Men And Beasts (Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book 6)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Smart. She didn’t want to be out in that either. Hopefully, Ladon was okay. Her dad had people on the ground all along the I-25 corridor watching for him. A big guy in black with a barbarian mohawk stuck in people’s memories, even if they all felt as if they shouldn’t look him in the eye.

  But Rysa said they needed to come north even though they hadn’t found her fiancé, so they came north. One does not argue with a Prime Fate.

  Except their Prime Fate was also a Shifter who felt she had a right to enthrall Gavin, which still pissed off Daisy, no matter if Rysa and Gavin “had a talk.” And now Rysa enthralled him to want to find his center.

  Why the hell did she do that now? Rysa could have talks with Gavin all she wanted—he was her bestie of honor for the wedding—but interfering like that and forcing the talk onto Gavin and Daisy was just…

  Daisy didn’t know. Mean? Inappropriate?

  No. Neither. Rysa cared about Gavin and she probably didn’t use her future-seer to spy on the fact that he’d want to firm up the center of his relationship with Daisy.

  Probably.

  Or not. One might not argue with a Prime Fate, but they were sneaky, even the good ones Daisy counted as friends.

  She stopped walking and leaned against the wall just before the wide entrance to the lobby. Right now was not the time to talk about their future. Too much was in play: His med school applications. Her final board exams. Licenses. She planned to return to Branson and take over her father’s horse operations. What if her life interfered with his? She wouldn’t do that to him.

  She also wouldn’t put him in Aiden’s path.

  Her gut tightened. Gavin shouldn’t be here. He should be in Portland, deep inside Praesagio Industries’ vaults where he’d be safe until she and Rysa ripped the heads off that Aiden Blake and his sisters.

  She stuffed it all down inside where the rage wouldn’t interfere with what needed to be done—where it wouldn’t get in the way of thinking logically about how to present her long-distance relationship concerns to the one man she never wanted to be apart from.

  He was young. Too young, really, to understand what it meant to sacrifice the future for a dream.

  Not that she understood, either. But she did understand building—and rebuilding—after having a future yanked away.

  When she walked through the vestibule toward the main restaurant entrance, a young couple with a baby stood near the hotel’s check-in desk. Mom soothed the little one as a fear-and-frantic smelling Dad asked about rooms.

  The roads must be close to impassible if they were frantic enough to argue about it.

  Daisy’s phone beeped. She pulled it out, her stomach still knotted by the moment with Gavin, wondering if it was him—or fearing that maybe someone had found Ladon out there, in the snow.

  But the text wasn’t gut-wrenching. She grinned and a moment later, Amir—or maybe Asar, she couldn’t tell them apart yet—walked into the lobby with three room keys in his hand.

  Security detail donating rooms, the text from Cordelia said. Ben is bunking with Brandon.

  Daisy waved. Amir-or-maybe-Asar nodded, and handed a key to the young couple.

  She tucked her phone back into her pocket, relieved to know what he was doing but also a little unnerved. Cordelia knew she was in the lobby.

  Of course Cordelia knew where she was. The unnamed were very, very good at their jobs. Knowing that Cordelia knew didn’t make her feel better, though. Because she didn’t know what Cordelia knew.

  Fates were problems, even good-hearted ones who worked for her father.

  She didn’t want to talk to Amir-or-maybe-Asar, so she waved again and walked into the restaurant full of people just as uneasy about the weather as the young family.

  A sweet-faced teenager with a brown ponytail and slightly smeared make-up stood at the podium. She wore a nametag saying “Shay”, a black polyester vest, and a white blend shirt—the standard hotel restaurant uniform. The poor girl also smelled of grease and vinaigrette and exhaustion.

  Daisy suspected she’d been here all day, and would likely be here all night, too.

  “Long shift?” Daisy asked.

  Shay smiled. “Cook’s been here since nine this morning.” She pulled a menu out from under the podium. “He loves it. Says it’s like being an on-call doctor. If you can’t cook as well in your twelfth hour as you did in your first, you have no business cookin’ at all.” She drawled the last words.

