Games of Fate (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 1)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “What the hell?” she gasped. A real gasp that in a split second forced air all the way down into the base of her lungs.

  These weren’t withdrawal symptoms because she’d missed her meds. Her brain had just exploded. She was going to keel over in this little coffee shop under the Continuing Education Building and that would be the end of everything and she’d die.

  Spots appeared in front of her eyes and floated like wiggly balloons between her and Gavin. They churned, full of heat and glare and fire, as if each one was its own liquid universe. The spots didn’t look real but she knew if she reached out, if she touched one, it would ignite and burn her hand.

  One of the weird liquidy fire spots ruptured. Her nose filled with an acid stench so overpowering she stopped breathing.

  I’m having an aneurysm, she thought. She must be having an aneurysm. Only an aneurysm explained hallucinations she could smell and feel.

  “Gavin…” She choked out the whisper. Her gut mirrored the pain behind her left eye and squirmed as if infected with the fire bubbles. She would have retched but the muscles of her belly and chest wouldn’t move. They wouldn’t respond.

  Gavin stood up and pointed at the screen behind her head. He hadn’t noticed her panic. “A gas station in Stillwater exploded!”

  Her chair fell over when she stood and turned toward the screen. The seatback scraped against the concrete floor and a metallic screech filled the coffee shop. The sound rasped against her ears, solid and seemingly touchable, like the spots.

  Gavin stared at the screen. The freshman server behind the counter stared at her.

  “What’s happening?” Rysa’s lips formed the words, but no vocalizations left her throat.

  Gavin’s gaze jumped from the screen to her face and he blanched. He shouted at the freshman. His mouth moved but she didn’t understand.

  He seemed to yell something about calling 911.

  Gavin, the server who stared at her with terror-filled eyes, the coffee shop’s now-grating halogen lighting, the darkening evening outside, all spun as if the planet got on a carnival ride and left her standing alone in the void.

  Warm air hit Rysa’s nose as she pushed through the shop’s door. The spots that weren’t real—couldn’t be real—took on a sharpness that would slice her open.

  Monsters were about to crawl out of her wounds—fiends that would eat her whole.

  A word whispered through her haze of pain. A word that sounded not like her thoughts, but also like her at the same time. Like an echo of herself. Like her future self—the Rysa who was about to land fully inside whatever hell caused the aneurysm and hallucinations—was yelling backward in time trying to warn her present, freaked-out self.

  Ghouls.

  Rysa screamed. She had to run. The spots chased her. Ghouls chased her, but the world fuzzed out as if someone had slapped a dirty bandage over her eyes.

  Another spot burst, but this time a memory flashed as well—her mother at the kitchen counter watching the television. She’d rubbed her knuckles and Rysa had wrapped her arm around her shoulder. “Go to class,” her mom had said. “I’ll be fine.”

  Shadows swam through the evening gloom and the scent of the humid summer air somehow pushed through the phantom burning in Rysa’s nose.

  Her hand hurt.

  “Don’t hit me!” Gavin yelled. He wiped at his nose and glared at her as if she were the monster.

  She’d hit him?

  They weren’t at the café anymore. They stood on the hill, halfway between the coffee shop and the student parking lot, under the streetlight where the path intersected the walk from one of the campus barns.

  But she didn’t remember—

  Another spot ruptured. Orange and hot yellow dropped over the world like a curtain. More glare erupted. More phantom spikes impaled her skull.

  Rysa staggered alone in the yellow bullseye of a different streetlight. This one flickered like a strobe, buzzing and popping as if it was about to explode.

  How the hell did she get into the student parking lot three blocks from the café?

  She was losing time. Losing her sense of space.

  She really was in the middle of an aneurysm. Nothing else explained what was happening. Not the blackouts. Not the weird, whispered warnings about… ghouls.

  Why was her brain whispering about not-real monsters?

  She was dying. She had to be. Her body had dragged her out here to commit suicide and she couldn’t stop it.

