All but Human

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  From around his shoulders, he pulled his dragon-skin-like Praesagio fabric. He didn’t understand how it worked—it carried no batteries. But Vivicus had never been good with science and numbers, preferring to spend his time solidifying relationships and building his legacy. One must focus on priorities.

  From two stories above, he heard a dog bark. “Silly puppy,” he said in the Fate’s voice. “No treats for you.”

  The dagger dug into the wood as if it were butter. Vivicus grinned as he formed his body into his version of the barbarian. He spread out the invisi-cloth and stepped back as he scratched at his hair’s version of the barbarian’s black waves. His shoulders shook, setting into their best barbarian width, and he breathed in again as he rubbed over the place near his spleen where he held the First Fate’s talisman.

  I feel you, he thought. My beast. “Come to daddy,” he snickered.

  “Ladon? I need you. Please come down.” he whined in the Fate’s voice. “Please.”

  A wet, rough tongue raked over Ladon’s cheek. He swatted at the offender and groaned a low, mumbled “Leave me alone.” The beast was a little over an hour from waking and Ladon’s accompanying woozy, semi-jumbled state of mind started about fifteen minutes ago.

  Over the last few weeks, Dragon’s wake-time had become more… intense. More… overwhelming. Ladon’s ability to block the beast’s rush of dragon-language constructs, his tactile and visual overlays, had been… taxed.

  Stress always made the beast’s transitions from sleeping to waking harder for both Dragon and Ladon. Dragon’s mind raced and Ladon swore sometimes he picked up what felt to him like nightmares—strings of images of places that looked like the inside of a giant metal trap. Sometimes the roar of a blazing, much too large, much too cold sun. Strange tastes on his tongue, accompanied by stranger textures, with no corresponding understanding for Ladon about flavor or composition.

  It never seemed real. Or right.

  Andreas’s enthralling helped last night. He’d felt okay enough to come in and sleep. Rysa kissed his forehead and made him promise “to talk about it” when she got home from her last exam of the semester, and had left him alone with his unease and his mound of nightmare-filled dragon.

  He’d managed to shower and dress and to promise Daisy to let the dogs out around noon. He then flopped onto the mattress and stared at the fine cobwebs in the attic’s ceiling beams, wondering if Gavin and the women saw these moments as signs of Progenitor weakness.

  He and Sister kept the dragon-awakening process secret. Andreas knew its intricacies. So did Derek. And, because of their current living conditions, Rysa had gotten a hint. But waking moments were between him and the beast, and she understood. So she left them in peace.

  He’d dozed off, a generally wise way of dealing with a dragon-awakening, but one of the dogs seemed to believe sleeping was not wise.

  “What do you want?” he groaned.

  The dog licked his face again.

  “How the hell did you get up here, anyway?” Ladon was pretty sure he’d closed the door. “Daisy train you two how to open doors?” It wouldn’t surprise him if she had. Most of the doors in the house opened and closed with levers to be pressed instead of knobs to be turned, so anything was possible.

  The dog woofed in his ear.

  Ladon groaned and rolled over.

  One dog stood over him. The other stood at the top of the stairs, his butt toward Ladon and his head low.

  “Which one are you?” Ladon patted the animal closest and the dog tilted his head a little extra to the left. “Radar. What do you want?”

  At the head of the stairs, Ragnar growled.

  Ladon immediately jumped to a squat, his head tilted like Radar’s, to listen.

  Someone moved downstairs, and from the reaction of the dogs, the person wasn’t someone they knew.

  And they woke him up, instead of attacking the intruder.

  Daisy trained them to sniff for weapons—and for Shifters—and not to attack if they were in danger. Whoever was downstairs could be a normal with a gun, or a Shifter armed with calling scents or a healer’s death-touch.

  Or the dogs smelled a morpher.

  Every inch of Ladon’s skin crawled. Every synapse in his brain trying to process the flickering spillover from Dragon screamed like a terrified child.

  His worst nightmare might be downstairs.

  Ragnar backed away from the stairs, his hackles raised and his teeth bare. In front of Ladon, Radar turned around and took his brother’s posture, also snarling, also with his teeth bare.

