Phoenix in My Fortune (A Monster Haven Story Book 6) Read Free

positions on the Board. We kept in touch, but they didn’t need me either, unless I was willing to fly out to Kansas and help them conduct interviews. That wasn’t going to happen.
    I sighed and grabbed my purse. No use letting the quiet ruin my mood. As I passed him on my way to the car, I blew Riley a kiss, and he blew one back.
    I pulled out, singing made-up words to a song on the radio I’d never heard before. At the end of the driveway, I stopped to check for cars and prepared to turn left.
    From the corner of my eye, I saw a figure staring at me. No. I felt it more than I saw it. Something impossibly tall and thin and dark. I whipped my head around to see it, but there was nothing there. The figure was gone.
    Goosebumps covered my arms and sweat broke out on my upper lip. I shivered.
    Nothing there, Zoey. What the hell is wrong with you?
    Nothing there. Whatever I’d thought I’d seen clearly wasn’t there. Yet I didn’t believe that for a minute. Hungry or not, I backed the car up and returned to the house.
    As I pulled in, Riley shut off the hose he’d been spraying to try to return my grass to its natural color. “Forget something?”
    I stepped out of the car, my body shaking. “I saw him.”
    Riley’s face paled. “Are you sure?” He didn’t bother to ask who I’d seen.
    I nodded, paused, shook my head, paused, then nodded again.
    He dropped everything and came to wrap his arms around me. “Well, shit.” He kissed the top of my head. “I guess the reprieve is over.”
    I buried my face in his shirt and my voice was muffled. “I’m not ready.”
    “We’re as ready as we can be. We’ve beaten everything that’s come before. We’ll be okay.”
    He was right, of course. We’d beaten a hungry incubus intent on devouring every woman I came in contact with. We’d beaten the Leprechaun Mafia and a sorceress who’d tried to auction off all the Hidden to the highest bidder. We’d beaten the most powerful empath the world had known and a cult of Shadow Man’s worshippers attempting to set off the zombie apocalypse.
    Knowing all this didn’t mean I believed we were ready. This was it. The end of the line. The Last Hidden had stepped into the world, and he was there to destroy it.
    * * *
    We’d known he was coming. Four months ago he’d sent a cult of worshippers to kill all the Aegises in the world, thereby breaking some mythical Covenant nobody really understood and causing the zombie apocalypse.
    Except, it didn’t really go down that way. The cult had managed to kill all the Aegises but my Mom and me. And then they didn’t wait for this Covenant thing to be broken and the two of us to be dead. They went ahead and started the zombie apocalypse anyway.
    It was all out of order. Which probably meant a couple of things. First, that not even this Last Hidden guy really knew the terms of the Covenant. And second, he wasn’t too eager to go by the book and was playing by his own rules.
    In the end, we put the zombies (and werefolk, demons and vampires) back in their boxes. Mom and I had also been getting messages from the First Hidden, an enormous bird called the Simurgh. Like its descendant the phoenix, every time she died, she was reborn and started life again, which was why she was still around after thousands of years. At least, that was what my research suggested.
    Her most recent message had been the awesome news that the Last Hidden had chosen a name. I’d really been hoping he’d be the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, but no. That wasn’t the name he chose.
    Shadow Man.
    Then, we had four months of peace and quiet. We’d dared to hope maybe he’d changed his mind. Or was two inches tall and not the threat he’d expected to be. Or invisible and totally helpless to communicate with us.
    Anything was possible, right? A girl could hope.
    But fun-time, apparently, was over.
    In what I would forever think of as The Great Time of Peace and Quiet, I had researched Shadow Man. About six years