Page 69 of Phoenix Falling
“I understand you fine, bastard. Now out!”
A door somewhere opened and closed. Light steps approached, and then a gentle hand on my shoulder. I tried my best to cram myself into the wall behind me.
“It’s all right,” Grim said gently.
“If it was all right, I wouldn’t be bleeding from my eyes, now would I?” I choked out.
A sigh of air teased my hair. “The ability to overpower someone’s mind is given only to the king,” he said. “As far as I know, Sun has never used it. Not even against prisoners.”
“Lucky me.”
Another sigh. “Risk…”
I opened my eyes to a hovering gray blur in front of me, and held up a hand to ward him off, my blood-covered eyes refusing to bring him into focus.
He took my hand. “Let me heal you.”
“Stay…away.” I was sobbing, I realized. Agony racked my brain. “Don’t…”
Warmth flooded my mind. I jerked back, smashing my head into the wall in my effort to get away, but Grim refused to relent.“I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. I can heal you like this. Just let me help you.”
“No! Stop!”
But the asshole refused. Lyris knelt beside me, her presence a hovering heat that seeped into my system despite my efforts to resist. Grim traveled through my head, though I could sense him only at the periphery, as if he was conscious of not entering my actual memories, invading my thoughts any more than he had to. I should probably be grateful for that, but I wasn’t in a grateful mood right now. I wanted the hell out of here; nothing else was going to satisfy me.
And apparently that wasn’t happening anytime soon. When Grim withdrew from my mind, I stayed where I was, slumped on the floor, and listened as Lyris and Grim began to argue about what to do with me.
“She must stay,” Grim finally said, his tone final.
No way in hell! “I want out of here.” Wherever here was.
I could sense him staring down at me but refused to look up. “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he told me. “I could defy him, but if I did, I’d be dead.”
My mouth twisted in contempt. “Well, we wouldn’t want to risk anyone’s life but mine, now would we.”
A long silence met my words. “Damn,” he said. Then, “Let’s just go.”
I didn’t have a choice, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be looking for every opportunity to escape.
ChapterTwenty-Six
BAER
Iheard Grim’s footsteps in the hall leading toward the cells. They were distinctive, easy to recognize, a heavy man, moving softly, almost as if wings kept him barely off the ground. I had no idea what his shifting form was, but he always made me think of wings for some reason. Maybe because he represented the only freedom my brother and I had right now. What little chance we had of it, anyway.
But Grim wasn’t alone this time. Two separate sets of footsteps, one even, one shuffling, followed him.
I reached out, as had become my habit in the months since we’d been kept here.“Grim?”
“Bringing you some company,”he said in my head. He was the only one who respected me enough to use telepathy.
He didn’t sound happy about it. Not to be a cliché, but his voice was the grimmest I’d ever heard it.“Company?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”And then the door leading to our hall opened. Grim hadn’t acknowledged the guard on duty, Franklin. I could smell him, his sweat, the smell of his animal beneath the skin. Now, with the door opening, I smelled his shock, his surprise.
Sometimes being a werewolf was a curse.
I moved to the small window in my door, enclosed with bars that they somehow expected would keep me in. More likely they knew they wouldn’t, and that’s why the guard was there. It was the outside door that was the problem. I could get out of my cell, but to go where?
