All But Human (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 5)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Silence fell over the backyard. The snow crinkled under Vivicus’s boots. Behind her, Radar panted and whined, alive but wounded. Derek heaved. And a low, agony-filled moan rolled from Ladon.

  “He’s coming.” Vivicus yanked Ladon toward the garage. “He’s knows I’m here and he’s looking for you.” He head-butted Ladon, obviously to cause him more pain. “Gotta keep you two far enough apart.”

  “Let him go!” Daisy hollered. “If you let him go, we’ll let you go! If you don’t, he’ll rip you limb from limb when he comes to!” She ran after them but Vivicus dug his fingers into Ladon’s face.

  Vivicus stuck out his tongue and yanked open the back door of her sedan. He threw Ladon in.

  “Brother-Dragon!” Daisy screamed. “Derek! Get up! Get Brother-Dragon! Now!”

  Derek groaned but got to his feet. He staggered toward the mudroom and vanished into the house.

  “Don’t do this, Vivicus. Don’t hurt them. Please.” She tried to get closer. If she could touch him, she might be able to stop this.

  He opened the driver’s door. “When you see that scary fuck, tell him thanks for the help.”

  Vivicus clambered in. The engine started. He must have stolen the keys earlier. He must have planned this. Because when he pulled out into the alley, Daisy couldn’t stop him from stealing the human half of the Dracos.

  The cold of the air suddenly, completely drenched her body. Her eyeballs ached. Her fingers stung. “No!” she screamed. Maybe Brother-Dragon could catch them. Maybe—

  She ran for the house. Radar whimpered and tried to sit up but she couldn’t stop. She swung through the door and again through the mudroom’s inner door, into the kitchen. She had to find Brother-Dragon.

  Since her father activated her, she’d felt the presence of the dragons. Like all the other Shifters at The Land, she knew when one pulled into the parking lot. She knew when Ladon or AnnaBelinda entered the building. But she’d never heard either of them.

  Brother-Dragon’s internal scream opened a crack at the back of her mind. It drove a spike into her skull and it let in things Daisy should not see.

  A nightmare star boiling red and cold. It hung over a place the dragons knew, a place that to them meant home and comfort, but the star came too close and shrieked too loud.

  Nipping shadows curled around her ankles. They’d pull her down and she’d drown if she didn’t get—

  Daisy gasped and the real world slammed down over her body and its weight made her knees buckle. Unable to breathe, she stumbled into the kitchen wall.

  Derek leaned against her shattered island. “A Dragon needs a Human.” He sounded as dazed as Daisy felt.

  “Ladon’s gone!” she croaked. A loud thump reverberated from the living room. The house shook. “Vivicus… split up… the Dracos!”

  “He did not,” Derek slurred.

  “Yes, he did!” She stumbled over to the counter and grabbed his elbow. “He—”

  Derek looked up. His normally bright-blue eyes gleamed with warm, metallic striations.

  Gold glints, like Ladon’s eyes.

  “I am Human,” he whispered. “I—”

  A tentacle shot outward from the cold, cold star into Daisy’s vision. Electricity manifested in all her nerves at the same time, across her skin, up her muscles, and into her brain.

  Her throat closed.

  And Daisy Pavlovich dropped to the tile of her kitchen floor.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Andreas?” Rysa blew another breath into his mouth. “A healer will meet us at the hospital. I need to be your heart and your lungs until we get there.”

  A return breath slid cold and deathly from his open mouth.

  “You can’t die,” she whispered, and blew into his mouth again. She fired everything she had into his chest and the blood stopped but Sister-Dragon didn’t understand his torn flesh any better than Rysa and this wasn’t like the bullet that hit Ladon’s side in Rock Springs. This bullet turned Andreas’s heart into pulp. It must have exploded on impact. The bullet must have had a charge inside to make sure Rysa couldn’t heal the wound.

  But she knitted Andreas together as best she could and his heart would beat every so often and he’d twitch and groan and she’d breathe more air into his throat even though he didn’t have functional lungs anymore.

  “Please don’t die,” she said again. “Please.”

  The robotic British voice of the GPS told Anna to take a right and the van skidded around a corner.

