Phoenix (Reawakened #3)

Chapter 8

Jessie

“MOMMY!” I hear Warren shouting, over and over again, sounding tortured.

It’s a disconcerting thing to hear a deep, low, gruff-sounding voice to be calling out like this, but I know where it’s coming from, and the natural nurturer inside of me can still interpret it as a desperate little boy trying to get to his mother. Jake often had outbursts in his sleep, and I would always hold him until it soothed him back into a more peaceful slumber. I never told him about it, just let him maintain his role as the protector; I think it gave him strength, much like it does for his cousin.

When I burst inside of his room, he’s writhing around on the bed, with nothing on but a thin sheet and a layer of sweat covering his trembling body. His tattoos seem to come to life under his skin while he wriggles and flails about, still in a deep sleep, still having an intense nightmare.

Initially, I halt and keep dead still, with fear and doubt infiltrating my senses. My natural instincts, which have already been tested beyond most humans my age, cause me to falter in my attempts to soothe the child inside of him. Within these few moments of contemplation over what to do for the best, he seems to come to with a sudden inhale of air, followed by rapid shallow breathing as he slowly comes down from whatever ordeal he was just having to battle through. Eventually, he turns to face me with such an intense look in his eyes, I jump back a little, feeling scared of what he’s going to do next.

After what feels like much too long for my nerves to withstand, he throws his hands up over his face and folds in on himself. I would never have imagined, given his size, attitude, and the fact he is a hired killer, that he could appear so vulnerable in front of me; in front of anyone.

“Warren?” I whisper as I reach my hand out toward him, even though I have no hope of ever being able to touch him from here. It’s the way I prefer it, it’s safer.

“Phoenix?!” Jake booms from behind me, and I instinctively move to the side to let him walk past me and over to his cousin who is now sitting on the side of the bed with his face still inside of his hands. The phoenix tattoo heaves up and down, looking as if it’s actually trying to break free from the flames. But it can’t. It’s forever stuck, just like he is.

“Hey, Cuz, you ok?” Jake stands before him and clasps a hand over his shoulder, crouching slightly to try and look at Phoenix more clearly. “Another nightmare?”

Phoenix wordlessly nods while trying to get his breathing back to normal, as if desperate to rid himself of his vulnerability in front of us.

“I-I’ll go,” I whisper, more to Jake than anyone, and he nods with a reassuring smile on his face. Before I can turn and leave, Warren jumps to his feet, stretches, and then turns to look at me with an expression I can’t quite figure out, something between anger and humiliation. Whatever it is, it scares me. “I’m s-sorry,” I blurt out, and duck my head in shame.

“Don’t be,” he murmurs, though the words sound as clear as day in my ears. By the time I look up again, he’s already pacing into his bathroom and switching on the shower. Jake walks slowly over to where I’m hovering and hugs me. I hold him back, only to catch a glimpse of Warren now giving us a strange look before he shuts the door on the room.

______

I wake much earlier than I did yesterday and decide to walk into the living room to start a book I found in Warren’s sister’s old room. It looks like a fantasy novel with a romance element to it, not my usual choice of genre, but I’m desperate for something to take my mind off things, so here it is. When I walk out, however, I catch Warren sitting hunched over his knees on the couch, his hands together as if in prayer, and still with that phoenix tattoo on show. Though, now it sits still, completely immersed inside the flames, not even trying to escape anymore.

“You can come in, Jess,” he says without looking at me, “I won’t bite.”

I slowly walk over to where he’s sitting and take up the armchair opposite while he remains like a statue in that same position. However, on closer inspection, I see he’s not praying, he’s holding something. It’s long, fluffy, and was once a deep purple shade, but now looks very much faded. He’s clutching it to his nose and seems to be breathing it in; it looks as if he’s taking great comfort from it.

“What’s that?” I ask without thinking about the ramifications of asking such a thing, given what I witnessed last night.

He opens his piercing blue eyes and focuses them on my green ones, holding me captive for a few moments with their intensity before finally flopping against the back of the couch and sighing heavily.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he says, ignoring my question completely, though I would never push him on it. “I sometimes have nightmares and, as it would seem, I talk in my sleep.”

“You were shouting, Warren, screaming in fact,” I tell him softly, still unsure of how open I can be in front of this huge assassin, one who was meant to kill me. And yet, I can see this is not who he really is; he’s still that scared little boy caught in the fire. “There’s no need to apologize for it, I was just worried, that’s all.”

“You don’t need to worry about me, Jessie,” he says, almost with a bitter edge to his voice, “I can take care of myself, been doing so since I was seven.”

“That’s a little sad,” I reply, to which he looks at me with a condescending sort of smirk on his face, one that’s meant to antagonize. It’s all a front though, a ruse to keep others from thinking there is anything deeper than the fa?ade of being a cold-blooded killer.

