The Dracae would do anything for this man, and for Marcus Drake. “Why are you asking me?”
“We need to get into Praesagio Industries, ma’am. We need to rescue Marcus’s brothers….”
The base…
The sandy Fate led Billy toward another door beyond the sword table.
“There’s more?” Billy asked.
The Fate swiped a card and held open the door. “Yes.”
No one had turned on the lights in this room, though room was not the correct term for what Billy stepped into. Cavern fit better. Gloom swallowed the walls. His footfalls echoed. He had no idea how large the cavern was, but he knew it was large enough that if he ran, he’d get lost in the shadows.
The Fate motioned him toward a pool of light at least twenty-five feet away. Billy squinted and peered, and made out what looked like a large aquarium. “Someone keeping fishes down here?”
Sandy Boy did not answer; he only pointed.
Billy skipped across the steel grate of the floor. “Are we suspended?” He scraped his heel across the metal. “What is this place?” He turned around to face the Fate, but continued to walk backward. “Is this the mothership? Your lot’s not squiggly squid aliens, are you?” He wiggled his fingers next to his head. “The princess, she talked about her seers feeling like tentacles.”
Was it true? Was his princess a slopping, groping bit of nasty?
The Fate looked as if he wanted to slap Billy.
“Oh…” Billy skipped to the side, then back. “I hit a nerve.” He wiggled his fingers and smacked his lips to make the wettest, fishiest sound he could.
“Please turn around, Mr. Barston,” Sandy Boy said. “Please look at the containment vessel.”
Part of Billy wanted to run. Part of him wanted to scream, because every part of his body felt the velocity coming off whatever they held in the fish tank behind him.
The glass in his neck burned. He pressed on it, doing his best not to look too pained in front of Sandy Boy. Slowly, he turned around.
They had a body in the glass crate. Someone had wrapped the corpse up with spiffy, glowing fabric, but a dead guy was a dead guy. “Someone put a bullet in that guy’s head,” he said. “Ripped a righteous hole in his douchebag hat, too.” He tapped on the glass.
Sandy Boy exhaled as if he’d been holding in a great deal of suspense. Or perhaps fear.
“Is he a snack?” Billy shouldn’t joke about eating people. The princess would be disappointed if she knew.
Living flesh was better, anyway. Though something about this corpse screamed tasty. Scrumptious and mouth-watering. Fulfilling. The velocity Billy felt pounding against his body was nothing more than his hunger rumbling.
The radio chatter in his head started again. … two…
A screeching, piercing tone cut through the buzzing and the counting.
Billy backed away from the coffin. The chatter and the tone stopped.
“What is he?” That thing in the coffin was not human. It looked human but it was something new. Something that would take care of so many of his hungers.
That corpse scared the living daylights out of Billy.
A disembodied voice echoed around the coffin. It lacked directionality—the man speaking could have been in any direction, or below the floor, as far as Billy could tell.
“Yes, Mr. Barston, we saved you a snack,” the voice said.
Billy pointed at the sandy Fate. “God voices, now? You Fates can’t help yourself, can you? Arrogant fucks, the whole squiggly aliens squid-for-brains lot of you.”
“You know who speaks, William.” The sandy Fate walked away, into the shadows, leaving Billy alone with the dead thing and the disembodied voice of a man who thought himself a god.
“We must embrace our true natures. You. Me. The Dracae.” The voice sounded closer. “Your princess. The Progenitors. All of us.”
Power rolled off the thing in the coffin. Ordered power, the opposite of Billy’s Burner chaos. Power whispering promises.
“Open the case, Billy. Take what you need. Help us save the princess.”
Billy closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. They sure did enjoy invoking Rysa. Wasn’t going to work on him. “I changed my mind, you manipulative fuck. I don’t want to work for you.”
“You walk and I will immediately rescind the stop order on Burner harvesting for Fate-proofing.”
Of course he would. And he would likely mix Billy’s dust into a special brick made specifically to jack up his toilet. “What do you want?”
“I want you to go to Vesuvius, Mr. Barston. I want you to fetch your Progenitor and I want you to bring him here.”
“Why?” How? Billy thought.
“Because, Mr. Barston, this is my world. My planet. It is my duty—my destiny—to protect her and her peoples. I will do what is necessary. I always do what is necessary. Earth will not fall.”
Billy closed his eyes. The radio chatter buzzed in his ears and the power rolling off the thing in the coffin behind him buffeted his back like the gale force winds of a hurricane.
What was happening to him?
“I have done things I am not proud of,” the disembodied voice said. “I have hurt assets I should have helped, and I helped assets I should have killed before they turned bad.”
Billy glanced at the coffin.
“I did it all for the greater good. I saw the patterns. I see them now. I learned and I leveraged my mistakes.”
What was the man behind the voice planning for Billy? He ate people. He blew up shit. He wreaked havoc and he murdered.
“Take a bite, Burner named Billy. Become what you were always meant to be.”
He already was a monster. They were all monsters.
Billy unsnapped the first closure on the box, then the second. Then the third. He could smell the thing now, its power and its perfection, and it smelled like no scent he’d ever inhaled before. He had no words to describe it, no experiences with which to compare it. But he knew it filled a hole he never truly understood he had up until now.
