Fifth of Blood

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  The next chunk of concrete he tossed between his hands. “I bet that perverted half-brother of mine can still hear the beasts. Maybe I’ll get him out of storage and see. Because if you don’t do what I say, I will kill Ladon. I will smash his head the old fashioned way and give his beast to Vivicus.”

  Anna did not move. Neither did Ladon. They did not pull Trajan’s attention from Rysa. So she played it up, grabbing Billy around the neck. “You think you’ve beaten Hadrian down to the point he won’t pop the girl, but I’ll pop this Burner!”

  Billy screeched like a banshee. “Oh my God I don’t want to die!”

  Trajan turned in a circle. “A pathetic Burner is your back-up plan? What—”

  An arm appeared out of nowhere and wrapped around the Fate’s neck. Sister-Dragon’s front limb appeared next, the hide covering her arm and claw-hand sparking wildly as it instantly flashed on. Trajan attempted to flip his attacker, but Derek’s other arm appeared from behind the beast.

  And one of the midnight blades swung to Trajan’s throat.

  “No, Emperor, the back-up plan would be me.”

  Trajan stiffened. “I can’t read you. Why can’t I read you?”

  “Quiet or I slice.” Derek nodded toward Rysa. “I doubt either healer present would be inclined to close the wound.”

  Trajan would not shut up. “How did you get my sword? The prototypes are kept at a different facility. How the hell did—”

  “Enough, Trajan!”

  Rysa recognized the deep baritone calling from behind the copter. “Andreas?” But he was supposed to be in Branson helping Dmitri.

  His eyes widened as he jogged past her and Billy, but the huge man did not falter. “No more games!”

  “You cannot enthrall me, brother. You cannot—”

  “I am not your brother.” Andreas punched. Trajan staggered backward, away from Derek, who let him fall on his ass.

  “Good to see you, Tsar.” Andreas pulled Trajan’s mask off his face. “Help me get his pack.”

  Derek, grinning, sliced open the suit Trajan had stolen from Hadrian.

  The world spun. Rysa’s stomach growled. Dizzy, she slid down Billy’s side, her ass also dropping onto the concrete. “Ladon?” she called. He just stared. She’d crawl to him if she had to. “Dragon?”

  A column of dragon flame burst toward the sky above. He hurt Human, Sister-Dragon signed. He hurt Brother and Brother-Human.

  On her hands and knees, her arms so weak she barely held herself up, Rysa crawled toward Ladon. “Trajan spiked Ladon and Anna. I think fighting my calling scents opened them up to the attack.” And Ladon had purposefully breathed in a mega-dose.

  Why did he do that? Why did he do something he knew would cause him pain?

  A new male voice rose over the din inside the hangar. A voice Rysa had not heard in nine years. “Rysa?”

  She plopped onto her butt and looked over her shoulder. “Daddy?” she called.

  Her father stood next to the copter clothed in a jacket and t-shirt she recognized as Andreas’s, with a big backpack over his shoulder. Still huge, still with the same dark hair, he leaned forward a little on his toes, as if he wanted to bounce.

  The way she would have, if she had the strength.

  “I’m here and we’re going to fix this, ma risa. All of this.” He took a step forward to come to her, but he stepped back, like everyone else. Everyone but Billy and Derek.

  “Daddy, my Shifter half is eating me alive.” What could he do?

  Her daddy set down his bag and quickly pulled out one of the masks. “Sister-Dragon helped me steal this, up above.” He placed his hand on the beast’s side when she circled around him. “She wants to help. You are going to help, correct Great Lady?”

  Yes, the beast signed.

  I can’t yell anymore, Rysa signed.

  “Have your seers told you what you need, daughter?” Her father pulled the mask over his face as he clicked on the pack. His bag returned to his shoulder and he jogged toward her.

  Immediately, his hands cupped her cheeks. “You look like a famine victim.”

  Billy hovered protectively. “That’s not helping, mate.”

  Energy coursed from her father’s hands to the skin of Rysa’s face. Her body sucked it in, eating her father’s healing instead of itself. Rysa fully breathed for the first time in days. Billy’s bite to her arm mended. Her mind cleared. Her aches vanished. Her daddy fought back the overstimulation.

