The Mephisto Mark: The Redemption of Phoenix (35 page)

“I don’t need to do that.
They’re aware.” But I really did have an insane urge to throw my head back and shout at the top of my lungs. Maybe I’d beat on my chest for good measure. The thought was a little funny.

“You’re smiling!
This is serious, and you’re
grinning
.”

I advanced on her and she didn’t back up.

“You’ve got to be kidding. I’m not done yelling at you.”

“Bookmark your place,” I said,
a little hoarse, whether from yacking so long or because I was ridiculously emotional, I don’t know. I lifted her off of her feet and turned her in a circle.

“Put me down. I’m not going back to bed with you.”

I stopped turning and looked into her face. “Really?”

She w
ent still in my arms. “No, not really, but honestly, Phoenix, you’re impossible. Why did you think, even for a second, you could give me up? And why did you imagine I’d give you up? I’m not an object you can hand off to someone else. Zee is right. For a brilliant mind, you can be a real putz.”

***

Hours later, I woke and knew she was having her dream. She was stiff, her breathing way too rapid. I moved closer and stroked her hair. “Wake up, Mariah. You’re dreaming. This isn’t real.”

She mumbled in Romanian, “How
are you here?” Once again, she’d drawn me into her dream world.

“I came to take you home.”

Even in sleep, her expression was one of wonder and awe. “You made . . . disappear.”

“I’ll always make him disappear. Come on and wake up now.” I wondered how
much longer she’d be haunted by this nightmare? I hoped someday she’d fight him in her dreams and win, and maybe then she’d stop seeing him. Except I knew dreams didn’t work like that. When the day came that she was past it, when she felt strong enough to fight him off, she’d not have the dream. I was overwhelmed by sadness for her, that the bloody bastard still tormented her, even in death.

She blinked open her eyes and I instantly gathered her close. She clung to me, shaky and unnerved. “I wanted so badly not to have it any more.”

“I know.” I hugged her tighter. “I know.”

“How could you ever think I’d not want you,” she whispered. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. The very . . . best.”

“It’s only that I’m the one you opened up to, Mariah. If you were as open with—”

“I wouldn’t open up to anyone else. It’s you. There’s something about
you
. Maybe you are selfish, maybe you’re wild. But not to me, Phoenix.” She nuzzled into my neck. “Not to me.”

We laid like that for a long time, me petting her hair while I held her close, and her mumbling
grossly exaggerated praise into my neck. I could almost transport to an alternate reality and imagine that she loved me. Really loved me.

Even more outlandish, I could imagine that I loved her. I’d do anything for her, slay all the monsters, stay with her every night for all time and be there when she woke up, happy, sad, or scared. I didn’t know about love, not really, but I did know there was no one in my life, in the world, that I’d rather be with.

Someone knocked. Expecting Mathilda, I called for her to come in, and had a shock when Zee opened the door.

He walked to the bed and stared down at the two of us, still
tighter than a sailor’s knot beneath the covers, Mariah’s face half buried in my neck. “I assume this means your plan is null and void.”

I nodded.

“You do realize I’d never have gone through with it, right? I only said as much because I knew it’d make you crazy, make you do exactly what you did. You’re the most hardheaded, stubborn asshole on God’s earth. It takes something extreme and harsh to get you to pay attention.” His gaze moved to Mariah. “It’s our duty to ensure the comfort and happiness of all Anabo, Mariah, and I was chosen to do the honors. Are you well? Is everything okay? You have only to say the word, and he’ll be dealt with accordingly.”

She turned her head and said, “I’m
horribly embarrassed, but that’s not his fault.”

“Why are you embarrassed?”

“Because I’m in bed, naked, with your naked brother, and you’re here looking at us, and everyone in the house knows what happened last night.”

“Of course we know
,” he said in his usual blunt, reasonable, Zee way. “He marked you. This is how it works. Perhaps it’ll make you feel better that no one will know about any subsequent sex. Unless you yell a lot. Some girls like to yell, which seems a little overdramatic to me, but whatever. Are you happy?”

She’d turned her face into my neck again, no doubt ten shades of red.
“Very,” she said, her voice muffled.

