Ladon realized she wasn’t kissing Derek any more than Andreas had kissed her. She’d covered his mouth and his nose and was forcing calling scents into his lungs.
By all the gods, Ladon loved that woman. Loved her quick mind and her caring soul, even if it put her in danger. A lot of danger.
Derek gulped. “What?”
A bullet pinged off the front of the van. Derek flinched his gun arm as he pulled Rysa behind him.
The dragons leaped, both appearing, both flaming. The four Seraphim on the ground fell back, one screamed and fell on his ass.
Rysa stepped back, her face slackening the way it had when they’d synced in the RV. Her seers exploded outward again like a horde of waving tentacles causing Ladon’s insides to explode.
He shouldn’t feel this disoriented. He’d battled Shifters and Fates and Burners through the rise and fall of civilizations and, even wounded, his body didn’t react this way. But the combination of clicking into Rysa’s abilities and his loss of blood had him crawling like a baby.
Harm flashed through Ladon’s mind. Familiar harm. Sneaky, stupid harm full of bravado.
Sister and Andreas were already out from behind the SUV, but Ladon was still closer. He needed to get up.
Flat-nose wrapped his hand around Rysa’s throat.
Some enthrallers had specific gifts. Some, like the voice enthraller who’d gotten Derek, could operate over phones. Some had exquisite senses of smell. And some, like Flat-nose, could sneak in and out of any situation.
The son of a bitch blew an enthralling cocktail at Derek.
Ladon sprang off the pavement. He moved fast and ignored his lurching ribs. He slammed his fist into Flat-nose’s jaw with enough force that the Shifter’s neck cracked.
But the punch caused something inside Ladon’s chest to separate. Something split open again. He gulped in air, staggering back, and wrapped his hand over the wound.
Blood. He bled again.
She’d fixed him, but… His blood seeping around his fingers. She wasn’t trained. She didn’t know what to do.
“Ladon!” Rysa screamed. She had her arms around him, helping him as he dropped to the pavement.
Derek stood over them, his gun up, pointing between them and Sister and Andreas.
“Put down the stupid gun, Derek!” Rysa yelled. Tears rolled down her cheeks when she turned back to Ladon. “I thought I’d healed you. Oh, God, Ladon, you’re bleeding everywhere!” She looked around. “Dragon!” She didn’t take her hands off Ladon’s side.
Derek backed away, toward the one remaining Seraphim in the one still-functional truck.
“God damn it, Derek!” Rysa shouted. “Let the huge guy help you! He’ll fix what they did! I can’t. Obviously, I can’t.” She pressed on Ladon’s chest. “You’re not going to die! You can’t die. Ladon, don’t die! Please. I love you.”
Cold seeped into Ladon’s bones. Why was he cold?
The beast appeared, his hide screaming as much as Rysa, and he spun by the disoriented Derek.
Whose gun arm came up.
Derek fired.
Chapter Twenty-Four
This couldn’t be happening. Rysa had seen the irreality. She’d seen Derek die, not Ladon. Not Dragon. “No!” she screamed.
The bullet raked across the beast’s left flank, tearing open his sparking hide, and ripping through his underlying muscle. It set free his bright red blood.
Derek dropped the gun. It slid out of his fingers to the asphalt, bouncing when it landed, and a metallic clinking pinged between the vehicles. Rysa dropped over Ladon, but the gun didn’t go off again. It lay on its side, pointing at the Seraphim.
Derek’s foot slid back. He stared wide-eyed at Dragon’s wounded haunch, his own pain pulling the skin around his mouth and eyes tight. Was shooting Dragon enough of a shock to snap him out of his daze?
Pain beyond anything Rysa had ever felt—agony from Dragon—solidified Rysa’s mind like burning ice, so cold, so hot, it transformed everything it touched into a crystal resonating at the absolute perfect frequency to shake apart all of her cells. Her body wanted to disintegrate into a puff—a cloud that had once been her, but was no longer.
AnnaBelinda shouted something. Andreas, something else. And Rysa’s man and her Dragon lay dying at her feet.
