Mom’s here. Rysa’s present-seer bounced around inside her groggy skull. Dad’s here! Her healer joined the party. It’s wedding time!
Rysa opened her eyes. The dream, like so many she’d had recently, had stayed beyond its welcome. She moved, yet she did not.
She was in the bed she shared with Ladon, in the cave, safe, yet she was not, because ghosts walked the Earth.
She sat up. The piped-in light had dimmed to a low glow. Their olive tree shimmered as it often did in the evenings; Ladon told her the original tree had its own lights. He said that it wasn’t until he and the beast lived with the Norse and he first saw the aurora borealis that he understood.
She’d understood the first moment she’d seen Ladon and Dragon in the parking lot off campus. He and his beast carried the same lights, the same moving-yet-not-moving glow.
A slight, warm breeze flowed across the bed, toward the entrance to Dragon’s nest, behind their huge mattress. The dragon’s nesting shaft acted as one of the many chimneys for the cave’s ventilation system. In the winter, warm air rose up toward the mountain’s surface. In the summer, cool air drifted down into the cave.
No sounds of a dragon digging wafted in through the nest entrance. Often, when she woke up alone, it was because Dragon had gone in to dig and move boulders. If Ladon wasn’t soundly asleep, their connection compelled him to follow.
Her past-seer flickered outward: They’d bathed and talked to Gavin. Then her present- : Ladon took Dragon for a walk. They were now deep in the cave building a fire on the edge of the secret pool, beyond the baths and behind the cave’s third olive tree.
And her future-: They weren’t coming back. Not tonight, at least.
Her present-seer again: Out in the kitchen area, the wedding party talked about medical equipment and power supplies and how to hold both a wedding reception and a wake at the same time and not seem tacky. Her father laid on healing hands. AnnaBelinda brooded. Sister-Dragon hovered over Derek as if she thought he’d be stolen out from under her snout at any second. And Gavin tried not to be poked at by all the power around him.
No wonder Ladon didn’t want to come home tonight.
Rysa rubbed her face. Weddings were supposed to be special. A big event, a tiny event, it didn’t matter. It was supposed to be the special day they declared in front of family and friends their commitment to each other.
Without Andreas. Without Billy, for that matter, or Marcus and Harold. With the gaping, not-yet-healed wounds caused by her uncle Faustus, Vivicus, and Aiden Blake. Wounds that felt tender to the touch for Ladon and Dragon.
For Rysa, her healer worked its magic, but her muscles still ached. It cleared the cobwebs from her mind but she was still having a hard time spinning the plates she needed in order to keep all her thoughts in the air at the same time. So why wasn’t she freaking out? Why did she stare at the all the shit flung at them and not run away screaming, something she used to do all the freakin’ time?
What if Aiden Blake followed them home? Daisy was certain he was still alive, and after her dream, so was Rysa. He just wasn’t here. He’d vanished. He was, now, mimicking all the burning hell he’d inflicted on their world.
Could he still hurt them from wherever he hid?
And what if the ghost of Nate never left Ladon? This Nathaniel person was not who she wanted to marry. Not the ghost himself, or the reflection—the fractured memory—of the ghost who seemed to continue to haunt Ladon. Time for an exorcism, she thought.
Her present-seer told her that out in the kitchen, Dmitri and her mother discussed how to eulogize Andreas at the same time they celebrated Rysa and Ladon’s wedding. They both knew that’s exactly what all the guests were going to do anyway.
Rysa just wanted to go back to sleep.
But if we don’t party, the terrorists win, her inner Parcae asshole said. Sometimes the truth came out glib.
She’d put on her big girl pants and greet her family. Then she’d leave them to their fiddling and go find her soon-to-be husband.
She forced herself to drop her feet over the side of the bed. The dream about Aiden flitted through her head again: Motion. Velocity. The Legion.
No, they’re not coming, she thought. Andreas was the heart and soul of the Dragons’ Legion. Her mom was planning the Legion’s wake right now.
A knock echoed from their apartment’s grand door. After a moment, her father poked his head in between the huge wood slab and the frame. “Rysa?” he called.
