Fifth of Blood

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “What happened?” Nakajima pulled his phone from his pocket and switched on the screen. The little airlock, now bathed in the eerie brilliance of the phone’s blue-green light, shimmered like the interior of some spaceship.

  The nurse tapped his phone. “Don’t know. Building communications are down.”

  But Rysa knew. “Burners,” she whispered. And not her Burner.

  Even in the harsh electronic glow from his phone, Rysa saw the blood drain from Nakajima’s face.

  Another boom filled the airlock, but this one was closer. Much closer. Someone kicked the door.

  “God damn it!” The anger and frustration Rysa knew Nakajima had been harboring since he appeared at the warehouse cinched his face into a mask as tight as the one over his nose. He had been behaving himself up until now, doing his best to be professional in front of the Dracos. But now Ladon was on the other side of the door from Rysa.

  And he wanted in.

  “Tell your boyfriend to calm down.” Nakajima did not look at her. He fiddled with some mechanical handle and barked orders at the nurse, who held up his phone, using it as a flashlight. But the dismissiveness, the expectation that she would start crying at any second, showed in his posture.

  She whimpered, to play it up. “I can’t see. It’s too dark.”

  A roar filled the airlock and a bright light from the other room. Dragon flamed.

  Ladon hit the door again.

  “I need your phone, so I can see.” Rysa reached out her hand.

  Nakajima, distracted by the mechanics of trying to open the other door, handed it over.

  He gave her his phone. Just like that. Rysa repressed a smile.

  Her hunger made her stagger and her limbs felt weak, but she now had access to information without the use of her seers—and without setting off the obvious Fate alarms. Access to their network probably wouldn’t last long, but she had to try.

  She swiped the screen of Nakajima’s phone. The nurse was right. No external messages. But she did find something in his inbox. External calls jammed. Use internal emergency systems.

  She held it up to the window.

  On the other side, Ladon nodded. The nurses are yelling about Burners, he signed.

  Says here too, she signed and flitted through his older messages. BC lab requests further tests on t. She held that one up, too.

  It’s safe, she signed. She found several other messages she didn’t understand but her buzzing seers flicked out small ah-has confirming her earlier decisions.

  She needed something at Praesagio, but they wanted everything she had in return.

  Ladon nodded again. We will—

  Ladon suddenly turned around as Dragon’s hide flickered, a massive starburst moving over his side.

  What’s going on? Her seers only buzzed. She didn’t know. And if it was Burners, she wouldn’t know, anyway.

  Ladon held up his hands to sign. Your father is here.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  “Brother’s van.” Anna backed her vehicle into the space next to the other van. Behind her, Sister-Dragon’s hide flickered, then dimmed. Neither spoke or signed.

  Three people jogged out of the building, all in white lab coats. The one in the back carried a box but stopped, holding the door with his foot.

  Andreas recognized the fourth person who stepped out. Tall and classically handsome, he carried himself like he was still in charge of the world. He flexed his shoulders and dismissed the third lab-coated assistant when he stopped only long enough to take the box.

  “Trajan.” Anna’s face turned stony as she opened her door. “He looks younger.”

  Andreas frowned. “He probably has a healer on staff doing cosmetic work.”

  Behind them, Sandro made a small snort of disbelief.

  The back door opened and Sister-Dragon snaked out the opening, her hide changing to full invisibility as she passed over the threshold.

  “Stay here.” Andreas pointed to the corner behind the passenger seat. He didn’t come all this way to have Trajan walk up to Sandro and carry him off like some bauble.

  Sandro nodded and hunkered down, though the seat barely concealed his large frame.

  Andreas ran his hand over his face, feeling the fatigue of the past week fight with the adrenaline of the moment, and opened his door. The three technicians lifted two packs, attached to what looked like oxygen masks, out of the box.

  Trajan took one and held it out to Anna. “I am sorry our reconciliation came because of harm done to your brother’s new companion. If we had known the Jani’s plan, we would have stopped it.”

