All but Human

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Ladon pulled her close. His lips danced along the top of her ear the way he always kissed—his attention on her skin, his arms tight around her waist.

  He knew how to love her and he commanded the moment.

  “White Cat, Black Cat, Gray Cat, and Stripy Cat, because Dragon started the literal naming,” he said.

  Ladon smiled and the familiar call energy burst out from him again. “Because every beast has a name.”

  Daisy took the umbrella from Gavin. She flicked it open and for a brief moment, they vanished behind the fabric. “One last question. In your van, which med kit holds the sutures?”

  Ladon rubbed his forehead. “The red one. Pills are in the orange container.”

  Gavin vanished out the door.

  Daisy stepped across the threshold. “Come out. Brother-Dragon wants to see you.” Then she, too, vanished into the rain.

  Rysa took Ladon’s hand. “Are you ready?”

  She’d walk out with him into the drops falling from the flat gray sky onto his torn, black t-shirt.

  The same rain that slicked her burgundy-red t-shirt to her skin and, outside, slid down the side of a dragon who, when happy, greeted the world with golds and oranges, and blues and greens.

  In the inn outside Mount Rushmore, after their warm bath, they’d spoken quietly of intimate things, their dragon nearby. She’d asked questions and he’d answered.

  The salt scrub had a yellow-green tint and reminded her of baby snot. Ladon had laughed. “We will show you the plant when we return to the cave.” Slowly, he’d toweled off her breasts. “Its blooms are a lovely spring color.”

  Behind him, a beautiful lavender-violet flower shape had moved across Dragon’s side, a color shown, not spoken.

  As they walked out of the auditorium, she let Ladon take the lead. She let him walk through the door first.

  And when she passed over the threshold, all Rysa’s colors turned a shimmering, midnight black.

  Chapter Fifty

  When this was done, Rysa would have to take Gavin aside again. Tag some memory with an ask him about colors.

  Probably should make sure the Praesagio techs know to bring him whatever upgraded hearing aids he’d had in his ears as well.

  Whether they gave him back his super-hearing, or if Praesagio’s security forces were listening via the aid, she didn’t know. But if it protected her friend, then she would make sure she put in the extra effort to bypass the fog with that little tidbit of info, too.

  She didn’t need a new echo reverberating through the what-was-is-will-be. One carrying the sounds of more friends dying.

  “Where are Ms. Pavlovich and Mr. Bower?” When the man pretending to be Ladon turned toward Rysa, he looked genuinely perplexed. “Where is my dragon?”

  Rysa’s seers sputtered this close to the building but she knew that Praesagio Industries was full of technological wonders. If Dmitri’s people did not want Gavin and Daisy seen, they would not be seen.

  Slowly, she picked up the umbrella she’d left leaning against the wall outside the door. “Where is he?” The son of a bitch faking Ladon liked to monologue. No reason for him to stop talking now.

  He stretched out his fake-broken arm and waved it to get the blood flowing again. “I figured you’d catch on.” He shrugged. “Took you less time than I expected, so kudos to you, sweetheart.”

  “Have you ever been tortured by a healer?” Rysa clicked the umbrella against the drawing she’d scratched into the concrete.

  He waved his hand at the auditorium. “I worked hard to get him here. I stole two airplanes—planes, my amply-chested sweet-pea—to get him into my Fate-proof facility. This place is a treasure house. It’s top shelf.”

  It’s Fate-proof. Rysa looked down at the drawing again. But not Legion-proof.

  “Is he alive?” She had an umbrella but the blackness inside her soul had its midnight blade. She held it in the front of her mind, this symbol of Parcae prevarications and strategic manipulations.

  But it also equally symbolized the quicksilver piercing disruption of the Mutatae.

  And now she had everything nasty about both her Fate and her Shifter heritages molded into an imaginary blade capable of slicing Vivicus into ribbons.

  But it wasn’t imaginary. Her healer flowed into her hand, honed sharp and deadly by her seers, and the air around her fingers shimmered.

  Vivicus crunched up one side of his nose as if only half of him smelled something funny. “Didn’t you hear me? This place is Fate-proof. You can’t read my secrets here.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You’re not too bright are you, beautiful?”

