Awakened Abyss (Firebird Uncaged Book 2) Read online

  “He’s breathing just fine,” Miriam said as she produced a handful of healing squishies.

  I looked away, the sight of that blue jelly bringing back memories of when I’d been high out of my mind on it. I hadn’t let her put any on my sides, even though she’d tried when she saw the blood dripping from beneath my jacket.

  When Miriam clapped her hands, I looked back to see little bits of squishy in various places on Adrian’s head, his temples, his throat, behind the ears . . . Then she tore open his shirt, popping the buttons off to reveal his bare chest, all hard muscle and alabaster skin shining with sweat.

  I looked away again, heart pounding, trying to banish the sudden urge to run my lips over those muscles. After everything that had just happened, the thought sent an aching lump into my throat.

  I was trying to swallow it down when Miriam threw the shirt at me, still warm. “You need to at least stop the bleeding,” she said, then scrunched her nose at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, clearing my throat.

  I tore Adrian’s shirt in half and wrapped both pieces around my waist, trying to achieve even pressure over the wounds. Miriam was right. If I let myself lose too much blood again, I’d be even more useless than if I let her make me loopy with those squishies.

  “Can you help me move him?” I asked. “We can’t wait around here for him to wake up.”

  “Mmm hmm,” she said. “But not up that ladder. I have my limits, you know.”

  “Let’s just get him to the entrance. It’s dark; he’ll be hidden in case any more vampires come through.”

  Miriam nodded, but not without letting out a huff of reluctance as she slipped off her shoes.

  We were both panting by the end of it, as we tried to put him down gently against the crumbling brick wall without hitting his head again.

  “Why are humans so dense?” Miriam whined, leaning her forehead against the wall as she caught her breath. “He’s not even that big.”

  “I mean, he’s pretty damn big . . .” I said, then shook my head. Adrian was all muscle and Miriam was all jelly, so I shouldn’t be surprised by her complaints.

  “I’m not talking about his fuck stick,” Miriam said to me sternly.

  I grimaced, too taken aback to tell her that I hadn’t been talking about that either.

  “What?” she said. “Isn’t that what you call it these days?”

  “Come on,” I said, not willing to continue this conversation. “I need you to take me back to the club basement. You said there was a trap door somewhere?”

  Miriam grumbled a little as she hobbled back the way we’d come, her bare feet nearly slipping in the trail of blood I’d left from Simeon’s head. “Are you going to carry that thing with you everywhere?”

  “Only until I can burn it.”

  She slipped her shoes back on, red staining the pink suede where her feet touched the edges. “This way,” she said.

  We walked across the old train platform, eerie in its complete emptiness even though I was sure it would have been worse had the cages been full of prisoners. The unmoving escalator led us up to an area where passengers would have once stopped to put their tickets through machines, but now the tunnel leading up to the outside world was blocked by cement.

  Someone had closed this place intentionally, neatly. Once again, I wondered what its history was and how it had fallen into the hands of the vampires in hiding.

  But Miriam led me off to the side, to a service door that opened up to another ladder of rungs. This took us up to another sewer tunnel much like the first, except this one had a short ladder leading up to a trap door, just like Miriam had said.

  I set Simeon’s head carefully behind the bottom-most rung of the ladder, where it wouldn’t get swept away by water and should at least be safe for a little while.

  Then I climbed up and poked my head through the floor of the strip club’s basement, finding myself in the hallway near the door that led to the statue room. This must be where Gary and Simeon had come from when I’d heard their voices and had to hide quickly before.

  The hallway was empty, so I went ahead and climbed out, reaching back to give Miriam a hand.

  I patted my pockets as we approached the door to the statue room. Adrian still had my lockpick set. But as soon as I tried the door handle and found it locked, Miriam liquefied behind me and slid underneath the door.

  A moment later, she was opening it for me from the inside, looking every bit as perfect as she always did—except for the blood on her shoes.

  The smell hit me before anything else. That sweet, rotting stench seemed even stronger than it had before. I gagged as flies buzzed around my head, skin crawling almost as much as it had at Simeon’s touch.

  The statue stood before us in the center of the room, still covered in honey that was shiny in some places and crystallized in others. Gary was nowhere in sight, but the bowl clutched between the statue’s spiny clay fingers was filled with fresh blood.

  And this time, some of the blood was dripping out of the statue’s mouth, splashing into the full bowl. I stared at it for a few moments, expecting it to overflow, but it never did. Must be on some kind of magical loop, like a gory garden fountain.

  “Well?” Miriam asked. “What are we doing here?”

  “I need to destroy this thing.”

  I tried to remember what Adrian had said, that it might be some kind of golem. Smash it to pieces, I remembered that. What else?

  “Reversal,” I mumbled, stepping forward to get a closer look at the statue.

  There were symbols inscribed on its chest. Strange pictures. Some looked like animals, and some I couldn’t make sense of at all.

  I walked around the thing once to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, then pulled out my littlest knife and leaned in close, holding my breath.

  I wasn’t the greatest artist, but I hoped it would be the thought that would count. Underneath the symbols, I began to carve copies of them in the opposite order.

  Reversal.

