Games of Fate (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 1)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “I’m sorry you have to see Penny again.” Rysa’s eyes closed.

  Then she slumped against his shoulder.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  A deep memory…

  Most people thought Daniel and Marcus the same, but to Ladon they were as different as night and day.

  Marcus held the Shifter against the tavern’s table and pressed his knife into the base of the man’s skull. “You did not sense him?”

  Ladon wiped the blood from his cheek. “No.”

  Daniel spun his daggers. Light flashed off the blades. He turned in a circle for all the tavern’s patrons to see, his expression predatory, and the normals cowered.

  Marcus pressed the point of his knife into the Shifter’s skin. Blood oozed. “Will this kill him?”

  Ladon squatted next to the would-be assassin. He looked Far Eastern. “Is this your real face, barbarian?”

  The Shifter spat and cursed in a language Ladon did not recognize.

  The clans were changing. First the new families who made others do their bidding and now assassins he could not sense.

  Ladon looked at the blood on his fingers. “A blade into the head is often enough.”

  Marcus twisted the dagger. More blood dripped down the man’s neck.

  The melody of Daniel’s future-seer played along the edges of Ladon’s awareness. “The Emperor is angry. You and the Dracas claimed his tribute.” Daniel sneered and tapped his temple. The circumstances of the Draki Prime’s activation, though years had passed, continued to heat the brothers’ behavior.

  Ladon mimicked Daniel, tapping his own temple. “I did not claim tribute.”

  The future-seer chuckled and drove a blade into the assassin’s thigh. The man’s high-pitched scream grated through the little tavern.

  “Besting his cutthroats will make the old fool livid.” Daniel twisted his blade.

  Marcus’s past-seer harmonized with his brother’s. When the triad used their seers together, the three rang true. They were young but worthy of their Prime designation.

  “You should have asked for five times your payment, scum.” Marcus pressed his blade deeper.

  Daniel pulled his dagger and wiped the Shifter’s blood on the man’s tunic. The assassin’s wounds closed but did not fully heal. He’d live, but the agony would rake his body for days.

  Marcus’s seer rippled again. “Three others. Outside.”

  They wait by the stables. Dragon’s bulk would have destroyed the tavern’s walls, so he had climbed the oak tree towering over the low-slung building.

  Ladon gestured at the entrance.

  Daniel’s seer sang. He clasped Ladon’s forearm. His brow crinkled. “Women.”

  The assassin laughed.

  The Emperor of the corpse of Rome sent women to murder him? Ladon guffawed. Women did not want to murder him. At least not at first.

  Daniel’s iron-colored eyes darkened. “Women will be our ruin.”

  “Not me, dear brother.” Marcus gestured at Ladon. “Him, most definitely.”

  Daniel ignored them, his seer pulsing and his eyes distant. “Your beautiful fate will find you one day.”

  “You are the only beautiful Fate here, Daniel.” Marcus kicked the assassin when he tried to escape.

  Archers, Dragon pushed. I must vent.

  “Skewer him to the table.” Ladon pointed at the Shifter before waving at Daniel. “Arrows, my friend.”

  Daniel did not respond.

  Ladon stopped, his sword half-drawn, next to the future-seer.

  Marcus rammed a poker through the Shifter’s shoulder. The man, now pinned to the table, screamed. Daniel shivered, and his gaze traveled between the Shifter and his brother.

  “Women.” He frowned as he slid his dagger into its scabbard and drew his own sword. “Take care with your fate, Ladon-Human. Only your fate will stand between you and your ruin.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The nasty thing in Rysa’s head wanted to kill her. Ladon said she’d passed out—he didn’t say anything about her kissing him—and she’d popped awake when he yelled something Russian and foul-sounding into his phone.

  He turned off the freeway onto a cornfield-lined county road and accelerated harder than the van liked. The engine groaned and the phone landed in the cup holder.

