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

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Dragon dropped down and slowly coiled herself around Anna. Her great tail flicked through the air and caused small snow swirls between Anna and the other bus. The beast settled, her head on her forelimbs directly in front of Anna’s position.

  Rysa has him. Dragon vented heat, but no flame. The cold allowed her to stay hidden longer than she could otherwise, but she still ran the risk of overheating.

  Anna’s sister-in-law had Derek’s life in her hands—his mind, his body, and with the dream, his soul.

  And here Anna stood idle. She had no other option; they could not come close or they might dislodge the fragile connection her husband had to her brother’s beast. So they stayed back.

  But knowing why did not stop her from feeling like a hole in the weave of the universe disguised as a woman swaddled in midnight-colored insulation.

  Maybe she should snuggle down inside the protection of her dragon’s body and her dragon’s warmth. She could disappear in here, encircled as she was. The beast mimicked the blizzard and would, if she asked, completely hide Anna.

  The Fate named Cordelia held vigil directly parallel to Anna’s wounded husband and her equally wounded Brother-Dragon. Parallel to the focused and crystalizing energy that was Rysa. To the lens that magnified the pain.

  If Anna let it go, if she sunk behind her beast, she’d vanish like her dragon, gone invisible inside a frozen world.

  Because… She blinked. Why did she think in riddles? Did it come from the horror rolling off her husband’s connection to her brother’s beast? Or was it her own… vanishing?

  She didn’t mean to flare her gloved fingers over her belly. She didn’t mean to connect the invisible one inside her to the exclusion she felt out here, alone with her dragon. But the world was changing under her feet and she couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

  Dragon snorted.

  “He’s okay?” Anna asked. He had to be okay.

  Both her men needed to be okay.

  Brother-Human comes home. Dragon’s ultrafine coat wiggled and released the snow accumulating on her back. It dropped in swirls that mimicked the whipping wind.

  Home, or so Rysa claimed.

  Dragon snorted again. She does not lie.

  No, Rysa did not lie. Anna should offer their new Prime Fate the same trust and acceptance she once offered Daniel, Timothy, and Marcus. If she did not, people might die.

  Dragon made no comment. They did not often mull such thoughts, but it snowed, and unlike Cordelia, they didn’t have a trashy novel to distract their minds. Now Anna snorted. Perhaps it is hormones, huh?

  We need to tell Derek.

  They did. When it quickens. If it didn’t, she’d have only her own anger to deal with. She didn’t need his as well. Or his disappointment.

  It will quicken. A slow rumble washed from Dragon and she sniffed Anna’s belly. He is your mate.

  Anna chuckled. Her mate. Her friend. Her confidant. Her husband.

  And he hurt.

  Where is Brother? she thought, more to herself than to her beast.

  But it wasn’t her beast who answered.

  Anna fished her ringing phone from her pocket and looked at the screen. A Portland number, but not one she recognized.

  She answered it. “Yes?”

  A woman’s voice rang through the speaker. “He just became visible in the what-was-is-will-be.” The woman rattled off an address on the east side of Cheyenne. “The Burner sings and the videos are spreading like a wildfire. He saw him, too. Make sure this ends safely.”

  “Who—”

  The caller hung up.

  Anna stared at the phone. Snow settled on the screen but she flicked it off.

  Dragon stood and her hide brightened.

  Careful, Anna pushed.

  Her entire person—body and mind—focused down on careful. They needed to be careful. Careful of the many possible hes to whom the caller might be referencing. They needed to be careful of ending and of safety.

  But they also needed to be careful of voices on phones.

  Anna glanced up, hoping that her techno-goggles would cut through the strengthening storm. And there, in her vehicle, Cordelia Palatini-Sut held up her own phone.

  They also needed to be careful of the shes involved.

  Slowly, in a sweeping way that indicated Cordelia felt stunned, the present-seer pointed to her screen. She must have gotten a call from the same voice.

  The same familiar, continental accent, the one halfway between French and English. A voice Anna would never forget, and would always recognize.

  Long ago, both Anna and Brother had vowed to strip the skin from the woman’s head and the heads of her triad mates, if they met them again.

