And again, nothing happened.
The talon, still in his fist, burned. He flinched but he kept his grip. If he let go, if it fell from his person, he might not be able to pick it up again.
He opened his hand. The damned thing looked exactly the way it did when he drew it from his satchel. It still shimmered with color and pattern. Its edges were still razor sharp, like the glass.
He dropped the talon into his satchel and drew out his last remaining free splinter of glass.
Where were the others? Why was he having difficulty remembering? Fina took one to act as an antenna to channel the Tsar’s new. He’d put one into the rib of Daisy’s boy toy more to torture and distract than to channel the kid’s energy. He’d had the healer who’d upgraded his flesh put two into his legs.
He’d put two into his own arms.
He held no marks. His sisters were dead. They’d both flared, both fed him their energy. Shouldn’t he have the Parcae sickness?
He hadn’t foreseen the death of his sisters. Did they do this to him? Add too much energy to his carefully balanced control of the new?
Bitches, he thought.
Aiden shook as if a ghost had just brushed a finger across the nape of his neck. The world, though still moving-yet-not-moving, still difficult to parse and to breathe within, returned to some level of comprehension. He was in a bar of a shithole hotel in a shithole town in the world’s whiniest nation. Shifters and Fates who did not have his best interests at heart poked and prodded the fabric of space-time near his here-yet-not-here body. And in his palm he held a splinter of glass with new properties.
He stabbed the splinter through the back of Dmitri Pavlovich’s unhealed hand, through his flesh and his bone and deep into the bar.
Pavlovich frowned. He stared at his hand for a long moment, then wiggled his fingers one at a time. “Go now,” he said into his phone. “You have a wedding to help set up, do you not?”
He swiped his phone and set it on the bar. Slowly, he lifted his unhealed hand and shook it as if it felt numb. “We will have the good Dr. Torres deal with you once and for all, my friend,” he said to his hand.
The glass poked through his flesh, one end sticking out where Aiden had pushed it in, and the other from the man’s palm.
Dmitri Pavlovich picked up his drink as if the splinter was not there. Yet it was; Aiden felt its presence in Pavlovich’s hand. He felt the push and give as the splinter interacted with the glass, and the sloshing as it entered the vodka inside. Felt it with the glass in his own flesh.
“Ahh…” he moaned. Pleasure rippled outward from the splinters in his forearms and mingled in his groin with the pleasure flowing up from the glass in his thighs.
Who knew becoming a living ghost felt so good? Aiden kissed Pavlovich’s cheek.
The man took one last pull on his drink. Slowly, he set down his glass, and just as slowly, he stood. The lackeys in the bar all stopped their scanning and their prodding. Pavlovich waved his unhealed hand in their general direction and a ripple flowed through Aiden’s belly.
Pavlovich picked up his phone and tucked it into his pocket. He spoke to an employee, then another, and walked toward the lobby.
The tingle in Aiden’s belly hardened to a stretched out, flowing buzz as Pavlovich moved away. When he reached the arch between the bar and the lobby, the buzz morphed into a pull not unlike the rawness of duct tape lifting off skin—as if a thousand needles raked from the inside.
Aiden kicked the kneecap of a tech as he followed Pavlovich into the lobby. The man did not respond, but the act felt good anyway.
He threw his vanished arm over Dmitri Pavlovich’s shoulders. “Looks like you and I are going to be great friends.” He stuck his tongue in his love’s father’s ear one more time, just for the fun of it.
Aiden unrolled his broken seer. His uncle’s spike still pinned his future-seer to the floor of his brain—still made it bleed and writhe in pain, but this was a path he knew well. First, the pain. Second, the fear and shock of the barrel of a large handgun, held in an equally large hand, only inches from his forehead.
The vision was always the same. Always Andreas Sisto behind the gun, but somehow unseen. Always able to call up an instant, overwhelming dread because the First Enthraller could make anyone do anything—forget or remember anything—even Aiden Blake, the future-seer of the Children of the Burning World.