  Daisy chuckled. “True.” She sniffed again, and glanced into the dining room. “Doesn’t sound like any of you are going home tonight.” She pointed at the snow pattering the big windows in the lobby.

  Shay shrugged. “Probably not.” She handed Daisy the menu. “This is the worst storm I’ve ever seen.” She leaned forward. “I called my dad an hour ago. He says he’s never seen anything like this come through here.”

  Daisy took the menu. Shay tipped her head slightly. “You with the big group from the bus in the parking lot? Does it run on Praesagio Industries’ new fuel cells? The ones that go a thousand miles without refueling?”

  Daisy nodded. She wasn’t one hundred percent up on the specs of the mega-buses, but she did know they ran on the super-cells. “Yep. We’re coming from the auto show. Guess we won’t make Portland for another few days even though we’re carrying what we need fuel-wise, huh?” They’d fueled in Denver and Amir had told them they wouldn’t need to fill again until they returned the buses to Portland, even with mountain driving.

  Shay leaned forward, her lips pursed like she was about to share a deep, dark secret. “I want to go to Eugene to study engineering. I want to learn how to make stuff like that.”

  Daisy leaned in too, and tapped her chest. “Doctor of Veterinary Science, University of Minnesota,” she said. “Among the other women who came in with me, we have an environmental engineer,” though Rysa wasn’t quite done with her degree, “a high-ranking military officer,” close enough for AnnaBelinda, “and one of the best security personnel working in the business.” Which, Daisy suspected, was not all that far off for Cordelia Palatini-Sut.

  Sometimes Daisy found it difficult to remember that not everyone expected the desire for a proper education and a proper career from all their children. Her father had his issues—he was old-school Russian royalty after all—but when she came to live with him, he’d made it clear that she was to go to college and get an advanced degree. She’d always wanted to be a vet, and her father made sure she understood the day-to-day operations of his barns. “You will run this,” he’d said with a grand sweep of his arm. “Only the best touch my horses.”

  Then he’d walked off, his point made.

  He’d have done the same if she’d been a boy. Dmitri Pavlovich’s expectations were for quality and intelligence; the chassis on which that quality and intelligence hung did not matter. Shay, here, just needed a pep talk. She looked like someone who’d figured out her life and who needed a few words of support.

  “Minnesota has a good engineering program,” Daisy said. “Colorado, too.” She leaned forward. “Take the future that’s best for you.”

  Now if only she could get Gavin to do the same thing.

  Shay glanced away, but smiled. “The dining room’s full. The wait’s about half an hour. If you want, you can order at the bar and we’ll call your room when it’s ready for pick-up.” She looked down at the menus as she shuffled them around. “No room service tonight.”

  Good thing she came down, then.

  Shay grinned. She nodded, obviously needing to get back to her job. But she looked a little happier.

  Daisy took the menu and made her way toward the bar.

  Chapter Eight

  Once in the bar, the noise calmed some. The area was darker than the dining room, though Daisy had no problem walking among the tables. The brightly polished and lovingly rounded walnut woodwork gleamed, but its deep, rich color sucked in all the light. Small LED lights in holiday colors encircled the mirror behind the bar, but
they added only a hint of ambiance and not enough light to make reading the menu easy.

  Here, the mixed smells of whiskey and rum, sweet syrups and salt, chips, popcorn, and peanuts overwhelmed the smell of bodies. It wasn’t pleasant to Daisy’s bloodhound nose, but it wasn’t overly nasty, either.

  She dropped onto a squeaky faux-leather bar stool and plopped the menu onto the bar. The restaurant offered a seemingly endless array of options, and she flipped back and forth through the stiff, plastic-sleeved pages, wondering if she should just get salads and call it a night.

  Not that winter-born tomatoes and lettuce smelled and tasted like anything other than cardboard. Perhaps, once they fixed Ladon and Brother-Dragon and they’d all gone to the cave for the wedding, she’d come back with a box full of produce. Every Christmas, either Anna or Ladon would show up at The Land with fresh veggies, grown inside their magical home. When she asked, both would shrug and say the dragons “engineered the gardens.”

