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

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Fina Blake, an evil past-seer of great ability, held a midnight dagger to Anna’s husband’s throat. He didn’t fight. Derek couldn’t fight—the chaotic, uncontrolled burn spitting from Brother-Dragon also held his mind. He stared off into the screaming, scouring snow with blank eyes and a blank face.

  That night, in the wilds of what would become Germany, she and her beast faced an enemy alone. No Brother or Brother-Dragon to back them up. No Andreas to cover the world with calling scents. No Draki Prime. Only a handful of Dragons’ Legion men and women.

  This time, she also faced the enemy without Brother or her Second. A Fate once again terrorized her man. But this time, Anna was not alone.

  On the bus’s roof, Dragon growled and bled. She held her brother’s mind as best she could—and contracted her connection to her human to a bare minimum. Dragon held back the waves of chaos so that Anna could determine the best way to use the weapon she had to save the man they both loved.

  “Rysa,” she said. “Focus.”

  Fina Blake yanked Derek around the SUV and away from the bus.

  “My aim is good, Fate,” Anna yelled. She still held her gun high and her arm steady. “I will put a bullet in your head.” Though with the combination of the blizzard conditions and Fina’s stripes of invisibility, seeing the Fate without the help of her dragon had turned difficult.

  A very dragon-like growl erupted from Rysa. Her three seers followed. Anna cocked her gun, but Rysa touched her shoulder. “You fire and she slices. He’ll bleed out before any healing takes hold.”

  Now Anna growled.

  Somewhere out in the snow, Derek yelled.

  New fire spilled out onto every connection Anna shared—her flow with Dragon, the parallel flow with Brother-Dragon. It burst searing and hot and her guts coiled. Anna bent forward.

  She’d felt this before. This exact moment filled with this exact death.

  Death. Death of a husband. Death of a family. Death that would rip both a man and a child from her arms.

  “What did you do to Derek?” Rysa screeched.

  She ran off into the storm, leaving Anna inside the bubble of brightness thrown by the lot’s overhead halogens. Seven months ago, the Emperor Trajan had forced this moment into her head while she had tried to stand between him and Brother. Between her family and a Fate as powerful as a god.

  In the vision, she’d stood in a bubble of visibility separated from Derek by a wall of ice and snow and her own dread. She couldn’t get closer. She couldn’t move.

  She’d thought it an illusion—the inability to see and to sense, the fractured connections, the terror. But he’d shown her the truth.

  On the bus’s roof, out of sight, her dragon roared.

  “Rysa,” she whispered. “Derek…”

  The wind howled. Traffic skidded out on the nearby road. A car approached. Anna sniffed. The wind brought more than exhaust fumes.

  She stood. She’d walk this parking lot, out here between the cars, buried in the cold wind and the blizzard of ice. She’d step out of the bubble and onto the ice, and this time she’d find the Fate who caused her the pain she refused to feel.

  She would find her husband’s body before the Burner she smelled on the wind and she would deal with what little of her life she had left.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Along the freeway, glowing, obscured business signs lit the blizzard like a string of red, green, and blue Christmas lights. Visibility was at about ten feet. The Fate literally drove blind except for her blasting, grating present-seer. She would brake and swerve, they’d skid, and the next thing Billy knew, they were doing sixty again.

  Billy would have survived a crash, though her driving had almost stopped his Burner heart enough times he swore he’d felt himself beginning to implode.

  “So the visual enhancers let you drive in a blizzard, huh, luv?” Why on all the godlings’ green Earth did he get in a car driven by a blind woman?

  But he knew—he wanted revenge. Revenge on the assholes who rounded up his people and made concrete from their dust. How could the Fates in Portland not understand the horrific nature of their behavior?

  Sort of like eating people and blowing up shopping malls.

  Billy pushed aside the thought and smoothed the magical bag of sword holding on his lap. The Fate had been remarkably silent about the bag. No questions. No glances, though he didn’t know if her goo-goo goggles could “glance.” Not even a single wave of present-seer blast aimed at his lap.

  The other one in that head must be doing something. Otherwise, this one would have taken Poke off him already.

