Page 10 of Phoenix Fated (The Phoenix Guardians #4)

A section of the wall to our left suddenly shatters as a dozen mandibles punch through it, chewing up the thick planking as easily as a wood chipper churns through a softwood spruce.

The bugs pour in, blocking our path with their numbers as they swarm towards the engine room.

A lantern is knocked from the wall, exploding across the floor in a circle of flaming oil, and the bugs go wild to avoid it, but their wings act like bellows that quickly spreads the fire to the ceiling.

Some of the bugs turn to advance on us, aggressively shaking their wings and snapping their mandibles. This is their territory now.

Airos holds his staff in front of him and hurls a bolt at the bugs, shattering one of their shells and splattering the wall with acrid blood.

Immediately, another takes its place. I duck my head in reflex as I feel a bullet whizz past my ear—except it's not a bullet, it's a stone from Tyler's sling, and it smashes into the bug's eye.

Instinct has me grabbing for my rifle, but of course I have nothing. Except...

I reach out with my hand, concentrating hard to find the small rock burrowed deep inside the dead bug's innards.

There.

I take it, and with a rapid jerk of my arm, send it careening back and forth through the air in front of us.

It whips through shell after shell like a silent, bug-seeking missile, until my concentration wavers and I lose my grasp on the stone as it gets stuck somewhere deep inside one of them.

Ten bugs seize up and go haywire, purple goo spurting from the tiny holes in their shells. They collapse, and the way is open.

"Fuck!" Airos says.

"Yeah, you're welcome?—"

He cuts me off when he grabs my arm and pulls me after him through black smoke and dying bugs, and that's when I realize the swarm has changed its attention from the engine room. Now, they're all coming after us.

Phoenix powers, you dumbass! That's what they're after!

"Dammit, I'm sorry!" I shout.

"Just run faster !" Kalistratos yells from the back.

I don't need to look to know we're on the verge of being swallowed by the swarm.

Their noise is all around us, as deafening as standing on a jet tarmac without ear protection.

Then, my feet fail to meet the ground as the world tilts violently forward, throwing me into Airos's back.

We're sliding fast along a floor that's quickly become almost vertical.

He locks his arm around me, pulling me close as we careen towards the end of a long passageway, fighting in vain to trim our speed.

Then we blow through the doorway, and the floor gives out beneath us.

Airos manages to snag onto a railing, and we dangle there in open space with me hanging from his waist. I watch Kalistratos and Tyler sail past us into the room, and they both catch onto a rope stretched taut between a crossbeam and the bow of a small vessel hanging like a pendulum over an open gateway.

The buzzer.

Wolf guards clamber up out of the buzzer to the bow with knives clamped in their jaws. Below them, their commander Sylla is perched on the edge of the helm with her bow clutched at the ready in one hand. Below her, I catch a glimpse of Dustin being pulled into the hold by two guards.

The torrent of bugs explodes out of the doorway like water from a sluice gate. They swirl around before dispersing in every direction, some on fire, and they shoot past us and ricochet around, spreading the flames through the hangar bay.

"Tyler, six o'clock low!" I shout.

Tyler looks down and sees the cat aiming her bow at them. They're completely exposed on the rope and there's nowhere for them to go except to slide down to the buzzer. Sylla has a clear shot, but she's not taking it. She can't risk hitting Tyler .

Tyler has the same realization and starts to make his way down the rope. "Cover us!" he shouts.

"I'm somewhat preoccupied!" Airos shouts back.

"Hold on," I grunt.

Hand over hand, I scale up his body, using the ridges of his muscles like handholds on a rock face.

The man is strong as fuck, unexpectedly so.

I have my legs wrapped around his chest, and I shimmy myself up to reach for a place to grab hold of.

It feels like I'm climbing with a full rucksack strapped to my front—the size of my stomach is making getting leverage even harder.

A visceral roar explodes from my throat as I make the final stretch, and it's echoed by one from Airos right into my dick.

I'm straddling his goddamn face, with my legs hooked over his shoulders.