Then the click as the gun’s mechanisms engaged. The flick of the hammer. The pounding of metal on metal. The brief and immediate stink of ignited gunpowder. The flash.
Aiden’s skull cracking. He loses his frontal lobe first, his reasoning, but his body never realizes. It thinks he should have gotten it out of the way, but he betrayed himself, and his brain pays the price.
He stops breathing. The gun appeared and he held his breath because the vision is a vision inside a vision, and it echoes inside of itself. He had lived his moment of death so many times that he should not have been surprised, yet he was.
The bullet hits his brain stem next. His heart stops. If he’d been a Burner, he would have imploded. But he is a future-seeing Fate, and this vision is the crucible by which he honed his skills.
The bullet hits his occipital lobe and he loses all sense of sight. His temporal lobe continues for a moment processing the bang of the gun and the wet sounds of his body dying. It hears a woman yell Andreas’s name. Then Aiden is no more.
Every unfurling of his seer begins with a vision of his own death, even now after he changed the future to make the vision impossible.
But now, here in this shithole lobby, he let the vision play as it always did. To him, navigating its echoes was no more difficult than taking a right turn on a city street, except for the fear. And the pain.
He did not flinch. He focused, and he looked at the near future of Dmitri Pavlovich.
“Hmmm….” He kissed Dmitri’s cheek again. “I get to be best man, huh?”
He may yet break out of his shell of new. He may yet become the phoenix of his destiny.
The dragons held the key.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Rysa’s boot slipped off the smooth rock under her foot but her present-seer compensated. She twisted slightly to pull her knee away from the wall. Her healer could handle a bruise, but it would still smart for a couple of minutes. She didn’t need the distraction.
Ladon had taken Dragon deep into the cave. So deep, in fact, she’d needed to fetch a lantern before making her way over the trail to the upper reservoir pool.
Fetching the lantern had involved a search for batteries in the kitchen cabinets while doing her best to explain to the entire wedding party that Ladon and Dragon were just fine, thank you. They’d all be back tomorrow. Ladon and Dragon needed some alone time.
Her mom nodded, shooed her off at the same time she announced that she and Rysa’s dad would be making tonight’s dinner. Rysa snuck away while the group argued about sugars and sauces and the finer details of quality barbecue.
The lantern’s long cone of bluish light did nothing to decrease the sense of constraint this far into the mountain. The upper reservoir pool sat a good hundred feet higher inside the mountain than most of their living area. Getting to it involved climbing and a lot of slippery rocks.
She’d only come up here once before, shortly after they returned from Portland. Ladon and Dragon had wanted to give her a full understanding of the cave’s systems. Teaching her about the hydrodynamics of her new home gave them something to do, and had helped pull them out of their well of melancholy.
And now they’d gone off by themselves into the one part of the cave their guests could not follow.
The path up to the pool was straight forward and wide enough to allow easy passage for a dragon. No difficult crevasses or jagged granite overhangs to catch her camping pack. With the lantern, the climb took her no more than half an hour.
The interior of their mountain looked warmer and friendlier when lit by the organic lights of a drago
n. The lantern cast sharp, dark shadows and Rysa’s hindbrain stayed on edge the entire climb, even though she opened up all three of her seers. No lizards flicked their tongues at her. The cave’s lynx didn’t appear and swipe her claws at Rysa. No hibernating bears. Only the soft dripping of water and increasingly cold air.
Fresh water, fed both by a spring and by snow melt, seeped in through the pool’s roof. This close to the surface, the air temperature dropped to comfortable autumn, campfire, and sweater weather. Outside, winter held Wyoming in its tight grip, but in here, she could cuddle up with her man and dragon, a book, a cup of cocoa, and be the happiest woman on Earth.
Her seers flickered over the walls of the tunnel, her three little buddies of past, present, and future. They stayed mostly quiet, preferring to help her body move than to fill her mind with worries and doubts. Were Ladon and Dragon really okay? Did she mess up helping them reconnect? What if Nate was a real ghost? Because in a world with Fates, Burners, Shifter, and dragons, anything was possible. What if he followed them home?
