Games of Fate (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 1)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Ladon loved her anyway. So did Dragon.

  And her mom. Her father, too, wherever he was.

  Faustus might have spiked her head but her abilities were hers. Her talisman didn’t function, but her abilities belonged to her. And unlike her family, Rysa had had enough of being dragged by fate.

  Her seers unfolded, snarling and reluctant to cooperate, and the agony painted the concrete hot white, but a vision flared.

  She didn’t see the Burners. Not directly, but she sensed threads of what-was.

  She doubled over. “Two have Adrestia. I can’t—” She cried out and wiped at her nose. Blood. “Fix me!”

  “No.” Faustus’s future-seer sputtered. He lowered his gun. “Ladon and I, we’re one and the same. We both do what we are meant to do, no matter the consequences. No matter who it hurts.”

  He thumped his chest. “At least I do it for the rest of the world.” He gestured at the open side of the building. Another gust flipped his jacket over his hip.

  The world was bigger than him. Bigger than his king-making talisman. Bigger than he could ever see. He could do all the douchebag rationalizing he wanted and he’d still be an idiot.

  The Burner link around her wrist slid down and clinked against the little dragons. Rysa looked down at her hand. Talismans filter, but her dragon enhanced. The beast gave her calm when he laid his head on her lap.

  The man gave her strength when he said “I love you.”

  Faustus’s little mind was about to let his own daughter die.

  She sprang at her uncle. He landed on his back with Rysa on his chest and a knee on each wrist. His gun clattered away.

  His seer slammed into her mind. The injection twisted.

  When she was between Ladon and Dragon, she felt their river of energy. Her nasty’s arms—her seers—curled around it.

  This close to her uncle, her nasty did the same to him. Rysa leaned her forehead against her uncle’s the way Adrestia had leaned against her in the rail yard—and her nasty felt his end of the injection.

  No whipping this time. Not snapping or flailing. Her nasty dug down to the root and yanked the spike out of her uncle’s skull.

  The world integrated memory by memory, point by point. Her mind stabilized, and the crack at the back closed. The ice bugs withered. Her nasty healed the holes in her psyche as fast as it forced out the spike.

  No one would ever do that to her again.

  Faustus’s head bounced against a concrete support. “What are you?”

  Rysa smirked as she pushed off him. “A better Fate than you, obviously.”

  Adrestia shrieked. “Papa! Ils sont trop nombreux. Je ne peux pas les repousser!”

  Four Burners dropped out of the ceiling next to Rysa and Faustus. Two big and ugly males threw bits of sheetrock at each other while they hopped toward the central elevator. A thin and pockmarked boy leaned against a support. His mouth spread in a pompous sneer, and a heavy reek drifted from him—he was the unwashed teenage-dork-Burner.

  The one in front snorted and pointed her little finger at Rysa.

  The child.

  “Skankadoodle!” she yelled. “Your boyfriend ain’t here so I’m going to chew you all up!” She jumped up and did a one-eighty in the air, and pointed down the length of the building at the stairs as she landed. “Don’t mess up, asswipes!”

  The one closest to the elevators pulled on his lower eyelid with his middle finger.

  The child jumped again and pointed at Rysa. Pellets of her past rained down into Rysa’s seers—a slap, a black eye, a belt. Screaming. A tiny doll, its painted face rubbed clean to the plastic underneath. She hid from everyone. Then anger, and the world igniting when the dark-haired woman found her half frozen in an alley.

  She’d been abandoned. Kicked from one terrible life to another. No child should have to live through that.

  “You have a past,” Rysa yelled. “I see threads.”

  The child glared at Rysa and her red eyes flashed. “Past? So?”

  “You don’t have to be like this.” But maybe for her, not remembering was a blessing. Who’d want to remember that? She’d been a vessel emptied by a horrid life before she was turned. Ismene had exchanged one type of blankness for another.

  “You don’t know anything, you smug Fate bitch. You’re all the same. Keep out of my business or I’ll eat you.” She giggled and kicked Rysa’s thigh. “Tasty little Fate skank.”

  Rysa tried to say something else, to reason with the child. But her head boiled and her seers roiled. A new spike tried to push in, this one flashing destruction and chaos. It grated, and not like the cold razor of before. This spike both burned and foamed.

