All but Human

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Rysa Torres, the healer of dragons, leaped away from AnnaBelinda’s van onto an icy patch and a pile of snow and had her hands over the wound in his chest before he dropped to his knees. She slapped down onto Andreas’s chest and covered his mouth with hers before breathing out as much ‘heal’ as she could make.

  Andreas wasn’t bleeding as much as he should be. He should be bleeding more.

  Her present-seer whispered: His heart is damaged.

  It was more than damaged. It was…

  Hold it together, flicked in as a chorus sung by all three of her seers. Hold it the fuck together Torres and save the Dragons’ Legion.

  AnnaBelinda ran by.

  “Anna!” she screamed. She can’t chase, Rysa’s present-seer bellowed. We need to go.

  Rysa pressed on the wound with both hands and fired as much healing into Andreas as she could muster, but she didn’t know what to do other than to tell his body to knit. She needed Sister-Dragon.

  “No dying!” He couldn’t die. He couldn’t—

  Andreas gasped and the air filled with a massive dose of muscle-solidifying ‘shock’ and flight-inducing ‘terror.’ Involuntary paralysis held Rysa in place as the need to run away slammed into her chest.

  Panic wanted in. Heavy, thick, smothering panic like every time she’d ever been overwhelmed by her ADHD. Every fucking moment of anxiety. But this time it would kill Andreas.

  “Oh my God oh my God Oh my God,” she babbled. “Andreas! I can’t fight your calling scents! I can’t—”

  But she had to. Andreas cannot die. He can’t! He—

  Whatever energy powered her seers congealed. It condensed into three all-too-familiar tentacles and it snapped directly outward into the blood welling between her fingers and palms. Her seers curled around her wrists. She was not to think. Not to listen to the raging in her mind. She was to do.

  Her seers snaked around each other, intermingling and interplaying. Information she did not see or hear but felt anyway passed directly between their flows. They talked to each other without routing through her language centers.

  And they talked to her healer.

  Andreas coughed. “Rysa…”

  “Pull in your calling scents!” she yelled. “Please!”

  He closed his eyes. The ‘shock’ and the ‘terror’ subsided, but they did not go away. But at least her muscles loosened and she breathed and she could fire into Andreas every ounce of healing her body held.

  A part of Rysa’s brain recognized another, familiar engine starting but she would not falter in her focus. Andreas must not die.

  He wasn’t breathing right. His heart wasn’t working. His lungs weren’t working. Hot blood covered her hands and filled the air with a metallic stench and the residue of his panicked calling scents made her want to run away.

  “You are not going to die!” If she screamed again, or if she whispered, she didn’t know.

  She felt a big, six-taloned hand cup her back. She felt an invisible dragon head nudge her side. Tires screeched. Van exhaust mixed with the calling scents and a shadow fell over Rysa and Andreas.

  A metal door banged against the back of the van but Rysa would not look. She would not turn away from or lift her hands from Andreas’s chest. She would not allow his blood to leave its home.

  An image in her mind overlaid the searing hell of the reality around them: Sister-Dragon was about to pick up Andreas and Rysa was to use her legs to hold tight to his waist.

  She was not to be afraid.

  New terror blazed through her mind anyway. She was the healer. They needed to listen to her. “Map for me!” she yelled. If Sister-Dragon mapped she could fix the hole. She could save Andreas.

  The front of her coat ripped open, as did the front of her shirt. Air colder than the ‘shock’ floating in the air bit into her skin.

  Rysa screamed.

  “Hold on so you don’t fall off!” Anna said. “Did the bullet miss his spine?”

  What? she thought. What the hell was happening?

  Yes.

  “Present-seer says yes!” Rysa yelled. She had to hold it together. To let her seers and her healer work and still communicate with Anna and Sister-Dragon and hear what they said.

  “Listen Rysa! The moment she lifts him off the ground you are to fall over the wound and wrap your arms under him!” Shuffling noises rolled out of the back of the van. “The Praesagio doctor is telling me that you need to press your chest against his skin-to-skin and to use your hands on the entry wound!”

  “Okay okay okay,” Rysa muttered. She flopped forward but kept her hands where they were.