  It seemed stupid and obvious and way too easy, but it was the only thing I could think of. If Adrian were conscious, he would probably have had a much better idea, but he’d gone and gotten himself knocked out by my ex-boyfriend, so honestly the imaginary version of him scolding me in my head could go fuck himself right now.

  So could the laughter that was trickling into my ears from the walls around me, growing louder with every stroke of my knife.

  I had to grip the statue with my left hand to brace myself in order to push the knife into the clay, and by the end of it my fingers were covered in the sticky, foul-smelling honey. Flies crawled over my hand as I stepped back to eye my handiwork, which seemed to have done nothing.

  But then the monstrous version of Noah I never wanted to see again flickered to life in front of me, its grotesque smile full of flies, its little perfect chubby hands reaching out for me.

  They passed right through me, stabbing me in the gut like ghostly icicles.

  I gasped, frozen in pain, vision blurring as skeletal faces and arms began to form in the walls around me. They stretched out towards me, and I felt myself somehow stretching out towards them, although I couldn’t be moving.

  It was only when I felt the energy in my scrye turn cold that I realized they were trying to take my soul.

  This must be what it felt like, then. For everyone who had gone mad. A monstrous child and his army of dead things all reaching into my body at once and rooting around while I stood helpless, violated, aware of parts of myself I’d never even acknowledged that would never belong to me fully now because these things were scratching them with their cold, bony fingers.

  I pulled back, bracing myself the only way I knew how even though I wasn’t sure it would do anything.

  My fingers twitched.

  Maybe.

  Hopefully.

  No, probably not. It was like I was made of clay, like the statue before me, and not flesh and blood and bones and nerve
s and magic.

  I could only watch myself float slowly away, inch by inch, as they dragged me out of my body and towards the walls.

  A crash halted everything.

  Then pain took over my world. Every nerve in my body screamed at me, like someone had injected acid into my veins and then thrown me over a bonfire. The agony flooded my senses so completely that it took what felt like an hour for me to realize it must mean I was back in my body.

  I hadn’t known what this felt like, but I knew what it looked like from my time in the healing clinic. It had been my job to guide loose souls back into their bodies, keeping dying patients alive just long enough for the other healers to save them. It was part of what had driven me to leave, the clear agony in the eyes of everyone whose soul I’d forced back into them.

  But none of those dying jerks had told me it would hurt this bad. Sure, maybe that was because they’d passed out from the pain and then I’d avoided them forever after, but still.

  I didn’t have the luxury of relinquishing consciousness right now. I wasn’t in a cushy bed surrounded by family and flowers and teddy bears—I was in a vampire dungeon with some kind of monster trying to kill me.

  Pushing at my senses, I tried to focus on anything outside my body.

  There wasn’t much. Something hard and cold against my back.

  Had I fallen down?

  Something soft touched my neck, easing the pain just slightly in that spot, which only made it feel worse everywhere else.

  Why couldn’t I see?

  Oh. Because my eyes were squeezed shut so hard that my cheeks were beginning to cramp.

  I did my best to crack them open. The thing touching my neck was attached to a blurry lump of pink and blond and rhinestones.

  “Miriam . . .” I might have croaked before focusing on what was behind her.

  A shattered mess of orange clay amid a pool of blood. Like the statue had been a water balloon she had popped.

  The lack of any immediate threat did me in before I could say or think anything else. Nothing to kill, nothing to fight, nothing to fucking stay conscious for.

  One more blink and I was gone.

  Soft drips of cool liquid landed on my forehead as bright lights assaulted my brain. I would have shut my eyes if they weren’t shut already.

  “I can call a car for you, ma’am,” someone said in a gruff voice.

  I worked my jaw, trying to take enough control of my mouth to ask who the fuck was talking to me when another voice replied, “No, thank you. We’ll be just fine. Our friend is on the way.”

  Heavy footsteps walked away while others passed in front of me with light giggles and chatter, cars beeping and heels clicking and tires squealing.

  I managed to crack my eyes open.

  Blinking, I recognized the street just outside of Soma’s club. I was sitting propped up against the wall near the entrance, out in the open for anyone to see.

  Panic raced through me for a moment before my spent body quickly shut down any thoughts I might have had of moving.

  I groaned in frustration. Gary was still out there, and he would have me killed in a heartbeat if he saw me here in this helpless state.

  Not to mention that Soma himself probably had me on a kill list, too, after what I’d pulled when I was supposed to be working for him. Sure, he might thank me and be my friend for life if he knew I had just stopped his old rival from trying to use an ancient god to overthrow him and all the other vampire elders . . . but he didn’t know that, and I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t ask.

  Miriam’s face dropped in front of mine as she leaned over, her lips pursed.

  “Can you walk?” she asked.

  Oof. What a question.

  “What happened?” I countered.

  She sighed, hands moving to her hips. “I dragged you into the bathroom, cleaned the blood off, and then asked a bouncer for help carrying my drunk friend.” Twisting her mouth into a smirk, she added, “It helped that you’re not really wearing a shirt. You look a bit worse for wear, but it is the middle of the night.”

  “Before that,” I said.

