The cooks served beef with spiced potatoes and other root vegetables for the reception dinner. He couldn’t place the spicing—it tasted both sweet and savory at the same time, and reminded him of juniper. The meat had been fork-tender and the dessert a crumble of bright red and blue berries.
He’d stuffed himself to immobility. Daisy had sucked down the main course but made a face as if smelling the dessert made her nauseated.
She’d been upset that her father had not returned from Portland for the reception. Excuses were made, and arguments had, and Gavin got the impression that Mr. Sisto felt himself to blame. Gavin didn’t ask.
Daisy had gone off to the bathrooms after the dessert made her queasy, and now stood on the other side of the dance floor with the tiny, blonde Ivan—The Land’s manager and Mr. Pavlovich’s main enforcer. After Aiden Blake attacked Daisy a decade ago and she came to live at The Land, Ivan used her enthraller abilities to make sure Daisy was okay. Ivan helped Daisy finish high school and made sure she was ready for college.
Ivan and Daisy watched the dance, Daisy with a beautiful smile lighting her beautiful face and Ivan a happy one on her usually disapproving lips.
Ivan no longer scowled at Gavin, which, he figured, was a good sign.
He was going to spend the rest of his life with Daisy. He knew it and he suspected she knew it as well. They just needed to get the timing right. It was nice that her family had finally decided he was worthy.
Daisy leaned toward Ivan, who arched a brow. She touched Daisy’s forehead in a surprisingly motherly way, then leaned in close to sniff Daisy’s breath.
Then she grinned and laughed.
They were all safe. Rysa and Ladon were happy, in love, and officially married. The dragons roamed the reception hall, both flashing I am happy across their hides with such glee, Gavin really did have a difficult time understanding how no one else was able to read the obvious.
He leaned to his left, toward Mr. Sisto. “Please tell me you see that.” He pointed at the very clear broadcast of AnnaBelinda’s pregnancy moving across Sister-Dragon’s back. “She’s making her own baby on board sign.”
Mr. Sisto slapped his back. “I wish we’d had you around when we fought the Visigoths.”
On his other side, Sandro Torres also laughed. “I want to put you in an fMRI, young man.”
Gavin had had enough of being a Praesagio Industries Special Medical Guinea pig to last a lifetime and did not wish to submit to brain scans. “When I’m done with medical school.”
Sandro nodded and turned back to the map Mr. Sisto had sketched onto the paper runner under all their plates. “Is the castle still standing?”
They went back to their conversation, and Mr. Sisto tapped his pen against the table. Sandro asked him another question. Mr. Sisto nodded, and began drawing a person.
He was good—portrait artist good. Gavin watched a man’s face take form. “Who’s that?”
Mr. Sisto tapped the drawing. “This, here, is Janus, the Progenitor of the Fates.” He sniffed. “He’s an asshole. Was before he vanished and I suspect if he’s alive, he’s worse now than he was when we lived in the Empire.”
Mr. Sisto tapped another picture on the other side of his plate and behind his mounded napkin, one Gavin could not see. “This, here, is my dear mother, Idunn, the Progenitor of the Shifters.” He tapped the picture again. “She, too, is an asshole, but I love her.” He chuckled. “Family, you know?”
On the other side of the dance floor, Daisy gripped Ivan’s hands. Her eyes rounded, and she lifted away one hand to touch her lips.
She visibly gasped.
Gavin pointed. “Did something happen to Mr. Pavlovich?” He pushed back his chair. Not now, he thought. Let Daisy have this night….
East of Cheyenne, Wyoming…
Dmitri Pavlovich stared at the glass coffin at his feet. The techs put Aiden Blake’s not-body inside a fucking glass containment unit as if he were a sleeping prince. His invisible, massless body—the lack of mass had caused many a physics orgasm within the Defense Technologies division—lay inside the damned box still wrapped in the landing strip fabric.
If he kicked open the coffin and stomped his heel into the fabric wrapping Blake’s not-there corpse, perhaps he would pop whatever magic bubble the little fucker used to conceal himself.
