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 the Aves class of vertebrates, with the flesh-rending talons and unstoppable strength to match. Not to mention the immortality. And what he wanted right now, more than anything, was to pick the meat from the bones of the nearest 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 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 months 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 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. Despite the lack of light, my phoenix saw every detail of her clearly. The thick blonde hair draping her shoulders, with its garish red and blue streaks. The silky-smooth skin gracing her body. And oh, that kick-ass body. Risk was high-octane sexual 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 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 zero possibility 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 draw 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 as first in line for the throne of 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 warriors council. Her type definitely wasn’t tall, deadly, and decidedly stiff.
I had been weaned not just on formality but on command, and yet neither I nor my animal objected as Risk preceded me along the back wall of the club 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.
The 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 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.”
“You would be compensated generously, of course.”
“Of course.”
I’d carefully considered the next order of business. 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. Risk had begun to earn our trust, but with something this important, our need to be sure was high.
Unfortunately I was running out of time. I still wasn’t a hundred percent certain of the female, but I had no choice. We desperately needed her eyes and ears.
“I want to enlist your help in finding a female.”
The slightest smile curled one side of her lips. “I think I told you the first time I met you, Sun, I wasn’t that type of girl.”
She had. I remembered wondering if I looked that hard up, that I’d need to hire a hooker to get some action, as Cale put it. The Risk back then had teased me, her smile suggestive, while she called Cale baby. The Risk sitting across from me now barely allowed her lips to curve. What had prompted the change in her?
I didn’t return her smile. “Wrong type of female.”
“What type of ‘female’ were you looking for?” Neon lights hanging over the dance floor glinted off the metallic hoop piercing her nose.
I studied her for another long moment before taking the plunge. “Not just any female. We have two criteria: specifically, you would need to look for someone whose mother died young, most likely committed suicide, and who were subsequently left to be raised in an orphanage or foster care.” There were hundreds of other possible scenarios, but we couldn’t track them all, not yet. Our first starting point was the lineages of the women who had already been discovered. Risk gave us a second avenue to make headway on a desperate—and with the Anigma threat ever looming, time-critical—mission.
“Why?”
The word brought me up short. “Why…?”
Risk tipped her head to drill me with that deep blue stare. “I might be mercenary, Sun, but I won’t put women in danger without a reason. Why do you want to find this ‘female’?”
“We have reason to believe someone who went missing from our…family…long ago may have given birth to a daughter that ended up in just such a situation. We’re looking for leads.”
It was the story we had decided to tell 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 were possibly 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’m not buying your story.”
Smart woman. “You don’t have to.” She simply had to do as I requested.
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…
“Do you have more specific parameters?” she was asking now.
“No.” There was no definitive way to know if a particular female was, in fact, Archai without a triggering bite. But we had to try, and it was too big a task to take on by ourselves alongside the other issues we were facing. How we would handle the possible psychs once we found them was a question we hadn’t answered yet.
Risk frowned, her fingernails continuing their tap dance on the table. The sound put me on edge. “Age? Description? Anything?” she asked.
Feeling the less said, the better, I kept my mouth shut and shook my head.
“Well”—Risk raised that imperious eyebrow once more—“that’s going to be a long-ass list.”
“I understand. If we could start locally and then expand outward?”
The tap dance stopped. 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 the end of this week.”
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.”
Surely not. 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. 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.”
PHOENIX FALLING releases on November 28th! Don't forget to preorder your copy!