It would stick in the maw of his deprivation, the bites and noshes he made on this thing, and it would sate his worst hungers.
He dropped the side of the coffin and moved aside the fabric covering one of the thing’s hands. Billy understood the bits of the world that sated the worst hungers. They did their jobs, they stopped the gnawing, but it was never permanent. Never complete.
Completion only came with death.
The corpse’s meat would fill one hole, but it would open a deeper, darker, new one.
Footfalls moved across the metal flooring. Subtle vibrations rattled his bones and shook his eyeballs. Voice Man did not hide his approach.
Billy smelled blood.
Clean blood. Fresh blood. Real, living meat blood.
“Presenting yourself to me while bleeding is not wise, mate.” Billy continued to stare at the corpse-thing. He had no desire to look at the man who now stood directly behind him, though he knew he had no other choice.
Billy stood. He smoothed his black nylon jacket. His orange shirt had faded and his red shoes frayed. “I want new clothes,” he said. “Something posh.”
When he turned around, the Emperor Trajan nodded. “Whatever you need, Mr. Barston.”
For an all-powerful Fate, he sure did look shitty. He’d stuck two of those damned glass splinters into his palms stigmata-style. Blood dripped onto the grating with little plink plink noises.
“You cutting yourself now, mate?” Billy pointed at his hands. “You need help.”
Trajan chuckled. Dark circles under his eyes made his head look like a skull. When he held out his hands Jesus-style, Billy had to fight the desire to laugh. He didn’t have the training to know what delusional disorder he was looking at, but he knew something grand was going on in the Emperor’s head.
“The world is going to burn,” Trajan said. “Fire is about to rain from the sky.”
Someone had cut open the corpse�
�s forearms and pulled out… something. Billy looked back at Trajan’s palms. “You pulled those out of the dead boy, didn’t you?”
Trajan only closed his eyes. He turned his face upward, but it only shadowed his features more.
The thing in the coffin called to Billy’s hunger and every glance at the corpse snapped another fiber in Billy’s threadbare soul. Every drip of blood from Trajan’s palms made him want to bite.
He was not a good man. He was not, at his core, human.
Trajan closed his hands into fists. Closed them right up in, around, over, through the glass splinters as if they weren’t there.
“How…?” Though Billy didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know about the chatter in his head, or his hunger anymore. He’d had enough of fighting and enough of living in the proximity to expectations. He didn’t want the glass in his neck, and at this point he didn’t want to be on the same continent as the glass in Trajan’s hands.
He wanted to hold Rysa’s hand, even if it happened just once, but he was a Burner and the only man she allowed into her personal space was Boyfriend, anyway.
Another wish. Another hunger that would never be satisfied.
Trajan opened his eyes. “We need everyone to fight what’s coming, Billy. We need you.”
Of course they needed him. He had a role in all this. He might as well play along.
The corpse’s hand tasted of the same indescribable newness as it smelled, and the closest Billy could come to understanding was that he ate speed. Movement. Unseen things that changed at fundamental levels.
Something harder than bone clicked against his teeth. Billy pushed the offending sliver out on the tip of his tongue.
It shimmered. He held it out in front of his face, staring. Dragon talon, he thought. He glanced at the corpse. How did you get a sliver of dragon talon?
Trajan seemed too involved in his stigmata to notice. Or, perhaps, Trajan did not see the bit of the princess Billy nipped from the corpse-thing. The Emperor didn’t seem to see his own wounds.
Billy stuffed the sliver into his pocket, then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
He belched. A yellow haze of acid rolled out into the air.
Billy pointed. “Heh. Look at that!” He skipped to the side as the haze slowly drifted to the grating.
The metal discolored.
Trajan frowned.
Things in Billy’s gut… moved. Things… settled. Trajan eyed him as if he was all that ailed the world.
Perhaps he should kill Trajan and be done with this….
Branson…
Somewhere in the recesses of Rysa’s mind, her dark Fate screamed. She twisted and knotted and hurt.
Her blade manifested. She dropped Ladon’s phone.
They were around her, Ladon on one side, Dragon on the other, both battle-ready. Both vigilant. “Love…” Ladon pulled her into his arms.
“Revelations…” she whispered.
A call-wave of energy moved from Sister-Dragon inside the pavilion to Dragon out here, in the back hallway. He answered with his own burst of communication.
We are needed inside, the beast signed.
Rysa glanced out the window at Dmitri’s state-of-the-art horse barn. Why, she didn’t know. “Yes,” she said. Revelations, she thought. Revelations and echoes.
Ladon nodded. He, too, glanced at the barn.
Rysa picked up his phone. “We’re going to help you, Billy,” she said as she dusted off the device. “I promise.”
New-space Dragon’s Rock…
Soil should not slither. It should not nip at ankles or draw blood. Nor should a too large, too red sun recede away like a baseball hit toward the stands.
Sisto put a bullet in his head and he’d died. Dead, fully, like in his vision, his frontal and occipital lobes turned to soup. His skull shattered.
