Bonds: The Silence Cycle Episode One
Page 12
None at all.
“I did. And I would, for a couple more days.” But that was another tale.
“So that’s when you parted company with Rysa’s dad?” The normal across from her sipped his latte.
“Yes. When I walked back to the car, he was talking to the Fate on the phone.” She sniffed and sat back herself, mirroring Gavin’s posture. “The angel Fate. The one who’d been feeding us instructions. I handed over the toy dragon. He didn’t ask. He just held it on his lap as he talked.”
Sandro hadn’t asked her how she felt taking Rysa’s toy. Nor did Daisy volunteer the information. Seemed they both understood they needed to begin severing their bond.
Gavin shook his head. To Daisy’s surprise, he didn’t ask about what the angel Fate told Sandro. Rysa, it seemed, had already talked to him about Fates. And the whole “don’t invite notice” way of dealing with them.
“Let’s go.” Daisy pushed back her chair. “The dogs are bored and hungry.” Outside, Radar and Ragnar watched the students walk by, but they had their limits. So did Daisy.
The light played over Gavin’s hearing aids as tiny rainbows when he stood. Outside, she untied the dogs. Her boys woofed, Radar sitting on Gavin’s foot as the dog seemed to enjoy doing. Her huge guard dog was a big puppy, really. A big, loving puppy who’d taken a shine to Rysa’s best friend.
And, Daisy was beginning to wonder, her best friend as well.
They walked along the sidewalk toward the west side of campus, and the neighborhood on the other side of Cleveland Avenue. Daisy’s father had bought her a house about three blocks off campus. At the time, she hadn’t realized the value of the property. She did now, and she made sure the dogs respected it.
“How long did it take you to realize Mr. Pavlovich is your father?” Gavin scratched the back of his head and flashed his disarming smile again. He seemed determined to keep her talking. “Why didn’t that other Fate tell you?”
Sometimes Daisy wondered the same question.
She smiled and tugged on the boys’ leashes. “Come.”
Time to return to her house. To feed the dogs. And to continue her stories, even if she never told Gavin the small details. The final connections….
23
Eight years and eleven months ago....
The doctor looked over his shoulder. He hitched up the camping backpack and nodded to Daisy, waving once from where he stood in front of the small bus station.
She’d given him enough of her cash to get him out of California. He’d given her the car, though she’d have to abandon it soon, because of the damage.
The Fate had finally been specific. The doctor was to vanish completely then reappear at a precise place at a precise date and time.
He hadn’t shared when and where. She hadn’t asked.
Daisy, it seemed, was free to go on her way and do what she felt she needed to do, as long as she never spoke of the doctor. At least, the Fate said, until his task had been completed.
So the doctor walked away into the wilderness, her camping gear on his back and his daughter’s stuffed toy in the bottom of the pack. Daisy watched him go.
He’d left the cell phone. Said something about cell phones being too visible.
It sat in the passenger seat, screen down, under Dawn’s German shepherd butt. The dog cocked her head, as she, too watched the doctor walk away.
“Yeah,” Daisy said. “I’ll miss him, too.” At least Rysa had a good daddy.
Maybe, if Daisy was lucky, so did she.
The phone rang. Dawn stood up, sniffing at it, and yipped quietly.
Daisy picked it up. No number. “Fate,” she said into the device.
“When we are done speaking, destroy the phone.”
“You are predictable, you know that?” Daisy watched the doctor disappear through the bus station entrance.
“The artifact you carry also has… properties. It should not.”
Daisy already guessed something was up with it, otherwise Ethne and her sister would have figured out she didn’t have what they were looking for. Maybe she should have asked Mira about it. She would have given her an explanation, at least.
“Do not contact his family.”
Daisy shook her head. “I gathered that already.”
“Good. Do not speak of any of this.”
“You already told me that.”
The Fate paused. “Yes. Promise me you will keep these secrets. The life of the doctor’s family depends on how well you hold your mind.”
Daisy glanced at the phone in her hand. The Fate sounded genuinely concerned. “I promise.”
Another pause. “Good.”
“Fate?”
“Yes?”
If Daisy was to stay quiet, she should at least have a few answers. “Why?”
“Why what, Daisy?” Now the woman sounded amused.
“Why me?”
The Fate sighed. “Because your probabilities burned the brightest.”
Daisy’s brow crunched up and she, too, sighed. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that when the time comes, you are not to discount your part in building this path.”
Daisy pinched her eyes closed. “Sure thing, mate. Whateveh you say, aye?”
“Learn Russian.”
Now Daisy laughed. “Is that your final instruction?”
The Fate chuckled. “No.”
