Chapter 28
“I…” She flexed her pinkie finger again. Come on.
She closed her eyes and imagined the feeling of her warm flames covering her arms. Covering all of her.
She summoned the rage at being back in her cage. Because of them.
Her mates wanted to lessen her powers. Because they were afraid of her abilities? Or because they were afraid of what she would go on to do without the alpha males? Were they afraid of what would happen when she did not need their protection?
It was time to see the real damage her phoenix genes could do.
She opened her eyes. FIRE.
Flames burst from her arms, over her back, legs, and hair.
“Ahhh,” Lemmuns wailed in surprise and pain, clutching his burned hands as he pulled back from the cage.
On fire, the blue powder’s numbing agent seemed to burn away instantly.
Nix pushed herself up and spun around to face him. She reached between the bars, grabbed his throat, and pulled him back to the cage. He pressed against the bars and breathed heavily as he gaped at her.
“The powder should have kept you down for another—”
“I’m going to kill you.” Wrath ruling her, she yanked him forward, banging him into the metal bars again and again. Flames danced up her hands and burned at his skin and white lab coat.
“Stop,” Lemmuns choked.
“Were there others?” Nix asked him. “Was I special?”
BANG, BANG, BANG.
She threw him down to the ground and grabbed his ankle. She pulled his leg into the cage with her until his crotch slammed into the metal bars.
“I’ll take this,” she said as she grabbed his scalpel. She pressed the blade to his crotch, right over his dick. “How many people have you used this on? How many girls have you kept in cages?”
“Gods!” Lemmuns sounded too stunned to respond.
“You think you are so powerful. But with a blade to your dick, you can hardly remember how to speak.”
“Please!”
“Would you like to know what you did when I told you I would kill you someday?”
Lemmuns struggled to breathe.
She answered for him, “You laughed.”
She stabbed, and he screamed.
His screams sounded like hers from the past. Shrill and helpless. Years of pain.
Her vision blurred as she stabbed.
And she didn’t stop.
“Fuck you,” she growled at him through tears as her back bled behind her, her wings featuring several raw, bald spots from the feathers he took.
Stab, stab. Flames continued to singe his skin as she drew more and more of his blood with the scalpel.
Sobs wracked her as she realized this moment was the entirety of her goal for her second life. What was she supposed to live for now? During years of torture, this was all she wanted. She had begged the gods for a chance for this and only this.
“You will never hurt anyone again. You will never fucking touch Persius.” She leaned forward and jammed the scalpel into his chest. “FUCK. YOU.”
She let him go, fell back into the cage, and breathed heavily. Having had her blouse cut from her, her chest was now covered in the red splatters of Lemmun’s blood. Her fire burned away her skirt as well.
Naked once more. Scarlet flames and crimson blood warmed her. A phoenix from the ashes. She felt reborn.
Lemmuns’s body lit completely on fire, disintegrating to ash, leaving only his skeleton and scalpel.
All the pain he caused me… Nix thought darkly to herself. And he’s just a…man.
Turned to ashes by her.
Her flames jumped from his corpse and ran over the flooring, leaving soot and dark burn marks in the fire’s path.
Is this the power they feared? The power her mates would rather Nix not have?
Will men always prefer us to be weak and powerless in comparison?
Well…fuck them.
A maniacal laugh caught in her throat and rang out. She cackled as she clapped her hands and lit the entire underground basement with flames.
BURN.
Everything needed to burn.
That was how she started over.
Next, she would burn Kellan Oadess. The man who had most likely killed her parents and kept her caged and used for experiments in her grim future.
Not in this life. She was going to change it all. All. By. Herself.
She laid back and moved her arms and legs up and down like she made a snow angel, but instead of a beautiful icy masterpiece, she was slowly turning the underground basement’s infrastructure into dust.
Finally, growing bored, Nix stood and narrowed her eyes on the cage bars. The flames coating them turned white-hot and burned so scorchingly, that Nix walked through the melting bars as they contorted and dripped. She ignored the sting when the liquid metal touched her skin.
The roof cracked as black smoke filled the room. Soil rained down from the splitting ceilings of the underground bunker.
She would not leave until the room was buried in the dirt above. Until no one could ever enter it again.
No one will ever know torment in this place the way I did.
BURN.
“Shit…” Bael whispered as he and Ryker flew toward the billows of black smoke coming from the edge of campus, where Nix was being hidden. “They were supposed to keep a low profile.”
Was she okay? Had she started the fire?
Damn, they were lucky that clouds hid the moonlight, keeping the noticeable smoke from being well illuminated in the dark.
“Nix!” Bael shouted, swooping down and retracting his wings when he dropped to the ground close to the smoke. “Where the hell are Stoney and Pers?”
Ryker landed beside him, leaving his large, scaled wings open as he roared. He swung his wings down, pushing some of the smoke aside. “Fire is…from underground.”
“Fuck, the bunker cell is old. It won’t survive any—”
The ground shook under the men’s feet. Bael gaped. Alphas with fully shifted wings were heavy motherfuckers; yet, the trembling of the ground was powerful enough to cause Bael and Ryker to wobble.
The two most dangerous shifters at Alatus Academy were stumbling to find their footing and balance over the formidable quaking earth.
It felt like Hell was about to open up beneath them. This level of power…
There were rumors amongst the other demons that a dark, powerful force would emerge in the next few years. Was that…Nix?
“What’s happening?” a familiar voice yelled just before Thierry swooped down a few feet away from the others. Persius arrived from the opposite direction.
“The fuck?” Bael demanded answers. “You left her? She is down there alone?”
The smoke darkened in color as it wafted up from the singed grass.
Phoenix rising from the ashes.
But Nix would not survive as the cement-and-metal bunker walls collapsed onto her. She had not aged into immortality yet. She could die. “We’ve got to get to her before—”
“Collapse,” Ryker anxiously bellowed.
The ground sank deeper beneath them as a female scream broke out.
“Nix!” Bael yelled and threw himself to where the old bunker door had concaved into the ground. The other men joined him within seconds.
On their knees, the four alphas ferociously clawed at the dirt to get to her.
“I will fucking kill all of you if she dies,” Bael promised. “You will all spend the rest of your immortal days tortured in Hell.”
“We left her with the new potions professor; she should have been safe—”
The ground shook and crumbled beneath them, right above where the bunker was.
“MATE,” Ryker roared as he tore up large chunks of earth even as the cracks in the ground sucked more soil beneath them than they could scoop away.
“She cannot survive being buried alive,” Thierry remarked, tone cold and withdrawn.
“You just had to fear her power,” Bael shot back sarcastically. His expression spewed his obvious disgust. “You had to lock her up like some kind of—”
“It was for everyone’s safety!”
Bael bellowed, “FUCK EVERYONE BUT HER—”
The ground fell from beneath them.