The thought of losing them made her bones ache because if they died, she didn’t know what she’d do. There wouldn’t be a world anymore, only ghosts of what could have been, and she’d spend the rest of her life trapped inside echoes.
Dragon’s agony abruptly shut off. He rolled toward her, presenting his wound, but he’d dropped one of his walls. She got nothing from him.
The abruptness of the change made her gag.
“He’s…” Ladon coughed. “He won’t die. It hurts. Damn…”
She couldn’t panic. “Sister-Dragon!” Rysa screamed. She needed help—a dragon. She couldn’t think about Derek anymore. Healing Ladon—healing Dragon—wasn’t possible without help. “Map for me! You have to. Oh God, Ladon…”
So much blood. How could they bleed so much? “I can’t lose you,” she mumbled.
A hiss shot from Sister-Dragon. She chased after Derek, who’d run for the Seraphim.
Rysa’s future-seer burst open as if it, too, had been shot. The Seraphim didn’t care. Derek’s programming told him to run to them but the remaining Seraphim were mercenaries and if anyone interfered there’d be more bullets. The irreality around Derek would click and lock one final time. They’d kill him.
“Make AnnaBelinda and Sister-Dragon stop! Andreas! They can’t follow. The Seraphim will kill Derek. AnnaBelinda! Come back. I need Sister-Dragon! Ladon’s dying.”
AnnaBelinda appeared in Rysa’s field of vision, but Rysa wasn’t tracking. She didn’t see the other woman’s face. All Rysa saw was her own panic mirrored back from a woman who hated her.
“You did this!” AnnaBelinda swore in a language Rysa didn’t understand. “I knew you’d do this. You goddamned Fate. You’re going to kill my husband and my brother!”
AnnaBelinda wasted time. Rysa needed help. Now. “Shut up, you stupid old bitch! You want me off your goddamned lawn? Huh? Well, fuck you!”
Someone caught AnnaBelinda’s fist before it connected with Rysa’s head. The air filled with ‘calm’ and ‘cooperation.’
“I will gut you, Andreas,” AnnaBelinda hissed. “I’m going after him.” She fought against the big man’s grip.
“That’s right! Ignore your Draki Prime and get your husband killed,” Rysa yelled. “But I swear to God if you let mine die I will gut you!”
Shock slackened both AnnaBelinda’s and Andreas’s faces.
Rysa pressed on Ladon’s wound. Why was AnnaBelinda doing this? “The Seraphim don’t know what to do so they’re taking him somewhere…” Her seers sputtered. “Damn it, Ladon needs help!”
“Great Lady!” The big man’s scents filled the area again. “Make her cooperate, Anna, legatus.”
Rysa didn’t hear anything else. A map appeared in her head, a new overlay of the same systems Dragon had shown her earlier, but one with slightly different colors. Slightly different angles.
She set her healer and her seers free. She wouldn’t interfere. Work together, she thought, pleading with herself. You’ve done it before. Do it now.
Ladon knitted under her hands. Her abilities forced his bones to make more blood, and this time to stay knitted. His wounds were not to open again. No more lacerations. No more ruptures.
The map lifted off Ladon and floated up into the air in front of her, shimmering and contorting. It imploded on itself, sucking down to a point, only to explode out as something wholly new. And something very different.
It snapped backward, a sudden three-dimensional overlay of Dragon’s haunch. Rysa, still straddling Ladon, twisted around and covered his wound with her bloody hands, feeling it pull together underneath her palms. His muscle re-formed, his hide weaving back together.
Dragon’s s
kin was thicker and more complicated than Ladon’s. Many, many layers folded over each other, each separate but all working in concert. And each connected to the others by billions and billions of nerves.
No wonder he hurt so much. His hide felt everything.
She hurt, too. Heat danced up her neck. Her eyeballs felt hot. Thirst latched onto her throat. She couldn’t do much more.
But Ladon had her. He’d sat up, his arms around her waist and his face pressed against her chest. Her man, her wonderful, brilliant man, did everything he could to help her do what needed to be done.