  Marcus’s charms had worn off at the store. Just like that, out of nowhere, she blacked out, kissed Ladon—kissed him—and now her nasty writhed like a pissed-off squid. Flashes and sounds and now smells—she didn’t tell Ladon about the Burner stink infesting her nose—bubbled around the edges of her peripheral awareness. Who had a peripheral nose? An endless stream of Wait, what’s that smell? made her jerk her head side to side like a crazy person.

  She spent twenty minutes ranting about randomness and jumping up and down in the back of the van as if jerked around by phantoms. Dragon pushed himself as far as he could to one side to protect his tail from her spazziness.

  Ladon hadn’t pulled off. He watched her in the rearview mirror and yelled more Russian into his phone.

  They passed through a little town with an ugly pink one-story hotel, a strip club, and a huge farm implement store-warehouse. The van slowed to the required thirty miles per hour. Rysa stared transfixed out the back window.

  The entire town lived within a thousand feet of the highway, as if the road pierced it like a bullet and carried all its muscle and bone down the asphalt. The town distorted but hadn’t yet burst.

  Rysa’s whipping tentacles picked up hate and defeat and a lot of booze. Then, as they moved across the town’s boundary, the vision vanished. Her nasty abruptly pulled in.

  Rysa now stared, dead still, out the front of the van.

  “Rysa!” Ladon waved his arm around the seat.

  The tip of Dragon’s tail flicked in front of her eyes. The van suddenly lit up, as if the beast had turned on an entire dive bar’s worth of neon.

  “Sit down!” Ladon pointed at the passenger seat. “Before Dragon rolls the van because you’ve forced him up the wall.”

  Her feet moved. She danced against the increasing speed of the vehicle, and she found herself dropping into the seat.

  Even in her worst ADHD moments—when she’d paced back and forth in the hall outside her fifth grade classroom, or when she’d disrupted her Health class in high school and had to go to the office, or when she had to drop her calculus recitation section her freshman year at the U because her teaching assistant couldn’t understand her when she talked too fast—she never felt this disoriented. Never.

  Something she didn’t catch flickered through Ladon’s eyes. “We’re almost to the rendezvous. You’ll be okay. I promise.” He lifted his hand from the steering wheel and reached for her fingers.

  He wanted to hold her hand. She was totally out of control and he still wanted to hold her hand. Was this because she kissed him? A sense of committed bounced between him and Dragon. Then their energy washed across her—not over, sort of parallel—and she felt committed again. Like fate had them by their necks and they had no choice but to help her.

  It took every morsel of self-control she had left not to unhook her seatbelt and curl into a ball on the van’s floor, right there in the front, between the dash and her seat.

  She hadn’t said anything about the kiss, but she remembered it—and in particular the feel of his stomach against hers. The power of his muscles alone made her want to weep. And his mouth. She’d faint if she kept thinking about it. Stubble against her lips never felt so good. Tom’s stubble hurt and Ladon’s hurt too, but in a way she liked.

  Which made no sense. Stubble was stubble. But the way he held her against him, and the way he moved his lips, made their kiss warm and brilliant and very, very good.

  She’d kissed a god. He drove down the little country highway like Apollo, but in black. What was up with the black, anyway?

  He pulled back his hand and something new played across his face. She’d missed her chance. She could have taken a sun go
d’s hand.

  Hurt bounced between him and Dragon. She’d hurt him.

  She’d do it again. No escaping that. It was as inevitable as them having sex. She would hurt him, really badly. A sudden sense of fate you cannot escape blanketed her perception of the world. Ladon turned gray—his skin, his hair, his clothes.

  It vanished.

  A whimper popped out of her throat like she’d just gacked up a hairball. How much randomness could flip around in her head before it exploded? Or was her mind imploding?

  “Beautiful! Look at me.”

  “I’m sorry!” She leaned forward. “I’m going to puke.”

  “Please don’t throw up in my van!” He looked totally freaked out. She’d never seen him so freaked out.

  She’d freaked out an immortal man who she was pretty damned sure had literally seen everything a human could see. “Why are you so good to me? I’m a problem. I’m—”

  “Rysa! Stop! Don’t say that.” A massive pulse moved between him and Dragon.

