Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Daisy nodded.

  Marci circled a phone number at the bottom of the page. “They’re closed today, so I called my buddy at the hotel.” She tapped the hotel again. “Sounds like they don’t have any one-way rentals available right now, anyway.”

  So no driving herself home.

  Marci tapped the train station again. “The train comes through in the afternoons. That might be your best bet.” She circled yet another hotel. “Or the bus.”

  The train might be fun. “Thanks,” Daisy said.

  “Oh!” Marci dug in a drawer. “Grandpa said to give you this, too, if you wanted to stay another day.” She handed Daisy a free pass to the big amusement park with the giant horse rollercoaster.

  “Thanks,” Daisy said again. Why all the front desk love? The fight she’d had with Brad must have annoyed the lodge’s other guests. Why were Jacob and Marci being so nice?

  Marci swirled the end of her pen across the map. “I think you remind Grandpa of someone.” She shrugged and her scent took a wistful, sweet tone. “Every once in a while he’ll get talking about the old days, ya know?”

  What could Daisy say? Unlike Jacob, she wasn’t old enough to be nostalgic about ex-flames, though she knew enough long immortal Shifters to understand.

  Daisy glanced at the door, then back at Marci. “You wouldn’t happen to have a bike I could borrow? So I can pedal into town?” She held up the pass. She’d stop at the train station and buy a ticket while she was at it. A little two-wheeled exercise never hurt anyone, and Wisconsin Dells wasn’t that big or far away.

  A wicked, naughty grin appeared on Marci’s face. “Oh, I have something much better.” She dug in the drawer again and pulled out a rabbit’s foot connected to a ring and a chain.

  And a key clearly designed for a motorcycle.

  The cycle was smaller than the one Daisy had learned on in Branson. Dirtier too, but it purred like a lion cub and got the job done.

  The helmet was more Motocross than street, but it fit well. Her red hoodie would have to do, but the town wasn’t far away; plus, she’d be on a slower road, and the morning was already warm. Town beckoned, as did a day of rides and waterslides.

  Daisy pulled the bike onto the two-lane road leading out of the state park and toward the loud and energetic world of Dells tourism.

  There were other Shifters here. Small, local tourist hubs often drew in clans. Enthralling visitors into leaving heavy tips made places like Wisconsin Dells, and her father’s entertainment complex in Branson, and at least twenty other locations she knew about across North America, perfect for Shifter employment.

  Maybe she’d meet a few. Maybe not. Either way, she’d remember to buy herself that t-shirt.

  Daisy buzzed down the little road. The wind whistled around the helmet, and the bike bounced along the pavement. The road wasn’t in bad shape, but a motorcycle took bumps worse than a car, and she found herself lifting off the seat more than she expected.

  The road twisted. Daisy slowed and adjusted her core to the bike’s rhythm and natural center of gravity. Even with the bumps, the bike handled well.

  Sun burst through the trees and splattered pools of glare onto the road—shadow then brightness, then shadow again—but the summer warmth made up for the squinting.

  She was free to enjoy the day.

  Free.

  The road twisted again. Daisy leaned into the curve.

  Freedom had as many meanings as snow. Sometimes it fell gently from the sky. Sometimes you could build igloos and snowmen and flap your arms and legs in it until the landscape filled with angels.

  Sometimes, it came screaming in as a wall of white and the next thing you knew, you’d lost three toes to frostbite.

  Or you simply died.

  Brad’s abandonment wasn’t a blizzard. She wasn’t so self-absorbed and self-serving that she believed her minor trauma at the hands of a douchebag was anything more than a little bump of ice in the road of her life. But it still jolted.

  The real road under the motorcycle curved yet again, and yet again, Daisy leaned into the real summer world outside her own thoughts. Animals filled the woods even with all the humans around. Nature and commerce intertwined and the land seemed to have a balance she hadn’t fully realized until she got onto the back of the bike.

  Perhaps she should follow suit. Perhaps Brad was nothing more than a slight chance of fog and she should ride on through into the warm sunshine to the other side.

