What had been the Jani Prime became Cara Caras. Sensing her body’s rhythms when he touched her hip. The brilliant rainbow of joy because she understood his signs. The intense bonding he felt when his humans made love against his chest.
Ladon lifted her onto his lap. “We feel everything that’s happening to you.” Tremors moved through his fingers as if Dragon had transferred all of her anxiety to him. “You are not alone. Don’t let the visions take you. Please.”
The hold released. Dragon couldn’t hold back her panic forever.
And that’s what was happening. She was panicking, simple as that. Rysa Torres, the sub-par Fate, was in the middle of a panic attack.
But understanding what was happening did nothing to stop it.
Dragon tapped Ladon’s shoulder and he tilted his head. “He’s going to give you something to help you sleep.” Ladon set her down and glanced at the beast. “Give her an eighth of what I need.”
I must stitch your arm, the beast signed. He held the pill to her mouth and helped her sit to drink. She swallowed the water and the pill without a fight. He helped her lay down again, then pulled antiseptic and a needle from the medical kit.
Ladon stroked her forehead. “We need to leave.” He kissed her cheek. “We’ll be okay.”
The pill made everything stand still and move fast at the same time.
Ladon jumped down to the seats. He pulled the phone from the cup holder and dialed a number. “I’m not calling about Sandro Torres, Dmitri.” A pause. He dropped into the driver’s seat. “We need a healer experienced with Fates.” He glanced back at her one more time. “I’m bringing her to you. She’s been attacked.”
Ladon pulled the phone from his ear. “Then ask Marcus! He can guide you. He—” Another pause. “What do you mean they’re gone? How the hell did Harold steal—”
His head dipped and his hand rose like he was pinching the bridge of his nose. “No. It’s not the sickness. It’s—” He glance back at her again. “Then you find someone. Now.”
Russian yelling poured out of the phone. Ladon pulled it away from his ear again. “You find a class-one healer and you find one now, do you understand?” Another pause. “I don’t care if they work for him,” he growled. “Let him try. If he comes near her, I’ll kill him and every member of his little cult.”
Rysa reached for Ladon one last time before her consciousness dropped below the blood and fire.
Inside the dream, Rysa’s back slammed into iron-hard clouds. Metal vapors billowed with dust and chains and wiggled into her nose, inched into her ears, filled her throat with acid grains. The clouds gripped her wrists with pulleys that twisted knives into her skin. Her back bruised against the dust and savaged her kidneys.
Apparitions rode the updrafts. They bit with dream teeth she felt but couldn’t see, and slapped with hands that couldn’t possibly hit.
She should fall. She should drop free and be tossed by the dream gravity.
But she wasn’t. Everything inside her body coiled. Every joint, every bone screamed. Dream hands wrenched and she crashed against the clouds.
Gravity should pull her down to the park’s asphalt. It should snap her legs on the monkey bars and twist her pelvis and snarl her neck in the swings. It should do what needed to be done.
Glowing splatters clung to Rysa’s body. Each drip adhered to an elbow, a finger, the tip of her nose. Surface tension sucked at her skin, but the drops weren’t shackled, like her.
Fire rained down from her skin.
Her nasty shrieked. It wanted to unfurl and show itself, but it would ignite if it got too close. So it vanished like Dragon, gone invisible to mimic the burning world.
Below, in the park, the beast would catch her when she fell. He’d caught her once already. She’d melt his patterns and scorch his bones when she dropped, but he’d catch her again.
Ladon shouted but the storm overrode his words with dream hammers and drums and chimes so loud they dripped acid into her eyes. She couldn’t see his intent, or what-was-is-will-be.
She should have seen that the burning dust would strip his skin from his body. She should have felt that she was the center of the storm and its engine of knives and pulleys.
Dream gravity yanked, but the burning world held her high.
Droplets fell, but she did not.
From above, Rysa dissolved the lives of the man and the beast who adored her, body and soul.
