Flux of Skin (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 2)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “I’m real. I’m here. Let me—”

  His back arched and he backed away again, his fists clenching. “He’s… ah!” Ladon dropped to his hands and knees. His body retched, his back contracting in spasms so painful he barely breathed, and he vomited onto the floor.

  Behind her, Dragon sparked, his hide warming and undulating. The beast lost his bed shape, his big head suddenly flinging outward into the room.

  Rysa ducked. The energy flowing between them vomited as well, spilling all Dragon’s stored anguish onto Ladon. Her man leaned over, throwing up again.

  “Dragon! Dragon, stop! Please. Your humans are here. We’re here. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  The beast’s hands appeared. Rysa?

  “Yes, love, I’m here. I will make calling scents for you. To help you calm down and to take away some of the pain. Okay?”

  Dragon nuzzled her side as he reached for Ladon. He signed no more words. But Ladon pulled her into his arms, curling against her body, and pushed them both against Dragon’s chest.

  When his tears started, she didn’t say anything. She didn’t breathe out any pheromones. She held him. And when his tears turned to sobs, she vowed she’d never again leave their side.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “Ladon?” Rysa kissed his forehead. “Love?”

  He’d wrapped himself around her, entwining their legs, his face in her neck, his arms tight around her waist and chest. Each exhale blew out his mouth and nose too forcefully, ending too fast, and he’d suck in his breath again, and his chest lifted off hers.

  He didn’t answer.

  Dragon poked his snout at Ladon’s side, and at Rysa’s. He flashed and shook his head, talons out, then dropped back against the wall, vanishing against the grain of the paneling.

  Pain rolled off the beast like wax down the side of a candle.

  “Dragon?” She tried to pull out from under Ladon, but he cinched his arms when she struggled to move. They sat on the floor, too far from the bed for her to grab hold of it, and too far from the wall for her to use it as leverage.

  “Ladon, let go.” He’d pinned her on her side with his weight and her hip hurt. She wiggled, but he still didn’t respond.

  “Dragon! What’s happening?” Her past-seer danced backward, looking for answers. The same thing had happened the last time Dragon slept, when her uncle stole her from the cave. Ladon woke the beast before his time and they’d huddled together in Dragon’s nest for over an hour, both disoriented. Both suffering and in pain.

  Ladon hadn’t told her. He wouldn’t, either. These moments moved between him and the beast, and no one else need know. No one else need understand, except Sister and Sister-Dragon. But the other beast had done this. Forced this on them so they’d face Shifters and stop her torment.

  Chaos still surrounded the cabin and Rysa’s seers couldn’t pick out anything useful. All the little scenarios diverged too much. The future washed away into a sea of white noise and no path of least resistance appeared in the surf. Nothing shaped the outward thrust of her future-seer’s tentacle.

  Rysa didn’t know what to do.

  “Ladon, I have to find Andreas. I need to find your sister. Please. Get off me.” Andreas or AnnaBelinda would know what to do. How to help Ladon and Dragon.

  We will not lose you. Dragon jolted and his big head hit the ceiling. A beam creaked, filling the cabin with a terrible sound more like bones breaking than wood. He dropped down, his head on his forelimbs, and pressed his eye ridge against her thigh.

  Random images fired into her mind—Cara Cara fruit, rose petals, the feel of concrete shattering under his talons, the texture of her skin when he tended her wounds, the mind-rending agony of a tear in his hide, the wonderful sense of peace and connection when his human felt she was safe.

  “Dragon, stop. Please. I need to think.” Where was Andreas? Where was AnnaBelinda? Neither of them sensed what was going on?

  Rysa called to Sister-Dragon, but no one answered.

  Sister does not like Fates. Dragon rolled onto his back, his front limbs in the air. She could no longer see his signs. The next few words might have been hate and death. She didn’t know.

  Ladon mumbled something she didn’t quite understand, but it sounded a lot like “How many times will I watch you almost die?” He gripped her chest like a vise. “I can’t.”

  “I can’t breathe!” Only shallow inhales made it past his arms. “Ladon, let go!” She pushed against his shoulders.

