She expected a snap. Something sounding sharp and faintly metallic, like a movie noise. But the Shifter’s neck broke with a wet grinding scratch. He gurgled as he tried one last time to breathe.
Ladon stepped back. He stared at the spasming Shifter with a face of solidified cold. The Shifter’s body flopped at his feet and rolled onto its side. The man’s eyes continued to bulge and his legs convulsed.
Ladon shook off the hardness and a wave moved from his core to his neck and face. He stepped over the Shifter and took her arms, checking for wounds.
“Did he hurt you?” Ladon asked. His palm glided over her shoulder as he checked her eyes. “Did he give you specific instructions? Tell you to hurt yourself if you got away?” His gaze darted around the storeroom. “Were there others? Were you able to fight his control? He’s likely a high class-two. Even low class-two enthrallers are dangerous.”
Ladon killed a Shifter. Snapped his neck. Right in front of her.
A crack appeared in the back of her mind. A big crack, one glowing with a fire behind it, and a hot glare poured over her seers.
“Rysa, are you okay?” Ladon pointed at a loading bay. “Dragon says we need to leave.”
“You killed him.” Were the Shifters monsters, like the Burners? Penny was a total bitch, but—
“Rysa?”
Was this okay in his immortal mind? She stared at the Shifter on the floor.
He knocked the Shifter’s hip. “He’s okay.” Then he swung her into his arms and carried her off the end of the loading dock.
Her throat constricted like a tilt-a-whirl whipped her head too fast. She slapped his shoulder. “Put me down!”
Ladon dropped her feet to the ground.
“Is that what you did to those Fates?” The calm she’d felt minutes before shattered. It burst and it scattered and the need to run away returned. Why was this happening? Why did they oscillate between trust and suspicion? And it wasn’t even normal oscillation. Every shift was a category five hurricane.
But that was Storm Rysa. She was a carnival ride in a tornado. She never slowed. Never stopped. Up, down, over, and around—her impulsiveness, her family, Ladon and Dragon, her lack of attention and confidence. And now she had seer tentacles offering up a balm—Hey, darlin’, we have just what you need! This here man. He’s gruff and drinks too much, but he’s good and his dragon is even better! They’ll fix all the bad shit.
The worst part about the carnival ride wasn’t the whiplash. The worst part was that she knew her nasty was right. She’d gotten a taste already—her seers blasted out their hot and heavy future every time Ladon smiled.
They wanted to help. They wanted her. Her entire sense of the future was that the man in front of her—the man who just snapped a Shifter’s neck—wanted to be with her as much as she wanted to be with him.
But he just killed a Shifter.
His stone face flitted so fast she almost missed it.
“No one touches you.” He gripped her fingers so tight they hurt. “No Fate. No Burner. No Shifter. They don’t come near you!”
A stereo growl reverberated through the loading dock. It issued from them both, Ladon in front of her and the invisible Dragon somewhere to the side.
“Rysa, get in the van. He’ll call his friends when he wakes up.” He caught her arm to help her into the back.
Up on the loading dock, the Shifter groaned.
She pushed Ladon away. “I’ll get in on my own.”
Dragon rolled in behind her and slammed the door, leaving Ladon alone on the asphalt.
Chapter Twenty-Six
That Shifter could have killed you. If he had told you to die, you would have died. Dragon signed faster than normal. Discordant patterns jerked across his hide in uneven intervals. The incident in the electronics store disturbed him as much as it disturbed her.
Ladon drove and, once again, yelled Russian into his phone.
Dragon’s colors darkened. Human is angry. The Shifters must show respect.
She’d scream if she didn’t calm down. Her abilities fizzled again—fire danced on the periphery of her mind. A hint of acid hit her nose. Flames licked at her eyes. Heat touched her skin. The Ambusti part of her Fateness used her confusion to reassert itself.
Clearheaded and in control, her ass. A swarm of burning cockroaches scurried around in her head and clicked just outside her field of vision.
She held a shudder. The bug image wasn’t helping.
