You are thinking too much about sex.
Ladon glanced at the ceiling. Dragon refracted, his tail swishing when he moved across the girders. The beast didn’t want Rysa to feel discomfort. Not from the hell chasing her and most definitely not from any action on Ladon’s part.
Across the aisle, she tossed several bra and panty sets in a variety of styles into the basket. The lace shimmered through a rainbow of hues as if she’d decided to wear Dragon against her skin.
Stunning Rysa, the Fate with a heart as beautiful as her body. She deserved all the respect he and the beast could provide.
At the registers, Ladon packed the food into two bags as Rysa put her clothes in two others. In the lot, Dragon crawled into the back of the van and she handed over their purchases. Ladon leaned against the door, watching her stretch and twist to transfer the bags.
“Aren’t you going to help?”
“You’re done.” He twirled the cart and gave it a shove toward a corral. It hit true and straight, nesting into another.
“Show-off.” Her lovely lips pinched together, a tad bit of mischievousness twisting them ever so slightly.
Dragon snorted.
Rysa reached for the beast, her fingers spread for a gentle touch as they moved across the van’s threshold toward Dragon’s head. “You’re a show-off too, you big, wonderful lug.”
Ladon reached for her. He reached to lift her up, to hold her close. To give her everything she needed to hold onto the happiness he saw on her face.
“Rysa,” he whispered as his fingers glided past her talisman, up her forearm and to her elbow.
Her gaze dropped to his fingers. Her face slacked. Shock from her seers hit him hard—he shouldn’t have touched her. She must be seeing him as forward again.
He let go. “I’m sorry. Beautiful—”
Her abilities flared across the parking lot, a combined music so breathtaking it broke into Ladon’s vision. In the van, Dragon rolled over, his hide sparking.
“Oh….” She tripped, her hand grabbing for Ladon’s shirt. “What’s happening…?”
The siphoning locked on and they staggered against the bumper. The edges of the world fuzzed.
Control it, Dragon pushed.
Their flow sputtered. Ladon forced air into his lungs and steadied his mind so Dragon’s attempt to moderate her vision didn’t unravel.
“Rysa?” He pulled her into the back and laid her down, then slammed the door. He touched her arms, her hands, assessing. She felt cold again, like she had at her house. He picked her up, cradling her against his chest.
Dragon’s hide barely moved, all his concentration on Rysa.
Another wave blasted from her seers and her nails dug into Ladon’s arm.
“Rysa?”
A vision has her.
Pain echoed from her body to his. A new twitch arced across her fingers. He twitched, mirroring the movement.
If she had another uncontrolled vision, she might not wake up—and the only help Ladon had access to now traveled south to Branson.
To the Shifters.
Ladon laid his palm on Dragon’s neck. Could one help?
The beast wagged his head. I do not know. How?
He didn’t know, either. But something said Shifter and in particular, enthraller. Ladon could almost see—
Do you feel that? Ladon pushed. It’s coming from her seers, like at her house in Minneapolis. He couldn’t quite see, as if he had to squint because the images were too bright. And too loud.
She twitched again.
“Phone!” Ladon waved at the front of the van. Dmitri’s bar teemed with enthrallers. They enticed good tips. One could come north. Meet them half way.
Dragon held out the phone. I will take her. The beast extended his hand to cradle her head.
No. Ladon dialed with one hand. She stayed where she was. “Dmitri!”
The Russian swore at him.
“I need an enthraller,” Ladon growled.
Dmitri paused.
Rysa coughed.
“Now.” The bar was too far away. “Who’s nearby?” But Ladon knew—a brief memory flickered in his mind’s eye: A woman dropping a necklace onto his palm.
A very particular, very unfriendly woman. Dragon blew out little rings of flame.
Dmitri said her name.
Ladon swore in a variety of languages. “You call her. Then call me back with a location.” He disconnected the call.
Penny. Another one of Ladon’s many mistakes. But if Penny was Rysa’s only option, so be it. He’d stomach that hell for Rysa.