  Seven months ago, Anna almost had. She’d left the woman’s future-seeing brother in a pool of his own blood, breathing, but only barely. Brother had broken the woman’s past-seeing brother’s femur and left him to the river.

  But the woman who called had been attacked by Burners. Rysa’s mother had taken her under her protection. Anna had left the Fates to their fate. Yesterday, she’d disappeared from Portland after helping Rysa’s mother stitch Andreas’s death into invisibility within the what-was-is-will-be.

  Anna stared at the number knowing full well that it would not be in service if she called back. The woman would not answer questions.

  Yet she’d called Anna’s phone and offered information, slight as it was.

  Dragon flowed off the side of the bus. Anna followed. They had an address, and no matter the source, they needed to investigate. She moved to tap Rysa’s number, but her phone buzzed again. Anna answered.

  “Was that…?” Cordelia’s question trailed off.

  “Yes,” Anna said as she entered her bus. “She murdered Timothy and Daniel.” She stripped off her coat and dropped into the driver’s seat. “Did she give you the address?”

  “Yes.” Cordelia paused. Her voice sounded hushed. “She tried to turn Rysa into the Ambusti Prime.”

  Anna started her bus. “Call in everyone. We’ll go ahead, in case it’s a trap.”

  “Will do.”

  Why was Adrestia, the present-seer of Les Enfants de Guerre—the War Babies—offering help?

  Anna hung up and pushed the key into the bus’s ignition. She looked out at the other bus one last time. Snow settled on the windshield and she pulsed the wipers once, twice, just as a lull fell over the parking lots.

  The wind died, and for that split second, the snow held perfectly still in the frigid air, a three-dimensional matrix of glittering dots between Anna, Dragon, and the other bus, the one protecting her husband and her brother’s beast.

  A phantom-shaped set of dots moved when it should have been still.

  Dragon! Her beast was out the door before Anna pulled herself from behind the wheel.

  The first bright flash of silenced gunfire ricocheted off the driver’s side window of Cordelia’s SUV.

  The second shattered the glass.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Daisy… Daisy… Je t’aime, ma marguerite….

  The dream sat at the back of Daisy’s throat, cinching and tightening and burning.

  Something—or someone—scuffed along the door of the hotel room.

  “Gavin?” She sat up. He wasn’t in the room.

  Daisy…

  She flung herself off the bed and landed in a crouch in the space between the window and the furnishings, as far from the door as she could get. Cold from the window slapped at her naked skin. The buzz of the heater nipped at her ears but she heard boots move across the carpet in the hall.

  A thump hit the wall next to the door, then shuffling, as if someone dragged a heavy bag along the hallway carpet.

  The light filtering in from under the door changed. A shadow stopped directly outside the room and the door creaked as if someone leaned against it.

  Not Gavin manifested in her mind more as a cloud of foreboding than a perception. The heater pushed air through the crack under the
door and out of the room, so she wasn’t picking up a scent from her spot next to the bed. She couldn’t see anything but shadows. But she perceived that the person pressing on the heavy hotel door was not her boyfriend.

  Gavin’s coat still sat at the foot of the bed. Their dinner trash was gone—she still smelled it, but not as strongly as she had when they’d gone to sleep. He must have taken it down to the bin by the ice machine.

  No aids on the charger, but his phone sat next to the clock.

  She swiped hers off the side table and sent out a broadband text: Someone at my door. Gavin missing. HELP.

  Whoever was outside moved deliberately, as if he held his ear to the door. Another, lighter thump echoed into the room, followed by a whistled exhale loud enough she heard it through the thick, manufactured panel.

  Daisy held her breath.

  A sound very much like fingernails on a chalkboard echoed from the door into the room and Daisy cringed but held a groan and her position, though the door shuddered.

  He’s carving on the door. The cringe turned icy. Only one person was crazy enough to carve up her hotel room door.

  Only one.

  A screaming seer washed through the room, one that felt nothing like Rysa’s music, or the unnamed triad’s sandstorm. This seer roared and chimed and whipped. For a brief moment, she was caught inside the cloud wall around the eye of a hurricane. Behind her, the broken savaging of the past. Around her, an atmospheric membrane that funneled the storm upward.