“I’m awake, Dad.” She rubbed her belly and smoothed her t-shirt. Good thing she’d been smart enough to nap in her clothes.
Sandro Torres stepped into the apartment. He stared at the tree for a long moment—everyone, no matter how detailed a description they got before entering, stared at the tree—before he walked deliberately toward the massive bed.
Her father, like all Shifters whose ancestry was within great-great- of their Progenitor, did not age. Like her mom, he could pass for a grad student on any campus in the world. And also like most Shifter men, he was tall, muscular, and quite handsome with his black hair and his hazy sunburst eyes, though the good looks probably came more from his Spanish blood than his Shifter.
“Your mom warned me.” He pointed over his shoulder at the shimmering tree as he approached, then he dropped his fingers to fidget with a leather bracelet around his opposite wrist.
Some things about attention issues and hyperactivity never change, and constantly moving fingers was one of them. Maybe she should get herself a bracelet like that.
Rysa patted the bed and her dad sat next to her. “How are you holding up, honey?” he asked.
Talks like this with her dad were so… odd. He’d missed her entire adolescence. But he wanted to make up for it and did his best to demonstrate his intentions every opportunity he got.
“Tired,” she said. “Physically, I’m good.” She swung her arms. “Healer’s doing its job.”
He tapped his finger on the bed. “I checked everyone. The Tsar’s wound is still visible, but healing well.” He leaned close. “Watch it so it doesn’t scar.”
She nodded once.
“Gavin seems like a nice young man. You’ve been friends since your freshman year?” He fiddled with his bracelet again.
“Yep.”
He looked away and stared at the tree. “He’s going to be your maid of honor?”
Rysa chuckled. “Bestie of honor, Dad.”
“Ah.” Now his foot tapped and he patted her on the back. “Your mom’s pregnant. It’s a girl, so you don’t have to worry about an obnoxious little brother hanging around.”
“What?” A sibling? Out of the blue, just like that, bestie of honor to little sister?
“Are Mom and Dmitri also planning a baby shower for when we’re in Branson?” Because rattles and a couple of foldout, honeycomb tissue paper baby bottle decorations would make lovely table décor for the wake-slash-reception.
She dropped her head between her knees.
Her dad chuckled. “No, no.” He pulled back his hand. “Unless you want to. You and your mom. If it were up to me, I—”
“Dad!” She didn’t mean to yell, but really, this was too much. What next?
Babies everywhere! her future-seer whispered. Babies babies babies!
She gulped.
“I’m sorry, honey!” He patted her back again. “I probably should have let your mom tell you.”
“Yeah, Dad, it probably would have been better to let the present-seer decide when to share that tidbit of information.”
He yanked his hand back again. “You did inherit your ADHD from me, you know.”
She jumped up. “Seriously, Dad?” Her feet wanted to pace but she threw her hands into the air instead. “I’m happy, okay! A little sister. Sounds great! But right now, I have other, more pressing issues.”
Sandro Torres, her handsome and accomplished class-one healer father, sighed as if she’d just kicked his puppy.
He’s thinking ‘I�
��ll do a better job with the new one.’ Because wasn’t that what dads in this situation always thought?
“I’m going to find Ladon and Dragon.” She waved him away. “They went deep into the cave, so this might take a while.”
Her father frowned.
“We’ll be back before the ceremony.” Probably. At this point, hiding in the back corner of the cave seemed like a really good idea.
Though her dark Fate didn’t like the idea of hiding from anything anymore, and for a second, she wondered if a full bridezilla rampage had been what it wanted all along.
No, that dark part of her wanted Aiden Blake’s head as much as it had wanted Vivicus’s.
Rysa walked toward the baths. “Climb the tree, Dad. It’ll make you feel better.” Then she ducked through the arch into the cave’s magic center.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Hours earlier…
Aiden Blake leaned into the headwind of what-will-be. It pressed into his skin and blew into his nostrils. It ripped the warmth from his flesh and made him gasp. He couldn’t breathe, here in new-space. Couldn’t fill his lungs with air or his dry mouth with water. He might touch the tight weave of the hotel restaurant’s carpet, but the fibers did not depress. A bang of his head against the bar’s wood frame or a knock to a stool shocked his skull and shook his arm, but the world ignored him.
