Thierry had once mentioned that resurrection was a rumored phoenix shifter power, hadn’t he?
“Of all of the most powerful and fearful shifters—werewolves, basilisks, dragons—only one species has ever been able to move through time, to emit the power of a nuclear explosion, to come back from the dead, to raise the dead. Because the Gods did have a favorite creation. A favorite shifter. Phoenixes. You, Nix.”
“You think you have power?” Nix looked right at Kellan. “You think you can treat me like the same weak, poisoned little girl you kept as a pet? You think you can rule me?”
Sarasa gasped for breath as her body went from deathly pale to rosy pink. She cupped her neck, where her murderer had strangled her, tipped her head back, and screamed.
Staring down Kellan, Nix whispered over the scream, “You have no fucking idea what I’m capable of.”
But instead of appearing afraid, he smiled.
And a blade sliced into Nix’s spine.
“Fucking Evernell,” Bael cursed as he woke, in pain, for the first time in years. Very little could make the demon hurt. He rubbed the side of his neck where a dart had pierced and injected him.
Male groans echoed around Bael as the other men awoke, flat on their backs.
“Whatever we got shot with was laced with the stuff,” Persius said, rubbing at his chest where he was also shot with a dart earlier.
“We should have been more vigilant,” Thierry muttered gruffly, laying on his back like the others.
“Uh, I was a little distracted by my mate literallyraising the dead,” Bael replied dramatically. “I felt Hell shake, Stoney. What she did was…”
“Incredible.”
“Extraordinary.”
“Unnatural.”
“I can hear you,” Nix grumbled as she leaned up against the wall that stood between her and her mates.
She laid inside what appeared to be a jail cell. Her mates’ voices flowed clearly from the right side of the wall, past the iron bars caging her. Their homey scents gave them away before their voices did.
Nix had awoken a few minutes before the others, but the effects of the poison still lingered. She felt weak and…dizzy.
She rubbed her eyes and tried to blink away the blurry, dazed fog that consumed her.
Some unknown period of time ago, she had been consumed in flame, high on power, then stabbed literally in the back with a poison-coated blade of some sort. Then, she was dragged to some kind of prison with her mates.
Fucking Evernell.
What was most surprising, however, was that Nix’s back wound still bled and stung. Why weren’t her shifter healing abilities kicking in? As the Evernell weakened in her system, she should have felt herself growing stronger.
“Where are you?” Persius asked, struggling to sit up as the poison effects lingered.
“In the cell beside you all,” Nix said bitterly.
“Why do I smell…” one of her mates started.
Ryker jammed a large fist onto the cement floor, rumbling the ground where they laid, and growled, “MATE.”
She could imagine her dragon shifter’s instant rage at the scent of her blood and not being able to touch, comfort, or help her.
“I—I’m okay. I’m just, well, bleeding. A lot.” Nix swallowed her rising dread as she ran her fingers over the wet stab wound at her back.
“Bleeding?”
“You do not feel yourself healing?” Thierry tried to lean up off the cement floor. All of the men were weakly trying to sit up from their laying positions.
