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TWENTY-SEVEN

Sorsha

The metal projectile stabbed right through Omen’s heart, the pointed tip tearing through his shirt as it burst from the middle of his chest. A plume of smoke so thick it hid his face gushed up from the wound. His body sagged into me.

A cry wrenched from my throat. “Omen? Omen! ”

My frantic appeal did nothing to stop his legs from crumpling. I clutched at him, but my attempts to steady him only sent the rest of him falling to sprawl on the dirty asphalt. The smack of his back hitting the ground drove the stake through farther.

A fucking stake , made of silver and iron, like some kind of three-in-one multipurpose monster-murdering device for mortals who couldn’t tell the difference between vamps, werewolves, and fae.

I dropped to my knees beside my lover, searching his slack features, but the concentration of those metals ripping through his most vital physical organ was enough to murder even a hellhound.

Omen’s head lolled to the side, his eyelids twitching. The faintest wheeze whistled from his lungs—and then every part of him went limp, oblivious to my shouts and my shaking of his shoulders.

More smoke billowed up in a congealing cloud. The color had already drained from his lifeless face. He looked more like a wax figure than a man—a man who’d once contained so much snark and power—a man I’d have put my own existence on the line for if there’d been the slightest chance?—

Fury surged through me, scorching hot. It blotted out every thought except one question burning through my mind: Who did this?

My head jerked up. Fire blazed from my body in every direction, but most of it downward. The rush of searing flames propelling me up into the air—up over the swarm of shadowkind gathered around us, up into the night sky, glaring in the direction from which the stake had flown.

A woman was crouched on the rooftop of the low building that stood between the parking lot and the taller brick structure that had been Tempest’s hideout. She was decked out in the standard Company armor, shoving another gleaming bolt into a crossbow.

My hands clenched at my sides, my fingers branding my palms with their scorching heat. Die.

Before she could end another shadowkind life, a surge of flame shot up from beneath the woman’s feet. In seconds, it had swallowed her completely, even her shriek of pain. Her body crumpled much like Omen’s had, the fire still eating away at it, but watching her form shrivel and blacken didn’t tame the rage coursing through me one bit.

A thumping of footsteps reached my ears through the roar of the flames that held me. A mass of Company lackeys were running toward the crowd of shadowkind. One of them was fumbling with a plastic box, yanking it open and drawing out one of several laboratory vials?—

Tempest’s disease. Of course her death wouldn’t stop the asshole mortals who had no idea that her creation would end them as quickly as the shadowkind it infected. Of course their first thought while their colleagues lay dying and their building in shambles was to unleash that horror on the world.

Not today, motherfuckers.

Burn. Burn them all to the fucking ground.

More fury flared through me, and flames erupted all through the swarm of would-be exterminators. I squeezed my fists tighter. The glass of the vials melted, fusing together and snuffing out the deadly microbes that floated within.

That wasn’t enough either. Who knew how much more of the Company’s vile invention was still stockpiled in that building—or in other facilities across the world? How many sites and people held the information to recreate it?

They all had to go. Every last one of the pricks who’d dreamed of ridding the world of shadowkind, who’d tortured and slaughtered for their own satisfaction, and the empire they’d built could damn well die with them.

My flames raced along the sidewalk to the smashed-open building. The roar beneath me propelled me higher still. More fire burst from my back with a stinging sensation that was offset by the rush of satisfaction as crackling flames swept through the air on either side of me to form wings.

They’d messed with a fucking phoenix, and every last one of them was going to burn.

I poured my rage toward the brick structure, and an inferno as sizzling as the bonfire inside me engulfed it. The taint of all those vicious intentions crawled over my skin. Without questioning it, I simply knew that I could follow that trail.

My awareness expanded through the darkened sprawl of the world below. An apartment here. A warehouse there. A blast of flames, and they were nothing but charcoal.

My rage spilled out along lines of communication and connection that shone clearer to my heightened senses with every passing second. It burned through the fraying threads of self-control I’d been holding onto so tightly, but what the hell did I care?

None of these pricks had cared one bit about who they were hurting.

My hellhound shifter, lying dead on the ground below me. Luna, shattering herself apart to avoid their capture. All the scalpel incisions and needle injections, all the slashing knives and suffocating nets, all the crashed cars and battered bodies.

But that was what humans did. One monster did them wrong, scared them, or screwed them over, and they thought that gave them the right to commit genocide on every being remotely like it.