  He’d have eaten her if she tried. He was pretty sure the princess would allow him self-defense, though he shouldn’t eat any people at all, anymore, good or bad. He’d promised. But a well-placed bite on the Fate’s thigh would keep her from chasing after him.

  He still might eat her. He was hungry and she smelled so much more tasty than a cow.

  She was probably important enough he shouldn’t take a bite anyway, because that seemed to be how this whole mess rolled. He meets the princess; he gets upgraded. He finds Boyfriend in what had to be the most random bit of happenstance in his decades as a Burner; he ends up in a car with a two-for-one Fate with only one half who consciously realized she was a two-for-one.

  And no one had yet tried to steal his sword.

  Mine, Billy thought, and tightened his grip on the bag.

  The crazy-scary blind Fate turned off the highway and into an area full of chain hotels—the wide, three-story types set between industrial buildings and surrounded by equally-chain restaurants that served nasty food to uncaring crowds.

  Her seer blasted through the car and outward, toward one of the hotel buildings. “Do you feel that, Burner?” she muttered.

  He peered out the window. “Feel what?” Though he guessed he was about to find himself hip-deep in Fate business.

  She swore in English. This one, the crazy-scary one, liked her French.

  Billy gripped the armrest. “Something wrong, luv?” He peered at her head and shoulders, looking for the telltale shifts in her muscles that signaled that the other one was surfacing again.

  “Quiet, Burner.” The car skidded to a stop at the corner of the building, just before the bend in the drive that circled around to the back lot.

  She still held herself like the French woman. “Get out.”

  Billy immediately jumped out of the car and into the cold snow blanketing the thankfully recently-shoveled walk. At least the hotels kept their shit together. He swung his bag of magic sword holding over his shoulder.

  Gunfire echoed between the hotel and the restaurant across the street. Billy ducked, but the Fate didn’t.

  Still hunkered down, Billy moved quickly toward the entrance, but the Fate grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him to his full height.

  “You’re a forceful one, aren’t you?” Keeping quiet never was and never would be Billy’s strong suit. “I bet you like things… constrained.”

  She pushed him down the sidewalk toward the back of the hotel but didn’t answer.

  “That’s leather wrapped around your ponytail, isn’t it?” Billy danced ahead of her, but sidestepped and twisted so he could point at the back of her head. “Lots and lots of leather. That’s my guess. Maybe some shiny latex added in to spice things up.” He made a kissy face while prancing like a filly and pantomiming spanking. “All black, of course. Gotta stay in the color scheme, don’t we? Boyfriend’s not all that creative.” He made another kissy face.

  Adrestia snagged his throat again. “Boyfriend?” Under those glasses, she probably narrowed her dead eyes. Her brows bunched up like she had.

  Billy’s lips rounded. “Umm…” How was he going to get out of this one?

  “Who do you speak of, Burner?”

  Billy let a little spark show in his eye. “Let go or I’ll fry through those lovely gloves of yours. Turn your palm to hamburger, I will.”

  Sh
e dropped her hold. Could he run? Should he?

  Seers erupted from somewhere nearby. Strong seers including ones Billy recognized—and running ceased being an option.

  “Princess?” Seers and the piercing, high, and blinding waves of power that came off Shifters in pain.

  Then a blast of the unmistakable color and pattern of dragons.

  Adrestia’s seer slid upward into the high, musical notes Billy associated with the one who helped. “They need to die, Burner.”

  Not the princess. Not with him here. He may be hungry and he might be a Burner but he’d do good this time. He’d help.

  Billy ran into the blinding blizzard and into blood.

  People blood. Death. Dying. Meat.

  Billy’s teeth clicked involuntarily. He knew his Burner stench ramped up as well, even if he couldn’t smell himself. Who smelled their own odor? He wasn’t that much of a monster.

  Except the swirling snow under the lot’s lights smelled of meat.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The stairwell door emptied into the wide open area between the hotel’s front desk and the arch leading into the restaurant. It whistled on its hydraulics, wheezing and groaning like a dying horse, and knocked against its latch.

