Ladon stared into the storm. He should get a phone. Or get online. But he couldn’t remember the number for the base. And it wasn’t like the base was listed on the search engines.
They weren’t that far from the base. Even with the storm, they’d make it in a couple of hours. But it didn’t seem like that was about to happen.
“I’ll get you there.” The Burner sounded almost apologetic. “I owe the princess at least that.”
Ladon nodded.
The Burner pointed at a bar and motel complex not far from the truck stop. “Let’s eat.”
He eased the SUV back onto the road and they drove slowly but steadily toward what Ladon hoped would be a safe haven for the night.
Chapter Eleven
The last of the unnamed triad stood at the top of the steps leading down into the snowstorm and watched Derek, Rysa, and Dragon thoughtfully with his light brown eyes. Unlike Brother and Wife, his eyes looked normal. Nor did he have the soft glow they carried, either.
But his seer washed through the bus as if the storm outside carried sand, not snow.
He looked away as he flicked the hood of his parka up around his face. Like the present-seer, he was about to step off the bus in full Arctic wear, goggles and mask included.
The other one, Derek guessed, had gone in already. He doubted he would stay in, though.
The Fate picked up the long case he kept behind the driver’s seat and with one last nod, left the bus.
Rysa walked to the front and watched as a vehicle swung around the bus. Headlights flickered through the interior and over her too tight, too gaunt frame. An SUV engine purred, then stopped.
“Cordelia pulled one of the security vehicles between us and the rest of the world.” Rysa pointed at the door, then waved at someone outside. “We can get out the front entrance, if we need to, but there’s not a lot of room.”
Like all touring buses, the bus had two doors, one next to the driver and the other halfway down the length of the vehicle. Dragon’s pillows mostly blocked the second door, so everyone used the front exit.
Tell Rysa that I will go over the top of the present-seer’s vehicle if I need to, Dragon pushed.
Derek winced, but passed on the beast’s statement.
After a moment poking at the console, Rysa returned. “I locked the doors.”
Derek nodded and leaned against the beast. No one would have bothered them, but at least this way, no random normals could take it upon themselves to nose around.
A new, hotter flash of disjointed, uncoiled thought blasted off Dragon. Derek leaned forward and pressed his head between his legs. “Get me a bucket, Sister, if you would.”
He had done well suppressing the nausea. He had done well, also, at acting normal when the others were on the bus. But he was tired.
Rysa set an empty waste container next to Derek’s side, then she, too, slid down the beast to rest on the floor.
They were the fractured ones, the incomplete three halves of what should have been Human, Dragon, and Mate.
“We are a triad,” Derek said, “we three walking open wounds.”
Behind him, the beast snorted. Do not make fun, Not-Human.
“I do not make fun, beast.” Derek set his hat on the floor. Now that only Rysa sat with them, he had less need to shield his eyes. “I speak the truth.”
“He’s on his way home,” Rysa stared off into space again, but she looked different. More like Brother and Wife.
She shimmers, Derek pushed to the beast.
Shimmered with an energy different from what flowed, if haltingly, between Derek and Dragon. Rysa’s seers felt almost solid, almost physical, as if they were bands around her body.
The beast answered with a pulse so strong, Derek dropped onto his side and clamped down on his body—he cinched each muscle in his belly to keep down his stomach’s contents and he forced his eyes to close so tightly his brow knitted into a furrow.
But the ground wiggled and fluxed anyway. A sun burned too large and too cold on the underside of his eyelids and filled the world with heat that consumed even as the air froze solid.
The pulse rotated like a gem flipping upward a new facet: A dead future-seer and a place of regret. Another facet: Metallic bands spun dark and ghostly around six…
Six bodies. Six talons.
Six…
He grabbed the container and what little food he had consumed came back up.
Rysa pressed her hand against his forehead. “Visions,” she whispered.
Derek opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said. Visions of Heaven? Yet he saw a place that did not exist under an impossibly large, too red sun. “The beast shows me Hell.”
