The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  … Sentinel Six, this is Intrepid. You are point zero three four one out of tolerance….

  After close to two weeks of listening to the chatter, he was pretty sure the voices belonged to a military or science vessel and its minion sub-vessels. His security detail let him do research on the way over the ocean—one of them taught him how to use his new Praesagio-supplied smart phone—so he checked. Turned out that there were no currently operating military ships called Intrepid.

  Whoever they were, they weren’t local. Nor, it seemed, aware of his deadline. So he listened. Maybe he’d pick up something important. Maybe they’d give him a clue about who they were, or where they operated.

  They counted down a lot, and made a lot of synchronization tones. They cheered a lot, too, when one of the Sentinels got something right. And if he concentrated, really listened, he picked up a second signal that seemed… even farther off? Farther away? Older?

  He had no word to describe the sensation that came with the second signal. He heard words, but they rode into his mind on the back of a shaking, an odd, quake-like realignment of the moment, like when one of the princess’s squid-like seer tentacles reset itself.

  There’d be the shaking, and the realigning, and for a split-second, he’d see through the cracks in the Intrepid chatter.

  … systems still operational… damage… then a screeching not unlike the tone the Intrepid people used. Then another word: Dragonslayer.

  Then it all vanished like one of the beasts. It went back into mimicking the obtuse fog the Fates claimed caused their current inability to do anything useful.

  He’d kept his hearing of the chatter to himself. Seemed the wisest, with words like dragonslayer being whispered by the universe.

  So here he stood in the shadow of a grand volcano, dressed in his posh new threads, wondering how best to play his part in what Trajan claimed was a two-millennia-old attempt to stop the world from burning. The wanker had pulled a full Jesus routine, complete with spikes of the glass like the one in Billy’s neck—Trajan had called them new—through his emperor-palms, stigmata-style.

  Praesagio Industries: Making a difference for the world to see, Billy’s flammable Burner ass. They weren’t any better than the Seraphim and their weird, heretic beliefs.

  The new, though, had made Billy smarter. He remembered things now. His control had moved beyond the excellent given him by the princess to utterly extraordinary. He’d do his best with it, and if that meant he needed to climb into the guts of a volcano, then he’d climb into a volcano.

  Billy Bare, ex-rock star, squared his shoulders to the smoking, looming death before him. It was the least he could do for his princess.

  The scruffy, not-twenty-year-old’s ‘calm’ and ‘focused’ calling scents preceded the enthraller as he walked with their guide along the field-side of the security vehicles. He chatted nicely with the woman, using non-threatening words and a tone that indicated he wasn’t at all put off by her distinctive, Fate-made-Burner stench.

  Good kid, Billy thought. Trajan did do well with his hiring.

  Billy breathed in the relaxing calling scents and allowed them to activate a cascade of looseness throughout his body.

  The changes that came with his new upgrades also gave him the option of using an enthraller’s calling scents. They no longer rolled off him like water on glass. Now, he could pull them from the air and form them up into the exact shape he needed. He could use a little here, and a little there, to activate a good feeling or to detonate a precision flare when he needed it.

  Enthrallers were better than any drug he’d ever pumped into his veins.

  But then again, he already knew that. Rysa was an enthraller, and Rysa’s presence gave him hope.

  Rysa’s part in his existence ended when he returned Ladon to her life. They were married now, his princess and her handsome Boyfriend knight in his all-black armor, and were living happily ever after with their dragon.

  Away from him. Away from the shite of the world. Away from Trajan’s proclamations and, he hoped, the what-will-be.

  The enthraller rounded the corner of the SUV first. He nodded once and stepped to the side.

  Their guide stopped five feet from Billy. She blinked her dark, scabs-on-fire eyes and frowned as if she believed Billy a lower form of life—a toad to be squashed or an ant to burn under her mighty, Fate-blooded magnifying glass.

  Billy ignored her. He was her maker and she needed to show respect. But when one had Fate blood in one’s veins, one tended to be an asshole.

  He peered at the wonder that was Mount Vesuvius and the unfortunate, smoggy reminder of humanity that lingered in the air around the volcano.

