Despite the space-aged uniform, this version of her felt… old.
She pointed at the bag once more.
“You want Poke?”
Again, she nodded.
He clutched it to his chest. “Why?”
She turned around. He hadn’t noticed her midnight sword’s hilt poking out over her shoulder, yet here it was, strapped to her back inside a scabbard identical to the one he carried.
The other version of her had not carried a sword, or any weapon.
“You’re… different… aren’t you?” His arms loosened even though his hunger screamed that it wanted to keep the sword. That he could use it to slice and dice and have himself lots of easy snacks. But this woman, the one who he’d seen helping Derek, seemed to understand what he carried. She knew what it was, even if he didn’t.
Princess, she mouthed. Or spoke and he could not hear.
“You’re a princess?” A real princess? Why not, he thought. Captain Russia was a real Tsar.
She nodded again. You are my King, she mouthed.
Billy clutched the sword again. “You read that off my arm.” She made it up to mess with him.
She shook her head. Safe with me.
Yells echoed through the storm. Rescuers approached.
She extended her hand again.
Billy clutched the bag to his chest. “No,” he said.
She slapped his neck; hauled off and smacked him good, right across the glass splinter in his flesh.
He felt nothing. No push, no force. No wispy touch. Nothing—
Buzzing like mic feedback filled his ears. … go for test one…
Radio chatter? “How…” What did she do to him?
Go. Then she vanished into the storm, an invisible girl gone to mimicking the frozen world.
Red laser targeting beams crisscrossed the air in front of Billy’s face. “Stay alive, mate,” he said to Captain Russia, and ran for the road.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The bright light of the lot’s overhead halogens refracted within each ice crystal whipping in front of AnnaBelinda’s face. At a fine level, the air burst with as much color as her dragon.
Her beast locked down their connection to minimize the blizzard within her brother’s mind, but Anna still felt it crawl under her parka and along her skin as if a million fire ants had found their way into her clothes. Still heard it buzz behind her ears as if it was a true, real sound. Still saw it spurt and spit on the edges of her vision.
In total, it overwhelmed. Too many small voices demanding attention. Too much distraction moving in too many directions, all wanting the same exact outcome—fall to Earth and be done with the chaos.
Brother-Human comes, her dragon whispered. He comes.
Visibility held at no more than ten feet. Anna saw the rear of the sedan to her right, but not its front.
Somewhere in the lot a Burner much better at sensing her husband’s injuries moved between the vehicles. In the hotel, a Fate she should have put down centuries ago attacked Daisy. Rysa ran off toward danger. And her beast held on by a thin thread because she had more faith in the future than Anna did.
A hotel door opened. One on the near side of the building, which suggested either a guest exit or the door that serviced the restaurant.
A seer blip followed—one too fast for Anna to get an impression, meaning that it could be any of the Fates inside, including Aiden Blake or one of his sisters.
Anna held her weapon ready.
Two female bodies manifested out of the bright, blinding snow, one clothed in dark fabrics, the other dressed as an employee. Both ran toward Anna’s position, both preceded by familiar present-seers—to Anna’s left, a pinging, semi-musical hammers in a storm. To her right, the sour, shiver-inducing feel of blood dripping on metal.
Both deadly. One evil, the other not trustworthy. Neither visible enough for Anna to get a clear shot.
The muzzle of Adrestia’s gun appeared first, followed by her dark-clad arm. She stepped into the bubble of clarity around Anna’s position. The small light at the temple of her goggles winked. The tech routed camera information into an implant behind her ear.
Why Rysa’s father had fitted her with special enhancements, Anna did not know, though it had been obvious before she and Derek left Portland that Sandro Torres had taken all too well to his new role as the co-head of Praesagio’s Special Medical unit.
“AnnaBelinda,” Adrestia said. Another pinging wave washed from her and she trained her weapon not on Anna, but on the other Fate emerging from the blizzard. “Ethne.”
Without the element of surprise, shooting at either present-seer would likely get Anna shot in the head. “Looks like we have a standoff.” And trusting Adrestia to not shoot Anna would be foolhardy, no matter what information she’d provided.
Anna had no proof that she’d given them a correct address. There’d been no communications from Cordelia since she disappeared from the parking lot. She could be dead as far as Anna knew, a victim of a ploy to separate her from the group and her triad mates.
Ethne waved her gun between Anna and Adrestia. “You have the shard.” She shrugged toward Adrestia. “Otherwise I would have read both of you out here in the storm.” Her grin gleamed in the lot’s diffuse glow. “Looks like I get to be the one who kills a War Baby and a Progenitor.”
Adrestia’s body language clearly indicated an eye roll. “Be quiet.”
“You can’t talk to me that way!” Ethne stomped her foot. “We told you to kill our father and both his brothers. You let one get away.”
So Aiden’s triad had put a hit out on the original Draki Prime, as Anna had long suspected. Marcus always said that Daniel and Timothy had gone out to stand between the War Babies and Brother in the dark hours surrounding the death of his baby. He never said anything about a family vendetta.
Fates made their own problems. They manipulated and set up intricate, overlapping schemes that threw more chaos than anything else into the mix.
