Billy jabbed a finger at her obscured eyes. “Forgive me for singing.”
She twisted her head and the camera in the left temple of her glasses winked as if she used it to peer at his eyes. “I called the Dracas before I came in. They’re coming. They’ll stop the seizures and get him back where he belongs.”
They’re coming sounded more like a threat than a promise. “I promised Rysa I’d come back for her.” They couldn’t interfere.
“You’re a War Baby,” Billy hissed.
The thin thread—the wisp of spider silk—connecting Ladon to the beast had vibrated in just the right way to hum a memory of Adrestia’s brother speaking a secret: Did you know my sister’s always had a crush on you? And here she thought you’d never want a Fate woman.
This memory brushed across Ladon’s mind like dirty burlap—it itched and it festered and centuries worth of threads and connections wove in and out of its holes. This memory carried understanding. This memory, unlike all the stripped down, hollow thoughts he’d been suffering, this memory was his. He knew it was his and not a reflection from the other person in his head. The young man he’d been oscillating with, the kid who didn’t understand what was happening any more than Ladon did. The kid with the name that wasn’t quite right.
The roar pushed up from Ladon’s gut into his chest. It filled out in his lungs, picking up resonance and meaning and emotion. Real, painful, deep-cutting emotion. Pain that had vanished from his life two days ago.
Vanished like a dragon…
“You tried to kill Rysa!” He moved faster than Billy. Faster than the Fate named Adrestia who still held the gun in her hand. Faster than anyone here.
He flipped their table. The fake flower in the bottle vase, the salt and pepper, the container of sugar packets flew across the bar. Their chairs crashed, one breaking under the weight of the upturned table.
Ladon ripped open the Burner’s duffle and pulled Poke and its mechanical scabbard from the bag.
“You did take it,” Adrestia said. “Burner, it’s been with you all this time?”
Billy shoved her toward the overturned stool in the middle of the karaoke bullseye. “Dragon boy doesn’t remember who he is, darling, and I doubt he remembers that he’s developed a distaste for killing Fates.”
The scabbard’s many arms released. The sword called Poke felt correct in Ladon’s hand—its shape and weight correctly mimicked the shape and weight of an untold number of swords he had carried over the span of his long life. Swords with the same square hilt and the same arm’s length, straight, sturdy blades.
“An emperor’s gladius,” he mumbled. The blade continued to suck in what little light bounced throughout the bar.
Ladon slammed Poke down onto the edge of the upturned table. The blade sliced through the metal trim into the manufactured, pressed wood of the tabletop with such ease that the table split with little resistance and very little sound.
Poke continued to slice through the carpet and the underlayment all the way to the joists of the floor.
The woman named Adrestia—this blind Fate who wanted him to run away—raised her hands in surrender, though she continued to hold her weapon and she watched the door more than Ladon, as if she didn’t think he’d hurt her.
She addressed Billy. “He thinks he’s someone else?” She emphasized the last two words as if they carried significant meaning.
“Didn’t you hear me, Fate? He’s—”
“I tried to stop her when her triad tortured you! I interrupted when I could. It’s…” Her mouth opened and she slapped the side of her head. “It’s difficult to… communicate. Her thoughts and my thoughts overlap. Sometimes I can’t figure out whose memories I’m sensing. Whose hate I’m feeling. What’s the present and what’s the future. We’re one person, but…” She slapped the side of her head again.
She mumbled as if talking to someone Ladon could not see. “Stay down. You’ve destroyed enough.”
She pointed her gun at the door and a thundering musical seer in a storm blasted outward from her body. “She’s going to surface soon. She’ll kill him! Ladon can’t be here…”
But then the energy changed, shifting higher in pitch, as if they were now moving toward the information it searched for, then downshifted to its first level.
She slapped the side of her head again. “Burner, when she takes over, the other one in here,” she pointed at her temple, “you had the shard all this time, understand? The man playing guitar in the uploaded videos is a random local. You don’t know where Ladon is. You don’t remember because you’re a Burner.” She pointed at the sword. “Make sure no one but the Dracas or her husband touches that sword.”