  But he didn’t stop the buzz of her seers or her flood of calling scents. He didn’t cure her, only reined in her symptoms.

  “I do not know what you need. Tell me what to do, ma risa. Please.” He took both her hands. “I’m sorry, honey. I was supposed to come to you when this started, but I lost track. I came late. But the First Enthraller brought me now and I will do whatever you need me to do.”

  “Trajan found a way to trick you.” Rysa sat up. Her body wasn’t important right now. She knew of only one way to see what needed doing. And only one way to connect to the Dracae, to fix the spikes.

  Because she needed to fix Ladon. And she needed to fix AnnaBelinda.

  “Derek!” Rysa yelled. “I need my talisman.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Rysa watched Derek grimace as he yanked gray tape off his belly. “You duct-taped my talisman to your abs? Thank you.”

  “I was not about to carry it around in my pocket.” He groaned as the last strip pulled off. “Perhaps I should have considered my actions more carefully.”

  “You kept it safe. They kept asking about it when we came in. I think they would have taken it again.” Quickly, she hugged Derek. “That close to your body, there’s no way Trajan would have realized it was in the building.” She took the plastic bag when he handed it over. “You really are the best brother-in-law ever.”

  A quick smile danced across his lips. “Andreas says the other mask is near depletion.”

  Her daddy glanced around the room. “Turn it off!” he yelled.

  Derek nodded, and waved to Andreas. Behind them, the big enthraller wrangled Hadrian and the poor Burner girl. Trajan, he’d enthralled to sit quietly. At the moment, Andreas breathed in Anna’s face.

  Unlike Ladon, he could bring her out of the damage.

  Rysa opened the plastic bag, but didn’t take out the talon. “Daddy, my seers are blasting, just like my healer and enthraller.”

  “I know. I feel them, honey.” He ran his hands down her arms, stopping at the insignias around her wrists, and more of her aches vanished.

  “The Dragons’ Legion insignias carry a micro bit of my talisman. With them, I’ve been able to cut through the noise a little bit.”

  He nodded.

  “But when I touch my full talisman, all that noise focuses. It’s like looking at the sun. And it hurts. A lot.”

  “Not this time.” He wrapped his hands around her cheeks again.

  Rysa pushed her hand into the bag, and she searched for the smooth surface of Dragon’s talon. She felt the sticky bumpiness first, where the now-missing original duct tape had secured the leather thong allowing her to wear it around her neck. Then the pads of her fingers found a clean edge.

  Rysa’s seers erupted from her head, wiggling and sniffing, searching and defining. The entire hangar blazed into brilliant detail in her vision—the gleam of the machine behind her, the soft shink shink of Sister-Dragon’s talons on the concrete. The dark devastation rolling off a broken Emperor, one who had seen too many days of too many deaths.

  It flickered like a shadow. But this darkness felt solid, as if it carried bones inside its flesh.

  The same darkness hovered around all the long immortal. Around Trajan and Andreas. It lurched at AnnaBelinda, then backed off, only to lurch again. But it blanketed Ladon and Dragon.

  Memories flickered inside the darkness. Nothing she could see specifically, but they roiled along its surface, popping out like bubbles before sinking back in.

  Ladon and Dragon dro
wned in liquid shades.

  She lunged away from her father. “Daddy! We have to help them. Please—”

  Sandro held her arms. “Concentrate. Look to the past. Look to the future. Ask your seers What needs to be done in the present to stop my body’s internal consumption?”

  “But Ladon needs me.” She should fix him first.

  Derek gripped her shoulder. “You need you, Rysa.”

  Billy sniffed and crossed his arms. “Yeah. Princess before Boyfriend every day. That’s what I say.”

  Her father did not glance up, but his voice took on the authority of an Emergency doctor. “Back away, Burner.”

  “Oh, Daddy’s home, huh? Fine.” Billy walked away toward the broken cars.

  Rysa’s seers licked at the walls of the room. They wanted out and to pull down onto her mind everything the Draki Prime should know. The answer to every question. The reason behind every warning. But the burndust in the walls blocked their access.

  Trajan’s paranoia had accidently provided Rysa relief.

  She yanked back her seers, using the clarity of her talisman to wrestle them into some kind of control, and asked what she needed to do.