  He pointed at the slopes. “So you’re telling me your da and the Shifter Progenitor stashed him in there?”

  The Burnerized past- and future-seer of the Jani Prime curled her lip. A wisp of her black, scorched hair flitted across her face and she flicked it away as if flicking a bug.

  She growled.

  Their three-member Praetorian Guard entourage stiffened. One placed his hand on his weapon.

  Billy rolled his eyes. “What did I tell you three, huh?”

  The enthraller pumped out yet another wave of ‘calm’ and ‘focused.’

  Ismene sneered.

  “She won’t hurt you.” Billy pointed at Ismene’s ashen nose. “Will you, dove?”

  “Not unless I want a snack.” Her sneer grew larger.

  Billy wrapped his hand around her neck before the security detail started their next inhalations. Before Ismene twitched.

  “You understand what is at stake, do you not, sweet daughter?” She was two millennia old to his half-century, but she needed to be reminded whose venom flowed in her veins.

  “You were a tool of Fates then, Father. You are a tool of Fates now.” She pushed him off. “Remember that.”

  “Yes, yes.” Billy snapped his fingers. A flow of sparks followed, starting with blue, then green, then yellow and orange. It ended with a blast of red and a perfect sphere of smoke. “I’m the perfect tool for the job.”

  Ismene growled again.

  “Why don’t you just draw me a map, chicken?” Billy swirled his finger along the SUV’s hood. “I find your company tedious.”

  Ismene lunged, but she wasn’t anywhere near Billy’s speed. She slammed into the SUV where he used to be.

  Billy crossed one foot over the other and leaned against the shoulder of the enthraller. “I never realized how bad some of us smell.” He pinched his nose and scrunched up his lips. “I wish to apologize to you and your brethren, my dear Shifter buddy, for Miss Stinkydrawers.”

  The enthraller snickered.

  Ismene howled. The other two guards pulled their weapons.

  “Now, now.” Billy stepped between her and the enthraller kid. “We all know you want a word with our Progenitor as much as I do.” He pointed at the guards. “Going boom because you can’t keep it in your pants benefits no one.”

  She shook. Her back stiffened. But she stopped threatening the guards.

  Her past-seer foamed from her, a corrosive, repulsive wave of energy that slid from her body more than sang the way most Fates’ abilities worked. But she was the world’s only Burnerized Fate, so she was entitled to a Burnerized seer.

  “Ladon-Human murdered my niece while I climbed that mountain.” She pointed over his head at the volcano behind them. “She died and my boys died with her.”

  Billy knew the story. Trajan had filled him in. Ismene’s brother, Faustus, had put a hit out on Scary Girlfriend’s then-husband and daughter. Blood had been spilled. Ladon came for Faustus’s daughter as revenge.

  Seemed there’d been a lot of tit-for-tat going on in the Roman Empire.

  And, it seemed, at the moment the kids bled out, the Jani Prime had been following the Fate and Shifter Progenitors up the side of Vesuvius while the godlings pinioned the Maker of Burners into the volcano.

  One was not likely to forget that particular
horror, Burnerized or not. And Billy thought the Seraphim were assholes.

  When he asked if the less-crazy present-seer of the Jani Prime could take him up instead, Trajan had laughed. “No one is as bound by fate as the Fates themselves,” he’d drawled. Then he’d waved one of his new-stigmata hands in Billy’s general direction. “Mira has another task.”

  So Billy crossed the ocean with Ismene in a sterile, bright-white, high-tech Burner cage-containment unit and with a set of guards who were more than aware of the danger they were in, yet got on the plane anyway.

  Billy pushed Ismene toward the volcano. “Let us find our path, shall we?”

  The guards holstered their weapons. All three stepped forward. Trajan had said to take at least one up the mountain with them.

  One, in case Ismene—or the Maker of Burners—needed a snack.

  Billy had promised the princess he would be a better man. “You three stay here.”

  ‘Confusion’ wafted off the enthraller.

  “I’ll ring when it’s time, boys.” Billy pulled his nifty Praesagio phone from his pocket. “Do not follow the Burners into the caldera of a volcano, understand?” He tucked it back into his pocket.