  Too much blood. Too much damage. His chest felt like hamburger. The bullet had hit a bone and exploded and peppered his organs with shrapnel.

  Her seers focused down to what felt like a white-hot, hollow needle. They poked randomly into specific tissues, specific cells. They read immediate need. They injected healer but they didn’t know what they hit. “I need—”

  A flash cut her off. Sister-Dragon was about to lift them both. Rysa pressed down with her bare chest and quickly pulled her sticky, bloody hands out from between her cold skin and Andreas’s too hot flesh.

  She tucked her arms under his body and clamped her hands over the wound’s entry.

  More blood. Less damage here. She pressed against his chest and prayed her healer moved as well from her chest as it did from her hands.

  They rose, carried by an invisible dragon, and Andreas’s head and shoulders passed into the back of the van. He moaned, unresponsive, and Anna crinkled her nose at his random, flickering calling scents. But she had his head and his neck and she guided him through the door as Sister-Dragon placed him in as far as she could reach.

  Anna cupped her hands under Andreas’s shoulders and readied herself to pull. “She’s going to come in over you. There’s not a lot of room so there’s going to be pressure, but it won’t last long. Breathe through it.”

  Rysa nodded.

  And the world crushed down on her back—and on Andreas. His weight, her weight, Sister-Dragon’s weight, all smashed down on Rysa’s hands and wrists under his body.

  It was over before she could scream.

  They rose up again, floating inches off the van’s floor.

  “Hold on!” Anna yanked.

  Andreas moved deep enough into the van that Sister-Dragon managed to slam the door.

  Anna rolled toward the front of the van without saying anything more to Rysa. She swiped her phone off the floor just as she dropped into the seat. “He’s in.” A pause. “Okay.”

  She looked over her shoulder as she pulled her seatbelt across. “We’re going to the level one trauma hospital in St. Paul. Praesagio says they have a surgeon who will meet us there.”

  She tossed the phone toward the passenger seat and threw the van into drive. “It’s on speaker.”

  A snout nuzzled Rysa’s cheek as jumbled images filled her mind.

  Sister-Dragon mapped, but the damage was so severe it looked like ruins, not conduits and rivers like it had when Dragon mapped Ladon’s veins for her.

  It has to be enough. Rysa held tight to Andreas.

  It had to be enough.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The morpher sitting on the floor with his hand in the box looked exactly like Ladon. To Derek’s newly-Dracae nose, he smelled like Ladon. To his enhanced hearing, his voice carried the correct pitches, sways, and modulations. He moved his fingers in the exact way Derek expected to see Ladon move his digits, and he sat on the floor in the perfect posture and position to simulate Derek’s brother-in-law.

  But the brain inside that head was not Ladon’s.

  “You sent the normal away.” Fake-Ladon’s grip on little Soyuz tightened. He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, as if listening. “Do you think he’ll text those Fates in Portland?”

  In his hand, the kitten screeched.

  “Nothing more annoying than tech-savvy Fates with a lot of money and time on their ha
nds.”

  Derek stepped closer and pointed with all the authority of his Romanov ancestry. “Put the kitten in the box.”

  The morpher sneered. “Why?”

  Only two of the bodies in the box moved. The tabby kitten lay on its side, obviously not breathing.

  Something had burst from the mother. Something with teeth and claws.

  Every point of fear and fight in Derek’s body collapsed into one singularity of pre-panic. It pinged from his gut into his throat but he steeled himself, clenched his fists, and channeled it into acuity. His vision sharpened. His muscles primed. His hearing focused.

  Derek Nicholson knew exactly who sat on the floor in his cousin’s house. Who pretended to be Ladon. Who had the control and enough psychosis to fake his death well enough to fool Praesagio’s army of Fates.

  Who would stalk his family and kill kittens.

  “Put the cat down. Now.” Who, if Derek had not sent him away, would happily snap young Mr. Bower’s neck.

  “See,” Vivicus grinned again as he held the kitten in front of his face, “I’m not trying right now.” He tipped his head and stared at the little gray face. “Thought I’d enjoy my last moments alone, you know? Before I share my space with my new pet.”

