Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Yet there stood Rasputin behind the Tsarina, unwashed and oily, grinning at Dmitri with a skull’s teeth. Rasputin, another like himself. A fellow Oboroten—a Shifter. And one with the special touch, the same as Dmitri. A man who could heal.

  The body at his feet did not move, yet Dmitri had heard tales of other Shifters who had survived bullets to the skull. They’d gasp awake, disoriented, but still dangerous. The improbability could not be ignored.

  He tossed the prince’s tasteless rug over Rasputin. Blood had seeped to the floorboards and the prince wheezed, pointing, his lips twittering once again.

  Even with the brain splatter on Dmitri’s coat and the marks on the wood under the carpet, the monk had not bled what he should have.

  Another reason to be concerned.

  The quicker Dmitri threw the body into the river, the better. He didn’t want to smell the shit in the prince’s trousers when he realized his ramblings about “the unkillable prey” held truth.

  One of Dmitri’s men stayed behind. A Shifter with a special voice, he’d whisper enthralling words into the ears of Dmitri’s co-conspirators and fix the prince’s mad ramblings into their minds as ‘truth.’ Then they’d all scurry away with the same preposterous tale of bravery and shored-up masculinity.

  Dmitri drove his Romanov vehicle through St. Petersburg unmolested by sentries and guards. The body rolled against the rear seats, thudding with a vibration Dmitri heard as well as felt as the sudden but slight pull backwards against the momentum of his car. Each time the tires slid on the frozen cobblestones, or the inky night caused Dmitri to slow, he compensated a slight bit more, one small inching of his fingers farther to the left or to the right, to deal with the bulk he hauled.

  He gripped the steering wheel tighter, waiting for a gnarled hand to reach over the seat back and take hold of his neck. Or a howl to rip through the interior his car—rasping and violent, shrill, like the monk himself.

  Or for a healer’s touch to snake around his neck and deal death, forcing Dmitri to taste his own guts.

  Dmitri stopped in a small stand of trees at the head of the Petrovsky Bridge. The shores were even and offered good footing, the mud frozen smooth and the slope flat. A narrow wood span, the bridge above creaked in the winter wind as it crossed over the Neva River. This part of the city lay blanketed by both darkness and poverty, and moving here unnoticed was both simple and expected.

  Dmitri glanced into the back seat. When a bullet was not enough, he’d been told, extreme measures were needed. Freezing until limbs broke off. Drowning. He’d carry the body down the bank and dump the bastard below the ice.

  Incineration worked best, but there would be no evidence. And in the spring, when the ice melted and all other evidence had washed away, that Hessian tart needed to see the consequences of her handiwork.

  So did Dmitri’s cousin. The Tsarina wept and Nicholas licked her tears from the floor.

  They destroyed his nation. His family. They’d birthed weakness and named it “Alexei.”

  Dmitri flung open his door. The night’s air slapped hard and he tucked the edges of his scarf into the collar of his greatcoat. Christ’s birthday had brought with it true cold this year—the kind that froze men’s feet into their boots and their hands into blackened claws.

  The cold settled in this unholy hour, in the last moments before sun pushed its full rays over the horizon. It built up, fortifying itself in winter’s attempts to hold Russia forever. It thickened and encased and those stupid enough to venture outside found themselves praying for the dawn and laboring solely to breathe.

  The cold prickled but Dmitri lowered the scarf and sucked it in, fixing it to himself. He looked at the river, fixing that, too, into his vision. Even in the darkest hour, the burning fire the Motherland’s crystal ice danced on the solid waters and through the stillness of the air.

  He, unlike the Hessian, would do what Russia needed.

  Dmitri yanked the body through the rear door of the vehicle. His Shifter ability to change himself took time—considerable time, since his morphing was much weaker than his healer’s touch—but he’d learned early how to maximize his body’s potential. He’d kept himself small for a Shifter male, concentrating his mass instead to increase his strength and athleticism. Hoisting Rasputin onto his shoulder took little effort.

