Games of Fate (Fate ~ Fire ~ Shifter ~ Dragon #1)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Her stomach lurched but she kept her head bowed over and on Dragon. “I’ll puke for sure.” Words spilled out, too fast again and too numerous, a reflection of her body’s full rejection of the meds. They always had made her feel sick. Now, she’d be throwing up within twenty minutes, just like at Marcus’s. And probably having ultra-intense visions that screamed “Come mess with my head!” to every megalomaniac Fate on the planet.

  “I’ll puke all over the van and Dragon! You don’t want me puking on Dragon. I don’t want to puke! I don’t want to take them.”

  “Okay, okay. You don’t have to.” His confusion didn’t ease. Now his lips bunched up. “Dmitri said the next exit. Penny will help.”

  “Why didn’t you call her yourself?” He’d been waiting for calls so he could yell more Russian into the phone. Driving, yelling, then driving some more.

  “Not a good idea.” He shook his head and his grip on the steering wheel tightened.

  “Why?” But her seers flicked the knowledge into her mind as soon as the question passed her lips: Penny might not be the most powerful enthraller, but she knew things about Ladon. Intimate things. And talking to her directly wasn’t the wisest idea. “Oh my God she’s your ex-girlfriend!”

  A new vision-flash: The seventies. Dragon, a car, hate sex in a field of corn so tall it dwarfed Ladon. “I didn’t need to see that. I didn’t want to see that!” Or smell it.

  Now Ladon looked like he’d throw up.

  “How many ex-girlfriends do you have? I don’t want any more visions like that!”

  Another very quick, polar-opposite flash: Ladon flirting with her in the Women’s Apparel section of the store in Mankato.

  She’d seen gray before, like a shroud. Now he gleamed like Dragon, happy and very much alive. Ladon, the magnificently hot, sun god flirt.

  Something bounced between Ladon and Dragon and the beast raised his head so fast he almost smacked it against the roof of the van.

  “I do not flirt!”

  Rysa’s mouth dropped open. “You heard that? I said that out loud?” Imploding or exploding, it didn’t matter. She’d die, right now, right here, from embarrassment.

  He didn’t look at her. He watched the road instead.

  She watched the fields pass by, not saying anything. Her cheeks burned. If she opened her mouth, she’d make it worse.

  A truth bubbled up from her nasty: Two days and she’d defeated an immortal. This time, it didn’t take her ten days to scare off a guy. Two must be a personal record for her.

  She acted like… she didn’t know what she acted like. But it wasn’t tolerable to anyone and she just lost Dragon. She’d just lost Ladon. She had no control and when this was done, he’d walk away. They wouldn’t even be friends.

  His cheek twitched. “You told me not to touch so I haven’t touched.” His lower lip very quickly, very briefly, pouted out. “Mostly.”

  Neither of them spoke for what felt like an eternity. Jagged patterns flashed over Dragon’s hide. Rysa watched the Iowa corn. They pulled off the road onto a narrow gravel lane and Ladon inched the van along.

  “We’re here.” His voice blurred as if he didn’t care anymore if he had an edge. He put the van in park and pulled the key from the ignition. Exhaling, he nodded out the front. He still wouldn’t look at her. “I’ll go out, so you can change.”

  She looked down. Harold’s ratty sweats crumpled over her thighs.

  When she looked back, he’d already pulled the door handle. But his hand moved toward her tentatively, his fingers curled under like he wasn’t sure what to do.

  When she touched his knuckles, his hand unfurled. Their skin met, palm to palm. He squeezed. Then he was gone, out the door, before she could say anything.

  ***

  Ladon pressed his back against the cold exterior of the van. Inside, Dragon picked up the unending stream of jarring, slashing seer bursts from Rysa. Every time it happened, she cringed.

  Her abilities—she called them her “nasty”—wrapped around his connection to Dragon and alternated clutching and siphoning. The frantic whipping had almost overpowered his concentration while he drove.

  He and the beast, they didn’t say anything. Adding weight to the burden Rysa already carried wasn’t something he’d do. She needed help—Penny’s help. Dragon’s help. His help. And he’d give it freely, no matter how panicked she became.