I will take her.
No. Ladon’s arms wouldn’t release. What if she didn’t wake up?
You must drive. Dragon gently, carefully lifted away Rysa.
Dragon lay her down and Ladon wanted to pick her up again but instead he covered her with the blanket, tucking along the side, and touched her forehead. No fever. But he still felt her seer’s fingers.
He needed to drive. He’d have to go up front and leave her in the back of the van where he couldn’t feel her skin for a fever.
He exhaled. Dragon had her. Ladon fumbled for his keys as he dropped into the driver’s seat. They’d go south, toward where Penny operated. If—
Human.
He looked up. Rysa caressed his shoulder and wiggled onto his legs, wedging herself between his abdomen and the steering wheel.
She is still in a vision, Dragon pushed.
The chill of her skin bit into Ladon’s. “Beautiful.” Why did he put her down? He wrapped his arms around her to give her all his warmth. “You need to rest. I found someone who will help—”
Her lips glided over his, her arms tight around his neck. A kiss—a real kiss, one full of purpose and intensity—touched his chin and silenced his words. The tenderness of the next kiss held all the trust and intimacy he’d seen in her eyes. Her mouth caressed his, wanted his, her body pressed tight against him.
“Rysa.” Her name expanded from his throat and out to his chest and limbs. It moved into the quiet moments of his life and into his deepest worries. She melted all the what-ifs and brightened all the dark corners. Her touch calmed his world.
Somehow, even in this vision, even with her demands of distance, she wanted him, his touch, his attention.
Or she will. The future jutted into the present again, pressing her body against his.
But he couldn’t lift her off his lap. Turn her away. Be strong like he should. She tasted perfect, felt perfect. Rysa, a woman who, somewhere inside her, accepted him, even though she was a Fate.
Ladon returned her kisses, accepting this gift he didn’t deserve.
Her fingers wove into his hair and traced the slope of his ears. She moved, squeezed between him and the wheel, her hips swaying with her kisses. He could lay her on the blankets and express everything inside him. Stroke her hips and breasts and kiss every inch of her skin.
Let the inevitable happen. Bind her to him with a physical need so strong that when her world righted, she’d understand why he wanted her to stay.
He pushed aside the thought. He couldn’t ask for a future she might never want, inevitable or not.
She kissed his cheek, holding tight to his chest. “Thank you,” she whispered.
His head filled with an overlay of caresses, of kisses, beyond what he felt now. The future danced on his mind and all the possibilities of her staying wrapped around his mind the same way her arms wrapped around his neck.
A wave of color and texture pushed from Dragon. The beast nuzzled her cheek, his emotions mirroring Ladon’s. The future touched the beast, as well. Her laugh would fill the silence of their van and give Dragon a new voice for his words, one strong and beautiful.
She moved like she was awake, kissed like she was awake, but the vision had her. The kisses were a promise of a gift that neither he nor Dragon may ever know.
“Rysa, can you hear me?”
“You are right.” She whispered the words into his ear, bare
ly a breath.
“What? Rys, I don’t underst—”
“When I hurt you, please come for me.”
She had said the same words after the fight at her house. He cupped her cheeks, kissing her again with every ounce of his resolve. “We will.” Even if she walked away, they’d come for her. Now, tomorrow, centuries into the future, it didn’t matter. They’d be there for her. Always.
“I’m sorry you have to see Penny again.” Rysa’s eyes closed.
Then she slumped against his shoulder.
21
A deep memory: Most people thought Daniel and Marcus the same, but to Ladon they were as different as night and day.
Marcus held the Shifter against the tavern’s table, his knife at the base of the man’s skull. “You did not sense him?”
Ladon wiped the blood from his cheek. “No.”
Daniel spun his daggers. Light flashed off the blades. He turned in a circle for everyone to see, his expression predatory, and the tavern’s normals cowered.
Marcus pressed the point of his knife into the Shifter’s skin. Blood oozed. “Will this kill him?”