  Daisy hit the door at a full run. She lowered her shoulder and rolled toward the opening. The door’s metal slab bounced off the jam and fought its slow control arm, but she twisted and slid through into the lobby.

  Chatter and laughter rode out of the restaurant on the backs of the smells of beer and old grease. A sleepy clerk behind the lobby desk tapped at her computer. An old man in a parka pulled a squeaky-wheeled suitcase toward the elevators.

  Aiden and Gavin couldn’t have gone far. Daisy twirled, checking the connecting hallways and the sitting area, but no men. She jogged into the lobby. He wouldn’t take Gavin into the bar. Too many people, several of whom were Praesagio security.

  She ducked into the restaurant foyer anyway.

  The hostess wasn’t around. Most of the restaurant chairs were stacked except for the area adjacent to the bar where at least three beer-fueled, raucous poker games kept the staff busy. Only low light filtered out of the bar proper, and Daisy suspected that they weren’t serving anymore, but had allowed the games to continue anyway.

  A yell rolled away from one of the games, followed closely by several laughs and a couple of “that’s what she said” jokes.

  Ben was down here, as was that cop. Asar or Amir, too. She walked as calmly as she could toward the games. Maybe she could get their attention without tipping off Aiden.

  The bar’s seating area came into view.

  Aiden and Gavin were right there, on two stools inside the bar, Aiden with his hand on Gavin’s shoulder and Gavin, his eyes huge and his skin ghostly-white, holding the jacket against his wound.

  Aiden pulled Shay into view. He leaned into the girl, slowly rubbing his body against her side as he stood. His gray knit hat had slid and sat precariously on the back of his head. He didn’t seem to notice.

  Nor did he seem to notice the bloodstain seeping up Gavin’s t-shirt from behind the wadded-up jacket.

  Aiden stared at Daisy as he pressed his face against Shay’s cheek.

  He licked.

  Daisy inhaled. Aiden grinned. He wagged his finger at Daisy, signaling that she was to stay exactly where she stood and not to speak up. She was to be quiet.

  Less than twenty feet away, at the closest of the three gaming tables, the cop laughed at something Ben said, then looked up, but not at Daisy. He signaled to a waitress standing in the shadows.

  She wore the same uniform as Shay—black polyester pants, white shirt, and a vest. She walked as if she belonged in the hotel as well, though Daisy knew better. And she knew how Aiden got by the poker games.

  The last time Daisy had seen the present-seer who now smiled at the cop’s flirting cousin, she’d had blonde hair. She’d also been wearing a lot of navy blue leather. Now, the Fate’s raven-black hair gleamed in the bar’s low lighting.

  She wiped her hands on a towel and leaned into the men around the table, but she looked up and directly at Daisy. I’ll kill them all, her glance said. Every last one before they understand what hit them.

  Ethne Blake, Aiden’s sister, masqueraded as an employee, which meant Fina was still out there, somewhere. They were both more deadly in a physical fight than Aiden.

  The shakes crawling up Daisy’s spine moved too slowly to be a shudder and too fast to be a retch. But they most definitely wanted her to freeze in place, to go limp in the face of a terrifying predator, and pray that the monster would get bored and leave.

  Where was Asar? Amir? Neither of them sensed a fellow Fate?

  Aiden pulled Gavin and Shay closer. He licked the bloody circle off Gavin’s cheek and his grin pulled up more on one side. Aiden Blake, the blood-eating demon.

  Aiden yanked Shay in front of his body. Her lips quivered. Her pupils were so large Daisy saw only black. He wrapped his hands around her head. She swayed, holding her balance.

  Daisy lurched forward, her body unconsciously responding, but she couldn’t stop Aiden from killing the normal girl who wanted to be an engineer.

  Shay gasped once. Her eyes said she understood what happened and that she couldn’t breathe anymore, and that she was already dead. That this job she’d taken to pay for college, this job in a small city in Wyoming should have been a safe place for her. It should have paid her bills and made her friends, but tonight, she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time and she’d just been murdered.

  Gavin dropped to his knees.

