The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  She’d dreamed a disconnected moment, one full of love and touching and Ladon’s joy, and right now, her present-seer seemed to think that her remembering a future-seeing dream from her past was a good idea in the present.

  Sometimes being a Fate gave her a headache.

  “When you were all over me?” Ladon’s frown turned into a smirk. He laced his hands behind his head and rolled his hips under hers. “I remember that.”

  She stuck out her tongue. “I saw you happy.” And not just regular happy, either. Happy as in full of zest for his life. She’d dreamed a man no longer entangled in his melancholy.

  Ladon curled his arms around her again as he sat up, to hold her on his lap. “You took care of that.” New kisses to her jawline followed.

  Behind them, Dragon snorted again, and a distinctive wave that could only mean Hurry up, I want to eat followed.

  Ladon groaned and rested his forehead on Rysa’s shoulder. “We’ll get you oranges,” he said.

  Dragon snorted yet again.

  Why was she remembering the dream now? They’d been pretty much having non-stop sex since the wedding. This moment was not unusual—nor did it completely match the dream.

  “You were wearing a t-shirt.” She’d threaded her hand under the dream-fabric.

  Moments like this—seers weaving around each other, déjà vu, remembering visions—meant something. They always meant something.

  But what? She flicked out her present-seer, but nothing danced up to the front of her mind. Stupid fog, she thought.

  Ladon chuckled. “I guess we’ll just have to keep practicing until I get it right, huh?”

  He didn’t seem to care about the dream. Dragon stood and sauntered off the bed, obviously not caring also.

  Perhaps the best route into the future was just to take it as it came to her.

  Rysa nipped Ladon’s shoulder.

  He flipped her around and laid her down on the bed. Gently, he stroked her cheek. “Finding you was the best thing that has ever happened to us.”

  “Oh, Ladon.” She pulled him down on top of her. Even with the hell of her activation, and the terrors of being separated from his beast, they still wanted her with them.

  She was their route into the future. Maybe that was the reason for the déjà vu. Maybe, right now, she needed to see his joy across all the dimensions of time and space.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, and did her best to share her own happiness with her new husband and his dragon.

  Chapter Four

  Vibrations worked themselves up the legs of Derek’s sawhorses and into the clamped-down panel of the nursery door. The wood bounced ever-so-slightly and the beginnings of the Legion insignia he had started this morning rocked.

  He glanced at the entrance to the dragon’s nesting shaft behind the massive bed he shared with Anna and Anna-Dragon.

  A low-frequency rumble echoed through two doors connecting the shaft to the apartments.

  Derek grinned. Newlyweds were newlyweds, no matter how long immortal one of them might be.

  A new call stretched from the shaft, this one moving distinctly away from the neighboring apartment and into the space where Derek worked.

  His wife’s Dragon attempted to orient not only to Anna, but also to him.

  I am here, lovely, he pushed even though he knew she could not hear his response.

  Derek set his chisel on top of the nursery addition’s plans, and arranged his hammer and tape measure in the center of his work table, so that they were safely out of the way.

  Another call pushed outward from the shaft, but this one in a sort of flickering, sweeping way. His lovely Dragon had worked up some specific plan with the good doctor Torres to test if she could “find” Derek. The new call structure must be part of their scheme.

  Derek checked his watch. He dutifully wrote down in his prescribed notebook the time and “space”—the shape and feel—of Dragon’s attempts to connect to him.

  There had been long talks about the new and Aiden Blake’s corpse, and engineering, and dragon-human communications. Anna-Dragon was convinced, even though Derek remained invisible to all Fates and impervious to all Shifters, that since he could hear her and her brother, that they should be able to hear him.

  Brother-Dragon could sometimes hear Rysa. So why could neither beast hear Derek? He kept the data she asked him to keep, and did his best to note all details even if he did not see how they could be relevant. But he was not the scientist here, nor did he design this study. He would not hinder any advancement by interfering with data collection.