  “Ladon?” Rysa’s voice filtered up the steps from, he suspected, the foyer. “I need you! Come down.”

  She sounded frantic—ADHD-overwhelmed and terrified, the way she sounded when she thought Fates and Shifters were going to kill her—and not the way she should sound.

  Ladon couldn’t text anyone. He’d left his phone downstairs last night, in his jacket. He did, though, have his handgun.

  Both dogs snarled and growled.

  Slowly, Ladon stood. Dragon still slept, still blended fully into the piles of boxes, furniture, and rugs in the corner. He was, for the moment, safe. But it wouldn’t take long for the morpher downstairs to find him, if he got past Ladon and the dogs.

  Ladon checked his weapon before tapping his thigh. Both dogs looked over their shoulders.

  “Protect Dragon,” he ordered.

  A thump reverberated up from the lower level. The dogs backed toward Ladon.

  Ragnar barked.

  “Beloved? I… I want to talk about it,” the morpher pretending to be Rysa said.

  Ladon pressed by the dogs, his back against the wall. For a split second, a flash from Dragon overrode his vision and he stopped cold, one foot hovering over the next lower tread and his weight unevenly distributed, but he ground his fingers into the wallboard. Ladon rocked, shock spasming all his muscles, but he held his ground.

  Why couldn’t the morpher wait an hour?

  He stepped out into the hallway, gun up, and listened for movement.

  “Husband?” the voice called from the foyer. “Come down. Please.”

  The pitch was perfect, but the tone off as if the morpher wanted him to realize he was not hearing Rysa. Ladon rounded the corner to the top of the stairs, his back pressed against the wall, and quickly looked down the step.

  “It’s about time you woke up, Ladon-Human,” his mirror said.

  “Who are you?” But Ladon knew. The morpher downstairs had to be the unkillable motherfucker who never died.

  Vivicus.

  Ladon had the high ground, but he faced his attacker. The son of a bitch might have a gun.

  “Leave now,” Ladon called.

  “Or what? You’ll snap my neck yet again?” Vivicus huffed. “Not going to happen. I’ve learned how to deal with adversity. You’re not murdering me.”

  Ladon’s now-vindicated, innate told you so corner of his mind thumped its chest and sneered. He was always right. Always. Two thousand three hundred years had to count for something.

  “How did you survive the fire?” Perhaps distracting the psychopath would get him away from the base of the stairs. “They found a body with your teeth in your cell.”

  Vivicus laughed. “Of course they did. I told you. I do my research. No one’s skills match mine.” He tapped his finger against the banister. “No one’s.”

  Andreas would come back sooner or later. Or Sister and Sister-Dragon would arrive. But if Vivicus came up the stairs while Dragon woke, they’d both be vulnerable. For a moment only, but still vulnerable.

  A burst of incoherent energy popped from the sleeping beast and Ladon flinched. The coherence of his mind shattered and became a bright spark of cold that, for a new split second, blinded his vision and snarled his hearing.

  Half an hour of a tougher-than-usual awakening would make dealing with Vivicus that much more difficult.

  “Oh pretty boy!” Vivicus called. “Come down. Let’s talk man to
whatever you are.”

  Ladon didn’t answer. He would not give Vivicus more auditory information about his exact location.

  The light from the front door flickered. A shadow moved across the steps. “If you do not, I will walk to that campus, Ladon-Human. I will slaughter every normal who crosses my path. I know where Pavlovich’s spawn spends her days. I know where her boy-toy walks. I know in which school rooms your honey toils. She won’t see me coming. I have props. Special gifts granted me by God because only I deserve a dragon.”

  Props? He must be talking about the shard of Janus’s talisman he stole while pretending to be Daisy’s mother.

  But he said props. Plural. Which meant he had other weapons. Ladon’s gut tightened.

  The light changed again. Vivicus must have crouched. “I watched your sex games. I listened to all the lovesick whining here in your frat house. I know who’s coming and this time I will not be satisfied with dropping a slug into the honey. This time, I will make her bend to my will before I slit her throat.”