Chapter Thirty-One
Rysa bolted upright. She’d had a nightmare. Ghosts pinned her to a storm while she dripped acid onto the world below.
She hugged her knees and pressed her forehead into her thighs. At least the van’s roof blocked the clouds from pulling her into the sky like some alien abduction victim. The dream couldn’t steal her away.
Sun flowed through a lone tree outside and in through the vents. The world had become dappled in bright and white. The light played through the interior like phantoms of the patterns on Dragon’s hide.
How many of her visions last night had been placed in her head by her uncle? How much of it had been her own seers cracking under pressure? She didn’t know. But the floodgate had been opened and now she understood the context of her talisman—Rysa, the Parcae whose purpose was to shape the Burners. Her fate lay in her status as weapon and as the bringer of Dracae death.
Her bicep ached. Dragon had bandaged her up well and the cut no longer oozed.
She was dangerous, deadly, but Dragon didn’t care. He tended to her anyway, even though she’d hurt both him and his human.
A breeze carried Ladon’s voice into the van. She sat up.
“Are you going after her?” A pause. “South Dakota. Rysa saw bison.” Another pause. “Les Enfants.”
A shadow passed by the driver’s-side door. “No one gets near her.” The shadow moved back the other way. “I could have said the same thing to you when you took up with Derek.”
The shadow flickered. Ladon must have jerked the phone away from his ear. “And he’d be dead now if I had.”
The top of the van creaked as a growl rolled in from above. Dragon must be on the roof.
The volume of Ladon’s voice dropped. “Yes.” A longer pause. “I can’t control when it happens any more than you can.”
The rumbling. They’d offered her a part of themselves last night.
What had she done? Faustus was right. If she turned Burner, they would never bring themselves to do what was necessary.
Rysa pressed her palm against her temple. I’m going to hurt them, she thought.
Dragon’s head swung down and looked at her through the rear door.
“I’ve got to go.” Ladon’s shadow moved toward the driver’s door. “We’ll be there in less than an hour.” A pause. “Don’t be like this. I need your help.”
The phone beeped.
Dragon puffed out little flames as he undulated in. Dragon’s mind worked in patterns and colors, textures and shapes. He thought with the lights of his hide and when he talked with his hands he translated what he could.
But he moved slower than he should; his hide had dulled since last night, and his patterns had lost complexity.
“You’re tired, Dragon. I can tell.”
Yes. I must sleep.
“We will get you someplace safe.”
A bit of understanding popped into her mind from her seers—he would sleep deeply, like a stone—unmoving and unwakable—for twenty-four to thirty-six hours, but he wouldn’t rest if he felt she was in danger.
We are close to home.
“Where are we?” They didn’t take her south, to the Shifters?
Ladon crawled in through the driver’s door. He knelt on the step with a hand on each seat, and watched her as she moved to the side for Dragon.
Outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming. Human drove all night.
“All night? Didn’t you sleep?” She looked around. Ladon hadn’t taken any blankets.
The van was clean. Gone were the pizza boxes and the stray clothes and the
empty coffee cups. The bottles were gone, too. She lifted the lid of the storage compartment behind the driver’s seat.
Empty. All the vodka had vanished.
Ladon didn’t say anything, but instead touched her cheek.
Dull as it was, Dragon’s hide still sped up. We will not lose you, he signed.
Her seers laid bare their anguish when they lost other women—one, long ago, murdered. The second—her name had been Charlotte. He never named their son. Ladon held her in his arms as her life seeped away.
He and Dragon shattered. Each color and pattern that was Dragon dropped away. Every action and response that was Ladon unraveled. Nothing remained but brutal anger.
No more vodka. No killing Shifters. They weren’t going to lose her, as well.
But if they stayed with her, they’d see her ignite and become the one thing that could kill them—the Queen of Ghouls.
White light flashed through her vision and she doubled over.
