Wildfire Witch (The Cursed Coven of Spells Hollow)

9. Nix

NIX

“Nix…”

My eyelids were fused together and every muscle in my body had become lead. I couldn’t move even if I wanted to.

“Nix, wake up…”

A groan escaped my lips at the persistent voice. I drifted up from the heavy fog wrapped around my mind and felt my skin light up with prickling pain from head to toe until it narrowed down to the arm and shoulder I was lying on.

I could tell I was sprawled on a hard surface and that a pulse of heat had my heart in its fist. The temperature was a warning: I was on the edge of yet another episode, this one promising to be fatal if I called upon any more of the fire element.

Two men were having a conversation nearby while I considered how fucked I was. Without magic, I was helpless. But considering I’d been moved who-knew-where by the fire bros, I already was. I was nothing to these people, just a jar with a stuck lid, containing what they really wanted.

“And report when she wakes up,” one of the men was saying. His deep voice was unmistakable; it was the fire dragon shifter.

“Of course, sir,” answered a less familiar man.

“My father will want to see her as soon as she’s awake. Keep her hands behind her back and wear the gloves. Don’t forget that she possesses unpredictable magic.”

A nervous quaver entered his voice. “Yes, sir. Perhaps we should move a few of the new recruits here to guard her? Just a suggestion.”

The dragon shifter growled, a booming rumble that sounded like it came from a creature three times his size. “I know who you’re asking for, wolf. Don’t forget who runs things around here. That ‘new recruit’ already outranks you.”

A submissive whine left the wolf shifter, followed by the shift of clothing and retreating footsteps of the dragon leaving. It took a good five minutes or more before he muttered, “Fucking dragons. They think they’re so superior.”

“Interesting,” I said to Aodhnait.

“That’s all you have for me? Your listening skills are an inspiration,” she said dryly.

“I can’t even move. And considering how far this wolf shifter tucked his tail up his ass when the dragon was talking to him, I doubt he’d lift a finger to help us,” I remarked.

Aodhnait shifted in my chest, rolling her heat through my midsection. “He is not a big concern. The dragon shifter and his father are. Remember ‘we all have things we want’?”

In retrospect, it had been an insensitive thing to say to a grieving man who’d wanted Aodhnait to restore his mother’s life. He didn’t understand my curse, or the fragility of phoenix rebirth magic. But no amount of explaining dissuaded him from killing me multiple times and degrading me into an object in the process for his ultimate goal.

The first leader of the Fire Brotherhood had made me enemy number one for his organization, a grudge that spanned most of my lives, and carried down his bloodline to present day.

“So, he and his father are descendants of the original dragon I pissed off,” I said, guessing that was what she was trying to point out.

“They are the people you need to convince to let us go. Tell them the truth. Let them know that butchering us over and over won’t result in them getting us separated. We know the answer to ending this curse. Draw them the diagram.”

“Why would I do that?” I asked in disbelief.

“Because you’re going to offer them a partnership. Once the curse is broken, I will go with them.”

“Aodhnait!” I protested. I’d never let her fall into the fire bro’s hands. They would kill her, trying to get her to resurrect someone for them.

“Do not tell them how my rebirth magic actually works,” she added sternly.

She could hear the chaotic whirr of my thoughts, the protests so loud I was practically screaming at her. Phoenixes had been next to extinct when we’d first bonded as witch and familiar. After all this time…she could be the last. It would make sense, considering how motivated the fire bros were for sniffing me out so quickly. Considering the circumstances, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had literally had their wolf shifters scent my location.

She sighed, tone weighed down by the considerable time she’d been alive. Decades, maybe centuries, longer than me, in lives separate and distinctive from me and our curse. “Give them what they want.”

“I could never do that to you. You’re my familiar. My literal other half.” The corners of my eyes burned, but no tears came. My body just didn’t have the spare moisture right now.

“Have you considered I would rather be in a cage in my own body than stuck in a loop of dying and rebirth trapped in your body?” she sneered. “Think of it as doing me a favor. The curse is your fault in the first place.”

The sensation of my crying attempt dried up. I cracked my eyes open, slowly focusing on a cinderblock wall just a foot away.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

Her ancient, crackling presence had an unmistakable edge of cruelty. This restored version of her spoke with contempt. “If your failures with the fire element weren’t so well known, Morfran wouldn’t have thought to punish us both with your curse. Your actions dragged us both into hell. Do us both a favor and do what I told you.”