  Lightning flashed outside the building. The wind whistled through the floor and over the open edge behind the tool cage.

  The child laughed. “Mom’s home.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  A Burner woman wearing a dark red, zipped-up hoodie lowered herself from the ceiling grid. She held the grid with one hand and flexed her arm as she controlled her descent.

  Only her chin, neck, and hands were visible. Doom effervesced off her body—puffs literally exploded along the surface of her exposed skin.

  Her boots clanked when they hit the concrete. She ripped the lock off the cage.

  Bob kissed her cheek. “Thanks, Mom.”

  Faustus had thought Ismene’s children were as stupid and volatile as all the other Burners. Just a little less stupid and a little more volatile. Timor must have identified them by using the past threads trailing like kite tails in their wake. But the War Babies, like their father, had snouts full of conceit. Adrestia wasn’t the only Fate blind to the obvious. Rysa’s family had utterly underestimated what they were dealing with.

  The Burners behind Rysa laughed. Bob winked and pointed at Rysa, then pulled himself into the ceiling.

  He’d eat Adrestia. Do it slowly and cooking her fingers and stuffing them in her mouth one at a time so she could taste her own flesh. She couldn’t fight what she couldn’t read. Her skin would sear and her tendons would rip as he savored her body. He’d melt her bones and snort her ashes.

  Bob would be a new monster created more out of the idiocy of the Fates than the stupidity of the Burners.

  Ismene watched him go.

  She locked her hand around Faustus’s neck. Her fingertips stroked his throat and she clucked. Sparks flicked off her teeth.

  The cooked-meat stench rising from Faustus’s skin was as strong as Ismene’s Burner tang.

  She tilted her head at the Burner angle. “My dear brother.” Her voice spun out viscous, like fireworks in honey. The pop and crackle of the explosions that burned away Ismene’s life were sweetened by the Fate blood running through her veins.

  She wisped her free hand in a shooing gesture meant to acknowledge Rysa, but her face stayed hidden in the long hood, and angled toward Faustus. “I had a sense of you. He thinks you’re the final weapon in his little war to save the future.” Sparks flicked off her fingers. “My brother’s petite Enola Gay.”

  “I saw him hurt you. In Texas,” Rysa said. He’d slapped Ismene the way he’d hit Rysa so many times since dragging her into the building.

  Faustus gurgled.

  “He called me a whore. Me. His sister.” The tips of the fingers waving at Rysa alternated glowing and smoking as a hazy symphony she tapped in the air.

  “I’ll help you,” Faustus croaked.

  Ismene let go and he rolled onto his side. He writhed on the concrete like a worm dried out by his sister’s heat.

  “You won’t be alone anymore.” Faustus pointed at Rysa. His voice was as singed as his skin. “Turn her and she’ll be like you. Then we can all be together again. We can be a triad.”

  “But you called me a whore, brother. Why help me?”

  “I’m sorry! I was wrong.” He flopped onto his back and closed his eyes. His hand slid up to cover the wound on his neck. “It wasn’t your fault. That Shifter enthralled you. I should have
killed him.”

  “You did kill him.” Ismene kicked Faustus in the groin.

  He heaved, and his eyes bulged. “Ismene! She’s supposed to be the Burner, not you. I see it.”

  Ismene spit a green cloud of vapors at Faustus.

  She pointed at Rysa. “He sees your fate.”

  They stood in front of her, Ismene bent over Faustus with one glowing hand poised to cook his flesh. The other waved in a graceful arc toward Rysa. Faustus cowered with one arm up over his head.

  The past- and future-seer of the Jani Prime played out a Baroque opera backlit by the lightning flashing across the edges of Salt Lake City. They posed; thunder crashed. He lied; she accepted. He hit; she presented her cheek for more. They followed their script.

  “A triad again?” Ismene’s gaze slid back to her brother.

  “Yes, Ismene,” he purred. “Let her take your place.”

  Ismene turned her face toward Rysa. Under the hood, her eyes glowed a horrible maroon-red, like scabs on fire.

  If Rysa didn’t escape, her eyes would soon burn that way.

  She tried to back away, but the child pushed her forward.

