Warm air hit Rysa’s nose as she pushed through the shop’s door. The spots that weren’t real—couldn’t be real—took on a sharpness that would slice her open. Monsters would come out of her wounds. Fiends that would eat her whole.
A word whispered through the haze of pain. A word that sounded not like her thoughts, but also like her at the same time. Like she heard an echo of herself. Like her future self—the Rysa who was about to land fully inside of whatever hell caused the aneurysm and hallucinations—was yelling backward in time trying to warn her present, freaked-out self.
Ghouls.
Rysa screamed. She had to run. The spots chased her. Ghouls chased her, but the world fuzzed out as if someone had slapped a dirty bandage over her eyes.
Another spot burst, but this time a memory flashed: Her mother at the kitchen counter watching the television. She’d rubbed her knuckles and Rysa had wrapped her arm around her shoulder. “Go to class,” her mom said. “I’ll be fine.”
The evening gloom slammed down on Rysa again. Shadows swam. The scent of the humid summer air managed to push through the phantom burning in her nose.
Her hand hurt. Her nails dug into the real skin of her real palm.
Gavin, his nose bloody, staggered along the path toward the parking lots down the hill from the Continuing Education Building. “Don’t hit me again!” he yelled.
She hit him? He glared at her like she was some kind of monster.
“I don’t… I d-don’t understand,” she stuttered. They stood on the hill, half way between the coffee shop and the student parking lot, standing under the streetlight where the path intersected the walk from one of the campus barns. But she didn’t remember—
Another spot ruptured. Orange and hot yellow dropped over the world like a curtain.
She stood alone in the glaring yellow bullseye of a different streetlight. This one flickered like a strobe, buzzing and popping as if it was about to explode. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly as her eyes adjusted to the pulsing shadows.
How the hell did she get into the student parking lot three blocks from the café?
She was losing time. Losing her sense of space.
She really was in the middle of an aneurysm. Nothing else explained what was happening. Not the blackouts. Not the weird, whispered warnings about… ghouls.
Why was her brain whispering about not-real monsters?
She felt like she was dying. She had to be. Her body dragged her out here to commit suicide and she couldn’t stop it.
A man, tall and lanky like Gavin, walked toward her between the hand-me-down cars, his step bouncing as if he was about to break into a tango. He wore bright red running shoes and a black nylon jacket over a blaze orange t-shirt—the fabric version of the damned fire-spots eating her mind.
He stopped a few feet away, a deep inhale bowing out his chest. His hand swept in front of his nose and he sniffed the air like some cartoon character breathing in fancy perfume. Another inhale and his head tilted at an angle that should have popped every vertebra in his neck.
“Who…” she stammered. Where was Gavin? “What…”
“Right where you’re supposed to be.” The man’s thick British accent made his words almost unrecognizable.
The same caustic stench from the spots rose off his skin.
Real stench. She gagged, her lips and nose curling in a futile attempt to keep the chemical sewage rolling off this creature out of her lungs.
His teeth gleamed in the dim parking lot light. “Calling yourselves Fates.” He shook his head, tisking. “You see the future but you know nothing.” He grabbed her arm.
The weirdness in her head bled into the real world and this man was its manifestation. All the spots, all the phantom smells—they were about to kidnap her. For real.
“Let go of me!” The man made no sense and she hyper-focused on his fluorescing mouth, ignoring everything else. His teeth glinted, sharp and too bright like they’d rip her apart if they got near her skin.
Her vision jigged like she’d changed the channel for a microsecond and then switched back to what she had been watching before. But in that microsecond, in that very brief flash when she saw something she knew wasn’t really there, she saw the man lean forward to bite her shoulder.
Bite and rip flesh and eat himself a right good snack.
Because he was a ghoul. A burning, stinking ghoul.
Somehow, some part of her mind had known. It had told her.
Her chest tried to fill with air and her throat tried to constrict to make as loud a high-pitched noise as it could because the man was a ghoul.
He grinned at her with his razor-sharp teeth. A loud sniff rushed into his nose. “You smell tasty, luv. I might take myself a nip now, before you finish activating.” He licked his lips.
“Activating?” She wasn’t dying of a brain aneurism. She didn’t know what “activating” meant, but the word held truth in the same way that ghoul held truth.