  The beast craned his neck around the seat and laid his head on her lap. Her nasty yelped—she heard it—and her seers stopped whipping. Stopped, laid down, and passed out.

  And as fast as the rant started, it ceased.

  She wrapped her arms around Dragon’s head and pressed her cheek against his crest. He did something, like when he stopped her cousins in the Texas vision. He calmed the chaos. “What did you do?”

  Ladon stared at the road. “He’s been trying.”

  She picked up We’ve been trying. Not the words, but the concept. Commitment came from both of them.

  She didn’t know what to say. They did so much for her.

  Ladon pointed at the glove compartment. “Your meds are in there. If you want them.”

  Her stomach lurched but she kept her head bowed over and on Dragon. “I’ll puke for sure.” Words spilled out, too fast again and too numerous, as a reflection of her body’s full rejection of the meds. They had always made her feel sick. Now, she’d be throwing up within twenty minutes, just like at Marcus’s. And probably having ultra-intense visions that screamed “Come mess with my head!” to every megalomaniac Fate on the planet.

  “I’ll puke all over the van and Dragon! You don’t want me puking on Dragon. I don’t want to puke! I don’t want to take them.”

  “Okay, okay. You don’t have to.” Now his lips bunched up. “Dmitri said the next exit. Penny will help.”

  “Why didn’t you call her yourself?” He’d been waiting for calls so he could yell more Russian into the phone. Driving, yelling, then driving some more.

  “Not a good idea.” He shook his head and his grip on the steering wheel tightened.

  “Why?” But her seers flicked the knowledge into her mind as soon as the question passed her lips. Penny might not be the most powerful enthraller, but she knew things about Ladon. Intimate things. And talking to her directly wasn’t the wisest idea. “Oh my God she’s your ex-girlfriend!”

  A new vision-flash—the seventies. Dragon, a car, hate sex in a field of corn so tall it dwarfed Ladon. “I didn’t need to see that. I didn’t want to see that!” Or smell it.

  Now Ladon looked like he’d throw up.

  “How many ex-girlfriends do you have? I don’t want any more visions like that!”

  Another very quick, polar-opposite flash—Ladon flirting with her in the Women’s Apparel section of the store in Mankato.

  She’d seen gray before, like a shroud. Now he gleamed like Dragon, happy and very much alive. Ladon, the magnificently-hot sun-god flirt.

  Something bounced between Ladon and Dragon and the beast raised his head so fast he almost smacked it against the roof of the van.

  “I do not flirt!”

  Rysa’s mouth dropped open. “You heard that? I said that out loud?” Imploding or exploding, it didn’t matter. She’d die, right now, right here, from embarrassment.

  Ladon didn’t look at her. He watched the road instead.

  She watched the fields pass by, not saying anything. Her cheeks burned. If she opened her mouth, she’d make it worse.

  A truth bubbled up from her seer-nasty. Two days and she’d defeated an immortal. This time, it didn’t take her ten days to scare off a guy. Two must be a personal record for her.

  She acted like… she didn’t know what she acted like. But it wasn’t tolerable to anyone and she’d just lost Dragon. She’d just lost Ladon. She had no control and when this was done, he’d walk away. They wouldn’t even be friends.

  His cheek twitched. “You told me not to touch so I haven’t touched.” His lower lip very quickly, very briefly, pouted out. “Mostly.”

  Neither of them spoke for what felt like an eternity. Jagged patterns flashed over Dragon’s hide. Rysa watched the Iowa corn.

  They pulled off the road onto a narrow gravel lane and Ladon inched the van along.

  “We’re here.” His voice blurred as if he didn’t care anymore if he had an edge. He put the van in park and pulled the key from the ignition. He nodded out the front. He still wouldn’t look at her. “I’ll go out, so you can change.”

  She looked down. Harold’s ratty sweats crumpled over her thighs.

  When she looked back, he’d already pulled the door handle. But his hand moved toward her tentatively, and his fingers curled under like he wasn’t sure what to do.

  When she touched his knuckles, his hand unfurled. Their skin met, palm to palm. He squeezed. Then he was gone, out the door, before she could say anything.

