Submerge (The Bound Ones Book 2) Read online

  Skylar put his hand on her shoulder, and she looked up to see that the three of them were looking at her, waiting for an explanation.

  “Don’t start feeling guilty, Phoenyx,” Skylar cautioned, reading her thoughts. “You’re not a murderer. What you did was self-defense. Don’t start doubting yourself now. That’s exactly what they want.”

  She nodded but didn’t discard her frown. Then she turned to Sebastian and Ayanna. “They have Lily, and if we don’t give ourselves up in five days, they’re going to kill her.”

  “The hell they are,” Sebastian said. “We’re going to their lodge alright but we’re not giving ourselves up. We’ll go in there, use our powers against them and get Lily back.”

  Ayanna shook her head. “They’ll be expecting that. They obviously know what you did at the Utah Lodge, they’ll be expecting a retaliation, and at the first sign of a threat they’ll kill Lily.”

  “Then we’ll be prepared,” Skylar said resolutely. “We’re going to recover the pieces of the stone the three of you have been collecting all this time, find the dagger, and use it on one of us so they can’t kill Lily.”

  “There’s only one problem with that,” Ayanna said. “The dagger is with the Four Corners, it always has been. It is most likely at the lodge in Prague, that’s the High Council headquarters.”

  “That’s where they want us to go,” Phoenyx said.

  “Alright, new plan,” Sebastian said, holding up his index finger. “We’ll get the stone, sneak into lodge, steal the dagger and use it before they can kill Lily.”

  “We only have five days,” Phoenyx said. “How are we going to find all the pieces of the stone in that time?”

  “It’s a stretch,” Skylar said. “But it’s the only chance we’ve got. And we have to start now.” He turned to Ayanna. “Bring back their memories. The sooner we get that ordeal over with, the sooner we can start the search.”

  Ayanna nodded and looked at Phoenyx and Sebastian. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Phoenyx was hesitant before, when regaining her knowledge from her past lives was optional, but now it was necessary to save Lily, to save all of them.

  “How do we start?” she asked without a moment’s pause.

  “Come, have a seat,” Ayanna invited, gesturing to a China red couch with wood-carved dragons coiling under the armrests.

  Phoenyx sat, facing Ayanna who took a seat next to her.

  “Like I said before, it’s not a simple process,” Ayanna prefaced. “The task itself is quick, but receiving your many lifetimes of memory takes a while, and it can be quite painful. Just don’t fight it; the more you resist it, the longer it takes. You just have to try your hardest to relax.” Ayanna lifted her arms and put her fingertips lightly on either side of Phoenyx’s head. “Close your eyes.”

  Phoenyx took a deep breath and did as she was told. A minute passed in total silence and she began to doubt that it was going to work. Then she heard voices and a fuzzy sort of static sound, and she thought perhaps Sebastian or Skylar had turned on the radio. That’s a little rude. But then she began to see pictures in her mind, flashes of faces and places she didn’t know. It was slow at first, image after image, face after face, until there was an onslaught of snapshots, flooding in as if a dam had been demolished, and the white noise of voices got louder, a chorus of laughs, whispers, cries, screams, curses, coos. It was deafening.

  She opened her eyes, hoping to find relief in sight, but she could see nothing but the memories avalanching into her mind’s eyes. After a while, the snapshots became clips, whole events unfolding in her brain, blossoming like flowers in fast-forward. Multiple life-long dramas played to entirety in seconds in the neurological television store of her brain. Countless romances with Sebastian under different names. Countless siblings, parents, children and friends, and their countless inevitable losses.

  She vaguely felt herself arch backward, her head splitting as if a miniature big bang had gone off inside it, threatening to explode through her skull. A distant part of her was aware of hands on her knee and shoulder as she blindly, deafly, helplessly relived heartbreaks, joys, sorrows, angers, fears, hopes, dreams. And fire. Fire was everywhere, woven delicately through everything. Always. It was all so overwhelming, Phoenyx feared her very soul would split apart.

  After what seemed like an eternity of bombarding visions, things began to slow down. Memories came in smaller numbers, shorter lengths, less significant values, until eventually she came back to herself, aware of her surroundings, able to see and feel and hear the present. After the trickle had stopped completely, the pain remained, a migraine leaving her ears buzzing and her vision rainbow-streaked.