  They’d stopped briefly, outside of Mankato, after she’d passed out on his lap. He’d sat next to her while she lay on the blankets and waited for Dmitri to return his call. Each time she twitched or moaned, he touched her shoulder or hair or cheek.

  He’d woven a leather thong around a Legio Draconis insignia as he sat with his back against the driver’s seat, to keep his hands busy. While he tied the knots, she’d rolled toward him and, in her unconsciousness, pressed her cheek against his thigh.

  He didn’t move again until his phone rang. He couldn’t. Not after their kiss.

  He threaded the thong through the chain of her mother’s talisman. Made for her something to represent the good in her life, to balance the damned Burner fire. And he waited as Dragon cycled calming hues over both him and the beautiful woman who slept against his leg.

  He now carried the bracelet in his pocket. A gift he wondered if she’d accept, overwhelmed as she felt.

  Inside, Rysa stripped off Harold’s sweats. Dragon turned away to give her privacy, but the dragons had another sense, a sort of perceiving that operated separate from their vision. He and Sister detected it but never fully comprehended what it was. They still didn’t.

  His brother-in-law, with his scientific mind, once said he figured it was akin to how octopuses sensed the background they hid against. The dragons’ hide saw as well as mimicked. They had to, or they couldn’t vanish.

  A human brain couldn’t comprehend the information their hides produced. Ladon and Sister felt its effects, but didn’t understand.

  Ladon had managed to adapt some in the twenty-three centuries he’d lived with the beast. Dragon-perceiving flitted in and out of his consciousness, sometimes like the after-image of a scene viewed in bright sun. Sometimes as a tactile doppelgänger of Dragon’s body as his coat mimicked the texture of a pattern. Often as a phantom second world that overlaid the first.

  Rysa floated just outside his awareness, her dragon-sensed form lovely but ethereal and inaccessible. The beast learned the smoothness of her skin to a level of detail Ladon could never feel. His hide saw her curves and angles and the precise connections of her muscles and tendons. He learned how she moved. How she breathed.

  A ghost of Rysa drifted to Ladon, as brilliant and perfect as the woman herself.

  In the van, the beast stroked her back. She weeps.

  Ladon felt her ghost touch the delicate skin under her eyes.

  Someone like her, someone so beautiful his breath hitched when she smiled, should not wipe away tears.

  Headlights turned from the narrow county road onto the gravel of the field access.

  The engine of Penny’s 1967 Chevy Impala purred, modern and smooth, like it’d been recently rebuilt. She’d painted the car at least twice since the last time he saw her—the surface gave off slight distortions—though she’d kept the original oxidized-mineral tint. But the finish glistened like glass and Ladon suspected she’d had the side panels bullet-proofed.

  Five dragon lengths away, Penny parked her Impala crosswise to rows and rows of corn seedlings. The headlights blinked out and the area dropped into evening shadow.

  In front of him, an enthraller strong enough to make Rysa think she had her visions under control tapped her fingers on the well-maintained dash of her retrofitted classic automobile.

  Ladon stood tall, feeling Rysa pull a new t-shirt over her head. She and the beast would soon roll out the van’s back door and she’d stand next to him, feigning calm, though not strength. She was stronger than she realized. Stronger, he suspected, than both him and Dragon.

  He’d g
et her the help she needed, even if that help did not look happy to see him.

  Not happy at all.

  23

  Penny squatted in front of the Impala, her knees flexed and her weight distributed in that peculiar way women wearing heels knelt.

  Ladon glanced down at her boots. Laced leather, reinforced toe, obviously custom-made. And the two-and-a-half-inch blunt heel she preferred.

  It hurt like hell when kicked into a nose.

  She’d aged at the rate Ladon expected. Like most enthrallers born around the time of the Civil War, she looked to be about sixty. Maybe a little older. The severely short hair didn’t help. Yet she still moved like an athlete.

  A piece of sunbaked bone stuck out of the gravel and she pinched it with precision before lifting it to her nose. “Raccoon.”

  Some enthrallers like Penny—not many—could take as well as they could give. Fates may not be able to read Burners, and the bastards were poison to all Shifters, but a good enthraller could track them fifty miles out.

