Men and Beasts
Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book Six
Kris Austen Radcliffe
Copyright 2017 Kris Austen Radcliffe
All rights reserved.
Published by
Six Talon Sign Fantasy & Futuristic Romance
Edited by Annetta Ribken
Copyedited by Terry Koch and Juli Lilly
Cover designed by Lou Harper
Series dragon design and art by Christina Rausch
Plus a special thanks to my Proofing Crew.
Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidences are used factitiously. All representations of real locales, programs, or services are factitious accounts of the environments and services described. Any resemblances characters, places, or events have to actual people, living or dead, business, establishments, events, or locales is entirely unintended and coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
For requests, please e-mail: [email protected].
Third electronic edition, September 2017
Updated and reformatted
version 8.25.2017
ISBN: 978-1-939730-36-7
Contents
Men and Beasts
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
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The Worlds of
About the Author
Men and Beasts
Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon
Kris Austen Radcliffe
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Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon
The Series
Games of Fate
Flux of Skin
Fifth of Blood
Bonds Broken & Silent
All But Human
Men and Beasts
The Burning World
Chapter One
Ice, Rysa Torres thought.
Ice dropped from the storm clouds above her head. It twirled in the air like dancing faeries but it was not sweet. It lied. Little, tiny shards tormented her skin and her lungs with heat-killing pokes and stabs.
It would rip her apart if she let it.
She hadn’t slept since they left Texas. Road noise from nearby Interstate 25 set her teeth on edge.
She felt slashed by razors—the cold on her skin, the noise in her ears, her fractured, wailing soul. She needed to hold her seers and healer together, and her mind. She needed to wrap her raw wounds and not splatter her guts on the pavement.
Without Ladon, she shuffled through the snow in front of the restroom buildings of a Cheyenne, Wyoming, truck stop, wondering when the ice razors falling from the sky would find that one right spot on her heart—the place already riddled with hairline fractures—and she would shatter into a million piercing splinters.
Every whiff of truck exhaust and every shattering grinding of brakes rising from the traffic out on the interstate made her want to run into Wyoming’s high desert. No people. No Fates. No Shifters. No Burners. She’d be out there in the coming blizzard, dying in the ice with just her frozen body and the sounds of her own weeping.
If she ran, there would be no one to hold Dragon’s disassembling mind together until Ladon came home. Her beast had lost his cohesion. She’d lost her cohesion, without Ladon. They’d all come unglued.
For the first twenty miles outside of Abilene she had pressed her entire body against the rear window of their Praesagio Industries touring bus hoping—praying—she’d see Ladon by the road. That he would be at an intersection, waiting. That their driver would open the door and Ladon would walk up the steps and she’d heal his connection to his fractured Dragon. They’d be a family again.
In Amarillo she dried her eyes and tried to block the mutterings of her seers. He’s moving north, they whispered. He’s going home. So she directed the buses and the people collected to protect her sick Dragon to move north as well, toward Wyoming.
When they crossed from Texas into Oklahoma, Dragon’s nascent connection to Rysa’s brother-in-law, Derek, thrashed like a livewire. Rysa did what she could with her healer, but her internal screaming started again anyway.
From Denver on, her insides turned as cold and whipping as the near-blizzard conditions outside.
Twenty-four hours ago, Vivicus snapped Ladon and Dragon’s connection. Derek held the beast together as best he could, but the intricate, interlocking cathedrals of colors, patterns, and meaning that structured Dragon’s mind were failing. Every minute that passed without Ladon stripped yet another stripe of humanity off the beast’s psyche.
He was becoming less a person and more… different. Not a beast, but not the dragon half of the Dracos, either. Alien.
He’d already lost his ability to use American Sign Language to communicate, and he no longer mimicked well enough to run completely invisible. He fought his disintegration—he would raise his head at random intervals and push questions to Derek about people he knew or about Daisy Pavlovich’s two German shepherds, Radar and Ragnar. Then he’d snuggle with Rysa and do his best to hold his memories intact.
Dmitri Pavlovich—Daisy’s father and the new Tsar of Praesagio Industries—brought in two huge, high-tech, garish Praesagio touring buses to transport the dragons from Texas to Wyoming. Both buses were auto show models and decked out with every possible bell and whistle. They were, quite literally, rolling four-star hotels. So at least their drive north into the blizzard had been somewhat comfortable.