  The kitten meowed.

  “Where is Ladon?” Had Vivicus duplicated Ladon down to his mass and density? Would he be able to move as fast? Derek could not judge from how the morpher rested against the wall.

  Nor did he sense his brother-in-law. But he did sense the first stirrings of an awakening dragon.

  “Dead.” Vivicus snickered and pulled his knees up as he sat forward.

  Dead? Ladon was not dead. He could not be dead. If Ladon had died at Vivicus’s hand, every Fate, Shifter, and Burner on the planet would have sensed it.

  Or so Derek believed. Severing the bond between a Human and a Dragon would cause a reaction. It had to cause a reaction. Yet no untethered energy flailed in the house.

  “Easier than I thought it would be.” Vivicus set the kitten on the floor next to his boot. “I have been trying to kill that motherfucker for two millennia and you know what it took?”

  His hand moved under his thigh with Ladon speed. Derek tensed and shifted to the side, to avoid a throw.

  “Well, well.” Vivicus twirled a dagger between his fingers. A black dagger that sucked away all light, the way Praesagio’s midnight swords had sucked away all visible reflection. “Looks like my sweetie-kins upgraded you good, Tsar.”

  Vivicus jumped to a crouch and flipped the dagger into his palm, ready to slice. “You did not deserve the boons she falsely granted you, with your soft soul and your pretty face.”

  A ripple flowed from the top of his head, down his neck, and across his back. “You have never worked a hard day in your life. I have watched more wives bleed out than that Progenitor barbarian. I have died more times than generations have passed since the fall of Rome. I have bet more, lost more, built more, than my mother and the Fate Progenitor, than your woman or her brother, than anyone. So today, I take the path God laid out for me the day I activated. The path to godhood.”

  Slowly, Vivicus stood. “I take into myself all that the Progenitors manifest, and I will take for myself all that the Progenitors are.”

  He looked down at the little gray kitten. His foot rose.

  The floor of the hallway groaned—yet no one approached. No dragon, no Ladon, yet Vivicus, the First Morpher and a man no longer a man, flew forward, his head rammed directly into the granite of the kitchen island’s countertop.

  The air rippled the way fabric wavered in a breeze. A cloth or poncho or a square of material capable of mimicking the world around it fluttered to the floor and revealed a bloody Ladon as he, once again, slammed Vivicus’s head against the stone.

  “The dagger!” Ladon croaked. Blood ran into his eyes from a gash on his forehead. He held his left arm as if it would not cooperate with his commands. But Ladon lived.

  Derek slammed Vivicus’s arm against the granite. His wrist should have shattered and snapped with a wet cracking noise and a scream from the morpher but it didn’t.

  Vivicus folded under Derek’s weight, his wrist coming up like a leaf of paper, and his fingers swiped the blade at Derek’s forearm. He lunged backward and swung to the side, his vulnerable arm lifting away before the tip touched his flesh.

  Rysa cured his bleeding disorder. He no longer needed to fear damage. But some responses would never stop, never die. Never go away.

  Releasing Vivicus’s hand unleashed an unnatural-yet-fast blade swipe toward Ladon. The dagger swung up and toward Ladon’s face and Derek’s brother-in-law lunged away in much the same way as Derek had.

  Vivicus flipped around, the broken bones of his face shifting and knitting around his eye. He shook, another ripple moving through his body, and waved the dagger between Derek and Ladon. “Guess I should have double-tapped.” He snickered.

  A pulse of rousing dragon energy moved through the kitchen. Ladon swayed, manifesting his beast’s normal awakening confusion. It hit Derek as well, and Vivicus, and the three men opened their mouths at the same time, rounded their lips exactly the same way, and blinked with the same cadence.

  If their humans were next to them when they woke, the dragons shrugged off the disorientation and opened their eyes calm and well-rested. But if they went to sleep angry, or if their human was not within touching distance, their energy thrashed outward.

  Up until Rysa made him part Dracae, he had not understood. He saw only the swaying and the concentration but it always ended quickly. Human and Dragon shrugged it off and moved on. But now he knew.

