The Burning World

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “Dream!” she yelled as she flinched awake. “Dreaming!” She was in an SUV driven by Andreas. They were on the interstate. He refused to wait for Ladon, Anna, and the dragons. But it was okay. She’d texted Ladon that she was going to nap and that they were heading east.

  She glanced over her shoulder. No sign of the bus behind them.

  “They haven’t caught up yet,” Andreas said. “You okay?”

  He still had the duffle with the midnight blades on his lap.

  “I think the dragon I saw—the dragon who attacked Ladon and Dragon in my vision—was surprised to find us.” She shivered and pulled the jacket tighter. “I don’t think it was one specific dragon, either.” She shook her head. “I felt like an entire people saw us. I think their surprise has altered… something. I don’t know what.”

  They met the enemy. The real enemy. Not the Burners. Not Trajan and his bullshit. No, they’d met what was about to cause the whole damned world to burn.

  The whole world. Cities. The planet.

  She saw it in a vision right after she activated. Whole cities burn.

  Her uncle Faustus saw it, too. That dumb, evil son of a bitch Metus, her cousin, saw it. They tried to make her into the Ambusti Prime so that she’d kill Ladon because Faustus thought the Dracae would cause the end. Trajan, too. Trajan tried to kill her because he thought her dragons caused the burning world.

  They all saw dragons. They just saw the wrong dragons.

  And in the process of meeting their enemy, their enemy met them.

  If Rysa had talons, hers would be fully out.

  No talons here, her dark Fate said. Just, you know, this. Rysa’s energy blade manifested around her fist. It flowed up her arm and cupped her elbow.

  Fire to fight fire.

  Andreas pointed at her arm. “That doesn’t hurt?” he asked. “It’s not going to set the car on fire, is it?”

  “I don’t understand what it is,” she said as she watched the energy continue flowing up her arm. Pretty soon, she’d have one of those shoulder-sleeve gladiator deals, but made out of fire.

  How menacing, her dark Fate said.

  Shut up, Rysa thought.

  Andreas’s forehead furrowed. He, like everyone else, did not fully comprehend what had happened at the cave, or why Rysa was suddenly “upgrading.”

  “What, exactly, did you see?” he asked. “In that vision?”

  “The… place,” she said. They’d been in the SUV for a couple of hours and she still felt dazed. “The plateau.”

  The long immortal understood “the place.” They, collectively, had been visiting it on and off for centuries.

  Andreas said nothing for a several breaths. “We have never encountered other dragons.” He sounded reverent.

  Dragon and Sister-Dragon were the only two. All other dragons were stories and myths. No winged dragons. No thirty-foot behemoths. No beasts who breathed fire like a movie flamethrower.

  Only Brother-Dragon and Sister-Dragon, two bison-sized, six-taloned, climbing beasts whose hides mimicked to invisibility.

  The monster they’d met in “the place”—it had to be new-space—had been considerably larger. And angrier. And meaner.

  And desperate.

  And… “He said ‘We will take what we are owed.’ He said he was a god and that his people were owed.” Rysa wiggled, trying to get comfortable. “He felt determined. Appointed.” She curled her arms around her chest, wishing for Ladon’s arms and his strength to help calm her mind. “Fanatic.”

  “Military,” Andreas said.

  Murderously military. If the monster in the vision had been physically present, he would have literally snapped Dragon’s neck.

  “Strategy?” Andreas asked.

  Trajan had strategy in spades. Dmitri was now the Tsar of Russia. He had walked into the Kremlin with a crew of high-powered Praesagio Fates and Shifters, and boom! now ruled the greatest Cold War enemy of the United States.

  Trajan humanized the Fates and the Shifters in America. Dmitri laid out in less than five hours exactly what elite Fates and Shifters were capable of if the normals did not cooperate.

  Well, duh, Rysa’s dark Fate said. She picked at her fingernails once again. Trajan needs control of the Russian military, she said. A gift to the Emperor Godhead from Tsar Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov, true hero of the Russian people.

  Dmitri was no one’s puppet. He understood what was coming as well as everyone else, and had moved to protect as many people as he could.

  Rysa’s phone rang.

