He wrenched her wrist, blinking for a moment as if he couldn’t speak. “You little whore. You let him touch you?”
She didn’t answer. He pressed the insignia bracelet into her flesh and the metal dragons poked into her skin. She focused on the new twinge. It let her feel, at least a little.
Faustus shoved her forward. “When the time comes, the Burners will do what they were meant to do. The Burners will end fire with fire.”
Inside a tool cage on the open edge of the deck, a man wearing a light blue cardigan and holding a pipe in his lips paced from mesh side to mesh side, muttering into the wind. He clapped when he saw Faustus. A cloud rose off his skin.
A Burner.
“Tell her to let me out!” The ghoul jigged around a generator.
Adrestia stepped from behind a stack of sheetrock. “It is not your station to demand anything, Bob.” A ragged laceration on her cheek and the bruise around an eye bloated her face. She lumbered toward her father.
Adrestia, the zombie Fate.
“I hope that scars up nice and pretty.” Rysa signed bitch at her.
Adrestia muttered something in French. Faustus muttered back, sullen, and yanked Rysa toward the cage. The Burner sniffed and pointed with his pipe.
“Oh… she smells scrumptious.” He sniffed again. “And different from you two.” With lightning speed, he climbed the mesh. He hung from the top of the cage, the pipe between his teeth.
Adrestia hit the metal with a rod. “Tais-toi!” ‘Shut up!’
Startled, Bob bit down and his pipe snapped in two. “Hey! That’s my favorite pipe!” He dropped to the floor and smoothed the front of his cardigan. It crinkled and scrunched like a plastic tarp. “I don’t have to be quiet if I don’t want to. I’m doing you the favor here, not the other way around.” The tarp-cardigan contracted into rows of permanent wrinkles under the heat of his fingertips.
He sniffed again. “I smell Dracae.” Bob stepped back, his hands up. “One of them didn’t follow you, did they? Because you promised.”
“No. The Dracos-beast sleeps and the Dracas hate Parcae.”
“I don’t see why. Fates are delectable.” Bob smacked his lips and did another jig.
Faustus narrowed his eyes. “Back away from the gate.”
Adrestia hit the side of the cage again and swore at Bob in French. The Burner flipped her off.
“She’s mean.” He nodded toward Adrestia. “Where’s the two who put me in here? One of them said you’d bring some Shifter for me to snack on when I was done.” He clapped with sparks and a wispy smoke.
Rysa’s seers were silent, but what-is pointed to this fate. She was about to be turned into the Queen of the Burners by a demented Mr. Rogers.
“This is not the future I choose.” She needed to fight, not be an automaton like Adrestia. “That Dracae you smell? He took care of the other two—” Rysa pointed at her cousin. “—and he’s going to take care of you, Burner.”
Bob chortled and smacked his lips at Adrestia. “Can I eat the mean one?”
Faustus swung a wrench and hit the cage mesh so hard it dented. Sparks flew as the wrench slid down the wire. “Moronic Ambustae!” he yelled. “Show some respect.”
Bob stepped back, his hands raised again, the cardigan reflecting hot-blue onto his teeth. “I’m just asking.”
A gust blew through the open floor and picked up the Burner’s stench. Faustus gagged. Rysa staggered back. Bob’s teeth flashed like the lightning behind him.
Arms pulled Adrestia into the grid of the ceiling.
And the past rode in on the wind.
43
Adrestia disappeared before Faustus could pull her down.
“Burners! She can’t see them.” Faustus spun around, a gun aimed at the shadows. The gun flitted to Rysa’s head. “This is your fault! Metus and Timor should have been with her.”
“You sent them after me! What did you think Ladon would do? Ask nicely to give me back?”
Faustus pointed the gun at Rysa’s chest. “Your talisman’s chaos. We didn’t see the Dracas giving a damn.” He flicked his gun at the darkness above. “Addy!”
Bob laughed. “Addy. That’s a cute name for such… a… bitch!” He shrieked the last three words and hopped up and down, giggling like a fool.
Rysa dropped to the floor, her back against a wheelbarrow. “Fix what you did to me so I can use my seers.”