Clouds roiled above Rysa’s head and she frowned at the sky at the same time she stomped her chilled feet. In Minnesota, storm fronts like the one hanging over her and the people collected to protect Dragon were the first sign of very, very bad weather. Of nights so thick with shadows and blizzards that if you took one step out the door, you’d vanish forever. Of air that would kill you if you let it—much like the Fate and Shifter prevarications around her.
Aiden Blake and his sisters—the Children of the Burning World—murdered Andreas Sisto at the same time Vivicus stole Ladon. They lurked and they waited, and, she suspected, built a Rube-Goldberg-level interlocking Fate drama of back-stabbings of already stabbed backs.
Let them. She was Rysa Torres soon-to-be Drake, the Prime Fate and healer of the Dracae. Her context was her beast and her man. Aiden might add sharp, ripping textures to the weave of her life, but for her, the shape of the tapestry of the what-was-is-will-be was delineated by the dragon talon talisman hanging from the leather cord around her neck.
Ice bounced off the bright yellow Praesagio Industries: Making a difference for the world to see logo embossed across the equally bright blue jacket wrapped around her body. The crystals flung themselves outward with a mad, hyperkinetic randomness. Contrasting heat wafted off her neck. Early Wyoming evenings might be cold, but her Praesagio-donated coat was too hot.
Too big, as well. She swam inside the thing. How could the twenty-person security team who followed them up Interstate 25 to Cheyenne have only an unused extra-large jacket stuffed into the corners of the touring bus parked fifty feet away?
If they had flown, they would have beaten the storm. But on a good day, the dragons disliked flying.
What they left behind in Abilene, Texas, had not been a good day.
AnnaBelinda and Sister-Dragon drove the other touring bus. Anna had stepped up into the slick vehicle, nodded once, and taken her place behind the wheel as if she’d just taken control of a jet fighter.
They stayed about a quarter mile ahead—within sight but far enough away that Anna’s connection to Sister-Dragon did not unsettle her husband’s connection to Dragon. They waited, now, at the head of the ramp returning traffic to the freeway.
Rysa, Daisy, and Gavin rode on the bus with the beast and Derek, along with Asar, Amir, and Cordelia—the unnamed triad—and a smattering of Praesagio techs. But legs need stretching, so they stopped at the rest stop, with its three beige brick buildings and its flat, gray parking lot.
With the storm, Cheyenne was as close as they’d get to home for a few days.
You don’t have a few days, her future-seer whispered.
Rysa inhaled slowly, to disguise the clenching in her chest.
No, they didn’t. But she refused to use her future-seer to look at what don’t have a few days meant. Instead, she allowed her present-seer, as Ladon once told her, to “optimize options in the present.”
Daisy Pavlovich paced the snow-dusted walk in front of the women’s restroom five feet from Rysa. She held her phone to her ear, her own Praesagio Industries jacket covering her tall and lean frame—but Daisy hadn’t zipped hers.
She must feel as overheated as Rysa.
“I don’t like it,” Daisy said into her phone. She spoke with her father. Almost seven months ago, Dmitri’s holdings had been a wispy net of global connections. Now, he controlled one of the most powerful corporations on the planet.
Daisy stopped walking and stared across the parking lot at nothing in particular. “Burners?” she asked.
Rysa wasn’t surprised. Daisy and the other bloodhound enthraller who’d come in with the security detail had both smelled the caustic acidity of Burners near Abilene’s own Victor D. Victor Magnet School for the Life Sciences, the high school built by Vivicus to hide his underground Fate-proof medical labs.
Vivicus, who was dead and filled with nanobot sniffers and whose body was en route to Portland. The same sniffers Rysa carried in her own blood. For her, the microscopic machines contained her out-of-control enthralling abilities. For Vivicus, they shut down every single cell in his morphing body.
In Texas, Rysa hadn’t been surprised by the high school, either. Every supervillain had a lair, and Vivicus’s was “the best.”
Daisy’s gaze flipped from staring at nothing to looking directly at Rysa, and her wavy, jet-black ponytail responded by swinging behind her head. Ice populated her hair the same way it populated Rysa’s auburn strands—snow clung across the middle of both women’s ponytails where they swooped out from their heads, but not near the tips.