  Ladon pressed his back against the cold exterior of the van. Inside, Dragon picked up the unending stream of jarring, slashing seer bursts from Rysa. Every time it happened, she cringed.

  Her abilities—she called them her “nasty”—wrapped around his connection to Dragon and alternated clutching and siphoning. The frantic whipping had almost overpowered his concentration while he drove.

  He and the beast didn’t say anything. Adding weight to the burden Rysa already carried wasn’t something he’d do. She needed help—Penny’s help. Dragon’s help. His help. And he’d give it freely, no matter how panicked she became.

  They’d stopped briefly outside of Mankato after she’d passed out on his lap. He’d sat next to her while she lay on the blankets and waited for Dmitri to return his call. Each time she twitched or moaned, he touched her shoulder or hair or cheek.

  He’d woven a leather thong around a Legio Draconis insignia as he sat with his back against the driver’s seat, to keep his hands busy. While he tied the knots, she’d rolled toward him and, in her unconsciousness, pressed her cheek against his thigh.

  He didn’t move again until his phone rang. He couldn’t. Not after their kiss.

  He’d threaded the thong through the chain of her mother’s talisman. Made for her something to represent the good in her life, to balance the damned Burner fire. And he waited as Dragon cycled calming hues over both him and the beautiful woman who slept against his leg.

  He now carried the bracelet in his pocket as a gift he wondered if she’d accept, overwhelmed as she felt.

  Inside, Rysa stripped off Harold’s sweats. Dragon turned away to give her privacy, but the dragons had another sense, a sort of perceiving that operated separate from their vision. He and Sister detected it but never fully comprehended what it was. They still didn’t.

  His brother-in-law, with his scientific mind, once said he figured it was akin to how octopuses sensed the background they hid against. The dragons’ hides saw as well as mimicked. They had to, or they couldn’t vanish.

  A human brain couldn’t comprehend the information their hides produced. Ladon and Sister felt its effects, but didn’t understand.

  Ladon had managed to adapt somewhat in the twenty-three centuries he’d lived with the beast. Dragon-perceiving flitted in and out of his consciousness, sometimes like the after-image of a scene viewed in bright sun. Sometimes as a tactile doppelgänger of Dragon’s body as his coat mimicked the texture of a pattern. Often as a phantom
second world that overlaid the first.

  Rysa floated just outside his awareness, her dragon-sensed form lovely but ethereal and inaccessible. The beast learned the smoothness of her skin to a level of detail Ladon could never feel. His hide saw her curves and angles and the precise connections of her muscles and tendons. He learned how she moved. How she breathed.

  A ghost of Rysa drifted to Ladon, as brilliant and perfect as the woman herself.

  In the van, the beast stroked her back. She weeps.

  Ladon felt her ghost touch the delicate skin under her eyes.

  Someone like her, someone so beautiful his breath hitched when she smiled, should not wipe away tears.

  Headlights turned from the narrow county road onto the gravel of the field access.

  The engine of Penny’s 1967 Chevy Impala purred as if it’d been recently rebuilt. She’d painted the car at least twice since the last time he’d seen her—the surface gave off slight distortions—though she’d kept the original oxidized-mineral tint. But the finish glistened like glass and Ladon suspected she’d had the side panels bullet-proofed.

  Five dragon-lengths away, Penny parked her Impala crosswise to rows and rows of corn seedlings. The headlights blinked out and the area dropped into evening shadow.

  In front of him, an enthraller strong enough to make Rysa think she had her visions under control tapped her fingers on the well-maintained dash of her retrofitted classic automobile.

  In the van, Rysa pulled a new t-shirt over her head. She and the beast would soon roll out the back door and she’d stand next to him, feigning calm, though not strength.

  She was stronger than she realized. Stronger, he suspected, than both him and Dragon.

  He’d get her the help she needed, even if that help did not look happy to see him.

  Not happy at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Penny squatted in front of the Impala with her knees flexed and her weight distributed in that peculiar way women wearing heels knelt.