Dragon touched her shoulder. Your mind is sizzling.
So? she signed back. Her seers always dropped random crap into her awareness. Rysa Torres, the Chaos Fate. A monster.
Human worries. I worry, as well. Dragon’s hide mimicked the wall of the van. He vanished for a split second, then reappeared. He swung his head toward the driver’s seat. We do not understand why you reject us. You called to us. We felt your terror. Human cannot tolerate when you are in danger.
The van stopped. Black night poured in through the roof vents. Ladon must have taken them out of town for it to be this dark.
Up front, he grunted and tossed his phone to the side. The door banged open at the same time as he reached under the seat, then he stalked away. The door slammed hard behind him.
“Where’s he going?” She peered out the windshield. In front of the van and surrounded by trees, a large picnic shelter and a playground sprawled over sand and asphalt.
Human must calm down. He is upset. Dragon’s patterns cycled so fast they blurred.
Rysa pushed open the back door and hopped out. Ladon stomped around the playground clutching a bottle of vodka so tightly she thought it might shatter in his hand. He whipped a rock at the jungle gym. It skipped across the slide and dust billowed off the plastic. A loud crack resonated through the park when the rock struck the slide’s wood post.
He took a swig when he saw her walking across the playground sand. “Are you going to yell again?”
“You’re drinking?” He worked off snapping a Shifter’s neck with vodka? So Penny wasn’t just some bitch with an attitude. What she’d said held truth.
And she’d pointed a claw at Ladon. “He used to hunt your kind,” she’d said.
Rysa shuddered.
The crack in the back of her mind brightened for a split second. She forced herself to ignore it. She didn’t go through hell with Penny just to lose the benefits of that witch’s enthralling in a few hours.
Ladon glanced toward the picnic shelter and a pulse moved through their energy. The beast must have moved out of the van after she’d stepped out.
Ladon flexed his biceps the way he did when Dragon chastised him and took another pull from the bottle. “I did what needed to be done.”
“Killed a monster?” Shifter, Fate, or Burner, they were all monsters.
The vodka sloshed when he thrust the bottle into the air. “He’s not dead! They wouldn’t put someone in my path who couldn’t handle a neck twist.”
Twenty-three centuries and he must have all sorts of rationalizations for his behavior floating around in his head.
He kicked at the sand. “This is about what Penny said. About me hunting Fates. It’s why you asked at the store if ‘that’s what I did to those Fates,’ isn’t it?”
The air behind him shimmered. Dragon had moved under the jungle gym and now leaned against the slide.
Ladon glanced over. “We knew you’d ask, sooner or later.” The bottle clinked when it bounced against his belt buckle. “I’m not a legatus anymore. I don’t have men under my command. The concept of justice has changed. The rule of law of the Roman Empire is not the rule of law you were born into.”
Her seers flickered out a moment from the past—she saw Ladon, his face hard and cold and far more frightening than any moment she’d seen in the short time they’d been together, with a short sword in his hand and black-crested Roman helmet on his head. Dragon with his head low and his hide showing nothing but fury, pranced behind his human.
Ladon rested a palm on
the invisible Dragon’s shoulder. “I have no progeny, Rysa. No woman I’ve loved has birthed a living child.” His biceps flexed again, but he leaned into the beast. “Most pregnancies ended before my companions realized they were with child. Very few quickened. Even fewer came to term. They were all born dead. Sometimes they killed their mothers.”
The woman who’d died the same night as the Draki Prime—the flash kicked Rysa in the gut. “Ladon—”
He shook his head and held out the bottle. “It’s how things are. It’s been the same for Sister. She’s lost all her babies.”
Ladon looked down at his feet. “Except one. Her daughter was born in a Legio Draconis tent under a snow drift on the edge of the Empire’s northern frontier. My sister held in her arms the only breathing child born to either of us, then or now.”
The memories momentarily brightened his features. “She returned her family to Rome. I followed. I had a niece. I wanted to see her grow. One morning, her father lifted her to his shoulders. They left the villa for the market. She was five years old, vibrant and so fast she could climb the flank of a dragon before you drew a breath.”
