The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Perhaps the glass in his neck gave him more than a channel into new-space. Perhaps, this one time, one of the bits and pieces should pay attention to its own nudges on that grand, self-playing game board.

  Intrepid, this is Sentinel Four, the chatter whispered in his head. We have resonance. We’re picking up echoes.

  The background buzz increased. Billy pinched his eyes closed.

  Seemed that somewhere out there in the could-have-been-is-not-might-still-be, six little Sentinels talked to their mama bear—and once again, to him.

  Copy that, Sentinel Four.

  Ismene appeared clueless. She’d wrapped herself in her own drama and was now more blind than the bird with that Fate named Daniel riding around in her head.

  Static buzzed through the chatter, then a barely discernible whisper: … is the Dragonslayer. All Sentinels launched! Godspeed, my friends. Do what you must! May you and Odin save us all…

  The static vanished. Intrepid, this is Sentinel Five. Did you get that?

  Billy sure did.

  Jesus, Intrepid. It’s real?

  Sentinel Five, this is Intrepid. We got it. It’s real.

  Billy pushed Ismene forward. What else could he do? “Time to find granddad, dove.”

  Still clueless to the chatter, Ismene nodded. “Yes. Our Progenitor.”

  Causal loop anomaly registered at tee minus six eight to full Sentinel synchronization, the Intrepid voice said.

  Causal loop anomaly? What the fuck was a causal loop anomaly?

  The flickering of the multiple Rysas returned. The sense of the boy Rysas, and the blonde Rysas. Of the Rysas with attitudes. She was with him, though she was not. She was here, but she was not. The crag looked the same. The crag smelled the same. Ismene blinked and paid no heed. Yet Billy felt the ghost of a might-have-been Rysa with the honed blade of Burner fire.

  “How many times do you play the game before you learn how to win?” dark Rysa whispered. Then she vanished.

  “What the…” He looked up the crag. They were alone out here. Just Billy and Ismene. Just the promise of their Progenitor.

  Anomaly marked, repeated all six Sentinels.

  Bits or pieces. Levers and levels. The game wouldn’t play if it wasn’t real. It wouldn’t kill children and destroy lives if it wasn’t real.

  And all Billy could think was that somehow, someone had just handed him a cheat code.

  The look Ismene gave him very clearly said one thing, and one thing only: I will incur favor from our Progenitor. I will have the glory I deserve.

  She had no fucking clue.

  He nudged her toward the top of the crag.

  Chapter Sixteen

  New-space Dragon’s Rock…

  In her dream, Rysa’s back slammed into iron-hard clouds. Metal vapors billowed and wiggled into her nose. They inched into her ears and filled her throat with acid grains. The clouds gripped her wrists with chains and pulleys and twisted knives into her skin. Her back bruised against the dust and left her kidneys savaged.

  An apparition rode the updrafts. It bit with dream teeth she felt but couldn’t see, and slapped with giant hand-claws that couldn’t possibly hit.

  She should fall toward the plateau below. Drop free of the clouds as her velocity accelerated her toward a version of the Dragon’s Rock that did not—could not—exist outside of new-space.

  Every cell inside Rysa’s body coiled against the onward, rushing speed. Every joint, every bone screamed. But the six-taloned dream apparition’s hands wrenched and she crashed against the clouds instead of against the Rock below.

  Glowing splatters rolled along her arms as acid droplets. Each drip adhered—to an elbow, a finger, the tip of her nose. The drops’ surface tension sucked at her skin but they weren’t shackled to the clouds by apparition hand-claws, like her. They fell.

  Below her, the splatters hit the Rock’s writhing shades and clung like dew. They blistered each shadow into a gray-brown sickness.

  Fire rained down from her skin onto the world below.

  Her dark Fate shrieked. That horrid version of Rysa with the smart-ass mouth, the woman who Rysa might-have-been but was-not, the talking rampage who took up residence in Rysa’s mind when her blade of new energy first manifested—that dark Fate wanted Rysa to accept what needed doing.

  Sometimes the echoes resonate with more clarity than the voice, her dark Fate whispered. Listen.