A laboratory in Berlin. A processing office in Madrid. My attention sizzled across the ocean all the way to the shores I’d left behind, the hot spots lighting up like the pins on the map we’d seen in the shoe museum in Chicago.

The fire was gushing out of me in waves now, and I could see it all in my mind’s eye: Good-bye, a few dozen Company employee houses in San Francisco. Sayonara, an entire condo building in Queens.

My reach was infinite, my fire inexhaustible, and every one of them was going to pay.

Burn. Burn. Burn it all down, until there’s nothing left but ashes.

Glaring light dotted my vision. The stench of bubbling tar and frying varnish filled my lungs. Whatever grip I’d had on myself had gone up in smoke. There was nothing in me or around me but my fiery fury, like it was always meant to be.

My skin crackled and blackened; my stomach steamed. That was fine. If I had to burn myself up to take every douchebag who deserved it down with me, so be it.

More and more buildings succumbed to my flames. More and more bodies crumbled into cinders. My soul screamed in vengeful triumph. More, more, burn it all …

The trails I’d traced petered out. Every person who’d contributed to the Company’s horrors, every place where they’d conducted their cruel business, every device that had contained their secrets had been swallowed up in the fire of my fury—but it still wasn’t enough.

An ache consumed me from throat to gut, rage churning through it, roaring to be set free.

Why should the Company be the only ones to take the blame? How about all the other mortals out there who would have attacked the shadowkind if they’d known about them—which was pretty much all humans, wasn’t it?

What about the shadowkind themselves who’d only hurled themselves into the fray not to protect their fellow beings but to destroy me ? Who’d slaughtered my parents—ripped my father’s head off and thrown it out a fucking window—for the sole crime of creating me?

Hell, what about the damned Highest who’d send their minions on that wretched quest? Did they think they were so invulnerable, lurking in the depths of the shadow realm?

Ha. With the prickling of the fire through and around me, I could taste how easily I could reach through the rifts and rain my searing fury across the darkness until it barbequed their ancient souls.

They thought I was a force to be extinguished? I’d show them who’d get eviscerated.

The flames were already leaping higher—from the smashed brick building to those neighboring it, across the parking lot below me to smack into one brutal being and another. I sucked in a scalding breath.

I really could do it. I could burn both the realms down and myself with them, and when I emerged from the ashes, maybe it would all be reborn into something better. Seriously, how hard could it be to do better than the shitshow we had now?

I gathered the fire swelling ever wider inside me, ready to spew it as far as I could cast it—and a voice penetrated the warbled blare in my ears. A bright, sweet voice ragged with an emotion that made my chest clench up.

“Sorsha! Sorsha, please, can you hear me?”

Then another voice: a chocolatey baritone that’d turned strained. “You’re not in this alone, Miss Blaze.”

And another: a deep ragged rumble. “We’ll fight whatever battles need fighting, m’lady. Just tell us what you need.”

The flames around me faltered slightly. I sank a few feet with a lurch of my stomach, and made out three figures hovering in the air in front of me, their forms lit by wavering orange light.

The light of my fire. Of my vast, violent blaze.

Thorn’s massive wings swept through the air, holding himself and the two men he was supporting aloft. Ruse had his arm stretched out to me, a desperation in his roguish face I’d never seen before. Snap’s eyes flashed brilliant green, wide and frantic.

“My peach,” the devourer said when I met his gaze. “Don’t go. I promised you I wouldn’t leave, no matter how upset I got—don’t you leave me.”

I wasn’t leaving. I was here, and I would still be here when the fire ravaged me to the bones and spewed me back into being. It was everything else, everyone else—couldn’t they see how rotten our worlds had become?

Omen’s voice echoed up from my memories. Remember everyone who’s for you.

Those words choked me up and provoked a fresh wave of anger at the same time. As the flames around me leapt and dipped again, another winged figure soared into sight.

It was Flint, but he wasn’t alone. He was holding… Vivi. My best friend, clinging tight to the warrior’s bulging arms, her face turned ashy and soot staining her typical white outfit. My pulse hitched.

She gave me a bright smile that was all too familiar. “Sorsha, you don’t need to do any more. You knocked those assholes flat. If there are any left, we’ll take them out, however many we need to, like shooting rats in a barrel of dynamite. But first let’s cool off and figure out where we stand. Please come down?”

Down. Down. Down to the place where my most recent lover’s corpse lay slumped; down to where the Highest’s horde stood waiting to lay judgment on me. My teeth gritted. Flames lashed around me.