Finally, I reach the railing with both hands and haul myself up.

Freed from my weight, Airos quickly pulls himself up and hurls an energy bolt at Sylla.

She dodges and immediately shoots her drawn arrow at us, but it clips the wing of a passing insect and careens harmlessly to the side.

Tyler and Kalistratos are halfway down to the buzzer now, but the guards have their knives dug into the rope and the fibers are coming apart fast.

The fire is spreading fast through the bay, and more of the burning insects shoot out from the doorway like tracer rounds from a smoking barrel.

One of them impacts the side of the buzzer, scattering flames across its hull.

The buzzer's back end then slowly begins to rise as a new pulsing fills the air.

Its engine is coming on, and the insects immediately respond.

So does Sylla. With terrifying speed and a cold disregard for the guards, she ignites the tip of an arrow off the nearby flames and shoots at the split in the rope, slashing through the side of one of the guard's hands and setting the rope on fire.

With a pained howl, he loses his balance on the bow.

I watch as he falls from the buzzer, his body spinning as it collides with a passing bug, and drops away.

We're a thousand feet above what looks like an ocean of yellow sand and orange rock—and we're losing altitude fast.

The rope snaps, freeing the buzzer. It plunges out of the bay before righting itself with a mechanical whir. From her perch, Sylla sneers up at Tyler and Kalistratos before jumping down and retreating into the hold. The craft launches forward with unexpected speed and disappears from view.

Tyler and Kalistratos leap from the severed rope, dropping into free fall.

I shout in startled alarm, watching them plummet.

Then Kalistratos bursts into his phoenix form, his transformation a streak of bronze and gold against the smoke-filled air.

He swoops to catch Tyler on his back, and they streak away, pursued by a surge of the frenzied insects.

A massive section of the ceiling caves in, and we're nearly obliterated by the debris. Flames lick across the exposed framework as the airship continues its death spiral toward the ground below.

Airos's eyes meet mine, sharp and assessing. "Think you can hold on?"

"Yeah, I think I can handle a little bird ride," I say.

"Excellent," he says, the corner of his mouth quirking up. "Because I've never actually carried anyone in phoenix form before. But it's a good day for a first time."

Before I can reply, he transforms, wings spreading wide, and suddenly I'm scrambling to grab hold of feathers burning with an otherworldly energy that hums against my palms. It's like I'm touching a live current that buzzes through my nerves without burning me.

It's one of the weirdest sensations I've ever felt.

It could almost be painful, but at the same time it also feels strangely good.

I pull myself closer, fighting the overwhelming reflex to let go, willing myself to adjust and let it in.

And then my stomach drops as we plunge into the open air.

I let out a scream that tears from my throat—starting as terror but transforming into something I haven't felt since my first firefight, a raw, primal howl of fear and balls-to-the-wall exhilaration.

Pure fucking adrenaline. Spread around us is a vast desert, with rolling sand dunes interspersed with islands of rock, some flat mesas and others rising high into the air like skyscrapers.

Airos dives and swoops, and I get my first good look at the airship as he puts it behind us.

The vessel is flat bottomed and shaped kind of like a fish, with an upswept tail-like stern and a pointed prow painted with two wolf eyes and a mouth of grinning fangs.

The entire starboard side is on fire, and insects fall from it like bits of smoking charcoal.

It's nearly vertical in the air, and it feels like watching a sinking ship underwater plummeting to the sea bed.

Then, like an invisible wire snapping, the ship's steady descent turns into a free-fall plummet.

No more juice. It smashes into the desert in a giant plume of flame, smoke and dust. I salute the wreck with my middle finger.

Ahead, the insect cloud whirls around Tyler and Kalistratos like angry bees. Tyler manages to pick off one or two with his sling, but there are dozens of them, and Kalistratos has to do some Top Gun shit to shake them off. The buzzer is getting away.

"We must draw them off together," Airos says, his voice rising through his body and vibrating against my chest. "My power alone won't be enough to tempt those monsters."

"What do I have to do?" I ask.