  A tall, lanky man skipped toward her between the hand-me-down cars. He wore the fabric version of the damned fire-spots eating her mind—bright red running shoes and a black nylon jacket over a blaze-orange t-shirt.

  He did a two-step as if he was about to break into a tango, but then stopped suddenly a few feet away. He inhaled deeply. His hand swept in front of his nose and he sniffed the air like some cartoon character breathing in fancy perfume. He tilted his head at an angle that should have popped every vertebra in his neck and inhaled again.

  “Who…” she stammered. Where was Gavin? “What…”

  “Right where you’re supposed to be.” The man’s thick British accent made his words almost unrecognizable.

  The same caustic stench from the spots rose off his skin.

  Real stench. Rysa gagged and her lips and nose curled in a futile attempt to keep the chemical sewage rolling off this creature out of her lungs.

  His teeth gleamed in the dim parking lot light. “Calling yourselves Fates.” He shook his head. “What good’s seeing the future when you know nothin’, huh, luv?” He grabbed her arm.

  The weirdness in her head bled into the real world and this man was its manifestation. All the spots, all the phantom smells—they were about to kidnap her. For real.

  “Let go of me!” The man made no sense and she hyper-focused on his fluorescing mouth. His teeth glinted, too sharp and too bright, like they’d rip her apart if they got near her skin.

  Her vision jigged for a microsecond as if she’d changed the universe’s channel, then switched back to what she had been watching before. But in that microsecond, in that very brief flash when she saw something she knew wasn’t really there, she felt the man bite her shoulder.

  Bite and rip flesh and eat himself a right good snack. Because he was a ghoul. A burning, stinking ghoul.

  Somehow, some part of her mind had known. It had told her.

  He grinned at her with his razor-sharp teeth. “You smell tasty, luv. I might take myself a nip now, before you finish activating.” He licked his lips.

  “Activating?” She wasn’t dying of a brain aneurysm. She didn’t know what activating meant, but the word held truth in the same way that ghoul did.

  The man clamped a ratty-fingerless-glove-clad hand over her mouth and nose. “You’re a bit of a freak, aren’t you? Can’t hold still. Stay normal for a moment longer, darling.”

  “Let her go!” Thirty feet away, Gavin jumped the lot fence and ran toward her and the man.

  A scene played through the pressure behind her eyes—the ghoul was about to lock onto her friend’s throat. He’d feel a surge of hunger and he’d salivate like an animal. Then his hands would cook Gavin’s flesh.

  How, she did not see, but she knew the vision was real. A ghoul had ahold of her. A ghoul whose touch could burn. And that ghoul was about to murder Gavin.

  Run! she signed. Go!

  A new, slow dread of certainty fizzled through her consciousness from the same source as her knowledge of ghouls and activating: Something bad was about to happen to her. Something as terrible as the fiend gripping her arm.

  But she could save Gavin.

  A couple of car lengths away, Gavin stopped running as if he’d run into a wall, then gagged and bent forward.

  He must have hit the man’s stench.

  “He your boyfriend?” The man loosened the hand he held over her mouth.

  “Please don’t hurt him.” The ghoul could take her, but Gavin had a life ahead of him. He would
become a wonderful doctor. He’d do good for the entire world.

  She knew the truth of his future in the same way she knew something horrid was coming.

  The ghoul tilted his head again as he peered at Gavin. He flicked his chin toward campus. “You better listen, little normal. Better run before my mates find you.”

  Gavin stepped back, both his mouth and his hands working but not making sense.

  “Run!” Rysa screamed. He had to get away. She’d make sure—

  Then the world flickered hot yellow again and Gavin was gone. The ghoul stood on her other side. Anger danced through his eyes.

  “Do not do that again!” He slapped her face and caustic chemicals burned her cheek.

  He dragged her toward a break in the fence. “Claw me one more time and you’ll be lucky if you keep your arm, you stupid cow.”

  She didn’t remember clawing him. She didn’t remember Gavin running away, either.

  She’d had another blackout and had lost more time.

  How could she get away if nothing made sense?

