Page 76 of Bizarre Bonds
I swipe at my eyes. “It’s my fault. I made her want to destroy things even more.”
27
Periwinkle
Footsteps crunch through the gravel next to the trailer I’m huddled under.
A wry voice carries into the thicker darkness. “Do you want to come out and talk about it, Peri, or would you rather I pretend I can’t tell you’re hiding in the shadows.”
It’s Sorsha. The phoenix shifter helped us a little in handling the first weird rift we found, but I don’t know what she can do about this. I couldn’t even get her in a position to tackle Viscera with her fiery powers.
On the other hand, when she says it like that, I do feel kind of ridiculous staying tucked away under here.
The men I marked are spread out through our fake movie set, pulsing concern and their own flavors of guilt, as ifthey’vedone anything wrong. How could they have when they didn’t even get close enough to Viscera to invite her to dinner, let alone capture her?
I don’t know what to say to any of them. I’m not sure I want to hear what they’d say to me.
And while I’m shying from my failure, Viscera might be turning yet another part of the city into her violent version of vigilante art.
Talking to Sorsha definitely couldn’thurt, could it?
Shaking off my reluctance, I emerge from the low crawl space and the shadows one after the other.
Sorsha looks me over, taking in my now standard outfit of leather jacket and vividly colored dress, the twist of my mouth, and my drooping head where my hair flickers shades of bruise-purple and sickly yellow into the dusk.
“What do you want to talk about?” I ask, as if I don’t know.
Can ignorance still be bliss if it’s feigned? It seemed worth a try.
She cocks her head with a swish of her bright red ponytail and motions to me. “Let’s take a walk. Sometimes it’s easier to think when your legs are moving to get your mind moving too.”
I haven’t heard that theory before, but it sounds reasonable. And I’m relieved that she walks onto the field in the direction away from the trailers rather than toward the men I’ve been avoiding.
“From what I’ve gathered, this isn’t the first time your powers have gotten away from you and had a negative effect,” Sorsha says after a moment.
My grimace deepens. “No. But I thought I’d gotten so much better at controlling that part of my nature. I don’t know why it happens in the first place, and then— It wassoimportant that I keep Viscera there and calm… and I still couldn’t do it.”
“It wasn’t all on you, though. No one managed to catch her.”
“I was the one the plan depended on. And…” I swallow hard. “It all comes down to me. My powers connected me to the rest of my team, and all those bonds do is mess us up. It’s like… likethe shadowkind creatures we saw that merged into each other when they warped. They couldn’t function properly because they were tripping over each other, and they couldn’t pull themselves apart…”
So Hail had to put them out of their misery.
“And I wanted to stop Viscera so badly that I made her even more eager to break the city,” I finish. “One more way I threw everything out of whack.”
Sorsha hums to herself. She extends her hand palm up, and a flame flares into being above her skin. “Did I ever tell you about the time I nearly burned up the entire world?”
I stare at her. “No. Why would you do that?”
I don’t remember reading anything about the phoenix in the records about problems between shadowkind and humans… but Rollick does seem to be friends with Sorsha, as much as the formidable demon has friends. Maybe certain details got strategically left out of the shadowkind history books to protect those who’d be implicated.
She laughs, the sound as dry as the air. “I didn’t exactlywantto. Not really. But that’s what phoenixes are meant to do—flame out and be reborn. And when you’re a rare, unstable, unprecedented hybrid human-shadowkind who’s also a phoenix, it turns out you could be powerful enough to take an awful lot of what’s around you down with you. Unfortunately, the rest of the world wouldn’t automatically rejuvenate.”
I try to picture the smiling, upbeat woman beside me hurling destructive fire at everything around us. My brain cannot process the image. I’ll just have to take her at her word.
“But you didn’t,” I say.
“Obviously, or this place would look a lot more charbroiled. But here’s the thing: you didn’t burn down the whole world either.”
