Games of Fate (Fate ~ Fire ~ Shifter ~ Dragon #1)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

Derek leaned forward after Sister slammed the door. “Anna! You don’t know her. Mira is her only family.”

  Sister paced, not answering. Her behavior was worse than anything Ladon did when she took up with Derek. All he’d done for her over the centuries, and she treated him this way now?

  Rysa had nothing to do with what happened two millennia ago. This hate, it reared its head every few centuries. Took ahold of his sister and wouldn’t let go. He’d long suspected her antagonism toward the Shifters was a displacement of her hate of Fates more than a real fury.

  Sister glanced at the ceiling, listening to Sister-Dragon.

  Brother is angry, the other dragon pushed.

  Ladon’s lip twitched. Dragon wasn’t taking abuse from his sister. Neither dragon brooded or nitpicked, but Sister’s attitudes had long ago infected Sister-Dragon. She’d poke at her brother and make him pulse grating irritation into Ladon’s mind.

  “Damn it!” Sister threw a plastic bin at Ladon’s head.

  He caught it just above his shoulder. A snarl sat at the base of his throat as he crunched the plastic into a prickly ball.

  “Stop!” Derek articulated each syllable of his next sentence, voice low and specific, his accent punctuating the words Ladon knew his sister needed to hear. “No one deserves to lose their family to murdering ghouls.”

  More enraged, she glared, but didn’t answer.

  “Then it is settled.” Derek’s gaze stayed locked on his wife’s face. “You take Rysa home. Get some rest. You and Brother-Dragon cannot fight as tired as you are. We will find Mira of the Jani Prime and we will return her to her daughter. Alive.”

  Sister looked away, silenced but still angry.

  Rysa has gone outside.

  Ladon bolted for the door. Why did she go out alone?

  You and Sister-Human were yelling.

  He growled at Sister before he realized what he was doing. Her eyes narrowed. She’d heard Dragon, too.

  Something is wrong.

  Sister stayed behind as he ran into the corridor.

  ***

  Billy waited at the edge of the parking lot, his hands tucked into his nylon jacket. His red cross-trainers stood out in the dry grass and his orange t-shirt nudged from under his collar.

  She should do something, but Rysa couldn’t remember what. She should tell someone there was a Burner between the cars.

  He danced a little jig and ran across the median to the white clinic building on the other side of the asphalt.

  “Billy!” Dodging vehicles, she chased him into the lot. “Where’s my mother?”

  He stomped on the gravel in the rock-filled bank and cocked his head at the weird Burner angle. “Where’s the lizard king?”

  Lizard king? Something nagged at the edges of understanding. Something capable of bracing her against cracking into a million shards. Something to give her the will to stand on her own feet and know if she fell, it would catch her.

  But she couldn’t remember.

  “I’m supposed to tell you something.” Billy scrutinized the cars. An arm snaked out and he singed a print into the lustrous finish of a big pick-up. “They drive a lot of trucks in the mountains.” He sniffed and scratched at the tip of his nose. Little sparks popped off his skin. “Harder to steal a truck.”

  “Is my mom okay?” She walked forward and flared her hands as if she approached an angry dog.

  “They took Lizzy.”

  A memory tried to surface but slipped under Billy’s mumblings. The world felt edited and the edges of her context trimmed. She remembered her mom, and Billy, and that she was in Rock Springs, Wyoming. These were the central clues in her game of life. Nothing else registered.

  “Where is she, Billy?”

  His head swiveled, his red-tinged eyes dancing with hate. “Didn’t you hear me, Fate bitch? They took Lizzy.” Coiled like a snake, he seethed, as if waiting for her to twitch so he could strike. “Your mum begged us to take her. Said she’d help us get away if we helped her find the other one.” His face heated and he jabbed his fingers in the air as if he were firing pistols. “I told her they promised us Shifter snacks and she’d better get us at least three or I’d eat her! But they caught us and took Lizzy.”

  “Billy.” She held up her hands. “Who took Lizzy?”

  “The girl is creepy. Even I can tell she’s creepy.” He bopped on his toes and bent forward, his voice lowering. “You pissed off their pa. That’s what one of the boys said. I can’t tell them apart.” His gaze flitted across the lot. “The big horse-dog’s not going to snap my neck, is he?”