  And in front of her, on the other side of her hotel room door, a storm eye spun. Its center looked clear but it wasn’t. Centuries of debris swirled around the man outside—good works he shredded and people he murdered. Lives destroyed for his entertainment. Worlds collapsed, all because he was bored.

  But there was more to the eyes of this storm. In here, in the crystal clear center, purpose clarified the psychopathic bullshit.

  “Aiden,” she whispered. Aiden Blake in the hall in front of MY ROOM, she texted.

  He was here in this place where the Dracae—the dragons—waited outside. In the building crawling with Praesagio Industries security personnel.

  Aiden Blake, the man who raped her, got in.

  And Gavin was out there, with him.

  Daisy grabbed her jeans and shirt off the floor and pulled them on, not worrying about underwear or socks. She forced down the slithering, slimy emotions that thoughts of Aiden always brought up into her chest and the curse words he always brought to her voice.

  No fear, she thought. Gavin’s out there.

  Now was an opportunity. She had no use for the fear. She would make sure Gavin survived and Aiden died.

  “Come out naked, Daisy,” Aiden’s deep, melodic voice flowed through the door. “I miss you like that. Open. Vulnerable. Sweet.” He chuckled.

  Another harsh scrape moved across the surface of the door.

  She grabbed her boots because kicking Aiden in the balls would hurt a hell of a lot more if she was wearing her steel-tips.

  “I still love you,” he purred. “You’re the only Shifter who’s ever cared about me. You’re my one true love.” He slammed a fist against the door with such force she thought it was going to shatter.

  Daisy jumped but she didn’t make a sound. She laced her boots.

  “Not the normal we marked!” The shadow moved. A bang hit the wall next to the door.

  Someone groaned.

  Did he have Gavin? Daisy crawled toward the door. The room smelled of old food and sex and her beloved, but she had to concentrate. She was a bloodhound and she would not panic. She would scent and she would call for help and Aiden would not hurt Gavin.

  Daisy’s fingers curled into the weave of the carpet so tightly pain shot through her knuckles and into her wrist.

  She looked down at her hand. Use it, she thought. Feel it. Don’t let Aiden get into your head.

  “I didn’t mark him for you, love, like I told you when you made me so mad. When you pushed me away, in Texas.”

  A decade ago, she’d been a naïve girl with a head full of fantasies about what it meant to be a Shifter—and stupid enough to think she could walk into The Land of Milk and Honey and be rescued from all the world’s ills. Aiden had sniffed out her teenaged self, and Aiden took advantage—coerced sex and stolen cash and threatened to murder her true love if she told anyone.

  Gavin, who at the time had been eleven years old, the same age as Rysa. Gavin, whose hearing Aiden’s sister destroyed to mark him. Gavin, who that son of a bitch Aiden probably held hostage outside their room.

  Aiden sounded wistful. “I marked him for the little girl with the attention problems so we could follow her as she used him. To find you, my love.”

  What was he saying? That they hurt Gavin to set him up for Rysa to use in the future? Could Fates do that?

  No Fate could ever be that good.

  Aiden lied. He made up stories to convince himself that he was the best. He probably believed that he’d manipulated all the circumstances that led them to this hotel—the attacks on Rysa, Vivicus’s schemes, even Daisy’s father’s ascension to the head of Praesagio Industries—and that he did it to prove his love for her.

  “So don’t think your true love is him. It’s me.” His feet shuffled again. “I marked myself for you.”

  Another sharp scratching rattled the door. “Because I love you.”

  Daisy ran for the door. She yanked it open, not thinking, only reacting, because she knew—Aiden had Gavin and she needed to—

  Hot, metallic stink of blood hit her nose.

  She staggered into the hall, her hand over her mouth and her stomach lurching. “Gavin…” He had to be okay.

  Aiden had covered the door with swirls and patterns, hack marks, and scrapes, all in blood. He’d painted her door in what looked like satanic symbols with blood.

  “Gavin!” she screamed.

  They were two doors down and moving fast toward the stairs. Aiden had a hand around Gavin’s neck and his hand under a wadded up jacket that Gavin held against his side.