  If they were fast and strong enough, the enthraller tended to get caught by “the calling”—the Shifters who patrolled and protected their kind, no matter their own desires.

  Or their own proclivities. Last year, Ladon met a sixteen-year-old morpher boy who’d been activated young so his family could shape his body-altering abilities to suit Burner hunting. He’d run away. Now he worked for Dmitri, crunching numbers and fiddling with the whining electronics in the back rooms of The Land of Milk and Honey.

  Ladon suspected the young man was the true source of the Burner tracking app on his phone.

  In front of him, Penny stood. Her blouse glowed in the evening light, well-tailored and formfitting, as was also her preference. Styles may change, but the basics of Penelope McFarlane Sisto did not.

  She glowered, her lips a thin line. “A Fate, now, Ladon-Human?” She shook her head. “Never expected a surprise out of you.”

  Why do you care? he thought, but held his tongue when he felt a blip from Rysa’s seers. Irritating Penny helped no one.

  Penny glared at the van. “When is she coming out? Let’s get this over with.”

  Rysa asks for a moment. She sat with her back against the passenger seat, hiccupping. Dragon placed his head on her lap and cycled through every calming light and pattern he knew.

  Ladon wanted to open the door and jump into the back. To hold her like he had after their kiss. To keep his promise that they’d always be there for her.

  But he couldn’t shake the feeling he’d only make things worse. “When she’s ready.”

  Penny sniffed, her eyes narrow. “Clean your van. It smells of Burners, vodka, and sad little Fates.”

  He stepped toward her. A fast moment, and not too close, and he did it without thinking.

  Penny held her ground. “There’s a triad in Wisconsin Dells. They emigrated from somewhere in Eastern Europe about five years ago. The pawn shop on the edge of town is theirs.”

  Ladon did not step back. He crossed his arms. Shifters liked tourist havens such as The Dells and Branson. They tended to be attracted to transient economies. But Fates preferred to confine themselves to affluent urban areas. Better security. “Fates so close to Shifters?”

  “They’re breeders. Not very powerful. No one knows what their talisman is.” Penny shrugged.

  “So this makes your behavior okay, Penny? Because some of your friends are Fates?”

  Her voice took on the magical tones of a practiced enthraller. One who knew, all too well, which resonances to soften and which to calm both Ladon and Dragon. “Darling, I do this for you. You know that, right?”

  Her saccharin grin looked a little too Burnerish for Ladon’s tastes.

  “It would be wise, Penelope, for you to remember with whom you speak.” Practiced or not, only a few enthrallers could control Ladon or his sister. Penny was not one of them.

  She sighed, a grand exhalation of her many decades of pent-up annoyance. “I can’t give her something she doesn’t already have. You know that.”

  Healers changed. Enthrallers coaxed. If Rysa didn’t have the capacity to control her abilities, no matter how Penny modulated her voice or what pheromones she breathed from her lungs, it wasn’t happening.

  But Ladon wouldn’t mention this to Rysa. She needed to believe.

  And so did he. Stomaching the thought she might be caught forever in this cycle of misery wasn’t something he’d accept.

  If Penny’s enthralling didn’t work, he’d take her to Dmitri. They’d stay in Branson as long as it took for the Russian to figure out how to heal her out-of-control abilities.

  If something like this could be healed. Ladon frowned. He’d concentrate on the good they could do now, not the what-ifs he had no control over.

  “She’s not royalty.” Penny’s eyes narrowed. “You tell her to come out. I won’t waste my time waiting for a Fate, no matter her lineage.”

  In the van, Dragon raised his head.

  “What do you know?” Ladon moved again, this time placing himself between the van’s door and Penny.

  “Only a Jani Prime would be arrogant enough to buy a house in Minneapolis using her real name, though ‘Torres’ was a bit of a surprise.”

  Ladon shrugged, not taking the bait. “It’s a common name.”

  Penny held her face flat and unreadable. “Are the War Babies in the States?”

  The Jani triads had caused plenty of havoc for Shifters over the centuries, but the War Babies made it sport. Ladon wondered how many times other than the Texas attack they’d snuck in and out of the States without him knowing. “Probably.”

