“Legs.” He scooped a hand under her thigh, pulling her foot around. The cutter snapped another link and he rolled her to the left, lifting her other foot, then snapped the last link. “Better?”
Dragon tossed the chains into the corner.
She yanked on the cuffs. If she curled her thumb maybe this time she could pull out her hand. Agony fired up her arm and into her neck. Nausea followed and she doubled over, the shrieks muffled in the blankets under her body.
Ladon gripped her shoulders. “We’ll cut them off. When we have you someplace safe. But you need to stop screaming.”
“Take them off me now!” She yelled louder than she meant to. “Please! Take them off.”
“We will. But I need to saw through them and I can’t do that in a parking lot. I won’t chance cutting you.” A slight pout pushed out his lip. “We won’t hurt you. I promise.”
A stuttered whine blew out Rysa’s nose as she clamped her mouth shut.
He glanced at Dragon. Her eyes narrowed. A pulse moved between the man and the beast and she had a distinct sense that he wasn’t being completely honest.
“What aren’t you telling me?” She wrapped her arms around her chest and tried very hard not to rock back and forth. “Why did this happen to me?”
“You really don’t know, do you?” He massaged her shoulder, his fingers moving in little circles and arches. Powerful but sensitive, the strength of his touch grounded the horror. Calm flowed into her muscles from his touch and for the first time since she woke up this morning, she breathed deeply.
Her gaze moved from his fingers up his arm to where his black t-shirt sleeve stretched around his bicep. Even in the dim light, she saw the definition of his arms and shoulders.
She’d been rescued by the most distracting man she’d ever met.
When he let go, a sigh escaped before she could stop it. He grinned and looked away, scratching the back of his head. Ringlets threatened to pop out along the nape of his neck and above his ears. The youthful messiness of his hair juxtaposed with the shadow of stubble covering his jaw made her want to stroke his face. She wanted to feel the contrast, to understand why it worked so well to frame the olive tones of his skin.
When he looked at her again, his fingers twitched as if he wanted to touch her once more.
The damned wiggling nasty thing dropped a realization into her perception: He read the world with his hands. She knew, like she knew their name. Energy connected him to the beast, but touching was how he learned. He wanted to dance his fingers on her shoulders so he could listen the way another man might move his head to better hear her voice.
Those hands could hold the world steady.
They could hold her steady. She saw it: He’d pick her up, his face buried against her collarbone, and then lay her down along Dragon’s side.
She gasped, her hand coming up to her mouth. Her nasty laid the scene out for her in vivid detail—they were going to end up naked together, and soon.
But then it dropped something else into her perception: A memory, but not her memory. Ladon throwing his jacket against the wall of the van. A distinct sense of grumble moving between him and the beast.
Ladon didn’t like Fates.
But he’d have sex with her.
5
The sob came out of nowhere. It yanked on her throat on its way out, twisting and contracting everything between her lips and chest at the same time she tried to inhale. She felt like she’d swallowed a bowling ball.
Every single thread in her heart had said she could trust him. But she’d believed that with Tom, too.
That was why she’d never dated Gavin. Never said yes all the times he’d asked. He was her best friend and he treated her well and if it became something more he would have changed. She would have lost her best friend forever.
She bit her lip. Her cheeks burned.
She rolled under Dragon’s forelimb and jumped down to the van’s back door. She didn’t look at Ladon. She couldn’t.
The door popped open and she dropped out the back. They were in the lot of the sporting goods store south of Highway 36, in a back corner, away from the doors and the lights. Traffic flowed by less than a block away and filled the air with a dull hiss. Trees rustled, crisp and unhappy this close to a freeway. The inky night and the ugly shadows in the spaces between the trunks ate their leaves.
Rysa staggered away from the vehicle into the lot’s potholes. The weight of the shackles made her stumble, but she walked anyway.
“Don’t run away!”