  Out in the bar, Ethne joked with the men. She wiggled and flirted, and kept all their semi-drunken attention on her body parts.

  “Do not interfere,” Aiden mouthed.

  Ethne’s dripping, smothering present-seer pulsed outward, and she looked up at the ceiling as if she’d just gotten off on whatever vision her seer had dropped into her head.

  Behind her, in the shadows of the far table, a man stood up. He spun around, his hand dipping under his jacket toward his holster, and a sandstorm future-seer rolled out through the restaurant.

  Ethne grinned directly at Daisy. She sidestepped toward Asar, her weight shifting, and slammed his face against the table. She stripped his gun at the same time.

  A new rush of sand-in-a-storm seer burst outward from Asar as he dropped to the floor. Aiden gulped it in, his body stretching upward, his arms out at his side, a glistening, blood-covered needle of glass in each of his hands. He spun once, in a full circle, and swept an arm downward as he came around, that hand’s needle aimed directly for Gavin’s face.

  Gavin ducked. Aiden’s arm missed his face but swept along his back.

  Gavin’s shirt ripped. A new, bloody line appeared from the nape of his neck to his upper back, between his shoulder blades, where Aiden’s sweep lifted off his skin.

  Daisy lunged, praying that she’d get to Gavin before Aiden jammed the needle into her true love’s spine.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ladon tried to keep the lights of the highway to his right, but they had vanished into the storm some time ago. When he stopped and listened, the faint growl of engines sputtered underneath the wind. The modern world whirled out there, somewhere.

  Or perhaps he only imagined what he wished. Only snow and shadows swirled before him. Only the wind and snow slapped his stiff skin. The cold took away his ability to move, to walk, yet he continued to trudge toward a base he didn’t remember.

  Maybe the glow and the growl were phantoms.

  Ghosts, like the ones swirling out of the flakes to walk in his footprints. They trudged along at his side, just as cold and just as unforgiven as him.

  The first had appeared to his left shortly after he lost visual on the karaoke bar.

  “Blame the Burner for veiling us,” said the first of his ghosts, a tall, lean man with a katana and an attitude. “I blame you for killing the Draki Prime.”

  La
don didn’t understand. Draki Prime? He thought Rysa was the Draki Prime. “I need to get back to her,” he said.

  The phantom gave him the finger. “The first Draki Prime. Marcus. Timothy. Daniel. You’re a shitty friend. You abandoned Marcus. You abandoned me.”

  Harold, Ladon thought. Your name is Harold Demshire. But again, he’d read about Demshire in reports and hadn’t met him in person because he was smart enough to stay away from the high command.

  The next phantom he knew more intimately. “Aye, Boyfriend.” Billy skipped through the snow to Ladon’s right, though he didn’t stink, nor did he give off heat the way he should. “How many people have you left to die?” He wore sunglasses and carried a marker in his hand.

  “You told me to leave.” Ladon waved the ghost away.

  “I did!” Billy twirled like a ballerina. “But don’t you feel it?” He stood directly in Ladon’s path, a frozen, smoking phantom. “The pull?” He sniffed at the air and pointed his marker at Ladon’s nose. “The call?”

  He didn’t feel anything. The snow had found its way into his boots and he’d lost sensation in his toes. When, he didn’t remember.

  Billy shrugged. “I remember. I’m smart enough to write down what I need.” He pointed at his forearm. “Here.” He pointed at his shoulder. “And here.” His hand dropped to his side. “Because the princess made me a better man.”

  A real boy, Ladon thought.

  Billy vanished. A huge, warm-skinned, ocean-eyed man appeared. He walked silently at Ladon’s side for some time, not leaving footprints. Not breathing the snow. This phantom seemed more a dead ghost than any of Ladon’s other hauntings.

  “Brother,” the man said.

  Ladon looked up at his friend’s face. “Andreas.”

  “I need to clean up this mess for you, don’t I?” Andreas continued to trudge forward at Ladon’s side. “I always clean up your messes.” He poked a finger at Ladon’s shoulder. “Always return balance to your life.”