  He let go. His eyes popped wide open, and he flung himself backward, landing against the bed. His eyes stared; he didn’t blink. Nor did he say anything.

  How was she supposed to help them? What brew should she make for this? She had no sense of Andreas or AnnaBelinda, either.

  Ladon’s eyes closed.

  But she could stop their physical pain. “Dragon, show me your wound.”

  The beast ignored her and stayed on his back. He reached for the ceiling, stretching one limb, one talon fully extended. A gouge opened across the plaster. Little bits rained onto his belly and bounced off.

  He mimicked each small fragment of white as it fell, his body a mirror image of what happened above him.

  “Dragon!” she yelled.

  He flipped so fast he looked like a kaleidoscopic blur. A flame swirled in the air, a grand circle of dragon breath vanishing into the gloom of the cabin.

  Rysa pushed around the beast. The wound was still visible, and not completely closed. It looked more like a scar than a cut, but it still radiated hurt. And if it didn’t heal correctly, he wouldn’t be able to fully mimic to invisibility. He’d always carry a distortion.

  She laid her hands over the wound and called up her healer. “You need to concentrate. Map for me, like you did at the hospital, otherwise this won’t work.”

  More random images hit her mind—the pressure and flow of blood within Ladon’s arteries. The blockages, rips, and spilling of her blood, in the interior of her bruise. The smell of healing calling scents as they triggered changes in his body. The echo of his dragon-perceiving as it bounced back to him from Ladon, when his human tried to make sense of the images.

  The images moved too fast and grated over her mind the way his talons had grated into the ceiling.

  She called her seers, past, present, and future, and she called her healer. Her Fate and Shifter sides could work together. They’d done it before and she’d make them do it again. They were all part of her, not individual entities. They were already integrated, whether they liked it or not.

  Tentacles whipped. Paths pushed forward into the future, across the present, backward into the past. Dragon’s wound would heal, is healing, had healed. Rysa felt the ridges of the gash under her hands, smelled the slight variation in his dragon scent of summer and civilization. She saw the variation in the colors of his hide, the dimming and the desaturation. She remembered how deep the bullet had gone.

  A blast jolted from her healer. A random jolt, as wide a shot as the pellets of dragon images hitting her mind, but she hit something.

  The beast cranked his neck around and sniffed at the wound like a big cat. He nuzzled her face and his hide calmed. The pain, at least the worst of it, diminished.

  Thank you, he signed.

  But Rysa felt woozy again. Nausea pooled in her gut and not just from the smell of vomit in the cabin, though that didn’t help. Her face flushed.

  She felt hot.

  Your fever rises. Dragon knocked Ladon. Human is unconscious.

  “Ladon?” Rysa dropped to her knees next to him. His shoulders and face felt clammy, and the normal dragon glow of his skin had faded. He looked the way he did when he and Dragon were too far apart.

  “Is he okay?” Her seers told her nothing—not about his health, or when he’d wake up, or if he’d be okay. The chaos around him seemed to be settling, but not fast enough for her to see through it.

  She couldn’t heal him if she didn’t know what to heal. And she couldn’t bre
athe out the right calling scents if she didn’t understand what was wrong.

  Dread that she might lose him dropped over her. It draped like a net over their lives, woven of thoughts whispered by her terrible little voices—you did this. You held them to the dirty ground. If you paid attention, you would have seen this coming.

  You pulled all his hurt to the surface.

  Tears blurred her eyes. “Wake up. Please.” She touched his cheek, shook his shoulders, poked his chest, but he didn’t respond.

  “Dragon!” The pitch of her voice ramped higher, like a frantic child. “Why won’t he wake up?”

  I woke too early. The beast rocked back and forth, but said no more.

  Rysa jumped to her feet. She needed help. She had to get help.

  The cabin’s door bounced off the bed and slammed shut behind her when she ran into the circle.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Andreas?” she yelled. Where was everyone? The mid-morning sun warmed the gravel and little shimmers rose around Rysa’s feet. The sky above glowed vivid and blue, clear and cloud-free. Desert sage filled her nose, drier and crisper than the soaps and salts. Insects hummed in the few shadows around the cabins.