  What horse-dog? “Billy, please.”

  “They all thought together real hard and they saw your mum.” He twirled around. “They were real cocky about it. Rubbed your mum’s face in it, they did. Something about “practicing” and “focusing on consequences” and being “the best.” His fingers smoldered as he air-quoted the words. “Wankers.”

  He tapped a cheek and little wisps burst into the air. “We were with buffalo—bison—mean ugly cows.” He shrugged. “They’re big. Not tasty like you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “They’ll snap your mum’s back!” A light popped from his mouth when he gritted his teeth. “That’s what I’m supposed to tell you. Won’t kill her. Not technically.”

  The War Babies. And she’d followed Billy away from the hospital building.

  “I don’t like them.”

  The editing increased and her nasty struggled, its confusion growing. It should have control of her seers, of the tentacles, but it didn’t. It fought anyway, and it guarded something important.

  “Come here.” The pen felt as if it vibrated against her palm.

  “Why?” Billy scoffed but walked toward her.

  “Give me your hand.” She moved closer and held her breath against his Burner stench. It pricked her eyes, but she had a task to complete.

  Wiggling it out of his pocket, he jutted his hand forward. She twisted it so he could read her words when he looked down.

  She wrote: I will listen to Rysa. On his other hand: Bring Mira to Rysa.

  His eyes stared, unblinking, at the words. “Why the hell did you write on me?”

  “Get my mother, Billy. Bring her to me safe and alive.” Billy was the only one. No one else would help. No one knew where to search or cared to track or gave a rat’s ass about her mother’s spine. Only this Burner and his random loathing. Why had been trimmed, set aside as not important in this stage of the game.

  She pushed the pen into his palm and backed away.

  His lip curled. “I hate Fates,” he muttered. “I hate all of you.”

  “Billy, please.”

  His red eyes closed to slits. “I’m going to skin her. I’m going to eat her myself.” He pointed at the roof. “Tell your boyfriend I hate him, too.”

  The Burner’s head angled and he planted his feet. Darting across the hospital drive, he ran up the hill opposite the entrance and vanished around another building.

  Something changed. The overwriting grew stronger. The world flattened. Maybe this had always been her life. No color, no interest, the best of everything in the past. She dropped to the ground, her eyes blank.

  She should tell someone. But she couldn’t remember who, only that he was important.

  They stepped around a large vehicle next to the clinic outbuilding: two males and a female. Identical, with auburn hair and blue eyes, the men looked like Faustus. They moved in the same cadence as her uncle. But both were stocky and vicious, taut muscles obvious under their tight-fitting black clothes.

  The female walked at the point of their triangle, her dirty blond hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. It swung behind her like a hammer, its entire length wrapped in leather cording.

  Around their necks they wore a dagger split vertically in three, each segment wrapped in a silver coil. The female carried the middle, the segment cut around a jewel as red as a Burner’s eye. The two males carried the sides, each with one ha
lf of the blade guard, the dagger’s divided point aimed inward, at their present-seer sister.

  She didn’t look at Rysa. Her cloudy eyes didn’t focus, dead in their sockets.

  This Fate was blind.

  Yet the female knew where everything and everyone stood. She had a sense of the environment far beyond anything Rysa’s seers comprehended. Her ability blipped like radar as it touched Rysa. It squirmed through her uncle’s injection and replaced her world with the blind present-seer’s.

  Large guns poked from their legs and short swords from their backs, except for the male on the right, who held his blades. Blacker than anything should be in the bright sunlight, the blades reflected nothing. They sucked away all sense of their existence. Their appearance alone sliced a hole in the universe.

  The other male stared at the roof of the hospital, his arms crossed over his chest. He pulled a pair of expensive sunglasses from a pocket and covered his eyes as he studied the building. He pointed toward Rysa and tipped his head before muttering something in French.

  The female nodded to her brother and walked toward Rysa. “Venez, ma cousine, nous avons du travail à faire.”

  ‘Come, cousin, we have work to do.’