She turned around. From the outside, their van loomed over the corner of the lot, bigger than any delivery truck she’d seen, and black and mean-looking. Some sort of faded and unreadable lettering ran along one side, a sort of ominous warning to anyone who dared to scrutinize the vehicle.
Dragon hopped onto the pavement, a line of invisibility running down his neck and back as he passed over the van’s threshold. Ladon followed, landing in front of her, a good six feet from the steps, and reached for her elbow. “Don’t call your seer until you get your bearings.”
“Don’t touch me.” Her body pulled in on itself. Ladon didn’t like Fates, no matter how he acted, and Rysa’s nasty wasn’t going to let her forget it.
“I’m sorry.” He pulled back abruptly, his hands in the air. “If you don’t want our help, that’s fine. We’ll drop you somewhere. Your family can deal with those—” He pointed at the shackles on her wrists. “—and whatever those Burners did to you.” He frowned and thrust his hands into his pockets. “But we think you should be careful. Your seer feels as if it’s turning on and off by itself. Right?” He nodded over her shoulder.
Warm breath blew against her ear and the invisible Dragon nudged her side.
“He agrees.”
Calm pulsed from the big beast. Her body leaned against his neck without her willing it to. She probably looked ridiculous, slanted into thin air, but Dragon didn’t care that she’d become a horrible creature with a nasty in her head.
She glanced at Ladon. Was he making those little calculations men always made? He wasn’t staring at her breasts. He watched her expression instead.
Tom never watched her face when she was upset. He always looked away.
Men were so confusing.
The shackles scraped her shirt and dug into her skin. She’d pull the damned things off, no matter how much it hurt. Throw them into the Mississippi River and run away. Maybe she’d disappear into the mountains out west. No men. No Burners. No Fates.
“Rysa?” Ladon had moved closer when she wasn’t paying attention—close enough she could throw her arms around his neck, bury her face against his chest, and cry until she couldn’t cry anymore.
“I can’t think,” she whispered. Not that she could ever think. All these thoughts about sex made it worse.
She forced it back. It wasn’t happening right now. Things might get weird between them in the future, but now, in the present, she needed his help.
So she should quit her blubbering and put on her big girl pants.
Rysa wiped away a tear, careful not to scrape her cheek with the shackle, and stood up straight. “Why was everyone calling me a Fate?” She was just some college student, not a god.
Ladon glanced at Dragon. “You’re a Parcae. A Fate. Not a real Fate, like the old cultures believed. Your kind’s been calling themselves Fates since your Progenitor realized it both terrified the normals and made them reverent. You’re supposed to activate as part of a bonded triad of three: One sees the past. One the present. The other the future.”
But she’d been alone. “Others?” Did the Burners eat them? Her stomach knotted again. What did she cause?
“Hey, hey, don’t make that face.” This time, he took her elbow, even though she’d told him to stay back.
She didn’t pull away. She couldn’t. Calm cascaded over her and she leaned into Dragon again. The questions whipping around inside her head felt as nasty as the new thing he called her “see
r,” but having Dragon pressed against her back and Ladon holding her steady kept her at least a little grounded.
“We’d been tracking the Burners a full day. You’re the only Fate they went after.” He nodded to Dragon again. “So no one else’s been hurt. And even if they were, this isn’t your fault.”
She nodded. But he didn’t know that. Didn’t fate mean inevitable? Maybe just being her was enough to cause all this.
She didn’t say it out loud. She had enough problems without adding a man and dragon pity party to her life. “What happened?”
He peered at her through narrowed eyes. “Do you have two mothers and a father? Or two fathers and a mother? One must have spit out your activation ten, maybe twelve hours ago.”
“Spit? That’s disgusting.” She shook her head. “My mom was watching the news this morning. I think she’d been watching all night, to be honest. She wouldn’t turn off the TV after the mall in Chicago exploded. She looked so distraught I almost stayed home, but she handed me a glass of orange juice and said to go—oh, my goodness.” She touched her mouth and the damned shackle smacked against her chin.
He didn’t say any words, though his expression said uh-huh.