  Energy flashed outward, then contracted back to the waking beast. Harsh dragon pulses flailed for at least half an hour longer than was apparent to any onlookers who were allowed close enough to see.

  “You will not survive this time, Vivicus,” Ladon slurred.

  Vivicus slashed at Ladon’s chest. “Yes, yes.” He slashed again. “I won’t survive. You can’t have my dragon. Leave my women alone!”

  A fake wound opened along his forehead. He nodded slightly and concentrated on Ladon’s left arm. His own pulled in, the muscles under his skin contracting.

  “I like your women. They smell nice. Maybe I’ll hang both the Fate and Pavlovich’s spawn from the parapet. Set them on fire, like I did that one in Gaul. What was her name?”

  He clicked a fingernail against the dagger’s guard. “Abigail! Except there’s no babe to cut out this time.”

  Ladon bellowed and lunged but teetered and staggered toward the door.

  Vivicus laughed and danced out of the way, slashing wildly with the midnight dagger as he took up a position between Ladon and Derek. “Struck a nerve, did I? Even then, I knew how to hide from Fates.”

  Ladon was at the outer limit of his connection to Brother-Dragon. When the beast slept, they could be as far apart as they wanted, but a waking dragon reassured his pull.

  “Hey!” Derek yelled. He needed to get Ladon into the kitchen, not closer to the door and farther into the backyard. But Vivicus stood between them.

  The morpher stood up straight. He twirled the dagger between his fingers, his grin bigger and wider than any human’s should be.

  “Watch out, pretty boy. I’ll knife your leg again. No healers around this time to give you special treatment because you’re special, isn’t that right? I never understood why Mom favored you.” He shrugged. “Why did she make you lovely? Was she unable to look at the smug Russian face you were born with?”

  “I will rip you apart with my bare hands,” Ladon growled. “I will slice your head from your shoulders and your arms from your torso. I will burn your parts one by one.”

  He swayed, his eyes hooded, blood dripping onto his cheek.

  The Ladon surfacing was not the Ladon that Derek knew. This Ladon was the man whom Europe feared. The basis of the dragon myths.

  The reason why the Dracae feared a new rampage.

  Two Dea
ths stood in Daisy’s kitchen. Death the avenger and Death the clown. And Derek, the man who escaped Death not once, but twice.

  Another, stronger dragon pulse swamped the kitchen. Ladon groaned and Vivicus drew back the dagger.

  Derek didn’t think. Didn’t yell or vocalize in anyway. His body simply dropped its shoulder and he barreled into Vivicus’s knife arm.

  Ladon swung, his injured arm thrusting outward as Derek knocked Vivicus toward the back of the kitchen.

  He caught Vivicus’s forearm.

  The morpher snaked under Derek’s weight, his body undulating in ways a human should not be able to move. But he could not worm out of Ladon’s grip.

  The blankness of Ladon’s face terrified Derek as much as Vivicus’s morphing, but he understood what Ladon was about to do. He understood why it needed doing. And he also understood that what was about to happen was not something the young people should see.

  Vivicus’s arm bent perpendicular to how it should be, snapped by Ladon’s strength. His grip tightened. Vivicus’s arm turned.

  The dagger, still held by Vivicus’s hand, smashed toward Vivicus’s face.

  But the morpher’s hand glopped off his arm like toothpaste off the end of a tube.

  Vivicus screamed. The dagger dropped to the floor. But his hand flowed down Ladon’s arm, tightening, and he swung them both around, shifting his center of weight with such force the change played across his skin. He spun Ladon toward the back door.

  A sharp pain shrieked through Derek’s arm. Vivicus could not have cut him. The dagger sat on the floor. But…

  He couldn’t think about that now. Vivicus hauled Ladon outside and Brother-Dragon woke, his dragon mind searching, and Derek needed to get Ladon back in. They could not be apart. They—

  He stumbled out the door behind Ladon and Vivicus. They yelled and cursed, both as randomly as Derek’s mind felt, but too far away, both scrambling to get back into the kitchen.

  Derek couldn’t tell them apart. Vivicus had re-formed his hand. They bled the same. Their black t-shirts looked the same. They swore the same.