“Everyone carries a sliver of Hell and a slice of Heaven, Brother-in-law.” Rysa grinned. “Needles of universal psychological terror.” She winked and pushed her finger against her temple, then patted his shoulder.
“That university has made you a bore, Sister-in-law.” Derek closed his eyes again, though her words did make him feel better.
“My mom didn’t pay tuition for nothin’.” She moved away to wrap her arms around the beast’s neck. “It’s okay,” she crooned.
A bolt of healing fired from Rysa into the beast.
“Do you think our merry band realizes your healings do nothing for me?” Derek wiped his mouth and sat back against the beast again.
“They know.” Rysa fired a bolt into his head anyway. “It comforts them to see me do it, though.”
Derek grinned. “Good.”
Rysa grinned too. “I’m sorry this happened, Derek.”
“If you had not healed me when Vivicus knifed my leg, I would not have been able to take the beast.” He patted Dragon’s side. “I believe it was for the best.”
Tell Rysa that you are correct, Not-Human.
“He agrees.”
Rysa leaned against Derek’s shoulder. “You’re the best big brother a girl could ever want.”
Derek laughed. “I was the youngest.” He closed his eyes again. “My sisters watched over me.”
“I bet you were a naughty boy.” She slowly ran her hand down the beast’s neck.
You were, the beast pushed. I see it.
And there it was, his youth. Right there, in his mind, as its own cathedral. The opulence. The coddling. The pain. The vicious cold of the Russian winters, and what little time he had been allowed with his father.
Tsar Nicholas had been a good man. He had loved Derek’s mother with a pure heart and a good soul. But he was not a good ruler and the Empire suffered because of it.
Millions died. Derek’s family paid the price.
If his father had seen the world for what it was—in his own lands and outside—he would not have made the mistakes he made. But it did not matter now. His family was dead, gone a full century. And now his name was Derek Drake Nicholson.
The cathedral in his mind was Derek in a language that could not be spoken. Not in a way a human would understand. But the construct that was him snapped in two and Derek’s world shook. The heat behind his eyes returned, as did the blinding lack of color. He opened his eyes to see only the beast’s head next to his, and Rysa over him. She had one hand under his neck and the other holding his chin.
She blew into his mouth.
“Damn it, Derek, don’t do this.” She held open his eye and stared at his pupil. “You have to hold it together until we find him, okay? You have to.”
She sounded more angry than frantic. Calmer, too, than Rysa should be.
“You would have made a fine Tsarina, Sister. As great as Catherine.”
Rysa sat back, but her face stayed serious. When she spoke she addressed the beast, not Derek. “Do not speak dragon to Derek. It’s hurting him.”
Dragon snorted and dropped his head. I am sorry, he pushed.
“He did not mean to hurt me.” Derek tried to sit up. His efforts failed and he dropped back on to the beast’s pillows.
Rysa closed her eyes. “I know, I know.” Sh
e wrapped her arms around the beast’s neck and buried her face in his ultrafine coat. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I yelled. I’m so sorry!” A small sob left her throat. “I’m so sorry I didn’t stop Vivicus. That I didn’t see. That I didn’t listen to Ladon. Oh my God. I’m sorry.”
“Rysa.” Derek reached for her from his place on the floor. “He’s on his way.” Push to her that Brother will return.
A pulse washed over both Derek and Rysa.
“I miss him so much,” she whispered.
Dragon did not need to show Derek the hole in Rysa’s soul. He understood. “I can still heal you, Derek.” She wiped away a tear. “It just takes longer.”
He shook his head. “I doubt that, Sister.”
“I can.” She sat up. “I will.”
Derek’s sweet soon-to-be sister-in-law, the young woman who only a few short months ago had stood at the end of his hospital bed with her face pale from fear and the weight of the world, now looked as if she would take no disagreement. Rysa Torres would heal him of this wound.
