The Mephisto Mark: The Redemption of Phoenix (10 page)

He ran his hands through his hair before he said in a tired, dull voice, “Eryx knows she’s Anabo.”

Holy hell.
I came more awake. “How?”

“Jordan took her to her apartment in Bucharest to get some pictures of their parents
, and while they were there, a lost soul came in and assaulted Mariah. Shoved her shirt up to see her birthmark. Jordan thought he intended to rape Mariah, so she smashed his head with a toaster.”

“Is
Mariah hurt?”

“I just saw her and she seemed fine.”

“What about the lost soul? Did Jordan kill him?”

“No, just knocked him out.
When she and Key went back for him, he’d made his way down to another floor and was texting Eryx.”

“
How did the guy even know to look?”

“Eryx hacked into the GPS system on Jordan’s phone. It’s
Secret Service high tech that works anywhere on the planet. Eryx is tracking her every move, and when he realized she was in Bucharest, he texted one of his locals and told him to follow her and see what she did. The guy texted back with a photo of Mariah and Jordan and, since they look so much alike, Eryx told him to see if the other one had an Anabo birthmark, which he did before Jordan beaned him. When he came to, he went through Mariah’s things, and before he left the apartment, he sent Eryx her name.”

This was bad. Really bad.
Cataclysm bad. I got out of bed and went to take a piss, thoughts racing around my head while I tried to think of some way,
any
way I could fix this. Back in the bedroom, I opened the drapes, realized it was nighttime in London, and closed them again. Jax followed me into the sitting room and we sat by the fireplace. I said, “She’ll have to move and change her name. If he doesn’t know where she goes, or who she is, he can’t touch her. She can live a normal life and he’ll never find her.”

Jax slowly shook his head. “The instant Jordan goes to see her, and she will, no matter how risky it is or how much Key insists she can’t, Eryx will know.” He
saw me open my mouth to speak, and held up a hand. “Jordan will be marked within a month, Phoenix. I’m not sure she and Key will even make it that long. And once she’s marked, Eryx won’t need GPS to find her.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Had he really said that to me, of all people?

As if I hadn’t spoken, Jax continued. “He’s so obsessed with her, it’ll be forever before he’ll leave her alone. A hundred years from now, she and Key will have an entire family and there will be Eryx whenever Jordan leaves the mountain, still trying to talk her into staying with him.”

“
Since when are you a fan of hyperbole?”

Jax shot me a look. “My point is, I don’t think Eryx will give up on Jordan
for a very long time.”

I shook my head. “
Jordan’s immortal, so Key’s mark will be permanent, and she can never give Eryx what he wants.”

“She can never give him children, but he’s gone over the edge with
this obsession. I think he wants her to be with him, regardless.”

Assigning normal human emotions to Eryx was dangerous, but I wondered if there was still something in him that needed a tie to another soul.
Chasing Jordan, even though he had to know she was ultimately unattainable, was a sign of desperation, and it had nothing to do with keeping her from Key. It certainly wasn’t to keep her from becoming Mephisto. He was way too late for that. No, his obsession was all about his need for her to be with him.

Which meant Jax
was dead on the money. Eryx wouldn’t give up, even after Jordan was marked. Mariah would be at risk for a very long time.

I sat back and
looked at the cut roses on the mantel. “So Mariah has two choices – leave the mountain and be murdered by Eryx, or stay and become a Lumina.”

“That’s the way I see it.
And for the short-term, until Jordan has Key’s mark, Eryx could use Mariah as leverage to coerce Jordan, so it’s not only Mariah who’s at risk. There’s no way Key’s letting her leave.”

My list could now be made into a paper airplane and flown into oblivion. “Did Jordan tell her she’s Anabo?”

“No. She and Key want to keep it from her at least until the end of the week so she can get to know everyone and let it all soak in at a distance. If she doesn’t know, she has no investment, no decision to make.”

“So she’ll spend the week thinking she’s going home on Sunday, and when the time comes for her to leave, Jordan
and Key will say, oh, by the way, this is Hotel California. You can never leave. And she’s supposed to be okay with this. She’s not going to be upset or angry that she was lied to all along. It won’t bother her that everyone knew and she didn’t. Is that how it’ll be, Jax?”

My brother slumped back in his chair and glowered at me. “You got a better idea?”

I didn’t. Yet.

“It’d be different if she was . . . if there wasn’t something wrong with her.”

“There’s nothing
wrong
with her. She’s had some bad shit in her life, but that doesn’t make her
wrong
. It makes her wounded. And I think bullshitting her, in some stupid misguided attempt to protect her, is the worst possible idea. Jesus, that’s cruel. Protecting her means helping her understand what she is and what her options are, not lying to her.”

“Are
you
going to tell her?”

“Of course not. Jordan should tell her.”

“Well, she won’t and Key won’t, and no one else is going to tell her and risk getting his ass kicked, including me. I’d have been furious if anyone had interfered with Sasha and me.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Since you’re not taking the lead, it’s got to fall to someone. Key brought her, so he’s ultimately responsible for her.”

“He’s completely biased on Jordan’s behalf. I think this calls for a war room meeting and everyone should have a say in how to go forward.”

Jax’s gaze slid away from mine and I already knew what he was going to say. “We just had a meeting, and everyone agreed it’s best to wait to tell her.”

Before I could tell him I was pissed
that they’d met without me, Key appeared just inside the foyer of the suite and focused on Jax. “I need to talk to him alone.”

Jax
got to his feet and said to me before he left, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

I assumed he meant,
Don’t tell Mariah she’s Anabo
, which only served to prove that his definition of stupid and mine were not the same.

After Jax was gone,
Key wandered around the sitting room, peeked through the drapes, reached out to touch one of the roses, picked up a porcelain figurine and bounced it in his hand.

