Phoenix Falling: Archai Warriors 2
Chapter One
Sun
The cacophony of music and laughter and humans on the hunt for their latest lay stirred the animal lurking restlessly within me. My phoenix was only a bird in the strictest sense—an integral part of my being, my alternate form, he was more mythical monster than modern-day member of any class of vertebrates. When I released him, his massive form was endowed with flesh-rending talons and unstoppable strength, not to mention near immortality.
And what he wanted right now, more than anything, was to pick the meat from the bones of the closest human body for daring to disturb his peace.
Only one thing saved them: the scent of the female we had come here to meet. Risk. Her essence mingled beneath the odor of human sweat and alcohol and sex, reaching my nose and my animal simultaneously. The creature stirred in my chest now for a far different reason than anger. This was hunger of a different kind.
Need.
Lust.
My all-too-human cock stiffened immediately. I’d had the same reaction to Risk before I’d ever met her, the first time I’d caught her scent in a bar very much like this one several weeks ago. She’d been a possible source for the intel my clan needed, intel that had led us to the discovery of the enemy compound located right on our doorstep. The Anigma contingent had since been decimated, its remnants scattered, but I had no doubt that the threat was just beginning. And I needed Risk’s help to prevent the war I feared would be coming all too soon.
“Sun.” Risk leaned against a wall in the darkest corner of the club, head tilted back to meet my much taller gaze. My phoenix enhanced my eyesight, seeing every detail of her clearly. The thick blonde hair draping her shoulders, with its garish red and blue streaks. The silky-smooth skin gleaming in the dim light. And oh, that kick-ass body. Risk was high-octane sex appeal wrapped in an athletic form prepared to take down any comer, and with my phoenix’s gifted sight, I couldn’t miss a single curve of a single muscle that came together to make that gorgeous physique.
My animal took it all in, staring from my eyes, breathing in her intoxicating scent through my nose. I barely managed to suppress his avaricious growl as it rumbled up inside my chest. When it came to this woman, being both animal and man seriously sucked—there was no chance of ignoring her.
“Risk,” I murmured, her name like gravel in my tight throat. The female had gone to ground not long after our battle with Maddox’s Anigma soldiers, a fact I still found suspicious, but since she’d also dropped Cale, my fellow warrior and her former lover, around the same time, Cale had convinced me it was no more than fickle female hormones rearing their ugly head. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t be watching her closely. My phoenix would ensure that, if nothing else.
One feminine brow arched above a deep blue eye.
I quirked my own. “What?”
Risk straightened away from the wall. “I should be the one asking you that. You requested this meeting, not me.”
I had, hadn’t I? And I was standing here dazed over the female’s erotic appeal rather than getting down to business. “Of course. Perhaps we could sit.”
She turned to lead the way. “Perhaps we could.”
A frown tugged at my mouth at the same time that a hint of uncertainty tugged at my brain. And wasn’t that a mind fuck in and of itself—the Archai prince unsure of himself around a human woman. My people survived because the strongest of us ruled, and I was first in line for the throne. As part of leading the largest Archai clan in the world, formality had been drilled into me for a thousand years. What did I care if Risk was amused by the precise way that I spoke? She had been drawn to Cale, after all, the playboy of the Archai Warrior’s Council. Her type definitely wasn’t tall, deadly, and decidedly stiff.
Her type didn’t drink blood or change into a giant immortal bird either, I was certain.
Risk preceded me along the back wall of the club. I focused on not staring at her well-shaped ass outlined in a tight red dress, watching our surroundings instead until she came upon an empty booth, raised on a dais to overlook the writhing figures on the dance floor. It was as private as things got in a place like this, but Risk insisted on setting the location of our meetups. Yet another thing I had no control over when it came to her.
My phoenix screeched his displeasure at the idea that we were not the ones in charge, particularly of her. I shook off his reaction and followed Risk into the booth.
The curved walls cut the chaos of our surroundings in half, insulating the two of us in a quasi-intimate atmosphere that did nothing for my current mood. I had never met Risk alone before; always Cale had accompanied me. Now, with Risk at the back of the circle, facing out toward the club, and me moving instinctively close to grant us a modicum of privacy, the draw of the female was impossible to ignore. I had never been close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her skin, to taste her blood with no more than a bending of my head toward her neck. I cursed under my breath at my body’s instant reaction and scooted back a few inches, bringing my knee up onto the seat to give myself more space.
If she noticed, Risk didn’t let on. This time when she arched a brow, I knew what she was thinking.
Time to talk.
“Your assistance with our previous problem proved to be invaluable, Risk.”
She raised her hand. “There’s no need to butter me up. I did a job, and I’m happy to do another one. For the right price.”
Agreed. But first, follow-up. “We’d like to know if you’ve seen any indications that the group we discussed previously has returned to Nashville.”
She tapped her red-tipped nails against the slick table. “Not as a group, no. Though there may be individuals out there—I’m not specifically hunting them anymore—I haven’t seen the kind of activity we tracked before.”
The word hunting on her full lips had certain parts of me throbbing harder than the bass line of the current song torturing everyone from the club’s speakers. I shifted in my seat. “Good.” I narrowed my eyes on her. “If you should happen to see—”
“You’d be the first to know, big boy. Again, for the right price.”
I tilted my head, finally putting my finger on what was bothering me about Risk’s words. She was saying the right things—the right Risk-sounding things—but her tone was flat, empty. No teasing, no laughing.
Had breaking up with Cale changed her this much, or was it something else? To say that I hated the idea of Cale affecting her like this was an understatement.
