Page 65 of Inflamed By an Incubus

Fenix thought about what to tell Rosalind, Vail and Hartt as the sun beat down on the canopy of the parasol, the warmth of it reaching him.

“Frayne killed the hunters right in front of me. Cut them down one by one and when they got to Evelyn, I tried to stop him, but it only made things worse. The wanker had his soldiers take me away and I couldn’t stop them. I felt the connection between me and Evelyn fading and I was distraught.” His throat closed as he relived that moment, how he had sat in that dank, dark cell desperately reaching for their connection and feeling it disappearing. He had never been so aware of her dying as he had been then, alone in that cell, feeling her slipping away from him and knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it. “I waited for the bond we share to black out for a moment like it always did and then come back when she was reborn, but—”

“Reborn?” Hartt interjected, his violet eyes wide. “Wait. Your mate is a phoenix too?”

Shock rolled through Fenix, what he had been saying falling away as his mind blanked and he stared at Hartt.

“She is,” he muttered, unable to believe what he was hearing. “I didn’t think you were mated.”

“I wasn’t… not when you first came to me.” Hartt shuffled to the edge of his seat. “I met Mackenzie after that. We were contracted to eliminate the same target. Turned out it was all a ruse to get the three of us to kill each other. A blood mage had a vendetta against myself, Mackenzie and Grave Van der Garde of the Preux Chevaliers.”

The King of Death.

Someone had been crazy enough to take on a contract to kill the most dangerous vampire in Hell. Fenix frowned. Not just one someone either. Both Hartt and Mackenzie must have been desperate for coin, or to prove something, to take on that contract.

“What happened with the blood mage? One of those wankers cursed me and Aderyn… or Evelyn as you all know her now.” Fenix gave the elf the whole of his attention, not wanting to miss a thing, because the feeling that this male could help him had just increased a hundredfold.

“We tracked him to Norway,” Rosalind put in.

“Norway?” Fenix’s gaze snapped to her as that feeling grew stronger still. “What happened there? Whereabouts in Norway? Did any of them look like this?”

He leaned back and reached into the pocket of his black jeans, pulled out the silver portrait frame and opened it. He showed it to Hartt and then Rosalind and Vail. They all shook their heads.

He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or frustrated that they hadn’t seen the mage he was after. Relieved seemed more appropriate, because he had seen Vail fight. The male probably hadn’t left anyone alive.

And Fenix needed the mage alive to break the curse.

He wasn’t going to bet everything he had on Aryanna being able to help.

“We wiped out a few of them, but none looked like that.” Hartt peered at the portrait again. “No. He definitely wasn’t there.”

Fenix pocketed the frame. “I’ve been following leads, trying to find the mage who cursed us so I can free her. One of those leads pointed to Norway, but I haven’t been there yet. I’ve checked out others. One in New Hampshire that has turned up nothing so far, but I have Hella and my clan looking through what we took from the house. There’s another place in England. I only scouted that one from a distance. Too many mages there at present. Norway. Maybe he’s there. Did you go inside the building?”

Rosalind shook her head. “We left it standing.”

She said that as if it was an accomplishment.

Fenix eyed the trio. It probably had been.

“I need to check out that building. Even if the mage isn’t there, there could be research that might help me or a clue that will lead me to him.” Denying his need to get Evelyn away from Archangel while he investigated the building in Norway was going to prove hard though. It was going to take all of his will to stop himself from going to her, but he needed to find a way to break the curse. He couldn’t risk taking her captive when there was a danger she might fall for him. He thought about the other place the mage might be, one that was looking more accessible now he wasn’t alone. “The mansion in England had several mages living in it… and I sensed phoenixes there too.”

Hartt growled, his top lip curling back off his emerging fangs. “I need that location. I need you to take me there.”

“I will.” Because Fenix could see how much the elf needed to know where it was and he knew the reason why. He wanted to give his mate, Mackenzie, the location so she could help her kin. “I’d like Evelyn to meet your mate. She always thought she was alone in this world, trapped here away from her kin. We travelled across Hell, finding information on the spell the mages had used to seal the gateway between that realm and the phoenix world, and we came close. The mage who cursed us is the closest we came to finding out how to open it. He knows. I’m sure of it.”

“Mackenzie will definitely want to speak with her… when the curse is broken and she can remember who she is.” Hartt half-smiled at him, a sympathetic one that told Fenix he had his doubts that would ever happen.

It would.

Fenix wasn’t going to fail this time.

Although he wasn’t one hundred percent certain she would ever remember who she had been before or the things she had done.

“So… did you sense her disappear or not? Because this is like an awful cliff-hanger at the end of a series that got cancelled, and I’m bloody damned if I’m going to wait much longer to find out whether I’ll ever discover what happened. I’ll make up my own ending.” Rosalind shifted on Vail’s lap.

The elf’s eyes darkened, glittering with hunger that rolled off him in powerful waves as she wriggled on him.

Fenix levelled her with a black look. “Stop teasing your mate. I’m hungry enough as it is.”

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