Or not. Even in death, Aiden Blake was nothing more than negative space.
Not staring at the box took more effort than Dmitri’s exhausted brain wished to put into the helicopter ride. His more morbid and creative parts surfaced anyway and he stared to make sure nothing wiggled and that the not-corpse stayed a corpse. No new bugs poured from inside the evil son of a bitch’s mummy fabric wrap. No not-there arm rose.
No one would harm his daughter again. Not Aiden Blake. Not another man. No one.
Dmitri adjusted his earphones and flexed his fingers. He flew enough that a helicopter ride should not bother him, but his hand throbbed again.
When he came near Blake’s corpse, the throbbing increased.
Cordelia Palatini-Sut sat next to him, her sand-borne seer a constant buzz. She also stared at the corpse. Asar Sut sat on the other side of the glass coffin, also staring. Amir Sut was off “collecting an important asset.”
They had not left the hotel to rest and recuperate. They had, he learned after the fact, been part of the ruse surrounding Andreas Sisto.
Cordelia had been appropriately apologetic. She’d stitched while Asar explained where—and why—they transferred Blake from Portland to a more secure facility.
A facility that turned out to be east of Cheyenne, in the plains. A place they referred to as “the base.”
Dmitri’s curiosity got the best of him.
She also insisted he carry the shard of the Fate Progenitor’s talisman with him at all times. “I cannot stitch around you twenty-four hours a day, sir.” She wished to increase his overall security.
“I am sorry you are missing the reception, sir,” she said. Her comm clicked and buzzed, and across from them, Asar nodded his agreement.
Dmitri scowled with full Russian venom. These Fates needed to know he did not fully trust them—or Praesagio as a whole.
Cordelia continued to stare at the coffin. “I am sorry you were not informed.” She pointed at the box. “He needed to die. All future-seers involved agreed that informing you would have made Mr. Sisto visible in the what-was-is-will-be. The probabilities of your daughter’s death—and the death of Mr. Bower—were too high to risk.”
“One in three chance, sir,” Asar Sut said. “Much too high for future-important assets.”
A quick look of anger and disgust flitted across Cordelia’s face, but she controlled it well. “My nephew should have killed The Children of the Burning World when he had the chance.”
Her nephew turned out to be Daniel Drake, the ghost inside the Adrestia shell.
Dmitri enjoyed Fate genealogy almost as much as he enjoyed Fate politics. “No one is as bound by fate as the Fates themselves,” he drawled.
Cordelia’s eyes narrowed. He had gotten the response he desired. Damned Fates and their unwillingness to take responsibility. Their pathetic statement of bondage was no better than yelling “The devil made me do it!”
They flew in silence after that, a Shifter and two Fates staring at a corpse that was not. The copter landed on a pad also marked with the same fabric wrapping Blake’s body. Would Blake sit up when they carried his coffin over the new fabric outside the copter? Dmitri had a momentary flash of an old monster movie from the forties, Frankenstein, and Victor von Frankenstein yelling “It’s alive! Alive!”
He checked his sidearm. Not that it would do any good, but he wished to be ready.
Cordelia motioned him off the copter while the pilot helped Asar load the coffin onto a flatbed four-wheeler. The future-seer waved and drove off ahead along an asphalt path leading to a small, concrete-walled shed big enough to house transponder equipment and a cot, and not much else.
“The base” had to be underground. Dmitri saw nothing but snow-covered fields when they flew over and now heard nothing but the cold winter wind and a few clicks and whirs.
Which meant, most likely, that the base inhabited an old missile silo.
“Come, sir.” Cordelia motioned him forward.
The concrete building held an old terminal, at least five security cameras, a retinal scanner, and an elevator. Nothing else. Nothing more.
Cordelia looked into the scanner. It beeped, and she entered a code from an authenticator she carried in her pocket. “We transferred your scan from the main systems, sir.” She pointed at the scanner.
Dmitri placed his head for easy eye reading. The scanner beeped, and Cordelia entered another code. She pulled another authenticator from her pocket and handed it to him. “Please enter your code, sir.”
He did. She entered another code.