  It took her a moment to realize she was in Sebastian’s arms. She had almost forgotten where they were and why they were here, it seemed she hadn’t been gone for a very long time. She looked up at him, into those cerulean eyes she knew better than anything else.

  “Are you alright?” he asked, brushing loose hair behind her ear in a gentle caress.

  She sat up, hand immediately pressing against her forehead to combat the pain.

  “Here, this should help with the pain,” Ayanna said, handing Phoenyx two blue ibuprofen capsules and a bottle of water. “Gotta love modern medicine.”

  Phoenyx downed the pills, then chugged the water. “That. Sucked.”

  “It’s harder for you to take every time,” Ayanna said.

  “I remember,” Phoenyx groaned, rubbing her temples. Then her eyes widened as she understood the gravity of this. “I remember!” Phoenyx repeated in a brighter tone. She could actually remember all the times they’d done this before—it must have been hundreds of times. She remembered Ayanna, truly and deeply. Ayanna was no longer just some professor who had told Phoenyx wild tales, she was Phoenyx’s oldest friend, her confidant. The two of them had been through so much together. There weren’t words to describe Ayanna’s loyalty.

  “Thank you, old friend,” Phoenyx said to her with a smile, causing joy to spread across Ayanna’s face like the dawn rays pouring over a mountainside.

  Then Ayanna turned to Sebastian. “Are you ready?”

  He nodded, and Ayanna proceeded to do the same thing she had done to Phoenyx. It didn’t take long for Sebastian to succumb to the tidal wave of memories, and Phoenyx caught him as he crumpled into her lap, happy to hold him as long as he needed.

  Her head still ached, and she remembered that the ache lingers for a day or two. How incredible this all was. On one hand, she felt more truly like herself than she ever had as Phoenyx, and yet she still was Phoenyx. Living as Phoenyx for nineteen years had morphed her way of thinking. Each life was like that. She was still the same base person, but with nuances added and altered with each new life.

  For six years she had mourned the loss of her father, but now that she had returned to herself, the loss was so small compared to all she had been through. She couldn’t quite remember every person she had ever known and loved and lost, but she knew of a great deal of them right now. Parents she lost in every single lifetime, men she had loved in lives she had not found Sebastian, siblings, friends. But there were two constants throughout her entire history. She had never and would never suffer the loss of Sebastian or Ayanna; if Sebastian died, she died too, and Ayanna was immortal, incapable of dying.

  As she caressed Sebastian’s face, Phoenyx looked around Ayanna’s latest dwelling. So many different cultures all blended together in this one room. The couch they were sitting on was Chinese, the rug under their feet was Persian, the miniature obelisks here and there were of course Egyptian, and on the large bookshelves were tens of trinkets from all over the world, many of which Phoenyx remembered Ayanna acquiring.

  “Will you go next, Skylar?” Ayanna asked him.

  He shook his head. “It’s not as important that I recover my memories right now as it is for them. It is something that I would like at some point, but right now we just need to focus on finding the pieces of the stone.”


  “Very well.” Ayanna nodded. She looked at Phoenyx. “Do you remember where you hid the stone fragments?”

  Instantly, the hidden tomb in Egypt popped into her head. She could see it all—the route to get there from Thebes, the mountain side where the trail was hidden, how beautiful that first stone fragment looked as she finally held it in her hands before she tucked it away.

  “I remember where the first piece is,” Phoenyx said.

  “In Egypt,” Ayanna said. “That was our first victory.”

  “Yes,” Phoenyx said. “And therein lies a problem. Doesn’t a flight to Egypt take close to a day? We can’t afford to waste a whole day on a plain.”

  “We won’t have to,” Ayanna said. “I have a private jet. We can fly there directly in less than ten hours.”

  “Of course, you have a private jet,” Phoenyx said with a snicker. Again it was so surreal to simultaneously feel like she knew Ayanna so well and that she had just met her; both were equally as true. She had not found Ayanna in several lifetimes, and though she understood that who a person truly is doesn’t change over time, it was still like she was getting to know Ayanna all over again.