“I don’t like your eyes.” She leaned over him again. “Your irises look fractured, with the gold now mixed into the blue. It’s not right.”
He suspected that if he could see his eyes, he would not like how they looked, either.
I could—
Derek raised his arm. “Please do not, dear beast.” Please stay out of my head as much as possible.
The same shocked feeling of I am sorry rolled from the beast that rolled off the beast earlier, when Rysa yelled at him. He laid his head on his front limbs again, but stayed quiet.
“He needs to share.” Rysa rubbed Dragon’s crest. “He can’t build understanding if he can’t share.”
Derek felt three sizes too big, and his head felt five. His senses jittered the way one’s mind fluttered on the edge of sleep: His body moved, yet it did not move. He jerked awake, aware but not fully cognizant.
You have been awake too long, Not-Human.
Yes, he had been awake too long. The beast had been in pain too long. Rysa, also.
Fabric rustled. When he opened his eyes, she’d taken off her jacket and her top, and was in the process of stripping off her jeans.
She sat next to him in only her bra and panties, and a pair of plaid socks.
“What are you doing?” Why is she naked?
“You need to sleep.” Slowly, she made him roll so she could strip off his shirt and his t-shirt. She rolled him back the other way, to strip the shirt over his head.
“It is cold.” He did not know what else to say. He was too tired to argue.
Rysa pulled a blanket over her shoulders and wiggled between him and the beast. “Come here,” she whispered.
Derek did not know if she compelled him to listen, or if the beast did, but when she pressed her naked back against Dragon’s side, he fitted his body against hers.
Rysa’s skin heated as she wrapped her arm around his head. “Sleep,” she whispered. “I’m here. I will hold the connection. It’s just another channel in my head.” She chuckled. “The ADHD has to be good for something. I can do this.”
Sleep came faster than he expected. Sleep and memories and dreams:
His sister Maria tucked him into the crook of her arm. He had been thirteen at the time and taller than her, but she pulled him close anyway. His other sisters slept on the cot against the far side of the shack under the one blanket their captors had left for them. Their mother dozed in the chair next to the small stove.
Moonlight filtered through the dirty glass. Outside, the wind howled. Snow slammed the shack and the entire structure leaned away from the onslaught.
Or perhaps now, in this cold place in the middle of a different continent—the bus leaned. Derek did not know which version of reality held the most truth.
The glass—or the bus—did not break. It shook and it screamed, but the walls stood.
To this day, to this point in the history of the world two world wars and thousands of world skirmishes beyond the murder of his family, Derek remembered. He remembered a part of his life that formed a hard and cutting facet of what it meant to be him. A terrible slicing edge within the cathedral of meaning that was Derek Nicholson.
After his family’s murders, Andreas Sisto tried to ease his pain. He tried to help, during the years Derek walked with Idunn, the Shifter Progenitor. She had tried also, in her own selfish way.
Many times, she forced back his blood disorder. Many times, she stopped the shaking and the panic. Once, he believed, she tried to make him the way Rysa had changed him: a new man of the dragons.
Now Andreas Sisto lay dead on a slab in the bowels of Trajan’s castle. And Dunn, that bitch, vanished after Andreas stepped between her and Wife. When Andreas finally realized the truth of the restraining calling scents she had forced not only onto Derek, but also onto him, he had not responded well.
But that came later, after Andreas, a giant with a heart larger than the Empire, had picked a bleeding boy off the ground one night during a particularly brutal Russian winter. Andreas, who had breathed away the pain.
“We’re too late,” he had whispered, holding the bleeding thirteen-year-old not-yet-Derek. The cold light of the moon had reflected off the snow and the flat land had glowed with the colors of midnight. There had been shots fired. Bullets. But it had been too dark for the blood to look like anything other than shadows.
Not-yet-Derek lived. Dunn saved him, but not his family. He left with the giant and the healing woman. And he became Derek Nicholson, an American son.
