Page 25 of Phoenix Fated (The Phoenix Guardians #4)

JACKSON

I rip through the boundary of the Shimat's control and tear my mind out of its clutches. I'm awake, but I'm engulfed in pitch black oil of its body. I yell for him in my mind as I fight my way toward the feeling of his presence.

You will not stop me from getting to him.

And then my fingers reach a warm hand. The contact hits me like a live wire.

I yank him toward me, and he pulls back, both of us fighting our way through the churning darkness of the Shimat.

Then we're crashing into each other, and I wrap myself around him as tightly as I can.

I feel the warmth of him against me and the strength of his arms locking me close, making sure that nothing can pull us apart.

Suddenly, there's this rush of energy filling me up—warm and golden and alive .

It surges through my veins, and like during our flight over this desert, I feel the power crackling from me into him, where it mixes with and replenishes his energy and explodes into something more powerful than either of us alone.

This is what I was meant to do. This is my purpose. Right now, with his arms around me and our power flowing together like two rivers joining into one, I finally get it. This isn't just about saving these people or defeating a corrupted elemental, or even a phoenix prophecy.

This is about us.

His chest heaves like he's been hit by a defibrillator, and a brilliant phoenix flame explodes around us. The darkness doesn't just retreat; it screams as the light tears through it like molten steel through ice.

We fall from the Shimat's body, along with Azin and Onar, their limp forms tumbling through the air.

Airos shifts into phoenix form mid-fall, his transformation a burst of emerald and bronze flames that streak across the desert sky like a comet.

He swoops beneath the falling shamans and catches them in his talons before they hit the ground.

Above us, the Shimat stands frozen with a huge crater blasted into its side, and Airos veers away toward the dunes overlooking the encampment.

Then, the Shimat begins to shrink and convulse, its liquid surface hardening into brittle sheets that crack and peel away like burnt skin, shattering when they hit the ground in great thundering booms.

Airos gently releases Azin and Onar onto the sand as he comes in for a landing. I leap from his back, he shifts to human form, and we run to them. They've already regained consciousness, and we help them to their feet.

"It's over," I say.

Onar grips Azin's arm for support. "No. Not yet."

The Shimat lumbers toward us as it continues to come apart, the shattered pieces disintegrating and melting away into the sand. It's molting, but the poisoned heart still remains somewhere deep under the ground.

A fluttering inside of my chest tells me what needs to be done. It's the final remaining drops of the water elemental.

"Then let's end this," I tell them.

Behind us, the tribe approaches the dunes with Niah leading them. They're here to watch a prophecy be fulfilled. They're here to see a couple of Shalkeks kick a Shimat's ass.

Onar plants his foot into the ground with a solid thud . Azin, Airos, and I do the same. And then we dance.

The rhythm quickly reveals itself to us, flowing through our bodies like liquid fire, and we move across the sand with purpose, our feet carving intricate patterns into the earth.

My eyes lock onto Airos's as we circle each other, and the world around us dissolves into a blur.

He grins at me—that cocky, mischievous grin that always gets under my skin—and I can't help but laugh out loud.

Pure joy surges up through me, bubbling over and spilling out in ways I can't control. God, I don't think I've felt anything like this since I was a kid.

The Shimat's approach slows to a jerky, shuddering crawl.

Airos takes me in his arms, and as we twirl around each other, another wave of phoenix power surges through me and overflows into him.

Just the feeling of his touch is enough to spark regeneration.

It's a chain reaction, a feedback loop. My head is filled with flashes of his hands exploring my body, of what it would feel like to finally have him the way I've been craving, and every heated thought sends another pulse of energy through my veins. God damn . Give me more of that shit.

With our powers in perfect resonance, the desert around us becomes an extension of our bodies.

We can feel the heart of the Shimat in its aquifer deep below the ground.

We capture it in a fist of sand, and the ground rumbles as we reel it to the surface.

The Shimat writhes angrily, fighting to break free from both our grasp and the influence of the shaman dance, but we have it by the balls.

The desert soil erupts into the air like a massive geyser as we pull the heart out from the ground and lift it high into the air, trapped in a ball of sand. The Shimat floats above it, undulating like a sphere of water in zero gravity.

Airos looks at me and I nod, and then we sprint for the edge of the dune. He shifts, I leap on his back, and we're in the air. Azin and Onar keep the dance going below, maintaining their hold on the Shimat as we fly toward the massive beast.

The shadow of its underbelly swallows us, and I clamp down on its heart—that poisoned core buried deep in its sandy prison.

We weave between the streams of sand cascading from the Shimat's body like waterfalls, and come around for the attack.

I call the water elemental, and it leaves my body and forms into a long, slender spear in the palm of my hand.

Now!

Airos and I rip the sand away, revealing a throbbing black tumor wrapped around the Shimat's glowing heart like a parasite.

The Shimat convulses violently in a last defense, and manages to wrestle some control back from Azin and Onar's spell.

Tendrils burst from its body and whip towards us with lethal speed, but Airos banks hard left, his wings screaming through the air as we dodge a strike that would've cut us in half.

"Jackson!" Airos shouts over the howling wind. "One shot!"

The elemental spear in my hand blazes with purifying light, but the window is closing fast. The Shimat's defenses are reforming, layers of corrupted water swirling around its core like armor.

We streak in like a lightning bolt, weaving between the chaos.

Tendrils come for Airos's wings, but he's too fast for them now, and a blast of phoenix fire from his feathers turns them into shriveled husks.

I draw back my arm, feeling the water elemental's power surge through the spear.

"Got you, motherfucker," I say.

Throw.

The spear cuts through the air, punches through the Shimat's defenses, and lances the poison bulb dead center. For a heartbeat, everything goes silent.

Then the corruption screams as the tumor explodes in a geyser of black pollution.

The elemental's cleansing power spreads like wildfire through the Shimat's massive form, and I watch in awe as the darkness drains away like ink being washed from glass.

What's left behind is crystal-clear water that catches the desert sun and fractures it into a thousand dancing rainbows.

The purified Shimat hangs in the air like a giant prism, casting brilliant arcs of color across the sand dunes below.

Then the Shimat's massive form shudders once, twice—and pops like the world's largest water balloon.

Its purified waters come cascading down in a torrential downpour that soaks us and the desert below, each droplet sparkling with captured sunlight as it falls.

The rainbow light follows us down, painting everything in shifting bands of color—the sand, our faces, Airos's feathers as he pulls out of our dive.

For a moment, the entire desert looks like it's been touched by magic, shimmering under a canopy of light and falling water.