“Good. Don’t forget to practice your scales. Every day. Lesson on Wednesday at
nine. Be sharp.” He paused. “B sharp. Get it?”

“I get it. I’ll be sharp.
Thank you for the TV.”

“Welcome. I also bought you a laptop, which you need to let me teach you how to use. Phoenix will do it wrong.”

Offended, I said, “I beg your pardon. I’m not some Luddite who doesn’t know—”

“You’re an amateur. She needs me to teach her.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”
He turned away. “Try and make it downstairs for dinner. Key is leaving just after to go with Jordan to her school’s winter ball. He’s asked Sasha fifty times to adjust his bowtie, and Mathilda is about to bean him with a skillet because he keeps freaking out that his tux trousers are wrinkled. He’s put his hair in a ponytail ten times, taken it down ten times, and now he’s wondering if he should pull it back again. It’d be pathetic if it wasn’t so funny.”

This, I had to see.
When Zee was gone, I asked her, “Are you up for this yet?”

“I may as well get it over with.” She raised her head and looked at me. “And I am kind of hungry.”

“Kind of?”

She grinned. “Okay, I’m starving.”
She tickled me. “Luddite.”

Bouncing around on her bed, scaring the shit out of Olga, I couldn’t stop laughing. Life could never get better than this.

Chapter 18

~~ Mariah ~~

Isak Dinesen wrote in
Out of Africa
that the Earth was made round so we can’t see too far down the road. That night, the first time I remembered those words was when Key came back from Washington and called a war room meeting.

I
was in the basement with Phoenix, in his lab looking over all of his potential plans for the takedown that would happen during Jordan’s birthday party. I was impressed by the detail, the absolute attention to every facet. Faking deaths was tedious business, and Phoenix rarely got it wrong – at least, according to Hetta, a Lumina who was a biomedical engineer before she came to be with the Mephisto. She worked with Phoenix when the plan involved death by anything internal, whether poison, or virus, or a health issue like a stroke or heart attack.

She was explaining her work with a particularly nasty
foodborne virus they were considering, one they would hand off to M to use for the doppelgangers at the party, when Key’s voice came through the intercom, announcing a war room meeting.

Phoenix walk
ed toward the door of the lab, then turned and looked at me expectantly.

“What?”
I asked.

“You need to come with me, Mariah. You’re one of us now.”

Feeling extremely weird about that, I followed him out into the narrow hallway and walked beside him to the room from which everything flowed, like command central, or a brain, or the queen bee. The Mephisto basement was like a medieval castle, with flagstone floors, stone walls and many candles. There were computer banks in various niches and rooms, all giving out additional light, and the lab had been brightly lit with electricity, but for the most part, everything was lit by candlelight. The war room was a mix of ancient and modern. There was a large, oval hickory table with a repaired crack down the middle, and nine chairs, the newest one for me, a world map and a white board with colored markers across one wall, and a huge flat panel screen on the opposite wall. An iron fixture with at least fifty candles hung from the center of the high ceiling.

They were all there when we arrived, sitting around the table, Ty with his mastiff
, Gretchen, next to him, Key still dressed in his tux, although he’d undone his tie. His hair was down, as it had been when he left, mostly because he’d run out of time to pull it back again.

As soon as Phoenix and I sat down, he said, “There was an incident at the dance tonight. Jordan somehow got it into her head that I
might consider defecting to join Eryx. He was talking to me, and she went ballistic. Shoved him, then punched him, and if I hadn’t stopped her, she’d have jumped him and continued hitting him. I carried her out of there and she cried so hard, was so hysterical . . .” He sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “It’s too much for her. Being there, being Mephisto, trying to act normal – it’s killing her. I want to vote on my plan to tell her when she comes later tonight that she’s not going back.” He looked at Phoenix. “Hoping, actually assuming, you’d all agree, I went ahead and asked M for a doppelganger, a brain aneurysm.”

I said, “If she can’t go back, she won’t have the time that’s left with her dad.”

“Maybe it’s better this way,” Sasha said. “I’ve been thinking about how hard it was going to be for her at her birthday party, knowing she was about to leave him.”