  She’d wondered about the hold the threat of a rampage had over Ladon and AnnaBelinda. How could two good people—two caring, loving people with two caring, loving dragons—vanish into a behavior so vicious, so vile?

  Where did it come from?

  She looked down at her blade-hand, the one she held over the center of her modern version of the Legion insignia.

  The black figure who had appeared to her after the Daniel vision made sense now.

  A rampage wasn’t about vengeance or justice. It wasn’t about protection, either. A rampage was about cutting down a forest of terrors.

  Fallen trees provided an enemy no shelter. Fallen trees hid no ghosts.

  “I’m going to kill you, Vivicus.” Her voice sounded hollow. Her words carried no inflection, only their singular, two-dimensional meanings. She was about to stand up and end his life.

  “I slithered into his throat, darling. I saw and I listened and I did my research.” He waved his arms around like the lunatic he was.

  Slowly, deliberately, she balanced her weight between her toes and her heels and stood tall. “Will imploding your heart shut you up?”

  “Go ahead and stop my heart. It won’t kill me. I’ll come back and put a bullet in his head. The next time I’m the one the beast wakes to.” He sniffed and danced around with his hands on his waist.

  His eyes had taken on a yellowish, demonic tint. “Do you know why he likes you?” Vivicus wiggled his fingers in the air between them. “Besides your dependency and your fuckability?”

  Her rampage calculated angles and thrusts. It watched stone-cold and focused. The what-was-is-will-be buzzed but her rampage didn’t care. It was bound to a fate that would set it free.

  Vivicus grinned. “He likes you because you don’t have it in you to be like him. You’re the flipside of his murderous ways. You’re the one he thinks will give him a family.”

  He has a family, she thought.

  A family.

  The air behind Vivicus shimmered. Two six-taloned hands appeared, one folding around his shoulders and the other around his waist. Two six-taloned hands grasped him firm.

  Anna and Sister-Dragon, her present-seer whispered. They’re here. They left St. Paul.

  You know what that means.

  Deep inside, deep in a place Rysa didn’t think something could snap, a tendon let go. Not one holding muscle to bone, or organ inside cavity. No, this tendon held her mind to her soul.

  Her seers flared upward.

  Long tentacles of power curled and climbed into the rain and the clouds and Rysa went with them. Her mind flared upward too, rolling and roiling in the lightning and the thunder and the lashing winds and the… echoes.

  She’d been here before, in a dream, not long after she activated.

  Chained to the clouds by engines and pulleys and looking down at the death spreading below.

  That time had been a warning that if she wasn’t careful, she’d hurt Ladon. She’d drip acid onto his life and eat away everything that he was.

  But now, the death had already come as a whirlwind of fate executed by the hands of the Dracas.

  A small body stepped out from behind the protective invisibility of a seething dragon. A small hand rose next to Vivicus’s neck.

  A syringe glimmered in the rain and a long, thin needle jammed all the way into his flesh.

 
; Vivicus jerked.

  From her soul’s floating vantage point, Rysa saw the exact flow of solution into the flesh of an unkillable morpher. She saw Vivicus’s slipperiness unslip; his mercurial nature crystallize.

  That which made him malleable froze in its tracks, terrified that the solution entering his body might see it for what it was.

  Sniffers, Rysa’s seers chorused. Anna injected Vivicus with undiluted sniffers.

  The same sniffers Rysa carried in her blood. The same microscopic robots that worked twenty-four-seven to watch and measure and delineate exactly what a Fate’s or Shifter’s abilities did—the observations that whatever powered the abilities did not want seen.

  So the abilities shut down.

  Anna just shut down Vivicus.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Rysa’s sense of out-of-body, of disconnect, stopped.

  Her mind reoriented and for a micro-second she felt as if she stood in the center of a playground merry-go-round—the small kind with the bike-rack-like bars and the rusted bolts; the ones only about four or five kids could ride at once.

  The creaky, dirty, paint-chipped kind of merry-go-round. The ones surrounded by packed dirt and sand that had been run on by small shoes so many times ankles vanished into the rut.