Her entire body shook the way Ladon’s shook when he had one of the episodes. When the confused young man who called himself Nathaniel walked inside his body.
Billy’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”
“I…” She staggered into a chair. “We need to get him out of here… before she… surfaces….”
Billy grabbed the bag with the scabbard and pushed Ladon toward the emergency exit.
Chapter Nineteen
“Where are you?” Rysa pressed her face against the bus’s tinted window. The parking lot’s overhead lights turned the whipping snow into a wall of gray and Rysa saw nothing beyond Cordelia’s SUV.
The door hung open and the interior glowed with light thrown by the dome bulb and the dash indicators. The headlights poured brightness into the wall of snow, but the light illuminated nothing, only flickered off the whipping snowflakes.
Like the light, Cordelia Palatini-Sut had vanished into the storm.
Rysa’s present-seer sniffed at the what-is and found no direct evidence of Aiden Blake’s past-seeing sister, Fina. No direct evidence of Aiden or Ethne Blake, either. Somewhere out there, Fina Blake danced with her guns and, Rysa suspected, the Tsar’s ring. The other two had probably doused themselves in burndust to hide their movements inside the what-was-is-will-be.
Which means no Fate in the security detail would be able to read their location or intent.
Derek dropped into the bus’s driver’s seat and quickly adjusted his position. The bus’s motor purred to life.
Dragon lifted his head. He stared out the window next to Rysa and she got the distinct sense that he was dragon-perceiving details through the whiteout that her human eyes could not see. She pushed on his neck anyway. “Get down. I don’t want her to know your position inside the bus.”
The beast snorted.
“He says his position is the—”
Silent bullets ricocheted off the windows.
Derek swore in Russian. He ducked as the windshield cracked, but it didn’t shatter. The bus held—if barely.
Rysa pushed on Dragon’s neck again. “You stay down and you get as invisible as you can.”
The beast whipped his head as if saying no.
“Listen to your Prime Fate!” Rysa yelled. He couldn’t do this now. He couldn’t argue and be the savior he’d always been because he was hurt and… Her beast was about to die. Her man was out there somewhere so close she could feel him but Aiden’s sister was about to murder Dragon and Rysa would never be able to heal either Ladon or the beast.
If Fina murdered Dragon, she would murder Ladon, too.
“Get the bus moving!” Rysa grabbed her coat and jumped the two steps down to the bus’s rear door and slammed her hand against the emergency release.
A flash of panic washed off Dragon. Derek yelled her name. But Rysa Torres jumped into the blizzard and ran around the pinging corpse of a dead SUV.
“Fina Blake!” she yelled. The SUV hung open, a pool of light bubbling in the center of frozen land. Rysa shielded her eyes and tried to see through the storm.
Behind her, the bus rocked. Derek thankfully listened to her command and wiggled the bus away from the SUV.
“I know it’s you!” Rysa yelled. “I remember you from the Student Union! You and your creepy psycho-bitch stare can�
��”
Fina Blake manifested out of the snow. Evil stood directly in front of Rysa with its face and body tiger-striped with vanishing.
Both Daisy and Derek had said something about a cloth with dragon-skin mimicking properties. Fina must have stolen it from the house and cut it into strips. She’d wrapped herself in ribbons of invisibility like some comic book ninja. The effect had been enough to break up her profile. In the storm, she’d effectively become invisible.
“… vanished like Dragon…” Fina Blake tipped her head like a Burner as her past-seer enveloped the storm and Rysa’s mind. “…gone invisible to mimic the Burning World.”
Rysa didn’t know what the riddle-echo meant, but it had been with her since she activated.
Fina Blake was not going to steal it from her. The echoes were hers—the loud echoes and the quiet ones. Echoes of the past and echoes of a burning future. Echoes formed by actions past and coming circumstances of the future.
“You see it, too.” Fina cocked her head the other way. “Aiden sees it. The Burning World.”