  “I’ll call my pilot and make the arrangements.” Ayanna pulled out her phone and walked a few steps away to make the call.

  “Wow, Egypt,” Skylar mused. “I always wanted to see it someday, I just never thought that day would come so soon. What about the other two pieces?”

  Phoenyx looked blankly down at Sebastian to think. She dug through her memories, trying to recall any details about the other stone fragments. In just her nineteen years of this life, trying to remember an event from the past could be cumbersome, but now she had thousands of years of memories to search through. Just because her memories had been unlocked didn’t mean she could pull up a memory at the drop of a hat with crystal clarity. Ayanna had merely given Phoenyx access to those memories, it still might take some time before she remembered anything of value.

  Even though Phoenyx didn’t say anything, Skylar was nodding; he have heard her internal soliloquy. He then looked down at Sebastian.

  “I’ve gotta say that, as much as I want to remember my past lives, I’m in no hurry to go through what you did, what he’s going through now. Just standing by watching and listening is giving me a headache.”

  “You can see all of his memories coming back to him?” Phoenyx asked, forever in awe of Skylar’s telepathy and still not quite used to it. “You saw all of mine too, then. It’s a very strange feeling, to be who you are and suddenly know who you’ve always been. I can’t explain it.”

  “Yes, it’s interesting to witness the change in you,” he said. “You’re so much surer of yourself now, I can see it in your thought pattern. You were always confident, but the tinge of self-doubt you’ve always had about you is gone.”

  She nodded thoughtfully.

  “He’s almost there,” Skylar said, eyes moving from side to side as if watching something Phoenyx couldn’t see. “Things are slowing down.”

  “And just in time,” Ayanna said, coming back into the conversation. “Our flight leaves in an hour, so as soon as he comes to, we have to head to the airport.”

  “Where in Egypt are we going?” Skylar asked.

  Phoenyx and Ayanna shared a knowing smile, then said together, “Luxor.”

  Phoenyx, Sebastian, Skylar and Ayanna sat on a bench outside the hangers, waiting for the jet to come around so they could board. Now that the awe of regaining her memories had faded, the urgency of their situation returned to Phoenyx. Lily’s safety was hanging in the balance, and so was each of their lives, and possibly their eternities for that matter. Just sitting here waiting was making her jittery; she didn’t know how she would handle ten hours of sitting on the plane.

  Sebastian had recovered spectacularly from his mental reboot. When he had first come out of the stupor, he commenced excitedly telling Skylar about all the wondrous things he could remember seeing, all the while glancing at Phoenyx every now and then with the deepest and most meaningful of looks.

  But now that they were at the airport, the possibility of their doom had apparently settled on him too, as he was now quietly holding her hand.

  At last, the private jet pulled out onto the strip in front of them, parked, and let down the airstair.

  “Wow, that’s some jet,” Sebastian said. “I feel like a celebrity.”

  Phoenyx expected Skylar to make a quip at that remark, as he usually did, but he stayed silent, reserved. For once, she wondered what was going on in his mind.

  They filed up the stairs and into the jet. The inside cabin was much more spacious than any airplane Phoenyx had ever been on. There were three red velvet-lined armchairs on either side with small black marble-top tables in between. The carpet was also red—Ayanna’s favorite color, Phoenyx remember--ed. Phoenyx and Sebastian each took a chair on the left side and Ayanna and Skylar sat on the right.

  “We will be leaving shortly,” the pilot said to Ayanna.

  “Thank you,” Ayanna replied.

  As comfortable as the chair was that Phoenyx was now sitting in, she couldn’t find a comfortable way to sit. Every inch of her was restless, every muscle twitching at the slightest provocation.

  Skylar knowingly leaned close and captured her gaze with his cool eyes. “Tell me about where we are going.”

  She nodded, appreciating the invitation for distraction; they were going to need plenty of distractions for the next ten hours.

  “We are going to Luxor,” Phoenyx said. “In the desert not too far from the city, there’s a hidden treasury where one of the stone fragments is stashed.”

  “That and much, much more,” Sebastian said. “We collected so many treasures trying to find that stone. Most of it all in one lifetime.”