  Both beasts found it an interesting challenge, though to be honest, Derek could live without the constant mental poking by two bored dragons.

  Though from the last call, he doubted his wife had dragon-chatter logistics on her mind. Not after her dragon fully awakened to the love-rumbles flowing from the other apartment.

  He closed his eyes and listened, and waited for his lovely Anna-Dragon.

  Derek, she pushed. I am awake. After a pause, a wave meaning “cuddle time” followed.

  He wiped his hands on the towel hanging on one of the sawhorses. A shower would be nice. Sawdust clung to his arms and face. He probably smelled no worse than he did when Anna went into the nesting shaft two hours ago, but it would be nice to not deal with the grit.

  The drapes of metallic red, gold, blue, and silver fabrics hanging over their bed swayed. Derek dropped the towel on the wood panel, but not on the carving. “What do you think, my lovely?” he waved his hand over the work.

  A shimmering line of ocean-like blues and greens moved from the tip of his Dragon’s nose, over her crest, down her long, strong neck, over her sides, and to her tail. She flicked the tip just as her shimmering settled, and for a split-second she looked as if her eleven-foot body ended with a sparkler.

  She rocked from one front foot to the other, then nudged his side before looking over his shoulder. You finished the other panels while I slept? she pushed as she sniffed at the wood. This is the new one?

  “Yes.” The door was to have three panels. This one, with the insignia design, was the largest.

  She rocked backward onto her hindquarters before waving her head in a dragon nod. It is perfect, she pushed, then followed with a brief mental cathedral flash of a concept Derek could only label as “competency.”

  He knew that would be the end of her compliments, at least for this work. She had declared her approval of and her trust in not only his woodworking abilities, but also his ability to organize the creation of a perfect, safe, and inspiring home for their new nestling.

  Her simple acceptance of his addition to their environment felt as important as his quiet moments with Anna. As important as the touches and gestures, the smiles and laughs, the hugs and the calm that came with human expressions of love.

  Dragon’s acceptance carried a sense of process, as if the act of adding this moment to her mental cathedral of “competency” deemed it worthy.

  She lifted her head and very quickly pushed her updated concept to her brother in the other apartment.

  Come, she pushed. Human missed you. She motioned toward the bed.

  Derek was sure she had done the same thing with him in the past. That she had taken a memory of an act he considered simple and literally added it to the dragon language she shared with her brother. But this was the first time she had done it in such an obvious and specific manner.

  Anna sat on the edge in her black tank top and her black yoga pants, a pillow under her bottom and her legs crossed in a meditative pose. She smiled, bit at her lip, and curled her finger suggestively.

  He walked toward the bed. “How often does she do that?” he asked.

  Anna looked him up and down and did nothing to hide her desire for his attentions. “Do what?” she asked.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but realized he did not have the right words to fully describe what he wanted to say. To his wife and beast, Dragon’s response was their normal way
of living. Both Anna and Ladon had blind spots in their processing—not voicing color descriptors, certain issues with names, a lack of awareness of certain vulnerabilities, to name a few—and he suspected he just experienced another.

  Speaking of Dragon’s language, also, would probably change the mood of the moment, be a distraction for sure, and he would rather snuggle than talk dragon philosophy, anyway.

  “Never mind,” he said. He rubbed Dragon’s snout as she moved by. Perhaps he should talk to the young people about this first, anyway. Rysa might have insight, as might Gavin Bower. “It’s not important.”

  The last two weeks had been good for Anna—she had rested, as he asked. She had also taken to answering Sandro Torres’s questions and had participated in many of his tests to monitor little Alexei, though she had been strict with the doctor about what records could and would be kept.

  Her belly now clearly showed her pregnancy. Her wavy black hair had grown out enough she had taken to braiding it flat against her head, but she still wore two pigtails at her hairline, mostly, he suspected, because he had said he liked it that way.

  The human half of his wife pairing had added one of his small preferences to her human concept of love.