He sat on the floor, his back against the bar’s dark wood base, and watched the Praesagio Industries technicians comb every fold in every napkin, scan every peanut in every dish, and flick every single dust mote within the restaurant’s seating area, stepping over him, never tripping. Never noticing.
This was not the future he foresaw. He was to be the phoenix risen from the ashes of the Burned World, the Fate Emperor of the New.
The splinters from the shard’s glass casing were supposed to act as antennae. They were supposed to bring the new to him, not him to the new. They should have allowed him to manipulate the energies that spun up around all the newly made phoenixes—the half-breed’s self-triggering of her full Shifter abilities, the reformation of the Tsar’s latent Fate and Shifter bloodlines into something wholly Dracae, Daisy’s pet’s activation of his latent inheritance.
Enough normals with unactivated Fate and Shifter ancestry walked the world now that shit like this was bound to begin sooner or later. At this point every single who was human descended from royalty carried bloodlines from both breeds, as did the vast majority of the ruling classes of most nations. Fina, his past-seeing sister, had easily picked out the Tsar’s lineage. The kid’s, not so much, but it seemed that no longer mattered.
The shard and its glass needles were supposed to allow Aiden to control the emergent new abilities that erupted around the half-breed and remake him in the way he foresaw: Aiden Blake, the Emperor Godhead.
He smacked his head against the bar again. His possibilities and probabilities did not align exactly as his future-seer predicted and now he found himself in the undertow of the what-was-is-will-be.
Perhaps the seer spike Aiden’s uncle forced into his mind after he killed the First Healer caused more damage than he realized. But five centuries of honing his skills and working around the spike should have compensated. He accounted for all possibilities. He was the greatest future-seer to ever walk the Earth—better than their Progenitor.
The answer was that this new-space he found himself in was unpredictable. Nothing else made sense.
Every moment now had velocity. Every step the people in the bar made, every beep from their machines, every dropped kernel of popcorn as it fell to the floor. The what-will-be sped up and only Aiden felt the acceleration.
Nothing else. Only the push of the winds of space and time.
One of Praesagio’s technicians scanned the bar stool to Aiden’s left. The device swished through the visible what-was-is-will-be turbulence around Aiden like a pinwheel in the breeze. It amplified the push of the what-will-be against Aiden’s face and reminded him, yet again, that the new had not become his.
He had become the new’s bitch.
Aiden roared and kicked at the tech, and once again, nothing happened. The tech registered no response. No one noticed.
Aiden pushed at the stool, trying to cause a tremor, or make it skid on the carpet, but nothing. He slapped at the tech’s face, but again, nothing.
He pulled in what breath he could from the wind slamming him against the bar, and yelled in the man’s face. “I’m right here!”
Nothing.
The carpet’s dark green pile wiggled. A snake curled out and bit at his ankle.
Aiden yelped and stood so fast he slammed his head into the underside of the bar’s customer-side countertop. Pain snapped through the bones of his skull, into his ears, and down his neck. It flung itself wide at his shoulders, and stabbed into his spine.
The carpet, thankfully, stopped wiggling as if it was living smoke, but the bar did not move. Nor did the man sitting on the bar stool with his phone to his ear and a drink in his hand.
“Where did you come from?” Aiden sniffed at the man’s ear. Did he lose time? He’d seen the carpet change before, right after he activated inside the new. He’d felt high up as if he stood on a mountain plateau. There’d been a wrong sun, one too big and too red.
Then he flashed back to the bar and to his Daisy, her boy toy, and all the security guards were gone. Winds blew north, and he’d felt the sliver of dragon talon in his satchel flutter.
The talon, it seemed, was its own kind of antenna. What, exactly, it picked up, he hadn’t yet figured out, but it caused a disturbance.
How long he’d stood in the archway between the restaurant and the lobby staring into his satchel, he did not know. Perhaps hours. His bag moved yet it did not. It seemed to want to take him somewhere.
