Marcus patted Daisy’s shoulder. “We all must do what needs doing, Ms. Pavlovich.”
Daisy turned toward Harold. “Where are we going?” she asked.
He straightened his jacket. “The Nebraska-Wyoming border,” he said. “We’re going to a place with no name.” He walked toward the door. “We’re going to the base.”
Chapter Twenty
Mount Vesuvius, Italy…
Billy heated the tips of his left pointer and middle fingers. He held them in front of his chest, his hand otherwise curled into a peace symbol, or a bunny, or from his point of view, a very British hand gesture signaling that perhaps he should fuck off.
Yet here he was, in a cave up the side of a ridge that used to be part of one of the most dangerous volcanos in Europe.
A trickle of light filtered in from the entrance. Not enough to keep him from tripping over the sharp boulders, but enough that if he lit a couple of fingers, he could pick out the way.
The tunnel had tightened to the point where both he and Ismene needed to turn sideways to pass through. She pressed forward, oblivious to the rips the tunnel walls caused in the outer layers of her jacket. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up blowing them a wider passage, and he’d have to find his own way back down the mountain.
In here, the universe’s lines of energy contracted and became obvious. They welled up in his vision and became impossible to ignore. The swirls and the eddies bounced off the rock wall like ping pong balls. The low light somehow made them stand out more. They became more like textures in the air than shimmering ghosts; like an aurora borealis that had solidified into actual fabric ribbons.
Billy swatted at one. It coiled around his hand but, as he expected, left no sense of smoothness. No rough edges. No sense of breeze from the little tornados.
He saw the winds of the new, but they were just beyond his touch.
But he swore the glass in his neck warmed.
Ismene didn’t light a finger as Billy had. She didn’t ask for his help. She just probed with her acid-soaked seers and squeezed between the glass-sharp rocks as if possessed by a demon.
Which, come to think of it, they both might just be.
Heaven and Hell. New-space. What difference did it make? Maybe they were about to come face-to-face with the Devil himself.
Ismene pressed between two outcroppings and stopped. Just flat-out stopped, her back visible between the dark, craggy bulges, her shoulders scrunched and her neck visibly tightening.
“What is it, dove?” She blocked his view but perhaps he could see around her if he moved closer.
Tiny bits of Burner randomness sparked off her exposed skin, off her fingers, off her entire person. They flitted and gyrated as if caught in some kind of whirlpool or tiny, slow-moving tornado. Her stink altered, as well—it, too, gyrated.
Ismene’s seers frothed. The slow-motion energy tornado of her chaos picked up the bubbling slime that was her abilities and splattered it against Billy’s mind, and the heavy rock around them, and against the universe.
He groaned. Another Burner should not affect him so, but Ismene, as she so deeply believed, was special. Special in her Parcae-dom. Special in her Prime-dom. Oh so very special to the universe at which she now threw the psychic equivalent of Burner shit.
“He’s through there.” Ismene pointed at the smooth, dark hole in the solid rock wall in front of them.
A man could slip his arm through that hole. No light filtered out from it. Inside was nothing more than another pit in the universe.
“He’s on the other side,” Ismene said.
Billy squeezed through the gap to get a closer look at the hole. Ismene didn’t move. She continued to be as much of a wall as the rock in front of them.
“Footing,” he said.
Her seers frothed up yet again, but she continued to be a barrier.
Billy sighed. “Look, we can’t—”
Ismene lunged forward as if yanked by a rope and slammed against the rock wall. Her head bounced and her nose audibly cracked. She yipped, and a corrosive, sparking haze erupted from her mouth and nose. A low gack popped out of her throat. Her seers abruptly shut off.
She’d left a smear of blood on the rock—blood that had begun to whine.
Yet the impending implosion wasn’t the only terror in the tunnel. Something was here with them, something inhuman, something not dragon or Fate or Shifter.
Something new.
Billy slid back through the tunnel’s constriction as fast as he could. There was nothing he could do for Ismene; blood smeared her lip as well. There was nothing he could do for any of them, new or Burner.
