All but Human

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Brother-Dragon roared. He rolled backward, his arm and talon yanking away and toward the van’s roof, and he flashed so brightly Daisy ducked.

  “Jesus!” Gavin yelled. The van rocked and swerved, but he kept control.

  Derek swore in Russian. Dazed and blinded, Daisy flopped against the back of the passenger seat.

  “I no longer bleed.” Derek wiped away his blood with the bandages.

  She fixed him? But why did Brother-Dragon freak out? “Are you okay?” She reached for his big dragon cheek.

  “Do not touch him!” Derek yelled. He looked as shocked by the words as Daisy.

  She yanked back her hand. “I’m sorry!”

  He held out his finger. The very tip of his talon, the spot he’d used to point out the hole for her, no longer shimmered. It now looked like glass—and like Rysa’s talisman.

  Did she change his talon somehow? “What happened? How did I—”

  The van jerked and stopped. “We’re here,” Gavin said.

  The back door flew open. Rysa stood on the sidewalk, scowling. Blood covered her face, chest and hands, but she reeked of anger and determination, not fresh wounds and gore.

  The blood came from Andreas.

  “News?” Daisy pulled out her phone. “Have you called Renee? Given her an update?”

  Rysa jumped in and quickly moved to Brother-Dragon. Her seers flared and she wrapped her arms around the beast’s neck. “I’m here, love.”

  The beast flicked out his now-damaged talon like a little kid showing his mommy a booboo. Rysa touched his snout, then his hand, then the talon itself, and her scowl deepened. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the beast.

  Derek crawled toward the door. “Is Wife here?” he asked.

  “No. She is at the hospital.” Rysa’s seers flared again, as did her healer. “You are not his Human.”

  Derek sat on his ass again, obviously too tired from his blood loss to fight. “I wish to see Wife.”

  “No!” Rysa moved between Brother-Dragon and Derek. “The connection is tenuous. Any interference will cause damage to the energy flow. They stay here! The security detail will arrive soon but they are not the Dracas. Andreas needs real protection until my father arrives.”

  Sandro Torres was on one of the planes? Daisy looked between Rysa and Derek. “Will someone please explain what—”

  Rysa thrust her finger like a spear at Daisy’s nose. “They came because they sensed weakness. They think that by murdering Andreas they saved their future but they have not.” Her shoulders straightened and her back elongated. “Gavin, take us to the airfield.”

  He looked from Rysa to Daisy to Derek, then back to Rysa. “Planes take time to fuel. Can we at least stop at the hospital on the way out? So Derek can tell Anna in person that he’s safe?”

  The stone-cold look that flitted across Rysa’s face made both Daisy and Derek lean away. “No,” she growled. “They aren’t getting into my head!” Rysa sniffled but the stone cold anger didn’t falter. “The only thing I can do for Andreas now is to make sure the Dracas are here for him.” She snatched Daisy’s half-eaten nutrition bar off the floor and bit into it. “Call her.”

  The way she looked at the floor told Daisy that Rysa knew something she was not telling them. “We go to Texas.”

  Gavin started the engine. Ragnar whimpered and pushed his head out between the seats. Rysa patted him gently. “Are you watching over the kitties?”

  Daisy’s boy barked.

  “At least one of us has a handle on what they need to do, huh?”

  With that, Rysa slid down the back of the passenger seat, the bar in her hand, and closed her eyes.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Ladon stared at the roof of what was not his van, his ears and his entire body from his scalp to the pads of his toes ringing.

  The vibrations evened out the agony of his broken arm. They spread the sharp needles of the cut in his side to all his organs. They blended with his lack-of-Dragon and threatened to rattle his teeth from his head.

  Cold seeped into his bones. He’d been cut open and his innards cooled. He wasn’t whole anymore.

  Outside, someone yelled. A gun fired. Ladon closed his eyes.

  Soft hands trailed over his chest. Delicate fingers massaged his pecs and his shoulders. Sweet breath tickled his neck along the edge of his stubble and for a moment—for a brief interlude in the searing visions and the frostbite of anguish eating away at his skin and muscles and bones—he felt his beloved’s touch.

