Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Fifth of Blood
Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book Three
Kris Austen Radcliffe
Copyright 2017 Kris Austen Radcliffe
All rights reserved.
Published by
Six Talon Sign Fantasy & Futuristic Romance
Edited by Annetta Ribken
Copyedited by Terry Koch and Juli Lilly
Cover designed by Lou Harper
Series dragon design and art by Christina Rausch
Plus a special thanks to my Proofing Crew.
Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidences are used factitiously. All representations of real locales, programs, or services are factitious accounts of the environments and services described. Any resemblances characters, places, or events have to actual people, living or dead, business, establishments, events, or locales is entirely unintended and coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
For requests, please e-mail: [email protected].
Third electronic edition, September 2017
Updated and reformatted
version 8.25.2017
ISBN: 978-1-939730-49-7
Contents
Fifth of Blood
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Meanwhile, far north of Portland…
BONDS
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Fifth of Blood
Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon
Kris Austen Radcliffe
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Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon
The Series
Games of Fate
Flux of Skin
Fifth of Blood
Bonds Broken & Silent
All But Human
Men and Beasts
The Burning World
Chapter One
Seven days from now…
Grandpa Andreas told her she was dangerous. He called her a true hornets’ nest.
The douchebag asshat in front of her didn’t know the half of it.
His blue-green enviro-suit creaked and crinkled. He lumbered and twitched and waved the wrench he carried in his gloved hand.
Sweat plastered Rysa’s hair against her mouth and added ash and Burner stench to acrid notes of her own fear and exhaustion. Her hand wrapped around the axe and cold crept from the handle to her palm. Praesagio Industries collapsed to nothing more than the spruce-colored suit in front of her.
That suit was meant for the ocean more than to protect a body from the acid of a Burner or the mind-shattering calling scents of an enthraller. Seams sealed out air and water. The hood, with its mirrored facemask, concealed. A rebreather recycled the wearer’s air.
He swung. The wrench hit her shoulder and almost shattered the bone of her upper arm. But Rysa Torres, the Draki Prime, the healer of dragons, pulled through her pain and drew a long breath of Praesagio’s dust-choked air. And Rysa swung the axe weighing in her hand.
The axe’s cut-steel head was balanced only in pounds by the flare on the end of the handle, not in ounces, and it rolled in her grip. It was an axe meant to take down walls. To open holes so those needing to escape a burning world, could.
Not to defend a young Fate-Shifter from a Roman Emperor.
Rysa’s white-hot seers ruptured and flared like a supernova. He was about to swing the wrench again.
Burning sat on her tongue as a hot, acidic aftertaste her calling scents could not mask. It popped in her ears as a crackle as loud as her own breathing. And it colored the world with drago
n flame.
The monster grunted loudly enough that Rysa heard it through his suit’s hood. This time, he raised the wrench over his head. This time, when he hit, she flew sideways. Her collarbone fractured, and she slammed into the edge of a tool case, but she held her body straight. She would not allow the monster in front of her, the thing who was much worse than her uncle Faustus, see the blinding hurt screaming through her body.
He twisted slightly, she knew, to see her clearly through the mirrored facemask. One more hit and she’d knock off his rebreather. He’d go down like everyone else who came too close to her, a shrieking heap on the floor rocking back and forth because he couldn’t breathe anymore.
No one breathed around her. No one. She was Fate. She was Shifter. And her calling scents set brains on fire.
He wouldn’t get by her. Not now. Not ever.
She would take him down and he would never control the Dracae.
She lifted her arm, righting her collarbone and pulling the bone flush. Under her skin, bone knitted, but she wouldn’t move the axe to the other hand. She wouldn’t show weakness.
They were matched weapon for weapon. He was bigger. But Rysa healed.
The monster wiggled his shoulders inside his military-grade ocean suit, breathing singular air pulled from a filter system capable of trapping ash and fire and the calling scents of an out-of-control Shifter.
The wrench arced toward her again. Its reflection glinted for the briefest moment on the plastic of his hood, mixing with the gleam and glitter of sun streaming in through the broken roof.
The iron in her hand slashed, but the suit held. And this monster, this man who still counted himself Emperor of all—the normals, the Fates, the Shifters, the Burners—swung his weapon one more time….
Chapter Two
Now…
Rysa Torres leaned against the door of a stolen sedan, her phone in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other. Her soon-to-be brother-in-law, Derek, had parked at the far end of the big mall’s lot, in the little patch of asphalt to the side of the main entrance. He’d been nice and gone into the mall to buy supplies—and to do recon—by himself. So she could tease Ladon “privately.” Or at least as privately as allowed in a parking lot.
The road ran by just up a dusty embankment, separating the mall and its movie theaters from the big box stores, the liquor warehouses, and the indistinguishable chain restaurants. Blocked from the shoppers by a rock-filled median and the sorriest-looking little tree she’d ever seen, the spot offered some privacy.
Which she so very much wanted.
Three days in a car with her butt on a rock-hard passenger seat and Derek cramming two thousand years of Dracae history into her head left her squirrelly. Both he and Andreas seemed to forget that attention deficit meant a real, honest-to-goodness deficit in attention. Without the calming effects of Ladon and Dragon’s energy flow, a lot of what they threw at her didn’t stick.
But she did learn about the sheer quantity of actual Romans walking around, and Derek’s thoughts on modern Russia. And she lived through the “necessary” three-hour lecture on Fate-Shifter politics, even though Derek refused to talk about the Shifter Progenitor. She’d been so bored her seers started whipping around, looking for something—anything—else to think about.