“What else?”
“Learn American Sign Language.”
Daisy laughed again. “Will do, Missus…” She glanced at the phone again. “What is your name? After all this, at least tell me who you are.”
The Fate paused too long. For a moment, Daisy thought she’d hung up.
“I will tell you.” Another too-long pause.
“Fate?”
“Destroy this phone.”
“I will.” She’d already promised.
“One day, you will know to whom and when it will be necessary to say my name. It will not be an easy moment. Do you understand?”
How could it be any worse than what she just went through? “I understand.”
“Until that day, you are never to speak of this. I give you a boon, Daisy. Because I trust you.”
The Fate trusted her. Daisy’s mouth opened and closed, but she did not answer.
The Fate breathed in and out several times. “Who am I?” She spoke it as if she asked herself, and not Daisy. “My name?”
“Who are you?” Daisy repeated.
Another round of breaths. “I will tell you my name. My true name.”
Daisy’s fingers gripped the little cell phone. She’d drive over it when she left, maybe back up a couple of times, just to be sure. But she’d have this bit of truth. This little moment where a Fate trusted her more than the Fate trusted herself.
“I am…” the Fate said. “My name is…”
Daisy did not interrupt. It felt as if the Fate needed to hear her name more than Daisy. Needed to move on as much as Daisy and the doctor. Put this all behind, as well.
Another breath. Daisy set her hand on Dawn’s head, waiting.
“Daniel,” the Fate said.
“Daniel?” How could Daisy have been talking to a man all this time and not known? “But—”
The Fate hung up. Daisy stared at the phone in her hand, not thinking too much about what the Fate said. Thinking about it seemed… dangerous. For her. And for the Fate.
Thinking, instead, that the safest possible future awaited her to the east.
Before she drove away, she took out the phone’s battery and placed the device under her front tire, as she promised. The phone crackled and broke, smashed to bits.
When Daisy pointed the car toward Branson, Missouri, and the bar favored by the dragons, she left the broken bits t
here, fallen onto the bus station lot, with all her other bonds.
Join Daisy and Gavin in:
Broken
Fate – Fire – Shifter – Dragon
The Silence Cycle
Episode Two
Available Now
1
Branson, Missouri, eight years, ten months, and three weeks ago….
San Diego had sirens: cops, ambulances, tsunami warning tests. The dry, square states between California and Missouri had an overabundance of big sky: whirlwinds, dust devils, and long, unending highways.
But no tornadoes.
Hail slammed into Daisy Reynolds’s sedan. White boulders fell from the black sky and how the hell the car’s windows hadn’t shattered yet, she didn’t know. Clinks from the ice smacking into the glass reverberated through the interior, mixing with the deafening drumming as it hit the roof.
Visibility ahead on the road leading to the “bar favored by the dragons” was, at the moment, zero. She and her dog were less than five miles from The Land of Milk and Honey but too much white ice death rained from the sky and too much wind whipped the black clouds into even darker blackness.
Daisy’s fingers probably wouldn’t let go of the steering wheel even if she willed them to. They pressed into the hard plastic like they believed their force alone would keep the car on the road.
Every breath she sucked in over her tongue tasted sodden and ionized. Every nasty smell the interior of the car usually carried—old burrito, her own unwashed seventeen-year-old proto-Shifter stink, bored dog—were all subsumed into the raging violence of lightning-charged air and the terror that she might die because a hail stone will puncture the windshield and embed itself in her heart.
The car groaned. The wind knocked it to the side and Daisy compensated, steering left as the backend fishtailed right. She slammed on the brakes.
Somewhere out there in the black, blistering storm, a tornado siren screamed.
The car skidded across the pebbles and the hail under its tires, fishtailing the other way this time, and Daisy cranked the steering wheel a little too hard in the other direction.
A little too much to the right. A little too far, even though she knew damned well the limits of both her driving skills and the mechanics of the vehicle. Dr. Torres gifted the car to her before vanishing into the wilds of the world. She’d used some of the money her mom stuffed into her pockets to fix the Burner-destroyed window and buy gas for her trip out of California. She’d practiced with the car, and driven all the hours through the mountains and the fields.
So the car shouldn’t be tipping the way it was right now.
In the back, Dawnstar barked. The big German shepherd slid along the seat’s upholstery, her doggie claws making stuttered pulling and ripping sounds.
A tire caught something and the car’s tipping suddenly shifted from to-the-side to forward. The front end whipped around, the back end following, and Daisy slammed against her seatbelt. Her head snapped forward, but the belt held, otherwise she probably would have smacked her face on the steering wheel.
The car tipped again as one set of wheels spun into the mud.