“You are now fully authorized for entrance at your discretion, Mr. Pavlovich. We will get you full protocols and instructions once we’re inside.”
“Why was I not informed of this place?” He knew the answer—military secrets and clearance levels, plus a thick layer of Ulpi secrets.
Trajan and his damned manipulations.
Cordelia shrugged. The elevator’s blindingly bright chrome made Dmitri squint. They dropped, but not as far as Dmitri expected, and the door slid open.
The man who greeted them stood broad and regal, as Dmitri would have expected of him.
He would not act surprised. He would not yell and, at this point, ask the question he suspected the Fates were goading him to ask: “Why was I not informed?”
Because he should have been informed about this man.
“Hadrian,” Dmitri said. The once-emperor Hadrian, Trajan’s normal-made-immortal foil, stood in front of Dmitri as if this meeting was a normal part of his daily routine.
Hadrian nodded once. He looked less the broken man he had been when he walked away from Praesagio seven months ago, though he had not trimmed his pewter hair and it twisted around his head like a mop. He stood in front of Dmitri in a t-shirt and jeans, both well cut, a tablet computer in one hand, looking like the strange love child of Einstein and a movie action hero.
Hadrian extended his hand. “Dmitri.”
Cordelia moved by as they shook. “Come,” she said.
Hadrian handed Dmitri the tablet. “It’s all here. We need you up to speed and ready before you return to Portland.”
“We have no new information concerning our other targets, Hadrian, sir.” Cordelia said.
Dmitri tapped at the tablet and scanned the reports—and the list after list of names, all separated by country of residence. “What is this?” More “targets”?
“We are looking for several high-value assets, sir,” Cordelia said.
Dmitri opened the “Unknown Whereabouts” list.
He stopped walking. “You search for the Progenitors?” The list held several other names, all clearly Roman, and one he recognized from his studies. “Yet another Emperor?”
Hadrian waved him forward. “He is like Trajan—another son of Idunn born of a form not her original. He would not be a First.”
Hadrian glanced at Cordelia, then back to Dmitri. “Come, Mr. Pavlovich. It is time we inform you of the true nature of Praesagio Industries….”
Aurora, Colorado…
Irena Karanova rubbed her parchment-like hands together. She did not enjoy her old age. She did not enjoy her fragility or her dependence. In particular, she did not enjoy the hard pokes and bumpy surfaces of her damned wheelchair.
The chair did, though, give her an opportunity to talk to the nice young woman who worked as a nurse’s aide. Her parents named her after an American city, one which Irena could not now remember.
She also did not enjoy her old-age memory lapses. They reminded her of an enthralling even though she knew none of the Shifters living in the care facility had it in them anymore to jab at a person’s mind. All except him.
The lovely young lady named after a city wheeled Irena down the dour hallway, over the dour, dark brown carpet and between the beige, boring walls. “I do believe this place needs art!” Irena declared. “I have art.” Or she once had art. It was difficult for her to remember. “My mother rescued it from the Bolsheviks.” Sneaky, angry bastards, the lot of them.
“I remember, Mrs. Karanova,” the lovely young woman said. “Your mother was the Romanovs’ cook, correct?”
The young lady remembered! “Yes.” Irena rubbed her chilly, leathery hands together again. “My mother was Maria Romanova’s best friend.” It was true. Maria told Irena herself. The Shifters saved Maria, Alexei, and a few of their servants from the frozen death of Siberia. They’d relocated her then-pregnant mother here to Colorado.
Irena knew the Shifter Progenitor made her mother special during her pregnancy. Nothing else explained her mother’s—and her own—life-long ability to see the two ghosts of Maria Romanova.
The young lady smiled, but she slowed as they passed his room. Everyone slowed as they passed his room. His enthralling was impressive, for sure, but a calling scent glamour was just that, a glamour. The brain saw correctly, but the mind perceived only what he wanted it to perceive, which was a frail old man.
He was old. She was sure of it. But she doubted he was frail.
The lovely young lady nodded toward him. “Do you need anything, Mr. Nax?”