  Daisy revved the bike around a sandstone outcropping.

  A road sign came into view—not a big one, though the billboard did have lights. Just a smallish, yellow-and-white, hand-painted sign declaring “Auto Repair” a quarter mile up the road.

  The sun hit the sign, and the glare hit her eyes—just as raccoon and the hot, metallic tang of fresh blood hit her bloodhound nose as if someone had slapped a bleeding palm over her face.

  Daisy coughed, then gagged, and her hand jerked.

  The bike’s front wheel leaned too far to the left. The back hit one of the road’s many bumps. Gravel smacked against her helmet. Another rock bit into her arm. The world swayed.

  The bike dropped onto its side.

  Up turned sideways, and down rose to smack into Daisy’s hip and shoulder. She hit the pavement hard—as did the bike. The engine revved, then coughed, and the stink of gasoline overrode blood and her own fear.

  Daisy rolled. The helmet slammed the pavement and her world went dark, then it slammed again and the sky appeared. Dark, then brightness, then dark once more—and the clean freshness of grass. Damp soil. Minty lavender rising from deep green, scallop-shaped ivy. Larger, smoother rocks under her belly and hands. Soil.

  She’d rolled face-down into a ditch.

  The helmet suddenly constricted around her head. The padding pressed on her ears like the rocks under her belly pressed on her gut. The visor cut off her air.

  “Off off off!” Daisy tossed the helmet. It bounced once, then rolled down the shallow slope into a puddle.

  Minty lavender hit her nose again. Small, delicate, purple flowers rubbed against her cheeks. She’d crashed a borrowed motorcycle and landed in a patch of creeping Charlie ground ivy.

  Daisy flopped over onto her back.

  The warm Wisconsin sun reflected off the sign and danced over her face. The green and purple of the ground flickered over to the printed, flat, white and yellow promise of “repair.”

  “Promises, promises,” she groaned. Air left her lungs. Ache took its place.

  Shit, she thought. Damn it. The adrenaline anesthetization dripped away from her nerves and her skin and her jostled brain, and left behind her body’s screams.

  She was a Shifter healer. An animal healer, but like every healer no matter how weak or strong, her body instinctively righted itself. The bruise on her arm faded. The jolt to her hip re-aligned. Her brain immediately healed all damage from being jostled by the fall and the roll.

  But it still freakin’ hurt.

  A lot. Spikes of heat stabbed her spine. A boiling ache meant one of her major abdominal organs wasn’t happy.

  Breathing through it was her only choice. Not like anyone was around to help.

  And she still smelled blood. Not hers. Just a trace under the gasoline and her trauma. An animal’s.

  Daisy coughed. Just how much damage could her body tolerate? This wasn’t so bad. No poison. No knives. No evil Fates looking to slowly murder her.

  Maybe if she closed her eyes for a moment, her healer would finish its work and she’d be able to sit up.

  Or not. The creeping Charlie really did smell nice. Why did people think of it as a weed? Better a bed of ivy than a coffin full of nettles.

  She closed her eyes. When she woke up, she’d find the bleeding animal.

  I promise, she thought, and let the sleep in.

  Chapter Four

  A shadow moved over Daisy’s face.

  She sat up faster than she meant to. Faster than she should have, conside
ring how the world did a swirly jig around her head.

  A kid knelt in the creeping Charlie next to her side. He looked to be eight or nine—ten, tops—and a couple years out from puberty. He was tall, though, or perhaps just lean. But he already had the beginnings of an inverted triangle shape to his frame, and was probably destined to be one of those surprisingly strong thin guys—the ones who looked unassuming but could scale the sides of buildings or carry couches by themselves.

  She couldn’t tell the color of his eyes. The sun hit the billboard and the glare made them both squint, but his eyes looked rich and dark, like royal violet, or a velveteen chocolate brown. His hair matched—maybe black with blue undertones, or maybe brown with violet. In the reflection of the billboard, she couldn’t tell.

  His skin was both warm and pale at the same time, much like her own, with strong olive undertones, and his face matched the sculpted, chiseled sharpness of his hair.

