The plan Aiden had originally aimed at Rysa—and at Daisy—had been unintentionally upgraded by Vivicus.
“New?” Rysa asked. What new?
Fina pulled the blade out of the bus and stepped back—and took the butt end of Anna’s gun to the back of her skull.
Fina staggered into the lot but didn’t go down. “Aiden said you’d do that.” She danced around like a Burner. “We paid a healer a million each to do upgrades.” She danced again. “Can’t kill us.”
That’s why she rolled off the SUV without any broken bones.
Anna pointed the gun at Fina’s head.
Fina hissed and held up the midnight dagger like a shield. “Aiden’s going to kill his lovely Daisy.” She stood ramrod straight. “Break her first. Then cut off her bud.” She made snipping noises.
Rysa wanted to punch, but the blade in Fina’s hand could cut through her arm as easily as it did the side of the bus.
Fina skipped backward. “He’s going to make his flower pay and I get her cute boyfriend for my very own.”
A gust swirled up around her and she vanished.
Anna fired at where she was, and at her most likely locations, but missed.
Rysa’s connection to Sister-Dragon oscillated, first pulling away from Anna and Rysa, then pushing toward them, and it must have thrown off not only Rysa’s perception, but Anna’s as well.
Anna reached out to Rysa. “Dragon is on the bus’s roof. She’s having trouble holding her brother.” Semi-panic rolled off Anna but she held her face flat. “Are we too close? When Fina fired at the SUV, we…”
Anna trailed off. She felt the strain not only from Dragon, but from her own beast. “We know where Brother is. I’ll drive. Get on the—”
A small cyclone of snow whipped up between them and the rear door of the bus. A tiger-striped cyclone.
Rysa had pushed through that door only moments before. She’d left it unlocked.
She opened her mouth to yell, but Sister-Dragon had already felt Fina’s presence. The dragon swiped her front limb down from the roof, her talons fully extended, but she couldn’t quite hold her invisibility.
The dagger slashed. Sister-Dragon screamed. Dragon blood dripped.
And Fina Blake, the past-seer of the Children of the Burning World, hauled Derek down the bus’s steps and into the raging storm.
Chapter Twenty
Adrestia didn’t smell right to Billy. The present-seer smelled like a… future-seer. Like she was lying about her power set, even though she wasn’t, which didn’t make any more sense than Adrestia offering help in the first place.
She hit the side of her head again. “Ladon needs to be out of sight.” She nodded toward the back of the bar.
Billy grabbed the scabbard and his sword-hiding duffle off the floor. “Give me that.” He wiggled his fingers at Poke.
Ladon-Nate growled.
“You want to eat the guitar before we leave? Because I don’t have a chew-toy, Boyfriend.” Billy grabbed the sword and pushed Ladon-Nate’s jacket into his hands. “Go.” He pointed at the rear emergency exit door.
“Ladon.” Adrestia pounded her knuckles against her forehead and her nifty techno-goggles jostled. “Go west. Do you understand? Not east. West.”
Ladon-Nate refused to move. “The base is east.”
Adrestia pointed her gun at his head. “You will return to the Draki Prime and you will be healed.” She pressed the gun’s grip against her temple. “Your smelly friend here is going to cover for you.”
Whoever she was, at least for the moment she seemed to have their well-being in mind.
Ladon-Nate stalked out the bar’s rear door and into the shadows between the building and a huge, dark dumpster. Steam rolled off his unjacketed shoulders as if he’d just walked out of the gym into a cool evening, except here the snow fell so thick and fast they couldn’t see the other side of the parking lot.
Adrestia pulled Ladon around to the back of the building.
Billy followed. “We have an SUV around front.”
Why the hell was he trusting this woman? He should know better. She seemed off, but in a good way.
Most of the time. “Who are you?” he asked again. He placed Poke in the scabbard and put it into the bag. Carefully, he swung it around to his front so that his free hand rested on the zipper.
Snow hissed when it hit his skin. Flakes melted away to nothing and vanished forever, like his life. Billy the Burner, sizzling like bacon inside a killer Wyoming snow storm.