  Thankfully, they didn’t move to follow.

  Billy returned his attention to Ismene. “Time to face the mountain,” he said, and pushed her toward the slope.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Over the Rockies…

  Daniel could not see. He continued to wear the visual optimizers—neither his future-seer nor Addy’s present-seer considered removing them a good idea—but the scene they showed him was not reality.

  Timothy had touched the port into his brain and the world turned… eerie. Strange. Harshly angled and… mathematical. And full. Utterly, completely, full of data.

  Was he looking at new space? Or did his brother download something into his optimizers’ buffer? Was Daniel looking at data ghosts?

  Yet his mind had decided to think about other things, as he suspected a Progenitor-powered enthralling had ordered it to do. He shrugged it off.

  Dunn made Eric stay with Andreas and Mira, so he had no one to ask. Marcus wanted only to learn about Timothy. Did he speak? Where is he? Is he alive? Are you alive? Brother, are you real?

  Marcus, the only one of their triad still breathing, and he’d become an old man.

  Daniel now relied on Addy’s radar-like seer: Colors clarified as if pulled from Addy’s stored opinion of “true red” and “perfect yellow.” Seatbacks looked straighter than they felt against his spine, and Harold’s frowns appeared deep and emotive.

  Harold, it seemed, was of two minds—angry at being enthralled, but enthralled nonetheless.

  Daniel dreamed up the world, really, from the pings of a murderer’s what-is.

  He pretty much shrugged that off, too.

  Harold went forward to talk to the enthralled Praesagio pilots. The helicopter was some sort of large warbird—one rotor instead of the twin-rotor monstrosities Praesagio supposedly usually flew—and louder than any machine Daniel had ever been near, much less inside of. He wore a headset to protect his ears and to communicate with the other passengers.

  Marcus, for the most part, sat quietly next to Daniel. Dunn, for hers, watched him with a detached, somewhat annoyed look probably caused by his constant present-seer scanning of the copter.

  Dunn did seem to find his body-sharing predicament entertaining—or unsettling. Perhaps both. Addy’s present-seer picked up flickers of disapproval he did not quite understand.

  She watched him for most of their first four hours in the air, her Progenitor eyes narrow and her mouth scrunched up as if she was concentrating on forming just the correct and perfect opinion of Daniel-in-Adrestia.

  Too bad Dunn didn’t enthrall a shrugging off of motion sickness. Or his cramps. Daniel’s belly still cinched into a ball under his kidneys.

  The two security personnel attached to the copter were both Shifters. They were average-size, average-looking men, as many morphers tended to make themselves. Both forgettable.

  To Daniel’s surprise, neither of them attempted to interact with their Progenitor.

  The pilot and co-pilot were Fates and, as both Marcus and Daniel felt, triad mates. The pilot’s mechanical-sounding past-seer would occasionally loop through the passenger compartment, and would usually be followed by the co-pilot’s equally-mechanical present-seer.

  Each time either of them tested the integrity of their warbird, the irreality of the data pumped into Daniel’s brain by the visual optimizers flickered.

  “They’re Ulpi,” Marcus said, as if the fact that they were direct descendants of Trajan had any effect on the outcome of their ride or the continued sense of data ghosts in Daniel’s head.

  Dunn sniffed as if Daniel smelled foul. Before Harold moved up front, she’d been grilling him about the Guard, what he knew of “the base,” the “godhead” Emperor Trajan, Dmitri Pavlovich’s ascension to CEO of Praesagio Industries, and Rysa Torres Drake’s initiation of so many of the problems of the world.

  Torres should have become the Ambusti Prime, Addy whined.

  Daniel winced. Addy was becoming… harsher. Her attempts to regain at least some control felt more and more like claws hooking into the back of his mind.

  The cramps in his lower belly did not help.

  Marcus patted his shoulder. “It’s okay to ask her for pain relief,” he said into the mic on his own headset. He still sounded too paternalistic. Too comforting, especially since Dunn could hear him, too.

  Addy snickered. Pity, pity, pity…. she clucked.

  Quiet, Daniel hissed back.

  You will need to let me out sooner or later, little boy. You are in over your precious, man-child head.