  “Fate!” Anna yelled. “Red light!”

  Rysa’s present- and future-seers flung up and outward, away from Andreas and at the world. “Brake for three seconds then floor it.” They’d get through between cars.

  “Aye!” The van screeched again.

  Rysa would have slid off Andreas’s chest but Sister-Dragon cupped her back and draped her big body over the humans, keeping them perfectly still.

  A new map popped into Rysa’s head. Her own heart beat too fast, but it beat strong. Sister-Dragon flickered it with her map of what should be Andreas’s heart, doing her best to overlay the two, and nuzzled Rysa’s side.

  “Okay,” she whispered. But his heart was supposed to be half again the size of hers and the arteries didn’t line up the same. She had to try anyway.

  The constant healing from her body spiked into a focused heat. She aimed it at the side of his heart, at a place missing tissue, and she told it to do what it did when she healed Derek—copy. Make anew. Give Andreas functioning organs.

  Under her hands, it beat not once, not twice, but three times in a steady rhythm. Four.

  “Andreas!” Maybe she’d done it. Maybe she’d saved him—

  It stopped.

  “No!” Rysa focused again. Aimed and demanded, but lightheadedness made the two maps swim. Her brain and body burned all her energy just like they did at Praesagio when her enthraller was out of control and she’d faint soon. She felt hot.

  Something dripped down her lips. A drop of blood hit the back of her hand. Was her nose bleeding?

  A searing, stabbing pain latched onto the space behind her left eye and twisted. Her mind knotted up. “No,” she whispered. Not now. I need to save Andreas.

  A blast of energy flowed over her from Sister-Dragon and Rysa felt a distinct sense of I have you. You are safe.

  She reached for the other dragon. For this person who used to hate her but who, now, wanted nothing more than to save her and Andreas. To save her family.

  “Rysa!” Anna bellowed. “Stay conscious! Do you understand me, Draki Prime? You will not pass out! Do your job, soldier!”

  “I am not a soldier!” Rysa screeched. “Stop distracting me!”

  “You are Dragons’ Legion! You will save my Second.” The van took a hard left. “Nakajima, we’re here,” she said into the phone. A pause. “Yes.”

  “I’m trying.” Everything hurt. Rysa felt as if she’d been shot, not Andreas. “I have a fever.” Not again. Why was her life full of echoes? Waves of again lapped against her mind and her soul and she knew it meant more than she understood.

  In the front of the van, Anna slammed her fist against the steering wheel. “How long?” A deep, intense growl reverberated from both the Human and the Dragon. “Your father is on a plane, Rysa. He’s coming.”

  She couldn’t breathe. The parasite dream snaked into her consciousness and down her throat because something was wrong. The sense of piling it on returned.

  “Where’s Ladon?” Under her hand, Andreas’s heart beat again: one, two, three…

  Sister-Dragon vanished. The door flew open and she and Andreas slid toward the too-bright, cold light outside.

  … four…

  A man she’d never met before said something and laid his hand on her forehead. His palm heated. “I’m here to help.”

  … five…

  The other healer yelled something over his shoulder. Something about needing a glucose drip for her.

  “Anna!” she screamed.
“What’s happening? Where’s Ladon?”

  In the front of the van, Anna gasped and slammed against her seat.

  … six…

  Rysa’s healer pulled completely off Andreas. It snapped back like a rubber band stretched too far and it hit her full in the face. Her enthraller broke free, flooding the van with ‘heal’ and a new calling scent, one that meant nothing to the other people in the van, but jacked her own body: ‘see.’

  Rysa rebounded against her healing energy and her enthraller scents and her mind floundered into her seers. Her soul knocked between the energy points of her abilities like a pinball in a game. Her seers flung upward as a column of Fate power temporarily freed from their Praesagio-built sniffer cage, and saw.

  Someone who edited himself from the what-was-is-will-be shredded Ladon’s mind into an echo of the hamburger that was Andreas’s heart and he couldn’t breathe.

  Her husband was dying.

  “Where is my husband?” she screamed. Where is Ladon? Where is Dragon?