  Daisy dropped the menu on the bar and spread her fingers wide over its slightly sticky surface. Four days until the winter solstice. Four days to find Ladon and give him back his Dragon. Four days of snow and waiting and anxiety and…

  The bar stool next to her scraped on the floor. Its cover squeaked—and Daisy caught a familiar scent. Her mind pulled away from her endless parade of nasty what-ifs.

  The cop from the rest stop had just sat down next to her.

  She did her best to be charming. She smiled and nodded once, then returned her gaze to the fine print of the menu.

  “You from that bus in the lot?” he asked. He sat on the stool with his back to the bar, so he could see the patrons in the dining room. “I remember you from the rest area south of town on I-25 earlier this afternoon.”

  He grinned and looked at the floor. “You had it under control.” He chuckled and looked at his own menu.

  Ben’s enthrallings didn’t wipe a memory, just changed the enthralled’s perspective. The cop’s cousin or brother or whoever the other guy had been would probably remember that he never had any interest in Daisy or Rysa. The cop, though, seemed to be remembering them as non-suspects who had put his more-of-a-suspect cousin in his place.

  “Yep,” she said, doing her best to be non-committal.

  Even without his stocking cap and his cop-coat, he gave off an air of authority. His huge frame helped—she now guessed that he was at least six-four, maybe six-five, and broad enough that he’d moved the other stool away from her in order to make sure they had an appropriate amount of space between them.

  He wore a black t-shirt with an embroidered Wyoming Highway Patrol badge over his left pec. The shirt’s fabric skimmed his muscular torso and its short sleeves pulled tight around his biceps. Up until she’d met Ladon, she’d wondered if big men tailored their t-shirts to show off their muscles, but Ladon would rub at his arm where his shirt hit his skin now and again, and she figured tight seams probably bothered them as much as they bothered her.

  The cop leaned back as he watched the crowd. “I apologize if my cousin acted like a dick with you and your friend.” He shrugged. “He’s harmless.”

  “No, he’s not.” Daisy ran her finger down the menu. “And neither are you. It’s disingenuous for you to present yourself as anything other than what you are.”

  The cop laughed. “You sound like my girlfriend.”

  When Daisy threw him a disgusted look, he balked and held up his hands. Slowly, he pulled his phone out of his back pocket.

  “I mean smart and fearless.” His finger swiped over the screen. “She tells our little boy the same thing all the time—be who you are.”

  He held out his phone. On the screen was a photo of a cute brown-haired woman holding on her lap a little boy with reddish hair. The kid grinned at the camera, his bright blue eyes shining.

  “They look happy.” Daisy went back to looking at the menu.

  “We’re getting married in a couple of months,” he said, sounding more dreamy than she would have expected from a big cop like him.

  “That’s sweet.” Seemed everyone wanted to tell her their life stories tonight. Must be the weather.

  The cop tucked his phone back into his pocket. “Took me long enough to ask her.” He almost rolled his eyes. “She says she knew the moment she saw me, but I’m a dumbass.” He grinned again. “Though my cousin’s more of a dumbass than me.”

  “I would hope so, since you’re State Patrol.” She’d get two turkey on rye sandwiches, and some potato salad.

  The big cop laughed again. “Look, I’m glad you and your team took us seriously and stayed in town.” He pointed at the rattling window. “Worst blizzard to move through here in years.”

  Daisy glanced over her shoulder. Ladon was still out there, somewhere, in that.

  The cop tipped his chin at the bartender but his phone beeped. He pulled it out again and smiled.

  He flipped it around. The little boy stood on the snowy front step of what looked like a standard suburban split level, a black cap with a State Patrol badge on it pulled tight around his ears. Next to him, in the snow, he’d spelled out “Be safe, Daddy!” in what Daisy hoped was colored water.

  “Nathaniel’s a scream,” the cop said. “He’s starting kindergarten next year.”

  Nathaniel must be the boy’s name.

  “Too bad you’re stuck here, too.”

  The cop shrugged. “I’m off duty. I think the manager likes knowing there’s a trooper in the building.”

  Daisy nodded again. When a waiter came by, she placed her order.

