words sharper than usual. “You take a decade off my life every time you blow through that door and I don’t know you’re still here.”
“You’d have been wise to pay more attention over the last three months,” he groused. Stopping at the obscured door tucked around a blind corner, he pulled a set of keys and rifled through them. “Seeing as I live here, it shouldn’t shock you so that I come from the kitchen to go upstairs every night.”
“Smart-ass. It’s not that you emerge from the kitchen, it’s that you do so like a Pamplonian bull with the gleam of death in his eye. I’m never sure whether to run or...run.” She shrugged and grinned.
He grunted, the sound as close to a laugh as he ever issued. “Beyond your impromptu Riverdance, I both saw and heard you toyed with Gareth Brennan tonight.”
Her mouth worked like a landed trout’s—open, close...open, close—before she finally sputtered, “‘Heard?’ How in the hell could you have heard anything? You never leave the kitchen.”
“So you did.” He gave a short nod. “It would be humane—” he sneered the word “—to warn you to be wary of that one. Used to be as he was a fun sort, the type that both silly girls and jaded women alike took to like a hummingbird does nectar. Something’s changed him, though, and recent-like. But two issues impede my warning. First, I’m no’ humane. I could give a rat’s ass what happens to you that doesna benefit me and mine. Second, it’s never wise to get wrapped up with someone else’s problems when you’ve plenty of your own.”
Fear skipped down her spine faster than the denial passed through her lips. “I don’t know what you’re talking—”
“Sure and you don’t.” He stared over her shoulder, focusing on something so tangible she felt that the “thing” he stared at could only be hovering inches behind her. The sensation intensified until, casting pride aside, she had to turn, to look.
There was nothing—and no one—there.
It took her a moment to work up the nerve to face her boss. Stiff shouldered, tendons corded in his neck, a ruddy flush to his skin, the warning to stay away from the new male... Fergus knew something. His scent shifted, and suddenly she was surrounded by the wildness of the Burren, that alien landscape strewed with dolmen, ocean squalls and scrubby little wildflowers. Sea salt would have glazed her skin had she stood still long enough. Luckily, she never stood still.
Moving a bit farther out of reach under the guise of returning her cleaning supplies to the cupboard, she called over her shoulder, “Where’s this oddity coming from, Fergus?”
“It would be none so odd if you’d been paying me the attention I’m due. You and your kind have always had a superiority complex, thinking your ability to resurrect is your right.”
She froze. You and your kind... Resurrect is your right... He knew what she was. “How?” she wheezed.
“Your scent changed tonight after Brennan arrived.”
Studying him in the reflection of the bar mirror, she watched as something not unlike a rolling black-and-white television channel skipped across his appearance. He showed himself as one thing for fourteen of every fifteen seconds, but that one, lone second that rounded out every quarter minute? That one blip? Fergus became something Other.
Hunching forward, he folded in on himself before rising. When he finally stood as straight as he could, he was so tall he had to cant his head to the side to avoid bumping the ceiling rafters. His temple brushed the iron chandelier and set it swinging. He reached to still it with a hand that now sported a palm the size of her dead drink tray.
She couldn’t get her mind around what she saw and understood to be true. Both magnificent and terrifying, Fergus had changed. With a sheet of hair as brilliant as a new star and eyes that blazed a myriad of crystalline colors, skin that shone with a diamond hue and hands the size of dinner plates, she couldn’t look away. Legend said that the last of the genii—giants who could change their appearance and proportion at will—had faded, passing to the afterlife centuries ago. But that couldn’t be true. Not if what Fergus presented was a fleeting image of his true nature. And if that was the case...
Years of education rolled through her mind, flipping faster and faster as she tried to recall what it was the genii wanted with the phoenix. What was it that had rendered them friend or foe? It had all centered around one thing. What had it been? Somehow, it involved dice. Or a card game.
“Confused, little phoenix?” He huffed out a sound of genuine disdain. “I expected better of you. Turns out you’re nothing but a stupid bitch in heat. However, your cycle changes my time frame. It saves me having to pay the male I located. They’ve been looking for you, you know. This saves me having to defend my rights against any of the men of your clan should one or more of them respond to the gods-be-damned scent of you. The timing isn’t perfect, but it’ll be what it is.”
Ashley kept her gaze loosely focused, trying to take in everything around her that she could, certain she needed to find her way out of this mess before she was forced to fight her way out. But... “You called me a bitch. Do it again and I’ll be calling you a hearse.”
Fight it was.
That’s when she remembered the connecting pieces of history.
Their king had made a last stand in the final Tribal Wars, and he’d lost. Desperate, he’d challenged Daghda, the All Father, to a game of dice. Daghda had declined, asserting his right to dissolve the band of giants. The giants’ king, with nothing left to barter, wagered the giants’ immortality against the god’s ability to beat him in the game of Daghda’s choosing.
What. An. Idiot.
Daghda chose archery, and the genii’s king lost. Badly. In a final stand that had been recorded in the blood of the fallen, the last of the giants had disappeared. Only their legend remained. Those rumored to have survived had been rendered mortal, their lifespans still far greater than a human but shortened all the same. So what could a genii want from a phoenix who had to be less than half his age...
Ashes.
Horror stole over her and her skin felt as if it shrank.
A female phoenix’s ashes were the key to immortality if a being knew how to harvest them. To get to the point of harvest typically involved murder and theft—of the phoenix’s life and ashes, respectively.
To kill any phoenix was nearly impossible, but the females were far more difficult to dispense than the males. Few knew the secret to forcing a member of the secretive race into irrevocable death. The phoenix had to take her life by removing her own heart. Once that happened, the heart had to be burned to ash. Those ashes could then be harvested. If a mortal tattooed her ashes over his own heart in the constellation symbol for the phoenix? The phoenix’s immortality transferred to the mortal and gave him what so many coveted. Immortality.
She had to get out of here. Now.
Ashley shot him a hard, hot look. “Timing?” Her smile was brittle. She’d expected to defend herself from her own tribe, not a damn genii. “Your timing sucks. I have a date tonight.”
“Whore.”
“Screw you and the hearse you’re about to ride out on.”
He rocked forward on the balls of his feet, arms loose, body ready. “I’ll take
