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

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Had Ladon ever thanked this man for his help? For his love and his support? “Brother,” Ladon said. Not by birth—only one of them had been born—but by life.

  The giant stopped walking. The snow whipped around him, through his phantom shape, but he did not vanish. “You know damned well I would never abandon my family.”

  But Ladon would. He had, so many times.

  He needed to hold tight, to be vigilant, to stand between those who needed him and those who would do harm. If he didn’t, people died, which was why he needed to get to the base. He needed to come back for Rysa. She needed him.

  People might die.

  The Andreas phantom who was made of wisps of Ladon’s soul, of the bits of the real man he’d internalized over the centuries, looked as if he inhaled the storm. Flakes froze in the air. And the phantom’s ocean eyes gleamed.

  “Inhale, my brother.” Andreas spread out his arms. “Let me help you.”

  Ladon did not like surprise enthrallings.

  “Why would my enthrallings be a surprise?”

  Andreas vanished. A woman whose hair carried the same metallic hints as Rysa’s, whose eyes also glimmered with similar, grass-like tones, appeared directly in front of Ladon so close he could lift her up in his arms. He could kiss away the soot and the burns and tell her how sorry he was.

  She never learned to read, no matter how she tried. No matter the hours Ladon and Daniel and Andreas worked with her inside the walls of their fortress in Gaul, so long ago.

  She’d been with child when she was murdered, burned to death by a mad morpher. The same madman who took something—someone—very special from Ladon not quite two days ago.

  The woman watched him, her face blank but disappointed in the way he’d seen on so many women’s faces over the centuries.

  “Abigail,” he whispered. He shouldn’t know her name. She was many centuries dead.

  She looked up at him, as she often had. “You slaughtered entire villages avenging my death.”

  No, he hadn’t. His training was to save, not to murder.

  “You need to let it go, Ladon.” Her phantom form wavered. “You need to be you. Not your past.” She tipped her head. “Not your future.”

  But she was long gone, long dead. She was his past.

  “Listen.” She pointed to his right, to where the highway should be. When he looked back, she’d vanished into the frozen world.

  Alone, Ladon dropped to his knees. He was not to run—he smelled something in the air that told him to stay where he could be helped. Was he to die, finally, frozen to death in a modern blizzard? He’d survived sandstorms and hurricanes. He weathered the far north for decades. He’d sailed with the Norse and he…

  He lived with a dragon.

  But his name was Nathaniel, and Nate had only seen the Earth’s dragons from a distance. Nate knew nothing beyond his job—and his unrequited love for a goddess named Rysa. A woman who had stepped into his path and had offered her hand in friendship because….

  He didn’t remember. But he’d promised her that he would come back. And he had. He came back, long, long ago because one day she would need his love and his help to become the goddess she had to be.

  “Get up, Ladon-Human.” This new phantom wore an Emperor’s face and this phantom snarled. “Do not break yourself. You are the best of my toys.”

  Everyone knew that face. Everyone bowed down to this man because this man made the bowing possible. Trajan, the Emperor Godhead.

  Shadows swirled in the dark, out here away from the road. They snapped and bit and sucked at his ankles….

  Shades. He looked up at a sky that should have been nothing but the fog of the cloud deck. Should have been the world, but was not. An ancient sun hung too big and too cold above his head. It roared and it snapped out hellfire and…

  A beast twisted his great head. He glimmered under the light of the dying sun, his back and his sides mimicking the shades coiling around Ladon’s feet. Frankincense and cinnamon wafted from his snout when he sniffed at Ladon’s face. “Human,” he said, his voice rising from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, “listen.”

  … are go for test one in six… fiiivvve… The chatter stretched as if it accelerated away, toward a new position.

  “Ladon.”

  In front of him, the new phantom dropped to her knees. A seer danced over his mind, one that did not feel all that different from the snow battering his face. She wore a hood tight around her face, one that obscured her features as well as the blinding light blazing around her shoulders.