But I couldn’t drag my eyes from the figures in front of me. As I stared at them, more images rose in my mind.

It was also the world where my devourer delighted in everything from extravagant hotels to a simple banana; where we’d discovered his capacity for desire together. The world where my incubus had offered every pleasure he could imagine to leave me satisfied, not just bodily but in mind and heart as well. The world where I’d fought side by side with my wingéd warrior while he let his strength buoy mine rather than supress it.

The world where my bestie and I had passed cartons of Thai food back and forth on her couch in front of our favorite cheesy movies, where we’d laughed and danced together and made plans for grand adventures we hadn’t yet seen through.

Could I burn down the realms and spare the few who held a piece of my heart? Could we even hold onto any of the happiness that had brought us together in the wreckage my raging fire would leave behind?

All those people out there, all the beings drifting through the rifts—so many of them had laughed and delighted, fought and loved too. There were so many other parents, other guardians, other lovers and other friends who’d be mourned.

Maybe some of them were monsters. Maybe we were all monsters. But that didn’t mean there was nothing good in us.

Scalding tears pricked at my eyes. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to spread nothing but pain through the realms. Who would I have to be furious with then except myself?

I could make Omen right about one last thing. I wasn’t like Tempest, not at all.

As the rush of heat beneath me dwindled, my fiery wings did as well. I glided to the ground, my body seeming to contract in on itself.

My clothes hung in singed scraps, my skin equally charred. When I shuddered in the sudden cool of the night air, the blackened bits fluttered off me like moulting feathers, revealing unmarred flesh beneath.

Even in the dim light from distant streetlamps, I could see that I’d scorched the parking lot around me to an even darker shade than the pavement had been before. Tempest’s ashes had dispersed in the inferno. As my companions drifted down to join me, my gaze came to rest on Omen’s slumped form, which had somehow held its shape.

His body lay on a streak of silver and iron. The heat of my flames had melted the crossbow bolt so thoroughly that the liquid metals had rippled across the lot to pool in a nearby pothole. His clothes, burnt into a solid mass, hid the wound on his chest, but I knew exactly where the fatal stake had struck him. I knew?—

His chest moved.

It rose and fell with a shallow breath, and my heart just about leapt up my throat to do a dance number on the asphalt.

“Omen?” I threw myself to his side. His body shuddered, and the carbonized layer coating his form cracked and began flaking off like mine had.

My fire hadn’t burned him. Of course not. It never had before—he was a being that thrived on fire. The flames I’d poured down had melted the toxic metals from his body and absorbed right into the gap of his wound. Had—had they?—

My hand shot to that spot in the middle of his chest. The remains of his shirt disintegrated, and my palm rested against a solid plane of hellhound-shifter flesh, only a white blotch of a scar showing where he’d taken the wound.

Naturally, that was when he opened his eyes.

For a second, Omen blinked at me as if he needed to clear his vision. A faint furrow creased his forehead. Then a thin smile crossed his lips. “Can’t resist the opportunity to cop a feel even in the middle of an apocalypse, huh, Disaster?”

“You fucking bastard!” I said, which wasn’t really fair, since I doubted he’d wanted to get himself killed. But he probably figured out I didn’t really mean the insult from the enthusiasm with which I threw my arms around him right afterward.

Omen let out a hoarse chuckle, lifting one arm to return the embrace. Another hand squeezed my shoulder. A third rested on my back, and a fourth brushed over my hair. My other three lovers knelt around us, welcoming me and their commander back.

“Are you all right?” Snap asked, a question that might have been for either of us or most likely both.

For my reply, I lifted my head from Omen’s shoulder to pull my devourer into a kiss. Then Thorn’s broad arms were tugging me to my feet as the hellhound shifter heaved onto his. Vivi leapt to my side, looping her arm around mine, and I hugged her just as hard as I had my lovers.

“You came a long way to watch me burn down the world,” I said.

A startled laugh spilled out of her. “It was an epic performance, but I don’t think I want any repeat showings.”

“Good, because neither do I.” The fire inside me felt subdued in a brand-new way, like the vast calm of the ocean after a monster of a storm.

I had been going to end the world… but I hadn’t. And now that I’d walked up to the brink and taken a good hard look at it before stepping back, I couldn’t imagine ever allowing myself to be pushed even close to over it. That vast calm was mine now. I was a phoenix reborn as something better, even if it hadn’t worked quite the way anyone had predicted.