  Gavin. Keep him calm, her present-seer whispered.

  Because no one was calm. Nothing was calm. Not at all.

  Daisy had been stolen by Dunn and was not answering her phone. Dunn had enthralled Gavin to ‘stay here’ at the house in St. Paul.

  Which he didn’t.

  “What’d you do?” Rysa asked.

  “Ian took the door off the new oven. I used a sledgehammer one of the workers left and broke the front banister. We also gathered the sheets off my bed and took the pillows off the couch,” Gavin said. “The dogs are in the back seat.”

  A bark echoed across the line. “Radar. Sit,” Gavin said.

  Dmitri had told him to bring his here with him, so he did.

  “You piled it all in your car?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m wrapped up in the sheets and I’m holding the oven door on my lap. Ian’s driving. We’re about halfway across South Dakota.”

  Andreas leaned toward Rysa. “I told you Mr. Bower was Legion-worthy,” he said.

  “Andreas says you’re Legion-worthy, by the way,” Rysa said.

  “I don’t care if I’m Emperor-worthy. I want Daisy safe.”

  Rysa saw nothing of Daisy or Dunn. Or Daniel, Marcus, and Harold, either. But she did know she and Andreas needed to drive east, and that Gavin needed to drive west.

  So they drove.

  “Dunn wants Stab and the daggers, which we have. Dunn will have to communicate with us sooner or later.”

  “She better,” Gavin said.

  Rysa glanced at Andreas. None of them were confident that Dunn would call any of them, including Andreas.

  “She will,” Andreas said. “Or Marcus or Daniel will. They are Legion.”

  They need to act like Legion, Rysa thought.

  “They’re enthralled too.” Gavin’s voice had begun to edge toward breaking again.

  “Hey, Gavin,” Rysa said. “How’s Ian holding up?” Maybe distracting Gavin with his little brother’s needs might help.

  She’d met Ian Bower a couple of times, mostly at lunches in the Student Union. He seemed nice, if a little awkward.

  Not that Rysa had a handle on her own awkwardness. Ian Bower, though, had a scary hint of “girls frighten me” which had always made her back away. She was not, and never had been, a low-key, don’t-scare-a-jumpy-boy kind of woman.

  She’d never wanted to deal with the possible consequences of interacting with a “girls frighten me” guy, even if he was her best friend’s little brother.

  “He’s up-to-date, if that’s what you’re asking,” Gavin said.

  Ian must not be handling the whole “the world’s full of Fates, Shifters, Burners, and dragons!” thing as well as Gavin wanted.

  Perhaps Ian was frightened of more than girls.

  “Andreas can help,” she said. “When we meet up.”

  Gavin paused. “Yeah.”

  Andreas opened his mouth to answer, but his phone rang.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Hadrian must have lowjacked his car, otherwise Dunn wouldn’t have state troopers on her tail. They annoyed her more than anything else, although she probably wouldn’t have sped all the way into Cheyenne if they’d left her alone.

  They managed to follow her into what was probably this cow town’s one and only parking garage and now surrounded the vehicle.

  Daisy had sat in the passenger seat with her hands on her lap and her eyes closed for most of the trip. Dunn let
her be. Not much mattered now, with them only a few hours from the end. She did, though, place her hand on her daughter’s arm and give her a booster healing every quarter-hour or so.

  Activations were like that—quicksilver and unsure. What was healed half an hour ago could very well be unhealed ten minutes later. It was always worse with Firsts.

  An activation, up until she birthed Severo and added healer to the Shifter mix, had a non-trivial chance of killing a child. Were they sick before receiving the spit? Did they carry Fate blood? Had they been exposed to burndust or Burners? Without a future-seer, it was always a gamble.

  Vivicus’s fever had raged for six days. Sometimes, Dunn wondered if his activation had damaged his brain.

  Andreas had experienced a bad-but-not-deadly activation. But he’d always been big and strong, and often swatted away illnesses that dropped other men in their tracks.

  Severo, on the other hand, barely had a fever.

  Daisy was manifesting… something different. A fever, yes, but nothing Dunn couldn’t counter. The chills and shakes were more concerning. She twitched, and sometimes Dunn wondered if she was about to shed her skin and appear to the world a wholly new, angelic creature.

