Flux of Skin

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  The lights flickered.

  On the roof, Dragon, his head pointed low and aimed downward, roared again.

  Paige gasped and stepped back from the stretcher, her eyes turned upward. Her hand jerked as if she meant to touch her lips, but she held her fingers still in front of her chest, her palm cupped upward as if to catch rainwater.

  The doctor froze with a finger poised above his phone.

  Paige gaped at the ceiling. “You pissed off his squirrel,” she breathed.

  “What the hell was that? You bombing us now?” The doctor’s finger descended toward his phone’s screen.

  Ladon wanted to snap the doctor’s arm and strip the damned phone out of his hands as he flattened the little man to the floor. Or swing and snap his neck.

  Rysa coughed. She clawed at the mask, her eyes locked on Ladon, her lips mouthing “Stop!”

  Rysa is frightened.

  Another change in perception. One that slapped him hard, like fingers raking his face. What was he doing? “Love.” He returned Rysa’s hand to his chest. “Breathe. Please.”

  The doctor opened his mouth.

  Ladon knew—the doctor was about to say something pathetic. Ladon’s fingers were going to clamp onto his neck. It’d happen, no matter how wide-eyed Rysa stared or how much Dragon admonished him. And Ladon was about to lose control.

  “Mani!” Paige yelled. She pointed at Rysa. “Focus here!” She gripped Ladon’s elbow again, more to hold him in place than to get his attention. “He’s helping her breathe.”

  The doctor, Mani, stepped to the side and back again as he watched Ladon.

  Paige and the nurse moved the stretcher deeper into the hospital, pulling Ladon along on one side and the doctor on the other. “They aren’t up to anything. Let it be,” she said.

  The doctor stepped back to give the nurses room, but he kept his chest squared to Ladon. His belligerence rolled off him in steady clicks that flicked with the cadence of the stretcher’s wheels.

  Yet harm had diminished, and what-is lost its extra layer of sensing. Rysa’s abilities burst again, and their mist rained down.

  Colors faded. Sounds muffled. Ladon tasted nothing and smelled a flattened version of ever-present hospital tang. The light in the hallway changed. New shadows crept across his love and Ladon pressed her hand into his chest.

  Her lips rounded again. Please please please.

  The only threat he cared about now, right now, was the fever overtaking her life.

  Paige touched Ladon’s arm. “You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m fine.” He placed his other hand over Rysa’s heart, lifting it as he breathed in, pressing gently, carefully as he breathed out.

  Her fingers curled over his. She mimicked.

  “Is she epileptic?” Mani asked.

  Ladon didn’t answer. If he spoke to the doctor, the shift would happen again. And the fury would do more than press along the edges of his awareness. The perception-shifting distracted it, filled his mind and kept it confused, but if Rysa stopped breathing, it would explode and fill the hospital. Dragon would come down from the roof. And every single Shifter within a thousand miles would pay for what a few of their kind did tonight.

  “Ladon,” Paige nodded toward the doctor. “We can’t help her if we don’t know what’s happening.”

  She spoke the truth. The annoying little man could not doctor without information. But trust wasn’t coming easy.

  Ladon focused on Paige. Rysa’s illness started after her Shifter half activated in Salt Lake City, but Ladon couldn’t tell Paige that. “She’s had a slight fever all day, but she—” He stopped, not knowing what to say. “The fever started early this morning, before sunrise, but she was fine, sleeping mostly, on the way home.”

  “Her name is Lisa?” Paige asked.

  “Rysa,” Ladon said. “Rysa Torres.”

  Paige nodded. “Sorry. Rysa. Got it.”

  The nurse ran a scan thermometer across Rysa’s forehead. “104.2.”

  Paige nudged the stretcher toward the main hospital’s corridors, away from the Emergency Department.

  The doctor named Mani balked. “She needs to be in the—”

  “Take her to 1367E.” Ladon’s words ground out of his throat, lower and more vicious-sounding than he intended. His ribs pulsated. He bled. Walking was beginning to hurt, but she needed to be in their room, the one under the shed on the roof.

  Paige glanced between him and the doctor, aware that Mani was pushing the wrong buttons. Mani frowned like a man not used to having his authority challenged.