“She could have weathered that,” Key said, “but lasting another week in the real world? I don’t think so. Eryx is the problem. He’s relentless. He told me tonight that he’s giving up, but I don’t believe it. He’s up to something, and I’m convinced we need to bring Jordan home to make sure she’s safe from whatever he plans.”

Everyone nodded and Key said, “Hands for aye.” We all raised our hands. He stood and said, “I’m going to my room to wait. I’ll explain when she gets here, and tell her the vote was unanimous.”

I almost offered to help, but didn’t. Jordan and I weren’t close at all. She’d lean on Key, which I supposed was how it should be.

When we stood to disburse, Phoenix said, “She’ll be glad you’re here, once the shock wears off.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.” He took my hand and led me from the war room.

“Are we going back to the lab?”

“Not right now. I’m going to have to dream up a whole other plan.”

“Because now there won’t be a birthday party
where a lot of lost souls will be gathered.”

He glanced at me. “Now, there’ll be a memorial service.”

I felt chilled. No matter that her death would be fake, the idea of a memorial service for my baby sister made me shaky.

Wrapping an arm around my shoulders, he walked me down the hall toward the stairs. “Let’s do something to take your mind off of it.”

“If you’re thinking of—”

“A movie. Let’s go to the TV room and watch a movie.” He
shot me a meaningful look. “Unless you were thinking of something else?”

I smiled, which was what he intended. “Later. For now, a movie sounds
good.”

Everyone else had the same idea, so
there was a crowd sprawled across the sofas and chairs to watch
The Bourne Identity
, evidently a family favorite. I was sucked in fairly quickly, taking my thoughts away from the sadness my sister was about to endure, but not entirely. It was there in my subconscious, humming along, waiting.

When the movie was over, everyone took a bathroom break and we reconvened to watch the next Bourne movie. Mathilda brought popcorn and sodas, and all the while, I wondered what was taking so long. Shouldn’t Jordan be here by now? Maybe she’d arrived and Kyros was telling her.

The second movie was done and we were halfway through the third when there was a loud crash right above us. Zee immediately paused the movie and we all exchanged looks. Another crash, followed by glass breaking, then an anguished scream that went on and on, making the hair at the nape of my neck stand on end, bringing instant tears to my eyes.

It wasn’t female. It wasn’t Jordan. It was Kyros.

One heartbeat later, we all popped upstairs to the hall outside his room and everyone looked at Phoenix, as if by silent consent, he would be the one to go inside.

We crowded around the door when he opened it and collectively gasped. K
ey had broken everything inside and thrown most of the furniture out the windows, smashing them completely. He was leaning out, into the heavy snowfall, screaming in agony. Phoenix went into the melee and retrieved Key’s cell phone from the littered floor. Bending his head, he read the small screen, then looked at us from over his shoulder, horror on his face.

Turning back to his brother, all he said was, “Kyros.”

He wheeled around and saw Phoenix standing in the midst of the wreckage, Key’s phone in his hand.

Phoenix
said solemnly, “Now you know.”

Falling to his knees, Key buried his face in his hands and sobbed.

***

We waited in the hall an eternity before Phoenix finally came out. He looked around at
all of us before he focused on Jax. “She wrote an email but didn’t send it. M did. Eryx visited her and convinced her she could help him, that if she kissed him, there was a chance he could change, that she could share some of her light and the war for Hell would be over. She said he looked different, and she had to take a chance for Key, because he loved Eryx so much, but it backfired and she lost Anabo and Mephisto.”

Jax swallowed so hard, I heard it. “She’s immortal, so if she’s not Anabo or Mephisto, she’s
. . .”

Phoenix took a deep breath and let it out slowly, leaning against the wall to stare up at the ceiling. “
She’s like Eryx.”

I wrapped my arms around myself and moved back, away from the group, shaking so hard, I don’t know how my teeth weren’t chattering.
Lucifer’s omen repeated in my head.
“The Mephisto will suffer a great loss by straying from the path.”
I never dreamed it would be my sister. All I’d done hadn’t been enough. Not in the end. She would suffer a million times worse with Eryx than she would have with Emilian. She was lost. To her, there was now no God, no Lucifer, nothing but Eryx. What would happen to her? Was her soul still her own, or did it now belong to Eryx?

