Flux of Skin (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 2)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Why did Sister do this?

  Ladon’s memories flickered—rousing from one dream into another dream. The beast’s waking flux pressing down on his mind. He’d felt hunger. Felt pain. Hot, burning pain. He’d kicked the bed and it had skidded against the door.

  Rysa had tried to calm him, but he dreamed of his wars.

  And he terrorized her.

  Ladon roared as he dropped back onto his knees. He dug his hands into the gravel, clenching the stones so tight his bones strained. His fingers bled.

  They were alone out here in the dust and rock and blood seeped around his knuckles. He sensed only his dragon. “Where are they?” Where are Sister and Sister-Dragon? “Where the hell is Andreas?”

  He couldn’t think, but he knew they were wasting time. What would Vivicus do to Rysa? Would he slice her, terrorizing and laughing as one of his healers put her back together? Sell her to the highest bidder? Would he have an enthraller make her think she was Seraphim? Take her as a wife?

  Would he kill her mentally, if not physically?

  They were long gone, away from the cabins, into the wild. Unlike Salt Lake City, this time Ladon didn’t know where.

  Each time a new threat came at Rysa, it got closer than the threat before it. Each swipe at her person or her soul connected, first leaving scratches, then cuts and bruises, and now, Ladon feared, a gaping wound.

  A chuckle rose from the gravel, alongside the step to Andreas’s cabin. “Nice ass, douchebag.”

  The flat-nosed Shifter, the one who threatened Rysa, rolled over onto his back. He wheezed and groaned, his face crunching up into a mask of pain, and he held his side.

  Ladon’s disorientation swirled tight around the man and he closed down like an iris. Focus resurfaced. This Shifter would provide answers.

  Flat-nose pushed himself up onto all fours but groaned and dropped back down. “Fucker broke my ribs.”

  Dragon leaped over Ladon, a flame rolling from his open mouth and down his sides, blending with the fire patterns playing over his hide.

  Flat-nose screeched out a wet, high-pitched noise so rough he spit blood. Dragon lifted him off the gravel, talons digging into his sides, and the bastard’s sounds abruptly stopped.

  “Don’t kill him!” Ladon yelled. Not yet.

  “Don’t kill me!” Flat-nose wheezed again. “Look, man, I could handle your fucking neck twist but your damned dragon’s going to gut me!”

  Put him down. He won’t answer questions if he’s dead.

  Dragon dropped the Shifter on his side, from three feet up. All his breath puffed from his ugly face in a cloud of halitosis. He groaned and rolled around on the gravel and clutching his side.

  “Fuck you and your fucking dinosaur!” Flat-nose wheezed again. “Put on your pants! Jesus Christ, no one wants to look at your dangly bits.”

  Kicking with boots did more damage than barefoot. Ladon landed his heel on the other side of the bastard’s ribcage anyway. More bones snapped.

  “Where are they going?” Ladon bellowed. He’d rip this man’s arms from their sockets.

  Dragon bellowed too, blowing fire at the son of a bitch.

  “I don’t know anything! I don’t!” He rolled onto his side as he coughed and spit out more blood.

  One more kick, one placed in the correct position, would snap his head against the concrete step of Andreas’s cabin. If Ladon kicked hard enough, the back of this Shifter’s skull would split like a melon.

  Dragon pranced, and his talons dug into the ground in long, grinding pulls. His hide now simmered—colors like sparks off a gasoline fire flitted in zigzags.

  Ladon no longer picked up words from the beast. Dragon no longer translated into linear human language. Instead, he dumped rolling, multidimensional constructs into Ladon’s head. Hate took on shape. Pain, a very specific weight. Vengeance, a structure as intricate and complicated as any cathedral.

  Flat-nose grunted. “The Tsar’s in Branson, okay? I don’t know what they’re going to do to him! I don’t know where he’s taking the Fate, either!” More blood coughed onto the gravel. “First he’s all ‘get the sweet thing.’ He figured he could get good cash for her and maneuver that Russian prick Pavlovich into doing something stupid at the same time.

