“She’s with the Dracos. I…” Another cough. “They followed the Burners. They—I told you to fuck off!” She hit someone. A garbled man’s voice yelled at her. He sounded British.
“Who, Mira?”
“My daughter. I just dialed, Andreas. I don’t have my talisman. I didn’t use my seer. But I dialed and you answered and you have to help. Please, this once. She’s not like me. She’s nothing like her uncle. She’s good, Andreas. And…” Another cough. “She’s with him. They both need you. Please, Andreas! You are the Legio! I know….” Sounds of slapping popped across the connection. Mira whimpered.
“Mira, where are they?”
“I don’t know. I don’t! I can’t use my seer. I—” She screamed.
Andreas pulled the phone away from his ear. “Mira! Where are you!”
Memories and emotions swirled in the big man’s mind. Moments popped into his consciousness—a moment of damning. A time, much later, when he walked away from Ladon. Several centuries of a delicate dance with Fates to protect people he thought much more precious than his Legion duties, or his own life. Pitched battles with Fate families much worse than Rysa’s, the Jani. And fights with Rysa’s three cousins, Les Enfants de Guerre.
Other times, as well—moments of reconnection with Ladon and AnnaBelinda. Times of peace. Of family bonds.
All his years with the Draki Prime had taught him what to do. “Mira of the Jani, tell me right now, the what-is I need to know.”
“Go to Rock Springs. Stop it before it happens.” The connection clicked again. “I don’t have any more money. I—” Another pause. More sounds of slapping, but she continued her answer. “She balances Fate and Shifter, Andreas, but they’re… not going to… cooperate.”
Was she pulling from the future? How much burndust had she taken in? “Your daughter?”
“Her name is Rysa Lucinda de la Turris.”
De la Turris? Shock played through the big man’s body. “Mira, is her father Shifter?”
“Please, Andreas. It has to be different this time.”
The connection cut.
Andreas stared at the phone in his palm, weighing this moment. He had work here. Important work. But he had always been, and would always be, the Second of the Legio Draconis.
The dragons trusted him. Even to this day, they trusted him more than any of his own family did. And this time, he’d stop a terrible mistake before it happened.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rysa sat up. Ladon slept fitfully on one side of her, and rolled with each bump of the van. Blood streaked his face and caked in his wavy black hair. It had dried his t-shirt into a stiff armor around his chest.
Dragon rested on the other side, his hide dim and his patterns slow. How much longer Andreas’s calming pheromones would keep him sedated, Rysa couldn’t guess. Her seers didn’t really want to cooperate.
She fingered the talon around her neck. The duct tape covering the side visible to the outside world frayed around the edges and little bits of stickiness pulled on the skin of her neck. She rubbed at a particularly sensitive spot, wondering why she didn’t just heal herself.
But she knew. She’d drained her abilities saving Ladon and Dragon. Her reserves needed time to rebuild. Which was also why her seers sputtered.
It almost felt like when she had the wrong talisman. Like she’d lost half of herself, and half of what was left had been cut away.
If that were true, she’d still have access to a quarter of her abilities. But her Fate-Shifter hybrid self wasn’t as simple as third-grade fractions. Once her healer activated, something changed. It wanted to be on all the time, but it pulled from the same well as her seers, and there was only so much power to go around. Right now, it had turned off, to help with the recharge.
She rubbed her hip, hoping she’d be able to turn it back on soon. Nothing was broken, she was sure of that, but something had pulled wrong. Carefully, she rolled down her sweats.
The bruise covering her hip had already turned a deep, nasty purple. She pulled the sweats back up. As long as Ladon and Dragon were okay, she’d live with the bruise.
Ladon sighed when the van bounced over a big bump. She stroked his hair, moving a curl off his forehead. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d let his hair grow longer than an inch, but on top, he had a good inch and a half going. She grinned, wondering how long it would be before she’d wake up one morning to a mohawk and him shrugging like a little kid while asking “What?”
