Phoenix (17 page)

Brandon raises his knife. His blade flashes down as Phoenix
stumbles in front of him. He pushes the point between Phoenix’s
shoulder blades. Phoenix falls to the ground.

Phoenix lies bleeding, looking up at Brandon.

Angel-me cries out one sharp syllable. ‘No!’

Beautiful Dead Phoenix stands beside me, looks at his dying
self then at Brandon and he spreads his arms wide.

In an agony of realization, Brandon falls to his knees.
In the confusion, only he knows what he’s done. Oscar pulls
Nathan back, Black and Hall grab Oscar’s knife from
Brandon and run with it. All across the forecourt, cars and
Harleys start up, race away. The kids on bikes vanish down
the side streets.

Brother, I forgive you!
Beautiful Dead Phoenix looks on
and spreads his arms. The feathers in his wings flutter, he looks
like a crucified angel.

Out on the forecourt, Brandon holds Phoenix in his arms.

‘Tell Darina I’m sorry,’ Phoenix whispers before the whine
of sirens splits the black silence.

He lies bleeding to death, gazing up at the brother who
has killed him.

There was the journey back – the black vortex, the million
tortured souls – but nothing so terrible as the knowledge we
had gained
.

Dean said nothing. He led the way into the darkness,
beating his wings to rise above the awning up into the cloud-
heavy sky. Phoenix and I followed, looking down at two small
figures, one hunched, one sprawled on the ground, waiting for
the paramedics in a pool of harsh neon light
.

Clouds surrounded us, the figures below were hidden by
mist which twisted and turned, wound itself around us and
carried us into the dark tunnel where there were no stars, no
skies or earth, only a spinning force which dragged us out of
the past towards an unbearable present and the last goodbye.

I held Phoenix’s hand, followed the overlord, closed my eyes
and prayed for it to end differently.

Let this not be true.

The forces of time tore at us, the death heads reappeared
.

Go back. Tell it a new way. Take the knife out of Brandon’s hand. Put it in Nathan’s or Oscar’s – anybody’s. Spare us.

Skulls grinned and crowded in. We were hurting in body
and soul.

Dean led and Phoenix and I followed, turning, falling,
tumbling towards the here-and-now blinding light, torn apart.

Chapter 13

I
ceman waited at the barn door, under the branching moose horns, beside the rusting truck. He reached out and offered me his hand.

‘I’m OK,’ I gasped, looking round for Phoenix, who had slumped against the barn wall, head back and staring at the starlit sky.

Dean stood a few paces from him, watchful and still silent.

I ran to Phoenix and led him into the barn, willed him to bring his attention back to me as I took his hands in mine. ‘Talk to me!’ I whispered.

‘This is how it ends,’ he murmured out of the musty darkness of dust and spiders’ webs, a century of planting, harvest and toil. ‘Not how we wanted, but how it was.’

‘I am so sorry!’ I breathed. ‘I see now why you were
afraid. And if I could alter it … if we could wipe it from our minds.’

But his brother’s name was branded there for ever.

I put my trembling hands to Phoenix’s ice-cold cheeks. There was one more thing I needed to be sure of. ‘Did you know this from the beginning?’ I asked.

There was no light in his dark eyes, no spark of comfort. ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘After I left the house with Zak, there were a thousand fragments – faces, sounds, voices calling – but no clear knowledge.’

‘Did you suspect?’

He sighed. ‘A fight like that, a feud – I knew that anything was possible.’

‘Did Dean know?’

‘He was a cop so he saw the files, he understood the background.’

The overlord came into the barn with Iceman, watchful and still keeping his distance.

‘Was Brandon’s name on the list?’ I asked Dean.

‘Everyone who was there that night was a possible suspect, Brandon included.’ His answer fell heavily into the silence.

‘And so what do I do now?’ I demanded, turning in anger on Dean for the way things had worked out, hating the whole world for leaving me with the one answer I
didn’t expect. ‘Do I name Brandon? Do I say, “Here’s the guilty one”?’

The overlord stepped around us in a wide circle, his footsteps muffled, walking in deep shadow. ‘It’s a tough call,’ he said quietly.

‘Do I?’ I asked Phoenix as gently as I could.

He sighed and shook his head. ‘We could have stepped back from the brink,’ he reminded me. ‘We could have let it go.’

I saw again the death heads that had spun towards us in the time tunnel, desperate souls in a limbo of doubt, and I knew that stepping back from an answer would have meant that Phoenix would have joined them for ever.

