Flux of Skin

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Sister backed off Ladon’s chest. The two dragons rolled apart, even as they continued to hiss at each other.

  Andreas nodded toward the newcomers.

  On the other side of the small clearing, flanked by two of his lieutenants, Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov glared down at Ladon and his sister from the back of one of his mares. The horse pawed, as did his lieutenants’ steeds, afraid of the rage pulsing along the hides of the two dragons. The horses sidestepped, but held their ground.

  The Russian carried two rifles, one on his saddle and one on his back. He yanked his mare’s reins and the animal pranced, revealing a third rifle on the saddle’s other side. The mare stepped closer, moving the man from the shadows into the harsh but dim light cast by the dragons.

  Dmitri had taken to looking to be in his mid-thirties, a good age, he said, to elicit both respect and desire, and his dark hair melded into the night’s gloom. He wore his customary gloves, because, he also said, he no longer cared to tax his healer to keep his easily bruised hand invisible. And he glowered, because Dmitri Pavlovich knew enough about the universe to understand its true nature.

  His bright Romanov eyes pierced through the gloom. “They have my horses.” He pointed at Ladon. “They have my bar.” His finger moved to Sister. “They have my cousin. And you two squabble? Grow the fuck up.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The dragons seethed. No other word described what boiled from them as an acidic effervescence off both their minds. Ladon’s sister, though, was beyond seething. As was he.

  I will snap Dmitri’s neck. Sister-Dragon knocked against her brother.

  “Quiet!” Ladon would have punched the other dragon again, if she’d been close enough. Instead, he pushed his sister toward her beast.

  Dmitri’s mare whinnied and he dropped his hand to her mane.

  Andreas grunted. “Where have you been, Pavlovich?”

  “Where have I been, you damned idiotic brute? Watching from a distance while your spawn infect my life’s work.”

  “They are Vivicus’s soldiers, not mine.” Andreas walked toward the mare, his hand out. The animal whinnied again, but did not balk at Andreas’s touch.

  Sister laid a hand on her beast’s neck, but the seething did not lessen. Ladon floated on a sea of nettles.

  He could drop to his knees into the spongy moss of Middle America, but he’d not feel anything beyond the shadows he saw swirling around the hooves of Dmitri’s horses. They’d taken on weight and thickness. The dark bubbling off the dragons had found its way into the physical world. Ladon stared at Dmitri’s frightened mare and watched all the bad of this world lick at her ankles.

  Dragon sniffed Ladon’s head, his fury tinged with alarm. You see what you should not, Human. The shades are not real.

  The shadows were real enough to crawl from Ladon’s soul and into the world.

  The Russian’s face contorted into an exaggerated expression of contempt. “Do you want to retrieve my cousin or do you want to stand there like a pack of whimpering puppies?”

  Andreas said something in response. Sister walked out from behind Ladon and into the open space between the horses and the dragons. The others formulated a plan. Something vast and grand and guaranteed to teach those in need a well-applied lesson. The humans loaded weapons. The dragons flicked to each other buttressed constructs of rage and intense mental origami made of folded actions and creased memories.

  The beasts had stopped translating into a language Ladon and Sister understood.

  Ladon smoothed his hand over the stubble coating his head. It rubbed his fingers, stinging his scrapes. The salt of his skin made the steak knife’s cuts open once again, beads of blood touched his fingertips.

  They would retrieve Derek. If The Land of Milk and Honey burned to the ground in the process, so be it.

  For his sister, the shades would shrink back.

  Andreas nodded, taking the van’s keys. “Get in.” To Dmitri and Sister: “Half an hour.”

  Dragon slammed the rear door. Ladon holstered his gun and drew his plated leather jacket over his shoulders. The van grumbled to life.

  Ladon dropped into the passenger seat and for the first time in centuries—in a true millennium—he let his godling take over.

  Derek Nicholson sat in a dark booth in the back of The Land of Milk and Honey with morphers he did not know flanking him on both sides. He could not get out without crawling over one of them, which was, of course, why they had placed him in the middle.