  An echo…

  … Sentinel Six, this in Intrepid. You are pppoint zerrrrro thhhrrreee ffffoooouuuurrrr…

  Then another echo, one distorted by a greater distance than the first. The same voice but riding a different wave through the what-was-is-will-be….

  Saaaavvvve ooouuurrrr ppppeoppppllle…

  I am the Ambusti Prime, little Rysa of the Draki, her dark Fate whispered. I’m the version of you who could not save Ladon and his beast….

  Her dark Fate wanted to unfurl and show herself. To be her truth. To be Rysa’s nasty, blazing, Ambusti Prime.

  The world needs me, not you. Somewhere in the clouds behind Rysa, her dark Fate picked at her fingernails with the tip of her energy blade. You’re the wrong combo, darling. Fate and Shifter. Wrong, wrong, wrong. An acid puff rolled off her blade. Wrong question. Wrong answer.

  Then the Ambusti Prime was there, right there in Rysa’s déjà vu dream of a dream she’d had before, right in front of Rysa in the burning clouds, so close their noses touched.

  Boom! Rysa’s dark Fate yelled.

  Then she vanished like the six-taloned apparition holding Rysa to this dreamed new place. Vanished into her echoed version of the Burning World.

  Below Rysa, on the plateau that was and was not the Dragon’s Rock, a man who looked too much like Marcus Drake not to be his brother watched Rysa hang in the death-raining clouds. Dark-haired and tall, he stood with the same posture as the past-seer, but this man’s shoulders were broader, and he wore a close-cut, thick beard.

  He flickered like a videotape ghost—like a computer-generated phantom in a horror movie. He jumped to the side, then back, then into an oddly-distorted, clay-like version of himself surrounded by shifting clicking walls of irreality, then back into the regal version of a man who could not possibly be here.

  Timothy Drake, her present-seer whispered. Marcus and Daniel’s brother.

  Slowly, he raised his hand, and just as slowly, he pointed at Rysa’s place in the sky above the burning world.

  Why was a dead man below her? Where was Ladon? Where was Dragon? The beast would catch her when she fell. He’d caught her many times already.

  She’d melt his patterns and scorch his bones when she dropped, but he’d catch her again.

  “We are Legion,” Timothy called. “We protect our own.”

  Timothy shifted. He rotated in a way he should not be able to rotate, and he slowed, which made no sense at all. He pressed at the fabric of the universe as if looking for a rip. Tapped at the looking glass. Punched at the wall to make a hole.

  Yet he did these things where he stood below her, in this remembered dream.

  She was the center of the coming storm. She was its engine of knives and pulleys. Dream velocity yanked upward, but the Burning World held all versions of Rysa in its nexus.

  The apparition holding her in place coiled its massive, invisible neck and its long, mimicking tail around her body. Somehow, it also held Ladon and Dragon in its iron grip. It clawed Anna, Sister-Dragon, Derek, her mother and father, and Andreas. It ripped apart the original Draki Prime and Dmitri and Gavin and Daisy.

  It destroyed the world.

  We are dragon, it whispered. We are legion.

  We come for what we are owed.

  Rysa screamed.

  Rysa? Shimmering, beautiful burgundies and rose tones slammed down on top of the dream. Warm, loving patterns followed. Are you okay?

  Dragon stopped the bad dream in its tracks.

  Bits lingered. Pieces stung. Echoes reverberated inside her skull. She’d been in t
he sky and raining death down on the world again. Again. But…

  But this version of the dream felt closer, as if the tornado that whipped up the winds of new-space was right here in the cave with her.

  I need to remember, she thought. Dream or vision, she wasn’t sure, but it cinched her gut worse than any anxiety-ridden, horrid, spinning, phantom thought her brain had produced in a long time.

  She was physically alone in her warm bed, which she usually shared with her equally warm husband and his wondrous dragon.

  Yet the beast had picked up her dream distress. Where are they? she asked her seers.

  Her present-seer flitted an image into her mind’s eye: Ladon stacking luggage against the wall next to the big vault entrance into the cave. Her father waving as he headed out into the tunnel.

  Then her past-seer followed with an explanation: Ladon and Dragon had decided to let her sleep and had gone out to pack for their trip back to Minneapolis, and her dad wanted to check in with her mom.

