Page 100 of Phoenix Falling
The knot in my stomach eased. Lyris hung up, then turned to me. “Demetri is coming.”
Not Sun, thank God. “Not the guard?”
She shook her head. “Not if I’ll be gone that long. I don’t trust anyone but my twin.” She tilted her head, eyeing me. “What’s your plan after we get back to your apartment?”
“Go through the footage?”
“I mean as far as coming back here.”
I looked over my shoulder, down the room to where the foot of Raine’s bed was barely visible. “I’ll be back, I promise. And hopefully with something we can use to find our target.”
Which was how I ended up pulling into the parking lot of my apartment complex in the passenger seat of an Escalade, Lyris at the wheel. It felt weird, being with her in the daylight, though I knew now that there was no such thing as an allergy to the sun. Archai simply preferred to remain unseen as much as possible—probably wise given the rise of technology and surveillance in the human world.
Lyris parked, and I led her upstairs to my third-floor apartment. “You know,” she said, waiting for me to unlock the door, “if the shifter we’re looking for is working with Helios, it’s likely their meetings were recent. Helios wasn’t a factor when we were first looking for the Anigma.”
She’d told me on the way here that Helios had come after Maddox. “My detective friend, Nick, has been following a couple of incidents that tipped me off to the Anigma coming back to the area. Maybe we start there, see what we can find? Work our way back.” The likelihood that we’d see an actual meeting of Helios and the traitor wasn’t high, but if we could put movements of various shifters together, proximity and timing might work to narrow our suspect list.
“Good idea.” Lyris stepped through the door to my apartment.
“Very good idea,” a deep male voice said behind me. I gasped, jerking around, only to find Sun at the top of the stairs.
“Sun!”
Lyris muttered curses under her breath.
“Yeah, Sun,” he said, his tone forbidding.
“What are you—”
He slashed a hand through the air. “Get inside.”
I really,reallywanted to snap back at him, but his warning glance would’ve made me wet my pants a month ago, so I shut my mouth and hurried inside. Sun entered and closed the door behind him. In the dusky dimness of my tiny apartment, he seemed to suck up all the space and air.
“Sun—” Lyris began.
“We have to come to an understanding, you and I,” he said, turning to her. I backed toward the kitchenette, noticing that Lyris stood as if ready for battle, hands clenched at her sides, feet braced apart. She was in trouble, and it was because of me.
I wouldn’t let her face him without support. “Sun, I—”
He raised an imperious hand at me. “I’ll deal with you in a minute.”
Heat shot through me. “Fucking—”
“Don’t!”
I didn’t. Sun focused back on Lyris.
“We’ve known each other for several lifetimes, Lyris. Longer than most people can fathom.”
“Exactly.”
“You really need to be silent right now,” he warned her.
Lyris didn’t blink.
“I value your protectiveness of the women, your fierce spirit, but I am no longer merely a friend. I am your king, and though I never planned to be, that does mean something.”
Something flickered in Lyris’s eyes. She stood straighter.