She thought about it for a moment, imagining her gorgeous Ladon standing in the bathroom door, a towel around his waist and more of his black wavy hair in the sink than on his head.
She wouldn’t be mad. He’d look even hotter with a mohawk.
She stroked his head again. The true wonder of the thought wasn’t his chosen hairstyle, but that he’d choose to live with her. From how he’d reacted to her slip of the tongue when his wound opened, it seemed he planned to wake up with her every morning from now on.
Thing was, they didn’t know each other. Not really. They hadn’t yet gotten beyond the one-week point—the time in all her relationships when guys started pinching their lips and rolling their eyes.
Dragon blew out a small flame, but he didn’t move, instead staying against the wall of the van, his haunch up.
“I wonder what you think of all this, my wonderful beast.” She patted his hide, next to the wound. “Being that you’re my talisman. You’re kind of important, you know.”
A small flame curled from his lip, but he didn’t sign anything.
Rysa peered at his wound looking for bleeding or anything else that looked weird. Could a dragon get an infection? Should she clean the wound?
Maybe she should ask Andreas.
The van rocked, slowing and stopping for a road sign. Andreas had taken them south, first through Green River and then out onto one of the two-lane roads heading toward Utah. They drove and drove through high mountain desert and brush, sometimes through hills, sometimes close enough to mountains that Rysa saw peaks in the late afternoon glare.
AnnaBelinda drove ahead of them in Andreas’s big SUV. She’d dropped all the seats flat and a mound of dragon shimmered through the tinted back window.
Rysa plopped into the passenger seat and pulled on her seatbelt, and watched the dry bushes and purple sage go by outside.
The van smelled like blood and stale calling scents, not like old pizza and vodka the way it had when Ladon first found her. She’d popped open the roof vents before coming up front. Now, she rolled down her window.
“He’s asleep?” Andreas nodded toward the back. “The Great Sir rests?”
Andreas needed to teach her what he did to Dragon. The beast lay next to the sleeping Ladon, his head on his forelimbs and his hide calm as if Andreas had put him into a trance.
She nodded. The wound still oozed. She’d done everything she could, but she didn’t know dragon anatomy. Thank goodness Sister-Dragon had been willing to help. “Should I clean the wound?” She turned around and looked into the back. “I don’t know what to do.”
“He needs sleep or his haunch won’t heal.” Andreas glanced at the rearview mirror. “They don’t get infected, so I say leave it alone.”
And Ladon, too, probably. He’d stared at her the entire time she’d healed him with that weird, goofy look mixed in with his agony.
Familiar thoughts crept into her mind—he’s compelled. It’s not real. You blurted out a scary word and now he’s going to run!
Having seers whispering all the time had made her aware—very aware, actually—of the differences in all the little voices in her head. Her past-seer sounded like her, but deeper, as if she listened to herself as she pulled away. And it would hold up antique pictures, or make a moment smell musty, or add an unusual sound. If she had to describe it with one word, it’d be drama. Blazing, look-at-me, overacted drama.
Her present-seer, on the other hand, sounded as if a brand-new best friend who could complete he
r sentences had moved into her brain and now they were the best roomies ever, even if this new best friend loved to outline everything she saw with a thick, black marker. Sort of like having the super-friendly, perky goth-girl roommate.
The future, though, was different. The future overlaid and spit fully-formed moments into her perception. She interpreted. When she heard the future, it came fully as her own inner voice.
A little like her healer.
But as she’d started to listen to her seers, as she began to understand their different voices, she’d realized something—she had voices, too. The calm voice who smiled and only seemed to come out when she felt safe between Ladon and Dragon. The frantic voice who babbled and ran around but picked up on situations in an unconscious way. Her attention-flitting voice, who she was beginning to think might be a manifestation of her brain trying to knit things together. A sort of wordless integrator of what she saw and heard and felt and tasted, who babbled as it processed.
And then there was that other little voice. The one sounding very much like her. The one, she was pretty sure, that used to access her abilities when she was a child. It’d whisper Stop! Don’t do that. Do this. You shouldn’t have done that. And I told you so.