“Twenty years ago, I woke long enough to make sure you were the Burner who changed Ismene of the Jani Prime. I couldn’t stop what was happening, but I could nudge the circumstances to help the future.” She pushed them against the wall and glanced around the back corner of the bar’s exterior wall.
She inhaled. “A decade ago, I woke long enough to help Ms. Torres’s father and the daughter of Dmitri Pavlovich.”
Her accent changed to something more French sounding, though old French, as if this Fate had been walking the Earth much, much longer than Billy. “Seven months ago, Addy began to realize she loses time. Wrestling for control has become… difficult. I did what I could. I did what I had to. I had to. I couldn’t stop Vivicus.”
She waved the men around the corner toward the parking lot to the side of the building. The wind whistled between the dumpster and the wall. Plastic bags rustled. But the night had become eerily quiet.
“Make him run, Burner,” Adrestia whispered. “Make him go.”
Billy pushed Ladon-Nate toward an eighteen-wheeler parked on the service road in front of the bar. “West, got it.” He tapped Ladon-Nate’s shoulder to make sure he had his beefy friend’s attention. “Put on the jacket and walk that way.” He pointed west. “Stay on the service road.”
A gust picked up Adrestia’s changing scent—electrical, like Ladon-Nate’s seizure stink, but she raised her hand and touched Boyfriend’s cheek. “What’s your name?”
“My name is Nathaniel. I’m…”
She slapped him across the face. “Nathaniel, this body does not belong to you. This body is the human half of the Dracos.”
“But… I…”
“Listen to me.” Adrestia gripped Ladon-Nate’s face. “I don’t know what you are, Nathaniel. Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you’re an actual ghost. Maybe you’re something else. Maybe you’re the past. For all I know, you’re the future.”
The not-Adrestia person in that body was a ghost? Billy shouldn’t be surprised. He was a ghoul, and Boyfriend lived with a dragon. Why not ghosts, too?
Not-Adrestia continued. “You need to leave. This man’s body isn’t yours any more than the body I wear is mine.”
Ladon-Nate shook as if startled. “But…”
Adrestia slapped him again. “She pays for her crime! You are not supposed to be here!” She let go of his face. “Ladon has never deserved his ghosts. So you, Nathaniel, need to go away.”
This wasn’t just the strangeness that made the human half of the Dracos the confused man Billy called Ladon-Nate. This, for the ghost in Adrestia, was personal.
“I told you once,” she said, “long ago in those decades after you lost Abigail and I lost Antonius, when we both felt only the weight of death, that you would one day need to remember who you are. Do you remember, Ladon-Human?”
A massive present-seer blast rolled off her body. Present-, not the future-seer power Billy was pretty damned sure went with the person talking right now. Present- and full of storms and very, very much like the Adrestia Billy remembered.
He did the only thing he could. He pushed Ladon-Nate toward the road. “She said she called Scary Girlfriend. You’ll be okay, but you need to run. Up there and ’round that semi, where we can’t see you.”
“The base is east.” Ladon-Nate pointed in the wrong direction. “I need to go the base.”
“Your sister is coming. She will take you to Rysa.”
Seizure-stink swirled around Ladon-Nate. He twitched.
/>
Billy didn’t want to be the fiend who snapped his teeth at babes and the infirm. He didn’t want to be the terrifying monster his Burner blood made him. But he had no choice. “If you don’t run right now, Boyfriend, I’ll eat you.” He made his entire body hiss—his teeth and his voice and the acrid smoke rising off his skin. He made his eyes flash like scabs on fire and he made his teeth heat to gleaming. “Then I’ll eat the princess.”
Ladon-Nate backed away.
“Run west, dragon boy, before I lose what’s left of my soul.” He’d brought Ladon-Nate as far as he could and now the care and feeding of his princess’s true love was out of his hands.
Someone would rescue Ladon-Nate. The dino-dog would find his human. What more could a lone Burner do?