Aiden Blake was as dead as the stone under the slithering, nipping shades.
This… place… was an afterlife of some sort. Because he was dead.
“I’m dead.” He needed to escape. “How do I not be dead?” He was new. He could rise from this like the phoenix of his destiny.
He kicked at the biting shades around his ankles. He’d climb his way out. If Hell had a highway, he could run its median back into the city, so to speak. He just needed to find an on-ramp.
“Son.”
He’d been alone a moment ago.
I am in Hell, he thought. Proof speaks to me. “Father.” He turned to face the other ghost. “Or should I say uncle.”
Timothy Drake snapped and pulsed like an image recorded on low-fi video tape. He jumped from one location to another, flickering and buzzing. He was the unsurprising, modern ghost cliché.
Aiden’s father frowned, as he often did. “Wrong question,” he said. “Wrong answer.”
“Yes, yes.” His father—his uncles—had always thought poking at Aiden and his sisters with questions and ways to “think” through a situation made them good parents.
It did not.
Aiden waved his hand at his ghost-father. “Leave me alone.” Timothy was no more real than the shades at his feet. “This is nothing more than my final trial. I will—”
The shade of Timothy Drake unsheathed his talons. They extended beyond his knuckles, sharp and shimmering and devastating across his flat, six-fingered hand.
Timothy slashed the ghost of Aiden Blake. He mimicked the trajectory of the bullet that had shattered Aiden’s skull and he turned strings of memory to soup.
He mirrored. He destroyed.
The cohesive order of Aiden’s patterns faltered.
Timothy Drake sliced again, his six-taloned hand moving in a specific pattern, a cleansing one designed to break down artifacts and encoded context. He ripped with the shape of true death. He pulled the electrical and the plumbing from Aiden’s cathedral.
He had learned this pattern during his exile in new-space—from its first mimicking, learning algorithms to its last destructive lines of dissolution. This pattern, both precise and mathematical, was exactly what was needed to accomplish the job of dissembling a fiend he should have put down a long time ago.
At his feet, on this mirroring of the Dragon’s Rock, the shades rose up and ate the now-disordered pieces of what had once been Timothy’s son.
Behind Timothy, a too-small, faraway sun continued to rush away.
“I am Dragons’ Legion,” he said. “The Legion protects its own.”
He flickered, but the exactness of his patterns refused to be gutted—refusing as they had for almost two centuries—to have their electrical and plumbing stripped away to fit the new architecture in which they resided. “We are all Dragons’ Legion,” he growled. “We protect our own.”
He flickered again and this time, his framework—his chassis—laughed.
We are legion, the body in which he rode pushed. We are dragon. We will take what we are owed….
The base…
Trajan’s fists dripped blood onto the floor. “We need the Progenitors. Fate. Fire. Shifter. Dragon.” He held out his hand. “New.”
Billy didn’t want to think about newness, either. Nor did he want to listen to the chatter in his head anymore.
“They’re coming, Mr. Barston.”
Perhaps Billy should eat the corpse’s other hand. Or perhaps he should snack on Trajan’s fresher, imperial meat. “Who’s coming, you old geezer?”
But he knew. Meat, Billy thought. Meat like what chattered in his head. Meat that made him less and less like the man she’d wanted him to be.
“Seventeen days.” Trajan licked his palm as if he were the Burner and not Billy. “The world ends in seventeen days.…”
… six…
… five…
… four…
… three…
… two…
… (tone)…
Test one complete. Sentinel One, your systems are functioning well and within tolerance. (background cheers)
Copy that, Intrep
id. Confirming all systems as functional and within tolerance. Our ansible is warm. We are over Santa’s workshop, date-locked, loaded, and positioned for incursion targeting. We’re ready, Intrepid. Let’s do this. Let’s save the past from the future.
That’s why we’re out here, One. (cheers) Please hold position. (pause) Sentinel Six, this is Intrepid. You are go for test two in…
… six…
… five…
The story concludes in The Burning World….
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The Worlds of
Kris Austen Radcliffe
Genre-bending Science Fiction about
love, family, and dragons:
Fate – Fire – Shifter – Dragon
Games of Fate
Flux of Skin
Fifth of Blood
Bonds Broken & Silent
All But Human
Men and Beasts
The Burning World
Smart Urban Fantasy:
Northern Creatures
Monster Born
Vampire Cursed
Elf Raised (coming soon)
Hot Contemporary Romance:
The Quidell Brothers
Thomas’s Muse
Daniel’s Fire
Robert’s Soul
Thomas’s Need
Andrew’s Kiss (coming soon)
About the Author
As a child, Kris took down a pack of hungry wolves with only a hardcover copy of The Dragonriders of Pern and a sharpened toothbrush. That fateful day set her on a path traversing many storytelling worlds—dabbles in film and comic books, time as a talent agent and a textbook photo coordinator, and a foray into nonfiction. After co-authoring Mind Shapes: Understanding the Differences in Thinking and Communication, Kris returned to academia. But she craved narrative and a richly-textured world of Fates, Shifters, and Dragons—and unexpected, true love.
Men And Beasts (Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book 6) Page 34