  The man dragged her through the lot gate and into the street between the University parking lots and the ones owned by the State Fair. He pushed her forward with one hand as the fingers of his other tapped in the air as if he played an invisible piano. His fingertips glowed and smoldered one at a time, turning on and off as he pressed each imaginary key. “Quiet now, luv.”

  A dark-gold hatchback with rusted side panels and blistered paint weaved down the street. A blue van, just as ratty, rushed from the other direction.

  The man lifted his chin. “Time to meet the family, princess.”

  Chapter Two

  They tumbled out of the vehicles. Ten, twelve, maybe more, their stench so thick it hung in the air like a yellow-green mist. They lurched around, some moving toward Rysa and the man gripping her by the neck, and some away.

  Rysa coughed. The man laughed.

  Behind the hatchback and van, an ocean of parking lot asphalt blocked any escape. If she did get away, she should run back up the hill toward campus. The trees offered cover. There were people up there, too.

  People who weren’t ghouls.

  The smallest member of the group lunged out of the hatchback. She flicked her singed baseball cap as she skip-walked toward Rysa, and yanked on her tattered sweatpants to pull them up her slight, willowy frame.

  She didn’t look any older than ten. The kid should be at home and in bed dreaming happy kid dreams, but she was out here leading a gang of ghouls who smelled like burning rotten eggs.

  The kid stopped and tapped her foot. “Billy! You found her, huh?”

  The man holding Rysa had a name. “Billy,” she whispered. “Please let me go.” Maybe he’d listen. Maybe she would get out of this alive.

  Billy ignored her and spoke to the little ghoul. “Of course I found her.” He rolled his eyes.

  The kid pushed her fists into her hips. The air whistled into her scrunched-up nose as she sniffed at Rysa. “Yep, she’s one of them, alright.” She stuck out her tongue. “Pricks!”

  The kid jumped straight up into the air and spun in a half-circle, then landed on the precise spot from which she’d launched herself but with her back now to Rysa. “Bring’em out!” she yelled. Another bounce and she faced Rysa again. “Party time, skankadoodle.”

  Billy waved his hand and his fingers skittered as if they had minds of their own. “We’re too visible. He’ll find us again, like at the park with the rollercoaster. That way.” He pointed east, toward Wisconsin. “The Fells. Kells.”

  “The Dells, dickweed.” The child shrugged.

  A woman with dirty hair jerked out of the van. She twitched like Billy and the little ghoul, and kneaded the balled-up blanket she carried.

  The bundle must have weighed enough to throw her off balance. She leaned to the side and her foot landed wrong as she stepped away from the vehicle.

  She staggered backward into the bumper and dropped the blanket. Chains unfurled. Shackles bounced against the van’s door.

  Metal clinked across the pavement.

  The pressure behind Rysa’s eyes screamed and these people had chains and she needed to get away before—

  Time hiccupped again.

  Rysa held the dirty-haired woman’s neck. The skin of her palm burned as if she’d touched a hot stove. She shrieked and pulled her hand away.

  How had she gotten away from Billy? She must have slammed the female ghoul against the van.

  They’d kill her now. Chained or not, no way would they let her live.

  The female ghoul snapped her bright-white, glowing teeth at Rysa. Her mouth crackled. She growled.

  Rysa screamed.

  “Lizzy!” Billy caught the woman’s elbows. “Hush now.” Wisps of something—smoke, dust, ash, Rysa didn’t know—rose from the woman’s skin when he touched her cheek.

  The child skipped over and poked her little finger at Rysa’s chest. “Get her up!”

  Another ghoul snatched Rysa’s head backward. Disorientation overrode all sense of up or down and a new, more raw scream erupted from her throat.

  Hands lifted her hips into the air. More held her legs. The ghouls flung her up high above the pavement as if she rode a wave at a concert, and they giggled when they caught her on the way down.

  The chains rattled. Billy’s grip on Rysa’s thigh tightened. The heat from Lizzy’s palms burned through Rysa’s shirt to her skin.

  They would never let her go and the glowing sky above was the last thing she would ever see. Reflections of Minneapolis set the cloud deck ablaze and the sky swam in a yellow-green much like the haze from the monsters.

