Men And Beasts (Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book 6)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Human! Dragon pushed her away from Adrestia. He’s here.

  Adrestia gurgled, and if they could see her eyes, Anna was sure they had rolled back into her head.

  Daisy grabbed Adrestia’s hand. “Anna, help me get the ring.”

  “She clenches her fist.” Anna stepped around her beast and wiggled her own fingers between Adrestia’s.

  “No!” Daisy swatted at the air. “We don’t know where he is. He might be licking my cheek while sticking his fingers into her brain through whatever port she has on the back of her skull. I think the ring will let me see him.”

  The enthraller, Anna thought. But only one enthraller was strong enough to hide in plain sight from either Anna or her brother. Only one.

  But he was dead.

  Anna pried Adrestia’s fingers loose. The ring dropped off the Fate’s finger and into Daisy’s palm.

  Adrestia inhaled as if someone had just cut off her ear.

  The seer that burst from her was not Adrestia’s sweeping, pinging present-seer. This seer rolled out through the cave as a warm, melodic cascade. A familiar cascade of musical brilliance and beauty.

  A seer Anna had not felt in almost two hundred years.

  “Why do you have Daniel’s seer?” she asked.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Aiden…

  The talon sliver in Aiden’s hand popped him into the middle of a sweet, full-on girl fight. Anna-Human was about to gut Mira Torres. Aiden had stopped to watch the show for a moment hoping that one of the ladies would grab a ponytail, let loose a banshee cry, and proceed to rip the shirts off her sisters.

  Not that he wanted to see Anna-Human’s little titties, but Mira Torres was a fine bird. When his Daisy joined the brawl, his hopes soared, but alas, Anna-Human calmed down for some reason, and it became obvious that there would be no girl wrestling.

  Pity.

  The dragon paced next to the door and Aiden couldn’t see around her, but the spectacle of girls threatening each other was so entertaining he’d almost forgotten that the beast had drawn him here in the first place.

  He was reminded the moment the ring left contact with its carrier. The person who had been obscured appeared and Daisy vanished inside a bubble of editing.

  Aiden swung at the hole in the universe where Daisy should be. “I see the hole. I know where you are.” Just not how to get to her. The damned ring acted like armor.

  The woman who appeared looked familiar. He poked at her face. “Adrestia, right?” It had been centuries. Two, almost, to be precise. He’d paid her triad a lot of money to kill his father and his uncles. “Why are you here?”

  The velocities around Adrestia weren’t correct for a present-seer. Neither was the familiar future-seer rolling off her body. He peered at her face. “No. Really?”

  She slapped the side of her head. The hit reverberated and for a split second, Aiden saw both Adrestia and her guest.

  “Uncle Danny?” His uncle, who was just as much in new-space as him, controlled a body that didn’t belong to him. “But you’re dead.”

  Though obviously not as dead as the real world thought.

  Aiden punched at Adrestia again. Neither the woman nor her passenger responded. Was his uncle aware of him? How did he get control of Adrestia?

  Maybe he should try again with the boy, but Pavlovich’s splinter got in the way, and that healer ran back into the gardens. Adrestia looked to be an easier target.

  “Hello, uncle. How did you get in there?” Aiden Blake tapped the goggles covering the blind woman’s eyes. “Nice new chassis you have here.” He groped her left breast, then her right. “Ever feel yourself up? Oh, that’s right. Not your thing.” He snickered.

  He tapped the tip of his uncle’s new body’s nose. “It must be lonely in there.”

  His uncle’s future-seer blasted outward from Adrestia’s body like a concussive wave. Aiden staggered backward and fell onto his ass a good distance from the women.

  His uncle knocked him over the way he would have knocked over a pile of sticks.

  “You’ll pay for that, old man.” Aiden brushed non-existent dust off his white shirt. He adjusted his hat and tugged on his satchel.

  He’d gut Adrestia for giving Daniel a ride. He’d gut AnnaBelinda and her beast just for good measure. Then he’d use the cumulative guts from the boy, Pavlovich, and his love to write his manifesto in the snow. I am new, he would tell the world. I have risen. I am your Emperor.