The lines and eddies of the new pulled against his body as if contracting toward the impending implosion. They wrapped around his face; they got in his eyes and his mouth. He felt none of it, but seeing them cover his nose and mouth made him suck in his air as if suffocating.
Breath pulled through the phantom curtain and deep into his lungs anyway. He wasn’t suffocating. He moved forward—too slowly away from the whine behind him, but he moved.
Billy gripped the rock, twisted, and yanked himself through the narrow tunnel toward the light outside.
Du bist spät dran! rang through his head as if his Intrepid air traffic control friends had switched to speaking German.
Behind him, Ismene screamed. Her caustic seers raked through the tight space and Billy cringed.
He had to get out before her blood took down the tunnel.
“Hörst du mich, Frau? Sprich!”
Billy recognized Frau and Sprich. They meant “woman” and “speak,” two words the Intrepid people would not likely say.
Ismene’s implosion whine ceased. Billy ducked. If he was lucky, he might get blown out of the tunnel. If not, his mission up the side of the mountain was about to come to a pathetic and abrupt end.
Why would anyone think that getting anywhere near the Burner Progenitor would end well? That he and Ms. Frothy Dove would come back alive with a godling of Hell in tow?
What the hell had Billy been thinking?
A knocking bang echoed off the rocks and a soft push of a tiny concussive wave brushed his back. Cracking followed.
No massive explosion. No volcanic eruption. Ismene wasn’t as caustic as she thought herself to be.
Either that, or their Progenitor had a level of control over their chaos no other Burner possessed.
The bang, though, had opened a rift in the wall. It spread from where Ismene’s blood had smeared the rock, to the hole, then moved upward toward the top of the mountain as well as downward toward the base of the tunnel. Rocks fell away. Dust billowed. And the dark behind the rock took shape.
A man stepped through the crack. Not a fully physical man, not one real in real-space, yet more real than the dead boy ghost-corpse Billy had noshed at Trajan’s base.
The man stepped forward and licked the blood off Ismene’s lips. Then he closed his eyes and inhaled like a man savoring his first drink in eons.
Which he probably just had. Because the man had to be their Progenitor. The Maker of Burners. The walking personification of all the burning bad places the normals had ever made up.
“Lord Almighty fucking Hell,” Billy said.
Burner randomness danced along their Progenitor’s shoulders. It flickered upward like flame, then melted down his naked skin like living molten iron—like the writhing bloody interior of a Burner implosion. Then it morphed yet again into a shattering, dust-like crystalline structure.
This man, the man who had just walked through a broken wall of stone, peered at Ismene through a new-shell made of all forms of Burnerness—flame, acid, implosion, dust.
He looked nothing like a Burner. No stink wafted off his skin. He moved with a fluid ease none of Billy’s people carried. His tightly-curled platinum blond hair looked clean, soft—and well-groomed. Short and trimmed as if he had a stylist behind his rock.
The hair did not match his body. His skin gleamed the way an
oiled-up bronze statue gleamed in the sun. Equally shimmering, bright-bronze eyes watched Ismene from a long, angular face that suggested Syrian or Lebanese heritage.
He shifted from one foot to the other like a wrestler and grabbed Ismene’s coat. “Bist du mein Gefäß? Bist du die Ambusti Prime? Siehst du mich, Frau? Sag es mir!” he yelled.
Ambusti Prime?
“Are you looking for Rysa Torres?” Billy said.
The man let go of Ismene. She dropped against the stone floor and her head hit with a crack. She groaned, but didn’t bleed.
The man pointed at Billy. “Wer bist du? Nur das Gefäß sollte hier sein. Die Berichte sagten alle, dass der Kaiser die Ambusti Prime geschickt hat, um den Schöpfer der Brenner zum Einsatzort zu tragen.”
“I don’t sprechen zee Deutsch, mate,” Billy said. “Are you our Progenitor?”
The man inhaled and pulled himself to his full height. “Ja.”
Billy understood that. “We’re here to take you to Trajan. He says something bad’s about to happen and that we need all the Progenitors, you included.” He dropped his hands. “Please tell me you understand English.”