Guess I no longer get to be best man, he thought. He couldn’t take a man who’d lost his mind to a ghost into Praesagio Industries. Not for revenge. Not when he needed to manipulate this Fate into taking him.
Adrestia stood rigid, her mouth slack, and Billy turned her body away from Ladon-Nate. Time to concentrate on his new two-for-one friend.
Ladon-Nate pulled his jacket over his shoulders. Slowly, his eyes narrow, he walked up the hill, toward the long-haul trailer and out of their sight.
Billy yanked Adrestia around the corner of the building. Ladon-Nate might have listened for the moment, but Billy had no assurances that he wouldn’t run back at any second. Getting the Fate out of a direct line to Ladon-Nate’s hiding place seemed wise.
A wave of present-seer power pushed into the parking lot like an expanding bubble. The membrane pressed against Billy’s front, deforming around his body, and popped around him as it moved on to the building.
Maybe he should have run with Ladon-Nate. But he was a Burner, and why would anyone care about a Burner’s life? Even a Burner with a magic sword.
“Brûleur.” Adrestia spoke as if addressing a child who’d come home covered in cow dung, “N'êtes-vous pas spéciale.”
Special? He wasn’t the one with a second person living in his head. Though carrying around a passenger seemed to be all the rage these days. Still, he needed to keep his wits and get himself out of this alive.
Billy clutched the bag to his chest. He didn’t have time to take out Poke, and at this point, he doubted he could do anything good with it, anyway. “You’re Adrestia, aren’t you?”
Her high-tech “visual optimizers” hummed out here in the storm, and put off a pleasing counter tone to the hiss of the snow and the growl of the wind. Her tech and the Wyoming weather made a strangely melodic chord.
“Who else would I be?” She pushed him toward a nondescript sedan parked on the other side of the emergency exit, along the side of the bar.
“What are you going to do with me?” Maybe he’d get lucky and she wanted to cause as much mayhem as possible. Maybe she’d transport him to Praesagio Industries headquarters so they could both blow it into tiny chunks of burndust-infested concrete.
More likely she’d cut off his limbs and leave him to fizzle in a field.
She holstered the gun. Perhaps she wasn’t going to kill him after all, but her hand reappeared gripping a long, sharp-looking knife. The blade caught the few glints from the light on the back of the building when she twirled it in front of her like a baton. The sharp point whooshed around her wrist as it sliced through the snow.
“Andreas Sisto is dead. I stitched yet I remember nothing of the stitching. The memory is erased.” Her face crinkled as if she didn’t believe her own words. “Je ne me sens pas ensemble.” ‘I do not feel whole.’
“Obviously, luv.”
The woman in front of him, the now-crazy-scary Fate named Adrestia, nodded as she patted her jacket. “I put the shard in my pocket,” she said absently. “If I give Praesagio the shard, they will listen. Ils vous aideront.” ‘They will help.’
“Yes,” he said, though he doubted Praesagio helped anyone but themselves. “You put the shard in your pocket.”
Her present-seer pinged like radar and her goggles pinged blips right along with it. Her fingers descended into her jacket once again, and she slowly pulled out the shard. Carefully, she ran her finger over the residue from the duct tape. “They said the shard was on Ladon-Human.” She sounded the way Ladon-Nate often sounded—confused and absent. Or how Billy suspected he sounded after he suffered a Burner pop in his brain and lost a memory.
“The shard messes with seers, doesn’t it?” He clicked his tongue and continued talking, to keep her from thinking too much. “I taped it to my leg so I wouldn’t forget it.” This time, he clicked his teeth. “I’m a Burner. I forget things.”
She blinked. “But…”
“But what?” He poked his finger at his chest. “I don’t care what you say. I found that damned thing and I knew it was important and you promised me part of the bounty you’re going to get from Praesagio if I come with you and make sure they know you mean business.”
She blinked again. “Did I?” Another blink, and she tipped her head as if listening to her ghost whisper in her ear. “I did.” She narrowed her eyes as if she felt smart for keeping secrets from him. “Yes. You’ll come of your own free will. You will stay calm.”
He nodded his agreement. “Can we go?”
