Phoenix Blood (Old School Book 1)

  Phoenix Blood

  Jenny Schwartz

  In a grim biker bar with wizard mercenaries on her tail and a “found” amulet around her neck, Sadie Howard needs a miracle. What she gets is the man who broke her heart nine years ago.

  Marcus Aurelius is a changed man, in more ways than one. The preppy, confident medical school student is now a hard-bitten, magic-wielding assassin. He’s also a man on a mission. He has debts to pay and old wrongs to right before he dies—sometime this week.

  As the secrets of Marcus’s heart are revealed, Sadie learns that nothing is as it seems and that the man who broke her heart also saved her life and paid in agony for her freedom.

  With wizards trying to kill her, phoenix blood burning in Marcus’s veins, and a villain who’ll stop at nothing to acquire the amulet Sadie has promised to a friend, their road trip is a one-way ticket to extraordinary adventures. The question is, who will survive?

  ***

  Phoenix Blood is the first novel in the new paranormal romance thriller series, Old School. Each novel is a standalone read. Watch out for Fantastical Island in February 2017.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  The Old School Series

  Chapter 1

  The van’s wheels left the pot-holed asphalt, bumped, skidded, and finally stuck in the mud at the edge of the car park. The glow of the biker bar’s electric sign reflected in the puddle by Sadie Howard’s driver’s door. She splashed down into it. Icy water soaked her sneakers and splattered her jeans.

  Gloop! Slurp. She staggered through the mud, slipped, and reached the asphalt. She ran as if all the devils from hell were on her heels. Perhaps they were.

  Headlights framed her, exaggerating her shadow and sending its panicked silhouette before her to crash against the bar door. Two seconds later, Sadie crashed through that door herself.

  Bikers. She’d spent enough time on the road to know that they were like any group. There were good guys and bad guys, but there was a general rule that kept her safe: a single woman walking into a strange bar was walking into trouble. Given that she was running from death, Sadie kept on walking.

  Her magic was very specific and very focused. She was a finder. Her latest find hung around her neck. The amulet wasn’t hers. She had a friend who needed it—and the unknown men chasing Sadie couldn’t have it.

  Outside, two car doors slammed.

  She scanned the bar. Her talent said she could find safety here. Her anxious gaze flicked from unfriendly male face to leeringly interested male face and beyond them to the barkeeper who just looked annoyed. No, these men wouldn’t keep her safe.

  A flash of gold caught her eye, and she spun around. There was a small table tucked to the side of the door and half-hidden in shadows. The flash of gold came from it; more specifically, from the bantam-sized bird that fanned a long, golden-feathered tail from tabletop half-way to the floor.

  The man at the table put his hand on the bird in a gentle gesture that was incongruous in the biker bar. The bird turned its head, for all the world as if to study Sadie, and the man’s head turned, following the bird’s interest.

  Oh dear lord in heaven! The bottom dropped out of Sadie’s stomach and her heart tried to crawl out of her chest.

  The man at the table straightened. Nine years vanished as they locked gazes. And into the howling wilderness of those nine years stepped the two men chasing Sadie.

  She didn’t even see Marcus move. She blinked and one suit lay on the floor, unconscious. The second man flew back from a kick to his stomach. He hit a table and then the wall—the biker in between lifting his beer out of the way—and collapsed into matching unconsciousness.

  Nine years ago Marcus couldn’t have fought a feather duster. Tonight, he’d taken out two quietly terrifying men.

  Then he surveyed the bar filled with bikers.

  Big, tough guys with more muscles, illegal guns and lethal knives than anybody needed froze, barely breathing, careful not to challenge Marcus in what had been their bar.

  They watched in silence as he pulled money out of his wallet and dropped it on the table.

  The bird perched there pecked a peanut from a bowl before fluttering up to land on Marcus’s shoulder. Its golden tail lay along his arm. It cracked the peanut, and wisps of shell floated down.

  Marcus held out his hand to Sadie. He wore a black leather jacket dulled by age and scratched at the shoulders. It swung open over a navy-blue t-shirt that hung over a flat stomach. His jeans were old and faded. His boots were worn-in combat boots. But it was his face that had changed the most.

  His mouth was a hard line. His jaw was chiseled one fraction from gaunt. He was lean, stripped to his essence, and that essence was powerful.

  She stared at his hand as a shiver that threatened to break her started in her stomach. He had hurt her nine years ago. He’d torn out her heart and stomped on it, and she’d viciously protected the mangled remains ever since.

  Of all the bars in the world to walk into…

  She pushed magic into her finder’s talent. Safety. Where can I find safety?

  Her magic drew her to Marcus.

  She resisted.

  The man he’d thrown against the wall groaned. The suits would be waking up soon. She had to make a decision.

  “Sadie.” Marcus’s voice was low and rough.

  Going with him was dangerous, foolishly dangerous, but her magic said he was safety and the weight of the amulet around her neck reminded her that she needed help. She clasped his hand.

  Agony shot through Marcus as Sadie took his hand. Emotional pain, blistering regret, and the fury of the fever in his blood combined to torture him. He kept everything he was feeling from showing on his face and led Sadie out of the bar.