  She shrugged. “You said you needed to destroy the statue, but then you started carving pictures into it. Then you just stood there for ages. I tried to talk to you, but it was like you couldn’t hear me. So I did it myself. Smashed the thing, and then . . .” She waved her hand at me. “You were out.”

  I leaned my head back and knocked it against the wall, wincing when it hit the same spot that had been hurt in my fight with one of the zombie vampires. That small pain was a good sign, though. My noticing it meant the other pain was diminished, the soul-traveling pain that had set fire to every nerve in my body at once. That it hadn’t lingered was a small blessing.

  “We need to get away from here,” I said, and then something Miriam had mentioned clicked in my brain. My arms felt like lead as I lifted them to my chest, patting the bare skin peeking through from under my jacket.

  I wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  The panic did a better job of lighting my insides this time, my head starting to feel clearer and limbs starting to feel less like stone as I remembered why I wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  “Yes, I know,” Miriam was saying. “Hence the question of can you wal—”

  “Where’s the head?” I snapped.

  She made an exasperated noise. “Where you left it, I imagine. I wasn’t going to bring that into the club.” In a mocking high-pitched voice, she continued, “Ohhh, sir, can you help me please? My friend is so drunk she decapitated someone. Isn’t that funny?”

  Damn. “I need to go back to get it,” I said, but then I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket.

  Remembering that I hadn’t had service the entire time I’d been underground, I pulled it out and glanced at the screen. I half expected to see some snarky text from Dirk making fun of me for needing his flamethrower after all.

  Instead, the screen was filled with notifications from Ray.

  Missed calls, voice mails, and one text message. I opened it.

  The kids are missing.

  No, I thought. We found them. I looked up at Miriam. “What did you do with the kids we saved?”

  “Brought them to the nearest police station. They’ll be fine.”

  I narrowed my eyes at the phone. I was missing something. I read it again.

  The kids are missing.

  The kids. Ray didn’t even know about the missing kids I’d been after, so—

  Noah and Carina.

  “Fuck.”

  “What is it now?” Miriam crossed her arms, looking for all the world like she was trying to put to bed a child who had just eaten a whole bucketload of candy.

  “Noah and Carina are missing.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “They were after her—Carina. The same things that just knocked me on my ass. They were trying to take my soul, like they did to all your murder-spree perps. If that happens to her . . .”

  Miriam clicked her tongue. “How much damage can a little girl do?” she asked, and I would have laughed if the reality weren’t so sickening.

  “She’s a dragon,” I said.

  “Ah, that’s right. Well—”

  “I have to go after her. Can you go back and get the head for me?”

  Miriam raised her eyebrows.

  “You should probably check on Adrian too,” I said. “I can’t . . .” I shook my head. If Noah had gone missing with Carina, then his life was in danger as much as hers. Maybe more. I couldn’t do anything except go after them.

  “Of course,” Miriam said. “Just . . .” She brought up her hand and produced another pink mind-reading squishy like the one she’d taken off me earlier in the night. “Don’t do anything private,” she said as she stuck it on my neck.

  “I won’t.” I assumed that by private she meant sexual. But even if Adrian wasn’t lying unconscious underground right now, I wasn’t going to be giving in to that temptation again anytime soon.
r />   Miriam shivered, a twisted frown on her face. “Don’t think about that,” she said, and I realized I’d been remembering the moment she’d interrupted earlier in the night. “I don’t want to think about him like that.”

  “Honestly, neither do I,” I said as I managed to stand on wobbly legs.

  The look she gave me told me she didn’t believe me at all.

  I gave her a nod and then called Ray as I headed towards the Metro. There was no avoiding it now. I had to assume the things had gotten to Carina before Miriam had smashed the statue—and I had to hope that meant there was no more danger of them stealing my soul now that it was smashed.

  If I was wrong about that, I was probably fucked no matter what.

  The phone rang in my ear while I turned the corner of the club, and I paused as I caught sight of the alley where Adrian and I had waited for Miriam outside the basement window. The crates were still stacked up where he’d left them, and I couldn’t resist walking over to see if the vampire was still there.

  If she was, I would kill her. She had come at me with ice magic, which meant she was probably working with Simeon and his god. At this point, leaving her alive was a risk I wasn’t willing to take, regardless of what Adrian thought.

  I pulled out my neck-slicing knife as I stepped over to the crates, the phone still ringing.

  Tensing, I readied myself to deliver the blow before rounding the corner.

  But when I got behind the crates, there was nothing on the ground besides gravel and blood.

  “Fuck,” I said as the phone clicked in my ear.

  “What the hell took you so long?” Ray snapped at me over the line.

  “No signal,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Everything was fine until her mother called and told us she would be arriving early. Carina was so excited . . . I told her not to, but she went into the basement to get a piece of glass she’d been saving as a gift. Noah must have gone with her, and when they didn’t come back up again . . .”

  I groaned. That girl was so fucking reckless. I had told her specifically to stay out of the basement, and she’d been scared enough the last time I’d seen her that I’d naively thought she would listen. But she was still just a kid, as much as she tried hard to make me forget that, and I couldn’t fault her for being excited to see her mom.