  “I won’t!” she yelled. “I’ll hunt all your children, starting with this little punk.” Rysa’s context was chaos, and chaos she’d bring. “I’ll hunt you. I’ll hunt everyone! I’ll be the best Burner who’s ever walked the Earth. Better than the Progenitor. I’ll be the Reine des Brûleurs.”

  “Let me eat her!” the child screeched.

  “No!” Faustus sat up. “You’re Parcae, sister! Do your duty.”

  Ismene grabbed her brother’s hair. She pulled his head back and exposed his neck. “Come here, child.” She wiggled a finger.

  The kid bounded out from behind Rysa and over to Ismene. “Mom!”

  Could Rysa run? Three other Burners waited between Rysa and the elevators. Maybe there was a staircase closer. But her mother was tied to the wall. Rysa slid her foot backward, praying for her seers to show her the way.

  The greasy teen grabbed her arm and exhaled at her nose. She coughed. Her eyes blurred. He twirled her back toward her aunt and uncle.

  “Did you miss me?” Ismene stroked the kid’s head.

  Her cap smoked under Ismene’s touch, but the child didn’t seem to notice. “Can I eat one of them? Please? Dick-boy was mean to me, but the skankadoodle smells super-tasty.” She pointed at Rysa.

  Ismene’s seer spread outward like a thick paste. Faustus cringed. Rysa dropped to her knees. The child and the teen both giggled.

  Five fingers fanned out over the little Burner’s head. One hand twisted.

  Burner necks snapped different from Shifters. Burners spurt and crackled like a car backfiring.

  Ismene flung the child’s body at an angle, around the tool cage and off the open deck of the building. The little Burner crystalized as she flew and a trail of red streaked through the air. But rain bombarded the building and violent water attacked the edges of the deck and disrupted the implosion.

  The little Burner vanished in a cloud of sparkles against the storm and the mountains.

  Ismene hated the Burners, even the ones she made, just as much as her brother.

  “La Reine des Brûleurs, nièce.” Ismene’s gaze dropped to her brother. “What you are will be gnawed to nothing.”

  Ismene bit into Faustus’s shoulder.

  His eyes rolled back into his head and he tried to call out but nothing left his throat. Ismene’s wicked Burner teeth twinkled like diamonds. She’d taken a chunk of muscle from between her brother’s shoulder and his neck. Her acid cauterized the wound but his off-white and gouged collar bone showed through his flesh.

  He thrashed and dropped onto his side.

  “I must feed.” Ismene pointed at her Burner guards. “But unlike them, I feel. I see the normals and I remember.” Her foot descended onto Faustus’s knee. “He didn’t know I wouldn’t forget. Prime future-seer, but he can’t read me. He never saw that I understood what he compels me to do.”

  Faustus stopped fighting. He lay on the concrete, stray rain drops settling on his ash-white skin, with his body broken but not bloodied. Acid sealed it shut.

  “He turned me into a ghoul.” Ismene kicked him again.

  “You don’t have to kill him.” But Rysa knew there was no getting around what her aunt saw as her own fate—and the fate of her uncle. They’d continue down this path, not fighting. Not trying.

  “I was going to marry my Shifter. He was a morpher with some healing ability. They were working on drugs, applications of their abilities. Some were investigating a cure for the Parcae sickness. My brother killed him. Sent in Burners and murdered him.”

  “Ismene, I’m sorry,” said Rysa.

  “Not all of the Shifters hate us.” Ismene knelt next to Faustus, stroking his hair. “You’d think they would have learned their lesson long, long ago.”

  She tilted her head. “If I consume him, will I become both past- and future-seer of my triad?”

  Ismene bit into Faustus’s arm. She ate, burning away his clothes as she took his flesh. His body vanished into his sister as meat and bone disbursed to pay his debt.

  Rysa retched. The greasy teen breathed on her ear, increasing her nausea tenfold. She swung, not caring that his skin singed her fist, and punched him in the neck.

  He snorted and clicked his teeth. “We ain’t supposed to hurt you.” He grabbed her face—his palms were thankfully cold—and moved in for a kiss.

  Rysa kneed him in the groin.

  He coughed. Acid blew into her face, and his fingers heated. She screamed, kicking again, and he let go. She had two hundred feet, tops, between her and the elevators. If she—

  Ismene grabbed her upper arm. Around her wrist she now wore two eagles, one of the past and one of the future.