  The air outside smelled of mud and night-time. The dark was different to daylight. Different creatures owned it.

  The bird on his shoulder fluffed its wings and chirruped contentedly.

  “I’ll see you home,” he said to Sadie. He’d lost the right nine years ago to question why the men chased her. He had a fair idea of who they were. The signature of their magic had ridden in with them. Sloppy technique on their part. He’d known what he faced and had opted to disable them with old-fashioned, everyday violence. He’d take Sadie home and make sure she was safe there. Fate was a witch, but she had to give him time to make right the wrongs he’d committed. This one in particular.

  “Home? I’m not going home.”

  And his plans went all to hell. But he was adaptable. “Do you have some other safe place to go?”

  The harsh electric lighting from the bar’s sign showed her wince at the word “safe”.

  “Sadie.” They didn’t have time for a discussion. The two mercenaries in the bar wouldn’t stay out much longer. He could deal with them, again. It would be better if he simply got Sadie away.

  “I have to go to Los Angeles,” she said.

  “I’ll take you to the airport.” He walked toward a white van abandoned haphazardly at the edge of the car park, its driver’s door open. In this junkyard of choppers and trucks, it had to be hers. “What do you need to take with you?” Because he’d be driving her
to the airport in his truck.

  She halted. He stood in mud, she in the relatively dry. “I don’t want to ask this.” She really didn’t. Her hazel eyes were both angry and scared. Frustrated. She tightened her hold on his hand, probably unconsciously. Her brown hair was long, caught back in a ponytail. “But you owe me. Can you fly with me to LA?”

  He heard the scratch of bird claws on his shoulder, just the faintest shift of claws against leather. Damn, damn, damn it to hell. Fate wasn’t done with him. He had this chance to make something right, but not at the price of abandoning other responsibilities. The fire in his blood flared up, scorching him with its fury. “I can’t.”

  Sadie’s shoulders slumped. Only for a moment, though, before she pulled her hand from his—or tried to.

  “I can drive there with you,” he said.

  She stopped trying to tug free. She stared at him, then at the bird on his shoulder. She blinked. “Oh, your bird. I guess…okay. Your bird can’t fly. I mean it can fly, but not in a plane.” She sounded frazzled and perhaps that was why she said more than she meant to. “I need to stay with you, so—I’ll just get my bag.”

  Life had taught him suspicion. If anyone else who had every reason to hate him had claimed they’d needed him, he’d have run. But this was Sadie. For all the emotional pain being with her brought him, he was glad his last week would be with her. Whatever the price, he’d pay it. And he’d deliver her safely to Los Angeles.

  Sadie climbed up into Marcus’s pickup truck. It was a couple of years old, the shine off it, but new enough to be reliable and tough enough to go anywhere. It was a crew cab, so she tossed her duffel bag onto the back seat beside a backpack. His bird half-jumped, half-flew inside and landed on the backpack, gripping its rough weave with small claws.

  “What sort of bird is it?”

  “A bird of paradise.” Marcus buckled his seatbelt and switched on the engine, reversing out and around the car her pursuers had abandoned by the entrance to the bar door.

  That they hadn’t bothered to park suggested they’d anticipated no resistance to getting what they wanted. They’d intended to take the amulet, and possibly her life, and get out of there.

  “What’s his name? Her name?” Sadie concentrated on the bird. In the scheme of things, it seemed easiest.

  “She doesn’t have a name.”

  The truck bumped out of the pot-holed car park and onto the road. Marcus turned right and accelerated.

  “You haven’t named your bird?”

  He glanced at her. The dashboard lights illuminated the hollows and tense lines of his face. “How about we worry about who is chasing you and how determined they’re likely to be?”

  She slumped in her seat. “Very determined. As to who they are…I don’t know.”

  “They’re Stag mercenaries,” he said absently, as if it was information anyone might know.

  “Stag mercenaries?” she whispered.

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No! I…oh damn. This is why I don’t normally handle acquisitions.” Because faced with killers, she was defenseless—and Stag mercenaries were killers. They killed if it was required of them or simply if it made their job easier. They were wizards who…“Marcus, how do you know about Stag mercenaries?”

  Magic was rare. It was secret. Nine years ago, when she’d tentatively entrusted the truth of her finder’s magic to him, he’d responded incredulously. She would have sworn he hadn’t known magic existed and that he would never believe in it. Yet, now, he knew of Stag mercenaries. Her fingers dug at the outer seams of her jeans in a nervous habit.

  His gaze dipped, noting her fidgeting, before returning to the road. He slowed the truck and turned onto the highway. “I’ve fought them before.” He accelerated and the truck surged toward the darkness of the Great Smoky Mountains.

  “You can’t have,” she protested. He was Marcus Aurelius, born to wealth and privilege. He’d been a second year medical student when she’d loved him. He’d been preppy and charming, endearingly arrogant—or so she’d thought then. Her inexperience had loved his confidence.

  He didn’t answer her, but then, his actions already had. He’d left two Stag mercenaries unconscious in the biker bar.

  Her finder’s talent told her he represented safety. She just hadn’t considered that he would keep her safe. In her muddled, shocked thinking, she’d somehow thought that being with him would do that. No one touched a member of the Aurelius family. Marcus’s grandfather, the senator, made sure of it.