“Aodhnait, what ? —”

“Take some responsibility for what you’ve done. You’re not the only victim here, no matter how sorry you feel for yourself.”

Heat kindled in my clenching fists. “I have never assumed you weren’t suffering, too.”

She hissed back at me. “Yet you would keep me inside of your body out of some misplaced sense that I belong here,” she said.

“Fine!” I snarled. “You’ll be free of me before you know it.”

“Good,” she sniffed.

A short time later, the wolf guarding me noticed I’d sat up and took a quick look around. My clothes were torn and my back and neck were stiff from laying in awkward positions. Pain throbbed from my right hand, up my arm, to the muscles on that side of my chest. My stunt with fusing my fire with Seth’s water had left the skin swollen, tight, and a shade redder than the rest of my body.

But the worst pain was lancing through my heart, under the cloying humidity of my phoenix. The one who couldn’t wait to be rid of me so badly, she would trade me for a fire bro’s cage.

The nervous wolf put me in handcuffs and kept a bulky pair of fireproof gloves on his hands. His padded grip on my arm made me feel like I was being handled like a piece of cookware left too long in an oven. I didn’t bother telling him I wasn’t going to summon any fire magic the first time he shoved my wounded shoulder and my whole arm throbbed. He could wear the gloves, he looked stupid with them on.

We marched through a compound at about twice the pace my still-waking body could handle. I tripped and stumbled multiple times, hissing in pain when my wolf shifter guard squeezed tighter and hauled me along, cursing me for being “a little bitch.”

He stood somewhere north of six feet, twice as broad as me with muscle. His arms and collar were decorated with multiple small tattoos, like he couldn’t afford to get his sleeves done all in one go. The Fire Brotherhood fist was the biggest tattoo he had, surrounded by the cheaper ink.

Because of his rough treatment, I didn’t catch my bearings on the journey to see his boss. The twists and turns of corridors and stairs might as well have been a maze. There was a pair of shifters standing by the door he led me to and even more beyond the threshold, seated at a conference table.

“Leave us,” one of the men said. He wasn’t seated, but his calm order had the men and women in the room filing out without complaint. All except for one.

The leader of the Fire Brotherhood was a memory wearing a finely tailored suit. He had the same bass voice as his son, the rumble of which suggested that he was a much bigger creature on the inside. The chiseled features, trimmed black stubble, and slitted eyes of draconic amber all belonged to the man who I’d first insulted centuries ago.

He could be a grandson, or a great-grandson of that man. Dragon shifters were long lived and said to have birth rates as erratic as the fae race. This particular family didn’t seem to have a problem reproducing, especially considering the younger man reclining in his chair while the rest of the meeting group had left was his father’s spitting image.

“You too, Benedict,” the older dragon said, turning his amber gaze on the lounging man.

“Should I not be here, as your second?” he asked.

The leader snorted twin curls of smoke. “Leave. We will discuss the vessel’s fate later.”

Benedict got to his feet and brushed past me, his brows lowered into a leer as his eyes roved up and down my form. I curled my lip at him. There was nothing to view here, I had to look like a barely walking disaster. I knew I smelled of body odor and the grime of however many days passing without a hint of water.

A tension headache gripped around my skull when the wolf shifter shoved me in a seat, my arms trapped between my back and the cushion.

“You may go as well,” the leader said, nodding to my guard.

Once the door shut behind him, I raised my chin to look at the man looming over the conference table across from me. He was built tall and broad, as one could expect of a shifter with such a large second form. What also gave away his identity as the leader of the Fire Brotherhood were his hands, which he splayed over the glossy table as he leaned in to get a better look at me.

He had a tattoo of red fire across his palms, which wrapped around the back to form the tails of the flame design that was inked on each man and woman in his gang. His clenched fist was the one in control.

“Hi,” I said with a hint of false cheer. “I’m Nix.”

More smoke trailed from his nostrils as he continued his inspection like I hadn’t spoken.

“I never actually learn the names of any of you guys?—”

“We are not friends, vessel,” he scoffed.

“That’s really a shame, when I have something you want,” I said.

I was still out of sorts, so I made a mistake, baring my teeth in a grimace at the shifter. He responded with a growl so loud and deep, it rattled the table and chairs in the room like a mini earthquake.