  “And yet you knew of their attack on the Seraphim’s medical complex.” Anna stood her ground, her hands clasped behind her back the way any general would face an emperor. Andreas took up his place at her back.

  Trajan’s face remained expressionless and bland. Andreas expected nothing short of a perfect sparring posture.

  “You are familiar with the Parcae, Dracas-Human. Simplicity in action and reaction is never an option.” Trajan flipped a switch on the side of the pack and held out the mask. “One of Praesagio Industries’ latest innovations. Put it on and have your Second attempt to enthrall you.” He flipped a switch on the second mask and pulled it over his own face.

  Anna grimaced when Trajan turned on the machine, and took it but did not put it over her face. She nodded toward Trajan, glancing at Andreas, giving him her tacit permission to take down this Fate.

  He knew better. As Trajan said, nothing with Fates was simple. A direct frontal assault would likely cause the same response he’d endured centuries before, when dealing with another Ulpi triad—one dose of calling scents meant to disable their present-seer caused a chain reaction that incinerated everyone within one hundred feet. Every man. Every woman. Every child. They set off a Burner, and to this day, Andreas could not forget the smell of flesh burned to dust by acid.

  He stared at Trajan. Fates always had the upper hand, but they did not control all they surveyed. Andreas blew a heavy dose of ‘vomit’ directly at Trajan’s face.

  “My assumption is that whatever you sent my way was not pleasant.” Trajan tapped the side of the mask. “Technology is catching up, my friends. And we here at Praesagio mean to bring us all into the future—you, me, the Shifters. Even those damned disgusting things we used to call Ambustae.” Trajan swept his arms at the buildings.

  The masks blocked his calling scents. Andreas thrust out his hand, palm up, beckoning for the mask Anna held. The only distinguishing features on the pack attached to the mask were an on indicator light and what looked like an intake vent. Tubing snaked out one corner and connected to the mask.

  “What is this?” He sniffed at the mask. It smelled like plastic, but nothing more.

  “Proprietary technology. It’s a prototype. We have, I believe, six units, plus the larger one we modified for the Dracos-beast, correct?” Taking the mask from Andreas, Trajan nodded at one of the techs, who nodded back an affirmative. The tech took the second mask, turned it off, and dropped it into the box.

  “The young Draki Prime is, shall we say, field-testing for us as we speak.” He motioned for them to enter the building. “Eric is setting her up in a clean room. I suggest Dr. de la Turris come out of your van and come in to meet his daughter.”

  Anna held up her hand. “I do not trust you, Trajan.”

  This time, he did not hold his face flat. This time, his lip curled. Andreas almost blew ‘calm’ at all of them, but he wanted to see how this played out. “I have three hundred and eighty-seven Shifters working for me. I also employ thirteen triads beyond members of my family, not to mention the vast number of normals. Praesagio is one of Portland’s largest employers.”

  “So? We have seen you use an empire as a weapon, Trajan. This is no different.”

  “In Rome, I dealt with my Senate, Dracas-Human. I do not have the same power with my shareholders.” He exhaled. “The point is, modern empires function in a way that is fundamentall
y different than those of earlier times. I have adapted. I want you to adapt, as well. For the betterment of my planet.”

  Anna’s arms tightened. Her cheek twitched—she must have spoken to her beast.

  “Come out, Dr. de la Turris! Please.” Trajan motioned at the building again. “Now is time for the Ulpi to share what we’ve built, no?”

  Anna nodded at the van. Andreas whistled and Sandro appeared between the seats. His brow furrowed, but he picked up his backpack and wiggled across the seat and out the passenger door. He stood straight as he slammed the door with one hand and swung the pack over his shoulder with his other.

  He’d emptied it. It sat flat against his back, except for a small bulge in the bottom.

  Trajan looked him up and down, smiling, and walked toward him. “Welcome, Alessandro, son of Severo. We are happy to provide you with the equipment and the staff you need to continue your work. It is our way of making up for what other Parcae have done to your people.”