“You know more than anyone that life can be very sad, so why are you surprised? Do you think you’re the only one with demons in their past?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend,” I mutter and open his sister’s book to try and put an end to the conversation. I listen as he gets to his feet and expect him to walk away, but when I sense the shadow of his body fall over me, I reluctantly look back up to see him watching me, his arms folded, and his muscles tense.

“It’s me who should be apologizing,” he whispers sadly, “I’ll see you later.”

He grabs hold of a shirt and throws it over his head while walking through into the bar. I look back down to my book before I see him leave altogether, desperate to fall into a life that isn’t mine.

“Jessie?” he calls back, so I look up. “Do you want to go out today? I can take you on the bike if you like.”

“No thank you,” I reply, to which he frowns for a moment or two, but then seems to accept it with a small head shake. He leaves and I fall back into fiction; into a world that cannot hurt me.

If I’m inside, he can’t get me. If I stay hidden, I’m safe.

_____

Phoenix

The bar is full, the music is loud, and my beer is going down just a little too easily. At least I’m not working tonight, just sitting in one of the booths with Javier and his new squeeze. It won’t last longer than a few weeks, no matter how long she’d like it too. They never last long, he’s too hung up on somebody else, somebody he can’t have because she’s his best friend’s sister, his brother’s ex-girlfriend, and who is also married to a much better guy than either one of us. In fact, I would hazard a guess he cuts things short before she can develop any real feelings for him. The poor bastard’s doomed to walk alone until he finally manages to get Lou out of his head; the sooner the better.

Lisa, the current girl on his arm, is nice enough, much better to talk to than any of his past conquests, but she’s not his type at all. She’s far too dominant, too tom-boyish for his tastes and will no doubt grow tired of his commitment to his business anyway. She offers little affection but provides him with a good chuckle and someone to blow off steam with. Unfortunately, men like Javier and me are always desperately seeking out affection from someone, even if our persona, our body language, and our general stereotyped reputations, say otherwise. Both of us lost our parents young, so we both crave that missing bond with someone special, someone neither one of us has managed to find and keep yet. Though, perhaps it isn’t fair for men like us to fall in love, to inflict our kind of life on another.

“How was Mexico?” I ask, being that it’s the first time he’s been here since he and Lisa went to visit a few of his family members down that way.

“Hot,” he chuckles, making me smile over his way of avoiding anything remotely sentimental in mixed company. He’s still heartbroken over his brother’s incarceration last year, not that he’d discuss it with me because it’s my sister who he hurt.

“You surprise me!” I tease back, slurping the last remnants of my fourth bottle of beer. I’m still waiting for some sort of numbing buzz from it, but I’m getting nothing.

“How was your…job?” he counters. “A woman, Phoenix? That’s not like you.”

“Nope,” I reply, popping the end of that word between my lips, not wishing to elaborate further, which only raises his suspicions.

“You didn’t do it did you?” He smirks.

“Nope,” I pop the word again.

“Going soft, ese?” He chuckles all the while Lisa proceeds to deal out another hand of cards for us to play with. “First Lou, now you.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I scoff.

“I mean, first she goes off to marry Mr Suburbia, a suit no less, and now you are turning down perfectly good, paid jobs, because the asshole happens to be a woman. You of all people know women can be just as lethal as a man, Phoenix. Remember Leah?”

I laugh softly, shaking my head because he’s referring to a girl I used to ‘see’, one who could get rather physical if she had had enough to drink and I had managed to piss her off enough, which was frequently given how many bruises she gave me. I never lay a finger on her because that’s not how my father raised me. In the end, I gave a good threat, one I would never follow through on, but it was enough to get her to leave and never come back.

“Leah was guilty of being lethal, yes, but this one wasn’t,” I shoulder shrug, “you know I don’t hurt innocents.”

“Did you see her?” he asks, frowning over the hand he’s been dealt, and then putting down a card that is of little interest to me.

“Yeah, I did my research,” I mutter as I put my own card down, “nothing special.”

“Uh- ha?” He grins with his teeth. “Cos the picture I saw of her would say otherwise, you lying sack of shit.”

“Each to their own.” I grin back at him because there’s no denying Jessie is my perfect type. In fact, she’s most people’s type once you get past her obvious issues. Though, the same could be said of someone like me. I’ve been blessed with good genes, and I know my parents were aesthetically attractive. But that’s just my outer layer. What’s inside is seriously messed up. “Who showed you the picture?”

“Jake,” he sighs, then pauses at me when I look utterly confused, “they have history, no?”

“Yes, but how the hell do you know about that? And when the hell did he have the chance to show you a picture of her?”

I throw my entire hand down on top of the table because I can tell I’m not going to like what he’s about to tell me; his expression says as much.