“You would be compensated generously, of course.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
Of course she wouldn’t. That much was pure Risk—business first.
I’d carefully considered the next order of business before bringing it to Risk’s attention. Not only could information about possible Archai females hidden in the wider human population be a priceless commodity, as seen by the fierceness with which the Anigma had sought such females out, but that same information held danger if outside forces ever learned of the person to have gained it. Giving Risk even a hint of this information made her as vulnerable to the Anigma as it did us.
Then there was the matter of trust. Risk had begun to earn ours, but with something this important, our need to be sure was high. And no matter how much my body wanted hers, I still wasn’t a hundred percent certain of the female.
But I had no choice. We desperately needed her eyes and ears, and time was passing us by.
“The males you hunted… You are aware of their attacks on the local population.”
It wasn’t a question. Risk couldn’t have failed to see things that had made her suspicious during her surveillance, even if the Anigma had been careful to hide the actual acts of triggering from nearby cameras.
Risk’s eyes narrowed on me. “You mean local women.”
Neon lights hanging over the dance floor glinted off the metallic hoop piercing her nose. Despite looking like someone who played fast and loose with everything, Risk’s calculating brain made her dangerous. But also effective. And yet it wasn’t her mind that made my animal stir inside me. Every time I looked at her, the creature that shared my body raised his head, eager to stare out of my rainbow-hued eyes at the gorgeous female.
Not that I allowed him to. A female like Risk—wild, independent, secretive—was not for me.
And yet I couldn’t deny that her appeal had never waned. She was earthy, the air around her practically vibrating with energy, both carnal and emotional. A female made for sex. And a female who used that sexual energy often if Cale’s stories were to be believed.
Definitely not for me.
We could have her for a time.
True. And I was tempted. So very tempted. My animal knew that. But…
“Local women,” I agreed.
“I’m aware,” Risk said tightly.
I looked down at the table, at Risk’s fisted hand. “A member of our”—clan—“family, a young female, was attacked by members of the group before we stopped them. It was…brutal. Vicious.” Kat had been lucky her throat wasn’t torn out when her psych power erupted from her body.
Risk ducked her head. Her knuckles turned white. “I’m sorry to hear that. I hope she recovered.”
“Eventually.”
Risk looked out at the crowd. “What does this have to do with me?”
“We would like to trace the other victims.”
“Why?”
Because if they aren’t dead, they might be Archai. But I couldn’t give her that much information. I couldn’t tell her we had no way to find the women hidden in the human population who might have Archai genes in their DNA. The only way to know was to bite them. Until we figured out how to differentiate them from human females, all we had to go on were the previous victims. Some of those females now lived with us, but there were others. Many, many others.
“We want to help them. Make amends. And we want to track any leads they could give us in regard to the group itself. Any victim, alive or dead or missing, could give us a clue. This is a time-critical mission, and we have no other place to start.”
It was the line we had decided to give Risk to earn her help. When I considered how close it was to the truth, something deep inside my chest felt broken. We were missing not one female but possibly thousands, the offspring of psychs who had been separated from the Archai for hundreds of years. Those daughters carried the genes that made them capable of conversion, and every one was infinitely valuable. My clan had only recently discovered that such psychs might be hidden, unknown and unknowing, in the human world. Unfortunately our enemy had figured it out long before the Archai had.
How many females were being tortured right now, like the women we had rescued from my old friend turned Anigma general, Maddox, and his nightmare army? How long would it take to find them? How many wouldn’t survive long enough to be found?
Risk pushed the fall of her long blonde hair behind one ear. She was known in the underground as the best finder money could buy—you name it, and she could find it. I was praying that included people.
“I might be mercenary, Sun, but I won’t put women in danger without a reason.”
“I assumed you wouldn’t.”
She drilled me with that deep blue stare. “There’s more to this than what you’ve told me. I’m not buying your story.”
I said she was smart, didn’t I? “You don’t have to.” She simply had to do as I requested.
“So you want information on every attack, not only the women who escaped.”
Kat was, as far as we knew, the only triggered female to have escaped. Lyris knew one other, but she had not been bitten. “Yes. If we could start locally and then expand outward?”
Risk leaned toward me. “If I find any reason to believe you would use that list to harm them—and I will be looking—you won’t be getting it. Once I’m sure they will be safe…” Risk shrugged. “It’s your money.” She named her figure.
The price was fair. I didn’t hesitate. The Archai had no worries about money, given we’d been accumulating wealth and investments for millennia. Not to mention that I was, in fact, a prince. I gave the female a silent nod.
“Will do.” Risk began to slide her way around the opposite side of the booth. “I’ll have an answer for you by next weekend.”
She paused at the opening, her stare on the dance floor. I waited.
She glanced back at me through the veil of her hair. “It was good to see you again, Sun.”
Her words startled me. Surely she didn’t mean them. And yet there was something almost…wistful in her tone. As if she truly had missed someone. Cale, more likely. Except she had been the one to break things off with the warrior, not the other way around. Why would she miss him?
That certain something underlying her words had me speaking without thought for the first time all night. “Risk, are you all right?”
I shouldn’t ask. Shouldn’t want to know. Shouldn’t care for anything more than having her body or her blood. And yet I was unable to hold the words back.
She seemed puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Why indeed. I gave her another nod.
She stood, preparing to leave.
“Risk…”
She hesitated, gaze still on her exit.
Whatever had been on the tip of my tongue, I swallowed it down. “Good night.”
“Good night.”