Ladon squatted next to the would-be assassin. Far Eastern. “Is this your real face, barbarian?”
The Shifter spat and cursed in a language Ladon did not recognize.
The clans were changing. First the new families who made others do their bidding and now assassins he could not sense.
Ladon stood tall. “A blade into the head is often enough.”
Marcus twisted the dagger. More blood dripped down the man’s neck.
The melody of Daniel’s future-seer played along the edges of Ladon’s awareness. “The Emperor is angry. You and the Dracas claimed his tribute.” Daniel sneered and tapped his temple. The circumstances of the Draki Prime’s activation, though years passed, continued to heat the brothers’ behavior.
Ladon mimicked Daniel, tapping his own temple. “I did not claim tribute.”
The future-seer chuckled and drove a blade into the assassin’s thigh. The man’s high-pitched scream grated through the little tavern.
“Besting his cutthroats will make the old fool livid.” Daniel twisted his blade.
Marcus’s past-seer harmonized with his brother’s. When the triad used their seers together, the three rang true. They were young but worthy of their Prime designator.
“You should have asked for five times your payment, scum.” Marcus pressed his blade deeper.
Daniel pulled his dagger and wiped the Shifter’s blood on the man’s tunic. The assassin’s wounds closed but did not fully heal. He’d live, but the agony would rake his body for days.
Marcus’s seer rippled again. “Three others. Outside.”
They wait by the stables. Dragon’s bulk would have destroyed the tavern’s walls, so he had climbed the oak tree towering over the low-slung building.
Ladon gestured at the entrance.
Daniel’s seer sang. He clasped Ladon’s forearm, his brow crinkling. “Women.”
The assassin laughed.
The Emperor of Rome’s corpse sent women to murder him? Ladon guffawed. Women did not want to murder him. At least not at first.
Daniel’s iron eyes darkened. “Women will be our ruin.”
“Not me, dear brother.” Marcus gestured at Ladon. “Him, most definitely.”
Daniel ignored them, his seer pulsing and his eyes distant. “Your beautiful fate will find you one day.”
“You are the only beautiful Fate here, Daniel.” Marcus kicked the assassin when he tried to escape.
Archers, Dragon pushed. I must vent.
“Skewer him to the table.” Ladon pointed at the Shifter before waving at Daniel. “Arrows, my friend.”
Daniel did not respond.
Ladon stopped, his sword half-drawn.
Marcus rammed a poker through the Shifter’s shoulder. The man, now pinned to the table, screamed. Daniel shivered, his gaze traveling between the Shifter and his brother.
“Women.” He frowned as he slid his dagger into its scabbard and drew his own sword. “Take care with your fate, Ladon-Human. Only your fate will stand between you and your ruin.”
22
The nasty thing in Rysa’s head wanted to kill her. Ladon said she’d passed out—he didn’t say anything about her kissing him—and she’d popped awake when he yelled something Russian and foul-sounding into his phone.
He turned off the freeway onto a cornfield-lined county road and accelerated harder than the van liked. The engine groaned and the phone landed in the cup holder.
Marcus’s charms wore off at the store. Just like that, out of nowhere, she blacked out, kissed Ladon—kissed him—and now her nasty writhed like a pissed off squid. Flashes and sounds and now smells—she didn’t tell Ladon about the Burner stink infesting her nose—bubbled around the edges of her peripheral awareness. Who had a peripheral nose? An endless stream of Wait, what’s that smell? made her jerk her head side to side like a crazy person.
She spent twenty minutes ranting about randomness and jumping up and down in the back of the van, jerked around by phantoms. Dragon pushed himself as far as he could to one side to protect his tail from her spazziness.
Ladon hadn’t pulled off. He watched her in the rearview mirror and yelled more Russian into his phone.
They passed through a little town with an ugly pink one-story hotel, a strip club, and a huge farm implements store-warehouse. The van slowed to the required thirty miles per hour. Rysa stared out the back window, transfixed.
The entire town lived within a thousand feet of the highway, as if the road pierced it like a bullet and carried all its muscle and bone down the asphalt. The town distorted but hadn’t yet burst.