  He squinted and raised his hand to shield his eyes. He smelled it again, the ‘accept help,’ but he couldn’t tell where it came from, or if it was as much a phantom as the storm’s hauntings.

  “You need to stand.” The Fate held her arm against her side in a way that suggested significant pain, and the scent of blood suggested a wound.

  “Who…” He didn’t think he could stand.

  “It’s Cordelia, Ladon-Human. Do you remember me? We’ve never met, but we’ve spoken.”

  Cordelia Palatini-Sut. “Commander.” He tried to salute, but his arm felt frozen in place.

  Commander Palatini-Sut glanced over her shoulder at the blinding light behind her. “Even with a functional arm, I cannot carry you.”

  “I…” What should he say to a Commander? I can’t do my job? I’m not worthy?

  She leaned forward. Her seer washed over him again. She flickered in his vision, changing, but not. Her voice altered. She sounded like the Commander Nate knew—Nate, not Ladon. “Stand up, sentinel.”

  He understood the need to survive. Something swirling in the snow told him he had to survive. He had to stand and cooperate with the demands of his commanding officer. He breathed it in with each inhalation.

  Cordelia Palatini-Sut looked over her shoulder again. The blinding light behind her came from two orbs accompanied by the rumble of a well-tuned combustion engine. “Our driver can’t get out of that car. It’s Fate-proof. If he does, he will become visible inside the what-was-is-will-be and that cannot happen until we bring the villains to heel.” She grinned. “So you need to do this yourself.”

  Ladon nodded. There was an art to camouflaging within the what-was-is-will-be. It took the finesse of a ghost and anyone who could pull it off deserved respect.

  Slowly, he rose onto his numb feet. How long had he been out here? “Will you take me to the base?”

  She looped her good arm around his waist. “Don’t lean on me, please. I’ll steady you until we get you into the car.”

  He didn’t move. “I need to go to the base.”

  The woman who Nate insisted was called Commander Palatini-Sut pulled him toward the vehicle. “I’m taking you where you need to be.”

  Ladon allowed her to guide him toward the purring classic muscle car, one painted an ocean-like mineral tint and driven by a hidden brother, and prayed that this one time, he’d find his way home.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Pretty, pretty Russian man.” The half-visible Fate kissed Derek’s cheek. “Why can’t I keep you? I want to keep both you and Aiden’s flower’s boy.”

  A bolt ratcheted through his brain. He twitched and slid, and when he realized he had stumbled, the Fate had moved to his other side.

  She poked her midnight dagger into his shoulder. “Aiden says the half-breed will overpower the network and that you’re the one made most new so therefore you’re the node that will power his future-seer.”

  “I am a node?” And why did she keep speaking the word “new” as if speaking the true name of her god?

  Her triad must have figured out how to trigger another “emergent property” of Fate and Shifter power interactions. There was no other explanation. They put their past-, present-, and future-seeing heads together and saw what happened to him, to Rysa, to young Mr. Bower—

  Another bolt of seizure snapped through Derek’s mind. He lost his train of thought, but the sense remained that
the three horrors who called themselves The Children of the Burning World had figured out how to expect the unexpected.

  So much snow, so much wind slammed into his face and body. Derek slid down the icy side of a dark-colored sedan and looked up at the lot’s bright yet obscured overhead lighting. Why was he outside in a blizzard? He had lost that train of thought also. He could not see beyond the bumper of the car. Were there other people out here? Someone yelled.

  The semi-visible Fate crouched next to him. “Is the dragon talking to you?” She stood long enough to look over the car’s hood. “The dragons never spoke to us.”

  A flash of not-his memory hit the inside of Derek’s corneas: Two tall, identical male Fates, both with iron-gray eyes but only one with a belly full of anger, watching their brother take in the three children who belonged to them but were not right.

  “This is not a good idea,” Marcus, the past-seer, said.

  Daniel, the future-seer, only narrowed his eyes. Behind him, Dragon snorted. He turned and looked up at the beast. “I will watch them closely, my friend.”

  But wickedness will find a way, if it desires a way to be found.