“Get out of my head.” Get out of my past! Rysa thought-yelled. She’d had enough of other Fates digging in her soul. Enough of them taking and destroying and causing pain.
Fina grinned her camo-crisscrossed death’s-head grin. “Only the strong will survive.”
She pulled a chain out from under the strips of invisi-fabric wrapping her neck and chest, and with it the huge, gaudy ring that must be the cursed Tsar’s insignia. “Only those who understand the new.”
Rysa’s energy blade curled around her hand and through her fingers and up her arm as if it had a mind of its own. She swung.
Fina dropped one foot back as she braced with the other, and leaned out of the path of Rysa’s fist. Her fingers snagged the chain anyway. It cut into Rysa’s hand and stopped Fina from completing her move.
The past-seer hollered and tugged, her feet planting again, and she raised one hand to hit Rysa in the face.
The chain snapped. The ring dropped into Rysa’s hand.
Her perception of the world altered.
She’d been like this before, inside the ring’s pulsings. She’d dreamed it after Vivicus first stole Ladon. She’d had a vision of Daniel, the long-dead future-seer of the original Draki Prime, and she’d seen how to use other people’s memories to circumvent the interference put out by both the ring and the shard.
But that vision had been physically outside of the ring’s influence. Now she was deep inside of it.
The ring on her palm had been altered by a Shifter. It sang like a living thing as if it had been healed—or unhealed—but unlike a living thing, it did not understand what had happened to it. Echoes of anger pinged from it, as did a formless, context-free fear.
It wasn’t being used the way it was supposed to be used. It was meant for someone, and not being with that person hurt.
The ring had its own agenda, one that the Fates who stole it from Daisy’s mother had not been—nor could have been—aware of.
She almost hooked onto the ring’s purely Shifter plan, but a new anger as hot as a Burner’s skin swept across Rysa’s mind. For a split second, she drowned in a blazing white hot wash that was neither hot nor cold, just… blanketing.
Blanketing and electrical.
A new seizure blazed inside Dragon, and Rysa’s brain seized along with him right in the middle of a fight with an evil Fate, because he couldn’t hold himself together. Death threatened: His death. Her death. Ladon’s death. Derek’s—
Dragon had no idea that she’d hooked the ring. No idea that the damned thing amplified disruption—all disruptions.
The bus accelerated toward the building. When Dragon seized, so did Derek.
“Derek!” Rysa screamed. Fina held her wrist and she couldn’t move and Derek was about to crash the bus into the side of the hotel because Rysa hadn’t thought things through and stayed with her dragon. She’d let her anger and her frustration and her fatigue guide her decisions and now Fina Blake was about to break her arm and probably stab her, too. She was about to bleed out in the snow while her world went up in flames.
Fina crinkled her nose. “You can’t sit still.” She sniffed at Rysa. “Are your seers always like this?”
I’m not explaining ADHD to you, Rysa thought. “I’m going to kill you and your triad.”
Fina twisted Rysa’s elbow. Pain screamed hot and cold up her arm—hot on the surface and cold deep inside. The orange glow of the SUV’s light danced on her skin but the blue ice and the black sky danced in her bones. They fought across a membrane somewhere inside her muscles, a sheet of resistance that kept what needed to burn on fire and what needed to freeze crystalized.
But the electrical sparking of the dragon-seizures made the hotel’s parking lot look pixelated. Rysa watched the world through a mesh of random dragon-perceiving and a point on the bus looked too bright, while a point on the ground too pale. The building flattened out as if hand-drawn. The trajectory of the bus’s skid showed as a glimmering arc in the wind and the air.
She shouldn’t have thought that she could take on a centuries-old past-seer in a physical fight. She should have thought things through.
Her muscles gave in to what her seers told her: You’re vulnerable.
A massive pulse of energy moved between Rysa and her connection to the dragons. Go limp, Rysa. We have you.
New dragon-perceiving flared through the lot and a new beast, one who mimicked the blizzard even as her brother could not, swept her great six-taloned hand between Rysa and an evil Fate.