Faustus punched this time. Rysa tasted blood. She touched her mouth. He’d split her lip. Pain raged through her head—it, too, might split. Pop like a damned Burner. Maybe she should let Adrestia die. What did she care? After everything the War Babies had done, they deserved to have their present-seer eaten by ghouls.
But her mom hadn’t raised her to be coldhearted. To be Parcae. This wasn’t what Adrestia would have chosen, if she knew how to choose.
Rysa couldn’t let Adrestia’s fate strip her to bones and meat. “You trained them to be your attack dogs.” Her seers clicked a small bit of understanding through the fog. “You had her killing by the time she was five!” He did this to them when they were children.
Faustus leaned against a stack of sheetrock. “Damned Ambustae. Where did they come from?”
“Let me out!” Bob howled. “I saw them first!” He climbed the mesh.
Faustus scratched his head, the butt of his gun rubbing against his temple. “We watched this place. Burners don’t come to Salt Lake City. We were careful.”
“Papa! Ça fait mal!” ‘Daddy! It hurts!’
Rysa had spent her life dragged behind her attention issues, bruising and breaking every time she hit a sharp edge or a terrible divot. But, she realized, her issues belonged to her. They were part of her. Ladon loved her anyway. So did Dragon. And her mom. Her father, too, wherever he was.
Faustus might have spiked her head but her abilities were hers. Her talisman didn’t function, but her abilities belonged to her. And unlike her family, Rysa had had enough of being dragged by fate.
Her seers unfolded, snarling and reluctant to cooperate. The agony painted the concrete hot white, but a vision flared. She didn’t see the Burners. Not directly, but she sensed threads of what-was.
Nausea welled up and she doubled over. “Two have Adrestia. I can’t—” She cried out and wiped at her nose. Blood. “Fix me!”
“No.” Faustus future-seer sputtered. He lowered his gun. “Ladon and I, we’re one and the same. We both do what we are meant to do, no matter the consequences. No matter who it hurts.” He thumped his chest. “At least I do it for the rest of the world.” He gestured at the open side of the building. Another gust flapped his jacket over his hip.
The world was bigger than him. Bigger than his king-making talisman. Bigger than he could ever see. He could do all the douchebag rationalizing he wanted and he’d still be an idiot.
The Burner link around her wrist slid down and clinked against the little dragons. Rysa looked down at her hand. Talismans filter, but her dragon enhanced. The beast gave her calm when he laid his head on her lap.
The man gave her strength when he said “I love you.”
Faustus’s little mind was about to let his own daughter die.
She sprang for her uncle. He landed on his back, Rysa on his chest, a knee on each wrist. His gun clattered away.
His seer slammed into her mind. The injection twisted. “You little bitch!”
When she was between Ladon and Dragon, she felt their river of energy. Her nasty’s arms—her seers—curled around it.
This close to her uncle, her nasty did the same to him. Rysa leaned her forehead against her uncle’s the way Adrestia had leaned against her in the rail yard—and her nasty felt his end of the injection.
No whipping this time. Not snapping or flailing. Her nasty dug down to the root and yanked the spike out of her uncle’s skull.
The world integrated memory by memory, point by point. Her mind stabilized, the crack at the back closing. The ice bugs withered. Her nasty closed the hole
s in her psyche as fast as it forced out the spike. No one would ever do that to her again.
Faustus’s head bounced against a concrete support. “What are you?”
She pushed off him. “A better Fate than you.”
Adrestia shrieked. “Papa! Ils sont trop nombreux. Je ne peux pas les repousser!” ‘There are too many! I can’t get away!’
Four Burners dropped out of the ceiling next to Rysa and Faustus. Two, big and ugly, threw bits of sheetrock at each other while they hopped away toward the central elevator. One, thin and potmarked, leaned against a support. His mouth spread in a pompous sneer, the reek drifting from him heavy—he was the unwashed teenage dork-Burner.
The one in front snorted and pointed her little finger at Rysa.
The child.
“Skankadoodle!” she yelled. “Your boyfriend ain’t here so I’m going to chew you all up!” She jumped up and did a one-eighty in the air, pointing down the length of the building at the stairs as she landed. “Don’t mess up, asswipes!”
The one closest to the elevators pulled on his lower eyelid with his middle finger.