  The kind with the bearings that screamed and the kids who yelled because they flew around and around and around.

  The open lawn of the Victor D. Victor Magnet School for the Life Sciences gleamed a bright green, now that the rain made the poor, dry grass less poor and a lot less dry. A low, soft rumble of thunder meandered through the iron gray clouds.

  Anna, Sister-Dragon, Rysa, and the dying Vivicus were about fifteen feet away from the cobalt door. Across the lawn and on the other side of the curving drive, the school’s mandatory Texas football field spread out across the land, complete with a college-sized grandstand.

  Rysa’s mind whipped in a tight circle around Vivicus’s gurgling, shuddering form.

  If she looked outward she saw the fields and the building and, somewhere down the drive and physically out of sight, the cavalry.

  A small army of Praesagio security held back all the normals in the area. A sniper set up on the roof of the auditorium.

  Dmitri personally hauled Gavin, Derek, and her Dragon away from the scene, to protect the most vulnerable from the energy flares and the disorientation—and Sister-Dragon’s bright, high-definition maps of Vivicus’s death spasms.

  Daisy stayed behind. She was out there, somewhere, waiting. The Fates told her she needed to stay.

  The merry-go-round of Rysa’s mind slowed. Someone, or something, held on and dug in their heels and braked the spin. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Sister-Dragon, either. It felt like other Fates.

  “No!” she screamed. This was Rysa’s fight. Her rampage. Her—

  Sister-Dragon’s map pulsed and cut off her ragings. The sniffers spread upward along the superhighway of Vivicus’s carotid artery into his brain and downward, toward his heart.

  The mushiness of the map—the fuzziness of Vivicus’s ever-changing landscape—solidified into clear, well-delineated structures behind the wave.

  On the inside, he now looked like a man.

  On the outside, he continued to look like Rysa’s soon-to-be husband.

  Vivicus will die looking like Brother-Human, Sister-Dragon signed. She sniffed at the side of his face.

  “No!” Daisy asked Rysa what she would do with a knife. She’d cut Ladon’s face off Vivicus’s squishy skull. She’d use it to cut a rope to hang him from the goal posts of his douchey school. She’d slice the kindling to stuff into his pockets when she set him on fire.

  She’d burn him down. She’d burn the entire fucking world down so that he never wore Ladon’s face again. She’d destroy everything and then she’d vanish into the fire.

  “Rysa.” Somehow, AnnaBelinda stood next to her. She’d stepped onto Rysa’s whirling merry-go-round and now stripped off gloves before gripping Rysa’s elbow.

  She stared at Rysa’s hand. “Stop.”

  Her hand?

  The fire, her seers whispered. All the pulleys and the engines and the power of the storm that they harnessed was, right now, funneling downward into her hand.

  Vivicus wasn’t the epicenter; Rysa was.

  “It’s my job to protect us. I’m the Draki Prime,” she whispered. “Daniel told me to do what he could not.”

  A small, almost imperceptible shake ran up AnnaBelinda’s arm, through her shoulders, and down her spine. “When did Daniel talk to you?”

  The other Fates, the ones braking the merry-go-round, surrounded them.

  Three people, the past- and future-seeing men and the present-seeing woman, all squatted in an equilateral triangle around Vivicus, Rysa, Anna, and Sister-Dragon. They stayed back, stayed silent, but they watched. And they stabilized the what-was-is-will-be.

  Rysa recognized their faces from photos Gavin had shown her shortly after they moved into Daisy’s house. These three were the Fates assigned to watch over him.

  They must be the Fates who had been—and were now—picking up her Gavin-carried, tagged messages in the what-was-is-will-be.

  “This is on me,” Rysa growled. “Go away!”

  She needed to make sure Vivicus died this time. She needed to see it happen, feel him become still, hear him stop breathing.

  Gently, Anna moved her hand to Rysa’s wrist. “Do not cross into a place from which you can never return, Sister.”