Rysa’s whipping tentacles picked up hate and defeat and a lot of booze. Then, as they moved across the town’s boundary, the vision vanished. Her nasty abruptly pulled in. Rysa stared, dead still, out the front of the van, her mind a vast blank landscape.
“Rysa!” Ladon waved his arm around the seat.
The tip of Dragon’s tail flicked in front of her eyes. The van suddenly lit up, as if the beast had turned on an entire dive bar’s worth of neon.
“Sit down!” Ladon pointed at the passenger seat. “Before Dragon rolls the van because you’ve forced him up the wall.”
Her feet moved, dancing against the increasing speed of the vehicle, and she found herself dropping into the seat. The seatbelt pulled across her front, her hand guiding it, and snapped into place.
Even at her worst ADHD moments—when she’d pace back and forth in the hall outside her fifth grade classroom, or when she’d disrupted her Health class in high school and had to go to the office, or when she had to drop her calculus recitation section her freshman year at the U because her teaching assistant couldn’t understand her when she talked too fast—she never felt this disoriented. Never.
Something she didn’t catch flickered through Ladon’s eyes. “We’re almost to the rendezvous. You’ll be okay. I promise.” He lifted his hand from the steering wheel and reached for her, his fingers out and gesturing for hers.
He wanted to hold her hand. She was totally out of control and he still wanted to hold her hand. Was this because she kissed him? A sense of committed bounced between him and Dragon. Then their energy washed across her—not over, sort of parallel—and she felt committed again. Like fate had them by their necks and they had no choice but to help her.
It took every morsel of self-control she had left not to unhook her seatbelt and curl into a ball on the van’s floor, right there in the front, between the dash and her seat.
She hadn’t said anything about the kiss, but she remembered it—and in particular the feel of his stomach against hers. The power of his muscles alone made her want to weep. And his mouth. She’d faint if she kept thinking about it. Stubble against her lips never felt so good. Tom’s stubble hurt and Ladon’s hurt too, but in a way she liked.
Which made no sense. Stubble was stubble. But t
he way he held her against him, and the way he moved his lips, made their kiss warm and brilliant and very, very good.
She’d kissed a god. He drove down the little country highway like Apollo, but in black. What was up with the black, anyway?
He pulled back his hand and something new played across his face. She’d missed her chance. She could have taken a sun god’s hand.
Hurt bounced between him and Dragon. She’d hurt him.
She’d do it again. No escaping that. It was as inevitable as them having sex. She’d hurt him real bad. A sudden sense of fate you cannot escape blanketed her perception of the world. Ladon turned gray—his skin, his hair, his clothes.
It vanished.
A whimper popped out of her throat like she’d just gacked up a hairball. How much randomness could flip around in her head before it exploded? Or was her mind imploding?
“Beautiful! Look at me.”
“I’m sorry!” She leaned forward. “I’m going to puke.”
“Please don’t throw up in my van!” He looked totally freaked out. She’d never seen him so freaked out.
She’d freaked out an immortal man who she was pretty damned sure had literally seen everything a human could see. “Why are you so good to me? I’m a problem. I’m—”
“Rysa! Stop! Don’t say that.” A massive pulse moved between him and Dragon.
The beast craned his neck around the seat and laid his head on her lap. Her nasty yelped—she heard it—and her seers stopped whipping. Stopped, laid down, and passed out.
And as fast as the rant started, it stopped.
She wrapped her arms around Dragon’s head and pressed her cheek against his crest. He did something, like when he stopped her cousins in the Texas vision. He calmed the chaos. “What did you do?”
Ladon stared at the road. “He’s been trying.”
She picked up We’ve been trying. Not the words, but the concept. Commitment came from both of them.
She didn’t know what to say. They did so much for her.
Ladon pointed at the glove compartment. “Your meds are in there. If you want them.”
Games of Fate (Fate ~ Fire ~ Shifter ~ Dragon #1) Page 15