He clamped a ratty fingerless gloves-clad hand over her mouth and nose. “You’re a bit of a freak, aren’t you? Can’t hold still. Stay normal for a moment longer, darling.”
“Let her go!” Thirty feet away, Gavin jumped the lot fence, his feet pumping as he landed.
New panic flooded in, different from what she felt for herself. A scene played through the pressure behind her eyes: The ghoul was about to lock onto her friend’s throat. The fiend would feel a surge of hunger and he’d salivate like an animal. Then his hands would cook Gavin’s flesh.
Run! she signed. Go!
A new, slow dread of certainty fizzled through her consciousness from the same source as her knowledge of ghouls and activating: Something bad was about to happen. Something as terrible as the fiend gripping her arm.
A couple of car lengths away, Gavin halted like he’d run into a wall. He gagged and bent forward. The stench must have hit his nose.
“He your boyfriend?” The hand over her mouth loosened.
“Please don’t hurt him.” The ghoul could take her, but Gavin had a life ahead of him. He’d do good. Become a wonderful doctor.
She knew the truth of his future with the same inner-understanding she knew something horrid was coming.
The ghoul’s eyes narrowed and he tilted his head again as he peered at Gavin. He flicked his chin toward campus. “You better listen, little normal. Better run. Before my mates find you.”
Gavin stepped back, both his mouth and his hands working but not making sense.
“Run!” Rysa screamed. He had to get away. She’d make sure—
Then the world flickered hot yellow again and Gavin was gone. The ghoul stood on her other side, anger dancing through his eyes.
“Do not do that again!” He slapped and caustic chemicals burned her cheek.
He dragged her toward the break in the fence framing the walk to the road. “Claw me one more time and you’ll be lucky if you keep your arm, you stupid cow.”
She didn’t remember clawing him. She didn’t remember Gavin running away, either.
She’d had another blackout and lost more time.
How was she supposed to get away if nothing made sense?
The man dragged her through the lot gate and into the street between the University parking lots and the ones owned by the State Fair. He pushed her forward with one hand, the fingers of his other tapping in the air as if he played an invisible piano. His fingertips glowed and smoldered one at a time, turning on and off as he pressed each imaginary key. “Quiet now, luv.”
A dark-gold hatchback with rusted side panels and blistered paint weaved down the street. A blue van, just as ratty, rushed from the other direction.
The man inhaled, his chin up. “Time to meet the family, princess.”
Rysa’s story continues in Games of Fate.
Also available: Activation: The Complete First Trilogy
Also available from Kris Austen Radcliffe:
Urban Fantasy… with Science:
The Fate - Fi
re - Shifter - Dragon Series
Games of Fate
Flux of Skin
Fifth of Blood
Activation: The Complete First Trilogy
(Includes Games of Fate, Flux of Skin, Fifth of Blood, and the shorts Conpulsio and Pop Rocks.)
Bonds Broken & Silent: The Complete Second Miniseries
(Includes Bonds, Broken, Silent, and the short Dmitri and the Mad Monk.)
All But Human
Men and Beasts coming soon
Science Fiction:
Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds
(Includes the FFSD shorts Conpulsio and Cinder to Dust.)
Modern Erotic Love Stories:
The Quidell Brothers
Thomas’s Muse
Daniel’s Fire
Robert’s Soul
The Quidell Brothers Box Set
Connect with the Author:
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.krisaustenradcliffe.com
Publisher: www.sixtalonsign.com
Facebook Fan Page: www.facebook.com/AuthorKrisAustenRadcliffe
About the Author
As a child, Kris took down a pack of hungry wolves with only a hardcover copy of The Dragonriders of Pern and a sharpened toothbrush. That fateful day set her on a path traversing many storytelling worlds—dabbles in film and comic books, time as a talent agent and a textbook photo coordinator, and a foray into nonfiction. After co-authoring Mind Shapes: Understanding the Differences in Thinking and Communication, Kris returned to academia. But she craved narrative and a richly-textured world of Fates, Shifters, and Dragons—and unexpected, true love.
Kris lives in Minnesota with her husband, two daughters, Handsome Cat, and an entire menagerie of suburban wildlife bent on destroying her house. That battered-but-true copy of Dragonriders? She found it yesterday. It’s time to pay a visit to the woodpeckers.
Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds Page 17