  The world suddenly, completely stopped spinning. Sister-Dragon’s mapping snapped off. The other dragon unplugged Rysa’s channel to Vivicus’s death. She paced behind Vivicus, between the silent Fates and the First Morpher, watching his twitching, spasming body.

  “No!” Rysa dropped to her knees in front of Vivicus, in the mud. “Map for me! I need to know he’s dead. I need to see.”

  Vivicus knelt with his ass on his boots, his legs wide and his hands draped in front of his body. Vivicus, in his Ladon-like dress, looked as if he was about to be sacrificed to the gods.

  No one touched his flesh. No one came close enough. They only encircled.

  “We cannot touch him,” Anna said. “He’s full of active sniffers.” Slowly, she squatted on the other side of Rysa, but close enough to touch elbows. “After they helped you, the Praesagio techs created a concentrate, just in case.” She nodded toward Vivicus. “For him.”

  Vivicus gurgled.

  Spittle ran down his chin. In some places, his version of Ladon’s skin looked like clay; in others, it looked like concrete.

  His version of Ladon’s eyes had lost their luster and appeared more as glass marbles than windows to a soul.

  He slumped but Rysa knew he wouldn’t fall over. Every cell the sniffers in his blood touched froze into an icy version of itself.

  The power of the morphing Shifter—the power that allowed him to change and to copy—was so integral to his body’s processes that over the millennia, he’d become his ability.

  He had, on a basic, fundamentally cellular level, stopped being human.

  Rysa leaned closer. “They want me to leave.”

  Vivicus slowly, in a stuttered way, blinked.

  “You said that I’m not capable of rampages and that’s why Ladon loves me.”

  He blinked again.

  “Rysa.” Anna curled her hand around Rysa’s. Slowly, she grasped her palm. “You do not need to be the one to send him into the afterworld.”

  The woman at Rysa’s side had walked the old ways many times. She and her dragon had many sins staining their souls.

  They saw no reason for Rysa to be sullied as well.

  But her mom once told her something important: You cannot understand the future if you do not understand the past.

  Vivicus’s hands hung between his thighs. They twitched and shook and bounced against each other making soft slapping noises in the misty Texas drizzle.

  “Vivicus.” Rysa leaned forward. “Does it hurt?”
/>
  His eyelids did the same twitching, shaking, bouncing as his hands.

  Rysa’s present-seer blipped. “It does.”

  Anna’s lip curled into a snarl.

  Slowly, Rysa raised her hand. Her seers danced outward, doing exactly what Anna told her not to do—touching.

  “Sister-Dragon, please map for me.” She needed to see.

  Anna nodded. The map burst back on in Rysa’s perception.

  Vivicus’s body waged an internal war. Parts of him tried to slip away. Parts set fire to themselves in an attempt to block the frontline of sniffers.

  Every part lost. But in some places, the sniffers subsided.

  Rysa poked Vivicus’s cheek.

  “Don’t—” Anna grabbed for her wrist.

  “It’s okay. I see.” Rysa stared at her fingertip. Vivicus felt as fake as he looked. As fake as he was and as fake as the lives he’d spent all the centuries pretending to live.

  He felt smooth and slightly sticky, like a plastic bottle.

  “Where is my husband?” she asked. The security forces combed every single inch of the school and the grounds, but she knew finding Ladon would not be easy. Vivicus, for all his crazy, was a smart man.

  The next gurgle sounded like a laugh.

  Behind them, all three of the unnamed Fates shook their heads. They could not read the answer, either.

  Anna leaned closer, as well. “He’s always known how to hide from Fates.”

  “The shard’s gone.” Rysa poked his gut, too. “It used to be right here. It shouldn’t be blocking our seers.”

  Unless he’d copied it. Could a Shifter copy and affect non-living items?

  Vivicus’s head rose. He looked at someone approaching from the front of the building.

  Daisy stopped behind the squatting women.

  She wore a blue and yellow Praesagio jacket very much like the ones worn by the unnamed triad. The umbrella she held threw a dark shadow over her face but she looked both pale and shocked anyway.

  They must have told her why Anna flew to Texas instead of flying to Portland.

  Daisy stared at Vivicus. “Do you know where my mom is, you son of a bitch?”