Bonds Broken & Silent

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  This big man with his big arms and his big, fatherly way looked like he was about to be crushed by an avalanche of the weird and the grotesque that seemed to be the what-was-is-will-be life of a Shifter.

  How could Daisy have thought being a “superhero” would be cool? Did she think she’d spend the rest of her life as some immortal demigod who everyone deferred to just because? That her new powers would make life’s dangers easier to handle?

  The Burners doing the two-step outside the car showed very clearly that a level-up in power also meant a level-up in villains.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked. Not that she expected an answer. Not with the look currently wadding up and pulling down the doctor’s face.

  He shook his head, not answering.

  His shoulders slumped. He watched the steering wheel and not the Burners outside. He looked like his mind had just clicked completely over to overwhelmed, like at the diner when he all of a sudden decided to listen to the damned Fate. The doctor did not look like a person who’d put thought into the conclusion he’d just made. His mind just picked the solution that was, in this second, the most visible in the whirlwind churning in his head.

  So Daisy needed to make a better choice. For them both. “We leave. Right now. We drive and go to someone we can ask for help. If the Fates want us both dead and the Shifters are too dangerous, can we go to one of the… dragons?” Maybe they didn’t care about Fate-Shifter politics. “Will they help?”

  The doctor’s eyes narrowed. For a long moment, he stared at the Burners. Then his hand slapped the steering wheel. “Promise me, Daisy Reynolds, that if someday you meet my daughter, you be as wise and kind for her as you have been for me.”

  He didn’t look at her, but she saw the slight, if sad, curve to his lips.

  And once again, Daisy wished she could give the big man a hug. “I promise.”

  “There’s a bar. A place in Branson, Missouri, which the Dracae are said to favor.” The doctor took a deep breath and took the car out of park. “We’ll need to stop outside the city and fill the tank—”

  The male Burner, the one who seemed to be in charge, slammed into the side of the car, rocking it upward. The entire vehicle bounced. Dawn lunged at the window.

  And outside the Burners laughed.

  One slammed her glowing hands down on the hood. The car’s paint smoked and acrid, black smoke filtered in through the AC.

  Daisy coughed.

  Next to the doctor, just outside the window, the male Burner held up his hand. When he grinned, Daisy swore his teeth gave off their own light. Like they glowed the way his fingertips did.

  The Burner bit his finger.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Get out!” The doctor pushed Daisy toward her door. “Unlock it! Go!”

  She flung open her door and fell out onto the pavement, the doctor crawling over the seats and falling out of the door and almost on top of her.

  “Dawn!” she yelled.

  The dog scrambled into the front and out the door, jumping over both the humans on the ground.

  The driver’s side window of the car exploded. Safety glass rained down onto Daisy, the hunched-over doctor, and Dawn. The dog growled, her hackles up, and stood between them and the Burners, the two females close to them and a male on the roof of the car.

  On the other side of the vehicle, the leader-male Burner giggled. “Boom!” he shouted and jumped up onto the hood of the car, then onto the roof. He danced around with the Burner already up there, giggling some more, and pointed his fingers at them like he was shooting off pistols.

  Behind him, the fifth Burner skipped back and forth, a scruffy thing in floppy clothes. Daisy couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl.

  Out in the open, Daisy picked out the distinct odors of each of the five individual Burners. One smelled more like the cleaner. Another, more like sulfur. Another, like a battery soaking in garbage. They all acted the same, all random and weird and terrifying, but they smelled different from each other, just like people.

  One of the females cocked her head and reached for Dawn, her hand out like she wanted to pet. “Doggie!”

  Dawn snapped at her hand, growling, and the Burner snatched it back. She held her fingers in front of her face like she’d just saved them from a meat grinder, her eyes huge. “Mean doggie.”

  “Don’t let the dog bite them! Their blood will kill her.” The doctor dusted glass off his shoulder. “It’ll explode. In her mouth.”

  Gross, Daisy thought. “Dawn! Come!” Daisy slapped her leg.

  The dog stood her ground, growling again at the Burner.