  He had built up some resistance to the enthrallers. A century of breathing in their shit had made him aware of the facial tics and nostril flares most of them did when they attempted to enthrall a normal. Knowing one breathed something foul at him, even if he could not smell what it was, made his back bristle. And a bristled back went a long way to resisting everything.

  Except it did not work when he could not see the enthraller. He never expected one with good enough vocal control—and enough background on his idiot cousin—to fake Dmitri and fill his head with bullshit—and make him think leaving with the Seraphim had been a good idea.

  Or shooting Brother-Dragon.

  Derek set aside the thought. Now was not the time to wallow in his faults. Plus, setting aside such thoughts was one of few strategies that worked for dealing with the aftereffects of an enthralling.

  His leg hurt. They had healers but no one seemed to care. And they chased out Dmitri long before they dragged Derek into the bar.

  The Land of Milk and Honey sprawled on the backside of his cousin’s glitzy entertainment complex. Dmitri had upgraded the outside of the building—somewhat—and was in the process of repaving the parking lot. A huge showcase sign, one that looked like a giant television screen running an unending garish commercial, promised a night’s worth of entertainment and food in exchange for coin.

  Dmitri said it attracted the younger people flying in from the East Coast. He grumbled about their small-brimmed hats and their skinny jeans and air-quoted the word “ironic” multiple times during his rants. The young people liked the “charm” of The Land and the “irony” of Branson and the “comfort” of Dmitri’s entire complex—the bar, with its pockmarked interior and two performance stages, the four-star hotel on the other side of the parking lot, and the access to “nature” Dmitri’s massive land holdings allowed.

  He had built himself a new empire here in Missouri. Derek was not surprised; his father had always said Dmitri would have made a fine Tsar.

  But he had not been careful and now Seraphim overran his post-war life’s work.

  Derek had picked up a few tidbits from his handlers. Dmitri’s first attempts to find Rysa’s father, Alessandro Torres, had triggered a Seraphim alert. They had descended on the bar within hours, infiltrating and gathering information. When it became clear Rysa was half Fate and half Shifter, they upped their game, taking out Dmitri himself immediately.

  To Derek’s surprise, the de facto onsite leader had not morphed into his cousin, but instead his cousin’s lead bar manager, Ivan. Derek suspected it had to do with mass—the morpher in charge had not had enough on her bones to shift into his tall cousin, so she went for the smaller mass of Ivan.

  She was good, too. Very few of the normals and Shifters working in the complex noticed the change. Renee, the bartender, narrowed her pretty blue eyes at Derek while she poured drinks behind the show bar, her “Russian Hacker” t-shirt tight over her ample bosom. She had long been Ladon’s favorite, more, Derek suspected, because she did not care about who any of them had been, only who they were now.

  Derek liked her. He did not know anything about her beyond her five years working for Dmitri. No one asked about her past, and she seemed to prefer it that way. Many of the people working at The Land preferred it that way, Dmitri and Derek included.

  Renee, like him, also seemed to bristle around the many enthrallers. He had given her the note telling her to call Ladon. Hopefully she had—and was smart enough not to talk about it.


  Derek signaled to the waitress. The ache in his limbs left him thirsty.

  He had had tastes of a life without his damned blood twisting around his neck like a slipknotted leash. His disorder was both noose and collar. As, in all honesty, was his status as a normal. Both constrained as if he walked through his life within the clicking, locked walls of an invisible prison.

  Dunn, that bitch of a prison warden, used to occasionally cleanse his blood and let him off the leash. He would run, get tattoos, drink himself into a coma. Then someone would find him, sometimes the giant named Andreas, and carry him “home.”

  Derek sometimes wondered if his immunity to enthrallers was more from Andreas than from his own perception.

  He missed his wife, though he dared not show it, sitting here in his cousin’s overrun bar between two of the most skilled warriors the Shifters had to offer.

  He tapped the table when the waitress looked over, indicting he wanted a refill of his soda. She nodded and walked toward the bar.