  Derek dropped to his knees in front of Anna. He curled his arms around her waist and he laid his head over her heart.

  They had been together since the end of World War II. They survived multiple attempts by the Seraphim to steal him away, and all the changes to both his body and hers.

  Dragon curled behind her humans, and set her head next to Derek’s arm.

  “I am happy,” he said, and stroked her crest.

  Anna kissed the top of his head. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and she did not let go. “We have never been happier.”

  It is true, Derek.

  Anna tugged on his t-shirt. “Come share your sawdust and sweat with me, husband.”

  Derek smiled as he pulled her onto the bed. “Aye, wife.”

  Time to enjoy the moment.

  Chapter Five

  Ladon squinted as he tapped at the dragon-sized tablet computer’s screen. He held it in much the same way he would have wielded a Norse shield—strap around his forearm, bicep tense, elbow bent. Unlike a shield, though, the tablet faced inward.

  Harsh colors gushed from the damned thing no matter how he nudged the settings. The light pooled around his finger and flooded across his chest and arms, and raged against the soothing, organic glimmer of his dragon.

  At least the tablet didn’t fill his head with the incessant, high-pitched whine that came with most connected devices.

  Ladon leaned against the pillows he’d stacked along the bed alcove’s rock wall. The tablet pushed noticeable heat through the silk sheet covering his naked thigh. It flowed down his leg to his calf and was not as pleasant as the cave’s many hearths, or the smooth touches of his woman and his dragon.

  Over his many lifetimes, he’d built towns from nothing. He’d saved more people than he’d hurt. Yet the sands of his life had smothered him centuries before the fall of the Empire. His reasons to be grateful had turned into mirages of themselves long, long ago.

  It took disconnecting from and reconnecting to Dragon to realize that he’d spent most of his long immortal life inside a reflection of himself.

  Ladon swiped through yet another page of text on Dragon’s giant tablet.

  If it had not been for Rysa and the Legion, we would have died, Human, the beast pushed.

  Dragon rested with his limbs under his belly with his tail wrapped around his body. He looked like a giant, glowing cat tucked into the corner near the foot of their bed. He’d surrounded himself with a heap of colorful, shimmering pillows as well, and seemed happy to rest away the last few hours of the night here in their quiet apartment.

  True, Ladon pushed. Once again, they’d been lucky.

  Lucky to have the family they had—and the wife who now slept next to Ladon’s leg.

  And lucky, also, to now see the truth of his past mirages.

  When had he fallen into his melancholy? Perhaps it happened when Fates murdered his sister’s daughter. Perhaps it descended fully onto him the night he and the beast spread open their wounds and bled out a rampage onto the countryside of Gaul.

  Or perhaps it happened before he and the other Progenitors awoke under the olive tree. Not that he would ever know; the time before the tree was nothing more than an amorphous, colorless fog, as it was for Sister, and for both dragons. Dunn and Janus, in the few early times they’d spoken of it, expressed the same exact description.

  They had no childhood memories, no knowledge of how they came about their training, or why they awoke the way they did. After a few centuries, the mystery lost its luster, and they’d all settled into their long lives. But every once in a while, Ladon wondered.

  He swiped at the text on the tablet again. He’d leave the science of the long immortal to Dmitri’s people. Right now, his new, more immediate mystery took priority.

  He’d asked Sandro, who had provided a theory and appropriate documentation.

  “Electroconvulsive Therapy: Side Effects and Benefits” one of the scrolling titles read. Several sub-articles included photos of random men and women, all anesthetized, all with what looked like wands next to their temples. One article was titled “Electroconvulsive Therapy versus Various Drug Implementations for Major Depression in Males Ages 18-35.” Another read “Non-responsive Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Men: Is Electroconvulsive Therapy the Answer?”

  Sandro determined that Ladon’s body held itself at “adult prime.” Roughly speaking, biologically, Ladon was a fit, healthy twenty-seven-year-old. Also biologically, he fell in the middle of all the test groups in the articles.