The child jumped again and pointed at Rysa. Pellets of her past rained down: a slap, a black eye, a belt. Screaming. A tiny doll, its painted face rubbed clean to the plastic underneath. She hid from everyone. Then anger, and the world igniting when the dark-haired woman found her half frozen in an alley.
She’d been abandoned. Kicked from one terrible life to another. No child should have to live through that.
“You have a past,” Rysa yelled. “I see threads.”
The child glared at Rysa, her red eyes flashing. “Past? So?”
“You don’t have to be like this.” But maybe for her, not remembering was a blessing. Who’d want to remember that? She’d been a vessel emptied by a horrid life before she was turned. Ismene exchanged one type of blankness for another.
“You don’t know anything, you smug Fate bitch. You’re all the same. Keep out of my business or I’ll eat you.” She giggled and kicked Rysa’s thigh. “Tasty little Fate skank.”
Rysa tried to say something else, to reason with the child. But her head boiled and her seers roiled. A new spike tried to push in, flashing destruction and chaos. It grated, and not like the cold razor of before. It both burned and foamed.
Lightning flashed. The wind whistled through the floor and over the open edge behind the tool cage.
The child laughed. “Mom’s home.”
44
A Burner woman lowered herself from the ceiling grid, a zipped-up hoodie bagging around her midriff. She held the grid with one hand, her arm flexing as she controlled her descent.
Only her chin, neck, and hands were visible, her face hidden inside the long hood. Doom bubbled off of this woman as she effervesced, the air exploding along the surface of her exposed skin.
She dropped, her boots clanking as they hit the concrete. A step and she ripped the lock off the cage.
Bob kissed her cheek. “Thanks, Mom.”
Faustus had thought Ismene’s children to be stupid and volatile like all the other Burners. Just a little less stupid and a little more volatile. Timor must have identified them by using the past threads trailing in their wake like kite tails. But the War Babies, like their father, had snouts full of conceit. Adrestia wasn’t the only Fate blind to the obvious. Rysa’s family had utterly underestimated what they were dealing with.
The Burners behind Rysa laughed. Bob pulled himself into the ceiling.
Rysa knew he’d eat Adrestia. Do it slowly, cooking her fingers and stuffing them in her mouth one at a time so she could taste her own flesh, the way he tasted her. She couldn’t fight what she couldn’t read. Her skin would sear and her tendons would rip as he savored her body. He’d melt her bones and snort her ashes. And Bob would become a new man.
He’d be a new monster created more out of the idiocy of the Fates than the stupidity of the Burners.
Ismene watched him go.
She locked onto Faustus’s neck. Her fingertips stroked his throat and she clucked, sparks flicking off her teeth. The cooked-meat stench rising from his skin was as strong as her Burner tang.
She tilted her head at the Burner angle. “My dear brother.” Her voice spun out viscous, like fireworks in honey. The pop and crackle of the explosions that burned away Ismene’s life were sweetened by the Fate blood running through her veins.
She wisped her free hand, a shooing gesture meant to acknowledge Rysa, but her face stayed hidden in the long hood, and angled toward Faustus. “I had a sense of you. He thinks you’re the final weapon in his little war to save the future.” Sparks flicked off her fingers. “My brother’s petite Enola Gay.”
“I saw him hurt you. In Texas,” Rysa said. He’d slapped Ismene the way he’d hit Rysa so many times since dragging her into the building.
Faustus gurgled.
“He called me a whore. Me. His sister.” The tips of the fingers waving at Rysa alternated glowing and smoking, a hazy symphony tapping in the air.
“I’ll help you,” Faustus croaked.
Ismene let go and he rolled onto his side. He writhed on the concrete, a worm dried out by his sister’s heat.
“You won’t be alone anymore.” He pointed at Rysa, his voice as singed as his skin. “Turn her and she’ll be like you. Then we can all be together again. We can be a triad.”
“But I’m a whore, brother. Why help me?”
“I’m sorry! I was wrong.” He flopped onto his back and closed his eyes. His hand slid up to cover the wound on his neck. “It wasn’t your fault. That Shifter enthralled you. I should have killed him.”
“You did kill him.” Ismene kicked Faustus in the groin.
He heaved, his eyes bulging. “Ismene! She’s supposed to be the Burner, not you. I see it.”