  The dream echoed inside the hollow pain that was his lack-of-Dragon: She stands close, but not close enough to touch. The night cloaks her in darkness and shadow, but the moonlight of her eyes glimmers with a new brilliance he’d never seen before—her cool mist irises shimmered with striations reflecting the sun itself.

  She looks smaller than he remembered her, and maybe wiser. Her breasts appear softer, but her body carries the same strong and healthy assuredness he enjoyed. Her lovely metallic-highlighted hair piles up on top of her head, a style he’d never seen her wear before. The clothing she wears, including a jacket stitched from a fabric the color of the sky moments after the sun sets, appeared more like a uniform than any outfit he thought he’d see on her perfect body.

  Jasmine and mist-under-the-moon swirls in the air between them, as do hints of unrecognizable plastics and exhausts. The air smells fresher than it should in the modern world, but perhaps he only thinks it so because his true love stands before him.

  He brushes his fingers over her cheek and the woman who makes waking up in the morning possible kisses his palm.

  “When you realize how I’ve hurt you, please forgive me,” she whispers. “Please come back for me.”

  “I will.” He pulls her tight against his chest. “I won’t lose you.” Not her. Not Rysa. “I love you.”

  In his arms, she stiffens. “Don’t say that. Don’t—” She calls him by his name.

  Ladon’s jaw tightens to say his name but soft lips covered his mouth and the vision exploded loud and immediate like a balloon. A tongue forced open his mouth. And the thing that had been in his throat, in his chest, wiggled between his teeth. The tongue snagged it and the thing slid out, pulling on his throat as if the vacuum it created would suck out his guts.

  An audible pop followed the lips as they lifted away.

  “Ah,” the sweet voice says. “Time to change the slug. Freshness keeps a spring in our step and a breeze at our backs, huh?”

  The lips clamped over his mouth again. The tongue forced his teeth apart. And it all happened again.

  The lips pulled away and a hand clasped his jaw. “Swallow it,” the sweet voice growled. “I need more from you.”

  The thing sucked flesh and ate at his soul and every muscle in his body contracted. Ladon’s back arched and the sharp agony pulsing from his left arm’s fracture ratcheted up to the point it overpowered the background vibration. Every fiber, every cell, artery, and vein, screeched with the bright-cold fire of lying naked on a glacier.

  “There, there. It’s not so bad.” A palm moved over his abdomen. “I could rip it out each time, but you are a Progenitor, so I’ll grant you this one courtesy.”

  Ladon tried to open his eyes but the roof of the not-his-van reflected too much light.

  A finger tapped at the base of his throat and the thing in his flesh squirmed. “What were you babbling about, loverboy?” The soft fingers trailing over his chest turned rough. “Before I put in the new one?”

  “I…” Too much pain to talk. Or to fight. To do anything.

  In his chest, the thing stretched and flexed.

  The kisses on his neck turned slicing, like a Burner’s. “Your physiology changes when you think about her. Makes me think of how Pavlovich’s pet octopus changes when you poke it.” A sweet giggle filled the air next to his ear. “This new connection we share is so illuminating.”

  “Where…” Did he speak? He didn’t know.

  The lips and hands p
ulled away. “We’re changing planes. The new one’s faster. We’ll be home before the sun sets.”

  Home? Were they going to the cave? He wanted to go home. The house wasn’t safe. But no one believed him.

  “Hmmm….” The sweetness left the voice and Ladon’s sense of Rysa wiggled and writhed as it transformed into a sense of mirror. “Is this how you communicate with my beast?” A sigh filled the air. “Hearing does not do it justice.”

  Metal reverberated. Someone dragged him off a seat and he flopped onto concrete. Ladon coughed, but the thing in his throat gripped and he could not force it out.

  “That one.” His mirror pointed at a small jet a few hundred feet away. “Pavlovich’s people haven’t cleared out all my Seraphim.”

  I’m going to gut you, Ladon thought, though that wasn’t his name.