When Andreas found him, he had been leaning against Maria in the corner of the shack. He had had a dream like all the others’ dreams: evil and consuming. Ripping and violent.
A portent.
No one knew where they had taken Father.
The door swung open. Ice swept in, and blood. They threw Father down and shot him in the head.
His sisters screamed. His mother stepped between them and the men.
They put a bullet in her head, too.
Maria pulled him deeper into the corner. She grasped his mouth, telling him to be quiet. He was the Tsar now, and she would make sure he lived.
But they dragged both the tsesarevich and his sister into the snow. They ripped Maria’s dress and they kicked him in the gut and sliced his wrists with their knives.
Then put three bullets in his chest.
If it had been now, if they had had access to an airlift and real doctors, or if there had been a true healer with his family, he would not have been the only survivor.
The Bolsheviks walked away, leaving him on the ground in the cold with his dying sister. She had held to life for as long as she could, her arms around his chest and her hands over the wounds on his wrists.
He should have died then, but his sister staunched the blood.
“YA ustala,” she said. ‘I am tired.’
Tired of the blood. Tired of the pain. Tired of the men who came to rip their lives to shreds.
The facet that was him, the twisting, glittering cathedral of dragon-speak that both dragons understood, shifted again. Derek moved beyond his dream.
His sister’s arm tightened around his head. “Otdokhni,” she whispered. “YA zdes'.” ‘Rest. I am here.’
He needed to rest.
A blinding heat flashed through his mind and burned away the dream. It sparked and his body shook, but it was not as bad as it could have been. His sister held him.
But she was tired.
He knew. He saw it, in the cathedral that was this young woman, the one who had become as much a part of his brother’s life as his brother’s sister had become in his own.
“It’s okay,” she whispered in English. “It’s okay.”
But he knew what she meant. He understood, because he spoke dragon.
I’m tired, she said. So very tired.
And, once again, a sister held his wounds.
But this time, Andreas Sisto could not help, because Andreas Sisto was de
ad. Derek’s sisters were dead.
And if he could not help, his brother and his new sister would be dead soon, too.
Chapter Twelve
Ladon and the Burner pulled into the parking lot of a small restaurant-motel-general store combo a full forty minutes after they decided to stay in Cheyenne.
Twenty miles shouldn’t take forty minutes. The Burner had been right about stopping for the night. They had, at least, gone east at the I-80 interchange. They were now in the lot of a rundown, local-looking truck stop and bar.
The motel’s sign blinked promises of cable television and free wi-fi, and, thankfully, vacancies. Ladon released his seatbelt and stared at the sign for a long moment wondering how they would pay for a night’s stay, though the Burner seemed to have money.
Thinking too much about small matters made his brain ache the same way he stumbled around after two all-nighters in a row.
The sense of missing thoughts, experiences—knowledge—felt very much like total, complete, obliterating fatigue.
Yet it didn’t. Fatigue blanketed. This nasty, lacking thing felt as if he stared over the edge into death itself. Tentacles whipped out of the abyss and stole a bit here and a bit there and now he didn’t remember what had gone missing. He felt like a shadow.
“Is it true that your kind suffers small explosions?” he asked, still staring at the motel’s blinking sign. He really should be happier about having a warm place to sleep tonight.
The Burner pulled the keys from the ignition. He frowned but didn’t look at Ladon, nor did he answer the question. He only stared at the blinking sign. “We need to register before the place fills.”
Ladon nodded once. “You have cash?” He grabbed his jacket from the back seat. Now that the car was off, the winter storm’s chill had quickly moved into the passenger compartment.
“Of course I have cash, sweetheart.” The Burner drawled the last word in a fake Texas accent.
Ladon slowly pulled the jacket over the cast on his forearm. No need to show it off. No need for him to answer questions about it, either.
“I’m hungry.”
When Ladon looked up, the Burner’s finger tips glowed. Little wisps of smoke curled up from where the ghoul held the steering wheel.
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