She’d blurted out a sentence about her future with Ladon and now that little voice was screaming—you stepped in it now. Rip off that bandage, Rysa. Open up that tender spot to the hot, foul air and see what happens.
“Are you okay?” Andreas’s big, beefy hand lifted off the steering wheel and landed on her forehead. Rough but warm fingers felt along her skin as if he’d touched a crystal goblet or a delicate figurine and wanted to make sure he hadn’t knocked it off the shelf.
He’d touched her all the way from the driver’s seat. Rysa pulled back. How long was his reach? “Hey!”
He glanced into the rearview mirror again but didn’t take his hand off her head. “You feel warm. Are you breathing well?” He leaned toward her, sniffing at her face.
The weird enthraller nose-twitching thing was starting to get on her nerves. Every time he did it, he looked like he’d just sniffed a dead mouse he’d found on the front step.
His hand snapped back to the steering wheel. His nose twitched again and he raised one eyebrow.
His entire forehead crinkled when he glanced at her sideways. She snickered. With the bald head, he looked like a grandfather. A perfectly bronzed, young, extremely handsome grandfather, but a grandfather nonetheless.
Andreas shook a finger at the windshield and the desert glare outside. “You’re de la Turris. Alessandro’s girl.” He sniffed the air again. “That means you’re five generations out from me on your paternal grandfather’s side.”
“What?” Was she descended from him?
The van hit a bump and rocked, but Andreas just grinned like the Cheshire Cat. “You carry enthraller abilities. You’re pumping out ‘surprised’ right now.” He shook his head, still grinning. “Where do you think they came from?”
“Does that mean all those assholes who attacked us—” She turned in her seat. “Is that flat-nosed asshole who attacked me like my cousin or something?” She’d puke if he was. Son of a bitch.
“Depends on how you want to define ‘cousin.’” Andreas shrugged. “Most Shifters don’t consider anyone who carries less than one-thirty-second of the same blood as ‘family.’”
“So that’s what…” Rysa held out her fingers, counting off generations. “…great-great-great-grandpa?”
Andreas drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “At least. I didn’t recognize any of them. Vivicus is careful about who he recruits.”
“And you’re my…” She held up her fingers again. “…great-great-great-great-grandpa?”
“Yes.”
Rysa grinned. This wondrous friend of Ladon’s was her grandfather. Well, a grandfather. “I don’t look anything at all like you.”
A big, hardy guffaw rolled out of Andreas, but he caught himself and stopped, looking in the rearview mirror again. “Frankly, you look like your mother, with your father’s tones. They’re in your hair and skin. Your voice, too. Same beautiful features as Mira, same shape to you, but with the warm roundness and green eyes of your father’s family.”
A question popped into her head. “Dmitri—well, not Dmitri, the enthraller pretending to be Dmitri—told Derek that Lucinda was a Shifter who Ladon recognized. Someone who’d heard the dragons centuries ago.”
Andreas didn’t answer for a long moment. He adjusted the rearview mirror. “The woman in question was probably one of Vivicus’s wives. He’s had an… interest in your family since the mid-1400s.” He frowned. “She might have been an aunt. I don’t know.”
Rysa watched him for a moment and he glanced over, smiling more to be friendly than for any other reason.
“Why are you here?” she blurted out. She should be calmer, ask in a more socially acceptable way, but she needed to know.
“Your mother asked me to help you.” He scratched the back of his head in very much the same way Ladon did. “I owe her at least that.”
The dream flitted back into her mind. Her mom had called him while she was high on the burndust. “I’m the… balance?” Rysa didn’t quite know what “balance” meant for Andreas—or for her mom. It seemed like something only immortals understood.
In the back of the van, Ladon coughed. Rysa unhooked herself, her body responding faster than her mind could think. He needed her.
Andreas gripped her arm. “Look at me.”
She glanced back. “He’s—”
A blast of ‘clearheaded’ and ‘centered’ and ‘healthy’ hit her nose. She breathed it all in, filling her lungs to capacity—and all the little voices, all the ragged unevenness of her mind and body, smoothed out. Her perception cleared.