  34

  One male fiddled with her bracelet, muttering French insults when he couldn’t undo the leather’s knot. The other fired rapid syllables in his direction. The first grumbled and wrapped her wrists and all—chain, thong, and talisman—in duct tape before pushing her into an SUV.

  She frowned at her hands and watched the foothills pass by. She should have told someone she was leaving, but the world was in French now. No one would understand even if she tried.

  The woman’s unblinking eyes stared and she rested her palm on Rysa’s shoulder. Les Enfants de Guerre et la cousine. Sleepy, maybe Rysa would dream in French.

  The road bordered a broad swath of railroad tracks, the exit a long curve the driver took too fast. Rysa leaned into the blind present-seer. The three muttered to each other in strange inflections and vanishing consonants.

  Wizards and demons, maybe. ‘Magiciens et démons, peut-être.’

  Something pushed at the spike in Rysa’s mind and watched the woman, hiding from her, dodging and filling the holes through which the French world poured.

  “Are you my family?” Rysa asked. ‘Êtes-vous ma famille?’ She knew another way to talk, but she couldn’t remember what to do. Something about her hands.

  The man in the passenger seat stared for a moment before answering. “Oui.” ‘Yes.’

  The rail yard flickered. Shipping cars dwarfed the SUV, blotting out the sky in a clipped rhythm of dark thrown by a car, fire thrown by the sun into a gap—dark, fire, dark—as a train passed.

  Her entire life, she’d seen trains from a distance. Long, winding chains of unbroken power, they moved away without a care. A train carried what it wanted into the future and nothing could block its passage.

  The blind woman’s hammer-ponytail hung over her shoulder, precise and controlled. Her dead eyes looked at nothing but her face concentrated.

  Magiciens et démons. Et les dragons, peut-être.

  The woman clamped fingers around Rysa’s neck. “Stay calm.” Her resonance off, her voice sounded as if it called from inside a metal drum.

  The driver removed his designer sunglasses. Pulling the keys, he murmured to the woman and her grip on Rysa’s neck released. “We’re going for a ride on a train, cousin.” ‘Nous allons faire un tour sur un train, cousine.’ He pointed at a sleek, silver passenger car waiting not far away.

  The man in the passenger seat oozed out his door, his muscles tight and perfect for killing. He concentrated like the woman and Rysa felt clanging and electric static, like lightning striking metal, roll through the SUV.

  The driver watched Rysa in the rearview mirror, his lips pale from the pinch of his mouth. The man outside slapped the window and the driver swore, French vulgarity dropping like sand washing through gravel. The lock clicked open and the lightning man jerked Rysa into the slow strobing shade of the rail yard. She stared at his face. The moving shadows striped his feature in French.

  “Il peut nous trouver encore.” ‘He may find us yet.’ More lightning pounding across metal. “Les Dracas ne suivront pas. Elles sont en colère.” ‘The Dracas will not follow. They are angry.’

  Out of the SUV, the blind woman cupped Rysa’s cheeks. “I cannot look while I hold her. She fights and I am fatigued.” Her fingers dropped and she clutched Rysa’s arm.

  “Hmmm…” The driver rounded the front of the SUV and a new thunder much like the other man’s clattered across the gravel, but it struck backward.

  Rysa should understand how they did these odd things, but the words eluded her, the concepts overwritten. Nothing worked and these three dragged her into dark-fire, dark-fire.

  “Les Dracos sont dans l'amour.” ‘The Dracos are in love.’ The man with the sunglasses pointed at Rysa and smirked, his scorn jutting his jaw forward.

  Les Dracos sont dans l'amour. Why did he point at her? She couldn’t remember who Les Dracos were.

  “Perhaps we use this, brother Metus? Non?” His sunglasses bobbed in his pocket when he crossed his arms.

  “We have orders, Timor,” the woman murmured.

  Metus’s shoulders wiggled and he adjusted the swords on his back. More ninja cowboy than French killer, he whistled as he hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his pants, his feet apart.

  “You wish to infuriate him more?” The lightning rolled from him again. “He is already a danger.” Metus clutched Rysa’s chin. “As, I fear, are you.”

  Why was she a danger? French spun around her. French words, French ways. But somewhere underneath, something fought to bring back Rysa.