“You’re nervous. And you’re bugging the
hell out of me. Say what you came to say.”

He set the figurine down and came to stand behind the chair Jax had just vacated. “I didn’t tell the others, but I think you should know something about Mariah.”

“Emilian?”

His shock was obvious. “How do you know?”

Suddenly feeling way too exposed, I stood and went to the window, opened the drapes and willed off the lights in the sitting room. Watching the cars and pedestrians on Brook Street down below, I told Key about the way Mariah woke up and what I’d learned at Gustav’s.

W
hen I was done, he said, “I had my suspicions, but Jordan verified it.”

“Did Mariah tell her?”

“No, she wouldn’t talk about anything of her life after their parents died, but when that guy busted into her apartment and assaulted her, Jordan says she made no move to fight. She just . . . laid there.”

The drapery wand
my hand was wrapped around snapped in two.

“After she left Mariah with Mathilda, she came to get me so we could go collect the
lost soul. Cried so hard, it took me a while to understand her. She thinks Mariah has insulated herself so completely, she won’t let anything affect her, good or bad. She says it’s not unusual for survivors of sexual abuse to remove themselves from what’s happening to them. They can also be self destructive – cutting, drug abuse, sleeping around. And depression is almost universal.”

“What does
sexual abuse do to an Anabo?”

Key didn’t ans
wer for a long time. I counted twenty cars before he said, “Evidently they wrap themselves in cotton and avoid any kind of emotion.”

“Avoiding it doesn’t make it go away. It’s all inside, waiting like a sleeping volcano, isn’t it?”

“I . . . she . . . yes. To keep it asleep, her mind takes her somewhere else when she perceives a threat or something upsets her. Sasha said she checked out last night after you and Zee got into it. For over twenty minutes, she sat there eating a pear as if nothing at all was happening. Didn’t seem aware of the end of the fight or Deacon cleaning up. When Sasha took her upstairs, she said she needed to become invisible. Sasha asked what she meant and that’s when she came back. Looked embarrassed and said she was just tired.”

She’d tried to be invisible when she was with Emilian. I wanted to know exactly what he did to her. I wanted to fix it.
“Do you think she killed him?”

“I think she knew when the bed caught fire and did no
thing to stop it, or save him. What he did to her is eating away at her, but this is what’s destroying her. I asked M, and he said Emilian wasn’t a lost soul. Just an evil fucker who enjoyed beating up on little girls. When M took him to Hell, he didn’t cry and beg for another chance like most of them do. He shouted all the way. The thing is, Mariah didn’t do it because she hated him, or to get rid of him so he’d stop hurting her. It was to protect Jordan. He was planning to extort money from President Ellis in exchange for keeping quiet and not taking her back.”

“How did Jordan wind up in an orphanage in the first place?”

“Mariah took her there. They’d been living with Nadia and Emilian a week when he broke Mariah’s arm. He locked her in a closet for almost a week.” Key continued telling her story and I wanted to pick up the furniture and hurl it through the window. Mariah had been six years old, still practically a baby, and she was wandering the streets of Bucharest with her four-year-old sister. Once Jordan was safe, Mariah went back to Emilian to make sure she stayed safe.

I came
dangerously close to losing my shit. “Mariah told you this when you found her?”

“
Yes. And she never said out loud that Emilian raped her, but I knew as much from what she didn’t say as what she did. I don’t think she’d have told me jack if she hadn’t been so desperate that I not tell Jordan about her.”

I tapped the broken drapery hardware against my palm.
“So why
did
you tell Jordan? Doesn’t Mariah matter? Why did you take it on yourself to bring her to the mountain? Now, she’s stuck, and she’ll hate it, and not only because I’m an ass or because we’re all sons of Hell or because we spend our days killing people. Don’t you see? She’s had no say in pretty much anything that’s happened in her life. She’s finally making her own calls, then there you are, screwing it up for her. And this is a permanent screw-up, Kyros. You’ve completely altered the trajectory of her life, and she’s sitting in Colorado trying to make the best of being talked into staying a
week
.”

“I’m aware it’s an epic clusterfuck, and all my fault, but continuing to apologize and wring my hands isn’t going to fix things. All we can do is move forward.”
He came to stand beside me and looked down at the street. “There
is
a solution to the problem.”

I broke the wand again. Now I had two pieces of it.
“It can’t happen, Key.”

“It won’t be easy. It was impossible for Jax
, and I screw it up with Jordan daily. I have no idea how things will turn out between us. For you, it’s . . . she’s so broken, and you’re so fucked up, but she can’t leave, and you need her. Can’t you try?”

My anger settled and I huffed out a breath. “
It’s not that I don’t
want
to try, it’s that I
can’t
. So leave it alone. It’s never going to happen.”

I expected him to pick at it, but instead, he said quietly, “
Then the only other solution is for her to lose Anabo. We could tell her what she is and give her that option. If she went for it, she could go back to Bucharest after Jordan is with us permanently, and Jordan could visit her without worrying about Eryx. If she’s no longer Anabo, she can’t become Mephisto, so he’ll lose the motive to kill her, and Jordan will be out of reach, so he won’t want her for leverage.”

My insides twisted. She’d be lost
to me forever, extinguishing all hope. In spite of everything, even knowing I could never have her, there was still the promise of hope, and I wanted to hold on to it like a fugitive clings to dreams of mercy. But what I wanted didn’t make a damn bit of difference. “She deserves to know, Key.”

“Then tell her.
We all think it should wait, but it’s your call, your decision.” He looked up from the street and grasped my shoulder. “I’d do anything to change it, Phoenix. All of it – Jane, Eryx, Mariah.”