  The one on his left grunted. “That stuff will rot your teeth and your gut, Tsar.” This one looked like all the tourists—he wore a bright green t-shirt from The Land’s hotel gift shop and a pair of khaki shorts. He had morphed himself a ridiculously forgettable face, with flat brownish hair cut into a forgettable length, all on a deceptively doughy body. The one on the right could have been his twin brother.

  But they were Seraphim, and they occasionally twitched like all true Seraphim, a side effect, Derek knew, of exposure to burndust.

  Snorting burndust caused the neurological damage that proved their manhood. This, at least, made sense. Though Derek would have chosen vodka as his poison.

  He sat back, his face somber, and glanced at his captor. “I chto proizoshlo s tvoim muzhskim dostoinstvom posle etogo prevrashcheniya? Ono prevratilos' v smorchok i svalilos' na pol, i tvoi yaytsa pokatilis' po polu kak nedozrelyye yagody?”

  Insults about manhoods withering like mushrooms and balls rolling on the floor like unripe grapes were always better spoken in Russian than English.

  The morpher scratched his nose. He stopped asking his companion for translations after the third insult. Derek’s other captor, the one on the right who understood Russian, smirked.

  The waitress set Derek’s new soda on the table and smiled at the two idiots sitting on either side of him. “Would you two like anything?” She, like most of the staff, thought they were Dmitri’s business associates and that she should be extra nice and friendly. They were important persons, after all. Derek was here, entertaining them.

  Which, he’d soon figured out, was his true purpose—decoration. They thought him pretty enough to add a fine mist of dazzle to the enthralling of Dmitri’s staff.

  “We thank you, but are fine.” The one on the right said with a passable Russian accent.

  The waitress nodded, looking Derek over again, and walked away.

  They sat in silence for another long moment and Derek watched two of the staff set up a mic and stool on the stage. Some up-and-coming comedian was working the bar tonight and the floor was already packed. Every single table held its capacity of normals, all talking at deafening volumes and laughing at their own stupid jokes.

  Derek sipped at his soda. It popped and snapped on his tongue the same way his blood popped and snapped in his thigh. Under the table he rubbed at it.

  The pain was not getting better. The hospital staff had given him boosters before the Seraphim stole him away, but he wondered.

  He was not going to ask for a healer. Not from this bunch. He would have to wait and hope his cousin walked through the front door. Or for his wife and her brother to show up and his new girlfriend in tow. The dying one with the healing abilities.

  If they showed up. If shooting Brother-Dragon had not been the last straw. God, he hoped Renee had read Ladon the note.

  Derek exhaled slowly. He would not think too much about Rysa and the hospital. It served no purpose.

  He drummed his fingers on the table, watching the people in The Land of Milk and Honey enjoy their evening. The central room of the bar held a good number. Lots of cover for the Seraphim.

  He had picked up a couple other tidbits from the two idiots guarding him—they had the Dracae going, thinking this was all about them. But their leader—not Vivicus, their Bishop, but the woman who had taken Ivan’s form and now walked The Land not only in charge of the Seraphim, but also Dmitri’s empire—she worked around her father’s mad ravings, and she understood a good distraction when she saw one. She, like all great Shifters, had a mind as quick and mercurial as her ability. She went after the true enemy.

  And Derek knew when they showed up, there’d be hell to pay.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Vivicus pulled a pillowcase over Rysa’s head. An honest-to-God, super-soft silk—or Egyptian cotton or something else straight from the lap of luxury—pillowcase dropped over her face and all she saw was the sweet berry red of some interior designer’s high-priced mark-up.

  He’d taken it out of the back of the giant SUV. The big vehicle stopped and he grumbled something into his cell phone, then he threw open his door and dug around in the back for a very long time. The door pinged and pinged and pinged.

  She breathed in, breathed out. Pinging SUV doors made her skin crawl.

  He drove for another ten minutes or so and heat crept up from Rysa’s neck into her mouth, and up into her eyeballs. When he stopped, he pulled off the pillowcase, and untied her hands.