  Parts of Daisy’s body tightened up. Her neck, the top of her shoulders, her ears. Parts that only cringed when fear locked up her brain.

  She didn’t want to lose her dog. Dawn was all she had left of her mom, and if the animal’s head exploded, everything would be gone. All of Daisy’s living, breathing connections to family would vaporize into a puff of gore.

  “Dawnstar!” Daisy yelled. “Come! Now!”

  The dog barked, but she backed toward Daisy and away from the Burner.

  Daisy’s visual perception of the Burners changed. They all looked sharper, faster. Deadlier. “They want to kill us. They didn’t at first. I think they were more curious than anything else. But now they want to play with their food.”

  The doctor nodded. “The Fate would not have seen the Burners’ behavior. She didn’t know.” His fingers tapped the asphalt. “Though she should have guessed this would happen.”

  “What do we do?” What could they possibly do? Dawn couldn’t attack. If they cut one of the ghouls, it would explode. Couldn’t touch one either, without getting burned.

  “We run.”

  The Burners chanted “Run! Run! Run!”

  Dawn backed against Daisy, her doggie butt pressed up against her new master’s shoulder. Fear wafted off the dog in equal doses with aggression and protectiveness. She snarled both audibly and olfactorily.

  Slowly, the doctor stood. He pulled himself to his full well-over-six-feet height, and pushed out his broad chest. “Go to as public a place as you can.”

  The doctor turned his back to her.

  They weren’t running together? “How is—”

  “Do as I say, Daisy. They will follow me, not you.” He leaned toward her. Leaned right in, the same way he had at the clinic when she thought he might kiss her.

  He turned around fast and his mouth locked over hers. This time, Daisy knew what to do. She inhaled with all the strength her chest muscles could muster.

  The Burner woman who’d tried to touch Dawn clapped and giggled. “He smells soooo tasty!”

  The doctor pulled away as fast as he’d leaned forward. Daisy breathed in again and willed whatever he blew into her nose and mouth to take effect.

  The car grew distinct in ways she hadn’t noticed before. So did the distances between her and each of the Burners, and between her and the doctor. She saw small movements she hadn’t before. And she felt as if her body understood itself and what to do.

  If they ran at an angle around the Burner woman, they would get past. The road was less than two hundred feet away, on the other side of the building.

  They could go together.

  “Take the dog.” Dr. Torres, the man Daisy was supposed to protect, the man the Fate told her she had to protect, slugged the leader-male with a full-on jab to the face.

  The Burner reeled backward and hissed like the hit had opened a hole in his balloon of a head. “Shifter boy’s got some life in him!”

  The Burner lunged.

  Something about Dr. Torres’s scent changed. Her perception of him dimmed the same way it had at the apartment when he pushed past Kobayashi’s men. Daisy smelled ‘don’t pay attention.’

  His big hand wrapped around the Burner’s neck and he flung the ghoul at the car. The Burner smacked against the trunk with a loud crunch.

  “This way!” Daisy jumped to her feet, ready to
run. The boost he blew into her nose allowed her to see what they needed to do, and damn it, she’d make sure he didn’t get hurt.

  But the doctor took off, running fast for the field behind the building.

  Away from Daisy.

  The Burners didn’t laugh or dance or look between the man running away from Daisy and the girl with the dog. They just chased like a cat after a mouse. As if they couldn’t help themselves.

  Four of them chased. The woman fascinated by Dawn blinked and grinned at Daisy with her gleaming scalpel-teeth. “Puppy snack for me!”

  And she sprang at Daisy.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Daisy dropped to the lot’s asphalt and rolled under the Burner’s feet. She swung up one arm as the sky came into view, and she snagged the Burner’s knee.

  The Burner gasped and her arms flailed. Daisy yanked down and out, jerking the ghoul’s leg into as unnatural a position as she could manage before she rolled out of reach. A loud squeak burst from the woman’s mouth, riding on what looked like a little cloud of smog, and she teetered toward the open passenger door of the car.

