“You’re a great black hole anyway,” I muttered.
His gaze narrowed; then he glanced at Jimmy. “Cover yourself, Sanducci.”
“I’d be happy to. If you’d just release me from these chains.”
With an impatient grunt, Sawyer strode forward. Keeping one hand around my biceps, he used the other to put Jimmy back in his pants. Or at least he tried.
Jimmy twisted, drawing his shoulder away, then slamming it forward, catching Sawyer in the chest and nearly knocking him down. If I hadn’t been attached, he would have. As it was, I had to take a couple of quick steps or be dragged along.
“Don’t touch me.” Jimmy’s voice was flat, deadly.
Outside the wind stirred, blowing in through the door, tracing patterns through the dust. I couldn’t tell if the distant rhythmic patter was incoming rain, the breeze through the trees or merely the cadence of my own heart.
Sawyer’s gray eyes darkened to smoke, and his nostrils flared as he fought to keep himself under control. The air seemed to crackle with fury and power. If they’d been dogs, their hair would have been standing on end. Mine was.
Then Sawyer’s gaze lowered, and his lips curved. “A cock ring? The Dagda is my kind of man.”
“Since he isn’t a man at all,” Jimmy snapped, “I can see the resemblance.”
“Glass houses,” Sawyer murmured.
“Listen,” I interrupted. “We don’t have time for you two to play ‘my dick’s bigger than your dick.’ ”
“It is.” Sawyer lifted an eyebrow in my direction. “Isn’t it?”
I was so not going there.
“We need—” I began, then paused as a singsongy voice from outside called, “Sawwwww-yerrrr!”
He dropped my arm, faced the door. I glanced at Jimmy with a frown, but he was staring at the door too. That distant patter had become a full-blown thud.
Revenants marched in. Brand-new ones from the looks of them. Tiny particles of dirt pinged lightly against the floor, mixing with the dust of their forebears.
“Guess we were right,” Jimmy murmured. “Mommy’s been raising the dead all over the place.”
My chest went tight; I couldn’t breathe. My gaze was glued to the doorway as I waited for my first true sight of my mother.
She flew in—not literally, though I guess she could have—shoving aside revenants like the nuisance they were. Every time she touched one they cringed, scrambling as far away as they could get, though stopping just short of the door.
The chandelier’s yellow light made her skin glow like gold. Her curly dark hair shone. She’d found better clothes—a bright red sheath, yellow sandals, with turquoise bobbles at her ears, wrists and throat.
I stared at her and felt nothing, remembered the same. How could that be? This woman—loose term, I know—had given birth to me. Shouldn’t there be some connection? But when I saw her I only experienced a sense of the bizarre. That someone could look so much like me yet not like me. That we could share the same blood, yet without the similarity in appearance she could be any other being on the planet.
“My love,” she purred, her voice lower than mine, with that thick accent that brought to mind sand dunes and the pyramids of Giza. “What did you do?”
I opened my mouth to answer—who else could be her love?—and Jimmy elbowed me in the ribs. She wasn’t looking at me, didn’t even appear to have noticed me in the room, which was downright disturbing.
Hey! Long-lost daughter here.
I remained silent as she laid her palm against Sawyer’s dust-strewn chest. When she lifted it, she left her handprint in the grit like a brand.
“They disobeyed,” he said simply.
“So you killed them all.” She licked her lips. “You’re so deliciously vicious.”
I blinked. I’d just been describing Sawyer with similar contradictory terms. Was that an inherited trait? Or could she read my mind without even touching me? If so, we were all dead.
She drew her fingernail—long, spiky, very Fu Manchu—beneath the mountain lion tattooed on his chest. Rubbing her hand in the blood that welled, she expressed the delight of a child who’d just discovered finger paint, before she pressed her palm to his stomach, leaving behind a more colorful, more gruesome brand.
“Mmm.” She tilted her head as if listening to someone, though the room was quiet as the eye of a storm. “More.”
She’d cut his neck before my eyes tracked the movement. Blood spurted, and she stuck both hands beneath the flow, then began to finger paint in earnest, all over Sawyer’s body.
Sawyer, who’d been standing still as a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights, grabbed the Phoenix. I figured he’d toss her through the window, smack her against the wall, throw her to the ground and do a rain dance on her head. And we needed her—at least until we had the key.