  “We’re going inside.” He nodded out the windshield across the brightly-lit parking lot to a squat building rising out of a sea of asphalt. On the other side of the lot rose a tacky-looking new hotel complete with a bright neon sign proclaiming “Games!” and another screaming “Waffles!” Behind them, at the entrance to the complex, was the biggest screen-sign she’d ever seen, one like all the casinos had back home.

  She looked back at the squat building. It’d been painted recently and its exterior glimmered like obsidian in the harsh lot lights. Across the top, scrawled in a beautiful and elegant font, was “The Land of Milk and Honey.” Next to the word “Honey” a stylized golden drip blinked in neon.

  The wide glass front doors of the bar had all been painted black, to match the exterior, except for the two in the center, which looked to be heavily tinted. The place looked both sinister and clean and inviting, as, she supposed, any place filled with enthrallers would.

  The lot was full, too, including a couple of tour buses parked in the back.

  So the Seraphim hadn’t shut down Dmitri’s world, just taken it over.

  She didn’t ask why Vivicus had put the pillowcase over her head. It wasn’t like this place was a secret. But she blinked and sucked in her breath, making a show of looking helpless.

  He fingered her talisman. “She’ll come for her boy toy.” Smirking at his joke, he sniffed at her as if to say you’re the girl toy. “And I get her dragon.” He clapped once and rubbed his palms together. “Then off to Abilene with you, because he’ll come looking sooner or later. He’s quite predictable. Then I take his dragon from him.”

  She didn’t say anything but did as her whispering seers bid—looked frightened and overpowered.

  Not that she wanted to watch Sister-Dragon literally rip the son of a bitch in half, but she probably would, anyway. The violence of the Dracae’s world was something she’d have to get used to, sooner or later.

  “I don’t want to go to Abilene,” she whimpered. “I want to go home. I’m…” She trailed off.

  He stopped rubbing his palms together and cocked one of Ladon’s eyebrows. Though he didn’t quite look like Ladon anymore. His face seemed to have melted just a tiny bit, deforming enough to make him look like a puffy version of the man she loved.

  And his eyes weren’t the right color. They’d faded into a normal brown, almost hazel color.

  Vivicus seemed to have some trouble holding a shape.

  “You’re what, darling?” He ran a finger
down her cheek and she flinched. And the bastard said Ladon was predictable.

  “I’m not up to this. I’m not. My… issues make it… hard. If I was a good Fate, I would have gotten away from you.” The little voice, the one she’d sent away, hollered as the words crossed her tongue—told you so. But her other parts, the ones still whispering though she no longer wore her talisman, told it to shut up. It’d ruin everything. The best laid plans of a Fate’s seers were delicate business.

  “Sweetie, I can see this is hard for you.” His face didn’t change. He didn’t see any such thing, but somewhere in his life he’d learned saying the words helped him get what he wanted. “There are ways. Actions you can do, but you need to want the help.”

  Rysa blinked. Vivicus was recruiting her for the Seraphim like some high school football player.

  Somewhere inside, the whispering said Yes!

  “What do you mean?” she asked, wide-eyed. She kept her untied hands on her lap, like a good student.

  “You’ve already passed your burndust trial.” He nodded knowingly, as if they shared something special. “Now you need training. Good training, and not from my pandering brother.” He shook his head. “Half-brother. Mother’s been married a lot.” He shrugged. “I’ve been married a lot.”

  His body shook like it was resetting itself. When he looked back at her, his features had returned to their clearer Ladon-state.

  And his mind had snapped to something sharper. “We’re going in. You’re going to prove yourself. This is your chance.” His hand gestured at all the cars in the lot. “It will be difficult, but it’s an amazing opportunity. One you can’t let pass by.”

  His hand gripped her neck but he stared out the windshield. “I think I’ll keep this form. At least until I train the dragons.” His fingers twitched when he snickered. “And I train you.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  “Shit,” said the morpher sitting to Derek’s left, the forgettable one in the green t-shirt. He slammed one hand on the tabletop while the other snaked under the table for his concealed weapon.