The calling scents Andreas breathed were different from Penny’s. More precise. ‘Healthy’ smelled more like a brew of underlying, nameless pushes to make her body regulate itself better.
And ‘centered’ felt like it was just for her.
“Thank you.” She’d have to ask him to teach her how to make calling scents like that. Though she might not be able to, since she wasn’t a strong enthraller.
“Hey, I know what that face means.” He followed it with a blast of ‘confidence.’ And one of his brilliant smiles. “You’re not the first woman I’ve dealt with.” He waved her off. “Go check on the Dracos. There’s a lodge outside the next town. We’ll stop there. Get the beasts some rest so they can fight.”
Rysa nodded. Hopefully, AnnaBelinda wouldn’t run off. Though frankly, she might be more of a problem if she stayed.
But with the blast of ‘confidence,’ Rysa’s shoulders loosened. Even if AnnaBelinda went on a wild mission to find Derek and left them behind, they’d be okay. Ladon had her. And they had Andreas.
She squeezed his shoulder. This huge man had a way she didn’t expect of putting her at ease. Guys his size were scary, though she’d never been that afraid of big men. Her father was six-three and big, like Andreas. Like, it seemed, most Shifter men.
Maybe that’s why she liked him. He was family.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rysa watched out the back window of the van as Andreas stopped at the lodge’s main building, a long and narrow rustic thing built from logs and what looked like mud. Only the front window glowed in the early evening light, and a sinewy old man, tanned dark and wrinkly by a genuine outdoor life, handed Andreas three keys before pointing up the road.
They’d turned off into the Flaming Gorge National Park just as the sun set. Andreas talked into his cell phone, his voice rising and falling.
Ladon coughed again. “He’s telling Sister where to turn off.”
His shirt crackled when he tried to sit up. Damned blood had dried hard. But he wasn’t bleeding anymore.
“Stay put.” Rysa fanned her fingers out over his chest but didn’t push. If he pressed against her too hard, he might rip something.
He wi
dened his gorgeous eyes, grinning all goofy again. “Yes, ma’am.”
She looked away. They should talk about what she said earlier. And AnnaBelinda’s insinuation. Sit down across a table from each other, Dragon cogent and with them, and talk it all out. Because if she was to spend her life as the Draki Prime, these were not the kind of working conditions any of them needed.
And her least of all. What if he really didn’t have a choice? Then what did I love you truly mean?
She needed to know. If she was going to lose him, it had to be for a damned good reason.
“Love?” Ladon’s fingers danced up her upper arm to her shoulder. He wanted to ask if she was okay—she could tell by how he held his head.
She felt his inevitable response bubble across her future-seer—Ladon stroking her cheek, his strong fingers gentle, his touch soft. He would pull her close. Kiss her lips. He’d taste perfect—of sun and masculinity and all the things that shouldn’t have flavor but, when his mouth touched hers, did. And he would whisper, his lips just below her earlobe, his body flush against hers and his arms—his wonderful, strong arms with his hard muscles and perfect grace—would wrap around her waist.
And he would say the three words that made her happier than she deserved to be.
She looked away. She might be nothing more than an addiction for him. That little bit of woman that made him feel oh so very good.
Could she live her life that way?
She knew that without Andreas’s supporting calling scents she’d be a puddle on the floor of the van right now, rocking back and forth like she had when she thought she was locked to the Burners. When she was sure she’d cause Ladon’s and Dragon’s deaths.
Andreas backed the van up against the door of one of the lodge’s cabins.
“I’m fine. I’m just tired, that’s all.” She didn’t like lying to him, but right now it was what she needed to do.
He ignored her push to keep him down and sat up. “I know you don’t want me asking if you’re having problems, but don’t hide it if you are. Dragon and I will be fine. You don’t need to heal us anymore. When he wakes up, he’ll be as good as new, right?”
Flux of Skin (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 2) Page 17