  His reflection laughed as he dragged Ladon’s weight across the concrete. “You’re like a skipping track. It’s the same-old, same-old with you. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ and ‘I’m going to gut you,’ and ‘I’m going to do this,’ and ‘I’m going to do that.’ I learned a long time ago that you don’t have it in you to do the damage you think needs doing.”

  His reflection tossed him into a seat in the back of the jet. “Research, remember? I do the research. I test and I gather information. That’s why we’re going home. That’s why you’re not dead. I need to make sure I have what I require to get what I want.”

  He moved forward, to the cockpit. “If this doesn’t work, I can always gut your sister.” He winked as he pulled on his headphones. “But she’ll put up more of a fight than you. Always has. Always will.” He gave Ladon the finger as he turned away.

  The engines started. Switches flipped. His mirror glanced over his shoulder again. “What I need is there, under the filigree and contortions in your brain.” The sound of fingers tapping filled the plane. “The beast’s name. It’s there. He won’t accept me if I can’t call him to heel by his real name.”

  The plane jerked and rolled forward.

  “His name is in dragon. No one can say dragon,” the mirror voice growled. “Except me.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Rysa curled her fingers into her dragon’s ultra-fine coat. Holding onto the beast kept her from pacing the frost-covered tarmac of the Branson, Missouri municipal airport.

  Her feet shuffled to the left, then to the right. She twitched, thinking she should have grabbed a sweater when the plane landed to refuel. But this wasn’t Minnesota and it shouldn’t be cold here, and yet, today, it was.

  She’d pulled new clothes out of the bins before they switched to the plane, so at least she wasn’t wearing Andreas’s blood anymore, but she still felt it on her skin. Icy, sticky, smeared—she’d cleaned it off but a residue lingered.

  The beast shambled with her, just as confused and just as buried under the piled-on hell. Though that wasn’t true. He suffered more. He’d lost half his soul.

  Rysa fired another bolt of healing into his dragon head. She’d been healing him every fifteen minutes since she returned to his side.

  Because he suffered.

  Andreas suffered more. Renee suffered more. And somewhere out there, the man she wanted to marry suffered beyond any shivering, bone-crumbling hell that Rysa could possibly understand.

  Because it all piled on.

  “I’m here, Dragon,” she whispered. She’d been whispering the same three words again and again for the past two hours.

  The beast snorted and wagged his head. An emotion as fine and sweet as a rose petal rubbed across her mind.

  “I love you, too,” she whispered.

  About fifty feet away, Renee eyed her suspiciously, her face as cold and pale as Rysa felt. Renee and Daisy talked, and Renee curled her arms around her chest, then uncurled them, then balled her fists. Then she repeated the pattern—curl, uncurl, ball—again.

  Rysa sniffed. Even in winter, Missouri smelled funny. Too dank. She wanted to go home to the cave and rest and marry her man and her dragon, but she had to get this situation under control first.

  Pay attention to what’s important. Filter out all the extraneous noise and chatter and the little voices in the back of your head, young lady. Why are you so useless? isn’t what you need to be asking of your seers. It’s the wrong question.

  It will give you the wrong answer.

  What, right now, needs to be done?

  Rysa’s fingers twitched. She wanted to pace. She grasped her dragon talon talisman and flicked it from one digit to the next, but the leather cord around her neck kept it in place and the last thing she wanted was to pull it off and drop it on the ground because she couldn’t sit still and—

  She closed her eyes. Count, she thought, her hand tight around the smooth, cold surface of her talisman. Breathe.

  I miss him so much, she thought. Even in the worst of his melancholy, Ladon was still her rock. Still the anchor she needed against the storms of her life. He made her mad with his overreaching but fights weren’t permanent. They would have talked about it. Worked it out. Andreas had come to help.

  Why didn’t she see? Why didn’t she ask the correct questions? How the hell was she supposed to be a good Fate if she couldn’t see the difference between protecting and spying?

  Ask the correct questions, her seers chorused.

  “Stop it!” she hissed.

