The door to the diner dinged and I looked up. Icy anger flowed through my veins, replacing the grief as I took in the newcomer. One hand dropped to Eleanor, caressing the steel and recalling the promise I’d made to the man in the doorway such a short time ago.
Apparently, I was not done with the past, after all.
Chapter Three
The man who stepped through the diner door was not one I expected. Especially not after the last time I’d spoken to him. Noah Black, aka Noah Lancaster, was my husband’s partner in crime. Tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed, he was a solid man with plenty of muscle; more than a few of the waitresses did a double take as he stood looking around. He stuck out like a sore thumb against the bearded and fatigued truckers.
I had my one hand under my jacket on Eleanor’s grip. She shivered, and Dinah whined under her breath. “Eleanor has all the fun.”
Noah pulled his sunglasses off and those blue eyes swept the room, finally landing on me. He stepped around a waitress and sat himself across from me, his long legs brushing against mine. Abe let out a long low growl from his spot on the floor beside me. I put my free hand on his head. “What the fuck are you doing here? Do you want to see if I will hold to my word and blow your head off?” I’d warned him the last time I’d seen him, after finding out how deep his deception went that I would do just that.
He frowned. “You don’t want to know how I found you?”
I glared at him. “GPS trackers are a dime a dozen. I’ll be sure to check my car before I leave.”
He shook his head as if he was sad. “Bea—”
“Phoenix,” I corrected him. “Or Nix if you prefer.”
“Fine. Nix,” he said. “You are going after your father. I’d like to help. Justin was my friend and the closest thing to a brother I had.”
I snorted. My waitress came back with my food and I tucked into it while Noah ordered his own food. Half my burger was gone before he moved to speak again.
A few slow blinks from him as he watched me eat, but he wisely kept his comments to himself. “I don’t have the family bible to break the code Justin created, but that doesn’t mean I can’t help. He and I talked about what we would do, how we could cut into your father’s profits and how we could take him down. I have good information.”
I raised a single french fry at him. “Stop calling him that. Romano will do fine. He stopped being my father the second he had my son killed.” I flipped the fry to Abe who caught it with a snap of his teeth.
Noah didn’t back down. “Romano has his fingers in more spots than even Mancini and the Collective realize.”
My eyebrows shot up and I spoke around the last mouthful of burger. “And what do you know about the Collective and Mancini?”
He tapped his fingers on the table. “The Collective runs the hidden world, controls the usage of magic and myst. Mancini runs the Collective. What else is there to know?”
I wiped my fingers on my napkin and slid the plate with the extra burger to the side of the table. Abe took it without a need for more of a prompt. “There is a hell of a lot more to the Collective than that.”
He stared at me, as if I would just spill the beans here in the middle of a truck stop with normals all around us oblivious to what we were discussing. The door opened with a ding and Simon stepped through. Add one abnormal to the room, then.
Abe pressed against my leg, a low rumble in his chest. The hair stood on the back of my neck as the person in the booth behind me gave a deep grunt, and a waft of animal musk floated to me.
Okay, so make that a second abnormal. Abnormals carried a smell to them. The weaker they were in hiding their abilities, the weaker they were in using myst magic, the stronger the smell. The dude behind me might as well have dunked himself in a vat of abnormal scent. I gritted my teeth and blew a sharp breath out my nose.
“Legen.” I pointed to the ground and Abe laid flat as if I’d clonked him on the head.
“Nix,” Noah said my name and that was all he got out before the abnormal behind me shot out of the booth and spun to face me.
I had my legs on the bench seat and scrambled onto the table, and as quick as my reflexes were, I knew I was slow. Injuries and fatigue had me at their mercy.
The abnormal was a big guy with wide shoulders that were bulked up as if he had been using steroids at an accelerated pace. The same dude that I’d passed in the parking lot.
I stood on the table, legs apart for balance, and both Dinah and Eleanor drawn and pointed at him. “You got a problem, big man?”
The abnormal had tiny pig eyes and his nose was curled slightly making me think he had some rhino DNA kicking around in there. Entirely possible with the way magic and myst worked.
“You the Phoenix?” He rumbled the words and they resonated in my chest; the sound was so deep he might as well have had a personal bass system inside him.
“Yeah. You got a problem with that?” I hadn’t moved from my stance on the table. Noah stayed where he was—smart for an ex-FBI agent—and Simon stood by the door.
The abnormal pointed a thick finger at me. “You kill abnormals.”
I nodded. “Only when they disturb my lunch. It gives me indigestion.”
Dinah snickered. I ran a thumb over her stock to keep her quiet.
Although I wouldn’t have said it was possible, the abnormal narrowed his eyes further. “I think I can take you.”
My eyes widened. What the fuck was this? Since when were abnormals coming after me?
He gave a full-body shudder and his skin shimmered from a human tone, to a rather dark gray shade that gave more credence to the rhino look. He shook his big head side to side. “I think you’re going to die today, Phoenix. And I’m going to get a good payday.”
The rest of the truckers, along with the waitstaff and cooks, hurried out of the diner. I didn’t blame them. The big rhino abnormal currently pawed at the ground with one foot and then the other, sending chunks of the tile floor flying behind him. As if readying himself for a charge.
This was not how I thought my day would go when I woke up.
“Kriech,” I commanded Abe, and he shot toward the abnormal, on his belly, crawling like a commando until he was under a far table away from the path of the oncoming abnormal freight train.
I squeezed Dinah’s trigger and shot off a round at Rhino just to see what would happen. The bullet slammed into his chest over the heart, perfect aim. It flattened as if it had hammered into steel before it fell to the floor.
“Well, that’s shitty,” I muttered. The words had no sooner left my mouth when he charged.
“Jump!” Noah yelled as he leapt from the booth. I jammed Dinah and Eleanor back in their holsters.
I waited, feeling the milliseconds pass as if they were minutes. At the last possible moment, I leapt up and grabbed the edge of the rafter above. The abnormal crashed into the table, booth, then through the wall into the kitchen. Screaming ensued. Apparently not all the cooks had left.
I swung where I was, the bite in my shoulder throbbing like a son of a bitch. I let go and landed in a crouch away from the hole the abnormal had created in the wall. I stared into it, waiting.
Eyes or ears, that would be the only place bullets would take him, I knew it without knowing how. And with those beady eyes and the way the rolls of his face covered them when he’d charged, hitting them would be tough, even with Dinah and Eleanor.