  She inhaled to the count of four, then exhaled to the count of five, to help calm her mind. She wouldn’t let a bad dream—even one she knew she needed to recall—work up her anxiety.

  All her life, she’d been told to suck it up. Smart girls controlled their ADHD. The calm inside the energy flow between Ladon and Dragon gave her peace. Her husband and his dragon righted her world. Because they allowed her to filter, she could stop an out-of-control episode before it happened.

  So she breathed, to pull her Dracae calm to the front of her mind.

  I’m okay, she pushed toward Dragon. Bad dream. He likely wouldn’t pick up her words, but he would pick up her intent.

  From the back of her mind, from a place straddling her seers and her subconscious—the place in her own brain she suspected mirrored the place in Addy’s mind where Daniel had waited all those years—her dark Fate spoke: You need to be ready for what’s coming.

  Who are you? Rysa thought. Her naughty little mirage—and her blade of new—first appeared outside Vivicus’s Victor D. Victor Magnet School for the Life Sciences, right before Anna put the monster down for good. Rysa’s dark Fate then stuck with her throughout the hell they’d all suffered at Aiden Blake’s hands.

  If the dark Fate was simply a coping tactic, then she should have faded by now. But if anything, her presence seemed to be solidifying.

  The emotion of the dream returned—burning above. And…

  Rysa rubbed her forehead again. She’d dreamed that dream before. She remembered the first version from shortly after she activated—she’d rained acid death onto Ladon and Dragon.

  Another déjà vu of another dream.

  There’d been ghosts in the clouds the first time. Apparitions with engines and pulleys and… nasty things. She’d interpreted the dream as a warning that she’d hurt Ladon and Dragon. But now she wondered.

  Her dark Fate used the blade to pick at the floor of Rysa’s subconscious. I’m the Ambusti Prime. How could I be anyone’s coping tactic?

  Ambusti Prime? Rysa thought. Maybe her dark Fate wasn’t a coping tactic. Maybe she was an anxiety.

  She’d never be the Prime Fate of the Burners. Ladon and Dragon saved her from that fate when she activated.

  Was this about the new?

  Rysa would ask better questions after they returned to Minneapolis, for herself and for Dragon. He’d been quite excited, as had his sister, when the early draft of a Praesagio-researched article titled “Proposed Theoretical Arguments for the Existence of New-Space” appeared on his dragon-sized tablet.

  Her dark Fate poked at the floor of her subconscious again as if… jealous.

  Rysa shook. The wave started in the middle of her back and crawled both upward and downward at the same slow, painful speed. The apartment sharpened—the bats circling the dome above her head flitted and chirped. The olive tree chimed. On the other side of the nesting shaft, Derek began work on the nursery addition to his and Anna’s apartment. Tools pounded. Derek talked to his measuring tape. The cave lived.

  And for a split second—a phantom of a moment—Rysa’s dark Fate solidified in the what-was-is-will-be. For the flickering ghost of a moment, her dark Fate became more real than the real Rysa, with more history, with a present, but a lot less future.

  Her seers knotted and unknotted around Rysa’s body as a fireball of energy.

  Whipping, angry energy that disguised any understanding Rysa’s seers might pick up. Energy that screamed. Energy that, to the real Rysa, felt lonely and stripped of any possible containment.

  Rysa’s fingers squeezed tight and the back of her hand flattened. Her fist squared to her arm and the power inside her body aligned.

  She looked down at her arm.

  Somehow, her dark Fate channeled the chaos into a compact fireball of blade-shaped explosiveness.

  Fate runs parallel to Shifter, little Draki, her dark Fate whispered. Burner disrupts the orientation.

  Burner disrupts every orientation, Rysa thought.

  Her dark Fate energy blade flowed not only around her hand, but up, along her forearm. It rippled along her nerves and her energy lines, orienting itself to the architecture of her body—orienting itself to her plumbing and electrical.

  This must be magic, she thought. Dark magic. The kind that sucked a Burner into a writhing point of a Burner implosion. The kind that worked with the chaotic parts of her soul—her cathedrals of anxiety, her future-seer visions of a burning world, her healer’s ability to unheal.