A ghost of a smile flitted across his face. Even after the long millennia, thoughts of his family must still affect him deeply. But death and more death filled his life—and it settled in Rysa’s chest like a demon determined to steal her air.
“Fates cut down both father and daughter outside the gates of our villa.” He looked down at the sand again. “And Fates suffered a swift and severe retaliation.”
He threw another pebble at the slide. The plastic cracked with a loud snap.
“All your grandfather’s descendants who did not hide found death at the end of our swords. Invisible dragons ripped more than one triad to pulp in the public squares. The normals thought gods had descended from the heavens.”
Ladon stared out into the dark. “We emptied Rome of Fates, except for the Jani Prime. They knew not to cross our paths.”
He leaned his forehead against the beast’s neck. “Your uncle Faustus eluded me. He was complicit and I vowed vengeance. So I dragged his daughter from their villa and cut her throat. The girl didn’t fight.”
He held the bottle to his lips and vodka sloshed down his throat. “It had all been some damned Parcae game. Both girls were sacrifices.” He held the bottle to the sky. “I was the knife the Fates wielded to call the gods down upon Sister and me.”
Rysa touched her lips. A child for a child. Ladon had taken the life of a girl who would have been her cousin as revenge for the murder of the only living descendant of the Dracae.
“Her triad mates were twins. Your aunt’s children. They killed themselves. The Emperor frothed and your uncle got his way—we were driven from Rome, Sister and I. Vanquished to the frontier. In the following centuries, we rarely returned. We commanded the Legio and kept our distance.”
He’d consumed most of the vodka and now stared at the remaining liquid swirling inside the bottle. “I stopped hunting Fates after that. No more children have died at my hand.”
His eyelids drooped. Every gesture moved in slow motion. His fingers gripped the neck of the bottle but twitched in a slow cadence. His breath moved shallow and deliberate. Ladon stood a frozen statue, a body reflecting the past. “I’d spent four centuries as Roman military. It was me and I was it. I was justice. I enacted what was expected of me. But Faustus’s daughter did not cause my niece’s murder.” The bottle rested against his leg. “I can’t undo what’s done.”
Dragon inched forward and waited between them swinging his big, shadowed head.
She felt as if rocks sat at the back of her mouth. Her body wanted to force them from her throat, but they weren’t hers. They were purely Dracae.
“Sister stopped hunting Fates when the Draki Prime joined the Legio.” Ladon kicked at a pebble. “They saved your kind, Rysa. Daniel, Timothy, and Marcus. They gave us a reason to leave the Fates alone. They were the tribute paid to the dragons to stop a war.”
He looked up at the stars. “Now you know,” he whispered. “You know what kind of man I am. What happens when the fury escapes. We are no better than Burners.
“So if you want to leave, we’ll understand. We’ll stay back. We’ll keep you safe from a distance until we know both you and your mother are okay. Then we’ll leave you alone to live your life.”
He rested his forehead against Dragon’s darkened hide and flattened versions of waves and shapes flowed by his face.
“Your ability to see images from Dragon, the visions about us that you’ve had, the connection we feel—these things can’t cloud your judgment. You need to make your own decisions and follow what your heart tells you.”
She’d seen the joy in his eyes when she asked about surveying, and his concern not only for her, but for her mom, and for Marcus and for Harold, too. The care he showed Dragon. The respect he offered her.
She’d felt his joy when he kissed her.
He’d left war behind, civilizations ago. Now, he wanted to work with the land. To help. He wanted forgiveness, even if he’d never ask for it.
She extended her hand.
The bottle dropped to the sand. He moved so fast he was inches from her before she inhaled, his fingers weaving around hers. She kissed his knuckles. When his grip unfolded, when he stroked a fingertip across her cheek, she turned her lips to his palm.
He scooped her up and stood with his thigh between her legs and his face buried in the curve of her neck.