  Ladon would chop Vivicus into small pieces this time, if that was what it took to keep him dead.

  “No one knifes me in the head! No one fucks with me!” A bang reverberated up the stairs. He must have hit the wall. “Then I come back for my dragon.”

  The venom in the morpher’s voice made Ragnar appear in the doorway to the attic. Ladon had told the animals to wait, but now he was grateful they were as smart as they were.

  “You come down right now. It’s time you face me.” The shadow at the base of the stair said.

  Ragnar lowered his head and growled. The fur on his neck stood up straight. He bared his teeth. The dog stepped out into the open, at the top of the stairs.

  “Oh, look at the pretty puppy,” Ladon’s mirror said. “He’s cute, I’ll give Pavlovich’s spawn that. She does understand how to pick the best pets.”

  Ladon rounded the corner, gun up. “Leave, Vivicus.”

  The morpher threw his hands into the air in mock shock. “Oh, so manly!” He dropped them down and pointed at Ladon’s face. “I’m heartened you remembered shooting at me doesn’t do shit.” He gave Ladon the finger.

  “This time, I will do the burning. You will die a true death.”

  Vivicus waved his hand in the air. “Yes, yes, ‘burn my body to ash.’ You do that. It’ll be my wedding gift to you and your beloved. Everyone deserves a few moments of calm in their lives, even you.” He gave Ladon the finger again.

  “Why do you continue to torment us?” Ladon lowered his gun. “What do you want, Vivicus? Even someone as twisted as you can’t keep up the ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’ shit all these centuries.”

  Insanity on his level took work. It took effort and energy and time and even the father of all morphers had to have his limits.

  Ladon most certainly did.

  Vivicus cocked his mirror version of Ladon’s head and smirked a most Vivicus-like smirk. “What do I want, loverboy?” He twirled around. “Every morning, I empty my mind of the what-was. I see the newness of the universe in the what-is. And I know, deep in my soul,” he thumped his chest, “the core value of the what-will-be.”

  Ladon fought the need to close his eyes and look up at the ceiling. “You make no sense.” Nothing the monster said ever made sense.

  “I strip away the valueless. I surround myself with the best. I work hard and I deserve respect.”

  “Respect.” Ladon couldn’t fight the sigh. Couldn’t hold it in or smooth it out. It blew out his nostrils on the back of his millennia-old exhaustion.

  For a man who could mimic other Shifters down to the level of their abilities—albeit not clean copies—Vivicus sure had a lack of understanding of what it meant to be someone else. What it meant to live someone else’s life, to feel someone else’s pain. To show someone else the respect he demanded from every other human walking the Earth.

  “You need to die, Vivicus.” Ladon stepped down onto the first step and swung up his gun. “You’re a pit. You suck in the world.” And he swallowed it inside his shades.

  Ladon took another step. Vivicus sneered. Ragnar leaped in front of Ladon and the stairs creaked.

  The dog growled. Ladon took another step down.

  The tread moved.

  “I told you, Ladon-Human, I have props.”

  The step under Ladon’s foot, though not visibly different from the rest of the staircase, dropped away. The entire structure snapped and groaned, and dust puffed into Ladon’s eyes and nose. And, under his Progenitor weight, fell downward.

  Ladon twisted fast enough to snatch Ragnar. The dog yipped, but he had the animal, and he tossed him upward, toward the hallway. “Protect Dragon!” he shouted.

  Time slowed. Ladon blinked away the dust and relaxed his lower body, ready to bounce and roll with the energy of the drop. But he fell on broken wood toward the glass-filled metal shelving under Daisy’s basement steps. The shelves full of items people kept in storage—extra sporting goods. Cleaning supplies. Overflow pantry items.

  A thankfully blunt post hit his kidney. He gulped, the pain blinding, but he twisted anyway, his boots leading and his legs positioned to knock away anything sharp.

  More cracking, more falling, and the swinging stairs snagged his left arm. A bone snapped, firing more pain into his torso. He bellowed as one foot hit an upright. The other caught in the stairs. Ladon’s entire body swung around, hooked by his boot in the crag, and slammed into a shelf of dog food.