  Flat-nose shook his head. “Then your enthraller shot him and he wakes up and he’s all about ‘final trials’ and ‘God’s reward.’ We all thought he was just doing his Bishop babbling because he does that shit. But he shifted into your ugly dangling ass and it was fucking creepy. He started acting like you. I swear he even smelled like you. We all figured he wants to keep the sweetie for himself.”

  He coughed again. “Can’t blame him.”

  The terrorizing wouldn’t stop. She wasn’t Derek. Ladon didn’t know if she’d survive it.

  Ladon kicked Flat-nose again. “You ever touch her again…” And kicked once more. “…I will bleed you dry.” Another kick. This time, the man smashed into the concrete step. Ladon bent down and wrapped his hands around his neck. “I will hang you by your feet and I will set you on fire.”

  Flat-nose’s eyes bulged. He stopped wheezing.

  Ladon dropped back, on his knees, his face turned up to the sky. Nothing flickered through his mind. Nothing new. Only the old. Responses returned, things he’d long ago buried. Actions only the rough and the vicious used.

  He’d found a woman who wanted to help him live the way he wanted. She would help both him and his sister in this new life. She’d love him even if he occasionally failed.

  The world didn’t need him. The world needed her.

  He was about to lose another love to villagers with pitchforks. She would suffer wounds that could never be healed.

  Ladon knelt on the gravel, naked to his core, wondering if now was the time for him to die.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Once, long ago on the edges of a collapsed empire, Ladon kissed a wife. He stood between her and his war steed, his armor clanging like the bells of the village chapel when he stroked her cheek. She smelled of the morning’s gatherings—sweet berries and lavender and the cool water of their settlement’s stream.

  He loved her with more fierceness than he’d loved any other, and as he passed a millennium on this earth, he’d loved many. As the centuries moved beyond her, he would armor his heart with that fierceness, walking the lands with walls around his soul. Tall walls, ones encircling every touch and smile. He’d live centuries of a life as hollow as a dead log fallen in the wood.

  The beast stayed back from the wife, for his lights made Ladon’s love stutter and cringe. But Dragon understood that his human needed this female’s caress just as much as the beast’s connection. Each night, she lay flush against his human’s body and he breathed easy. She centered his mind and calmed his quiet fears, the ones only the beast knew. So the beast did his best, even if he was not included.

  An envoy had come the day before—Burners overran the new town nestled into the curves of the river Seine. Ladon must go. Only a dragon would bring the needed help, and his sister was too far away, across the Channel, in Britannia. So Ladon kissed a wife, touching her cheek with leather-gloved fingers, promising that he and the men would return in no more than a month’s time.

  Only one month.

  But one became three. He sent word home many times, and word returned to him—all was well.

  The wife did not tell him in the letters, maybe because she could not write herself, and wanted the news to come only from her. Maybe she did not want him to worry. He would have returned home immediately, if he’d known.

  The beast, who was not allowed near, had not perceived the news before they journeyed to the town on the Seine. The beast did not know.

  Ladon’s Prime Fates did not think to ask the right questions of their seers.

  So Ladon had not known.

  There’d been rumors of a traveling priest, a man who emptied his mind and filled it with God’s word anew each morning, who came to villages and spoke of tr
uth and trial. But he was a good man, one who offered solace, and he never cried “demon!” He never whipped the normals into any kind of frenzy.

  He’d never torn a world to nothing.

  When it happened, Timothy, Ladon’s Prime present-seer, rode away, roaring of his brothers’ blindness. But the act had been as random as a Burner, and Daniel, Ladon’s seer of the future, had not known.

  They knew nothing. And they rode.

  Dragon cut her down from the parapet. He cradled her charred body. The villagers, guided by the mad priest, had done more than burn her. They’d cut the babe—the babe Ladon had not known of—from her womb. She’d been six months along.

  Ladon remembered nothing of what happened after he’d seen the small body in the ring of stones, though an occasional shard of sensation would come from nowhere, inserting itself into his mind as if someone had sliced his eyes with glass. He heard his beast’s roaring flames as a village burned. He felt the blood on his bare chest or the swords he swung, one in each hand. He tasted bile. He saw hate.