The Burner Progenitor, a man who supposedly had been locked in this very mountain for two millennia, spoke German. And not some old-old-ancient version, either. Modern German. Maybe he spoke modern English, too.
“Schlimm? Du hast keine verdammte Ahnung, wie schlimm es dabei ist zu werden, Sohn,” the man murmured.
He slapped his new-space Burner thigh. Little stars fell from his skin like fireworks.
“Two of you. Wie überraschend.” Their Progenitor’s expression showed clear surprise. Then he smiled the brightest, sunniest, friendliest smile Billy had ever seen on any German man’s face.
But it flickered right back to the angry surprise Billy had seen before. He kicked Ismene. “Do you see me, woman?” he yelled. “He sees me, obviously.” He pointed at Billy. “The vessel is a woman and the Ambusti Prime. The reports said I rode out of here inside her flesh.”
He kicked Ismene again.
The vibe oozing from their maker clicked and locked in a way that felt as random as the Burner energy morphing around his body. Open, friendly body language would cut to stiff and vicious as if the universe jump-edited the space the Maker of Burners occupied. Happy, then sad, then psychopathic, then calm, all as if he randomly switched channels showing different takes of the same scene.
Through the movie magic of the universe, he didn’t move, yet Billy knew he did, because the edits didn’t quite match up.
A vessel? Was he supposed to take over Ismene’s body the way that future-seer had taken over that murdering Fate bitch’s body?
Maybe Ismene was as important as she thought she was. Their Maker sure seemed to think she was.
“Hey, don’t kick her no more, okay?” Billy held out his hands the way he would toward an unknown dog. “She’s Jani Prime. She’s Rysa’s aunt and she’s my Burner offspring. I turned her Burner.”
Their Maker peered at Ismene’s face. “You weren’t supposed to be turned. You can’t contain me if you’re turned.”
He kicked her again. “This happened because I was the only one who remembered! Me and the Whispering One.” He frowned a massive, almost cartoonish downturn of his lips and shook his head as if clearing away bees. “And I don’t remember all that well, anymore. Because things are crossing. Changing.”
Billy’s Progenitor wasn’t making sense. Then again, when did a Burner ever make sense? But something told Billy he should listen.
His Progenitor blinked, then smiled. “Ha!” he said. “Wer weiß, was die Zukunft bringen wird—gebracht hat, nicht wahr?”
Other than his nakedness and small stature—their Progenitor was shorter than Billy and approximately the same height as the moaning, on-the-ground Ismene—he could pass for a fit, smiling, welcoming-if-crazy German tourist.
“What did you just say?” Billy asked. Too much German made him as agitated as the random chaos oozing off his Progenitor.
“I said that fate has abandoned us.” His Progenitor extended his hand again. Honey-like random energy dripped from his arm. Billy slowly extended his own hand to shake.
Just because he could see the freaky weirdness leaking out of new-space, it didn’t mean it would hurt him.
Probably.
“Who is the Whispering One?” Was the other princess he’d met near Captain Russia the Whispering One? He’d seen her—the small woman with the silver eyes and the Progenitor hair in her futuristic uniform—in the parking lot during the snow storm when Boyfriend and the dino-dog reattached.
She’d wanted Poke, but he’d refused to give it up.
Poke, his magic sword, which he carried on his back in its special, dragon-built scabbard.
“Why did she want my sword?” Billy asked.
“Maria Romanova! She’s a fucking paradox. She made herself.” The Maker of Burners shook his head as if dismayed. “A Russian-princess-shaped causal loop. Kannst du dir das vorstellen?”
Causal loop? The Intrepid people talked about a causal loop.
“She wasn’t with us before the olive tree and then she was!” He did a little Burner jig. “Sometimes I think lovely Maria is why we are not bound to a singular fate. Causal loops will do that, you know.” He snapped his fingers and little cartoonish puffs rose off his tips.