Ismene spit fire at Faustus, a green cloud of vapors stirring the air. She pointed at Rysa. “He sees your fate.”
They stood in front of her, Ismene bent over Faustus with one hand poised, glowing, to cook his flesh. The other waved in a graceful arc toward Rysa. Faustus cowered, one arm up over his head.
The past- and future-seer of the Jani Prime played out a Baroque opera backlit by the lightning flashing across the edges of Salt Lake City. They posed; thunder crashed. He lied; she accepted. He hit; she presented her cheek for more. They followed their script.
“A triad again?” Ismene’s gaze slid back to her brother.
“Yes, Ismene,” he purred. “Let her take your place.”
Ismene turned her face toward Rysa. Under the hood, her eyes glowed a horrible maroon-red, like scabs on fire. Rysa gulped, nausea clawing into her chest.
If she didn’t escape, her eyes would soon burn that way. She tried to back away, but the child pushed her forward.
“I won’t!” she yelled. “I’ll hunt all your children, starting with this little punk.” Rysa’s context was chaos, and chaos she’d bring. “I’ll hunt you. I’ll hunt everyone! I’ll be the best Burner who’s ever walked the Earth. Better than the Progenitor. I’ll be the Reine des Brûleurs.”
“Let me eat her!” the child screeched.
“No!” Faustus sat up. “You’re Parcae, sister! Do your duty.”
Ismene grabbed her brother’s hair. She pulled his head back, exposing his neck. “Come here, child.” She wiggled a finger.
The kid bounded out from behind Rysa and over to Ismene. “Mom!”
Could Rysa run? Three other Burners waited between Rysa and the elevators. Maybe there was a staircase closer. But her mother was tied to the wall. Rysa slid her foot backward, praying for her seers to show her the way.
The greasy teen grabbed her arm and exhaled at her nose. She coughed, her eyes blurring, and he twirled her back toward her aunt and uncle.
“Did you miss me?” Ismene stroked the kid’s head.
Her cap smoked under Ismene’s grip, but the child didn’t seem to notice. “Can I eat one of them? Please? Dick-boy was mean to me, but th
e skankadoodle smells super-tasty.” She pointed at Rysa.
Ismene’s seer spread like a thick paste. Faustus cringed. Rysa dropped to her knees. The child and the teen giggled.
Five fingers fanned out over the little Burner’s head. One hand twisted.
Burner necks snapped different from Shifters. Burners spurt and crackled like a car backfiring.
Ismene flung the body at an angle, around the tool cage and off the open deck of the building. The little Burner crystalized as she flew, trailing red dust. But rain bombarded the building and violent water attacked the edges of the deck. She vanished in a cloud of sparkles against the storm and the mountains.
Ismene hated the Burners, even the ones she made, just as much as her brother.
“La Reine des Brûleurs, nièce.” Ismene’s gaze dropped to her brother. “What you are will be gnawed to nothing.”
She bit into Faustus’s shoulder.
His eyes rolled back into his head and he tried to call out. Nothing left his throat. Faustus’s agony blazed through Rysa’s seers, a wet clawing desperation not to die.
Ismene’s wicked Burner teeth twinkled like diamonds. She’d taken a chunk of muscle from between her brother’s shoulder and his neck. Her acid cauterized the wound but his collar bone showed, off-white and gouged. He dropped onto his side, thrashing.
“I must feed.” Ismene pointed at her Burner guards. “But unlike them, I remember. I feel. I see the normals and I remember.” Her foot descended and Faustus’s knee cracked. “He didn’t know I wouldn’t forget. Prime future-seer, but he can’t read me. He never saw that I understood what he compels me to do.”
Faustus stopped fighting. He lay on the concrete, stray rain drops settling on his ash-white skin, his body broken but not bloodied. Acid sealed it shut.
“He turned me into a ghoul.”
“You don’t have to kill him.” But Rysa knew there was no getting around what her aunt saw as her own fate—and the fate of her uncle. They’d continue down this path, not fighting. Not trying.
“I was going to marry my Shifter. He was a morpher with some healing ability. They were working on drugs, applications of their abilities. Some were investigating a cure for the Parcae sickness. My brother killed him. Sent in Burners and murdered him.”
Games of Fate (Fate ~ Fire ~ Shifter ~ Dragon #1) Page 30