  To this day, those shards still appeared occasionally, bursting into his life in places and at times that made no sense, and at times when they did.

  How many days passed before his sister came, riding from the coast, Andreas by her side, Ladon did not know. She dropped her armor to the moss and wildflowers surrounding what had been their settlement in the sweetness of Gaul, a hand around his forearm, and she led him to the stream. He remembered each moment metal struck soft ground or hard rock. Each thud or plink, each glint as a piece caught the last rays of the setting sun.

  His sister stepped into the stream with him, her tunic flowing around her small frame, the fabric flush to her high breasts. His sister, his family, washed from his shoulders the gore of normals with her delicate hands, but with her wrists and forearms still wrapped in her vambraces. Even in this moment, even as her brother blinked unknowing and lost, she tensed for war. She protected him.

  He dropped his head to her shoulder, but he did not shed a tear. His men walked into the cold stream with them—Daniel, Timothy, Marcus, and the others, some Shifters, some normals. Men who also lost family. Men who, like Ladon and his beast, understood a blade. They washed, all bare-chested, all as bloody as Ladon.

  Andreas followed them into the water, though he’d not been part of the vengeance. He became, though, very much a part of the forgetting.

  Water flowed around Ladon’s waist but it did nothing to wash away the stains.

  Nothing at all.

  Ladon stared at the wax lodged in the swath of his remaining chest hair. It pulled when he moved, limiting his motion. The canister lights’ glare reflected off the pale ceramic counter. His flesh looked as flat as the wax.

  Dragon would not come in. He dug his talons into the roof and watched the desert. He’d take any prey too stupid to come near—human or animal.

  The steak knife scraped over Ladon’s chest, taking the hair patch by patch. Sharp enough to do the job except for the tip Ladon had jammed into the kitchenette table, it did what he asked of it.

  He’d opened the vodka. Twisted off the top and set the bottle next to the sink. The little bathroom smelled more of acerbic distillations than the whole sweetness of desert sage. It reeked of the old and the new fell away, vanished from Ladon’s life.

  The knife scraped. The wax fell into the sink, hitting like ice. Dead ice, with neither cold nor heat.

  Dragon pushed to Ladon fully formed structures of action meant to cause nothing but death. He pranced overhead and the cabin creaked, then rattled. The beast kept his head low and his hide the screaming fire of Hell itself.

  The steak knife scraped over the skin of Ladon’s skull, taking the first strip of hair. A little vodka on the blade and it glided until the liquor evaporated from Ladon’s skin as vapors visible under the harsh vanity lights.

  He bled only a little. Ladon was good with blades. Blood welled up and he pressed on the new cut over his left eye, feeling the sting. Welcoming it.

  Drinking the vodka would achieve one kind of numbness. Dumping it on his head, another.

  He and the beast didn’t lose to a priest this time. No, this time they lost to a Bishop. This time, no one would come to take him to the stream. No one would offer a shoulder and wash the blood from his body.

  Ladon set down the bottle.

  His hair filled the sink under the glaring lights of the bathroom’s first little room. The one before the second, with the tub, where he’d told Rysa he knew how to be a good husband. Her husband.

  How many times had he watched her almost die? In the claws of her malfunctioning abilities or at the hands of people who wanted him dead? Each time he’d watched her almost die had been an omen. Each one another warning that he wouldn’t be enough. He’d never been enough.

  The knife sat next to the vodka, its blade against the cool glass. He knew where to stab his hand to do the least damage. Or the most.

  He knew where and how to slice his neck to make it fast. Or slow. Dragon would be free of him. He’d no longer be the beast’s leash.

  You will not, fired from the beast as a flash so blinding it hurt worse than any cut Ladon could make. You will not entertain these thoughts, Human.

  Ladon didn’t respond. With the beast’s admonishments, a cloud pushed through into Ladon’s perception. The knife and the vodka looked as if mist hung over them.

  Dragon had learned long ago how to compel Ladon, if he needed to. And Ladon, long ago, had learned to recognize the act.