  Her head slammed against the window. The door slammed shut and the woman bounced off, staggering backward, her arms once again flailing.

  For a second, she looked more like a deranged cartoon character than a real monster. But Daisy scrambled to her feet, her legs already pumping, and ran for the road, Dawn at her side. Letting down her guard would only get her eaten.

  The dog bolted by, then circled around Daisy in a wide arc. They both breathed in the evening air, feeling the Burner stench clear and the road smells reappear. Daisy’s boots hit the asphalt, grinding across the gravel. Her arms pumped. Her body did what it needed to do and she’d get to the road where other people drove by and these Burners would back off.

  She’d get help. And she’d rescue the doctor.

  Dawn settled into shadowing Daisy a few feet back, between her and the terror behind them. She ran silently, not growling or barking, and barely making a noise on the pavement. But Daisy felt her presence.

  Thank you, she thought at the dog, even though she knew Dawn couldn’t hear. Or understand. But Daisy wanted to say it anyway.

  Two dumpsters in a loading dock on the side of the building blocked her view of the main road, but Daisy heard cars. Smelled exhaust. Felt the slight change in the breeze that accompanied moving vehicles.

  She got away from the Burner. Maybe the doctor did the same. Maybe he ran around the other side of the building. They weren’t that isolated. They’d be okay.

  Daisy ran by the two dumpsters, one dark blue and smelling slightly burned and dusty, like old piles of cardboard recycling, and one dark green and rotten-smelling, like all garbage left in the sun.

  Daisy gripped the railing along the loading dock where the dumpsters sat, using it to fling herself toward the front of the building. She moved fast, out from behind a bush, and the road came into view.

  Along with the big, black, very expensive SUV blocking the drive into the building’s lot.

  She smelled the same cold perfume she’d smelled at her apartment. The high notes of ice. The medium notes of dryness and alcohol. And the faint but real touch of mineral salts.

  Ethne the semi-dead Fate lurched away from the vehicle the moment Daisy rounded the railing.

  And Ethne the Fate threw her very long, very sharp blade.

  Daisy twisted right, her hip slamming into the metal along the edge of the loading dock, and the blade nicked her cheek and the edge of her ear.

  Burning agony screamed from the slice across the side of her face. Blunt, heavy agony from her hip. She staggered forward, her feet skip-stepping, and teetered to the side.

  But Dawn had her. The dog pushed against the throb in her hip.

  Daisy buckled forward, her arm around the animal’s neck, and steadied herself. She wouldn’t fall over. She wouldn’t show her pain. And God knew she wasn’t going to let these Fates see her terror.

  Another female Fate stood to the side and a little forward of Ethne. Just as tall and just as beautiful as the present-seer, this Fate stared at Daisy with exactly the same psychopathic asshole expression as the woman who must be her sister. She, too, wore her hair in a smooth, blonde ponytail. The leather jacket over her lanky shoulders was probably the same navy blue color as her sister’s. From where Daisy groaned, they both looked like they’d swathed themselves in dark cocoons of expensive assassin’s wear.

  This new female Fate had to be either a past- or a future-seer. Daisy couldn’t tell. But she wasn’t going to assume anything. Not with Fates.

  Dawn growled.

  “Give us the talisman and we will let you live,” Ethne said. A tiny snarling lip curl flitted over her mouth before it transferred to the other Fate’s face as if it rode on a wave moving through their triad.

  She lied. Their cold-eyed stare made it obvious. They were going to kill her no matter what they said.

  “I threw it out the window of the car when we were on the freeway.” If they were going to lie, so was Daisy.

  Both Fates blinked and both their faces twisted up like they were concentrating.

  “No,” the new one said. Her word didn’t give Daisy enough information to tell if she saw the past or the future, but her expression did tell Daisy something as equally important: Concentrating looked like it caused her pain.

  Ethne’s neck tightened. “You are nothing more than an ant. Give us what we want and we won’t step on you.”

  Her sister pulled a gun from under her jacket. “I will shoot your dog. Spill her puppy brains all over the pavement. Make you talk that way.”

  Dawn growled.