  A vision from her past-seer appeared first. Her father cooed over her in her crib. She smiled, grabbing her little baby toes, and giggled. Something changed about his mouth. Something glowed. And he spit into a glass of water.

  Her future-seer followed up with Andreas breaking open Trajan’s pack.

  Then her present-seer issued a warning. The shades twist tighter around Ladon and Dragon. Her man and her dragon suffocated.

  Rysa had to act fast. “Did you activate me as a baby?” She grabbed her father’s collar.

  His mask shifted and he gasped, but quickly pulled it back into place. “I diluted my activation spit. We were working on using activators as inoculations when the Jani attacked. I wanted you safe.”

  He never told her mom, and she’d been busy when he did it, so she didn’t see. Rysa had been slightly Shifter-active her entire life. But if he fully activated her as a Shifter, she’d die within minutes. The bright flame of her abilities would supernova.

  Only activation by a Fate-Shifter can give you the control you need, her present-seer whispered.

  “I…” She did activate herself. Or, more precisely will activate herself.

  Her future-seer issued a new warning of convulsions ripping through her body. Her father rolling her on her side as she vomits, but he can’t stop it. Her fully activated body would, again, supernova, this time because of Vivicus’s attack.

  She tried to breathe, but gasped instead. Was there anything that could contain her abilities enough that she could survive the activation she needed?

  The mask over her father’s face clouded from his breath.

  “I need the sniffers. From Trajan’s pack.”

  Her father nodded to Derek and he ran off, to Andreas.

  “I think you need to dilute them, the way you did when you sub-activated me.” Otherwise Praesagio’s tech would poison her and she would die anyway, but this time slowly and painfully.

  Behind Rysa, AnnaBelinda knelt next to her brother. She touched his face, his shoulder, his hand. He didn’t respond. But the shades did. They contracted.

  “I need to help Ladon! Open the pack and use it to make a filter solution for me. Please!” Rysa crawled toward Ladon and Dragon.

  AnnaBelinda cringed, but didn’t leave her brother’s side as Rysa approached. “Do you know what to do?” the dragon woman asked.

  Rysa’s seers whispered and yelled and threw pictures. “I need to get in.”

  Without her father’s touch holding back the pain, the agony of using her seers inched back in, first as a cinching behind her left eye. It would grow and soon move to her right. Then her whole head, and down her neck.

  Rysa’s attention flitted from the new ache to AnnaBelinda’s face, to Sister-Dragon rocking behind her human. To Ladon slumped and unresponsive. To the flame patterns flowing from Dragon’s mouth, down his side, to the tip of his tail.

  “Rysa.” AnnaBelinda extended her hand. “Sync to us. Take what you need.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Derek placed Sandro’s mask over AnnaBelinda’s face. Anna inhaled deeply and held out her arms to Rysa.

  She stood up. She wasn’t going to crawl to Anna, no matter how badly her body creaked. Rysa walked slowly to Anna and Ladon’s side.

  Anna took her hand and squeezed. “Do you need to be between Dragon and me? In our energy flow?”

  Rysa nodded as she dropped to her knees next to Ladon. He twitched and looked at her face.

  Pale, eyes sunken, he looked as if the weight of his centuries had finally, totally dropped onto his shoulders. “Don’t let Trajan give Dragon to Vivicus,” he whispered. “He needs to be with you.”

  Anna’s mouth thinned to a line. “It’s his melancholy.” Her grip on Rysa’s hand tightened to the point her joints hurt. “Is this like the spike your uncle Faustus forced into your mind?” Anna asked. “Made you experience only one future?” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Or all your past?”

  Rysa covered Anna’s hand with her own. “Yes. All I saw, all I felt, was that I would hurt Ladon and Dragon. I couldn’t function, but they got through to me. Ladon saved me.”

  “We don’t have a mask for Dragon, but she will stay close to her brother.” A pulse moved between the woman and her beast, and washed over Rysa. “She will do what you need, Rysa. She will not falter.”

  Sister-Dragon moved behind Brother-Dragon and pressed her entire body against his side. A picture flashed into Rysa’s head—the calming feel of Derek’s hands as he stroked the ultra-fine down covering her hide.