  Anna-Human stepped away from his uncle’s new body. Adrestia bent forward at the hips. She tipped her head and looked directly at Aiden. “I should have killed you five hundred years ago, you little shit.”

  Then she ran around the kitchen and deep into the cave.

  AnnaBelinda…

  Daisy placed her hand on AnnaBelinda’s arm. “Let her go, Anna.” She slipped the ring onto her finger.

  Anna released Adrestia but she did not back away. “Tell me why you have Daniel’s seer.” Not throttling the Fate made Anna’s muscle’s clench. She came into Anna’s home carrying a stolen seer? “How did you steal his future-seer?”

  How is that possible? Perhaps murderers stealing their victims’ seers happened all the time and Anna never knew.

  Because there seemed to be a lot she didn’t know. About the present, and the future. About the past. About the true nature of Fates and Shifters.

  “I think he’s here,” Adrestia whispered. “Do you see him, Daisy?”

  Anna clamped her hand around the Fate’s neck again. “Explain how you came to carry Daniel’s seer. Did you steal it from him when you killed him? Did that ring help?”

  “Anna!” Daisy gripped Anna’s wrist. “Let him go.”

  Him? Anna lifted her hand off Adrestia’s neck and stepped back against the side of her beast. Is Aiden Blake in Adrestia?

  Dragon sniffed Adrestia’s face. Not Aiden.

  Daisy looked first at Anna, then at Adrestia. “This is the difficult time, isn’t it?”

  Adrestia nodded and rubbed her neck.

  Daisy pointed. “That is Daniel, Anna. At least some of the time.”

  Adrestia nodded again.

  “What?” She stepped closer again. “How?”

  “My nephew is here,” Adrestia squawked.

  Aiden Blake took priority. Anna squinted. Would she be lucky to see the bastard? Do you sense him? she asked her dragon. Can you get him? This needed to end, and it needed to end now. No more attacks. No more threats. She had lived for twenty-three centuries and it had to stop sometime. Everything stopped sooner or later.

  The universe gave no other option.

  Unless you are the future-seer of the Draki Prime, Dragon pushed.

  Anna would have smiled if she had the energy.

  Daisy rubbed the ring. “I sense only that I’m sure he’s here. I don’t know where.”

  We need to know his position, her beast pushed. She stalked to the side before sniffing at Adrestia.

  Anna wanted to press her back against the door and slide herself to the floor. She wanted to sit and breathe and let everyone else take care of this but that wasn’t going to happen. It never happened.

  She was tired. Tired of the fighting and the invasions. Tired of constantly building and rebuilding. Tired of losing men and babies.

  She waved her hand at Daniel-Adrestia. “I’m tired of losing good Seconds to murderous little fucks.” Maybe she just regained one. Maybe not. Maybe all this time she’d been imagining an enthraller here. One who felt that the only way to get a murderous little fuck was to fake his death.

  “Only idiots get themselves murdered.” She stared directly at Daniel-Adrestia.

  Somewhere nearby, an unseen person chuckled.

  Adrestia gasped. She stiffened once again.

  A wave of future-seeing energy stronger than any Anna had ever felt burst from Adrestia’s body—stronger than any Rysa had released, or Daniel while he lived in his own body, or than she’d felt from Janus, the Fate Progenitor. It e
rupted as all Daniel’s music at once, all his power, his anger and grief and loss.

  All of one man’s past fired from the body of a present-seer on the back of a wave of future.

  Adrestia’s body straightened at the shoulders. Her lips drew into a thin line. She adjusted the glasses on her face and she tugged on her jacket.

  She leaned forward at the waist and spoke words that to Anna felt overlaid, as if one half of her said one thing, and the other something very different.

  “Je t’emmerde, femme dragon.” ‘Fuck you, dragon woman,’ she said, and ran away, into the cave.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Adrestia…

  How was it that she had come to this place with Shifters and dragons? With her aunt Mira and, perhaps, others who hid themselves? The last thing she remembered was snow and cold and seeing a turquoise automobile parked on a road beyond the hotel. She’d felt compelled to go toward the car, but she stepped on the Tsar’s ring. Her sole deformed around the metal, and she had almost slipped in the snow, which should not have happened. She was Adrestia, present-seer of Les Enfants de Guerre, and she tripped over nothing.