  She banged on AnnaBelinda’s door. Were Anna and Sister-Dragon suffering the same agony as Ladon and Dragon? Served them right.

  But she needed them now. Sister-Dragon had caused Ladon to pass out and Sister-Dragon was going to fix this problem.

  Rysa let her seers feel around, not giving them direction or constraint, just letting them flail and touch, praying they’d catch something. But no. It was as if Sister-Dragon now ran silent, hiding from all views.

  Maybe it was her fever interfering. She wasn’t seeing blocks of irreality, thank goodness, but she didn’t have a Dracae to help stabilize her if she dropped into a vision.

  Her present-seer laid out a small truth, one she didn’t expect—her healer wouldn’t let her go into a vision. It knew, either by itself or because of Andreas’s training, that if it happened without Ladon or AnnaBelinda to help guide her tentacles, she’d go into convulsions. And out here, without Andreas, she’d die.

  She had to find him. Her body ached as if she had the flu and the fever inched up.

  She banged on the door again and wiggled the handle. Locked. Where the hell was Andreas?

  “Rysa.”

  She whipped around so fast she knocked her wrist on the door handle. Pain shot up her arm and she yipped.

  Andreas leaned against the corner of his cabin, his arms crossed over his huge chest. He peered at her and didn’t move.

  She stepped off the stairs of Anna’s cabin and rubbed at the new injury. The bruise on her hip had begun throbbing when she ran out of the cabin. Her fever brought all her aches and pains to the surface.

  “I feel sick. I can’t use my seers!” She hobbled toward him.

  Andreas pointed at her leg. “You’re limping.”

  She looked down at her foot. Of course she was limping. She felt as if she had a purplish-green parasite clamped to her hip. “Where the hell have you been? Where’s AnnaBelinda?” She turned in a circle, fighting the need to bounce and run back and forth between the cabins.

  He stood up straight, but his eyes stayed narrow. “You’re out here alone.” He glanced at the cabin. “Ladon-Human let you off your leash?”

  She stopped about ten feet from him. Her toes scraped across the gravel. The grinding clawed between the cabins, louder than it should be. Loud, like her whipping seers were trying to tell her something but she couldn’t hear.

  Let this vision through, she thought. She was pleading with herself as if she had other people living in her head and they were blocking the door.

  Something was wrong. She didn’t know what, but something was terribly wrong. “Where is AnnaBelinda?”

  “How the hell should I know? I’m not her brother.”

  Andreas grinned.

  No one grinned like that. No one had the twisted muscle structure to pull the corners of their mouth so far back, and so far up. No one but a morpher.

  “This will be a hard trial. One of the worst. But I’ll win.”

  The morpher sniffed and stepped forward, his gaze boring into her face, and his eyes began changing color, shifting from Andreas’s green into a bright yellow, then down into a rich, golden brown.

  On top of his head, hair appeared, wiggling like some damned feral animal. His foot rose, his huge black boot lifting off the gravel. The rocks shifted, rolling into a depression he’d left behind. His shoulders narrowed as he set the boot down again. His neck shrank. His arms, though still huge, decreased to Ladon size.

  Bones crackled. Joints snapped. His face twisted as if it hurt; as if changing like this caused him the same pain the gunshots had caused Ladon and Dragon.

  The monster in front of her walked through the pain as he shifted into Ladon’s face and body. An odd scent hit Rysa’s nose—a pathetic version of ‘comply,’ as if someone had made an artificial version of a natural fragrance. It smelled caustic, like fake orange scent. Like it’d eat off skin.

  He was trying to enthrall her, using a poorly copied version of Andreas’s abilities.

  Only one morpher was powerful enough to copy someone down to the level of their abilities. Only one, other than Dunn. And he’d found their hiding place.

  “Stay away from me!” Rysa screamed. She needed to run, but her feet wouldn’t move. What was happening to her?

  The morpher lifted his other boot, still staring at her as if mapping her body. The grin vanished, replaced by lips she recognized. His cheeks moved slightly, and his jaw squared.