  Timor shrugged. “I will check the crew.” He strode off, the hilts of his swords poking above his head. Normals stared, but he ignored them.

  “We leave as soon as possible.” Metus touched the woman’s cheek. “How do you fare, Adrestia?”

  She tapped Rysa’s shoulder. “She is strong, but I am stronger.”

  Adrestia seemed to struggle as if she lifted a heavy weight over her head. What if she dropped it? Would it shatter on the gravel, all the Frenchness falling from its surface like a candy shell?

  Maybe if Rysa yanked hard enough, Adrestia might drop the heavyweight candy jawbreaker with the en amour center.

  Metus nodded. “Yes, you are. You are stronger than all of us. You are stronger than our aunt, dear present-seer.”

  A constricted curve shaped Adrestia’s mouth, tightening her already taut cheeks. “And you are stronger than our father, dear future-seer.”

  Metus glowered over his shoulder at Timor.

  35

  Dragon sensed French. A word here, a sensation there, all in French.

  Les Enfants de Guerre snuck in using Faustus’s damage and Adrestia hijacked Rysa’s seers. They’d taken her from under his nose.

  The shattering threatened—the dissipation that threatened to drop both him and Dragon into the uncontrollable rending that he couldn’t—wouldn’t—let surface again.

  Ladon picked up his damned phone. Maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe a normal called in something. He shouldn’t mess with it while he drove, but if he adjusted the—

  The app pinged a hit: An unknown group with swords drove into the Green River Rail Yard. Rysa must have set it up. When, he didn’t know, but he gripped the phone, staring at the screen.

  Every emotion he felt for her flooded his body. He smiled.

  Tires squealing, they pulled into the Rail Depot parking lot. And there, behind the building, Ladon caught the glint of guns belted to legs and scabbards over shoulders.

  He and Dragon vaulted out of the van, Ladon strapping his own scabbards to his back as he ran. Dragon, invisible, scaled a rail car and jumped from the top to the next train.

  Ladon angled his shoulders and leaped forward. One boot slid across the greased metal of the coupler connectin
g the cars. Shifting his body weight with his other leg, he flipped midair and righted himself against gravity.

  He landed in a crouch halfway to the next line.

  The next train moved. His connection to Dragon oscillated as the train pulled away and the beast jumped from car to car. Ladon’s senses took in the precise angles and speed of the metal boxes. A smaller step, a slight pause, and he hurdled the coupling between two cars.

  His boot hit a safety bar and he launched himself with a twist. Rotating around the oncoming corner of the next car, he pulled his head and shoulder back. The dirty metal grazed his arm and a sudden sting clipped his skin. He landed, a small weld of blood appearing on his bicep.

  The beast vaulted from the top of the train car, his already blistering anger heated farther by Ladon’s injury. He landed half way to the next rail line, a deep growl rolling from his invisible form.

  The War Babies turned toward Ladon and Dragon in unison, their three-point triangle surrounding Rysa in front of a silver passenger car attached to the end of a waiting train.

  Metus raised his gun. Never a good shot, Metus’s aiming skills and future-seer abilities argued, as they did for many Fates. Ladon’s perception zeroed in on Metus’s hands. The Fate twitched and Ladon ducked, the bullet flying by his ear.

  Behind Metus, Adrestia pressed against Rysa’s back. Timor ran forward and pulled his gun, also aiming. The true threat, Timor’s weaponry skills outstripped both his father’s and his brother’s. Guns, bows, slingshots—the past-seer’s precision rivaled Ladon’s.

  But past-seers could not read what-is, or what-will-be. Dragon smashed Timor into the gravel. The beast whipped the gun over the rail car.

  Metus’s seer rattled—he targeted the space over Timor’s body.

  Ladon ran up the back of the SUV, one boot pushing against the window as the other landed on top of the vehicle. Reaching over his shoulder as he jumped, he lifted a short sword from the mechanical arms of his scabbard.

  Metus swung toward Ladon, the pulse of his future-seer rotating with him. Ladon twisted in the air, the bullet missing his side. One boot hit the hood of the SUV. He rammed the other into Metus’s breastbone.