  She couldn’t see through the editing and the stitching and the noise and the fever screaming through her body. But—

  The van vanished and a red sun half the size of the sky roared. Shades slithered along the surface of the Dragon’s Rock and nipped at her naked ankles. They wiggled and hissed, black and death-like. Above her head, the sun screamed. And the edges of the Dragon’s Rock dropped away into the sucking abyss.

  Dragon? she pushed. Where was her dragon?

  The shades blanketed the Dragon’s Rock like living-dead smoke, like zombie thoughts. A thick layer of decay undulated around Rysa’s feet, pungent and earthy and chaotic. The cold sun roared but the shades writhed.

  “Be careful. It’s not safe to be naked this close to the edge.” A man she recognized stood so close she felt his heat. She knew his breath and understood the beat of his heart.

  He fought not to become a shade, like his brothers.

  Marcus? she pushed. Where have you been? You’re lost. He’d vanished like Dragon when the Fates and the Shifters came to cut her to pieces.

  “I’ve gone invisible, Draki Prime.” He curled his hand around his Dragons’ Legion insignia talisman and watched her with his keen iron-gray eyes.

  “You are the Draki Prime,” she whispered.

  The talking shade in her dream, the version of Marcus Drake standing so close she smelled centuries’ worth of dragon on his skin, stood tall and young and handsome, his hair coal black and cut short. His mind and his muscles strong and lean. “Qui imite le monde brûler?” ‘Who mimics the burning world?’

  She didn’t understand. But dreams weren’t meant to be understood.

  “Sometimes a dream is more than a dream,” the other Marcus said, the one beyond her, the not-quite-a-man with the shades snaking around his calves to his knees and his thighs. The Marcus with the keen stare and the anger that long ago boiled off all its moisture. It coated this version of Marcus with a syrup so thick he appeared as if he’d become a molasses skin suit worn by someone else.

  He chuckled and glanced at the first Marcus, the real Marcus. “I do the wearing.”

  “You aren’t Marcus,” she whispered. What was his name? They were twins.

  Triplets: The third flickered in and around the two versions of Marcus, his face slightly rounder and his eyes a different, greener shade of steel blue. He vanished and reappeared, vanished and reappeared, always the same. Always non-responsive. A dead thing.

  An echo.

  I know who you are, she pushed, even though she’d only met the real Marcus. But she knew she lied. The shades whipped and bit and she knew she’d met other-Marcus’s flesh-suit. She knew she’d been touched by his flesh-suit hands.

  She pointed at the flickering echo. “The vanished one, forever gone.”

  “Yes,” said Marcus.

  She knew his name: “Your brother, Timothy.”

  “Yes,” said other-Marcus. “A sacrifice.” He too wore an insignia.

  So many sacrifices. So much pain. Shades stung her flesh and when she looked down at her naked legs, she saw her blood ooze from her wounds as thick as the flesh suit other-Marcus wore.

  “You are not other-Marcus,” she whispered. “You are Daniel.” The long dead future-seer of the triad that preceded her. Another talking corpse, like Billy, the Burner who loved her.

  She looked up at Daniel’s doughy face. “What are you?”

  “Wrong question,” Marcus said.

  How could she be a good Fate if she asked the wrong questions? “I don’t—”

  Daniel’s flesh suit hands clenched her face as fast as the shades nipped at her ankles. He cupped her cheeks, his fingers biting into her skin, and he tipped his head, his eyes wide.

  The cold, red sun caught in his steel gray irises and winter flared outward from his pupils. His eyes, now clouded, stared blind at her face.

  “Watch,” Daniel intoned, as if he saw both present and future.

  And Rysa dreamed:

  The old camper bounced along the dirt road. Her body felt taller, leaner, more beautiful, yet also younger and… naïve. Her belly swayed with each bump and her forehead sloshed as if someone had filled her sinuses with aquarium water and now she had little fishes in her head.

  Smells from the outside poured in through the camper’s vents: Dust. Scrub and hot baked dirt. A hint of gasoline and oil, as well as the exhaust from the camper.

  They were heading south, to a city with a familiar name.

