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I want to ask her about it, but this is neither the time nor the place.
“Finally decided to grace us with your presence?” Evan asks with a snarky little smile. “I thought I was going to have to send out a search party. And by search party, I mean your personal guard dog.”
Rude. After a century-plus of us being BFFs, Evan has tried to get me to forgive Rhys about three billion and one times. She would love to lock us in a room together and throw away the key. I’d likely end up killing him, which would temporarily end up killing both of us. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Phoenix bondings are stupid.
I hate that I wonder if he’s okay. I loathe that I worry that he’s not happy, if he’s in the same Hell as I am. If he regrets what happened to us. But more? I hate that the bond makes me care at all—makes me want to give in to the love of a man I should detest.
Picking up a plate, I slide a few of the cucumber cups onto it before moving to the pancetta.
“Below the belt, Evangeline,” I mutter, sending her a healthy dose of side-eye. “Give me time to inhale some of these goodies before you start in on me.”
Using her given name makes her eye twitch, which was the intended goal. If she’s going to hit me where it hurts, I’ll do the same to her. She purses her red-painted lips, undoubtedly deciding if yelling at me in this room full of people would be worth the ass-kicking she’d get later.
“You’ve sold four already,” she offers, diverting from the thorny Rhys talk. “Simone is wheedling with two others for the dollhouse painting. I think that one is going to start a bidding war in a minute.”
Nodding, I stuff a morsel in my mouth—whole—and chew. I don’t really care how much the paintings sell for—I only want them gone. All of them—every single one—is a depiction of how someone died, an artistic rendering of the deaths that stayed with me long after I opened my eyes. The dollhouse is my least favorite, and I’ll be glad to see it go.
“Here,” she says, offering me a small cut crystal whiskey glass.
Gratefully, I accept it and take a healthy swig, allowing the burn of the alcohol to warm me. Yeah, it’s July, but staring at these paintings make me shiver.
Suddenly, I yank Evan behind the cover of a steel column, pushing her little body in between the edges of the I-beam, unable to articulate the pictures that just rolled across my brain in enough time.
“What—” Evan squawks before the ping-ping-ping of bullets hit the metal.
Screams erupt around us, the crowd stampeding to the exits, and I wonder if I have enough cover to get Evan behind the snack table.
“When I say ‘go,’ you flip that table over and get behind it,” I order, staring Evan down.
She nods, pressing her lips together so hard they turn white around the edges.
The images in my brain tell me there are two phoenixes—soldiers to be exact. Great. I slide out from the cover of the I-beam, pull the gun from my spine holster, and yell for Evan to go, before the soldier in front of me even has time to blink. Wasting five shots on his vest, I quickly realize he’s wearing body armor before he starts returning fire.
Taking off into a run, I move in between two free-standing walls that wouldn’t stop a BB gun, and keep moving to the next I-beam. But I can’t stay here much longer. The other soldier skirts around the periphery of the room, ready to corner me. I’m being herded.
Fantastic.
Moans of pain reach my ears, and it’s all I can do to swallow down my tears as I attempt to block them out. Focusing on the heavy footfalls, I try to gauge their position. Reaching up, I pull one of my hair sticks from the bun and throw it like a missile. I enjoy the girly scream coming from a man’s mouth—more than I can possibly say—as the thin rod of metal embeds into his eye. Grabbing three more, I toss a few into the shoulder of his compatriot before giving him a matching skewer in his other eye.
Above everything—the moans of pain from patrons caught in the crossfire, the sound of a gun being reloaded, the screeching of the phoenix who’ll have to regrow his eyes—I hear the whimpers of my best friend.
Shit.
Evan is softer than I am, and not that she can’t handle herself—she can—but she hasn’t seen the things I have. She hasn’t endured. And she can’t be around the death coming for us without phasing—something she shouldn’t ever do in public.
If I phase, I look like an angel. Evan, however, resembles something out of a nightmare.
Avoiding the perimeter of the room, I manage to circle back to her, practically doing a baseball slide to dodge the bullets aimed for my head as I make it back to cover. After a second of inspection, I realize all too quickly from the hallmarks of blackened eyes and inch-long fangs that Evan is about a nanosecond from losing it.
“Get out of here,” I insist, reloading my Glock as I desperately try not to succumb to the fire that begs to explode from my skin.
My best friend isn’t like other wraiths, and that fact is made all too apparent when pieces of the floor start abrading away beneath her. I’ve seen her level an entire city once—by accident—over a century ago. Granted, her control has grown exponentially since then, but I’m not eager to push it.
Evangeline doesn’t acknowledge me at all, lost in bloodlust or fear or something I can’t name. Despite my unwillingness to hurt her, I can’t have a repeat of San Francisco. My free hand cracks across her face, and the inky quality to her wraith eyes slowly bleed back to human.
She sucks in a breath, shaking herself back to sanity.