  The air smelled clean only because the cold made all scents crystalize and drop to the ice. The monk flopped as Dmitri slid down the slope, and the rustling of the rug combined with the scrape of his boot’s heels in a whispered cacophony. It, too, condensed out of the cold, hardening. The sensations of the world popped against Dmitri’s face and burst on his tongue, a wild integration of perceptions that could only happen in a place where nothing moved.

  If the monk breathed, Dmitri did not feel it, nor did it fog the air. Perhaps the shot to the head had been enough.

  He dropped the bundle where the mud met the edge of the ice. The carpet muffled the thud but moved too easily on the frozen ground. Dmitri kicked at it again, angling the body into the river so it wouldn’t roll away.

  Snow swirled over the river’s surface as miniature winter faeries full of twinkle and malice. Dmitri stared, his gaze following the only movement in the stillness. He heard the sparkle, felt the slight brush to his cheek of the breeze, as the little whirlwind moved downstream.

  He’d commission artwork when this was done—a painting, perhaps, depicting living snow singing bright and high and as strong as he’d now made his home. Or maybe he’d compose something himself, a tune for the new, stronger monarchy. One that captured this unreal moment.

  Down river, the sun pushed upward along the horizon. Red seeped into the edge of the night, along the curve of the ice, and Dmitri stood, breathing it in. This was his nation. This red—the cold fire of the northern sun. The blood of the land that flowed under the ice and his boots. An Empire that had spread wider than Rome herself.

  Threats to the stability of his home loomed—threats the pathetic Tsar needed help to prevent. Threats that could no longer be ignored. But with the—

  The carpet twitched. Dmitri stomped, his body responding with long-practiced precision. His foot aimed for where the monk’s head should be, but the bundle rolled and his boot caught only the carpet’s edge.

  Rasputin unfurled onto the ice, stink and the slapping crackles of freezing blood following his body as it slid sideways off the rug. A wicked gasp blew from between his blue lips. Dmitri lurched backward, but the monk’s hand moved faster and latched onto his ankle.

  The world tilted—Dmitri’s sense of the horizon no longer matched what he saw as the line of the river. He buckled onto his knees, the leg held by the monk twisting away from his hip. Agony fired into his belly. He kicked again, but the monk moved with him, sliding closer to Dmitri’s side instead of away.

  The gun was in his pocket. He still had a bullet. Dmitri reached but the monk’s rancid breath hit his nose. He’d used his momentum on the ice and now he grinned like Death himself inches from Dmitri’s face.

  A guttural, angry roar ripped from Dmitri’s throat. This peasant did not understand his station. He’d destroyed the monarchy. He dare touch another Romanov? Dmitri kicked but Rasputin’s calloused hand squeezed the exposed skin between his hat and scarf.

  Disorientation slammed his balance hard. Dmitri dropped onto his back, suddenly and completely unaware of what was up and what was down.

  The touch of a healer could also harm, and Rasputin was a better healer than Dmitri.

  Dmitri’s arms flailed, as disoriented as his vision. The bridge should hold horizontal, its supports vertical, but his gut said the opposite. He pitched to the side, staring across the river and praying for straight lines.

  Dmitri tasted the upward draft of the cold—it moved vertical, instead of across, as it should, and siphoned away his strength the way a chimney siphoned smoke.

  Rasputin’s touch set fire to every nerve and muscle in his head. A rancid fire, one as ugly
as the man, oily and slick and pawing. Dmitri opened his mouth to yell, to call to the bridge’s sleeping sentry, but no sound escaped.

  No breath curled into the cold air kissing his lips.

  The monk stole his life.

  Rasputin withered away his body. The sky was under him, the river above. The stars were nothing more than layer of frozen faerie dust, twinkling like a harpsichord but as thick as the river’s ice. The red of the sunrise bled onto both and crept over Dmitri’s skin.

  His healing ability fought—he wasn’t yet dead—but the night wrapped around him like the carpet had wrapped around the monk.

  On the down beat of his blink that should have been up, Rasputin’s face came into focus. Flat, dead, gray still, the bullet hole in his forehead open as it was the instant after Dmitri released the shot, he attacked as a corpse. Yet Rasputin was stronger, more practiced, more in control of his abilities. Strong enough to cheat death.