“Rysa,” he whispered. “Don’t leave.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Ladon.” She wrapped her arms around his head and wove her fingers into his hair. She kissed his brow and the bridge of his nose.
Rysa caressed Dragon’s snout. The beast hummed and the shadows infecting his patterns dissipated and he became a mirage of brilliant radiance. He nuzzled Ladon’s shoulder, then Rysa’s, then Ladon’s again.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”
Her body slid slowly down Ladon’s front and his lips pressed gently up her neck to her jaw and chin.
“Every morning I wake determined to be the best man possible.” His eyes and skin brightened. “I know I can, now. I’ve felt that I can. From your seers. From you.”
Electricity crackled under his hand and danced on the tips of her nerves. He kissed her palm. His tenderness flowed up her arm and all her fears dropped from her body like ice breaking under the sun.
“Ladon.” He breathed life into her world.
He smiled as the focus of his kisses traveled across her thumb, her knuckles, her nails. His lips settled onto the inside of her wrist and drew at her skin as if he drank. She shuddered, the sensation sparking up her arm and down to her fingertips. Her awareness of her own body swelled and she felt every inch of her flesh in high resolution.
Ladon released her wrist. His jaw nuzzled her arm as he moved his lips to the tender spot where her neck met her shoulder. He brushed aside her shirt’s collar and kissed up the curve of her neck to just below her jaw.
Her body concentrated on him—his fingers as they traced her shoulder. The muscles of his core and chest as he held her against him. His scent. The brilliance of his eyes. His kisses. When his lips glided across her cheek, every inch of her body shivered.
He kissed the corner of her mouth. His fingers traced the lobe of her ear and down the delicate skin of her hairline.
Rysa wanted this moment, this tenderness, this, only this, in the present without the future or the past interfering. Her nasty flexed, drinking in their river of energy, but it didn’t siphon. The crack in the back of her mind dimmed.
Ladon’s embrace tightened. Dragon’s colors filled her eyes. She wanted to soothe their minds, to take away their hurt, to give them all they needed. Now. Right now.
A kiss, a real kiss full of need and desire and focus, found her lips. She pulled him closer, and kissed him harder. “Now, Ladon. Please.”
His muscles rippled under her p
alms. Nothing else mattered, only his hand on her breasts and his lips traveling across the crook of her neck. Just him. Only him.
He pulled back enough for her to see his face. “Are you sure?” Another bone-melting kiss met her lips before she could answer.
She could argue with him. Babble words about character and fate and how he was done with war. But she called her seers instead, quickly, and looked for exactly what he needed to hear.
And exactly what she needed to say: “You can touch.”
He kissed her with an intensity she hadn’t expected and pulled her so tightly against his chest she sucked in her breath. He lifted her high and buried his face against her collarbone. The tension in his shoulders released. His breathing deepened. Ladon enveloped her as his body accepted what she offered.
Three steps and he pressed her back against the van’s rear door. She fumbled open the latch, and grinned when his hand threaded under her shirt. As she scooted in, she rubbed the inside of her leg against his side, and massaged the erection straining his jeans with her ankle.
A low, deep sound rolled from his chest.
He rubbed his palm over one of her breasts as his mouth descended to the nipple of her other, then he nipped through her shirt and bra hard enough to send a wave of heat through her body.
Rysa gasped. Ladon grinned as he tugged on the fabric, but he stopped. “Rysa.” He glided a finger over her abdomen. “There’s still a chance you might get—”
Not tonight. “We’re fine.” She pulled him down on top of her and wiggled her hips against his.
Dragon spun into the van. The beast settled and wild rainbow colors played along his hide.
Ladon nibbled on the top of Rysa’s ear and massaged her breast. She ached like she’d been in the sun too long. The need for release coursed out to her limbs, strengthened by Ladon pinching her nipple hard as he breathed in her ear.
Ladon looked up at Dragon.
The beast scooped her against his chest. Ladon kissed her belly, between her breasts, and up to the soft spot above her breastbone.
Games of Fate (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 1) Page 19