  The bartender handed the cop several beers and he nodded back into the dining room. “If you or any of your team wants company tonight, we’re starting up a poker game.”

  Daisy smiled. “If any of my team wants in, you tell them no.” The least she could do was keep the Fates away from a state trooper and the locals. “They’ll clean you out.”

  He laughed again. “Is that so?”

  Daisy grinned. “We’re the best there is at what we do.”

  “So now you’re superheroes, huh?” He tapped the tip of his nose with his bottle. “I thought that was my job.”

  Daisy peered into the dining room. Over in the corner, away from most of the patrons, the cop’s huge cousin shuffled a deck of cards. She looked back at the cop’s face.

  He was a handsome man, now that he wasn’t looking authoritative and mean, and his features reminded her of Ladon’s. He was probably a good daddy, too. “So what took you so long?” she asked.

  He took a pull on his beer. “To do what?”

  If he was going to tell her his life story, the least he could do was give her the moral of the tale. “To ask your girlfriend to marry you.” Not everyone was like Ladon and Rysa—a godling and a future-seer who knew how to dodge the rocks and pits on the way to a good, strong relationship.

  The cop smirked. “You know, I’m not sure.” He tipped his beer bottle toward her. “I’m through the academy. Christie’s through nursing school. Nate’s starting kindergarten and we just bought a house.”

  He took another pull on his beer. “I think that no matter how hard we both tried to make excuses, to not let each other in, it happened anyway. We fit together.”

  With one last wink, he stepped away from the bar. “Nice chatting with you, Ms. Corporate Auto Show Team Member.”

  The state trooper walked away, six beers between his fingers, toward his cousin and his friends.

  Because sometimes, no matter how they fight, ties hold people together.

  Chapter Nine

  Daisy set the sandwich-containing foam clamshells on the dresser. The television flashed but Gavin had turned off the sound, along with the main light. The hotel’s pipes groaned and the fan screamed. Sounds of water splashing echoed from the bathroom. Gavin’s hearing aids sat on their Praesagio-built charger on the side table next to the bed, along with his cell phone.

  Her wiry, wonderful boyfriend was showering by himself.

 
Why did he tolerate her pushing him away again and again and again? She judged and she put up walls and she made sure men didn’t get close, yet Gavin stuck around. He was the most patient man she’d ever met.

  She wasn’t stupid. She knew exactly why she often came across as distant. Her looks made a good excuse but she didn’t push people away because she thought they were insincere—as a bloodhound, she knew better than anyone else who was sincere and who wasn’t. Her disapproval of Rysa wasn’t because she found her friend’s hyperactivity annoying—though at times the bouncing was annoying. Daisy’s disapproval stemmed from her own life’s slipperiness.

  When she’d met Gavin, she had thought him a handsome, smart, young—though entitled—boy, like so many of the undergrads on campus. But really, her judgments had been more about herself—and her own understanding of just how well her life had turned out after her father took her in—than about him.

  She had needed an excuse to keep him away, so she frowned and claimed “we can’t do a long-distance relationship,” and “I’m a dangerous Shifter,” and “I’ll ruin your medical training.” It was all bullshit. She knew it. Gavin knew it. Yet he was patient enough to stick around and he still wanted to help.

  But her slippery life came with a threat to Gavin’s life. Several threats, in all honesty. If it wasn’t Aiden and his lies and his terrorizing, it was the Seraphim or Burners or…

  Daisy inhaled and closed her eyes. Gavin would be done with his shower soon.

  The cop’s words came back to her: “No matter how we tried to make excuses, it happened anyway. We fit together.”

  No matter how Daisy reacted to the world, or how much she allowed her fear of Aiden to control her life, she fit with Gavin. She had from the beginning and she knew she always would. Keeping him at a distance didn’t change how either of them felt, it just added new layers of longing and fear.

  She stared at the bathroom door, fit together echoing in her head. Gavin shared her sense of humor. He loved her dogs, and took great care with both her boys. He was as concerned about Ladon and Dragon as Daisy. He’d been Rysa’s best friend since they were both freshmen. And he was more than smart enough to handle her life—both the vet part and the Shifter part. The “Russian royalty” part, as well.