Fina Blake arched upward and into the air, a semi-visible flailing of skinny arms and legs, and slammed into the SUV.
Rysa fell to her knees. “The ring…” She dropped it into the snow.
Her mind instantly reintegrated. Her connection to Dragon—her ability to feel not only the beast, but also Ladon—all but shimmered in the air the way her “blade” shimmered around her hand. But unlike the blade, it snapped and spit.
Dragon needed help. “Sister-Dragon! Hold your brother and his connection to Derek. Hold their minds together.” Rysa pointed at the bus. “Please.”
A cathedral of dragon-meaning blossomed through the lot, one built of centuries of love and loss. One buttressed with colors and beamed with patterns. One both strong and fragile at the same time, the way an egg was strong tip-to-tip but fragile side-to-side.
Sister-Dragon’s flame spread through the lot but narrowed at the same time as her connection to her brother narrowed and tightened. She snagged the tenuous thread between her human’s mate and her brother’s mind, and she wove herself into the fraying strand.
Sister-Dragon wouldn’t be able to hold their connection—or Dragon’s seizing mind—for long.
This was why Rysa told Anna and Sister-Dragon to stay back. Once Anna’s beast let go, what had been semi-stable would rebound and—
Deal with Fina Blake first, whispered her present-seer.
AnnaBelinda hauled Rysa to her feet. “Get up, Draki Prime.” She’d dropped the hood of her black coat away from her face. Her snow goggles hung around her neck and she held a large gun in her free hand. “We…” She cringed but ran for the bus.
The vehicle skidded and fishtailed, and its front jumped the curb, but Derek had control again. They didn’t crash.
Rysa flung her present- and future-seers outward. She panted, still disoriented, but she needed to know Fina Blake’s location—and what she was about to do. Being tossed across the parking lot by a dragon wouldn’t stop a psycho Fate.
Rysa had underestimated Vivicus. She’d underestimated her uncle Faustus. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she underestimated every single paranormal she had ever faced-off with. A part of her still didn’t believe she had the abilities she did. If her seers weren’t real, then how could anyone else’s be?
But the energy blade around her hand was real. The disruptive power of the ring was real. Sister-Dragon’s flame and her roar were real.
And Rysa’s family was in very real danger.
Where is Fina Blake? she asked her seers. Fina no longer wore the ring. She should be visible.
Burndust, her past-seer whispered. They were good at being Fates, Aiden, Ethne, and Fina Blake. They wouldn’t go into a situation without redundant camouflage.
But Rysa had two dragons, and dragons perceived. She ran for the bus. “Sister-Dragon! Map for me! If you map, I’ll be able to—”
Fina slammed Rysa against the bus’s taillights.
“You’ll what, little girl? See me?” Fina giggled. “See my toys?” She flicked a knife toward Rysa’s head.
Rysa pulled right and the knife’s edge cut through her hair, missing her ear by a fraction of an inch.
A black blade. One just like the dagger her uncle Faustus had when he snuck into the cave to kidnap her after she activated and he thought she would become the Prime Fate of the Burners. A blade made out of the same material as the two Praesagio Industries midnight swords.
Fina must have stolen the blade from Vivicus, too. “What else did you take from the First Morpher?” Rysa snarled.
“The glass casing from the shard and a sliver of your talisman.” Fina giggled again. “We were going to put the shard in you. You were going to be what allowed Aiden to see beyond the fog.”
She answered. Just like that. Spilled their villain secrets.
“He had the whole operation planned. Fuck with his flower. Fuck with you. Make everyone you care about suffered. Then you were going to sacrifice yourself and he would have what he needed.”
Seven months ago, the Seraphim had tried to use Rysa as bait to get The Children of the Burning World. It had been a double-cross, and Fina just told her why.
The past-seer waved the blade. “Aiden says Vivicus made the glass and now we have what we need to build a network. He says the glass is an antenna. This way he will be stronger. Better. That he’ll see the new behind the fog. He’s going to pull it into the real world. He’s going to bathe in it and make himself new.”
Men And Beasts (Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book 6) Page 13