  Even if it wasn’t magic, it sure felt as if it was.

  Her dark Fate rolled her shoulders. There’s a saying, she said. She flicked out her arms and shook her hands the way a swimmer loosened up before diving into water. Sufficiently advanced engineering feels like magic to dumbasses.

  I hate you, Rysa thought. You aren’t helping.

  Her dark Fate snickered.

  Rysa straightened her back and unfolded her hand. The blade vanished.

  What are you? Rysa asked again. Was she talking to another, possible version of herself? One she somehow avoided?

  Maybe the avoiding has yet to happen, her dark Fate grumbled.

  She’s lying, Rysa’s present-seer whispered. Her past-seer saw only blankness. Her future-seer drowned in fog.

  Her healer shrieked.

  Dragon! Rysa screamed in her head. She didn’t mean to. She was freaking herself out. All this was in her mind. Her dark Fate, her chatty, whipping seers, her barking, guard-dog of a healer. They were all part of her. So why did she feel as if someone just slapped the link of burndust-infested, shackle-chain-link, Ambusti Prime talisman back onto her wrist?

  Where’s your Prime future-seer now, little Draki Prime? Can’t you feel what’s coming? her dark Fate growled. You need to let me out.

  What was happening to her?

  The door to the apartment slammed against the wall. Dragon twisted through and crossed the space under the olive tree to her side in the blink of an eye.

  Rysa? he signed. He dropped his big head and nuzzled her side. You are distressed.

  Ladon jogged up. “What’s wrong?”

  His neck muscles had tightened to thick cords. His skin flushed as well, and his eyes had darkened. His forearms vibrated as if he was about to snap his bones.

  He clenched and unclenched his fists.

  His vigilance is back, she thought. No matter how cured of his melancholy he might be, the flashbacks would always raise their ugly heads when Ladon least expected it. She couldn’t stop them. Her father couldn’t, either. No one could.

  Rysa flung herself off the bed and into Ladon’s arms. “Look at me.” She gripped his face and breathed out the brew of ‘calm’ calling scents she’d perfected just for him. “I’m okay.”

  You are frightened, Dragon signed. He rolled over his own tail, flipping over onto his back, then righting himself as he pulled his head and neck back around.

  Ladon breathed in her calling scents. His grip on her waist tightened, though, as he sat on
the bed. “Did you see something?” He pulled her onto his lap.

  Dragon dropped his head onto her legs.

  “I was dreaming and…” She pressed her face against Ladon’s neck. “Sometimes the power behind my energy blade talks to me.”

  He pulled back. “What?”

  “Not in a crazy way,” she said. Though, really, the talking parts of herself were crazy. Because magic was crazy.

  Ladon frowned.

  “I…” She frowned, too.

  We understand, Dragon signed, though by the look on Ladon’s face, actual understanding would take more explanation.

  “If I knew how it happened, I’d tell you.” Rysa breathed deeply and cuddled against Ladon’s chest again. He, too, breathed deeply, mimicking her.

  They both calmed.

  Slowly, gently, he ran his soulful fingers up and down her spine. “I know.”

  That man is a distraction, her dark Fate huffed. He shows up and you go weak in the knees. Come out from behind him and act like the Parcae you are. Do the job fate’s given you.

  Shut up, Rysa thought. Ladon and Dragon were not “distractions.” Without them, her Fate abilities would have destroyed her mind, body, and soul. She probably never would have activated her Shifter half. And she never would have escaped her ADHD trap.

  She would have become the Ambusti Prime.

  Leave me alone, Rysa thought. Just go away.

  If she had a job to do, then she needed to figure out what that job was. Letting a snarky, random part of her pretending to be the Ambusti Prime take the reins would not reveal the information she needed.

  Her dark Fate growled. And here I thought you were smart enough to put together the pieces I fished out of the—

  Go away! Rysa thought-yelled.

  Her dark Fate fell silent. She vanished like Dragon.

  She went invisible.

  “Are you okay now?” Ladon said.

  Rysa blinked. Yeah, she was okay now, except for a biting sense that her dark Fate snapped and crackled behind a wall of mimicry.