She placed the shard back in her pocket, but kept the dagger out. “Marchez, Brûleur.”
Billy did as he was told, praying with each step toward the parking lot that both he and Boyfriend would survive this.
From behind the corner of the eighteen-wheeler parked on the service road, Ladon watched the woman named Adrestia push Billy into a sedan. When the car’s lights burst on, he circled to the other side of the truck’s grill, to keep it between him and the departing vehicle. They turned west as they pulled out, away from the bar.
West, the direction he was supposed to walk. West, away from the base.
He didn’t have a hat or gloves, and his ears and fingers tingled. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his too-thin jacket.
They told him to walk west, the direction they drove. West.
A new rupture fizzled in his head and when he opened his eyes again, he was on the ground with his back against the truck’s tire.
Snow had accumulated on his legs. How long had he been sitting here? Ladon brushed off the snow with numb fingers. He was supposed to go somewhere.
The base.
Another bright hot seizure slammed him against the wheel. His back arched, but this time, he remembered a long ago riverbank. A smooth place, one enveloped in fresh days and sweet-smelling nights. One with a river running with enough food for both him and his beast, though both ate only the bare minimum they needed to stay alive.
It had been a lonely place devoid of love and life. One where he sat, in the cold, wondering if he should drop to the bottom of the river while his beast slept.
But his friend found him. His friend, who had lost his own love at the same moment Ladon lost a wife named Abigail. He’d care for Ladon for thirty years even though they both had the same exact thought every night they sat next to each other, out there on the riverbank, under the moon.
The same desire to stop the pain.
But neither of them did. They got each other through that time, the man who lived with a beast, and his future-seeing friend. It seemed they’d get through this time, too.
Out on the freeway, a lone tractor-trailer inched by.
Ladon stood and dusted the snow off his hair. His friend with his confusing new face had driven away, taking with him the Burner who Ladon also counted as a friend.
“Billy?” he whispered. If something happened to the Burner because he couldn’t get himself together, he’d never forgive himself. He’d already lived many moments, many points in time that were now his memories; points for which he would never forgive himself. Best not to add another to his long list of failures.
They all curled up like a spike in his head—the old wounds from lifetimes ago. The new cuts that left spreading stai
ns on his mind and felt tacky when probed with his mind’s fingers. And the future ones, the ones to be lived by another life, the hauntings in his head. The ones he should not know about.
The wind slapped his face and the snow bit into his skin, and Ladon, once again, found himself wondering what “confused” meant.
“Daniel?” he whispered, as he looked west, the direction the car had gone. “How are you here?”
How was it that Ladon’s friend now walked in a new body?
But then Ladon remembered why he was here. He needed to get to the base. Rysa needed him to come back for her.
Ladon turned east, into the fields and the snow, away from the buildings and the people.
Chapter Twenty-One
Once, long ago on an eerily similar cold and violent night, the human half of the Dracas stood in a blizzard on the edge of what had then been the civilized world. Ahead of her had been a fast-flowing German river. Behind her, a forest so dark it later became the source of many of the world’s fairy tales.
They came to the battlefield, Anna and her beast, alone after their first loss of Brother. He had vanished with Daniel into the night, she had suspected, to die alone under the ice capping the deep waters of the very river under her boots.
But the people asked for help and, as Andreas had told her, she needed to quell the tales of vengeful dragons.
So she came to the frozen shores of treacherous waters with her beast and the man who was then her companion.
She rumbled for him. He’d fathered many babes who had not quickened. But he stayed, and she had been thankful for his smile and his brilliance and his love.
But like her love who fathered her one living daughter, Samuel became another of Anna’s men who died of a throat slit by a Fate. Twenty-three centuries and the people around her—the people around Brother—never reached old age.
Now, in the wilds of Wyoming, between an idling bus of incredible, fast-moving power and a string of chain hotels so blazingly lit up she knew there would be no quelling of the new tales caught on camera this night, Anna watched yet another Fate hold a blade to the neck of a man she rumbled for. Another man she dared love.
Men And Beasts (Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book 6) Page 14