  “I suspect the dragons always knew that you are psychotic.”

  The semi-visible Fate grinned and her teeth showed between the strips of fabric. Another flash hit his mind and his nose filled with smoke. The phantom smell sat on his tongue, making a phantom paste of ash and saliva. Derek spit it at the Fate.

  The dagger cut through his jacket and sliced into his arm. Derek looked down at the wound. Blood oozed, hot against the cold air, and should hurt more than it did. A lot more.

  He should be a lot colder than he was, and less… lucid. Brother-Dragon seized on the edge of their allowed distance yet Derek felt distant and… pulled.

  His Dragon — Sister-Dragon — whispered: We are here, Human’s Mate.

  She held her brother’s mind the way her brother had held hers when Vivicus invaded seven months ago, at The Land of Milk and Honey.

  I will not falter, she pushed.

  “No, you will not,” he whispered, knowing full well that his wife’s beast could not hear.

  Brother-Human comes, she broadcast, in a dragon push-yell. He comes home!

  Did she yell for him or did she yell for her brother? Or for herself? Unless…

  Ladon, Derek thought. He was near. He had to be near. The wind carried traces of his scent—unless Derek was hallucinating sunshine and civilization, as well. He moved to stand, to get a better view over the cars, but the crazy past-seer jabbed her finger into the new wound on his arm.

  Derek growled and pulled away. He outweighed her by a minimum of sixty pounds, and his new Dracae strength gave him Ladon’s speed and agility. He was, as she said, new. And the new was often underestimated.

  She ducked under his swing and slashed with her blade. He twisted, the blade missed its mark, but she did not. Her other, invisible hand slammed something very sharp and very thin into his deltoid.

  The blizzard channel-changed. The entirety of the whipping fog, the smell of ice and the undifferentiated yelling, lurched. Derek became exquisitely, deeply aware of the velocity of the planet under his feet.

  He moved, yet he did not. The Fate moved, yet she did not. Energy arched and twisted and ruptured like magnetic force lines bursting from a dying sun and Derek, a son of a dead past, saw the fabric of the what-was-is-will-be.

  Whatever she jabbed into his shoulder slammed his mind into a space to which he should not have access.

  The Fate giggled. “Welcome to new-space, pretty Russian man.”

  She lacked threads. Lacked the arching, weaving energy that spread out from the car behind her, from the Dragons’ Legion talisman around her neck, from the building hidden inside the storm, from his wife and his sister-in-law and the terrified people inside the hotel. Wisps trailed behind her, in the what-was, which she saw. But like a color-blind person, she could not see the what-is or the what-will-be.

  She lifted her arm to strike one last time.

  Derek saw the flash of red and the fluorescing of teeth, but he also saw the rupturing of the what-was-is-will-be, the chaos and the connecting and disconnecting, that happened around a Burner.

  The sword in the Burner’s hand, the midnight blade the ghoul had run with from Praesagio Industries, not only slashed through the hood of the car next to them, but also through the what-was-is-will-be. Force lines popped and reestablished. It sucked in the energy.

  “Nifty stripes you have there, luv.” Billy swiped at the Fate.

  The sword sliced through the new-space around Derek. Its trail in the what-was-is-will-be shimmered and swirled, like the ice and the wind, but unlike the snow, it lifted upward, into a column.

  The parking lot vanished. Derek knelt under an ancient star, one that burned too bright and too cold. It roared and licked and filled half the sky with tongues of flame. Under his shins what had been asphalt now writhed wispy and dark, like living shadows. The ground itself licked his skin with cold and ice just as the sun above licked the sky with bright and hot.

  Dragons, he thought. He should feel the dragons. They should be in his head. Did he die? Satan’s sister flicked him into Hell.

  He knelt on the Dragon’s Rock in shimmering air. An unseen beast sniffed his face. Not Ladon’s beast, not his wife’s beast. Not his beast, yet a beast nonetheless. A beast who walked in the new.