“And don’t think I will hesitate to take from you. The phoenix will restore my mate. I’ve already killed and skinned the bounty hunters who dared do the same to her.” His form rippled with his fury, scales rising to the surface of his skin and sinking back down in sinuous rolls over his flesh. The room’s heat spiked and I shifted with discomfort, flushing hotter without the relief of sweat. I needed a tall drink of ice water just as much as I needed Ceridor and Seth to walk through the door and rescue me from this place.

Still, I hardly hid my wince. If his mate was killed in that manner…she was super dead. Aodhnait could only bring back people under very specific conditions, and she was beyond the parameters for resurrection. If she tried, Aodhnait would snuff out her fire in the attempt and join her in the afterlife.

“Don’t tell him that,” she hissed in a furious whisper.

I cleared my dry throat. It was hard to breathe with the heat coming off this man. “What if I told you I figured out how to break my curse?” I asked.

He stopped his partial shifting and regarded me with slitted dragon eyes.

“I’d like to make a deal with you.” The words tasted like ash on my tongue. Despite Aodhnait’s sudden shift in her opinion of me, she was still the only being besides maybe Ceridor who understood me. I’d have preferred skinning myself than continuing to talk. “If you spare me the experimentation by the so-called scientists you’ve undoubtedly hired?—”

“I heard you have a smart mouth,” he muttered.

“—And the dozens of painful deaths that will follow from their ham-fisted work, I will leave this place and break my curse. The phoenix and I will become separate beings once more.”

His lips spread in a smile. It was predatory, full of sharp teeth. “You will give the phoenix to me?”

“You would treat her well, right?” I reasoned, entertaining the fantasy for a moment. “If she brought your mate back from death, she would have to stay close for the rest of her second life. When she dies, there goes your mate’s second life…”

Yearning tugged at his hungry expression. He might’ve been the monster that leads the gang whose actions haunted my nightmares, but he was still a man who’d lost his wife to senseless violence. “She will be the most pampered pet. Practically a Drakkon herself.”

“All you have to do is let me go, and I will handle the rest,” I said.

A lull of memory had softened his face, but it’d only been for a few moments. His gaze refocused on me, more ravenous than ever. “And where will you go, to break this curse?”

I bit my lip. This felt like a line to cross, a secret I could not take back.

“Tell him. You can see he’s going to agree,” Aodhnait pushed.

“Spells Hollow,” I answered.

The air grew heavier around me as silence closed in. He stroked the stubble on his chin while I cursed a blue streak in my head. He’d figure out where it was and then there would be no hiding from the fire bros ever again.

Aodhnait released a regretful sigh. “You won’t have to, if they have what they want.”

“But you will be dead, permanently. Just as you prefer,” I said waspishly.

The dragon shifter walked around the length of the table, grabbing the back of my chair to turn me toward him. “I will consider your idea,” he said in a heated whisper. “However, know this…”

The black claws that elongated from his fingernails skimmed from my collarbone to the patch of shirt above my heart. “This is mine. My treasure ,” growled the dragon inside of him. “Scheme all you want for your pathetic life, but the phoenix belongs to me, vessel.”

I met his stare in defiance. Several seconds passed before he hauled me to my feet, pulling me to the door and shoving me toward the wolf shifter who stood around waiting. “Take her back to her cell,” he ordered, slamming the door behind him.

With an angry mutter, he slapped an oven mitt-covered hand on my shoulder and steered me down the hall, ignoring my hiss of pain. We didn’t get very far before he jerked his chin and flagged a man from a group of young-looking shifters. “Ruston,” he barked. “Come here, recruit. Take this bitch back to her cell.”

The most muscular dude amongst them parted the group of recruits when he changed course toward us. His black shirt bulged around the swells of his inked-up biceps. “I’ll save you some dinner, Rusty!” called a woman as the rest of them moved on.

She giggled, and I understood why. He was built ruggedly, his jaw chiseled and strong, decorated with dark stubble. It matched the tousle of black hair atop his head, the only soft thing about him. His skin was a flawless, earthy brown…really, the only flaw he carried was the jag of his nose, broken and reset one too many times to be completely straight.

“The boss put her in A-20. Here’s the key.” The wolf shifter passed a flash of metal into the other man’s broad palm and went off to follow the recruits to dinner, apparently.

What a dick, I thought to myself, since I wasn’t speaking with Aodhnait anymore unless it was necessary. I could still feel her contempt for me, the echo of her words like a scattering of stinging embers.

He’d left me alone with Ruston, who took me in with an intense gaze that shifted into slitted, green-brown draconic eyes as he rumbled, “Mate.”