  And, it seemed, the seizures he had experienced while separated from Dragon—and the electrical flux of their reconnection—had laid upon his brain the same stimuli as the so-called “Electroconvulsive Therapy.”

  He’d been literally shocked out of his melancholy.

  He set the tablet down on the blankets and rubbed at his eyes. It was late. He should sleep. Rysa told him looking at screens too late at night wasn’t good for him, anyway.

  How do you deal with this thing? Ladon pushed to Dragon. The tablet was the beast’s toy and built specifically for him and his sister. It weighed a good fifteen pounds and glowed like a night-luminescent poisonous bug.

  The same as you, Human, Dragon pushed. The beast snorted out a small flame. I tap to open files and drag my finger to change the speakers’ volume. One of his giant claw-hands appeared and he moved a finger through the air to accentuate his point.

  Ladon smiled. The beast and his sister were nothing if not practical.

  Dragon folded his arm under his chest once more and stretched out his neck to rest his massive head next to Rysa’s sleeping body.

  The non-whining tablets came as part of the beeping, chugging, newly-installed medical equipment and were mostly configured for dragon talons and eyes. Other than the glare, Ladon didn’t mind. The beasts had already spent twenty-three centuries living in a world configured for humans. Ladon would never begrudge the beast his individual comfort.

  Nor would he begrudge his wife’s wish to delay their real honeymoon until after she finished her final semester at her university.

  Dragon snorted. I doubt Rysa’s return to her studies will lead to a decrease in sex for you, Human.

  He hoped not. He liked to feel his love’s skin and to listen to the rhythm of her heart. He enjoyed the quiet moments and the sharing and his wife’s responses to his body. How could such intimacy not result in lovemaking? Especially when Rysa welcomed every opportunity to deepen their connection with wide open arms and an enticing wiggle of her hips.

  When she wanted his touches—all of his touches—the world brightened. The air smelled fresh. Their olive tree rustled with the melodies of the songbirds in its branches. For the first time in centuries, the cave—the entire world—sho
wed him a path forward that he wanted to walk.

  Every day, every hour, every moment, with his beloved and his beast.

  He could get out of bed in the mornings now. He had a reason to enjoy his days. He’d escaped from the bright glare of his melancholy’s mirror.

  Rysa sighed in her sleep, her elegant female shape covered by their soft blankets and outlined by the warm, real glow of the fireplace tucked into the corner at the back of the bed, next to the entrance to Dragon’s nesting shaft. The fire snapped and crackled. A spark wafted upward to vanish into the cave’s chimney structures. They kept the flames low and contained, but they were enough to heat the entire rock surface of the alcove—up the wall next to the nest entrance, out along the wide ledge between the fire and the bedding, and under the bed—and were one of the reasons for the cave’s winter comfort.

  Rysa slept angled away from Ladon, her face shielded by a heap of pillows from the tablet’s glare. Her smooth, round backside was close enough that if he dropped his knee to the side, he could rub the entire length of his outer thigh against the sweet curve of her lower back.

  Ladon tossed the tablet toward Dragon and a thump rolled through the mattress. Rysa sighed again, but didn’t wake.

  Dragon grumbled but unfurled enough to retrieve his toy; the screen flared bright for a second, then dropped into darkness as he turned it off. He gently deposited it on the ledge that surrounded the bed.

  Their olive tree shimmered with a ghost light, as did the sun-reflecting mirrors in the ceiling, but the only light of any intensity now flowed from the fire and from the beast.

  Dragon dropped his head to his pillows again. He darkened the background colors of his hide as he wove more night-like tones along his sides and over his plaited ridges. The spinning swirls of color traveling from his nose to the tip of his tail slowed, contracted, and brightened, transforming from his resting water-and-forest state into a brilliant, gleaming hive of small comets, stars, and galaxy-like spirals.