  The baby, Dunn suspected, would not make it through this ordeal. Daisy might end up watching the world end from new-space, and then dying of a miscarriage on the other side.

  We can still fix this, the Whispering One whispered.

  Fixing this involved a plan that slipped in and out of Dunn’s mind: Shards. Whispering Ones. Dunn and the First Alchemist on opposite sides of the membrane between real- and new-space.

  Cages. Power. Energy. A cannon aimed at something. Five fucking days, even though they only had five fucking hours.

  Daisy wouldn’t be fully activated until after the end of the world. Why couldn’t the Apocalypse have had the courtesy to withhold its bullshit until the other, smaller apocalypses had their chance to fully spread their glee among her family?

  Dunn blasted another heavy healing bolt into her daughter. Perhaps saving the babe, and saving Daisy from a miscarriage, might help her find her way back from the other side. Dunn might not have any control over the when and where of Daisy’s activation, but she could at least offer this one small measure.

  Daisy, once again, did not move or speak.

  She’d felt a sudden need to push a shard into Daisy’s gut while still in Trajan’s lair.

  It had been a new moment of crazy, that’s all. Just another point in her life when the whispers sent her in a direction that didn’t make sense. There’d also been something about paradoxes, and echoes. Time and history, it seemed, were a spiraling helix that repeated but in truth did not.

  Dunn leaned her head against the BMW’s warm, plush headrest. Perhaps a helix was too simple. Space and time were fractal and Dunn’s “crazy” mind just happened to see and hear echoes from the other curlicues.

  What, exactly, was real?

  She’d keep telling herself the universe was nothing more than a repeating pattern making bigger or smaller versions of itself. It made sense. It also meant that there was a version of Daisy out there who wouldn’t lose a baby she wished to cherish.

  Five hours, Dunn thought. The five—three now, with the drive—hours until the end is a very, very real number.

  Outside the car, at least six cops, some in Kevlar vests and all with their guns drawn, yelled “Get out of the car!” and “On the ground!” and several other cop-specific commands.

  Dunn cracked the windows and rolled out vast quantities of ‘this vehicle is empty’ calling scents.

  One of the cops popped open the door. His gun swung around her face, but he did not perceive her presence. His handsome, square jaw clenched under his stocking cap, and his lovely blue eyes darkened as he looked around the car’s interior.

  “Aren’t you a handsome one,” she said. She ran a hand over his well-defined bicep. “Strong, too, I suspect.”

  She’d always liked the strong ones.

  He pulled his arm back and frowned, then stood up. “It’s empty!” he yelled, then took another look, just to be sure.

  The garage’s security cameras would show her sitting in the driver’s seat and her daughter in the passenger seat. She should take care of that bit of evidence, but it really didn’t seem to matter anymore. Even if, for some strange reason, she’d been sure that driving at high speeds into downtown Cheyenne would somehow fix the end-of-the-world problem.

  She looked at the clock on the car’s dash. Two of her five hours had vanished. Now three hours stood between her and the dawn of a burning world. Three fucking hours and her very long life would likely draw to a close. Or not. Maybe she and a few of her children would come through this. Shifters were hard to kill, after all.

  Dunn had stopped being angry about the miscalculations after she turned onto Interstate 80. What difference did five hours or five days make? Nothing.

  Absolutely nothing.

  Fates loved the threat of a disaster. “Do as we say or the world will end!” They’d do some minor future-seeing and then everyone would line up behind the guy “who saw our path to salvation.”

  Fates: grifters and charlatans, bullies and psychopaths. Yet this time, Trajan—via his surrogate adopted son—told the truth. He’d done—and continued to do—good by the world from up high on his dictatorial mountain. Trajan of the Ulpi, the Emperor Godhead, and her son, no matter how she refused to take responsibility for him or any of her other children.

  Trajan. Vivicus. Andreas. Severo. The countless unnamed and uncounted horde of her descendants. Daisy.

  Dunn wrapped her hand around the steering wheel. She thought of offering the plastic and metal a healing at the same time she wished it to morph under her fingers.

  The wheel deformed. “Hmmm…” she said.