  “She understands how you make her brother feel.” Another pulse moved between the Dracas. “Take from us what you need to save them, no matter what happens, Rysa.”

  Anna’s face said it all. I’m sorry. I understand.

  I was wrong.

  Rysa squeezed her hand again. “You are the bridge. Hold firm. If you shake, I will fall.”

  Anna nodded.

  Rysa unfurled her seers once again. They flicked out through the entire hangar, pulling in everyone’s movements. The men readied her cure. Trajan hummed to himself like a baby.

  AnnaBelinda and Sister-Dragon contracted their energy flow to a cable. It flashed between them, a hot, brilliant rope of energy they strung through their brothers’ connection, strengthening it. Anna and her dragon built the warp of the bridge Rysa needed in order to cross to Ladon and Dragon.

  Rysa contracted the tentacles of her seers. She made them as shimmering and warm as Ladon’s scent of sunshine and civilization, and as intense as all the images she’d ever picked up from the beast. They flitted out, dancing on the warp, and wove themselves through.

  The what-was-is-will-be became the weft of the bridge. The bad memories of Ladon’s past—and his good ones. The present in which Andreas, Derek, and her father prepared for his beloved what she needed to stop the terror eating her body. And the future she wanted as much as he did—Rysa asleep between the man and the beast, the worst of her issues calmed by their strength.

  Anna inhaled and her muscles tensed. She held the anchor points at both ends of the bridge and the effort strained even her iron-hard concentration. Pain flickered to Rysa—the ache behind Anna’s eyes tightened like a vise and would soon wrap all the way around her head. At what point the dragon woman would lose cohesion, Rysa didn’t know. But she quickly fired a bolt of healing into her sister-in-law’s body, to hold back as much of the burn as possible.

  Anna breathed easier. She and Sister-Dragon concentrated on their brothers’ thoughts and if Rysa listened just right, if she felt the vibrations of the energy she touched, she might hear, too.

  She just needed to tune in.

  Velvet, roses, Dragon’s joy…

  Rysa hooked the energy connection that allowed Dragon to push her images. A pulse shot from Sister-Dragon and she
mimicked, finding her own push-vibration, and reinforced her brother’s.

  Anna moaned and Rysa’s back arched, this touch by the other dragon almost as intimate as Ladon’s. Rysa’s skin wanted Anna’s strokes, her mind to share. And her soul to open.

  The hangar vanished. A plateau of flat, cold rock appeared. The sides dropped into a nothingness as dark and viscous as the shades holding Ladon to the ground. Rysa stood naked in the center of the stretch of dark stone, her toes cold and her body shivering.

  Yet the sun roared overhead, bigger than a star should be. Ancient red light pulsed down. Flares from the sun’s surface licked the sky. It would eat Ladon and Dragon alive if she didn’t get them out now. They had to leave.

  The shades writhed over the rock’s surface. Nips pricked the skin of her ankles. Some of the little bites drew blood, but Rysa kicked through the shadows. She moved.

  Ladon sat on the edge of the rock, as naked as she was, his arms around his legs. Next to him, on the rock, sat a Roman commander’s helmet, one of high rank, its crest a massive display of black horse’s mane. Next to it, a pair of blacksmith’s gauntlets. Farther still, a triad of rapiers, each with a Dragons’ Legion insignia on its blade guard, two broken and one old and rusted. And at the farthest, in a place closest to her, a bottle of vodka.

  Carefully, Rysa stepped over the bottle. The rapiers, she danced around. The gauntlets, she picked up and used to move the helmet. She walked deeper into Ladon’s past, through his worst moments, and sat next to him, on the edge of this cold place.

  A voice whispered in her ear. A resonant voice, one neither male or female, but full and deep and very large. “I cannot see the spike, Rysa. I hold him, but I do not know what to do,” it said.

  “I’m here, Dragon. Your sister is here. We will find it.” Slowly, she touched Ladon’s shoulder.

  Rysa wrapped her arms around his chest and placed her forehead against his neck. Out over the edge, images danced in the blackness—Ladon, a large sword in each hand, his chest bare but covered with gore, slicing in front of a burning hut. Dragon, as lost as his human, burning the world to the ground.