Black spots flashed in her vision. Her head swam.
And then he lifted his weight.
Her throat opened and oxygen filled her lungs. Deirdre coughed. The fire in her hands went out.
Stark loomed over her, fury and the healing fever making his face ruddy under the beard, eyes like shards of gold filed down to a knife point. "You're no better than Rhiannon. You lied to me this entire time, and-"
"And you beat me, and forced me to beat my friends, and ordered me to kill my boyfriend. Bitch all you want, but stones, glass houses, etcetera. Even if I'm a monster, you're still a better monster than I am."
His eyes narrowed. "You're a better monster every day, Tombs."
Stark made that sound like a compliment.
Deirdre was suddenly uncomfortable having him crouched over her. Not in pain. Just...uncomfortable. "Speaking of Rhiannon..."
"Don't."
"She bleeds red," Deirdre said.
Stark seemed to lose interest in fighting. He climbed off of her. "I saw that." He shook his fist at nothingness, as though clenched around her throat again. "I almost ripped her heart out. I saw the blood."
"That means she's not unseelie and can't be the unseelie queen."
"She performs unseelie magic," Stark said. "She used compulsion on me. She opened a portal to the Winter Court in my asylum and brought the sidhe to kill my people." His voice grew harsher. "On top of all that, she's mated to a shifter. She may be some rare breed of red-blooded sidhe."
"Or she might be an ordinary human witch who's using the unseelie to springboard herself to power. Witches are the weakest gaean faction. Do you think Rhiannon would ever be satisfied being one of the weakest gaeans in the world?"
He surveyed Deirdre with mistrust. "You talk like you know her."
"I don't need to know her because I know you," Deirdre said. "I can guess what kind of woman you'd marry."
Stark reached down, offering Deirdre a hand.
She hesitated before taking it.
He pulled her onto her feet. "Rhiannon's ruthless," he said with no small amount of pride. "But if she's not the unseelie queen, then who is? Where is she? And how does Rhiannon control the Winter Court?"
"Great questions," Deirdre said. "I'd love to know the answers."
"Then stay with me," Stark said. "Remain my Beta. Help me find the Winter Court and burn it to the ground with Rhiannon, Melchior, and Niamh inside of it."
"Are you actually giving me a choice?"
"You are the powerful shifter I always believed you to be. Of course I want you to come with me. I told you from the beginning that I prefer my followers to be enthusiastically consenting, and that hasn't changed."
But was that really the only reason he wanted her to come along? Because she could be powerful, assuming she figured out how to control her flaming powers?
Stark was standing close to her, forcing Deirdre almost to the lockers. The look he gave her wasn't one of an Alpha with his ally.
Her fist had burned a crater into his chest.
"It's not long until the election," Deirdre said. "Rylie is the Godslayer. We need to get her out of power, Stark. We can't go marching through the Middle Worlds with an army until that happens."
"The election doesn't matter."
"If you really think that, then why did we meet January Lazar at the safe house tonight? Wasn't that your idea of an election ad? Because I bet you anything it's going to improve your position in the polls."
"Forget the polls. I'll need more followers to defeat the unseelie," Stark said. "As soon as I find the juncture in the ley lines that will let me reach the Winter Court, I'll take everyone I've gathered to kill Rhiannon."
"Look at the facts: the sidhe have been underground since Genesis, so they don't have a following like you do. Melchior won't win the election. If you defeat Rylie, you'll defeat all the candidates in the election, including Rhiannon."
"Stop. Talking. About. The election." Stark stepped forward on each word until Deirdre's back hit the lockers. He braced an arm beside her head, leaning over her. They were almost the same height. He shouldn't have been able to look so intimidating. But Stark was so much more frightening than that.
Deirdre squared her shoulders, trying not to shrink away. "You're a household name. You have political clout. We've got momentum and we've got to hit Rylie hard before you lose it."
He gave a harsh laugh. "Is that what you think?"
"Yeah, that's what I think. You're the best chance we have at making real change, and I'm not going to watch you let that slip away from us."
"How can I ever trust you again, knowing how you came to me? Knowing that you've betrayed me?"
He sounded so bitterly angry, in an inhuman place beyond rational thought.
This wasn't about Deirdre lying to him. This was about his wife being alive, knowing that he was searching for her, and mating with a dragon shifter anyway.
She wasn't going to be able to talk with him rationally when his emotions weren't rational.
Deirdre pushed against his chest, hard enough to make him step backwards. "You're pissed. I get it. Now get over it. Hit me, make me toe the line, show me who's boss, and shake it off."
Stark stepped so close again that their noses were only an inch apart. "Do you want me to hit you?"
She pushed him again. "If that's what it takes, yeah. Do it. You were ready to kill me two minutes ago. Follow through. Let's get this crap out of your system so that we can move on to more important things, because if you let your wife mess with your head, you're going to lose everything."
The way he glared at her made Deirdre think that he was going to take her up on it. There was so much hate in him.
But Deirdre pushed again.
"Don't tempt me, Beta," Stark said. "I won't let you deprive me of my revenge."
"You shouldn't. But keep your eye on the target." Deirdre fisted his shirt in both hands. "Rylie Gresham. The Godslayer. She made Genesis happen. She killed my father. She created the orphanages that abused me throughout my entire life. She's keeping our people down. We can get revenge, but it needs to be the big target. The election. The OPA. Rylie Gresham."
Stark breathed heavily, shoulders heaving with the force of it, as though he'd been running laps around the bomb shelter.
Deirdre shook him gently.
