My mouth formed, No! But I never got the word out. It caught in my throat, choked me so badly I couldn’t quite breathe, as Sawyer put his hand at the back of her neck. One quick snap and—
Instead he lifted her onto her tiptoes and kissed her more passionately than he’d ever kissed me.
“You see now why I always think it’s Sawyer?” Jimmy murmured.
CHAPTER 25
“What the hell?” I demanded, stepping forward.
Jimmy muscled me back with his shoulder. “He’s one of them.”
I stilled. “A revenant?”
Sawyer didn’t look dead, risen or otherwise. He looked like Sawyer. Hotter than hell. Even when he was kissing my . . . I swallowed thickly.
Mother.
“No,” Jimmy murmured. “Not a revenant.”
And it wasn’t until the relief flooded me that I realized I’d been devastated at the thought of Sawyer dying.
Although death just wasn’t what it used to be.
“We should have known when they said there was a spell on this place,” Jimmy said.
“Just because there’s a spell we should automatically think our favorite sorcerer cast it?”
“Not my favorite,” Jimmy muttered. “But . . . hell yeah.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off of Sawyer and the Phoenix. The two of them were really going at it. Kissing, touching, rubbing against each other like cats in a field of catnip. His neck wound had clotted, but the blood all over him, all over her, made them seem like characters in an Anne-Rice-before-she-found-Jesus book. I wanted to glance away, but for some reason I just couldn’t.
The Phoenix lifted her mouth from Sawyer’s. “Raising the dead makes me so . . .” She leaned forward and ran her crimson tongue around Sawyer’s lips as if she were catching the last droplets of an ice-cream cone. “What’s the word, lover?”
“Horny,” Sawyer said.
“All right,” I practically shouted. “I come here to change sides in the war to end all wars, bring along the best general I’ve got, and you’re dry-humping in the front hall?”
“Make it shut up,” the Phoenix ordered.
The revenants started forward.
“Oh, sheesh,” I said. “Do you really want us to dust them all when you just got done raising them?”
The Phoenix, mouth poised again over Sawyer’s, paused as if listening. But not to me. Her eyes went distant, and she nodded once, shook her head, then murmured, “Yes. All right.”
I turned my attention to Jimmy, who lifted his eyebrows and twisted his lips, the facial equivalent of a shrug.
The Phoenix let go of Sawyer, but instead of turning to us, she moved into a spare corner and continued to have a nice long talk with herself. Most of it we couldn’t hear, because it only existed in her mind; the rest she whispered too softly for even our super-duper batlike senses—until she lost her temper.
“No,” she shrieked, the sound rattling the windows, making the revenants freeze, then fall to the floor with their hands over their heads. “I want to play now!”
She lifted her hand. The earth-toned flesh began to glow a dull orange.
“We can play,” Sawyer murmured, his gray eyes watching her like a wolf might watch a much bigger wolf. “No need to get—”
Fire suddenly erupted from the fingertips of the Phoenix, hitting the wall and rolling upward to dance across the ceiling.
“Upset,” Sawyer finished.
She spun toward me and Jimmy. I leaped in front of him just as he was leaping in front of me. We conked heads, then began to push and shove.
I expected fire to consume us both. We wouldn’t die, but being burned is excruciating. I don’t recommend it.
When nothing happened, we stopped mid-tussle and shifted our attention to her. The Phoenix stared at me; her lips formed an O of surprise. “It’s you,” she breathed, and clapped her still-flaming hands against her cheeks.
I waited for the shriek, but instead of being burned, her face merely took on the same orange-yellow glow, making her dark eyes appear surrounded by hellfire.
“Uh, yeah,” I managed, moving away from Jimmy.
Skipping forward like a child, this way and that, she sang an off-key tune beneath her breath, then paused halfway between Sawyer and me. At least her hands and her face had stopped glowing. I was starting to think she was nuttier than a Payday candy bar.
“Nefertiti,” she whispered.
“I’m Elizabeth,” I said slowly. “Or Liz if you like.”
She shook her head, scooted closer, and I tensed, thinking she was going to hug me. Instead she slapped me across the face—palm to my left cheek—then she backhanded me on the right one. I stumbled first in one direction and then the other but managed to keep my feet. Without even looking his way, I gave a quick shake of the head to stay Jimmy, but I kept my eyes on the Phoenix.
“Nefertiti,” she said again.
“Ooo-kay. I guess you named me Nefertiti.”