Doomsday Can Wait (Phoenix Chronicles, #2)(90)

"How are we going to get out?" Jimmy asked.

I turned reluctantly away from the mountain, which had begun to rumble my name.



Phoenix, it said. Come to me.

Jimmy stood by the golden door, dressed in black jeans and a tee that read Hannah Montana. In my old life that would have been hysterical. In this one, all I could think of was how sweet the blood of a child.

I didn't even consider clothes for myself. Such trivialities meant nothing to me anymore.

"They aren't going to open it," I said as I joined Jimmy. "Sawyer can't."

"And Summer won't."

This close to the exit, the heat of the metal made every inch of my skin throb like a bad sunburn. The thought of touching it made my fingers sting.

"How did you plan to get out?" he asked.

I hadn't planned, I'd just moved forward. I really needed to stop doing that.



My skin is my robe.

Sawyer's voice came to me out of the past. I turned away from the pulsing heat of the golden door and strolled back to the window—the only way out. Beyond it lay the mountain, where she awaited me. If I were a bird--

I tilted my head, suddenly understanding what Sawyer had meant.

I faced Jimmy. "Do you have a knife?"

Jimmy pulled his switchblade out of his pocket.

Stupid question.

I took the weapon and carved a bat into my forearm. The image resembled the icon for Batman—a stick bat at best, Id never been much of an artist—but I was pretty certain it would do the trick.

It began to heal almost immediately. I never thought I'd wish my preternatural healing abilities away, but right then I did.

"What the hell?" Jimmy growled as the blood dripped from my arm and onto the floor. He inched closer, tongue flicking across his lips, still-glowing eyes fastened on the rolling river of red.

"It's the only way." Reaching up, I removed the turquoise from around my neck and set it on the windowsill.

“How am I going to get out?" he asked.

"You aren't." I pressed my palm to the steadily healing bat carved into my arm.

Seconds later I took the chain into my mouth, flapping my black wings harder to offset the downward pull of the turquoise as I headed upward toward the full silver moon that hung above Mount Taylor.

Jimmy shouted something, but I wasn't listening. I wanted no one at my side when I met the woman of smoke. I'd always known it would come down to her or me.

Instead, the sonar that accompanied my shift—the ability of bats to "see" by sound—took over. The term blind as a bat had come about because bats use their incredible sense of hearing rather than sight to fly in the dark.

Now that I was a bat, I realized that it wasn't exactly sound but feeling. A buzzing awareness all around me that there flew a mosquito, ahead loomed a tree, and soon, very soon, I'd reach the mountain and my destiny.

The moon's glow made the whirling mist atop Mount Taylor luminescent. The rain had stopped, and I circled, unable to see the ground beneath, but somewhere in that fog I felt her.

I dropped through the shroud, making use of my bat supersenses to avoid trees, rocks, and one evil Navajo witch. A few feet from the earth, I reached for, then became, myself, landing in a crouch that allowed me to scoop up the turquoise and flip the chain around my neck. Just in time, too.

Naked as I, the woman of smoke stepped from the fog. "A bat," she murmured. "How ... cliche"."

"An evil spirit bitch," I returned. "Right back atcha."

"This will be a fight to the death," she said.

"Que será, será."

The Naye'i appeared confused. I guess she didn't listen to much Doris Day.

From the first moment I'd seen her—as a spirit of smoke in the desert and as flesh in Murphy's bar—I'd known she was dangerous. The more I learned about her, the more I hated her. But I'd hated as a human. A paltry, pathetic hatred, unworthy of the word.

As a spirit of darkness, I understood hate; I welcomed the desire to wreak havoc, to maim and kill just for the joy of it, and I saw why I'd needed to become like her to win.

The Naye'i had no humanity, no compassion, no restraint. And now neither did I.

We circled each other like all-star wrestlers waiting for an opening. I wasn't worried. I could still taste Jimmy's blood; the strength we'd shared pulsed through me; supernatural power lay at my fingertips; and the turquoise would prevent her from laying a hand on me.

The word cakewalk strolled through my head, and the Naye'i smiled. That smile made me pause. It was the smile of someone with a secret.

The woman of smoke's hand snaked out and closed around my throat. I blinked, shocked. "Wha—" I managed before she lifted me from my feet, squeezing off all the air.

Wherever her fingers touched, pain erupted, but not the icy burn that had occurred the last time her skin had met mine. Something had changed.

My legs flailed, my arms, too. I reached for the turquoise, but she was there before me.

"You thought this would protect you." She broke the chain with a single jerk and tossed the stone away. "Not anymore."

I couldn't breathe, which made thinking damn difficult. Even when she dropped me to the ground, I lay gasping like a fish on the shore.

"The turquoise marked you as his, but you chose another," she whispered, her brimstone breath washing over my face, making my skin flame. "And when you chose him, the stone became just a stone."