What if Aiden Blake followed them home?
She stopped moving, one boot set to heave her body over a boulder and her hands gripping the cold stone wall. The lantern cast an obnoxious glare onto the upward grade in front of her. The downward grade behind shimmered with a ghostly harshness. The tunnel looked like an overexposed photograph, or one of those “on” strobe flash moments inside a haunted house—the blinks of brightness that show you where a monster was.
What if Aiden Blake got in?
Rysa sat down on the boulder. Water dripped up ahead—she was within shouting distance of the pool. Close enough that if she screamed, Ladon and Dragon would appear around the bend within seconds.
They knew she’d come looking for them—she heard the low rumble and the obvious sounds of a man moving camping gear. They weren’t hiding from her.
But the phantoms were. Her seers picked up nothing indicating that the cave had been invaded. No future-notes using Gavin. No blank areas in the fog indicating editing.
Except that wasn’t true. The ceremony itself was a bubble of happiness Rysa refused to spy on. She would not inflict déjà vu on herself during the moment they exchanged vows.
No unhappiness beyond Anna’s general unease and Dmitri’s normal level of gruffness showed itself, though a moment of ecstatic shock was coming for Gavin.
She cut off the vision before she caught any details. No spying, she whispered. The line between knowing enough and knowing too much was a difficult one to walk.
Shuffling sounds echoed from up ahead. Dragon approached. Rysa snatched up the lantern and scurried forward to meet her beast.
His big head curled around the bend in the tunnel. His giant hand-claws appeared. Rysa? he signed. His head disappeared and she saw a clear dragon-image of herself.
He was pushing her location to Ladon.
Rysa turned off the lantern. No need for it now, and she didn’t want to drown out Dragon’s colors. She blinked, adjusting to the warmer, fuller—if softer—glow of her beast, and climbed the last ledge up to the pool.
Without Dragon or her lantern, the cavern would be pitch-black. No mirrors piped in sunshine here, and no ventilation system circulated air. Though the air did flow, if slowly, with the underground stream that fed the pool. Fishes camped out here during the winter, and the lynx did prefer this area of the cave.
The pool wasn’t large—it filled a space no bigger than most hotel pools—nor was it deep, except near the stream inlet. Mostly, the water here hit her at her chest.
She didn’t bring her suit; winter waters required a wetsuit, and she’d rather snuggle with Ladon and Dragon anyway.
Ladon stood to the side of the tunnel entrance in his black jeans, but he’d changed out of his usual t-shirt into a thick, black turtleneck that still managed to show off his muscular chest and back. Like a lot of his clothes, the shirt had a decades-gone-by vibe, and she suspected he’d bought it sometime in the seventies. All he needed was a shoulder holster and a moustache, and he could pass as a badass FBI agent—except for the messy, re-braided mohawk. The hair was axe-wielding old school, and decidedly pre-American. Still, the man in front of her stood both strong and handsome, and still carried the weight of the universe on his broad shoulders.
Ladon smiled as she walked toward him, and opened his arms to her.
She dropped her pack and immediately pressed her entire body against his. She could lose herself here, with them, cocooned in their glow and their warmth. No matter how he reacted to his melancholy or to his phantoms, he was now and would always be her anchor against the storms of her life.
He buried his face in her hair and inhaled deeply at the same time his arms tightened around her back and waist. Slowly, he stroked her back.
This was her Ladon, with his unconscious, real way of touching. No one could fake his responses to her, or his joy when she pressed her face against his chest. The tension of his muscles loosened and his blood pressure dropped in ways her body knew, but her mind could not describe.
He smiled again when she kissed his chin. He kissed the bridge of her nose, as was their way, though the ritual felt different. New, perhaps, as if he was experiencing it for the first time and wanted to make sure he learned every nuance correctly.
“Thank you for running off,” she said.
Ladon chuckled. “I take it our guests are restless?”
Rysa wove her fingers through his at the same time she reached for Dragon. “My mom is pregnant.”