  “You didn’t change it.” Daisy pointed at the wheel. “You flowed it.”

  Dunn lifted her hand off the steering wheel. “Interesting.” Perhaps this new ability at the end of the world might just be what the world needed.

  But she really didn’t know how world-ending the end of the world would be. She knew about the evacuations. They’d been all over the radio. She suspected that Trajan had started banking genetic material, information, and food years ago. She understood why he sent Dmitri Pavlovich to become the new Tsar of the largest military occupying the Eurasian continent.

  Which all pointed to bad. And, if she was honest, war.

  “Tell me what I need to do, oh great Whispering One!” she yelled.

  The pretty-boy cop ducked down and looked into the car again. He held out his hand to signal his buddies to be quiet. “Shut the fuck up!” he yelled. “I thought I heard something.”

  Dunn, inches from his face, stared at his handsome, well-formed lips. “Are all Wyoming boys as lovely as you?” She stroked his cheek. “After the world ends, maybe I’ll move to Cheyenne.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mom! Leave him alone.” A pained growl followed Daisy’s words.

  Dunn placed her hand on Daisy’s cheek and shot in yet another healing bolt. Daisy inhaled deeply and sat back in the seat.

  The cop pulled back again and all his handsomeness drained from his face. Hardness set in, and his expression immobilized into a mask of the kind of anger men use to hide fear.

  Dunn grabbed the attaché containing the shards off the back seat and dropped her legs out of the car. “Oh, my dear handsome boy, go home to your family.” Seemed the least she could do for this man who worked hard to protect this American city. “Keep your people safe from what’s coming.”

  He stared at the melted steering wheel, but blinked once. The three cops around him also blinked.

  “Step to the side, please,” she commanded.

  He dutifully moved.

  Dunn stood up. She’d miscounted. Seven cops surrounded the car. Another four, three men and a woman, stayed back and down the slope of the parking garage’s concrete passage, near their vehicles.
r />   Normals, all of them.

  “Come, Daisy,” she said. “Let us greet the end of the world in the wide open Wyoming air.”

  Daisy’s door opened, then closed. She stood on the other side of Hadrian’s comfy BMW and pulled her jacket around herself as if she did not like the enthralling Dunn had laid on the cops.

  Dunn poked the handsome cop’s chest. “Either an enthralling or they shoot us.” She poked him again. “It is Wyoming, daughter.”

  Daisy rolled her eyes. “Sandro can help you with that personality disorder, Mom. Evil is a treatable condition nowadays, you know.”

  Dunn laughed. “You are your father’s daughter, something I suspect the world will be thankful for in the long run.”

  “I’m me, Mother,” Daisy said. “I raised myself without either of you. Dad just happened to be the parent willing to help when I needed it.”

  Dunn shouldered the bag. The shards’ vibrations pushed through the leather to her side, and she tightened her fingers on the strap.

  “You are correct, Daisy. You are the First Alchemist and you made yourself.” Dunn watched her daughter slowly walk around the car. “Your father’s genes influence your appearance and your attitude, but they are only the container in which Daisy Pavlovich rides.”

  Daisy walked up to the handsome cop and peered at his face. “I thought you looked familiar. You’re the cop from the hotel,” she muttered. “The guy with the kid named Nate.”

  She looked back at Dunn. “He’s a trooper. Be nice to him, okay? He’s a good guy. He helped us stop Aiden and his sisters.”

  Nate, Dunn thought. He has a son named Nate.

  Yes, the Whispering One said.

  Dunn cupped his face and fired in a bolt of generalized healing. She stopped short of making him long immortal, but if it turned out that the world needed him at its end, he’d be able to fight, and fight well.

  Maybe he’d survive this time.

  Perhaps Dunn should accept the abandoned fate she’d been given. Perhaps she should stop asking questions, stop pushing back against the whispers, stop arguing. Her two-millennia-worth of anger about being alone and about her inability to harness a safe life was hers and hers alone, as was her deep well of resentment at being the “crazy” one. The world only had three hours left. Why pout about it? Why not live what time she had left as herself? As Cecilia Reynolds, a woman of power who answered to the name of a goddess called Idunn.