Daisy sat back, eyes wide and gasping. A ditch. She’d spun out and now they were stuck in a ditch with hail bombarding the metal roof over their heads and tornado sirens blaring somewhere nearby.
She felt her lips mutter something. What babbled from her mouth came out as incoherent to her ears as it probably did to her dog’s. But whatever her brain said to itself carried a whole lot of fear.
Dawn poked her head between the seats and nuzzled Daisy’s shoulder. Daisy’s processing of her own body’s information flipped to processing her interpretation of Dawn’s doggie body language and face-licking: You are unhurt. I am unhurt. We are currently safe.
Daisy blinked and wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck. “Thank you.”
Except the storm grew darker. And louder, like a freight train approaching.
“Shit!” Daisy hissed.
Lightning exploded directly over the car, a brilliantly bright flash followed immediately by an ear-splitting crash of thunder. Daisy ducked. Dawn barked. And outside, parallel to the road, another bolt slammed into the world.
One that illuminated the source of the roaring.
She’d watched her share of videos and looked at the pictures in her textbooks, but she’d never seen a real tornado descend from the clouds. Never witnessed, even in the brief flash of a lightning bolt, the energy and the power and the violence of the sky as it cinched itself into a scouring funnel.
It had to be several miles away, but she heard it. Felt the air change. “Oh my God,” she breathed.
Was she supposed to get out of the car? Lay in the ditch or something? What was she supposed to do with Dawn? The dog wasn’t going to lie down in the mud with her front paws over her head while pelted with inch-wide ice meteorites.
What if it changed course? Came this way? Was Daisy about to die out here on a road five miles from finally getting answers about her long-missing, probably royal Russian father?
The hail suddenly stopped. The pounding on the roof ceased. But the wind picked up.
A new crack thundered through the sedan. A loud, terrible, snapping sound, and Daisy instinctively pressed herself into the seat.
From the corner of her eye, she saw the tree tip toward the car. Saw the black shadow of the huge trunk grow larger and larger as it fell. Saw death come for her and her dog.
The car moved again, skidding back toward the road as the massive log slammed down on the sedan’s trunk. Dawn’s big, furry body bolted forward between the seats just as the back window burst.
Safety glass peppered the back of Daisy’s seat, missing her. But Dawn yipped as she dropped into the passenger seat.
Blood ran down her haunch.
“Dawn!” Daisy immediately pressed on the wound but her dog snapped. She pulled back her hand.
Dawn must have glass in the wound. Daisy couldn’t see. The wind and rain whistled through the hole in their car and she couldn’t see to help her dog. And what could she do? Daisy didn’t have access to her Shifter abilities. Her mom didn’t activate her before running off.
And now her dog might die because of it.
What could she do?
A new roar approached. Headlights illuminated the car’s cabin. Daisy shielded her eyes, sniffing, praying that she’d get a sense of who—or what—approached. They didn’t need Burners. Fates would probably kill her and steal the ring hanging on the cord around her neck. And only God knew what Shifters might do.
So she sniffed and tried to concentrate beyond Dawn’s blood and fear. Beyond her own. Beyond the spongy wood reek of the branches poking in through what used to be the back window of her car. Beyond the roar of the real, terrible tornado barreling through the Missouri countryside only a few miles away. Beyond the fact that she’d been so close to her goal, and yet so far.
She breathed in what the wind carried to her nose, and she smelled three scents she’d never picked up before: The layered brilliance of the clean sweat of hard work, the metallic undertones of freshly cleaned tools, and the earth as turned by the hands of strong people. But also the wonderful freshness of the sun on happy summer grass, the warmth given off by a clean stream at midday, and the scent of oranges.
Civilization and sunshine….
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Watch for Silent, Episode Three of the Silence Cycle, available October, 2014.
Coming in early 2015…
Old friends—and old enemies—return in All But Human, Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon book 4. Rysa works to finish college as she struggles with her ADHD, to deal with an escalating world of paranormals out for blood—and to mend Ladon’s broken soul.
All But Human launches Trilogy Two: Redemption in early 2015.
Also available from Kris Austen Radcliffe:
The Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Series
Science Fiction Romance
Trilogy One: Activation
Games of Fate
Flux of Skin
Fifth of Blood
Short Fiction:
Prolusio
Conpulsio
The Silence Cycle
Bonds Available August 14, 2014
Broken Available August 14, 2014
Silent Available October 2014
Trilogy Two: Redemption
All But Human Coming early 2015
The Quidell Brothers
Contemporary Erotic Romance
Thomas’s Muse
Daniel’s Fire
Robert’s Soul Available Sept 14, 2014
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