  The unnamed bird hopped forward and perched on the coffee holder between Sadie and Marcus’s seats. It chirruped. Its body was black, possibly with the gleam of iridescence in sunlight, but right now a matt black. Yellow feathers flared strikingly from its head and tail. Its beak was black and it used it to peck at Sadie’s purple sweater.

  She extended a finger and stroked its head.

  The black feathers dimply softly. The bird tilted its head, watching her, not shying away. She stroked its throat and it crooned. She smiled. “Aren’t you lovely?” The bird was the only bright spot in this horrible night.

  The road climbed and dipped. Sometimes headlights of approaching vehicles dazzled. Very occasionally a car passed them, speeding. “Would you know if they were chasing us?” she asked after minutes of silence: a silence that Marcus seemed to have no intention of breaking. In his position, with Stag mercenaries after the woman he’d picked up, she’d have questions.

  “No one’s chasing us. My car’s warded to evade surveillance. We’ll be safe tonight, but if they know that you’re headed for LA, they’ll check the airports, and then, they’ll follow us by road.”

  “They don’t know I’m headed for LA.” She hesitated. “No one does.”

  He didn’t look at her, but his hands shifted on the steering wheel.

  She’d just told him she was alone with him, at his mercy. But that had been true before her confession. Only her finder talent said it was a lie. It promised that she was safe with him.

  Not true. So not true. Ancient history lay hollow and aching between them, a canyon lined with sharp, pointed rocks.

  “We’ll stop at a motel, get some sleep,” he said.

  She rubbed the outer seams of her jeans. “You say that too easily. As if this was normal. As if we were. Marcus, why are you helping me?”

  She was lost in the darkness. Stars shone overhead. The bird had retreated to the back seat and was asleep. Marcus…Marcus was a mystery and a threat. The forested mountains rolled on, locking them in the dim security of the truck.

  “You said it yourself, earlier. I owe you.” His voice was low and contained, neutral.

  “So you drop everything, whatever purpose brought you to that bar, to help me because you broke my heart nine years ago?”

  “Why did you go with me?” he asked.

  It was a valid question. She hated the hurt he’d done her nine years ago, and she didn’t know the stranger he’d become, a stranger capable of violence and aware of magic. “I used my finder’s talent to find safety. It found you.”

  His chest rose and fell with a deep breath. “I will keep you safe.”

  A shiver slid over her skin, raising goosebumps.

  He’d spoken the words like a vow. “As to why.” He glanced back at the bird roosting on the back seat. “I’m righting old wrongs. I wouldn’t have sought you out. You have your life. I have—” He broke off. “Since fate cast you in my way…I don’t expect you to ever think of me with kindness, but I’m glad I can help you.”

  “Did you become a doctor?” she asked abruptly.

  The headlights of a truck travelling toward them shone in, highlighting his face. Perhaps it was the glare that made him flinch. “No.” His voice and face were expressionless.

  The “no” vibrated with finality. Finality and something more. Horror? Regret? Anguish?

  It was as if pain leaked out around his monosyllabic response.

  Sadie found herself figuratively stu
mbling to fill the silence—or to silence an unspoken scream? Her simple question had hurt something in him. “When I left Boston I promised myself I wouldn’t look you up. I wouldn’t follow what you did. I turned my back on that whole life.”

  “I thought you would.”

  She blinked. With Marcus speaking so little, it was difficult to discern the emotion behind his words. But that comment, was it one of bleak satisfaction? “Why?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He rolled his shoulders. “Do you want the radio on?”

  “No, thanks.” She nudged his hand away from the radio button. Energy shivered through her from the fleeting contact. She tucked her hand in her lap, covering it with her other hand, cradling it. Her response to the brief brush of their fingers made her reassess the wisdom of continuing their conversation. Maybe Marcus was right and they should silence it with music?

  The past was a different world. They’d been young, then. She’d been naïve and hopeful. He’d been…wonderful. She’d truly believed his determination to become a doctor. For all of his family’s wealth and power, he’d wanted to serve the community by healing people. She’d been awed by his sense of purpose.

  She’d had her own, then. She’d been going to college, determined to become a history professor or a diplomat or…so many dreams. “I went home. Back to Tennessee. Dad and my stepmother were running the family antique store. She’d just started an interior design business. My stepsisters worked in both. I was the stranger. I borrowed a van and started on the road, picking.”

  “Picking?”

  Of course he wouldn’t know the world of picking. She laughed, unamused. “I drive around looking through people’s junk. I’m at auctions and house sales and anywhere there’s junk to be picked through to find treasures.”

  “You use your finder’s talent.”

  “Sometimes. Mostly it’s just ordinary picking.” She didn’t mention how her work had gradually expanded, giving her a reason and a cover story to be on the road. Sometimes she used her finder’s talent to find special objects, like the amulet around her neck. Other times she acted as a courier. Usually she travelled alone, but occasionally friends rode with her. They had a purpose in all that they did. Her friends had kept her sane when her heart broke. “Can I use my phone or will the Stag mercenaries track it?”