Ladon coughed. “You’re making a habit of this.”
He shouldn’t be coughing.
“Don’t talk.” She needed to concentrate.
“You keep saving our asses.” He was grinning. She felt his cheeks round against her breastbone.
Why was he distracting her? “I’m the Draki Prime. It’s my job.” She needed to save Derek, too.
Rysa smelled ‘heal.’ Andreas was nearby and pumping out what she needed.
Ladon’s arms tightened. “Is that the only reason?”
If he held her any tighter, she would stop breathing. “Yours is an ass worth saving.”
“Heh.”
Andreas said something. Dragon rolled away.
“Tell AnnaBelinda…” She trailed off as her exhaustion kicked on. “Derek is safe as long as they don’t feel threatened.”
The map clicked off. Disorientation spun her mind and for a moment Rysa felt as if she was on the playground again, when she was eleven, after she’d fallen down because the other kids were throwing balls and she couldn’t track all the movements.
She’d landed hard on rough asphalt similar to what was under them right now. Too many faces surrounded her, making too much noise. It had been too much.
And she’d panicked.
But Ladon had her. Her wonderful, living man had a grip on her.
Dragon crawled into the back of the van. Andreas and AnnaBelinda argued. And the truck with the last Seraphim and his hostage had already vanished from Rock Springs.
“We need to get into the van.” Rysa needed to make Ladon stand up.
The grin against her chest turned into a smile. “You’re going to say ‘yes.’”
Rysa tugged him to standing. “You’re as disoriented as me. I don’t have any more in me to heal you again so you need to stop talking now.”
He leaned against her as she brought him around back. “I knew you’d say ‘yes,’” he said, still grinning all goofy.
Did she do something to his head when she healed him? “What are you talking about?”
Ladon slowly crawled up the back bumper of the van and into the rear, with Dragon. He leaned against the beast, his hand on his wounded side, and held out his other hand to her. “You said ‘if you let mine die.’”
And now he grinned like a little boy who’d just been told he owned the toy store.
She didn’t know what to say, so she crawled in and slammed the door behind her. Up front, Andreas looked over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. Then he leaned forward and the van rumbled to life.
“Come here,” Ladon beckoned her close.
He wanted to cuddle? “Ladon, we’re bloody. You’re covered in blood. So am I.” Everything that had just happened hit home. Every moment she’d been in danger. Every single time she’d used her abilities to heal Ladon and Dragon. The moment she thought she’d rescued Derek.
“I thought I had him, Ladon. I thought he’d be okay. I… I saw these weird clicking, sliding walls around him and I thought they meant he was going to die but maybe they were telling me he’d been enthralled.” She dropped against Ladon, even though they both reeked and were sticky and gross and he’d almost died.
“We’ll get him back. You said he’s safe for now. You’ll see where he is and we’ll go get him. We will figure it out.”
She’d done everything she could. “I’m sorry! Dragon, tell your sister I’m sorry.” She reached for the beast and laid her hands on his wounded haunch. “But they would have killed him if Anna had threatened them. It’s the only thing I saw. It’s the only thing I see now.”
Dragon didn’t answer. She didn’t feel energy from him, or see any images.
She sat up. “Is he okay?” What if she hadn’t done enough? “He’s not dying, is he?” She’d know if Dragon was dying, wouldn’t she?
Ladon pulled her back. “Andreas made a sedative for him, to help the pain. And to help him not flood our minds with how much he hurts.” He exhaled hard as he leaned against the beast. “This is the first time either of us has been shot.”
And they didn’t know what to do. They were as surprised by it happening as they were by how much damage the bullets did. No one shoots a Progenitor.
It seemed a weird blind spot in the life of the warrior in front of her.
He was a godling. And Andreas called him and AnnaBelinda legatus, which, if she remembered correctly, meant “general.” Ladon and Dragon, they were so good at beating the crap out of the enemy that they never got seriously hurt.
Except the Seraphim had upped their game. They now had the weapons technology—and the training—to do real harm to the dragons.