  Trajan slapped Sandro’s shoulder and ushered him toward the door, but stopped next to Andreas. “I cannot help but notice the lack of AnnaBelinda’s husband in Portland. I am assuming she is as protective of him as she has been with her other men?” He grinned and slapped Andreas’s shoulder.

  Andreas instinctively produced a specific blend of ‘ignore,’ ‘happy,’ and ‘assured’ he knew made Fates think they saw only the affirmation of their assumptions. If they used their seer, they tended to see around it, but the purpose of the blend was to make them think they did not need to.

  And right now, they did not need Trajan double-checking his assumptions. Or seeing Andreas’s surprise.

  He felt a nuzzle against his back—a push from an invisible dragon. She wanted him to move forward.

  Andreas quickly removed all thought of Derek from his mind. He had a job to do, one that necessitated his focus on his immediate surroundings and not the what-ifs of the games being played around him. He would go in. He would watch their backs. He would also assume filter packs meant he was about to enter Trajan’s lair stripped of his greatest weapon.

  “Sir!” One of the techs held up his phone.

  Next to Andreas, a small seer blip drummed outward from Trajan. Too small and too fast to get a sense of what kind of seer Trajan possessed, it still proved the man’s strength. And it still pulsed around them like phantom percussion.

  Anna tensed and her hand reached under her jacket. “Where is your triad, Trajan?”

  He did not answer. He never answered questions about his triad. Nor did he use his power in front of people who might glean his workings. Two millennia and this was the first time Andreas had felt anything from the Emperor, and he suspected the same for Anna.

  The undeniable tang of Burner rode in on the breeze.

  The tech with the phone held it up. “We have unauthorized—”

  At the far end of the gray slab of building, at the corner behind a tree, a sickly yellow glint caught Andreas’s attention. “Burners!”

  A boom ratcheted across the open area. The vans rocked, both groaning. Sandro ducked. Anna dropped into fight posture, mirroring Andreas’s own.

  The entire front of Trajan’s building collapsed. He coughed and threw a rock at Anna’s head. “You brought Burners with you?” He coughed again.

  Dust swirled with the unmistakable stench of Burner. Andreas blinked, trying to see, to hear, but the building groaned and shattered, electricity snapping and gas lines hissing. They needed to move back, and move back now.

  Trajan, though, ran for the building. “Do you have any idea the cost of the projects housed in this building?”

  Anna’s voice carried over the crackling of the debris. “Why would I bring Burners?”

  Another boom rocked the building, this one farther back and on the other side. A pillar of smoke blossomed into a mushroom over the opposite corner of the labs and a loud crack resonated through the area. The second attack must have taken down another exterior wall.

  One of the techs screamed. The debris had missed the other two, but the one with the box lay on the ground, his leg under a chunk of the building’s wall. “Please! Please….” He fell silent as people falling into shock so often do.

  “Help me with him.” Sandro dropped his pack next to the crushed and spilled box and carefully peered under the concrete on the man’s legs. “He’s a normal.” Sandro unzipped the pack but did not open it.

  Sandro’s Shifter power flared and Andreas swore that the air almost shimmered. The healer placed his hand on the man’s head and he instantly calmed.

  “Listen now. We’re going to move the rock. I can’t fix your leg completely but I will mend it so you live. You will not lose it. Okay?” Sandro glanced at Andreas and nodded at the debris.

  The man nodded.

  From his place in the swirling smoke and dust, Trajan bellowed at Anna. “We knew you were hiding with Burners. But to bring them here? When I am trying my damnedest to help you? You have caused your own destruction, Dracas!”

  Next to Andreas, Sandro reached under the concrete. The chunk probably weighed two hundred pounds. “Ready?” the healer said.

  “Yes. On three.” Andreas pressed his shoulder into the debris, feeling its roughness bite into his skin. “One. Two. Three!” The boulder rolled off the man’s leg too easily, but no dragon made herself known.

  The man screamed.

  Blood spurted but Sandro’s hand immediately covered the wound and the metallic iron smell of near-death stopped. The man relaxed.