He grumbled a reply and waved her away. She nodded again, and returned to pushing Irena down the hallway, toward her room.
“Which Maria is here today?” The lovely young lady indulged Irena’s “fantasies” more than the other aides, which was one of the reasons she was so lovely.
Irena leaned forward and peered into the space to the side and just ahead of her wheelchair’s path.
“Ah,” she said, and pointed. “The blue-eyed one.” This Maria didn’t carry a sword on her back. She was also taller than the ghost with the silver-metallic eyes and the curly black hair. “Where is your twin, my dear?”
Old Irena could not hear the ghosts, but she had gotten good at reading their lips.
Blue-eyed Maria patted her own back. Fetching my sword….
Earlier, at the cave….
Maria Nikolaevna Romanova, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, sister of Alexei, Anastasia, and Olga, a woman who, in another life, had once been a princess of the Russian Empire, watched the man named Ladon-Human and the beast named Ladon-Dragon walk the perimeter of the gazebo in which he had, only a day earlier, married the love of his life.
Ladon stopped in the patch of light thrown by the hole in the gazebo’s roof and looked down at the bottle of vodka in his hand. The label had been rubbed to the point Maria had a difficult time reading its “premium” and “quality” Cyrillic promises. Ladon, though, gazed at the liquid sloshing inside the glass as if it were not simple alcohol but a distillation of the new in all their blood.
The beast pushed language toward the man. Ladon nodded once, and a quick smile darted across his face. Then he peered at the gazebo’s framework, admiring her little brother’s talent and craftsmanship.
Ladon would plan an acceptable thank you. Of all the Progenitors, the man in front of Maria best understood family.
She sat on the railing near one of the arches, also admiring her brother’s talent. If she had been visible, or touchable, or there, her two scabbards—one carrying her talisman, the other empty—would have scraped against the well-tooled wood supports. The last remnants of her uniform’s armor would have brushed the rail. Her footfalls would have echoed across the perfectly planked floor. Ladon and the beast would have heard her breath inside the perfectly-crafted space.
But they did not. The last time they were aware of her presence was in the few precious moments they had shared under the original olive tree millennia ago, when six humans and two beasts came home.
He’d seen her, then. He’d said her name. Then changes took them all.
&n
bsp; “Oh, Nate,” she said. She reached out to touch his arm as he moved by, but felt nothing, as, she knew, he would feel nothing of her.
Twenty-three centuries, closer to twenty-four at this point, and not once had any of her fellow Progenitors realized her existence. None other than Terry, but he was locked forever inside that damned volcano. He was too dangerous to walk free. His sneezes toppled buildings.
“I’m glad you are happy.” In another part of the cave’s gardens, her brother spoke with the young people. “I am glad you are all happy.”
Her brother and the woman called AnnaBelinda deserved their happiness just as much as her friend, the man who had been called Ladon through the rise and fall of civilizations, as did Earth’s two dragons, and Ladon’s wife.
“I wish you knew the pain she caused you.” Maria sighed. “I wish she knew the pain.” Because the Draki Prime, of all the Fates, was the one least bound.
Ladon looked at the vodka in his hand. Sunlight streamed around him and he cast a compact, dark shadow around his feet.
Slowly, deliberately, he squatted over his shadow. He touched the wood planking between his boots and ran his fingers over a knothole.
Ladon glanced at the bottle, then back at the hole. He twisted off the cap. And with great care, he poured the liquid through the hole into a space full of shadows and shades. A space now vanquished by the structures of his new life.
He tipped the bottle and stuck it neck first into the hole. Then he stood. His beast rubbed against his side and he smiled.
Maria hopped off the railing. Slowly, concentrating, she touched Ladon’s cheek. “Come, my friend. Let us visit your armory.” She walked within the combined real-new crossing effects of her three midnight blades and sometimes—sometimes—their power cyclone allowed her to affect real-space. So far, other than her botched job of bringing the original Draki Prime into new-space and her recent encounter with the Burner, she’d only been able to nudge the Shifter Progenitor. But these were the End Times, and change now happened more often than not.
Men And Beasts (Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book 6) Page 32