Dragon flashed and the entire pool chamber lit up with bright, living colors—blues and purples that reminded her more of flowers than lightbulbs. The reds and oranges of a campfire. Yellows and greens that said trees and birds and warm days. The beast’s lights reflected off the calm water of the pool and played back on themselves, adding a visual sense of echoes to the wide rocks.
Echoes not just of lights, but echoes of statements, as well: A dragon-image danced through her mind, one richly packed with centuries’ worth of meaning.
So is Sister-Human, Dragon signed.
Rysa didn’t know. How could she have not known? She was the Draki Prime. She should have known Anna was pregnant. “What?” she asked. “When?” She wanted to ask How? but she knew that answer.
Ladon shrugged. “Sister-Dragon was not supposed to tell her brother, but when she held him and Derek, secrets were shared, correct?”
Dragon nodded. Yes.
“Does Derek know?” He hadn’t said anything to Rysa. “How come I didn’t see?”
She flicked out her seers. No indication of Anna’s pregnancy.
Ladon led her toward the fire ring near the pool. A small fire warmed the gear they left up here—a kettle and cooking griddle. “Derek knows.” He glanced at Dragon. “He also knows that Sister waits until a babe quickens before making an announcement.”
“Why? Shouldn’t she be taking pre-natal vitamins? My dad’s here. I hope she’s talking to him.” Rysa moved her pack next to the fire.
Ladon shrugged. “We suspect you did not see because the child is as invisible in the what-was-is-will-be as his father.”
“It’s a boy?” Rysa snatched up her pack and held it on her lap. She’d brought fruit and dried meats, though she knew Ladon had dinner covered. She could use her past-seer to check, but she liked being surprised by his cooking, unlike surprises about hidden babies.
Yes, Dragon signed. Sister watches. The babe will quicken soon. He sauntered toward the pool and dropped onto its lip with his big body between the fire and the water. He exhaled and shimmied his belly toward the water as if the flame was too warm for his ultra-fine coat.
“Am I the only woman here who isn’t pregnant?” Rysa sat her pack next to her feet. “I’m going to have a little sister.”
Ladon sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire. He glanced at her, then at Dragon. His eyes did his faraway stare and he looked at the pool.
“Do you want to talk about it?” She lef
t open what “it” might be. They’d talked about protecting her from problem pregnancies, but not a lot about the possibility of babies of their own. She didn’t think he believed it would happen, and she’d like to finish school first.
But the “it” here could be any of Ladon’s phantoms—Nate, or the hallucinations he suffered before Cordelia found him. Neither he nor Dragon said anything beyond “I remember Daniel talking to me.” But she knew it had been worse than a visit from the long-dead future-seer of the original Draki Prime.
She hadn’t told him yet about the vision of Daniel which led her to Vivicus. She sort of hoped that Daniel would visit again and give her a useful vision of Aiden, not a weird, moving-yet-not-moving dream.
Ladon rubbed the top of his head. “Dragon was going to trim my hair.” He rubbed at it again. “As a surprise for you.”
“Ladon, I don’t care what you do with your hair. It’s not like you’d do anything ugly, anyway.” Why were they talking about his hair? “I brought dinner.” And why was she dodging with food?
“I thought you might be upset if I wasn’t at least tidy for the ceremony.”
Rysa dipped her hand into her pack and rummaged around for the oranges. “I’d only be upset if you didn’t show up.”
Ladon smiled and looked up at the shadows of the pool’s ceiling. “How about furs and leather? I could pull my claymore from the armory and make a grand entrance.”
Dragon snorted.
“He says only he and his sister are allowed to make grand entrances.”
The jokes were both disarming and concerning—and both Ladon- and un-Ladon-like. Maybe this was his natural state and the past seven months of stress and depression were gone for good.
She pulled her hand out of the pack. “Are you going to throw me over your shoulder and carry me off?” She waved at the rock walls. “I’m already in your cave.”
Ladon smiled and ran his hand over his head again. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was flirting.
Men And Beasts (Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book 6) Page 24