‘No.’ I held onto the belief that I’d always had. ‘We needed to know.’

‘Darina’s right,’ Iceman agreed. ‘Sometimes the truth hurts, but without it we can’t move on.’

We stood for a while in silence, except for the creak of hinges as the door swung open and closed. We were all waiting, holding our breaths. Phoenix was rapidly fading from me.

‘So what do I do?’ I cried again.

Dean took me on one last journey, promising me that
Phoenix would still be at Foxton when I got back.

‘Wait for me,’ I begged in the midnight barn.

Phoenix’s spirit was ebbing, was withdrawing from the far side like the tide pulling back from the shore. When he embraced me, I couldn’t be sure how much longer his arms would have the strength to hold me.

‘Be here,’ I pleaded.

Then Dean surrounded me in gentle light and carried me away from Foxton, across the dark mountains to Deer Creek where he set me down under the stars. ‘Talk to Brandon,’ he told me. ‘Make your decision.’

The overlord left me at the water’s edge.

I waited where I had waited for Phoenix a year ago, by the big boulder in the middle of the creek. Stars shone over my head and in the stream at my feet.

In the dead of night Brandon rode out to meet me.

‘I got your text,’ he said, laying his bike in the tall grass, standing uncertainly beside it, his jacket zippered to the chin, hands in pockets. ‘What’s so urgent that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow?’

‘This couldn’t,’ I murmured. I wanted to look into the face of the man who had killed his brother.

Brandon narrowed his gaze and walked down the steep bank towards me. ‘So?’

I stared at him, at the face of a guy whose suspicious
eyes permanently said:
Don’t come near me. Don’t try to
understand or fix me
.

The creek ran at our feet. We stared down at the shimmering reflection of the stars. ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ I murmured.

He looked away, the barrier stayed up.

‘I know what happened a year ago.’

Still no reaction. The water flowed on.

Say it quiet and clear in the electric midnight air. ‘You killed Phoenix.’

If Brandon had made excuses, said it was a mistake, if he’d asked me how I knew or had tried to blame the Thornes or the confusion of that night, I might have had a clear idea of what to do next.

‘It was you,’ I said again. And I saw Phoenix stumble across Brandon’s path, I saw the blade go in. Again and again.

Brandon stared at the black boulder and at the water rushing over rocks, splashing, churning, whirling on.

Talk to Brandon
, Dean had said.
Make your decision
.

‘You don’t deny it?’ I asked. Guilt didn’t look the way I expected, shored up by excuses and anger.

Brandon shook his head. His voice seemed to be lost and swept away in the current.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

He gave me a dull, weary look then shrugged.

‘How does it feel? Talk to me.’

Walking away, crunching over the pebbles, walking back – ‘It feels like hell,’ he said.

Make your decision.

Brandon waited a long time to speak again. ‘Hell. I never leave it behind. I stay home, I hang out in town – it’s with me every second. I ride into the mountains and it’s there. I sleep and dream it. I want it to work out different. I wake up and it’s the same.’

Make your decision.

I looked at Brandon and saw that he, not Phoenix, had joined those death heads, spinning through a dark universe in eternal torment. I understood this and felt the first pang of pity.

‘What about Sharon?’ I asked. I compared her with Bob Jonson who had lost Jonas, with the Taylors grieving over Arizona, and with Jon and Heather Madison accepting that Summer was gone for ever. ‘Doesn’t your mom deserve to know?’

‘How would it help?’ Brandon muttered. He’d considered it a million times, never reached an answer.

I thought again about Bob Jonson. ‘I hear you.’

A death wish sat heavy on Bob’s shoulders after Jonas died, and the truth didn’t lift it. It ended astride a Dyna in
a soaring arc over the cliff edge, a plunge into white water and oblivion.

And how did it help Sharon to have Brandon stand in front of a jury? To know that if it had worked out a split-second differently Phoenix might have lived?

Then again, ‘This is to do with justice,’ I sighed. ‘The others – Jonas, Arizona and Summer – they got it, whatever it cost.’

‘Show me a way out,’ Brandon pleaded. ‘I mean it, Darina. An exit out of this is all I’m asking.’

‘I don’t know that you get to ask for anything,’ I said more harshly. ‘That’s not how it works.’ Because of Brandon we had all lived through twelve months of agony.