“He showed me when he hired me,” he replies nonchalantly and with a smile I’d like to smack, “to hire you…through a third party of course.”

“What.The.Fuck?!” I growl like a dog getting ready to rip someone’s throat out, so much so, that even Lisa stops what she’s doing and stares at me with a look of abject fear on her face. Javier, on the other hand, simply shrugs his shoulders, and then carefully places his cards back on top of the table. By this point, my hands are gripping hold of the table edge with such force, I might well crack the wood.

“You need to ask him, Phoenix,” he replies with his thick Spanish accent, one that is usually responsible for landing himself with his many female friends, including Lisa here. “I wasn’t privy to the details, just to make sure it was you who was hired to do the job.”

Without any other words, I leap up from the booth and shove my way through the crowd and toward the bar where I find the asshole himself, laughing and joking while serving up drinks to some of the usual patrons. He looks like he has nothing to worry about, so carefree. The sight of which has me standing there staring at him for a few minutes, trying to make some sort of sense of what Javier has just said to me. His reactions to her and what happened between them were so genuine, so real; there’s no way he would want her dead, is there? And why insist on it being me?

Anger is coursing through my veins at a dangerously fast rate of knots, and a massive headache is beginning to spread over my skull. With no clear path as to what to do first, I pinch the bridge of my nose and force myself out back, grabbing hold of my phone in the process. Jessie is not in the living room and given I haven’t seen her since I snapped at her this morning, I decide to go and check she’s in her room and not run away.

When I get inside of Lou’s old room, she’s not there, but I can hear the shower running in the bathroom, so I decide to wait until she comes out. I tell myself it’s for her safety, and not the fact that she’s already made this room smell of her or the rush of excitement I feel over the thought of seeing her in only a towel. When I perch on the edge of the bed, I hear crunching coming from underneath my ass, prompting me to shuffle back and pull away the cover.

There’s an assortment of paper underneath, all with pencil drawings, along with the pencils themselves. She must have found them in Lou’s old school stuff. Looking at them, I can already see she is a lot more talented than my sister ever was at drawing. Most of them are of dragons and caves, sometimes with her signature, sometimes labeled with the name ‘Stanley’. When I get to the last one, however, it takes my breath away; it’s not a dragon at all. It’s an intricate sketch of a phoenix rising from plumes of smoke and fire. It far outshines the work on my back; it outshines anything I’ve ever seen before. However, when I look more closely, I notice the raging flames morph into flowers, hundreds of tiny flowers.

“Sh-shit!” she yells, making me jump out of my skin which sends the drawings flying all over the floor. She’s wrapped in nothing more than a robe with dripping wet hair and a horrified expression. She’s trembling and clutching hold of her chest as she heaves in and out for breath she doesn’t appear to have.

“Christ, sorry, I was just checking…” I try to rush out, but she merely shuts her eyes and shakes her head, still breathing rapidly.

I step up to reach her and she flinches a little in my grip, but then lets me pull her against my chest so I can rub her back in calming circles. After a few minutes of us standing like this, her breathing calms down and she stops trembling, but, for reasons unknown, I don’t let go. Not that she’s fighting me on this. In fact, she feels like she needs me just as much as I need her in this moment.

Her hair smells like coconut from Lou’s shampoo, her pale white complexion contrasts with my tanned one, and her skin is smooth, all over. Apart from when I brush my hand against her shoulder where I feel a line of rough skin, all bumpy beneath my fingertips. Only when I touch this scar does she back away from me. Her mossy green eyes stare back at mine, mine which are searching for answers she’s reluctant to give.

“Did he do that?” I ask, looking at her shoulder where there is a two-inch scar marring her otherwise perfect skin.

“No,” she replies.

“Will you tell me how you got it?” I ask brazenly. She looks down to her feet before looking back at me with what looks like some courage in her eyes.

“I-if I do, will you tell me something?” she ventures, trying to stand tall before me. I like her standing up for herself, trying to show the strength she doesn’t know she has, so I smile and agree with one nod of my head.

“Ladies first,” I reply with a gesture for her to begin.

“When Jake and I escaped, I caught my shoulder on the door frame,” she explains, “it hurt like hell, but we didn’t exactly hang around to tend to it properly. We weren’t even sure if he was dead or alive but didn’t want to risk it if he wasn’t.”

“Where’d you leave him?” I ask, not knowing the details because Jake simply said he had died from prostate cancer when he returned. Lou and I never thought to question him any further on it.

“In the basement,” she murmurs, fidgeting with the sleeve of her oversized robe. Lou is petite, but Jessie is practically half-starved. “Where he had kept us for six years. Occasionally, he’d let us outside to walk around in the woods, but he always had a gun kept on him so we couldn’t wander far. Jake used to joke about us getting rickets.” She laughs as though it could turn to crying at any moment. “He used to threaten us with getting to our families if we ever tried to leave him. My parents and…you and your sister.”