  Ladon’s lip curled as a snarl forced its way up.

  Mani threw his hands into the air. “I need to help her.”

  Ladon tried to keep his forearms from tensing again—Rysa would feel it. This heat—his heat, not what wafted off her—it could make her run away if she became frightened of him.

  “Listen to me, Mani.” Paige said. “You need to take her to 1367E, okay?”

  Mani frowned again. “But I don’t have—”

  “Take her to 1367E.” Ladon tried not to growl again. He leaned over Rysa and stroked her hair. She nodded, touching his chest again.

  Paige checked her temperature. “Her temperature is down to 103.”

  The doctor barked orders, obviously deciding to pick his battles, at least for the moment. “Start an IV. We need to get the fever under control.” He turned back to Ladon. “You’ll need to step back. Let us work on her.”

  A flash popped from Dragon above. Do not let go.

  Ladon ignored the doctor. The man didn’t ask again. But in the room, he had no choice but to release Rysa’s hand when they moved her across to the bed.

  Paige brought a chair around to the other side. “Ladon,” she said, pointing. He nodded and came around, yanking the chair toward the bed as he dropped into it.

  Paige came around too and poked at his shoulder.

  He leaned forward. “Rysa,” he said. “Rysa, love, can you hear me?”

  Rysa’s eyes fluttered. “Ladon,” she whispered.

  She tried to sit up but he put his hand out and stopped her. “Hold still,” he said. “They’re going to put an IV in you now.”

  She nodded.

  He kissed her forehead. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “Please, Ladon. You can’t…”

  One of the nurses squirted something into her IV. “A sedative.”

  “…you can’t worry. You need to let it go.” Her eyes closed.

  But Ladon couldn’t let go. He might sit back in the chair and allow Paige to work on his shoulder but he couldn’t stop. Rysa breathed but he knew the Shifters who caused her fever and the panic eating them both.

  They wouldn’t stop—the Seraphim, and their leader, Vivicus.

  Chapter Seven

  Only one group of Shifters attacked out of a centuries-old misguided sense of vengeance. One little cult of elite personnel trained on the best and most expensive weapons.

  The Seraphim. The “burning ones” who baptized by burndust. The bastards snorted the ashes of exploded Burners, but unlike Fates, it didn’t hide them. It killed them. Or made them insane.

  Dmitri had warned Ladon that most of the class-one healers now worked for the Seraphim—and for Vivicus himself.

  Each time Ladon sliced open Vivicus, it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. Not when the Seraphim came for Derek in ‘84, not during the Crusades, and it had made no difference in the arena, two millennia ago, under a brutal Roman sun.

  Ladon’s memories:

  “You dare wear my face?” Ladon slammed the morpher’s head into the sand. The pit reeked of blood and dead men’s shit, and of the sweat of rich whores and their richer clients. Of an emperor who should know better than to infuriate Ladon and his sister.

  The audience gasped in unison, these most powerful of the Roman power-mongers, and clapped in delight when Ladon hauled the morpher to his feet.

  Vivicus, they called him. The Body. The Shifter P
rogenitor’s firstborn. The man Ladon held by the throat and who looked back at him with mirror precision. He’d taken an Ambustae bite to his right thigh. The bone showed. Dragon had snapped the ghoul’s neck and thrown him high above the pit. He’d exploded with great drama to the delight of the soft and pathetic crowd.

  If they release another Burner, throw it at the Emperor, Ladon pushed to Dragon.

  The beast pranced, then vanished. No. I want to live.

  Ladon might command the Legio Draconis, but the man in the shadows of the dais above the arena was the commander of the most powerful empire in human history.

  But Ladon was a Progenitor. A godling. He shook the morpher over the hot dust billowing off the arena’s sands. “Did they tell you the consequences of wearing my face?”

  Ladon punched. The morpher’s neck would have snapped, if he’d been a normal. “Would Janus allow you to live? Would your mother?” Rumors had reached Ladon and Sister on the frontier. Rumors of “beast” slaughter. Rumors of mockery and brutality fostered by both Parcae and Mutatae.

  Vivicus chuckled. Fear and pain rolled off him—Ladon smelled both. The chuckle was for the clientele above.