  Cans dropped on his face, followed by a thirty pound bag of dry food, but he wouldn’t pass out. He wouldn’t.

  Vivicus looked down at him through the hole in the floor. Slowly, he twirled a dagger, one with a blade as dark as midnight itself, around his wrist. “Nice, clean cuts in the framing,” he said. “Topped by another of Praesagio’s special materials.” He pointed with the tip of the dagger toward a space next to Ladon’s head.

  His neck hurt. He hung upside down, trapped by his snared foot, but he twisted to look anyway.

  Without the flutters moving through whatever hung on the broken stairs next to his face, he would not have seen it. It wavered again, this time enough to touch his cheek.

  Fabric with the dragon’s ability to mimic what it covered.

  Vivicus frowned as he looked up the stairs. “The puppies might be a problem.” He shrugged. “Work first. My dragon wakes and I need to be ready. Then I slice the boys into canine jerky.”

  He vanished from Ladon’s sight.

  A nightmare pulse fired from two stories up, in the attic. The beast would wake to Vivicus mimicking Ladon and not to his true Human.

  Which must have been the true point of all this.

  Ladon would have groaned, but all he saw, all he felt, was the too bright glare of the foyer’s light leaking through the hole in the floor.

  The hole in his life. The pit into which Ladon fell.

  The pain set his spine on fire and though he fought it, the hole closed around Ladon’s head.

  Miss Kitty merped again when Vivicus dropped onto the kitchen floor next to the box. The kittens nursed and he frowned, annoyed by their attempt to slow his progress. He pushed them away and picked up his cat.

  The little stripy one clawed at his hand. Vivicus pulled back his fingers. A small welt of blood appeared on his skin. He frowned and sucked it back into his body, closing the wound. The little shit thought it could claw him?

  Miss Kitty squirmed, obviously wanting to return to her kittens. He wrapped his lips around her head anyway. The stripy one hissed, trying to distract him from his efforts, but it needed to know its place.

  He needed only two fingers to snap its neck. The black and white ones backed away, toward the corner of the box. The gray one sat on its little butt, stunned.

  With his tongue, Vivicus pulled the slug out of Miss Kitty. She coughed and cat blood pooled in his mouth, but he got the information he needed.

  The cats were Astro and Retro, Soyuz and the now-still Booster. Pavlo
vich’s spawn fretted over her normal pet’s safety. And the Fate and Ladon-Human did, in fact, have a spat.

  Vivicus dropped Miss Kitty’s lifeless body into the box. He needed a moment to fully integrate all the cat had spied for him over the last few weeks. To sort and sift, and perhaps catch a hint of the beast’s real name.

  Then he’d have what he needed to fake the barbarian long enough to trick the beast into connecting to him when he woke.

  And once he tricked the beast into accepting him, he’d be the world’s one true godling. The usurper of the pantheon. The killer of the old gods.

  Vivicus chuckled as he leaned against the wall. Perhaps he’d change his name as well.

  After all the centuries, he was partial to Zeus.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Now…

  Rysa’s seers whipped out across the alley toward the Fate. In his non-gun-holding hand, he gripped the same large, gaudy ring the girl in the Student Union had held. It must be what blocked his presence in the what-was-is-will-be and smoothed over his bumps and divots. His edges and metal.

  But she saw his face and she knew why he attacked now: They were divided. She sent Daisy away. The Fate would have killed her if she’d stayed. It would have been Daisy and Andreas and—

  And now no one had the capacity to chase down the other Fate, so he took advantage to change his fate because—

  Sister-Dragon yanked Rysa to the side so she could leap out of the back of the van and the vision disappeared. The moment of clarity—the true why—vanished. All that remained was a sense of piling it on. Everything—time, Rysa’s seers, her healer, her thoughts—sped up and slowed down at the same time as her brain reoriented to the real world. She was, at this precise moment, hyper-aware of every sparkle of reflected light. Every single reverberation of her screams off the buildings. Of the police sirens blocks away.

  Of the massive welt of hot, sharp-smelling blood pushing out of Andreas’s chest—pushing up from inside his heart.