  The ghouls muttered as they carried her away from the vehicles. One clamped shackles onto her wrists—big, thick manacles like she’d seen in bad movies. She thrashed, but they clamped another set onto her ankles.

  They held her above their heads but the heavy chains pulled down her limbs. Her back arched as her shoulders and hips wrenched downward.

  She couldn’t turn her head. She couldn’t respond but she felt what the child did. She saw the sky but knew that the ghoul melted the shackle lock and bonded the metal around her wrist.

  Burning seared across Rysa’s right wrist. Pain jolted her mind as bright bolts and white noise. Maybe she’d black out again. Maybe she’d blink and be on top of the blue van, her body turning ninja the way she’d gone after Lizzy. Maybe she’d rain death down onto the ghouls.

  But they held her tight.

  “Stop! Please stop!” Tears blurred her eyes. Her voice rasped. The acid haze lifting off the ghouls burned away every thought in her mind.

  One of the ghouls screamed and the heat at her ankle stopped. A loud crack echoed next to her head. More screams, and the remaining hands under her back and hips let go.

  Rysa fell.

  Her back tensed as her instincts pulled her knees toward her chest. The shackles’ weight wrenched. She rolled. Her vision lost the glow of the sky and filled instead with the blackness of the pavement.

  She knew what was about to happen, felt the anguish play across her muscles and bones. She was about to hit the ground. Snap ribs. Her head would bounce and blind her with colorless flashes. Blood would pool in her mouth. A hip would crack and her forearm shatter.

  But it didn’t.

  Huge hand-like claws—long, dexterous digits ending in vicious-looking talons—scooped under her shoulders and hips.

  The talons retracted in a wave that moved from finger to finger as the hands gently rolled her onto her back.

  She faced upward again.

  Nothing stood over her. The clouds swirled in the open and visible sky. Both of the giant hands under her vanished to nothing as well, though she felt them tighten under her shoulders and back.

  A ghost held her inches off the ground, yet it felt warm and real and alive. Invisible muscles coiled and powerful limbs adjusted position. She rocked and a massive chest pressed against her side.

  She should fe
el terrified. She should scream at this new impossibility and fight and flounder in its arms. But the weird whispering returned and she knew what held her would not hurt her. Not now. Not ever.

  Carefully, she touched what she couldn’t see. The energy crackling from whatever caught her left the distinct impression that it was as amazed by her as she was by it.

  The ghost let go and her feet touched the ground. The creature’s body shifted and the position of its chest dropped. Something strong that felt like it might be a neck rubbed her shoulder.

  Across the lot, near the blue van from which the woman had pulled the shackles, another crack thundered through the air. A black-haired man wearing black jeans and a black jacket zipped tight around his neck smashed his gloved fist into the nose of one of the ghouls.

  Something invisible saved her from smashing into the ground and now a mysterious man in black punched ghouls?

  The fiend staggered back and pulled a knife from his belt. He grimaced and his face reddened. The blade flashed.

  He cut down his own arm.

  The acid stink increased and Rysa covered her mouth and nose. Whiffs of smoke rose from the ghoul’s clothes but he continued to slice.

  The man in black cursed and slashed a whip at the ghoul’s arm. The tip stripped the knife and the man bolted into the lot before the blade hit the ground. The ghoul danced around, swearing, until he looked at the blade next to his foot.

  It glowed red. A whine, high-pitched like a wind-up toy about to be released, reverberated between the van and the hatchback.

  Rysa ducked.

  The knife exploded. The ghoul’s leg below his knee burst into a red haze.

  The ghouls didn’t just burn. They didn’t just eat people, either. Their blood made knives explode.

  And shopping malls. They had to be responsible for all the explosions. All the fires.

  Maybe she was having an aneurysm. Maybe none of this was real. How could it be real? She stumbled backward. Maybe—

  The invisible chest of the creature who had saved her from falling blocked her way. It pressed against her back, gentle and real, and not at all a hallucination.