  The morpher pointed toward the royal stand. “They paid me well to fake one of the fire fiends besting you. Enough to rebuild Pompeii.” He pointed at his own chest. “I took the challenge.”

  “Kill him!” shouted a fat man seated between two courtesans and to the right of the Emperor’s darkened platform. Power watched from those recesses.

  Ladon sensed at least two Parcae—Fates—among the Emperor’s entourage, but he ignored them. Fates were not his concern right now.

  The courtesans flanking the fat man twittered, as was their purpose. The man pumped his puffy fist into the air, his face flushed from both effort and his new-found lack of decorum.

  The sun heated the back of Ladon’s neck. A bead of sweat trickled between his armor’s padding and his skin. “So you desire glory and coin.” Pathetic Mutatae dancing to a beat set by Parcae and the soft normals who controlled the lives of so many. He must think if he gained enough, faked enough, he could become one of Rome’s chosen.

  Many men thought the same. Most who did died in the slave pits.

  The wound on Vivicus’s thigh healed as he spoke. “Besting the trials God gives us opportunity beyond glory and coin.”

  Such whining platitudes and hollow justifications were most often the domain of Parcae. Words were a distracting slick of oil on the surface of behaviors meant to poison the people. The Parcae waved their arms, bombasting great and terrifying prophecies, and stole everything not gathered into the arms of the stampeding masses.

  “I endure my trials for the grace of God’s promises. The future’s truth depends upon my strength.” Vivicus glanced at the Emperor’s dais.

  “How good of your god to justify the stealing of my face.” Five centuries moving between Rome and the frontier had been enough for Ladon to understand gods and their wills. He disliked both.

  Shadows moved under the awning. Ladon recognized the young man who stepped into the light with his body erect—Publius Aelius Hadrianus, the likely next Emperor. They’d met once when the boy toured the frontier. He’d struck Ladon as smarter and more courageous than the average politician.

  The young normal pointed at Vivicus. “You will fight, Mutatae.” His face crinkled, his disgust obvious. It did not lessen as he surveyed the crowd. “He will fight!” Hadrian threw his arms out in a gesture most likely interpreted as a call for cheers.

  I could pull him into the pit with us, Dragon pushed. He hung on the wall, just under Hadrian’s position.

  “I dance with creatures worse than your beast each night,” Vivicus droned. His eyes—Ladon’s eyes—glassed over. He took on the far away slackness of a man driven to an action without thought to either implementation or consequence—like someone enslaved in a pit and forced to claw handholds into the walls one after another after another.

  Ladon let go of the morpher’s neck. Vivicus dropped to the vile sand, but he landed steady and sure-footed. Ready to fight.

  “I dance because my trials are opportunity.” Vivicus chanted the words fast and with practiced rhythm. “I change to flow between the hammer and the sword it forges. I take on what only I can do, because only I can do it.”

  Ladon had fought men like Vivicus many times. They had nothing to lose so they gave up everything they had.

  They were more dangerous than any of the puffy normals ringing the arena’s pit. More dangerous than an old Emperor who allowed this offense because his patrons had hoarded enough wealth that they felt they had the right to everything.

  And much, much more dangerous than Hadrian, the young man who watched Ladon through narrowed eyes. The boy glanced at the crowd, his disgust rising, then back to Ladon as if to ask what a Progenitor, a man more real than the pathetic morpher’s god, was about to do.

  The last time Ladon had fallen to vengeance, he’d taken the life of an innocent. This time, no innocents were present. But the truth was obvious in Hadrian’s posture—vengeance here would bring a legion down on Ladon’s sister and their men.

  But lessons needed to be taught.

  “Fight, you bastards!” the fat man roared. The two whores flanking him giggled and stroked his bulging flanks.

  Him, Ladon pushed.

  Dragon shot over Ladon’s head as an arrow of fire and demonic hate aimed at the fat rich man’s head.

  The crowd gasped as one. Dragon flung the fat man from the crowd and he landed on his ass on the shit-moistened ground.

  Ladon hauled him to his feet. Vivicus stared, his eyes still flat as glass and void of any understanding. He continued to mutter his chant through his mimic of Ladon’s lips.