Too much velocity out at the tails.
Daisy cupped her hand over her phone. “Dad says the team we left at the school found another lab. This one is about a quarter mile from the building and cut off from the tunnels under the school.”
She nodded her head south, as if to indicate the direction from the school where the team had found the new lab. “Burner stink everywhere and signs of a scuffle.”
Daisy turned her attention back to the phone. After a beat, she spoke again. “They found a recently used IV bag and a Hawaiian-print shirt.”
Vivicus’s calling card, that shirt.
“No blood, Rysa. No signs the Burners ate anyone.” The words tumbled out of Daisy’s mouth fast and pointed as if she felt that if she didn’t get them out immediately, Hawaiian-print shirt would take over. That the gaudy, obnoxiously blue, red, and yellow fabric would manifest itself above their heads. The clouds would vanish and the entire sky would become the ghost of Vivicus.
The bastard would float up there like a god drunk on “top-shelf properties,” spray tans, and his own thunderhead of bluster and machismo.
But Vivicus was truly dead this time, even if he did still haunt the world.
When Ladon found Rysa, she’d thought she was the Ambusti Prime—the Prime Fate of the Burners. She’d been keyed into their caustic randomness. They weren’t, if she was honest, all that much worse than her deepest ADHD moments.
So her seers knew what to look for.
“Burners won’t hurt Ladon,” she said. He’s their princess’s consort, she thought. She couldn’t control the small, ironic wiggle of her nose, though, that came with the thought.
Daisy’s brow furrowed. “Rysa says Burners won’t hurt Ladon,” she said into her phone, though her face said she didn’t agree.
“He’s coming home.” This Rysa knew deep down in her soul. It flowed from all her seers—past, present, and future. And it flowed from her knowledge of the man. “He will come here.”
He’d promised that he’d come for her.
A vision-memory flashed through her mind: The first time she’d kissed Ladon, her out-of-control seers had whispered: When I hurt you, please forgive me. Please come for me.
But it wasn’t just that shrouded kiss. There’d been other visions, other moments, but they’d vanished like Dragon the moment she’d come out of them.
Rysa rubbed her forehead. The echoes were getting stronger. Echoes of echoes and echoes of words spoken many times, or yet to be spoken, yet never said.
Echoes inside a web that was, itself, inside another web.
Please come for me….
Then the thought vanished like… Dragon.
Gone invisible to mimic the burning world.
Rysa sucked in her breath. She staggered, her perception of the horizon no longer vertical. No longer cold and gray and frozen.
Because the world will burn, her future-seer whispered. Be ready.
Be ready to sacrifice, Draki Prime.
Chapter Two
“Rysa?” Daisy Pavlovich touched her friend’s shoulder. Rysa looked as if she was about to lose the small bit of burger Derek had managed to make her swallow after their last stop.
Rysa wasn’t eating. She wasn’t sleeping, either. She only stared out the window of her seat next to Brother-Dragon, a hand on the beast’s neck and her seers poking into the eyes of the universe.
“Dad, I’ll call you back
,” Daisy said.
“There is more, Daisy,” Dmitri Pavlovich growled through her phone. Her father was not a man who dealt well with not knowing the full details of a situation and he wanted his daughter fully informed, even if it divided her attention.
“What?” Her gut did the little extra twist it always did when her father used his “there is more” tone of voice.
“Adrestia vanished immediately after she helped Rysa’s mother disguise the time of Andreas Sisto’s death.”
Rysa’s cousin, Adrestia, was the present-seer of the War Babies, a particularly nasty triad who had tried to turn Rysa into the Prime Fate of the Burners when she activated. Rysa’s mother, Mira Torres, had taken in Adrestia after she was mauled by Burners. As far as Daisy knew, Adrestia had been behaving herself and had, at least according to Rysa’s conversations with her parents, reformed.
“I take it this is not good, Dad?” How could it possibly be good? Rysa had been mumbling about “piling it on” the entire trip north from Texas. And now her probably-not-reformed evil cousin had disappeared into the ether while Ladon was missing.
Men And Beasts (Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book 6) Page 1