Ladon pulled her to him. “I watched Daniel do the same injecting, once. He overwrote the other Fates’ abilities to control their seers, as if he had a remote control.”
He closed his eyes. “Sixteen centuries and he only did it once. The triad he did it to were Timothy’s children. His nieces and nephew. They…” He trailed off. “He couldn’t control what they saw, only when they saw it. Like what’s happening to you.”
Daniel broke their camera’s shutter mechanism. “Like he took away their talisman,” she said.
Ladon nodded. “Yes.”
The link around her wrist clinked against the little dragons of the insignia. Not that her talisman helped that much to begin with. She’d been dealing with random obnoxiousness from her seers since she activated.
But this was worse. Every vision hurt. Her teeth rattled. The stench of Burners clung to everything. She felt as if both her mind and her body were being eaten away by random bursts of acid-coated ADHD hell.
Few people had tolerance for her issues. Even on a good day, her talking too much and her bouncing annoyed most everyone around her. The burndust-laced talisman on her wrist magnified the worst of her problems.
And now the spike her uncle had driven into her head felt as if she’d stopped being Storm Rysa. She’d vanished into gale force winds and she was now just simply Storm Death.
Hers. Ladon’s. Dragon’s. Everyone’s.
Yet Ladon and Dragon refused to abandon her. They refused to walk away, even for their own safety. They thought she had the strength to handle the pain.
“We’ll find a healer who can help. I promise.”
The Shifter in the store had said something about Wyoming. “Are we going to your home?”
He nodded. “Dmitri will call when he finds someone. Until then, we keep you safe from your uncle.”
“How’s a healer going to help me?” She needed a functioning talisman and a calm mind, not a bone mended.
He held her tightly. “I’ve seen Shifter healers regrow a leg. I’ve seen them cure the Plague. And once, I saw a healer lay her hands on the head of a madman and make him whole. The strongest, the class-ones, if they know what to do, they can work miracles. And I swear to you, I will find one with the skills needed to stop what is happening. You can’t hurt like this.”
A healer made a madman whole. But could a healer make a Fate whole? And she doubted they’d find one who cared enough to help.
Ladon kissed her cheek. “I should have been watching for Faustus. If the War Babies had truly seen you as a threat, the Burners would have eaten you, not put on the damned shackles.”
He leaned them against Dragon. The colors under their cheeks deepened and Ladon touched a swirl on the beast’s hide before he stroked down her arm.
He wove his fingers around hers. “Last night didn’t happen because you’re impulsive or because your family manipulated you into it.”
But they had set her in his path. They’d manipulated all of them and used her inattentiveness. Her mother may not have understood why she did it, but she did it anyway.
“I don’t think Mira had any idea that Dragon and I would become so… attached to you.”
Another scorching vision of flame seared the back of her eyes. She refused to cringe. “It doesn’t matter. Faustus will get his way. All the powerful future-seers see the same vision. We can’t fight that.”
“Yes, we can.” He sat up. “Fates do not always get their way.”
No, if they did, Ladon and Dragon would be dead by now. Fates, Shifters, and Burners had all tried. Both Ladon and his sister had outfought or outsmarted everyone who had ever tried to do them harm.
She didn’t know if it would work this time. She would become something new. A Fate-Burner hybrid designed to be the ultimate combination weapon to destroy the Dracae.
Ladon’s nostrils flared. “You will have what you want.” A quick nod at Dragon and he kissed her temple. “And so will we.”
He’d become so tied to her that when she dropped to the bottom of Hell, he’d drop with her. Dragon, too. They’d never escape.
“We will buy a house in Minneapolis when this is done and both you and your mother are safe.” He grinned and kissed her again. “Dragon and I, we will mow the lawn and install track lighting.”
“Ladon…” She needed to know that they could escape.