  The kid stared even though he squinted. He held his chin low and his jaw tight, and radiated an all-seeing vibe that made her wonder if he read not only her injuries, but her mind and her soul.

  Fate, she thought. But he was too young to be active. Like Shifters, Fates rarely activated their children before they were mentally mature enough to deal with their gifts, which usually meant late teens or early twenties.

  And like the three morpher, enthraller, and healer flavors of Shifters, Fates also came in threes: past-, present-, and future-seers. They activated in triads, with each Fate taking up one of the abilities. They needed a talisman—something metal that represented a context. It focused their seeing. Daisy didn’t quite understand it, but she knew that if you asked the same question of three different triads, you’d get three completely different sets of answers, depending on whether their contexts were love, or hate, or war.

  Whether the kid staring at her would one day frame his life as love or hate, or if his destiny was to stop a war, she did not know.

  Nor did she feel a seer. One of the bonuses of being a Shifter was a sixth—or seventh, or eighth—sense of who was nearby. Fates, other Shifters, the world’s two dragons, it didn’t matter. Only a few particularly powerful individuals—Prime Fates and class-one Shifters—could hide in plain sight from other paranormals, but such individuals were few and far between. And dangerous.

  This kid, for all his physical presence, was much too young to have both the power and the training to hide his gift. Even unactivated, it still pulsed off him in waves.

  Which meant that she was likely in the presence of a young man who would one day become a powerful Prime.

  The last Prime Fate to notice her… took advantage.

  Daisy pushed away her thoughts of Primes and Fates. That part of her life was done, and she’d moved on before she left Branson for her undergraduate studies. And this sweet-if-intense kid was not the Fate who had caused her harm.

  The kid touched her arm. “Do you still hurt?” He pointed over her shoulder. “Your motorcycle is damaged. You fell, yes?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I fell.” She patted at her belly and back. No pain. No sprains. Her healer must have finished the job while she was unconscious.

  She looked up at the sky. The sun hadn’t moved much. She hadn’t been out very long. Thankfully.

  The boy straightened his back, lifted one knee, and stiffly pushed himself to standing. He stood over her, blinked once, then pointed his finger at the billboard. “Will you help, please?”

  The animal blood she’d smelled earlier still hung in the air. “Is there a hurt critter nearby?”

  The kid blinked, but didn’t respond. He tilted his head as if listening to someone or something she could not hear. Then he blinked again.

  Daisy’s nose picked up… something. A calling scent, perhaps. Or maybe a natural pheromone. Whatever it was, it vanished as quickly as it appeared.

  Which was not normal. Scents weren’t as transient as light; not even a calling scent dissipated as fast as a burst of light vanished. Scents lingered long after an image left the retina.

  She looked around. “Are we the only people here?” Only a powerful Shifter could make such a subtle calling scent. If she hadn’t imagined the whole thing. She sniffed again. Which she might have. She’d just flipped a motorcycle and had been unconscious. Imagining phantoms was not impossible.

  The kid’s expression stayed exactly the same. No surprise. No comprehension. Nothing, as if he hadn’t heard what she asked even though he was looking at her face.

  A faint whiff of ozone drifted from his body, as if he exhaled burning wires.

  “Hey,” she said, and touched his arm. “Are you okay?”

  A big, bright smile appeared on his young face. “You have healed?” He pointed up the slope, toward the motorcycle, which sat on its side in the gravel just off the road. “Will you heal her?” He pointed at the billboard again.

  Did she imagine the ozone? Other than the staring and the tipping of his head, he seemed okay.

  Slowly, Daisy stood. Her knees creaked a bit, and her back tightened. She wiped her palms on her ripped jeans. Her hoodie was in rough shape, but her healer had, in fact, worked its magic. Her body was no worse for wear.

  She stretched her arm and swung her shoulder, and some of the residual ache in her back let go. She’d be okay.

  A soft chitter came from a bush under the sign.

  The raccoon. A young one, too. The gasoline and her fear had covered the animal’s scent before, but now terrified raccoon kit filled the area.