A gust of wind set Adrestia’s leather-wrapped ponytail swinging and something fundamental changed about her stance. What, exactly, Anna could not put her finger on, but it seemed familiar.
“I do not believe you understand the full extent of what’s happening here, Ethne,” Adrestia said.
“Aiden understands.” She scratched at her cheek. “He worked it out. Who gets the glass that used to encase that shard you hold against your body, and when. Who dies. Whose energy he needs released and when he gets it so that the network he’s built with all his pointy little antennae will channel what he wants. He’s going to harness the new.”
She said new the way a true believer spoke of their god.
“He says it’s an emergent property. That the rich context we’ve built over our centuries is allowing the new to build itself right now, right here, in front of the coming Burning World. He says we are its parents. We will control it before the fires cleanse the lands and the sky. My triad will be the phoenix that rises from the ashes.”
“The new?” Rysa was definitely new. As were Derek’s changes. But they were not prophecy.
“We stand at the leading edge of a paradigm shift.” Adrestia pointed her gun more at Ethne than Anna and her stance continued to be… familiar. “A sudden and complete change in the structure of the fate to which we are all bound. There are some walking among us already who have experienced the shift.”
“Yes!” Ethne waved her gun. “Out of the Burned World will rise the new. Aiden has seen the truth since our uncle spiked his head.” She tapped her temple. “The effort he needs to use his seer has given him great clarity. He sees through the fog.”
Anna’s connection to her dragon burst open. A torrent of energy—of clarity—rolled over her with such force she almost wavered. Almost moved.
Almost. These Fates would not see weakness.
Brother-Human! her beast yelled.
“Ohhh….” groaned Ethne. “This is what Aiden wanted…”
To what? Steal Brother’s connection to his beast the way Vivicus attempted to? To siphon off their energy like a vampire? “Tell me—”
Adrestia fired once into Ethne’s head, then another round into her heart. The other Fate was dead before she dropped to the ground.
Anna rounded on the War Baby. “I cannot get information from a dead Fate.”
“No, you cannot.” Adrestia’s accent had changed, and the cadence of her words, along with her stance.
“Who are you?” Was Anna in the presence of a morpher? But she’d felt a seer.
“I should have killed them five hundred years ago.” Adrestia holstered her weapon. “Your husband sustained only minor injuries. The new Draki Prime heals him now.” Adrestia nodded toward the hotel. “I have no sense of Aiden beyond this point. I’d hoped Mr. Sisto would be here to fulfill his destiny but I see now that he is indisposed.”
Why does she speak as if Andreas lives? Anna thought.
“Aiden does not understand the fire with which he plays.” Adrestia looked upward, into the snow. “Or what the new is he claims to control.”
“But you do?” What secrets do the Fates keep?
Addy smiled. “The new made me this way.”
Cordelia brings Brother-Human! A sense of safe vibrated through her connection to her beast. Brother-Dragon, still fragile, still chaotic, echoed his sister’s push. A bright flash of three combined seers followed.
Yells carried through the snow. Adrestia glanced over her shoulder. “I know it’s difficult for you to maintain control.”
What did this Fate know? “No.” Control was all she had.
Human! Come!
“You began pulling away from your brother after his wife Abigail died. You unraveled.” Adrestia moved as if she wished to touch Anna’s elbow. “It takes all your control just to function as a normal person. To get up in the morning. Doesn’t it?”
“No.” Adrestia knew nothing.
“Yes, it does, which is why you’re out here with me and not with your beast helping where you’d do the most good.”
“No!” Anna backed away. What if Rysa couldn’t knit Brother and his beast together again? Someone needed to have their wits in case pieces needed picking up.
“When have you ever been able to hide your true self from the Draki Prime, Human of the Dracas?”
True self? “No one as old as me has a true self.” Her fists clenched without her willing them to do so and her palm tightened around her gun.
Derek calls for you.
A yell echoed through the wind and the lot.
“The child you carry will be fine.” Adrestia glanced over her shoulder again. “All of the children of the Dracae will be fine.” She smiled. “They will be the world.”
“How do you…” She’d figured the child carried Derek’s invisibility within the what-was-is-will-be. No one knew but her and her beast.
“Crawl out from under your unraveling, legatus. Trust your mate to help you weave yourself back together.”
Adrestia vanished into the blizzard.
And AnnaBelinda, the human half of the Dracas, wrapped her arms around her belly before slowly walking toward her family.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Rysa?” Snow had settled in her hair and on her shoulders. She looked younger than Ladon remembered. Thinner, as well.
“Ladon!” She threw herself into his arms the way he would have expected her to greet a long-missing husband.
A sense of not permitted rocketed through Ladon’s body and he stiffened. Who was he to touch the Draki Prime, much less hold her the way she clung to him now? Her lips pressed against his neck and her stuttered breath grazed his skin. He could lift her high. He could accept this moment, her touch, and her warmth. But…
The Burner and the blind Fate both said something about this body not being his. That it belonged to the human half of the Dracos, a man he feared—they all feared. The man who…
Human.