  A huge ring hung on a cord around her neck under the collar of her t-shirt. In the space of the dream, the ring throbbed against her flesh neither hot nor cold but still radiating. The shades were here as well—the camper pulsed with them—but the world burned so brightly they vanished into the glare.

  Rysa wasn’t seeing the past—she saw a dream of the past dreamed at another time, also in the past, like a cell phone recording of a rerun of a program playing on a television in another room.

  In this remembered dream, the throbbing of the ring pulsed out a disruption and wiped away the man’s identity, even in this dreamed memory. He drove, yet he touched nothing. He spoke, yet she did not hear his voice. He sneered, yet she could not see his face.

  The ring edited important things, but she still saw. What was she missing?

  The camper flickered. A foot hit her gut. When she opened her eyes, she was on all fours looking down at scratched dirt, outside and in the southern sun.

  The man kicked again but froze and his form hiccupped, and he vanished, only to reappear rounding the corner of the camper, as he had moments before. The scene reset. The past replayed.

  She’d seen resetting before, in a vision about a place to the south. When her War Baby cousins tried to kidnap her. A place where her father and her mother had once worked.

  Daniel appeared where the man had squatted, drawing the entwined dragons of the Legion insignia in the dirt with a blade. But Daniel’s blade was as long as his forearm and honed so sharp it could cut through bridges and rail cars and RVs and not lose its edge.

  The blade sucked up all light as if it were a gladius-shaped black hole.

  She’d seen this sword before. Or ones like it. Daniel drew circles in the dirt with the tip of one of Praesagio Industries’ midnight blades. Why the blades? Why—

  “Wrong questions,” he said. “Wrong answers.”

  “But—”

  Daniel slammed the blade into the dirt and it sliced into the ground—into the shade-covered, granite surface of the Dragon’s Rock—deeper and deeper and deeper, until only the Roman hilt of the gladius remained visible. “No one is as bound by fate as the Fates themselves. Have the strength to do what must be done.”

  The cold, red sun howled. Rysa still knelt, still on her hands and knees, and shades whipped and danced around her wrists and ankles. Near the edge of the Dragon’s Rock, the ghost of Timothy flickered like a looped animation. But Marcus—the real Marcus—had vanished along with the stolen memories.

&n
bsp; Daniel squatted next to her with one hand on the hilt of the gladius, and his other encircling her neck. His body hardened and his skin took on the tone of ash. He became the rock infrastructure inside his flesh suit. “Find ways. Work around it.”

  “Around what?” she asked. The shades? The cold, roaring sun?

  “Do what I could not. Say what I did not. See the clues I’ve strung together for you.” His hand closed around her windpipe. “Ask the correct questions.”

  The real world slammed down onto Rysa. Cold air clung to her eyes and nose. Cars rolled by on the street. Someone brushed by her and, down the street, someone else yelled.

  She panted as if out of breath, and she felt too hot and too frail.

  A man walking by stared at her chest, his eyes wide, but he quickly moved by.

  Rysa glanced down. Her shirt hung open, her bra exposed, and her entire front was covered with Andreas’s blood.

  She pulled her coat tight around her body. She wasn’t in front of the hospital. She wasn’t near the hospital at all. She was significantly south of the hospital, into downtown St. Paul proper.

  Did she run away from Anna and the van? Why the hell would her seers make her run?

  Wrong questions, flitted from her present-seer.

  “Wrong…” Rysa turned in a circle and looked up at the sky. She felt hot and her head swam the way it did when her abilities burned out of control, and she’d run away. She’d had an out-of-control vision full of bad dreams and stolen memories more like one of Dragon’s layered cathedrals of meaning than her screaming, annoying, ADHD-fueled brain-spasms.

  You weren’t running away, her present-seer whispered. You were running toward where you need to go.

  “Where?”

  Her seers danced like happy, screaming lottery winners. Yes! Where…

  South.

  That ring edited like the shard. It deleted whatever identifiers her Fate abilities latched onto in the what-was-is-will-be—but the dream remembering retagged. It re-added where they were going.

  South, to a familiar city. A place where her parents used to work. Where the War Babies attacked. Where Vivicus first threatened to take her before he put the slug in her throat.