“I’m just glad you’re okay,” Vivi said.

I hugged her even tighter. “Me too. Thank you for helping talk me down.”

“Any time, bestie. All you’ve got to do is say the word.”

It seemed that was true. I’d been awfully worried about how she’d react if she found out what I was, but she’d seen the worst of me tonight, and she was still here. Maybe it was time to stop worrying.

About Vivi, anyway. Omen’s gaze slid past us to the crowd of shadowkind, slightly thinned by my recent torching but still a whole lot larger than our little cluster. Larger and taking some tentatively threatening steps toward us now that the torching was over.

“I’m getting better by the moment,” the hellhound shifter said to Snap, “but I’m not sure how long this lot will allow that to last, though. I don’t suppose our equines and imp came through with their part in the plan?”

“We haven’t seen—” Ruse started.

“Ruby!” one of the larger minions bellowed, raising an axe, and just then a clatter of racing hoofbeats echoed down the road.

Gisele and Bow led the charge, Gisele gone full unicorn and Bow showing off his centaur form. Antic perched on Gisele’s gleaming back, brandishing her tiny fist in the air.

And with them came dozens more shadowkind, rippling out of the shadows into the physical world and careening toward us in a wave.

They rushed through the crowd of minions, most of them small enough to skirt between the beefy legs, the equines jostling to make room as need be. Before the Highest’s lackeys could raise much protest, one familiar figure in the oncoming swarm stepped in front of me and swiveled to take in our audience.

It was the equines’ friend Cori. “This woman rescued me from the clutches of mortals who’d tormented me,” he shouted over the growing clamor. “She risked her life to break open our cages and usher us all to freedom.”

“She broke me out of a laboratory where I was being held,” another being piped up. “I would have died if the mortals had their way.”

More voices rose, one after the other.

“She fought through silver and iron to break us out and let us return home.”

“She burned the place where the mortals caged us so they couldn’t torture any more beings.”

“I thought I’d never reach the shadows again until she came for us.”

The lesser beings in the crowd of new arrivals chittered and barked in their own versions of language with what sounded like a cacophony of agreement.

A lump filled my throat. It didn’t seem possible that the equines could have rounded up every being I’d ever saved, and yet there were also dozens more here than I’d realized I’d rescued. All the collectors whose homes I’d slunk into, all the Company facilities we’d razed to the ground…

I guessed it had added up.

As the barrage of testimonials faded, Thorn cleared his throat. “And she took down the shadowkind responsible for encouraging the worst group of mortals in their horrific dealings—the sphinx called Tempest, which the Highest failed to subdue centuries ago.”

Omen took my hand and held it up as he had when he’d first reached me. “The phoenix has burned, and it is Sorsha, not Ruby, that remains. You can tell the Highest how badly they screwed up… or you can tell them, truthfully, that Omen the hellhound dealt with Ruby and no further threat from her remains.”

Another round of muttering commenced, but at least no one was waving an axe in my direction for the moment. Some of the minions pointed toward the ruined building, others toward the sky where I’d dealt out my flaming vengeance. Antic darted among them, tossing out interjections here and there as she saw fit. As we waited for the verdict, my fingers clamped tight around Omen’s.

Finally, a figure that must have been some sort of giant stepped to the fore of the crowd and raised his hand for silence. His voice carried through the lot.

“It is settled. We have witnessed that this being, whatever she is, destroyed those that threatened us. We witness that her fire has abated as the hellhound stands beside her. We will report to the Highest that he has fulfilled his duty and the danger is past.”

Then, as elation welled up behind my ribs, he caught my gaze and dipped his head in a slight but unmistakable bow.

The horde vanished into the shadows in a wavering surge. I stared, half afraid to move in case my legs failed to hold me.

“It’s over?” I said to Omen. “No more bounty on my head?” I lowered my voice. “No more deal hanging over yours?”

The hellhound shifter laughed. “It would appear that way. Let’s wait and see if the Highest send their minions charging back after all. But I think you may just have pulled off the greatest heist of your career, thief.” He offered a quiet smile that was just for me. “You stole back both our freedoms from the most powerful beings in existence.”

Ruse clapped his hands, a smirk curling his lips. “And I’d say this calls for a celebration. Come on, Miss Blaze. Wait until you see what we’ve done with the Everymobile now!”

“Sweet scintillating seahorses, do I even want to ask?” I shook my head with a disbelieving chuckle, pulled my best friend and my lovers close, and set off to see what the road ahead would hold.