  Now she was talking to herself. Stupid seers, she thought.

  Little bubbles of possibility and probability foamed up from her seers and she was pretty damned sure it was because her disoriented living dragon talisman had started to lose his sense of… humanity. Without a Human, the beast didn’t know how to communicate or to interact. His connection to Derek still held, but it wasn’t stable. Nor was it secure.

  She had to get Ladon back.

  Things leaked in and she was pretty damned sure things leaked out. That the triad who initiated this—who spurred Vivicus and set him on his path, who caused some paths to be taken and who took advantage of random events no one could control—they’d locked onto her.

  Rysa chuckled. So much paranoia. But you’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you.

  The part of her that surfaced after the vision reasserted itself—the shimmering, black part—twisted its midnight blade into the squishy underbelly of her paranoia. Her seers squirmed, as did her healer. So did her long history of dysfunction and her need to bounce. The effervescing damage flowing from her connection to Dragon did not help.

  But it did lay a cold blanket over her panic. It smothered a lot of the spikes and distractions.

  She curled her arms around the beast’s neck. He was here, with her, and alive. Andreas lived. In Texas, Ladon lived. She might suffer the rabid frothing of damage but she was still the Draki Prime and she was still the healer of dragons. She fired yet another calming bolt into her beast’s mind.

  He rubbed against her again, momentarily steadied.

  Twenty feet away, Derek slapped the side of Dmitri’s private Land of Milk and Honey jet. Rysa started, suddenly pulled from her reverie by the loud bang and its corresponding annoyed flash from Dragon.

  Derek ignored them both, pacing as well, and yelled strong-sounding Russian into his cell phone.

  The Praesagio planes had landed in St. Paul. Rysa and Dragon were halfway to Ladon and no matter how much she loved Andreas, he was out of her hands now. She had to remember that her part in fixing his wounds was done. What more can I do for Andreas? was not the question she needed to ask.

  Though Derek didn’t see it that way. Neither did Renee, for good reason. Or Daisy. Gavin hung back, watching everyone, and talked on his phone with random Praesagio people.

  Ten more minutes, and they’d be on the plane again. Then another two hours and they’d come down in yet another municipal airport in yet another city where Rysa did not want to be. But they’d be close.

  Close enough to smell Vivicus. Close enough for her to wrap her hands around his slimy, doughy, disgust
ing neck and breathe out the strongest, most potent, deadliest ‘die’ her truncated enthraller could make. Close enough for her to unleash the other side of her healer, the part that unhealed, and tell it to choke his cells. Let it heat their internal morpher juices until each and every one bloated and boiled and exploded. She’d spike his sick brain. Make him live his coming death just before his death came for him.

  What question should I ask? She kicked her future-seer into the what-was-is-will-be. Don’t come back until you have my answer, she thought.

  “Rysa?”

  She blinked, again pulled from a reverie she should not be in, and looked up at her best friend’s worried face as he walked toward her. “What?”

  “You look pale.” Gavin glanced over her shoulder at Daisy. “Are you sure you’re okay?” He waved at the plane. “I grabbed the two other nutrition bars from the van before we transferred. Do you need another?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  Gavin frowned. “Your face looks exactly like Ladon’s vigilance face, except you look like you’re going to murder someone.”

  Rysa’s muscles shifted into a tension that screamed she was about to engage in a full on, Old World meting out of vengeance. There’d be no escape for Vivicus or any stray Seraphim she encountered. There would only be the black Draki Prime and her shredding Dragon.

  She sucked in her breath. She was not a violent person. She’d never hurt anyone—or anything—in her life. It just didn’t seem… gentle, the one thing she’d always needed. The gentleness of a patient teacher. The gentle caring of a loving family. Her gentle, patient, caring, soon-to-be husband.

  Gavin touched her elbow. “If going medieval on Vivicus’s ass is what you need to do, then you do it.”

  A too loud, too high-pitched laugh grated from her throat. The part of her that knew it could get away with everything pirouetted and laughed, because everything was within its grasp.