“Why would she spit in my orange juice? Why would she do that and not tell me? Those ghouls almost—” The pressure behind her eye expanded and contracted, pulsing like a tire pump.
Ladon took her other elbow. “Sit down before you fall over.” He nodded toward the van’s bumper.
Dragon climbed in first and Ladon sat next to her, his arm behind her back, but not touching. “We’ll help you figure out what’s—”
Words blurted out of her mouth, interrupting his assurances: “But you don’t like Fates.” Her nasty or her attention issues, she didn’t know which, motivated the outburst. Her back stiffened. “Sorry!”
His mouth opened, then snapped shut. After a moment, he scratched the back of his head. “So that’s what you saw.”
Part of what she saw. But she was determined to ignore the other part, at least for now. She might not be able to shut up, but she could act like an adult around men. Even this one.
“It’s true that we don’t trust most Fates.” Ladon watched a father and two teenagers leave the store. “We’ve had bad dealings in the past. Even good people who can see the future can be… difficult.” Ladon glanced over his shoulder at Dragon again. Equal parts regret, anger, and resignation flowed between them. “But that has nothing to do with you.”
A new vision came out of nowhere and hit her hard: Burner fire, vomit orange and acid strong, flowed in front of her eyes. She saw it, knew it, but didn’t hear or feel it. She buckled forward anyway, her gut rolling, and dropped her head between her knees. “What the hell?” Would her visions always be this chaotic? They came out of nowhere, like random partiers throwing beer bottles.
Then the vision dropped back into the recesses of her brain.
“You’re not calling the visions, are you?” He didn’t touch her. He sat next to her, his arms and neck rigid, staring at her face.
“They come out of nowhere and take over what I’m seeing and—”
“Your talisman is chaos.” He said it like someone had just dropped a rotting fruit onto his palm. Oh, that’s gross.
“Talisman?” What did that mean?
“Your family should explain.” His gaze dropped to her wrists. “It’s a Fate thing and we don’t fully understand it ourselves.”
He meant the shackles. This was the real reason he hadn’t dug out a saw and cut them off her arms and legs. “I have to wear them, don’t I? I can never take them off.” The Burners did something to the metal. Made it part of them. And now it was part of her, because she’d become a Fate wearing them.
Ladon said something about cutting off the cuffs anyway, but she didn’t follow. All she could think about was that she was as much Burner as she was Fate.
“What if I have a vision while I’m driving?” Rysa felt herself sway back and forth even though she didn’t want to. “Oh my God what if they start and don’t stop? I’m going to die. Ghouls killed me. I’m dead! I’m dead.”
“Rysa!” He gripped her elbows again. “Metal locks a Fate to a purpose. It’s like… like…” He looked up at Dragon, then nodded. “It’s like a filter. My brother-in-law has these covers he puts on his camera lens sometimes. He says they’re to polarize the light. It’s like that. Your talisman is a filter on your abilities.”
“I don’t want this filter! It’s the worst filter ever!” She pulled away and dropped her head between her knees again. “Can’t I get a new one?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. It’s set when you activate.”
“So I’m doomed to see the world through flesh-eating stupidity for the rest of my life?” No wonder her seer felt like a nasty monster ripping apart her brain. “Does this mean my ‘filter’ is ‘crap that randomly blows up?’”
Ladon chuckled. “We don’t know. A talisman’s context isn’t always obvious, even to the triad bound by it. When is the complete context of anything clear?”
She jumped off the bumper and yanked on the cuffs. Pain ratcheted up her arm, worse than the first time she tried to pull them off, and she groaned. “I don’t care if I need them! Get them off me! I don’t need a filter that doesn’t work!” She’d start panting if she wasn’t careful.
“You can’t! It’s worse without a talisman.” He followed her off the bumper. “It’s like looking at the sun. You get everything. At least that’s what I’ve been told.”
“I don’t care.” The panting started. Maybe she’d die of a panic attack. That’d be ironic.