“
She knew what was happening to her when she wrote the email,” Phoenix said, “and I suppose by the time she was done, she’d already changed enough that she lost the motivation to send it, which is why M added his own note and sent it. Key says he’s going after her, that he’ll take her back to God and hope it works.”

They deflated and stared at the floor
. Zee said, “To do that, he’ll have to die.”

Dead silence
.

“We’ll all go after her,” Ty said, and the others
spoke at once, agreeing they would all go, then throwing out ideas about how to do it.

I moved next to Sasha and said,
“I want to go, too.” They stopped talking and turned to face me.

“We get why you’d want to, Mariah,” Sasha said
, looking as though her heart would break, “but you’re not immortal. You’re not yet able to do what we do.”

I looked to Phoenix, thinking he’d tell them, but he was still staring at the ceiling.

“Even if you were immortal,” Jax said, “you haven’t had any training. You’d be a liability, and going to Erinýes is way different than anywhere else. He has the castle and grounds on lockdown, so we can transport in, but not out. We have to leave his property, which is acres and acres in the Carpathian mountains.”

“But she’s my sister. I want . . . I have to see her before she’s taken. Before she’s . . . gone.” I willed Phoenix to look at me, to acknowledge me, to stand up for me.

He never said a word, his focus on the ceiling, his thoughts all for a master plan, his mind working in overdrive. And no doubt he was devastated to lose Kyros. I would lose my sister; he would lose his brother. All because of Eryx.

I said to the rest of them, “I understand.” Turning, I walked away, toward the stairs, up to the third floor, then further, up to the attic floor.
I heard them agree to reconvene in the war room, then there was only silence.

And me.

I went outside to the tiny terrace to stand in the snowfall. Nothing in my life had ever hurt this badly. I couldn’t get her sweet little face out of my head, standing there on the steps of the orphanage, her lip trembling while she held her rabbit and watched me leave.

I couldn’t stand this. I cried until I had the hiccups, and when I went back inside, there were all those shelves, so
organized and tidy with all those boxes of God knew what – clutter from the past, things that no longer mattered.

Standing behind the last shelf, the one closest to the door onto the terrace, I reached out and pushed a box so that it slid through
to the other side and fell to the floor. I pushed another and another, until I’d shoved all the boxes on that shelf to the floor. Things broke, papers scattered, boxes ripped, and the more I destroyed, the more I wanted to destroy. Fury took hold and I became vicious, shoving them harder and faster, repeating her name every time one hit the floor.
“Viorica . . . Viorica . . . Viorica . . .”

It was almost morning and I was nowhere close to sleepy. I paced the attic, scowling at the remaining shelves. In a rush, I ran at them and pushed with all my might, gratified when they dominoed and fell in a spectacular crash.

I was raging and frustrated, grief ripping my heart to shreds. Had my whole damned life been a waste? Had all those years of misery been for nothing? I’d saved her from abuse and sexual assault, but she’d lost her soul, lost God, lost love.

She was all I had. She was everything to me. Without her, I didn’t know who I was. Nothing mattered. Nothing made sense.
She’d been my anchor all of my life, what kept me sane, what gave me a purpose.

I stood in the middle of the massive mess I’d made, breathing hard, and didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go with them, couldn’t be any help to Kyros, wouldn’t be there when he took her away.
I’d never see her again and I’d never get past it. Never.

My mind tried to nudge me toward thoughts of Phoenix, of his complete and total lack of compassion, of notice, of anything. It was as if I didn’t exist.
The rational, logical side of me understood. He was thinking of Key, trying to dream up something that could save Jordan without his brother having to die. But the lonely, hopeful dreamer side of me was bleeding.

I forced it from my mind. I wouldn’t think about it. I wasn’t surprised. I’d always known he’d hurt me, and I was an idiot because I’d let it happen.

It didn’t matter. All that made any difference was Viorica. I had to see her.

I closed my eyes
, imagined I was in my room, and seconds later, I was. Olga meowed.

I’d
take myself to Eryx’s castle. I’d been there, and I was certain all I had to do to be there again was imagine it. I wouldn’t have the ability to leave by transporting, but I’d worry about that after I’d seen Viorica. I would see her one last time.