  But he did not carry the blood of a nation in his veins. Rasputin, unlike Dmitri, did not work for the good of his land.

  Across the edge of the river, the sunrise red turned to orange which then turned to gold, and his country brightened, his home gleamed. He pulled his fingers free of his glove, raking his hand across the ice to dislodge the leather. The blistering chill stole his skin’s warmth and the shock screamed into his wrist, a blazing sensation as sharp as the first rays splitting the ice.

  This piercing reality, both sweet and blinding, cut his perceptions away from the fog of the night. He saw the river right, the sky above as the red spread upward to the clouds. He heard the ice below, shifting and groaning under their fight. Dmitri Pavlovich knew clarity in his Romanov bones.

  He twisted his fingers into the snow, his enhanced strength gouging the ice, and dug deep. Strength sliced into him, sliced into his body and cut with his voice. “Dog!”

  Rasputin gurgled. Bone crackled as the monster’s skull knitted. His face showed the first hints of animation—a twitching cheek, some reflection in an eye.

  Dmitri swung his hand toward the monk’s head, feeling the give of skin and the grease of the peasant’s hair.

  Pressure pushed against the walls of Dmitri’s veins. It shaped his healer ability into a bullet like the one lodged in the monk’s skull, a solid force the squish of a man’s brain could not counter.

  Rasputin grunted. His mouth opened and closed but only a high-pitched wheeze escaped. The breath he dropped onto Dmitri tasted of filth. Let him whine. Let him whimper. This thing with its hand curled around his cheek was nothing. And he would no longer infect all that Dmitri held dear.

  Air rushed into the monk’s lungs. The wheeze dropped into a gasp. Then words: “Why do you want the boy to die? He will be Tsar! Not you.”

  The boy? This was not about the boy. The Tsesarevich would be dead by his eighteenth birthday. The family knew it. The world knew it. The boy’s blood made him immaterial. Only the Empire mattered—only the Empire glowed so bright in the morning sun that the rest of Europe dared not look upon it. The Empire would not bend to the whims of a German whore.

  “Stay dead!” The words croaked out of Dmitri, still strained but louder than the monk’s.

  All Dmitri’s anger—all his will and his ability—moved from his fingers into the monk’s scalp. He’d seen that woman’s influences from the beginning. Only Dmitri had the will to deal with her lapdog. She had no right. And she let this obscenity touch the Tsesarevich? A growl escaped, a deep sound that bounced across the ice to the other shore before it echoed back to Dmitri.

  “You want to be Tsar?” Grayness returned to Rasputin’s skin as he spoke—it crept from Dmitri’s fingers toward the fiend’s revolting eyes.

  Dmitri did not want to be Tsar. No sane person wanted to be Tsar. But if called, he’d serve. He’d do what was right.

  Rasputin panted. Dmitri’s power flowed through the fingers he cinched around the villain’s head. He’d end this.

  “Be the Tsar!” Rasputin’s suddenly paled to ash. A bolt ripped from the monk’s temple into Dmitri’s fingertips as Rasputin’s eyes rolled back into his head. His snarls bubbled away.

  He stiffened on last time, then dropped, lifeless, onto the ice.

  Dmitri pushed against the body. His jaw cinched closed—the skin of his face burned as if he’d washed with acid. As if the twinkling, malicious snow faeries had returned and now slashed at his cheeks with their ice wings.

  Agony flicked on an off as it moved from his face, across his tongue, and down his neck. It spread like slush into his joints. He’d need days, perhaps weeks, to heal himself from this. He’d claim a winter’s chill, retreat to his estate, and await his cousin’s gratitude. Then perhaps he’d propose to the other daughter—the prettier one. They’d make a proper Tsesarevich.

  The dawn’s cold bit into his oversensitive skin of his bare hand. The same agony that burned his face fired up his forearm.

  He reached for his glove. A fingertip pushed out of his sleeve, followed by another, then another. Then the back of his hand.

  He stared. His flesh swelled. His fingers would not move, all as bloated as sausages. His hand and wrist had turned the dark purple-green of a bruise and now it spread up his arm like some horrid poison.