  That Burner found her. He hauled her to her feet and made her walk to the car and the driver enthralled her to keep her under control. But she was Adrestia and she would not be controlled.

  Then she woke here with AnnaBelinda staring at her as if she had turned green and scaly.

  She would skin AnnaBelinda for what she did to Metus. Then she would deliver the dragon woman’s skin as a peace offering. Metus was out there somewhere. Adrestia felt the pull of her triad mate, her brother. She’d made him mad by not holding the new Draki Prime on that damned train and now he refused to speak to her.

  Her own brothers—Timor had also made no attempts to contact her. Both her brothers had abandoned her to Mira and the Shifters and to Trajan, the master of the Ulpi Fates. She had been safe with her aunt, but Metus and Timor were her family. Her triad. She had a duty to them.

  And now she was inside the home of the Dracae. How she got in, she did not know, nor did it matter. This moment was an opportunity she would not give up.

  Her present-seer whispered, Find the Draki Prime.

  She did not have a whispering seer like so many of her fellow present-seers. Hers had transformed long ago, after she lost her sight. Her seer showed her the truth of the world, but now it talked to her in a familiar voice, one she’d heard since she sliced open the original Draki Prime on that Dutch beach. She remembered a flare in her vision, and a mirage of a woman with two black daggers.

  One had gone into her head. The other into Daniel’s.

  But she was not to remember. Not because she shouldn’t, but because no one remembered that woman.

  Yet Adrestia’s seer showed her the truth, and every so often, when her present-seer whispered in a man’s voice, she would remember flashes of a moment of killing that made no sense at all.

  The Praesagio doctors told her that the glasses routed visual images around her damaged eyes and directly into her brain. She had begun to acclimate, but her seer was still the better of the two choices.

  Use the glasses. Do not use your seer, her seer whispered once again in a man’s voice.

  Pourquoi? ‘Why?’ she thought.

  I know what we need to see and what we do not. Her seer always showed the truth. Perhaps, right now, the truth should not be seen?

  Addy slid through a door into a second chamber, then through another into a rear, water-filled area. A stream gurgled through channels. A waterfall rolled down a rock face. Plants, furniture, candles dotted a long open terrace.

  Les salles de bains, ‘The baths,’ her seer whispered.

  Pourquoi? ‘Why?’ she asked.

  Reine des Brûleurs, ‘Queen of the Burners,’ her seer responded. Find Rysa.

  Rysa Torres was here, somewhere. Rysa, her cousin and the girl Adrestia had allowed to escape. If she brought Rysa to her brothers, they would take her back. But if she harmed her cousin, her aunt would try to kill her, and the Shifters would take away her new glasses.

  Nor would they help her understand why she lost time, or why her seer now spoke to her.

  Mira would be angry. Maybe as angry as her father had been, the first time she let Rysa escape. Addy touched her mouth, remembering the split lip.

  She scanned the end of the baths near the front of the caves, the end deeper into the mountain. A dragon roar followed her from the entrance. At the back of the baths, a dark tunnel held promise.

  Reine des Brûleurs. Rysa was down there, inside that tunnel. Yes, whispered her seer. Go to Rysa.

  Someone—something—touched her. It brushed against her front and it licked her face. Adrestia coughed. She pushed at the air, trying to force off the phantom, and ran for the tunnel.

  Did she have her phone? She needed more light for the glasses to work. Her seer told her so. She was to walk in slowly and not trip.

  She patted at her pockets. Didn’t she have the shard? It was in her jacket. Now, she only found a couple of receipts.

  Her holster was empty, too.

  She stopped. Where was her phone?

  The walls, the air, everything inside the tunnel blazed to life with dancing lights and shimmering patterns. Every rock gleamed. Every step would be a step deeper into a fairy land.

  Rysa Torres squatted on the top of a boulder directly in front of Adrestia, so close that if Rysa wished, she could slap Adrestia’s face. Where the dragon and his human hid, Adrestia did not know.