  Penny sighed again, but this time she sounded tired—and old. “Rumors are that the War Babies were responsible for Abilene.”

  Ladon didn’t answer. Best to let her talk it out of her system. He’d learned how to handle this bit of her personality a long time ago.

  “They killed a lot of healers. We didn’t have many to begin with, you know.” She walked back toward the Impala. “Enthrallers, too. They set medicine back a hundred years.” She paused. “And they’re after your new pet?”

  “She’s not my pet, Penny. No more than you were.”

  She snatched a rock from the ground and threw it at his head. It hit the van, just above the taillight, and bounced into the field. Ladon stared at the new dent.

  Her finger pointed accusingly at his nose. “What’s the best way to stand against the War Babies? Recruit a Dracae.” She looked him up and down. “And God knows your sister will have nothing to do with your little Fate.”

  He’d talk sense into his sister, no matter what Penny insinuated.

  “So the poor little Fate bats her eyelashes and acts all scared and here you are, saving the damsel in distress.”

  It wasn’t like that. Rysa needed their help.

  The back door of the van opened. Dragon rolled out, his big head first looping around Ladon as he jumped onto the gravel. He shook as he landed and a low growl rolled from his chest.

  Ladon turned to the van. Rysa stood on the bumper, her hands on each side of the door frame. She’d changed into the jeans he’d picked out and a lighter-colored t-shirt.

  She didn’t look at Penny. She looked at him. And he saw only pain in her eyes.

  Pain he felt. Pain that had pushed through the ice of his life. Before America, a wife bled to death, a baby boy never breathed, and the Draki Prime were murdered. He and Dragon lumbered away, their guts in their hands, across an ocean and into the arms of his sister and her pretty Irish Shifter companion.

  He wasn’t sure how much of that century and a half they’d spent with Penny. Or what they’d done any of the other moments. He’d have to force the recall. Because when the world is flat and colorless there’s no value to making a life worth remembering.

  On the bumper, Rysa looked down at his hands. The strap of one of her rainbow underthings peeked out where her shoulder met her neck. He wanted to brush aside her hair and adjust her collar.
Kiss the little hollow where the strap lay. And feel her cheek against his when she smiled her thanks.

  That would be worth remembering.

  “So you’re the Fate who’s got the Dracos tied in knots.” Behind him, Penny snorted. “He’s not worth it.”

  Rysa’s gaze left Ladon. She stared over his shoulder at the other woman and the pain turned hard.

  “How much vodka are you drinking now, Ladon-Human? Two, three bottles a day? He says it doesn’t affect him, but that’s one of the lies he tells himself to get through the day. Isn’t that right, lover boy?”

  Ladon turned toward Penny. The sneer on her lips said more than any of her insults.

  He knew exactly what she was about to say. But he couldn’t stop her from saying it.

  ***

  The sun’s last rays bounced off a lonely bank of clouds, spreading reds and purples across the western horizon. Rysa breathed in the humid Iowa air. Both the van and the Shifter’s turquoise muscle car sat on some farmer’s gravel road, noses pointed toward the crappy two lane county road.

  They were, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere.

  Dragon, stretching like a giant cat, rolled out first and stood between Ladon and Rysa and Ladon’s ex-girlfriend. He shimmered softly, casting just enough light to temper the long evening shadows.

  Penny looked old, like she was about to retire, or just had, and dressed like a cop from a detective show—tailored blouse so white it glowed in the light of the sunset, tailored mid-rise boot-cut jeans accentuating her still-thin waist, and black leather boots with a bit of heel, but not too much. Rysa suspected she had a blazer on the back seat of her car.

  The Shifter spit insults at Ladon. Rysa smelled the bile. It sat in her nose and tongue like some sort of phantom memory. It tasted like ‘hate.’

  Penny leaned against the hood of her car, watching Rysa with eyes that spit just as much anger as the pheromones wafting from her.

  She said something about Ladon not being worth it.

  Someone as old as Penny should have a better sense of “worth it.” Even if Rysa had ruined any chance with him, he and Dragon were “worth” more than anyone she’d ever met.