  When this was done—whatever this was—he’d ask Eric and Sandro Torres to help him with his Adrestia problem.

  Dunn wiggled in her seat. She watched him again, a tiny woman in a huge headset locked into a seat on a whirring Praesagio deathbird. She swirled her finger in Daniel’s general direction. “Perhaps you should ask your co-pilot how best to deal with that body’s menstrual pains.”

  Talking to Addy about anything helped no one. Daniel frowned at Dunn.

  She tugged on her headset. They wore seat restraints as well; his belt lay nicely on his shoulder and crossed between his breasts, but Dunn was a good five inches shorter than him, and hers cut into her neck.

  Seemed the men who designed the world cared nothing for the plight of petite Progenitors.

  “We could get you a cozy for that.” Daniel pointed at the belt. “I saw one at the convenience store before it blew up. It was sitting next to the diapers and the canisters of baby formula.”

  A crisp sense of Oh no you didn’t washed up from the back of his mind. Addy snickered again.

  Marcus groaned.

  Perhaps enthralling Daniel to shrug off much of his caring had not been the best idea.

  Dunn’s eyes narrowed, but at least she didn’t zap him with another enthralling.

  “How’s the ibuprofen working?” She nodded toward his belly.

  The drugs masked his cramps more than offered true relief. The tight cinching in his gut still felt as if new-space was trying to suck his body through a three-dimensional pinhole in his pelvic floor.

  Daniel was pretty sure his uterus had turned into something called a “black hole,” a terrifying cosmological entity Addy had read about in a science magazine. Damned things stopped time, too, or at least made each new wave of cramps feel as if they lasted an eternity.

  Dunn snickered.

  In the back of his mindscape, so did Addy.

  Daniel pulled out his phone. Testing the eerie overlaying of his optimizers with another device should distract him somewhat from the hell in which he currently found himself mired.

  He’d surfaced enough times over the past one hundred fifty years to get a sense of the speed of technological change. He also had access to all of Addy’s procedural memory, an
d much of her contextual as well, which meant that even though he now had to deal with their shared body’s functions, he didn’t need to learn how to do it. He may not like being a woman, but he had it under control, no matter what Dunn thought.

  The copter bounced along. The nauseous fluttering welling upward from the hard knot of agony in his belly bounced right along with it.

  The screen of his phone burst on and he saw… numbers. Not the symbols of numbers, but the concepts of the numbers—their architecture, their internal plumbing and their electrical wiring.

  Daniel dropped the phone and leaned his head against his seat. He shouldn’t be shrugging off the data ghosts, but he couldn’t fight the Shifter Progenitor’s enthrallings. No one could. He’d just watched her enthrall Andreas Sisto, and no one enthralled Andreas.

  “Please make this stop,” he said. “Before we reach the base. I cannot think straight.”

  “And why would I do that?” Dunn asked.

  Harold walked toward their seats. He gripped the handhold straps along the wall and stopped next to Marcus, but didn’t say anything.

  Marcus’s seer extended outward to Harold and Harold only; Daniel sensed the touch but nothing of the information transferred.

  Marcus looked up at Harold before looking directly at Dunn. “Because he asked nicely,” he barked.

  Fear washed up from under Daniel’s consciousness—not from Addy, but from a deeper, more Daniel place.

  From the floor of his Draki future-seer. From his connection to his brother—brothers.

  “Oh… he asked nicely, did he?” Dunn rolled her eyes. “Well, gosh, I better get right on making all his problems go away.”

  Harold grinned, and his voice took on a sweet sing-song quality Daniel recognized. Harold was pulling out his conciliatory tone—the one he used to defuse confrontations—just for Dunn. “We land in fifteen minutes. If—”

  Daniel gripped Marcus’s arm but spoke to Dunn. “Don’t you realize Timothy—who is not here—placed some sort of data inside the tech on my face?” He tapped the optimizers. “They no longer work properly. I must use Addy’s seer to see. Please do what I ask. Please.” He needed to be able to think. The pain made the fog worse. Addy’s muddling made it worse. And a ‘shrug it off’ enthralling only went so far. “Do what Marcus—”