  “I see how important she’s become to you. The dog dies unless you give up what’s ours in five… four… three…” She cocked the pistol.

  The fear resonating inside all of Daisy’s muscles took on a new, distinctive pitch. It started as an inward, specific vibration meant to make her body move to protect itself. Then changed into an outward quiver meant to move her in front of her dog. This animal who, right now, had placed herself between Daisy, a girl she’d literally only thought of as part of her pack for an hour, and a threat the dog knew might kill them both.

  Blood trickled down Daisy’s cheek from the cut. It trickled from the wound on her ear. She smelled its hot metallic stench, knowing it wasn’t all that different from what she’d smelled when Ethne murdered Lonestar.

  The dog in front of her, with her sleek silver and black shepherd’s fur and her strong shepherd’s muzzle, stood in front of Daisy with her head low and her hackles raised, ready to take that promised bullet. Because she’s a good dog.

  And her own blood didn’t matter.

  “Wait!” Daisy yelled. She threw her hands into the air palms forward, so the Fates saw she wasn’t holding a weapon. “It’s right here. It’s in my jacket.” She waved a finger at her side.

  The little kangaroo waited as a puffy ball wedged into the inner pocket of her lightweight jacket. Daisy patted the fabric over the toy.

  Ethne nodded. “Open the jacket. Take it out.”

  Daisy stepped out from behind the dog. She moved parallel to the Fates and farther into the lot. Completely out in the open now, she had no protection. But at least they wouldn’t shoot Dawn.

  Slowly Daisy pulled open her jacket. A breeze cooled her over-heated body and Daisy sucked it into her lungs, hoping it would cool the fear twisting up her mind. And her gut. And her fingers as they slowly moved into the pocket, for the toy.

  On the plane across the ocean, she’d gripped the little kangaroo and the little koala to her little kid chest. She’d hummed to them, singing goodnight songs, when the cabin lights dimmed. And she’d thought to herself again and again that even if she never saw home again, she’d always have her friends.

  She pulled the kangaroo from her pocket, feeling its squishy, soft fake fur under her fingertips. Dawn felt warm, alive. The kangaroo, comfortable. A comfort she’d never have again
.

  The Fates walked toward her, Ethne’s stilettoes clicking on the lot’s pavement and the other’s face scrinched up the way someone who’d just sucked a lemon then bitten into a Scotch Bonnet pepper would scrinch up their features. Like her entire head was on fire.

  She must be using her seer. She’d said she knew how important Dawn had become to Daisy, so she must be the past-seer.

  Daisy held out the kangaroo, gripping it so that she felt the hard pellet in its middle between her thumb and forefinger. It had always been there. She used to imagine her little friends had babies inside, a joey for each.

  Now she knew the truth.

  The Fates stopped about six feet away, both more interested in the toy than they were in their proximity to the snarling Dawnstar.

  “Open it.” Ethne waved at the kangaroo.

  “How?” The toy wasn’t a package.

  “Rip it open.” The past-seer raised her gun again and pointed it at Daisy’s head. “Now.”

  If she wasn’t careful, she’d cry. Not because they overwhelmed her. Not because of the threats. But because she was about to gut her last connection to home.

  Daisy’s fingers dug into the seam along the side of the kangaroo’s sewn-on pouch. She wiggled in her fingertip. The seam gave way. Tearing filled the parking lot. Tearing of fabric and tearing of connections.

  The tearing of Daisy’s world.

  Something shiny fell to the ground.

  Chapter Nineteen

  What fell out of her kangaroo looked round and metallic and smooth. It pinged like polished metal when it hit the ground and rolled toward Daisy’s feet.

  A ring.

  “What the hell?” The past-seer moved to swipe it off the pavement.

  Daisy didn’t think. Didn’t consider that maybe this psycho might shoot her. She snatched up her kangaroo’s joey and stumbled backward, into the railing along the loading dock.

  She held the ring in her hand. A big, masculine, gold ring with some sort of crest or insignia on it. Jewels studded the outer edge of what looked like two eagles and a crown.