  How long had the poor critter been injured? And here she’d passed out when she should have been helping.

  She touched the kid’s arm before starting through the brush toward the chittering. “How did you know I can help?” Perhaps she just wanted him to admit the obvious—she’d rolled her bike into the domain of Fates.

  Just this once she’d like one to be straight with her right out of the gate.

  The kid followed and did his unsettling listening-to-whispers thing again. “You are a Shifter.” He listened again. “And a healer.”

  She opened her mouth to ask more questions—the hows and the whats and the wheres—but snapped her jaw shut. The kit needed help.

  “What’s your name?” No matter how much she wanted to know, the question seemed a better one than Are you a proto-Prime Fate?

  “Orel,” he said.

  Orel. An Eastern European name. Her father had a colleague in Kiev named Orel.

  Daisy pushed aside a bramble and looked down at the source of the chitters and tang in the air.

  A tiny raccoon looked up. Its chitters turned to hisses, but it didn’t move from its spot in a small nest of grass.

  “A car hit her,” Orel said. He looked up at her again with his big, dark eyes. “Will she die?” He frowned and blinked, then shook his head as if he heard a voice Daisy did not. “No, she will not. She will be fine.” He looked up at Daisy. “You are special.”

  Again, she wondered if they were alone. Some Shifters were capable of enthralling others to not perceive their presence, but if someone was literally whispering in the kid’s ear, she probably would have caught calling scents or at least sensed a presence.

  Daisy knelt next to the raccoon. “How do you know what I am?” He likely knew exactly what she was just by virtue of living in a town crawling with Shifters.

  “The car hit her and she rolled down here and I knew if I stayed that you would come and make her better.” Orel pointed at the little raccoon kit. “Please help her.”

  Daisy blew out the same ‘calm’ and ‘help’ calling scents she’d made for the wolf. “It’s okay,” she whispered.

  The little raccoon’s hissing subsided and returned to her previous chittering. In the trees not too far away, an adult raccoon chittered back.

  “Did you hear that?” Daisy asked. “Her mommy is calling.”

  Orel nodded.

  Daisy carefully picked up the kit. Her leg felt sprained, but not broken. Like Daisy, sh
e’d gotten out of her accident in pretty good shape, but she could have internal injuries. Daisy curled her fingers around the little animal’s haunch and healed the muscle, then sent a wave of generalized healing into her little body, just in case.

  “There.” She set the kit down. The raccoon sniffed at her now-healed rear leg, then at Daisy’s hand. Her tiny raccoon hands patted along Daisy’s skin, and she chittered again. Then she patted the ground and Orel’s shoe.

  He grinned.

  The little kit waddled toward the trees and her family.

  “You did a good thing, kid. Helping the raccoon.” She touched Orel’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

  He stared at the woods. “You don’t like Fates,” he said.

  “What? It’s not like that,” she said. How could he know she didn’t trust Fates? He was just a kid.

  Orel slid his foot back. His dark eyes rounded.

  He ran away, up the slope to the dusty driveway.

  “Hey! Kid!” she yelled, but it was too late. He disappeared around a bend and out of her sight.

  Did she just frighten an eight-year-old kid? A Fate—likely a Fate—but still a child. Daisy frowned and pulled her phone out of her pocket.

  Maybe having her dad send someone wasn’t such a bad idea.

  She pushed the on button. Nothing happened. She pushed it again, and again, but her phone didn’t respond. Maybe it just needed charging, but it had been at ninety percent battery life when she left this morning.

  She tucked it back into her pocket and looked up at the billboard. “All repairs guaranteed!” it said in its grand yellow glory. She glanced at the bike, then up the hill toward where the kid disappeared.

  Daisy made her way through the creeping Charlie hoping that the sign did not lie.

  Chapter Five

  The driveway curved around a massive oak that towered over the nearby ash and pine. Someone had nailed a hand-painted sign proclaiming “Repairs!” to its trunk long ago, and the poor sign looked ready to snap under the pressure from the oak’s bark.