  “We had been in Egypt for several lifetimes because we had heard a rumor that a Pharaoh had possession of a rare stone that supposedly brought him luck,” Phoenyx continued. “In most of our lifetimes, we were born commoners, but in one fortunate lifetime, we were both born into nobility; I was the sister of Ramesses XI, and Sebastian was a High Priest of Amun.”

  “Sebastian, a priest?” Skylar asked, eyebrows raised skeptically.

  “Nothing like a white-collar priest,” Sebastian snickered, shaking his head. “Egyptian priesthood was seldom about religion, more about power and politics. At that time, the priesthood of Amun had control of most of Egypt. And seeing as I was also the most powerful military general, and married to the pharaoh’s sister, it wasn’t difficult to basically overthrow him and steal the throne. Ramesses was such a passive person, always reluctant to rule, he was relieved to hand most issues over to me anyway.”

  “And having me whispering in his ear didn’t hurt,” Phoenyx added, recalling how easy it had been to manipulate her long-dead once-brother.

  Sebastian smiled at her. “Yes, you were definitely the great puppet master that pulled all the strings.”

  “I may have pulled the strings, but the Great Raid was Ayanna’s idea,” Phoenyx said. “Before Sebastian seized power, there was a surge of relics and royal jewelry on the markets, which could only mean that tomb raiders were stealing from the tombs of pharaohs and selling them to common people. We hadn’t yet found the stone and there was the possibility that it had been buried with one of the pharaohs, so Ayanna suggested we use the recent thefts as an opportunity to order a Great Raid of recent pharaohs’ tombs and collect them in a secure location so that the thefts would stop. But the priesthood was profiting from the ‘reclaiming of sacred relics’ and would not give us the authority to give the order. So, since Sebastian was pretty much in charge anyway, he took the throne from my brother and gave the order as pharaoh, also ordering that a ‘tomb’ be built for him wherein all the raid collections would be put along with his funerary items.

  “King Tut’s tomb was a strip-mall jewelry stand compared to what we gained from that raid. More gold, silver, turquoise, mummies and ancient texts than
you can imagine, but no stone.”

  “The tombs of the pharaohs at that time were always built in the Valley of the Kings, but that’s where all the thefts were happening. We would have been stupid to build our tomb there,” Sebastian said. “So we picked a rarely traveled spot in the desert farther to the west. As further security, after the tomb was built, Ayanna erased the memories of the builders, so the only ones who knew of its location were Phoenyx and me.”

  “I always thought it was best that I not know its location,” Ayanna said, “so that I could never accidentally lead someone there. I didn’t have the tricks to deter people that Phoenyx and Sebastian did.”

  Skylar took a moment to appraise Sebastian. “That’s too incredible for words. I can’t believe you were actually a pharaoh of Egypt. Was it someone I might have heard of?”

  “His name was Herihor,” Ayanna said.

  Skylar choked and then laughed. “Okay, I’m sorry, even I have to laugh at that.”

  Sebastian considered it and then laughed himself. “Oh, that is funny in English.”

  Phoenyx rolled her eyes and shook her head.

  “I’m very excited to see this place,” Skylar said. “I feel a strange sense of…honor to be the friend of an ex-pharaoh.”

  Sebastian shrugged with a laugh. “Who knows who you could have been in your other lives. I wouldn’t doubt someone brilliant like Isaac Newton.”

  “Speaking of which, Skylar,” Ayanna interrupt--ted, “we do have plenty of time to waste before we get to Luxor; I can return your memories if you’re willing.”

  Skylar hesitated a moment, then nodded stoicly.

  Ayanna leaned toward him and put her hands on his head as she had done to Phoenyx and Sebastian before him.

  Phoenyx sat back in her chair and glanced out the window. To her surprise, the world was far beneath them. She hadn’t even noticed they had taken off, and now they were hundreds of feet in the air. It was oddly calming, to look down on the world. It was a metaphor for their existence; always watching. If she had been able to look down on the world when her existence began, she would have seen nothing but green, and now as she looked down at the quickly darkening earth, the dazzling lights of the modern age shimmered like stars, reflecting and nearly outshining the heavens above.