And suddenly, unexpectedly and out of nowhere, I was back for a delirious moment, here by Deer Creek with Phoenix, under the stars. It was our place, our precious time. I whispered his name. ‘Phoenix!’

Brandon heard me. He stood so still for so long I thought he’d stopped breathing.

I called Phoenix’s name but it was Dean who came to me. ‘I can’t do this alone. You have to help me to decide.’

Dean stood on the far bank surrounded by light. He was tall, unbending in the moonlight. ‘Explain your thinking, Darina. But hurry – we have very little time.’

‘I feel sorry for Brandon. I didn’t expect to.’

‘His is not a common suffering,’ the overlord agreed.

We gazed at him standing a little way off, a lonely figure under the stars.

‘What happens if the killer walks free?’ I asked Dean. ‘Will Phoenix still get to move on?’

‘I understand – you need justice for Phoenix to secure his journey’s end, but now you have to be prepared for things you didn’t expect, to open your eyes to the fact that justice takes more than one form.’

‘I long for Phoenix to be free,’ I whispered. ‘It’s all I ever wanted. I’m scared that if I don’t name Brandon, Phoenix will be trapped in limbo.’

‘Does the world have to know the truth?’ Dean asked. ‘Darina, I’m not sure. I don’t have the answer.’ And he looked kindly at me, surrounded by his halo of light.

I walked up to Brandon with a big weight still on my shoulders and I looked straight into his eyes.

He gazed back at me across a barrier of total, unending misery.

‘You took a life and you saved one,’ I said softly, knowing clearly and precisely now why Brandon had shown no fear as he ran into the flames.

‘Without you, Zak would have died.’

A brother’s life taken. A brother’s life saved.

Brandon heard me, walked a little way along the
bank, turned, and when he came back I saw that he was crying.

The weight lifted from my shoulders.
A life taken,
a life saved
.

I’ve kept the secret of the Beautiful Dead for twelve whole months, so carrying to my grave the knowledge of what Brandon did shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

‘Tomorrow morning at dawn, ride out to Foxton to find me,’ I told him. ‘I’ll need you then.’

He wiped his tears then walked up the bank, rode off on his Harley. I waited until the sound of the engine died.

‘Come with me,’ Dean said, inviting me into his silver glow.

We found Phoenix still in the barn, sitting on the hayloft steps with Iceman by his side.

‘He only has a few minutes,’ Iceman warned, touching Phoenix lightly on the shoulder as he and Dean left us alone together.

And as I sat beside Phoenix, I knew we’d reached the moment I dreaded. Every minute, every hour, every day of the last year had been leading to this. Now it was here.

‘I can’t find the words,’ I whispered, a tight band of
sorrow around my chest.

Phoenix put his finger to my lips. ‘What’s left to say? Except, we lived our whole lives for each other.’

‘And you’ll be free?’

‘Like Jonas and the others.’

‘Will you see them again?’

‘No one knows. All I’m sure of is that I leave the far side and go forward.’

Out of the darkness into light, free from doubt.

I took his trembling hand in mine, felt the dampness of my own tears on his cold fingertips. ‘Will I join you – in the end?’

Phoenix smiled and the crooked curve of his lips caught at my heart. ‘Let’s risk a yes on that,’ he murmured. ‘And I know that we’ll never be apart. Remember – as long as you live, when you need me I’ll be there.’

‘Any time, any place?’ I moved my lips but no sound came out.

‘In a heartbeat,’ he promised.

He leaned forward and his lips touched mine – not a kiss exactly, only a brief, brushing contact before those searching, all-knowing eyes looked into mine one last time.

Then Dean and Iceman returned. They stood in the doorway, waiting for Phoenix to rise slowly from the step.
I held his hand and I was the one who led the way out of the barn into the starlight before his time finally ran out, to the sound of the creek running through the valley and the sight of the crescent moon in a jewelled sky.

Phoenix walked slowly past the silver-grey ranch house, glancing at the shadowy porch and the securely bolted door. He smiled at me again.

In Hunter and Marie’s time, at different place in history,
this is where we would live.

‘I know.’

Dean and Iceman hung back until the very last moment. They let us reach the water’s edge together.

‘You are everything to me,’ I told Phoenix.

He kissed me on the lips, soft and cold. He spread his white wings and his hand slipped from mine.

And he walked away with his two companions, never turning back as they made their way out of the valley towards the ridge and the aspens, silver in the moonlight. Three winged creatures walked into the shadows. The barn door swung closed. The Beautiful Dead departed.