  Torres looked different than when Adrestia attempted to kidnap her seven months ago. Taller, perhaps. More assured, also. Angrier, most definitely.

  “It pains me to see you manipulated this way,” Torres said, though her face said she lied. She found no discomfort in seeing the terror climbing into Adrestia’s throat.

  The other woman, the one who had been with the Dracas in the entrance area, appeared also within slapping distance.

  Adrestia would have stepped back, but rocks blocked her way.

  “How are you…” One of them had to be a strong enthraller. No other explanation fit their ability to sneak up on her. Adrestia sniffed, but only sweet, clear water and warm spices found her nose.

  Her chest tightened as if someone squeezed her heart, then loosened as if the hand had been pulled away, then it tightened again.

  She coughed again.

  Torres leaned forward. “The man who sent you to murder Daniel Drake is trying to steal your body,” she said.

  Torres’s hand glowed. She said something to Adrestia but the only point of interest in the entire tunnel was the knife-shaped shimmer extending from the other Fate’s clenched fist.

  The other woman—the tall one with the black hair the Dracas-Human had called Daisy—grabbed Adrestia’s hands. “Where is he, Addy?” she asked.

  Someone rubbed against her front—not the tall woman. Not a dragon. This felt like callousness made solid and whittled into a life-sized voodoo doll.

  The phantom stuck its tongue into her mouth.

  Adrestia gagged.

  “The ring feels him,” Daisy said. “He’s here and he’s trying to push Daniel out of you.” She glanced at Torres. “He can’t take her body, Rysa.”

  Torres’s eyes narrowed. The hand with the energy knife rose.

  Suddenly, Adrestia stood on a wide plateau of rock under a receding red sun. She touched her face, then her eyes. She saw. No glasses. No seer. Her eyes worked again.

  Shades nipped at her ankles. The winds of the universe blew against her as if she moved and it did not. She wanted to stagger, to press against a wall because the universe spun her at the end of a rope and she’d fly off this plateau if she didn’t hold on.

  Torres’s hand cupped the back of Adrestia’s head. Torres had her. “Daniel!” she shouted.

  Daniel Drake, the original future-seer who served the Dracae, appeared so close to Adrestia he could have been her. So close that they moved together; they breathed tog
ether.

  He did not want her dead. He should; she murdered him. But his eyes held only pity. “Help us, Addy,” he said. “Stand up for yourself and do something good for once.”

  “You have no right to—”

  “What, dear Addy?” interrupted the other man, the one who looked like Daniel Drake but carried a satchel and wore a stupid knit hat.

  Why weren’t the winds of the universe blowing away his hat? And why did he interrupt? He was almost as close as Daniel Drake. He seemed to find rubbing up against her body a lot more interesting than the other man.

  “You don’t deserve this,” Daniel said. “To be manipulated this way. We can help you.” He nodded toward Torres. “Let us help.”

  “Do you know where my brothers are?” she asked. She wanted to go home to Metus and Timor. She wanted to be part of a triad again.

  The man with the hat grinned. “Of course I do, love.” He extended his hand.

  He lies, her real seer whispered. She felt it in her bones. She saw it in the eyes of the women around her. She smelled it on the wind.

  The truth.

  “Show me where Aiden is, Addy,” the tall woman said. “Daniel will help you. We can stop this.”

  Daisy…

  The ring didn’t disrupt. It tuned. Adrestia carried both Aiden and Daniel. The moment Rysa slammed her energy blade into Adrestia’s head, the tuning completed. Daisy saw both men as overlays over the Fate’s form.

  Addy needed to make a choice: Choose Aiden or choose Daniel. One meant death, the other life.

  Daisy released Adrestia’s wrists. She stepped far enough away to allow Adrestia the room she needed to move out of the living phantom that was Aiden Blake.

  What he was now, Daisy did not know, nor did she understand how he became this way. Or, also, how Daniel had cheated death and hitched a ride. She would leave the science of the moment to her father’s people.

  Now, Aiden needed to die.

  Addy’s fingers touched Rysa’s hand on the back of her head. She made an almost imperceptible nod. Rysa’s other arm curled around her waist.