And to anyone else who got in their way—including normals like Derek, or any Fates, or other Shifters like Dmitri, who they considered a threat to their consolidation of power.
Rysa’s seers bubbled up something that, to her, seemed obvious—this Vivicus psycho considered this fight the endgame. This was his big push to get what he wanted, whatever that was, because she doubted even he knew. His God revealed only a little to his tiny mind at any given moment and the mad son of a bitch turned on a dime when the voices in his head told him to do so.
Her past-seer blipped in a small bit of understanding. She was too tired—it was too tired—to give her any more right now, but it tried—today’s events started because Vivicus had heard that Ladon had Mira’s daughter. Mira, one of the Fates who’d been in his Abilene compound when Rysa’s uncle Faustus attacked twenty-one years ago.
Rysa’s mother, the Fate who’d then vanished with Vivicus’s best healer.
So he’d been looking for her father, just like Dmitri, and he’d seen a golden opportunity to attack not only Ladon and Dragon, but also another enemy—the Russian. And now his men had Derek.
Vivicus had long ago realized his randomness suited his Fate-killing needs well, so he cultivated it. Gave it a name and a purpose and called it his “trials.” He basically threw all the chess pieces at a board made of putty to see what stuck.
Rysa leaned against Ladon’s bloody side. She placed her hand on Dragon’s flank. She didn’t care who the crazy bastard was, or who he hired. Her man and her dragon, his sister and her dragon, Derek, even the man named Dmitri who she hadn’t yet met, and a huge man named Andreas who drove their van down a back road and away from the hospital—they were her new family.
And she wasn’t losing any of them.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Rysa slept in the space between the man and the beast, still bloody, with her seers flicking on and off. Up front, a big man worried about the woman driving his SUV in front of the van, down this lonely state highway, heading south, into Utah.
But he also worried about Rysa, and his memories filled her past-seer:
Her dream perception channel-changed. A small moment of white noise, of nothing, blinked through her mind, then a vision erupted through her senses—a place on the other side of the world. Andreas stood on the curb of a bustling street, under a sun hotter than any she’d experienced. Small cars and bicycles pushed by, all honking and dinging. People crowded everywhere and everything—people and more people—and he towered over them all.
This huge man, in this land, was truly a giant.
This place brimmed with colors different from the carefully-crafted American palette of salesmanship and corporate affiliation. Here, golds, pinks, blues, greens washed over walls and clothes a
nd food. Colors here were entities unto themselves, and pigments made by people to fill their world with joy.
She smelled the street—hot people, dogs, car exhaust. Foods she’d never smelled before but which made her very hungry. Humidity shimmered in the air.
Something vibrated against the man’s hip and a shrill rendition of a bad eighties pop song blasted from his pocket. He pulled out his phone and held it to his ear.
He heard static. Nothing else. He covered his other ear to block out the street noise.
“Hello?” he said.
A long pause, then a voice. “Who is this?”
A woman’s voice. One he recognized, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d not seen her for centuries.
Why would she call him? “How did you get this number?” he asked.
Another long pause. “I… found change. I found this… phone.”
She sounded dazed. Angry. She halted as she spoke, and her pitch changed at random intervals.
“Mira?” He asked slowly, hoping to make it through her haze. She must have breathed burndust. Fates only acted like this after they’d taken in the dust.
“I… she needs your help.”
“Mira, do you know who you called?” Did she realize?
“Andreas?” Another long pause. “Andreas Theodulus Sisto.”
“How did you get my number?”
The phone clicked. She’d added change.
“Are you in the States, Mira? You made an international call from a pay phone?”
“The money’s running out! The—” He heard slipping and a grunt. He wondered if she’d hit her head on the wall. Then a muffled “Fuck off, both of you! I told you this was necessary!”
“Mira, who are you talking to?”
“I…” She coughed. “Andreas, please tell me it’s you.”
“Yes, Mira. It’s me.” A small man bumped into him with a bike, but Andreas didn’t move. The little man swore in a language Andreas understood, but Rysa did not. “Who needs me?”
“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.
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