  Derek pulled away and the beast of the new pulled back his great, unseen head. He breathed in the air as if tasting the world and his six talons dug into the shades swarming the Rock. And this new creature, this thing Derek could not see, roared.

  Derek pressed his eyes shut.

  Slowly, carefully, he opened them again. In front of him, Billy slashed. The Fate danced out of the way. And the column of energy in front of Derek manifested a person.

  “Mladshiy brat,” it said. ‘Little brother.’

  A familiar woman stood between him and the fight. The tip of her hip-length, chocolate brown braid swung behind her head. She wore clothes similar to what he had worn the night they both died in 1917—trousers, a buttoned shirt, and a turn-of-the-century Russian military jacket. She carried no weapons, only her anachronistic clothes and her tall, leather boots.

  This woman died in 1917, the same night he died his first death. They both died in a shack during a storm similar to the one that raged around him right now.

  “Maria?” His sister. The Russian princess who would have been married off to form some political alliance if they had survived. Maria Romanova, the third born of the Tsar and Tsarina.

  She smiled. “You’ve grown.”

  I am dead, he thought. How else would he be able to see his dead sister?

  She touched his cheek as if touching a butterfly. “Two Progenitors edited me from this world, little brother. I vanished like the dragons the night the Shifters carried us from that shack. I exhale and no one feels my breath. I steal food from plates and no one realizes they have not eaten their meal.” She rose up and looked over his shoulder, toward the hotel. “Idunn and the Vanished Progenitor turned me into a living ghost.”

  Yet you are here, he thought.

  “Ask Andreas if he remembers me.” She chuckled. “He will not. No one remembers me.”

  “Andreas died. Murdered by Satan himself.” Derek pointed toward the hotel.

  “From now on, the young doctor will attract those of us inhabiting the new.” His sister shook her head. “As will the Burner.”

  His impossible sister, this woman woven into the invisible fabric of the universe, stepped to the side.

  The Fate rolled under Billy’s blade, her body twisting in a way Derek could not see, but felt. She had Derek again, her midnight dagger once again against his throat, and her invisible hand on the needle poking out of his shoulder.

  “She means to strike Mr. Barston,” Maria said. She pointed at the splinter of glass the Fate had begun to tug from his flesh. “Then put the glass back int
o you, where her brother told her to put it.” The Burner’s blood would blow off Derek’s arm. He was to die a slow and horrible death.

  But the Fate had no future. It ended now, out here in the snow. She was about to die, not him.

  The needle slid out of his shoulder as smoothly as it entered.

  The Fate swung the glass at the Burner. Billy howled. His free hand cupped his neck. Burner stench overwhelmed the storm’s screaming wind and, Derek suspected, what little self-control the ghoul had.

  The midnight sword clinked once, twice, as it bounced away, into the snow, as did the Fate’s dagger.

  Derek’s sense of velocity and of the what-was-is-will-be clicked off. The otherworldliness, the shimmering and the movement, ceased. He was, once again, looking at the inside of the blizzard of the century.

  He dropped to his knees and looked down at his hot, wet shoulder. Same arm as Vivicus cut, he thought. Looks like the bastards have a side preference. Blood oozed.

  Someone told him to ask Andreas a question. Who, he did not remember.

  Just beyond the edge of the storm’s visibility, a Burner smacked his lips. The Fate should have known better than to enrage a hungry Burner, especially one who was as new as Derek.

  Another body slid along the cars. A tiny flash blipped at the temple of what, to Derek, looked like goggles.

  “Addy?” he called. Had it been Rysa’s cousin who had given him the ridiculous command to ask a dead man a question? They met once before he and Anna left Portland. She had stood to the side of Rysa’s mother, doing her best to mask her confusion with tight sweeps of her seer. At the time, Mira seemed to have had her niece under control.

  She stood over him, her high-tech glasses shimmering in the diffuse glow of the lot’s lights. “Romanov,” she said, and kicked him in the gut.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Amir and three other security members rushed into the restaurant from the lobby. “Pavlovich! Down!” Amir yelled.