  Blood. He bled inside, under his skin, and he knew that if he cut himself, if it opened, it would not stop flowing until his veins ran dry.

  The monk had forced the boy’s blood disease into the Dmitri’s hand.

  Is this what he meant by “Be the Tsar?” Dmitri scoffed, staring at his hand as the cold numbed his bruised flesh.

  Enough concentration and his fingers would be strong again. How often had he healed himself? The knife wound in his shoulder after that fight with the French emissary, the broken leg when he fell from that damned horse as a child—this injury meant nothing.

  He stared at his fingers and willed the numbness and the blood back to their places. His flesh would not riot. He would not have an uncouth and ill-mannered hand.

  Except the healing did not happen. The blood pulled back only some.

  Dmitri sucked in the morning’s frozen air, his foot lashing out at the corpse. He’d bound Dmitri to the boy. To irrelevance. To the Tsesarevich.

  Thunder rolled under Dmitri as the ice cracked. The sun flooded over the river, the red hitting the floe’s edges. He flew backward, crawling up the bank, as the river took the body and the rug.

  A prick and he clutched his swollen hand. Nothing bled. He stared at his flesh, thankful for the mud’s smoothness.

  Thankful that his blood stayed where it should be.

  Dmitri glanced up at the rising sun. The cold of the world burdened Russia, but she controlled it. His nation’s strength knew no bounds.

  He looked down at his hand. This burden would not kill him. He was Russian and he’d control what that peasant did to him. He’d keep it in his fingers, make it obey. Dmitri would carry this burden, because he could. He would not die before his next birthday. He had the strength needed to be Emperor.

  He stumbled to his car. The Tsar would not send him to the Prussian front. Or worse, banish him to the decadent west of Europe. Nicholas would see the truth. They’d clasp shoulders.

  And Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov would now and forever do his best for his family.

  For Russia.

  Because only Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov had the strength to do what was correct for the world.

  Beware the Devil’s teeth

  Beware the Devil’s teeth

  They spit hellfire

  Your flesh they desire

  Beware the Devil’s teeth

  --16th Century Shifter nursery rhyme

  Pop Rocks

  Texas, twenty-five years ago…

  Pop Rocks

  Next to Billy, a little darling with a blue streak in her hair giggled until vodka and tonic shot out her nose.

  Billy stepped aside to let her pass. His new drummer, though, thought her cute enough to warrant a deep tonguing. The
two staggered by and into the night.

  Three in the morning, and ninety-degree heat still filled the air with shimmering mirages. A big truck grumbled through a distortion toward the petrol station on the other side of the blacktop sea. The rig’s brakes squealed and Billy cringed—the sharp pitch scratched like claws across a chalkboard.

  The drummer hauled the girl into the heat, his hand beating out a rhythm in the air.

  “You comin’?” Phil, Billy’s lead guitarist, slapped his shoulder. Phil had a wife and baby in Ohio but he could drink the entire band into unconsciousness before sunrise if it struck his fancy.

  The entire band was younger than Billy—Phil by a good decade. Babies, the lot of them. His damned drummer wasn’t even legal to drink in the States.

  But they were all good at what they did. Phil had scribbled some fine tunes into his notebook, and they’d find fame. Billy was lucky to have them for the tour.

  They’d all jumped at the chance to play with him—pop “icon” that he was. Billy Bare, the wunderkind, on his comeback tour. He’d “returned to his punk roots”—or so his manager put on the tour posters—and his band pounded out his greatest hits out of sheer awe.

  If only America felt the same.

  Billy watched the groupies climb onto the bus. The beer and the coke and the girls were the reason he stood next to a dingy bar’s dumpster instead of playing the arenas he’d been destined for.

  Phil slapped his shoulder again. “Tell you what, why don’t you and I take a walk around the dirt? I’ll show you the sights.” He waved at the lot.

  Six tours of the States and not once had Billy stopped to smell the roses. Not that this part of Texas had roses to smell. “All I see are cactuses and ugly lizards.”

  Phil took another pull at his beer. He’d been staying away from the hard stuff, unlike the rest of the band. Probably because of that little baby he hadn’t seen in two months.