Time ground to a halt. Rysa blinked so slowly he might have taken in five breaths as her lids dropped over her lovely eyes. The storm slowed as well, some flakes arching gracefully away, others gliding like arrows through the air between him and visibility’s edge.
The curtain of storm, the dull flatness no more than ten feet ahead, burst open. Colors exploded; patterns erupted. Meaning infused the space he occupied—the space they occupied, his beautiful Rysa, this body, the three dimensional cathedrals of energy and light and thought that were now and had always been dragon language.
The beast stepped out of the storm, into Ladon’s mind, and stopped.
Who are you? The dragon touched Nathaniel the way Nathaniel would have picked up a soiled diaper.
It doesn’t matter, he pushed. He never mattered. Not in his context-free pseudo-memories of times that had not, nor could have, happened. Not in his “confusion” or his need to come back for the woman who hugged this body because she yearned for a man he was not.
Could he be what she needed? Could he hold himself together well enough to stand with her against a burning world?
It matters. The dragon’s head lowered until his great cat-like eye was level with Ladon’s face. You are Human. The beast explained: Human, to the beast’s Dragon. Brother to his Sister. Husband to the Mate curled against his chest. His family. His Nest. All in a flash of octave-separated light and modulated pattern.
And for the first time since he woke on that table in the presence of Burners, Nate understood. Rysa wanted him to come for her, to come home. But he needed to find home first.
You are my human. The dragon nudged his shoulder. You are home.
Yes, he pushed. Yes, he’d done as she asked. He’d brought home the man she loved.
Nathaniel, a ghost, a man who should not walk in the body of the human half of the Dracos, reached out his hand. He had never touched a dragon before. In his memories of a world that was not, in his thoughts that he felt to be his past—in those memories he’d battled other beasts, other fiends. But the dragons, they stayed out of sight. They protected their own.
Those memories were Nathaniel’s and not the memories of the man in which he walked. Ladon-Human’s memories spanned millennia. Nate’s, a life sequestered within… what? The military? He was a warrior. A Sentinel. His role was to protect. How had he come to be here, in this present, in this body? This dragon, this beast, protected the body who reached out the hand, not Nate. This beast, this dragon, was the core of this Nest, its beating heart. He was the one who held together the family of the woman Nate loved.
The ultrafine coat of the beast waved under his fingertips. It touched delicately, learning and processing in a way a human could never understand.
Yet the man who was this body—the body was the man—understood. He’d lived in the shadow of dragon perceiving for twenty-three centuries. He had seen civilizations rise, and civilizations fall. He’d been eaten away by his grief and the slow blast of the sands of time. Ladon, a man who believed he no longer could move through the dunes of his life.
Nathaniel, Ladon whispered. You need to go, young man. This is not your fight.
I’m not that young. No, by the standards of anyone but the long immortal, Nate was an old man. He’d seen his share; killed more. This time in a body that felt young had made him think young.
Because this is not my body, he thought. Not his pit of melancholy. Not his trauma and his vigilance.
Not his Mate, his Nest, his life.
One needed to live for millennia to find this path home, and Nate had not yet lived that long. No, this was not his body.
No, it is not. The beast nuzzled his shoulder. Thank you for caring for him.
“I protect my own,” Ladon-Nate said, and this body had been his for a short amount of time. He needed to let go.
But Rysa would not. Rysa would hold tight.
Nate took a step to the side that no one else could take. He let go, and the beast fanned out into iterations, possibilities, probabili
ties. The velocity of the universe took hold.
His eyes saw more than was possible. More than he could handle. In his vision, several versions of Rysa touched his face, his hands, his shoulders. All versions were not quite the same but all possible, as if he watched multiple takes of the same scene overlaid onto each other.
Echoes, the dragon pushed. We resonate.
Rysa understood what was happening, even if Ladon-Nate didn’t. Each iteration worked to bring him through this resetting, this reconnecting to his soul.
A sense of separation washed over him. Rysa’s seers wrapped around his connection to the beast, three spirals of energy braided into a triple helix of containment. Her healer followed, her guard, and modulated touches and rubs, spikes and seizures. The rough electrical fire that had been his brain since Vivicus ruptured his mind turned to embers, then to nothing more than a heat mirage.
Ladon-Nate’s angle on the world reformed and he saw things clearly that had been obscured by Nate’s presence—the true depth of his link to the beast. Its full architecture, its colors and patterns and language. The taste of oranges, and the soft touch of his love’s fingers. The bright, high laugh of his sister during the few moments of happiness they had been allowed. The gratitude he’d felt the moment he had realized that his brother-in-law could—and would—take up some of his burden of vigilance.
The joy that had consumed him whole the first time Rysa curled her arms around his head and kissed away his pain. All his true memories. The parts of the past that made him Ladon.
Possibility took on weight. Portions of time became threads. The universe had a velocity but Ladon had armor.
He was Human to the beast’s Dragon. They resonated. Rysa knitted the holes and they were again whole.
Nathaniel, the ghost, the man who was no longer in Ladon’s body, let go of his final thread to Ladon’s being. He understood as he dissipated and relief filled that place in Ladon’s mind where Nate had walked, as if he felt a gratitude for Ladon taking up a burden Nate had not realized he’d carried.
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