  Vivicus laughed Ladon’s wonderful and hearty laugh. But it sounded wrong—and as hollow as a monster’s soul. “I had a wife who told me stories of hearing the dragons. It made her special. I thought, if she can, why can’t I? Mother yells at me for overstepping my station but I work hard. Do you know what it took to build the Seraphim? To find and recruit only the best? I deserve everything I’ve gained.”

  He sniffed with Ladon’s nose. “The wife who heard the dragons whispered of strong healers, a branch who’d mixed with the enthrallers.” He waved his hands in the air. “And with my descendants.”

  She carried his genes, as well? Vivicus was another grandfather?

  “Don’t look disgusted. It all comes back to Mother, either way.” He took another step toward her. “You should be glad you carry my genetics. They make you strong.” He winked and thumped his chest.

  “Get away from me,” she hissed. But she still could not move.

  “That’s why I recruited your father, though he never had the temperament to be a true Seraphim.”

  A snort popped into her ear from behind her.

  Someone brushed her back. “Well now, cuddlekins, the dragon been treatin’ you nice?” The big enthraller with the flat nose leaned into her back.

  His hand groped her breast.

  He’d been right here, taking advantage of her distraction, sneaking up on her to hold her in place with his calling scents. They weren’t in the hospital, but he’d found a way to do it anyway. He’d gotten in.

  She froze, not because he made her, but because she made herself. All those I’m okay barriers, the I’m safe walls she’d let herself build to block out the harsh world, crumbled and her body felt the same as it had in the RV. When she couldn’t breathe.

  Flat-nose licked her cheek. Bad breath filled her nose and stung her skin. He’d gotten in. And she was alone out here. Her fortifications had abandoned her.

  No, she couldn’t think that. No one abandoned her. They just couldn’t help right now. She wanted to puke. Her gut heaved and—

  Flat-nose snipped the cord holding her talisman around her neck. The dragon talon dropped down her front, sliding across her breasts, and landed in Vivicus’s hand.

  “Oh! Pretty!” Vivicus snatched it away, dancing backward on the gravel, his fake-Ladon face contorting between round and wide-eyed and pinched inward, l
ike someone had pulled a string out his nose and his features were snagging.

  Flat-nose chuckled, and licked again. This time, his tongue darted into her ear.

  The fever burned through her body but every single muscle of her arms and legs stiffened to solidity and she couldn’t move. Vivicus pranced around holding her talisman and an ugly son of a bitch probed her ear.

  They’d invaded her space and her body, and now they invaded her seers.

  Vivicus pointed at Rysa with one hand while he gripped her talisman behind his back with his other. He tilted his head side-to-side, ear-to-shoulder, like some goddamned third grade bully. “Got your toy!”

  Using her seers made her sick so she favored them, the way she limped and favored her hip. What took their place? Panic. Bouncing. Screaming. She’d lost what allowed her to control her abilities, and with it her ability to control herself.

  “Give it back!” she screamed.

  Vivicus twirled, obviously delighted at her response. “It’s mine now!” He petted the talon like he would pet a gerbil. “It will take effort and care to get off this abomination of tape, but it will be worth it.”

  “Will they want whatever that is, when they come for her?” Flat-nose rubbed against her back.

  Vivicus blinked. “Don’t care. It’s mine.”

  Flat-nose grumbled, shifting his weight behind Rysa. “Maybe I’ll keep you.”

  She’d been snatched again. Again. Snatched by bad men because she couldn’t take care of herself. Because she didn’t use the little bit of training Andreas had already given her. She didn’t check for threats as soon as she opened the cabin door.

  And they’d taken her only weapon.

  No. Her talisman was gone, but her seers whispered. She couldn’t call them, use them, but they hadn’t abandoned her.

  And neither had her healer. What to do flashed into her mind bright and obvious. “Get off me!” She twisted and blew ‘vomit’ directly into Flat-nose’s face.

  He retched and stumbled backward, and let go of her body so he could cover his mouth. He dropped to the stones, puking all over his hands, legs, and feet.