  Sandro leaned back. Blood covered his shirt and his hands. He wiped his palms on the grass as he looked over his shoulder, toward the corner of the building where the Burner set off the explosion. “We go. Now.”

  Sandro picked up his pack, zipping the pocket he had just opened, and moved into the smoke. Andreas ran after Sandro, who now scurried over the debris and into the building, a good thirty feet beyond what had been the front door.

  “I need to go in!” Andreas yelled, hoping Anna or Sister-Dragon heard. He didn’t have a choice. She needed to deal with Trajan on her own.

  Somewhere in the smoke, Anna dodged Trajan. They both fell out of sight as they vanished into the building. “Why would I bring Burners, you fool?” she yelled. “Think about the accusation you make!”

  “Then who, Dracas? You and your brother are the only ones angry enough to—” The tirade stopped.

  A loud, masculine voice boomed through the smoke, as loud as the sparkings and crackles of the buildings “You are a lying, manipulative monster, Caesar Marcus Ulpius Nerva Trajanus. You were when you adopted me, and you are now.”

  The other Emperor—Caesar Publius Aelius Trajanus Hadrianus Buccellanus Augustus—ran out of the smoke clad in a dark green environmental suit. Hadrian barreled into Trajan and they rolled across the debris-strewn ground, toward the burning building. They shouted and yanked on each other, and disappeared into the debris. Anna followed.

  Andreas watched, momentarily stunned. All his life he had been charged with two duties—watch over the Dracae and watch over the healers. He did his jobs well, knowing they did not—and would not—interfere with each other. They balanced well.

  Until today.

  “Andreas!” Sandro yelled.

  Andreas looked at where the godling and her commanding officers vanished. He could go to her side. Enthrall the two remaining bits of the Empire clogging her life and turn both men into quivering jelly on the debris-strewn floor.

  But he had other duties. Ones closer to his birth family.

  Andreas followed Sandro into the building.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Ladon pounded on the airlock door. Low-powered emergency lights flickered, turning the once pristine room to the color of fresh blood.

  Blood, like what he would carve from that doctor.

  Rysa, his beautiful love who cared for him and for the beast more than any other woman before, who soothed them both, now watched through the small window in the
door, her eyes showing every line and hollow of her fatigue and her fear.

  Her fingers pressed against the glass. Her lips thinned. The other door is ajar, she mouthed. Then she signed, They’re frantic. The batteries on their packs are about to run out.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Nakajima took back his phone and is texting someone.

  That close to her, without the protection of the masks, what would the two men do? Ladon kicked the door again.

  We should have gone in first, he pushed to Dragon. They would be inside instead of her.

  She looked over her shoulder. Where is my dad? she signed. She held the forearm of her damaged arm against the door, using her body to hold it in place. She’d screamed when she’d moved it into place, but seeing both her hands allowed them to sign faster. She didn’t need to finger-spell most of the words.

  Rysa asks about her father, Ladon pushed to Dragon.

  The beast used a talon to score the large plate-glass window dividing the front room from the clean room behind. I no longer hear Sister. A sense of alarm pulsed from the beast, but he reined it in. I do not know.

  Dragon would not tax Ladon, either. He bellowed, sick of the coddling, and hit the window with a chair.

  Dragon flamed. He retained his high level of mimicry, blending into the walls, but he needed to release his heat.

  We don’t know, Ladon signed.

  Rysa tapped the small window in the door. The doctor moved the other door.

  Can you get through? She needed to be separated from the normals. If they stayed in the airlock, they might not overreact to her calling scents.

  He would not consider what they might do. Rysa was too weak to fight them off. They might attempt the same attack Sister had used to knock her unconscious. They might strangle her.

  Ladon’s already dragon-enhanced vision clicked up to another level. Every weakness in every wall gleamed as if highlighted by a marker. Dragon’s talon marks in the big window shimmered. Ladon felt the tugs the two normals made on the interior walls as vibrations through the floor.