fucking with me, yet again. But my heart screamed at me that it was possible the picture was my Bear, screamed that I needed to go, right now, and get to the boy who could be mine.

  There was a chance he’d survived, wasn’t there? I’d been knocked out during the accident, and when I’d woken, I was in the hospital and Bear and Justin had been cremated already. The police were on the take, so why couldn’t the doctors be, too? It was possible. I knew it was. Romano’s money and reach were unreal when it came to getting what he wanted.

  The thundering of my heart said Bear was somehow, impossibly, still alive despite the accident, despite the fact I’d buried his ashes alongside his father’s, despite my goodbyes. I wanted him to be alive, because if he was alive I could . . . I could what? Even if Bear was alive, I wouldn’t stop going after Romano now. If Bear was alive, me knowing would put him in danger because he would be used against me. I knew how Romano worked.

  I shut down those lines of thought hard and wrapped them up in the instincts of a killer on the hunt for her prey.

  “I agree, it will be a trap and nothing else. There are too many Photoshop tools out there for me to believe it’s really Bear. You saw his body, didn’t you?” I knew my voice was hollow, but it was the best I could do given what Zee had just told me. Bear had been a part of my soul, and losing him had emptied me in a way I could never have understood until he was gone. The slightest inkling he could be alive would derail me like nothing else if I didn’t get a hold on my emotions.