“Jesus!” I hiss through my teeth, seething with rage. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like, to live that way for six years. No wonder you sleep so much, you must be exhausted.”

She perches on the side of the bed, using her hand to move some of the pencils out the way, clearing a space for me to sit beside her. I cautiously make my way to take up what she has offered, because from what I’ve read, Jessie’s never opened up to anyone before now. All past psychologists have noted that she remained monosyllabic during therapy sessions, whereas police reports were factual, nothing more. She never contacted her friend, Tammy, when she got back, the one who was taken with her, and her parents told therapists that they failed to rebuild any sort of meaningful relationship with her. In fact, for all I know, she never left her house until I took her.

“Who’s this?” I ask, gesturing to the dragon. “Who’s Stanley?”

“There’s an old folk story from where I live, about a dragon who lives in one of the caves on the beach,” she says with a smile. She looks at him as if he’s a short reprieve from reality, a fictional beast that allows her to get safely lost in the nostalgia of her childhood, before all of this happened to her. “Legend says that if you find one of his scales, he’ll grant you a wish. His name is Stanley, and he’s incredibly shy. If you wish to see him, he’ll send you a letter telling you how he had tried to show himself but got too scared. He fears people will stop coming to find his scales.”

“Ah,” I laugh with her, “your mom got very inventive then.”

“I guess she had to, being I was that irritating kid who had to wish for the impossible,” she says with a smile that is beautiful because it’s real. A genuinely real smile from the girl who is still very much lost. I smile back at her, and something seems to pass between us, something that feels remarkably like trust.

“Stanley reminds me of someone,” I whisper, “someone who wants to remain hidden because she’s too frightened to be seen. She’s also scared of finding out who she really is. Must be lonely, Jessie.”

“It is,” she whispers back, “but then you would know all about that wouldn’t you, Warren?”

“Touche,” I reply with a grin.

“So now it’s my turn to ask you, Phoenix,” she says, sounding confident but averting her eyes at the same time.

“That it is,” I reply, hoping my tone encourages her to speak freely.

“Why a phoenix?”

I have to smile because it’s the obvious question for anyone who doesn’t know my story.

“When I was seven, someone petrol-bombed our house. Dad was away and Mom was sleeping in the room next to mine and Lou’s. I was the only one who woke up when the fire was underway, and I remember thinking something wasn’t right, so I took Lou into Mom’s room and did everything I could to wake her. She tied Lou, who was only about one, to my chest with the belt of her robe and told me to get Lou out, that she would follow behind.” I pause to release a soft laugh into my hands, even though the memory is anything but funny. “I even asked her to bring my baby blanket with her. She said she would, even though she knew she wasn’t getting out. I crawled out of that burning house only to have it explode with her still inside of it.”

I stare at my hands, waiting for her to say something, but the silence that follows becomes almost deafening. When I finally look back up at her, her eyes are closed, and tears are running freely down her face. It’s so heartbreaking to see, I can’t help but cup her cheek with my hand and brush the tears away, making her gasp and look at me in such a way, I feel vulnerable, as if entirely at her mercy.

“They said I was the phoenix rising from the ashes,” I eventually continue, “that I was a little superhero who rescued his sister. But I’m no hero, Jessie, because most of the time, I’m just as lost as you are.”

I lean in and kiss her on her plump, red lips that taste salty from tears, all the while pressing my other hand against her right cheek. At first, she tenses up, but she doesn’t stop me, and neither does she open her eyes. As I continue, she eventually places her hand on my bicep and kisses me back. It’s soft but so intoxicatingly comforting, I feel like I could do this for the rest of the night and not want a single thing more from her. But then…then she moans, and when she does, I want so much more from her, more than I’m willing to take, not a second time, not like this.

“Why are you stopping?” she asks when I pull back, keeping my hands on her face because I crave the contact.

“Because I should never have slept with you that night,” I reply ashamedly. “You deserved better than that for your first time, Jessie.”

“I deserved a lot of things, Warren,” she counters, “and so did you.”

I sigh, shaking my head over it all because essentially, Jessie and I are both as messed up as each other, and worse still, my cousin, her brother as far as she’s concerned, hired me to kill her. I press my palms into my eyes and rub at them while jumping to my feet before I can fall into anything else. I march to the door as quickly as I can and grab hold of the doorknob, but her gentle, sad sigh has me turning back to face her. An epic mistake because when I see her tiny figure wrapped up inside of that robe, looking beyond hurt and embarrassed, I feel like a bigger asshole than I already did.

“Jess, I…” I begin but then stop myself, clenching my teeth in frustration. With a sigh of my own, I leave before I can do or say anything else to make this situation even worse.