  Her aunt’s seers locked onto Rysa’s awareness. The disorientation overwhelmed, but it didn’t foam. “You can be a weapon, if you choose. I don’t care.” Her diamond teeth flashed. “But can you rule them?”

  Rysa’s seers threw out a new vision—Ladon burning. What-will-be gleamed in a different pattern than it had before. “The future’s changing. I can’t see…”

  “Of course it is, niece. I am Ambustae. I am Parcae. When the breeds cross, the world always finds something new.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Energy surged upward from the base of the building. Energy she recognized. Energy she’d thought asleep.

  Ladon and Dragon had come for her.

  Rysa touched back and the beast called out in colors brighter than the sun.

  Ismene’s seers fizzled halfway between the foaming of Burners and the clinking of cymbals in a storm. Bewilderment washed over her face.

  “How can this be? His beast sleeps.” Her grip cinched around Rysa’s upper arm. Acid soaked through the sleeve.

  Rysa’s skin heated but she ignored it. Her attention hyper-focused on the center of the building.

  Ladon kicked through the stairwell door. He dodged to the left, avoiding the two Burner guards, and disappeared behind a stack of sheetrock. Then he reappeared, his armored jacket and gloves flashing in the lightning reflecting off the mountains, and ran up a pallet.

  Thunder rolled through the building.

  Ismene’s seers grated over Rysa but she didn’t cringe. She wouldn’t let her aunt hurt Ladon and Dragon. Her nasty reared up like a snarling guard dog Ismene couldn’t dance around.

  Ismene snarled and slapped her face. “Please, young lady. Show some respect.”

  Ladon kicked one of the guards in the chest. The Burner lurched backward but stopped, hung in midair, as if suspended.

  Dragon snapped the Burner’s neck.

  The entire floor flashed as another bolt of lightning flooded the area with white light. Rysa squinted and jerked against her aunt’s grip, and tried to duck out of the way of the dead Burner’s fireball.

  “Down!” Ismene threw her behind the tool cage.

  Rysa stumbled an
d her foot slipped off the concrete deck. Sixteen stories below, the asphalt gleamed like an oiled snake. If she dropped, she’d bounce. Every single bone in her body would turn to jelly.

  The wind hit her hard but Ismene hauled her up the side of the tool cage.

  The second guard ran at Ladon, but flew sideways into a column when Dragon rammed him from behind. Ladon whipped a brick at the ghoul’s head.

  “My mom kept me hidden for a reason. Let me go. Please,” Rysa said.

  A snap echoed over the concrete. The other Burner guard bounced off the floor, imploding as he flew, only to fizzle away in the rain.

  Ismene’s scab eyes burned hotter. “Mira abandoned me.” She looked away again. “She didn’t help. She could have helped.”

  Ladon ran for Rysa. Behind him, the greasy teen lunged out of the shadows.

  He held the end of the winch’s cable in his hand.

  Rysa didn’t need her seers to know what he was about to do. “Dragon!”

  The Burner locked the winch’s hook around one of Dragon’s hind limbs. The beast roared, kicking and swatting at the ghoul, but the greasy teen dodged.

  The ghoul yanked on the power lever and ripped it off the engine. The winch chugged to life.

  The cable pulled Dragon back.

  Dragon’s hide flared. The Burner laughed and pointed, and danced around like a fool—but Dragon’s talons extended. He wrapped his hand around the ghoul’s head and slammed straight down. His shoulder twisted and he ground the teen into the concrete.

  The agony seething up Dragon’s forelimb thudded to Rysa. It mingled with the beast’s fatigue and slowed his responses. Yet he pushed down harder and ground the Burner into the floor as the winch dragged him backward.

  The teen’s body spread into a thin trail. Wet, visible bubbles hissed off the concrete.

  Ismene pushed Rysa off the front of the tool cage. Ghost-threads of both past and future spooled from her aunt as Ismene sniffed the air. She stepped toward Ladon, then back, then looked at the floor as if measuring a distance.

  Ladon jumped pallets and dodged equipment. He couldn’t hide the agony of his stretching connection to Dragon. He slowed to a walk, then to a shuffle.