He held his breath. His jaw tensed. “I don’t have to buy—”
She touched his chin. “It’s not that.” He offered so much—every night, she’d sleep snuggled against his side and be soothed by the rhythms of his body. She’d wake to the warmth of Dragon’s touch and to Ladon’s smile. He’d touch her cheek. Then he’d offer a “Have a good day at class,” and a “Dragon packed you an orange with your lunch.”
The life she wanted.
But no matter what he believed, she didn’t see it. “I need to know you’ll be willing to take care of… me… if you need to. And that you’ll be okay when it’s done.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t—”
Rysa cut him off. She felt like a thief. She stole his strength and gave nothing but the promise of death in return. Ladon and Dragon were everything she wanted. They were everything she needed, but it didn’t matter anymore. It never had. The future would have its due and what happened here was nothing more than a ripple in the coming lake of fire.
She could shield them, though. She might wound them, but she’d keep them alive. “If you’re with me, he will hurt you.”
He slapped the floor. “You are not toxic!”
This wasn’t about her. This was about the future in her head. “We need to focus on what’s relevant—”
“You are relevant! I can’t let this be. We will not walk away from you! You’re part of our lives. You’re the best part. We don’t care about prophesies or Faustus’s threats or damned Fate power games. We haven’t cared for a very long time. All we care about is that you are safe and the spike is healed.”
He touched her temple. “We care about you because we—”
“Ladon, don’t.” She wanted to kiss him until the anguish in his eyes vanished. She wanted Dragon to feel it, too, and for his hide to glow in starbursts.
But the Parcae blood in her veins made her toxic. “We can talk about this later. We need to get through what’s happening first. Alive.”
He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against her shoulder. Dragon touched Ladon’s back and nuzzled Rysa’s side.
“How much of this fatalism is you?” Ladon whispered. “How much of it is your Parcae abilities? Or did Faustus shove it into your head?”
What was he talking about? “I’m being realistic.”
Ladon snorted. “You are being stubborn.”
“I’ve dealt with shit like this all my life. I know when—”
Ladon kissed her lips and forehead. “I know.”
“Ladon…”
A pulse moved between Ladon and Dragon.
Ladon touched the beast’s neck. “He’s telling me not to argu
e with you. He says he’s too tired and that your visions hurt you too much.”
Leave it to Dragon to make practical sense of the situation.
Ladon stroked her cheek. “It doesn’t change how I feel. Nor does it change how he feels.” He patted Dragon. “We will get you through this. Both you and Mira. I don’t believe she was complicit in this. It wouldn’t be the first time Faustus has used a sister for his own gain.”
Some of the weight lifted. Even if they had to pop her Burnerized body, they’d help her mother.
“I’m going to take you to Sister. She’s going to watch over you while Dmitri finds a healer.” He leaned forward and kissed her neck. “And Dragon and I will fetch your mother.”
A seer-made vision erupted in her mind’s eye—another dragon, but not her Dragon. Smaller, sleek. Angry.
She pressed on her temple again. “Your sister’s not happy about helping.”
“I can handle Sister.” Ladon stood up, moving toward the front of the van. “You are more important than her irritations.” He grimaced as he dropped into the driver’s seat.
She lay down next to Dragon.
“I need coffee,” Ladon said as he put the van in gear and drove them toward the other Dracae.
Chapter Thirty-Two
They parked outside the main entrance to Rock Springs’s sprawling, one-story hospital. Construction dominated the back of the building—the hospital looked to be doubling its floor space and adding onto several clinics, as well as the emergency department.
Rysa’s seers had calmed while they drove. For the entire half hour, Dragon rested his head on her lap and she fretted over the danger she’d put them in, but thankfully without any burning visions.
She didn’t pick up any more from her mother, either. The War Babies were smart enough not to strip off her mom’s flesh. Nor would they murder her. If they did, they’d kill their own father, but torturing their aunt to prove their superiority was a possibility.
Ladon took her hand as they walked toward the hospital entrance. Dragon ran by and scaled well-worn dragon-holds behind the landscaping.
Games of Fate (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 1) Page 23