"We've got to beat Rylie Gresham," she said again, softer than before. He put his hands over hers. His skin was cool in comparison. "Prove to me that you're the man I think you are. You're the guy who can fix every screwed-up thing that was done to me as a kid. You can defeat Rylie Gresham and make our world the place it needs to be."
"She'll die too," Stark said. "But Rhiannon and Melchior need to die first."
She wasn't getting through to him.
Deirdre released Stark, pacing away from him, rubbing her hands over her face.
What time was it? She felt hot and antsy, like she'd heard that she should on the night of a full moon, but she wasn't transforming yet.
She couldn't organize her thoughts.
"When do I change?" Deirdre asked, scratching the inside of her left arm. She hadn't worn an intake bracelet since coming back to life, but she still felt itchy where the needles had been embedded in her skin. "I want to get this night over with."
"Fine," Stark said. He caught her face in his hands, staring deep into her eyes. "Change into your animal."
There was compulsion in his voice.
He was ordering her to shift shapes using the talent that Rhiannon had attributed to sidhe magic.
Deirdre still didn't feel anything.
But she caught herself gazing into Stark's eyes, caught in the deep gold color of his irises. It reminded her of what she had seen after she died a second time-those rolling, grassy fields, with an oppressive sun smashing down on her as its heat consumed her.
She couldn't remember more than that. Just the fire of the overbearing sun and grassy fields.
Deirdre wasn't even certain that she hadn't hallucinated it.
Stark's compulsion still did nothing to her, and she still didn't transform.
"Damn," he said.
Why wasn't Deirdre changing? She wasn't an Omega anymore, was she? She'd been reborn with new powers, and she had assumed that meant that she would have finally unlocked her animal. "Maybe I'm not really a shifter," Deirdre said, slumping against the wall. "Maybe I'm a sidhe too."
Stark didn't like that she was including him among the sidhe. His scowl deepened. "I'm a shifter."
"Who cares? There's not that much difference between sidhe and shifters anyway."
"There's a difference," he said sharply.
"Okay. You're a shifter. But maybe I'm not! Maybe I don't have an animal form." She flung her hands into the air in frustration. "I'm not waiting this out down here. I can barely breathe. I'm going upstairs to get air."
"If you leave now, don't come back," Stark said. "I'm leaving for the Middle Worlds as soon as I find a path there. If you won't help me, then I don't need."
The rejection stung more than she expected. "Fine. I'll stop inconveniencing you with the ideals I thought that we shared." She stalked toward the stairwell.
"Rylie Gresham will be at the United Nations the day after tomorrow," Stark said.
Deirdre stopped in the open doors. "How do you know that? I haven't seen anything on the news about Rylie making any appearances."
"She'll be there." Stark picked the table up, put the maps back on its surface. He spoke again when she tried to leave. "Don't you want to know what you are?"
"Of course I do," Deirdre said. "I've never wanted anything so bad in my entire life. But I don't think I'm a dragon, and I have no idea what else I could be. What kind of shifter randomly catches fire? I've never heard of such a thing."
"I have," Stark said. "There used to be ancient firebirds tied to the cycle of life and death. They would die repeatedly, only to be reborn from their own ashes. They've been extinct for millennia. But I learned of them when researching my own unusual animal, as they roamed the Earth at similar times."
Deirdre clenched her hand on the doorway. Her fingernails dug into the metal. "Don't tease me. Give me a word. A name. Anything."
His gaze bored through her, intent and cold. "Phoenix, Tombs. You're a phoenix."
-IV-.
The high-rise was far from the tallest building in New York City, or even the neighborhood. But being up on the roof still gave Deirdre an excellent vantage point.
Helicopters swept a few blocks away, skimming the streets with blazing spotlights. The OPA was still looking for Stark and Deirdre. They were close, but not close enough.
It didn't matter if the OPA discovered where Stark was hiding. He had a high-rise filled with shapeshifters in their super-powered animal forms, and they were smack in the middle of vampire territory at nighttime. Weak as vampires were, they were strongest at night-strong, and thirsty.
No human OPA agent would be stupid enough to attack Stark that night.
Stupid, stupid Stark.
Deirdre dropped her coat to the roof and stepped onto the edge. The view of the street so many hundreds of feet below was dizzying. Nothing stood between her and a very long fall.
She spread her arms, wiggled her toes over the edge.
Her daddy, Alasdair Tombs, had always said that she was a graceful girl. He'd said that she moved like she could fly. Maybe he'd meant it literally. He could have known something about her that nobody else had. He was her father, after all.
Deirdre wanted to fly.
But now that she stood in the chilly rain, she couldn't summon the fire that had licked over her flesh earlier, much less an animal form. She just felt cold. Like nothing had changed since she died in the asylum, killed by a woman that Deirdre had considered her closest friend.
Phoenix.
That was the word Stark had given her for her animal. Deirdre had never heard of such a thing before. It sounded like some kind of mythological bullcrap-but then, didn't dragons seem just as fake? And it was impossible to deny Melchior's existence.
What if she jumped? Took a headlong dive off the side of the building and trusted that she'd find her wings before pancaking on the pavement below?
She'd come back from two deaths already. Risking a third would be tempting fate.
Deirdre stepped back to the relative safety of the roof, feeling sick and disappointed and exhausted.
There was nothing she could do about the transformation. Not yet. But she might be able to do something to help Stark with the election, even if he was determined not to participate.
Deirdre pulled her cell phone out. It was a burner, a cheap device she'd picked up earlier that day when Stark was making plans with January Lazar. She dialed Rylie's phone number.
Someone responded on the fourth ring.