Perhaps the what-will-be headwind was blowing away the granules of his life.
The man sitting on the bar stool talking into his phone and sipping at his drink smelled like Daisy.
“I know you.” Aiden poked at the man’s cheek, then stuck his finger in his ear. Nothing. He poked at one of the man’s bright blue eyes. Nada. The man only swirled his drink and talked.
“… no one saw fit to tell me?” He sounded more disbelieving than he looked.
“You’re a Shifter,” Aiden said. He sniffed again. He had to get in close, pretty much climb into the man’s lap to get a whiff or to hear what he said. The roaring wind carried off everything.
The man wasn’t any old Shifter. Here sat Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov, the man who killed Rasputin. The Tsar of Praesagio Industries. And his Daisy’s papa.
“Oh, I should kill you.” Aiden licked Dmitri’s cheek. “Who are you talking to, old man? Huh?”
A very clear “Yes, Dad,” rode out on the breeze produced by the Grand Duke’s phone.
Aiden poked at the phone and kissed Dmitri’s cheek. “Tell my true love hello for me, my soon to be dad-in-law.”
Aiden lowered his shoulder. He stepped back, planted his feet, and charged. His chin smacked against Dmitri’s jaw. His arms folded between them in ways arms should not fold and a new, sharp pain flared from Aiden’s elbow.
Dmitri Pavlovich did not move.
Aiden roared. He yelled and stomped and slammed his fists onto the bar. The winds of time, the velocity of the universe, carried away his causation. He stood so close to Daisy’s father that the man should feel Aiden’s pulse, yet he did not.
“My predicament is temporary,” he hissed into Dmitri’s ear. “I will kill you.” I will not be impotent, he thought.
Dmitri laughed at something Aiden’s flower said. Aiden growled and slammed his fist down onto Dmitri’s gloved hand.
The man flinched.
Aiden stepped back. He’d heard rumors about Pavlovich’s involvement in Rasputin’s death. About how the Grand Duke had suffered an unhealing at the hands of the Mad Monk, and concealed his pain under his gloves.
How he had been unhealed, no one knew.
But…
He peered at Dmitri’s hand, carefully lowering his face until he felt the soft yet distinguishable “breeze” of new wafting from the man’s palm.
He looked out at the technicians. One woman trailed a mist—an enthraller. Pavlovich’s healer ability moved off him like a small cyclone. Three other Fates moved along the outer wall, one with a headwind like Aiden’s. One with a sidewind. The third, with a tailwind.
The movement wasn’t the what-was-is-will-be. The breezes, the velocities of this non-place were power. His power to read the what-will-be. The abilities of the Shifters.
He pulled the sliver of dragon talon from his satchel.
Colors danced along its edge, patterns in its interior, and for a moment, for a split second, he thought he heard it speak…
…four … three… tttwwwoo…
Aiden Blake knew the exact locations of two dragons. He knew, in his bones, how far away they were, and the exact direction and curvature along the surface of the Earth he needed to follow in order to stand close enough to touch an ultra-fine coat.
His sense of placement and orientation, of space and time, pulsed outward toward the dragons as if someone had fed in the correct amount of energy needed to shift the edges of his bubble. What he knew changed from the twin cores of the dragons, to everyone within their vicinity.
Aiden moved.
His true love walked between snowflakes under a wide, bright blue sky. Her cold—the cold of the mountain air—bit his face as if he was real again.
He raised his hand to touch her cheek and to feel, once again, her soft skin. His Daisy, his beauty. The only one who cared. When they met, he’d given her a sweet version of himself, a puppet for her entertainment and his, and she’d enjoyed him as he’d enjoyed her. But then she had to go and ask questions.
He did get that ring off her, though.
The ring.
He reset.
Pavlovich said something into his phone about killing Aiden with his bare hands.
“Why did you bring me back here?” Aiden kicked this time. He raised his leg and launched his foot at Pavlovich’s head but it didn’t make any difference. “I went to my Daisy.” He kicked again.
Men And Beasts (Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book 6) Page 23