  Aiden cut Gavin.

  Daisy bolted down the hall ready to tackle Aiden, but he twisted again and pulled Gavin around between them, his hands on Gavin’s head in clear preparation for a fatal neck twist.

  “Don’t look so shocked, beloved.” Aiden tipped his head and his iron-gray eyes shimmered with glee.

  Please don’t hurt Gavin again. Please, she thought. “What do you want, Aiden?” Daisy raised her hands. If she stalled him long enough, more help would come. They’d overpower him.

  “I’ll snap his neck, my sweet Daisy.” Slowly, he pushed Gavin to his knees. He stood behind Gavin and moved his hands to get a better grip. “He touched you.” Aiden leaned close to Gavin’s hair. “I smell you on his clothes. You and the beasts and that little half-breed bitch.”

  She couldn’t smell anything beyond the blood. How could he?

  The last time Aiden had come after her, he and his sisters had wanted the shard of the Fate Progenitor’s talisman that Rysa said Ladon now carried. Maybe she could distract him. “We don’t have the shard. We don’t know where it is.”

  Aiden’s face closed off as if to say I’m not telling my secrets to a girl. “Your little friend isn’t the only Fate who’s figured out how to send messages to herself through the what-was-is-will-be.”

  She figured that the old Fates, the powerful ones, had learned to engineer communications with the future. They wouldn’t admit it, or talk about it, so she hadn’t asked the few Fates she knew. But now Aiden confirmed one of her worst nightmares: He was as powerful as he claimed. Even if, in raw ability, he didn’t come anywhere near Rysa’s level, he was much, much better at using what he had.

  And he lied. Lied about the big things and the small. He could make what he wanted with just a well-placed lie.

  “You still haven’t told me what you want, Aiden.” How a liar told his lies carried truth, too.

  Aiden stroked Gavin’s hair. “Our
talisman is the same as our fathers’. We each carry a Dragons’ Legion insignia. We knew the moment Rysa Torres activated. We knew before she knew that she was the new Draki Prime.” He inhaled deeply. “A new Prime. I realized then what my visions meant. I realized why she was valuable and why my visions had been driving me toward you—and her—all these years.”

  Daisy stepped closer. Maybe she could get to Gavin and get him away. “You shouldn’t be able to use your seer.”

  Aiden waved her off. “Uncle Daniel put a seer spike in my head when I killed the First Healer. Daniel thought that if he stopped my seeing the signs, I’d change my ways.” His expression hardened again. “It taught me to isolate. To work hard and to see beyond the wall in my ability.”

  He slapped his temple. “Andreas Sisto is dead. That future is no more. He will not put the muzzle of a gun to my face and I will not die at the hands of a Shifter!” Aiden yelled.

  Yes, you will, Daisy thought. Rysa and I are both Shifters.

  “I changed the future! I made it new! I made it… new.”

  The reverence in his voice when he said “new” sent chills up Daisy’s spine.

  “New like the usurping half-breed. Can you imagine? Active as both Fate and Shifter. That’s why I sent Vivicus after her. She’s special. You’re all special.” Aiden snickered and rubbed at his cheek. He pulled Gavin past the open foyer that housed the hotel’s elevator, candy machines, and trash bin. “The world has ended many times, but they have never been cleansing ends. Nothing new arises when empires fall.”

  Gavin made no attempt to pull away. He made no attempt at all to pull Aiden’s attention, which Daisy was thankful for.

  “The world’s gonna burn, my beloved. Every future-seer sees it now, even the weak.” Aiden drew a little circle in blood on Gavin’s cheek.

  “The new is real. Vivicus gave me the keys to open it onto the world.” Aiden pointed at Daisy. “The half-breed is a portent. This little normal and his new ability to understand the dragons is a portent. The Dracas’ changed husband with his new abilities is a portent. They are coming fast and furious, the signs. Time for the world to burn.”

  Aiden yanked on Gavin and reached for the stairwell door. “Come, my young Sign of the Times.” But he stopped and snapped his fingers. “Oh, I suppose I should thank you for making him, beloved. For being there at the right time with the correct power set to set him up for me.”