Billy opened his mouth to ask more questions, but the Maker of Burners danced a little jig again. He pulled back his foot to kick Ismene one more time, but stopped himself and set his foot down. Then he crouched over the whimpering and cowering woman.
Ismene curled up and tried to hide her face. “You’re talking to the ghost,” she whined to Billy. “Why is he doing this to me? Why did he attack me?”
Ismene, the angry sociopath, was legitimately terrified of the ghost she was supposed to carry down the mountain.
“What are you doing to her?” Billy asked.
If Billy only felt the Burner chaos of their Maker without seeing him, he’d be on the ground in a ball like Ismene. The fluctuations tightened in the air, then loosened, then sucked it all away, all while not tightening, or loosening, or removing it. Electricity sparked, then nothing. Ismene was probably feeling everything Billy saw.
And she was keeping her seers quiet, as terrified as she was.
Their Progenitor was the worst kind of poltergeist.
The Maker of Burners popped up to standing. “Well, that answers whether or not she can hear me, doesn’t it?”
“Stop hurting her.” For all his un-Burner-like attributes, their Maker sure did have a Burner-like personality.
Their Progenitor threw his arms into the air. “I can’t hitch a ride in her.” But he stopped, his arms out like he was signaling one of the Sentinels in for a landing, and bounced a little on his heels. “She’s a Fate made Burner? The… Jani, you said? Korrekt?” He dropped his arms down. “What’s your name, Schätzchen?”
“She can’t hear you, remember?”
Their Progenitor scowled again, and pointed at Ismene. “Is this the Ismene? The Usurper?” He giggled like a school girl. “Faszinierend!”
He poked at her shoulder and giggled again when she whimpered. “The vessel was the one made Burner Prime, but not Burner.”
Rysa. But Ladon had saved her from that fate. Ladon, who’d had some strange thoughts about the world while he believed his name was Nathaniel.
Billy’s mouth rounded. “Nate really wasn’t from around here, was he?” The weird belief that Dallas had been destroyed, his obsession with an already-married Rysa…. Had Boyfriend been accessing information about the future? Could the Progenitors not only see into the what-was-is-will-be, but also travel in it?
“Nate. Huh,” The Maker of Burners said. “Has that dragon killed him yet? They want to kill us all, by the way, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Wie konnte etwas so Glänzendes so böse sein?”
Billy inched closer. “I think you have information you need to shar
e with the Praesagio science types.” Lots and lots of information Billy could only guess at the meaning of.
Their Maker sniffed. “It’s that time, ja? The end is nigh? The Emperor would not have sent a vessel if it wasn’t time.”
The dripping chaos around The Maker turned bark-like. It blackened into a lava crust. When it shattered, little sparks swirled around his body.
He stared at Ismene as he clicked and locked through all the versions the universe deemed worthy of showing Billy: True empathy for Ismene danced through the set of his shoulders, then morphed into the fake empathy users show when they want something. Hate manifested, then vanished. Boredom. Loneliness. Angelic sweetness and devilish, glowing-eyed evil.
All without him moving one fraction of an inch.
He was supposed to hitch a ride so they could transport him back to The States because it was “that time?” This man would immediately destroy what little soul Ismene had left.
And then he’d steal her body.
Billy backed against the rock wall. He leaned against it, his face tilted back, as he tried to get his head above the tsunami he’d obviously just stepped into. Trajan said nothing about a vessel, but then again, he might not know yet that his sending a vessel was what fate demanded.
Because if he had known, Billy was sure he would have sent the princess, or at least the princess’s mum.
Mira could have held this man in check. Mira, with her solid present-seer, would have known what questions to ask and in what order to maximize figuring out what needed figuring. Mira would have known how to keep her daughter safe.
Ismene, not so much.
“Look, we need to get you down the mountain, okay?” Billy said. He had to do something. Maybe he could figure this out without a vessel. “That old geezer Trajan sent us with this nifty containment unit. Ismene and I rode in it.” He smoothed his hand down the front of his jacket. “You can get on the phone and speak German to the entire world, okay? Explain to the Praesagio scientists exactly what new-space and causal loops are.”
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