  “Which of you deserves a gutting, pig, you or the idiot?” Ladon nodded toward Vivicus.

  The man bristled. He scoffed either from fear or indignation; Ladon could not tell which. Nor did he care. He slammed the man’s face into the sand and looked up at the crowd. Dragon circled the pit at the top of the wall, his talons fully extended and ripping away expensive foods and fabrics from the hands of the pompous.

  “We will leave you to your scheming.” Ladon pointed at the crowd. “Swallow what the Parcae shoot into your mouths. Rape the Empire. You will all rot to mold and slime long before us. Your families will reap what you sow.” Ladon swung his fist toward Dragon. “The beast will gut you in your sleep if you contract again for such a show.”

  “How dare you—”

  Ladon’s grip on the fat man’s neck tightened. The bastard gulped, then fainted into silence.

  “See what befalls those who dare not heed the words of a Progenitor!” Hadrian raised his arms to the sky, his voice louder now, and commanding. “Our Emperor understands.” The boy did not turn toward his patron. Nor did he falter or waver as he swung his fist at the spectators. “Do not anger gods!”

  “What have you done?” Vivicus’s face took on the death-mask quality of a morpher in mid-change. His body stiffened and loosened at the same time—parts which should be soft hardened as they shifted and parts that should be hard gelled as they changed. But he didn’t take on the shape and tone of another. He only stopped being Ladon-like.

  “How you allow them to use you is your business, Mutatae. But you are not to wear my face or the face of my sister in any more of your dealings, do you understand?”

  “They warned me about you. They said I took the face of a demon at my peril but I will face my trials.”

  Vivicus lunged. Ladon could have sidestepped or countered or simply walked away. But unlike the normals who appeared and disappeared from Ladon’s world, their lifespans nothing more than a brief afternoon, a morpher festered. A morpher could cause no end of problems for no end of time.

  Dragon’s big hand wrapped around Vivicus’s head. He snapped his wrist backward and down. The man’s neck ruptured, not neatly in a way he’d likely survive, but with a wet grinding that should end his m
iserable life.

  Vivicus landed in the blood-stained sand.

  Hadrian stepped back from the edge of the dais and vanished into the shadows. The crowd stared, so silent Ladon heard the shuffling of sandals and the rustling of skirts.

  Ladon left the arena, Dragon following behind. Outside, his tribunus stood stone-faced, as Ladon expected. Andreas Sisto—a Mutatae like Vivicus—had asked to remain separate from the fight. The big man requested little and Ladon saw no reason to inflict more trouble onto his mind. Ladon had left him to wait at the gates.

  “It is done?” Andreas nodded toward the still-silent arena, his rich skin almost as vibrant as Ladon’s own in the late afternoon sun.

  Ladon clasped his second’s shoulder. The Mutatae, for all their mercurial shifting of abilities and alliances, did not kill or cripple their own.

  Ladon, Dragon, and Andreas left Rome unmolested, partly because of the new fear Ladon had caused, and partly because Andreas’s calling scents kept the world at bay. No one stood in their way, or attempted to block their passage. They returned to Sister and the wilds of the northern frontier.

  It would be centuries before the Seraphim appeared and filled one of the many power vacuums created by the fall of the Empire. Centuries before Ladon and Dragon once again stood eye-to-eye with the man who dared wear his face that day.

  Centuries before Vivicus dared again to anger a godling.

  Chapter Eight

  Machines hissed around Rysa’s head. They pumped out, then pumped in. Beeps filled the air. And arguing filled the gaps between each artificial punctuation of her body’s functions.

  She recognized the room. Ladon had brought her here before, the first time she’d met Derek. Sterile and beige and empty, a big, heavy window filled one wall and a big, heavy door the other. Big and heavy, like the fatigue sitting on her chest.

  The Emergency Department doctor and the woman with the blonde ponytail left and then came back. The doctor dropped into a chair next to Ladon, his elbows on his knees and his hands draped down. He asked something about “serving.” Ladon didn’t answer. Rysa heard “Veteran’s Services.” The doctor said something about Ladon’s behavior following a pattern he’d seen before. He wanted to make sure they were both okay.