"Follow my lead."

Airos's feathers flash like a gold leaf mirror hit by a glancing beam of hot sunlight, and that buzzing energy surges across my body with the same push-pull strike of a heartbeat. Below, the sand swirls into a rising dust devil that follows after Airos's wake.

It's just dirt. I've done this before.

Of course, throwing stones and tipping pots is a whole different ballgame from something this big, but there's no time for me to second guess myself.

I call back to when I'd first arrived in this world, to the hours I'd spent practicing building mannequins out of mud and making them move, and engage that muscle memory.

It's one fuck-ton of dirt.

But then I'm able to feel Airos's power there too, and mine joins with his, combining to work together to move our target.

The synchronization is instantaneous and powerful, and the only thing I can compare it to is the way it felt when working with my squad to clear a room.

Normally, that kind of cohesion comes through months of practice, drilling again and again, working to build trust and shared understanding.

What I'm feeling right now is all intuition, all feel, like a dance that we've known forever. How? And why ?

The cloud of sand has formed behind us like a massive flag, waving and glimmering in the sunlight. The swarm takes the bait, dispersing and reforming in a dark line coming straight for us.

Airos veers sharply and heads straight for a group of rock spires. Soon, I can't see the others anymore. They're behind us now, obscured by the thick sand cloud. We fly low and fast, but the insects have already pierced the cloud and are gaining on us. Goddamn, they're relentless.

It's getting harder and harder to keep a hold of the sand. My powers just aren't strong enough, and my stamina is burning out faster than a candle in a wind tunnel. Airos is weakening too.

"I hope you have a plan!" I shout. "Because I've got about five seconds of this left!"

"Save it! Let go!" he says. "I'm going to need your help to move those rocks!"

"Oh shit..."

This motherfucker wants to bring down one of those spires?

The sand cloud begins to disperse and drop away as I let go, but before Airos fully releases, he surges his power and squeezes the cloud between two invisible palms. In the blink of an eye, it crushes into a ball that splatters half the pursuing swarm into a black and purple mist.

"Nice one!" I yell, tugging his feathers.

Airos doesn't reply, and I can immediately feel how costly pulling that move was to his energy. He's barely keeping us aloft. We're only gonna get one shot to make this work—it's either success or we're gonna be cooked.

We enter the spire field. Airos weaves through the pillars of rock with such speed and agility it seems like a head-on collision is inevitable.

"Don't close your eyes," he says. "I need you ready."

"Oh, my eyes are wide fuckin' open, Airos," I reply.

I'm not missing a damn thing on this ride. Not even if it's us getting splattered against a rock wall.

The bugs tail his maneuvers with exacting precision, latched on to the trail of phoenix energy he's exhausting to keep them interested.

He makes a hard turn, swooping close to a spiky outcropping from one of the spires, and it clips a few of the bugs, sending them into a death spiral.

He tries the move again, but this time fails.

The bugs are too fast, or they've caught on to his tactics. Or maybe he's slowing down.

"Here we go," he says.

We shoot up, swirling around the tallest spire until we break past its peak into the open air, then corkscrew around, cutting past the bugs to pull into a sharp dive.

I cling to Airos's back with my entire body.

The muscles in my hands and forearms burn as I fight to maintain my grip on the roots of his feathers, which are rough and abrade my palms. I push my hips forward, squeezing as tightly as I can with my thighs in a desperate battle to keep myself from being plucked off by the g-forces.

"Now!" Airos commands, and I feel another surge of power. I immediately know what he's trying to do. I can see it in my head, and I join with him and grasp the top of the spire and pull with every bit of ability that I can summon.

I feel the rock shatter under our control.

I feel it fall in an avalanche of massive boulders raining down above us.

And then I feel something inside of me snap, like I've just laid my hands on a live power line.

Airos pulls up hard just a few feet from hitting the ground, and the last thing I see as my strength gives out is the mountain of falling rock crushing the last of the swarm beneath it.

My grip weakens, and the warmth of his feathered body disappears as I fall away.