Like the gorgeous man standing next to the driver’s side door of his van, thirty-five feet away, his own phone to his ear and his binoculars to his eyes. She looped her binoculars around her neck, moving her hand slowly over her breasts as she leaned forward into the light thrown by the lone streetlamp a few feet away. A finger worked over a nipple and she opened her mouth, releasing a breathy sigh into her phone. Not a lot of light filtered over the sedan, but just enough to make her movements distinct and clear.
Ladon’s growl rolled between the vehicles, a deep, masculine call of pent-up desire so loud Rysa didn’t need her phone to hear it. She grinned and ran her hand down her front. Then she splayed her fingers, and she dropped her palm to her thigh.
“Guess where I put the other insignia,” she purred, watching him watch her. Before she’d cycled up too high, Ladon had tied leather cording through a new Dragons’ Legion insignia. He’d bound one to her uncovered wrist, and placed another around her neck. She wore three visible now, and one she’d put on herself. In a hidden place he’d have to find.
He dropped the binoculars away from his eyes and just stared, one eyebrow cocked, chest forward and legs firmly planted, like he was about to sprint across the pavement and sweep her up in his arms.
Which he couldn’t. Her Shifter calling scents spewed at an insane level that no one could be within thirty-five feet of her. Not Andreas or AnnaBelinda or any normal. Not Ladon. Not Dragon, who rested on the roof of the van, his hide dark and mimicking the Santa Fe landscape. The poor beast was trying very hard to ignore his humans’ little game.
No one but Derek could be close enough to talk to her without yelling across a wide open space, which both pissed off Ladon and made him thankful. So Rysa did her best to keep her man engaged, even if they couldn’t touch.
She missed him. A lot. Derek was great—though obviously freaked out by the changes to his body since she’d healed him at his cousin’s bar in Branson, Missouri. But he wasn’t Ladon. He was, pretty much, her brother-in-law, and he seemed to be taking his new role seriously. Derek channeled “mom” better than Rysa’s own mother.
Right now, Ladon didn’t care where they were. If she asked him to strip naked so she could have herself a good look, he’d do it. Right here in front of the teenager staffing the drive-thru on the other side of the road and the fat housewives stuffing sleepy kids and ice cream into the backs of their minivans in front of the mall.
Her spectacular man would stand in the heat wafting off the asphalt, in full glory for the world to envy, just because she asked.
Ladon’s cheek twitched. “You put the insignia in your bra, over your right nipple. So it rubs like my thumb and finger.” All the lust in his voice carried through the phone.
“Oh…” Rysa breathed. “Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll take Derek’s and put one on each nipple.” She ran her free hand over her breasts again. “But that’s not where it is.”
The insignias weren’t her talisman, but they did carry a tiny fraction of dragon talon. They allowed her to use her Fate’s seers, at least a little bit. But losing her true talisman, Dragon’s talon, to that crazy nightmare-fuel douchebag Vivicus, and not being able to touch Dragon now because she had to stay back, hobbled her future-, present-, and past-seers.
And made them random. But she was working on that. When she wasn’t teasing Ladon or being lectured by Derek on what Shifter clan lived where, she talked on the phone with Grandpa Andreas for as long as her brain could hold focus, or used chat, listening and studying and learning how to be a good Fate.
Even hampered, she’d tracked Vivicus and her talisman to New Mexico. Three days they’d been jaunting around the Southwest, and she hoped they might catch a lead tonight.
Her seers were clear on one thing—catching Vivicus wasn’t going to happen. At least not now. Vivicus needed new money for new accounts, ones unnoticeable to Dmitri’s cyber-stalkers and not attached to the Seraphim, so he was looking for a buyer for her talon. She was sure Vivicus had morphed his body into a shape just as unnoticeable.
Her seers had been clear about something else—without her talisman, she’d never get her Shifter half under control. Dragon couldn’t get close for long enough to do any good. And it turned out dragons didn’t shed talons naturally. He’d volunteered to pull out another one—to tie a rope around it and use the van to yank it out the way her dad used to pull out her loose baby teeth when she was little. He said he’d hold still, maybe stay latched onto a tree, and have Ladon gun the van.
The look of horror on her face had been enough to make Dragon promise not to try. She couldn’t get near him to heal the wound, so she’d firmly—very firmly—said no. Absolutely, unequivocal
ly no. And he was not to argue.
The relief on Ladon’s face alone had been enough to stop all thoughts of de-taloning right then and there. Besides, Dragon’s missing one was still growing back, so he couldn’t lose another right now.
Vivicus stealing the talon pissed off Ladon’s sister AnnaBelinda more than it did him. Rysa had picked up bits with her seers—guilt over what had happened in Wyoming and Branson rolled off Anna and Sister-Dragon and muddied Rysa’s present- and future-seeing. But at least Rysa knew it motivated the dragon woman to help this time, not hinder.
When they left Branson, Rysa gave an order for AnnaBelinda to head off in a different direction, and to think very clearly about where she was going. So Anna had—and had returned to the cave to fetch the other van.
As far as anyone could tell, Rysa’s plan had worked. No Fates had yet shown up at Dmitri’s bar, The Land of Milk and Honey. She’d had the Dracae and the Shifters send waves of confusion into what-was-is-will-be and they’d dodged a big bullet as a result.
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