  We have work to do. I will not tolerate your moods. Dragon’s seething filtered down through the roof like sand sifting through slats. He would not allow Ladon to mess up his vengeance. We will go to Branson and you will cut from the Seraphim the information we need.

  Rysa would have married him. His beautiful love, his modern woman, would have taken his hand and said yes and consented to be his wife. His true wife. The one who took away all the other hurts. Rysa, the one he needed as much as—maybe more than—he needed the beast. The one the beast needed as much as he needed his human.

  Rysa, the best thing that had ever happened to them, Human and Dragon.

  Branson fired from Dragon. Cut there.

  Where Derek was. They could act on this portion of the beast’s vengeance. So Ladon dressed.

  When he drove from the circle, the van bumping over the gravel and down the drive, Ladon held no illusions about what was to come—one Dragon would come through this, with one Human and one Human’s mate, even if that Human and her Dragon had set into motion much of this chain of events.

  Ladon stared out at the high desert, his sunglasses poised on his nose. He’d keep his thoughts on his sister. Over the centuries, she’d suffered more than he had.

  He’d remind himself of that fact when he sliced Derek from the Seraphim’s grip, instead of Rysa.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “Why do you wear it with the duct tape on the outside?” Vivicus fingered Rysa’s talisman. The son of a bitch had tied it around his own neck after he’d punched her to unconsciousness. “Nothing else is like it. It’s one of a kind.”

  She did her best to ignore him and to concentrate on Branson and how she was going to get away as soon as she had Derek in her sights.

  He didn’t seem to want to hurt her, either. At least not right now. So she batted her eyes and looked as submissive as she could muster. Her seers continued to whisper, feeding her little things to say, or little ways to move to make him feel comfortable. She listened, and she hadn’t panicked, or lost attention, and she’d stopped being afraid of him about fifteen minutes after she woke up.

  He drove the cushiest, swankiest SUV she’d ever been in. She sat in the passenger seat with her wrists tied together on her lap and a silk gag over her mouth. Or she suspected it was silk. It actually felt nice against her lips. He’d pulled it down as soon as she woke up, most likely so he could argue with her. He seemed to like arguing.

  The SUV smelled of cinn
amon and expensive coffee. Not stale coffee, either. Nice, fresh French roast with a dash of spice and caramel. She didn’t see a cup, but the son of a bitch must have a source somewhere.

  The car purred like a big happy lion, sparkly and as clean as a showroom model, with soft leather seats and a billion cup holders. Gold-trimmed everything. The window tint darkened the sun, but not too much. Even it was perfect.

  Vivicus, who still wore Ladon’s face, had changed clothes. He sat in his high-end driver’s seat, driving gloves on his fake-Ladon hands, in a pair of gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses and the brightest, most obnoxious Hawaiian shirt she’d ever seen. Huge yellow hyacinths danced with green, orange, and blue parrots and maps of the islands, complete with hula dancers and tiki heads.

  All on Ladon’s body, with her dragon’s talon around his neck, the shimmering side out, taunting her.

  “You want some water? Some acetaminophen?” Vivicus hitched his shoulders as he drove. “Don’t want you moaning like a Reno hooker.”

  The weirdness of the scene left her speechless.

  Mostly. “Shouldn’t you be fearing God or something?” How was she supposed to be afraid of the ridiculous thing next to her?

  He hitched his shoulders again. “It’s not about fearing God, young lady, it’s about hearing God. There’s a difference.”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” At least Rysa’s whispering voices had a purpose—to keep her and Derek alive.

  “God sets greatness in our paths. It’s up to us to make the best of these amazing opportunities.”

  She stared at her talisman. Maybe she could enthrall him into giving it back now that they were in an enclosed space, but he’d been careful not to get close enough for her to try. And he had the AC blasting on high, blowing anything she breathed out into the back seat.

  “Hey,” she said. “Why don’t you put my talisman back on me? I’m one of a kind, too. We’re even more special when we’re together.”

  Fast like Ladon, his hand came off the steering wheel and he poked a fingerless-driving-glove-clad finger in her face. “Do not mock me, you little Fate bitch!” He swung to slap but missed when she pulled back. “Do you know who I am?”