“Rysa.”
She blinked, caught by the warmth of his eyes. His golden-brown irises edged toward uncanny. Still a real color, but brighter than they should be, as if a touch of Dragon’s lights played through them. His black hair and warm skin were the same. His eyes just showed more.
Her vision jigged, like it had when Billy grabbed her. Rysa felt Ladon’s arms, but saw her house through her mother’s eyes: She gripped a sword with both hands. The blade, long and bright, cut with sharp precision. Burners paused, watching, determined. The ghouls knew who activated Rysa: A parent, tastier than the pup.
Rysa wasn’t their only quarry.
“Burners!” she coughed. “They found my mom!”
Ladon pulled her into the van.
6
“Where?” Ladon pushed garbage off the passenger seat into a plastic bag before offering to help her down the step to the front of the van. Behind them, Dragon closed the back door and the roof vents.
Avoiding the gearshift, she maneuvered to the passenger seat and brushed away crumbs before buckling in. “North.” The quickest way was Interstate 35W, visible through the windshield.
She pulled her phone from her pocket and dialed the house. The call rolled to voice mail. “Mom! Something’s happened. I know—damn it, Mom, why didn’t you tell me? Burners are coming for you! I see it. I know what they are! They know what I am. Damn it!” She disconnected the call.
“What am I supposed to say?” She should have called right away. She should have called the police and sent them to her house. The ghouls were going to hurt her mom. “Why didn’t you stop them on campus? Why—”
“Because they eat people!” He slapped the steering wheel. “Or you would have been blown up in the crossfire. Or—” He stopped in midsentence.
She’d distracted them. Pure and simple, she’d drawn away their attention and the damned Burners were going to eat her mom because of it.
“No, no, no…” she stammered, dialing again. Her mother’s cell phone went to voice mail, too. “Mom! Someone found me.” She glanced at Ladon, but decided not to leave his name. “He says he’s going to help. Mom!”
She cut the call. “Hurry! Please. I don’t know what to tell her. Stay home, don’t stay home.” Why didn’t her mother answer the phone? “I’m sorry!” It burst from her throat. “This is my
fault. You could have—”
Dragon’s big hand wrapped around the seat and stroked her belly. The strength she felt flowing from him silenced her outburst.
“This is not your fault.” Ladon put the key in the ignition. “What’s your mother’s name?”
“Mira.”
Ladon’s hand stopped just before he turned the key. “Mira? What’s her last name?” His entire body stopped moving and his shoulders cinched up. His neck tensed to hard cords.
He wouldn’t look at her.
“Why?” But she already knew. The Fates he’d had bad dealings with were her family. Or her mother’s family, whoever they were. It’s not like Rysa had met them. “It’s been my mom and me since my dad left—”
“What is her last name?” His fists clenched so tight his knuckles turned white. Behind him, Dragon swung his head low. Sharp patterns burst across his hide.
“Torres.”
Anger reverberated between Ladon and Dragon, but the beast threw back an overwhelming and complex wave. It made no sense to Rysa, and it only made Ladon angrier.
Her panic gushed up from her stomach into her throat. “You’re not going to help us, are you?”
His cheek twitched. Anger, regret, irritation danced across his features. He tried to cover it with a stone face, one signaling “badass warrior,” but it didn’t quite work.
She turned to plead with Dragon. “My mom works for the school district. She does curriculum planning. She doesn’t… She’s not bad. I swear to you. We moved here from California after my dad left. To get a fresh start. It’s just us. My mom doesn’t even date! She’s—”
Ladon started the engine as another burst fired between him and Dragon. “Tell me her given name.”
She didn’t have a choice. Mad or not, he’d already figured it out. “Januson.”
Ladon hit the steering wheel. “Janus-on?”
“Janu-son!”
He slammed on the brakes and the van skidded down the hill of the store’s driveway. “Of course,” he muttered.
Games of Fate (Fate ~ Fire ~ Shifter ~ Dragon #1) Page 4