The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Their Maker did another little dance. “And save the fucking world! Don’t forget saving the world. We semi-saved the world twice! Or maybe it’s billions of times.” He shrugged. “Causal loops, and all.”

  Was Billy like that? So… toddler-esque with the dancing and the jumping from topic to topic? He half expected their Maker to ask for biscuits and a juice box. How very Burner of you, Billy thought.

  Maybe engaging him might get better cooperation. “What’s your name?”

  “Ah! Yes.” The Maker of Burners extended his hand to shake. “I apologize.” But he pulled back his hand and tapped his temple before Billy could respond. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen a friendly face. Any face. Ja!”

  He smiled again.

  His Progenitor thrust forward his oil-dripping hand once again. “Name’s Terry, Kumpel. Terrance Schmidt. Nice to meet you, my unexpected son.”

  And once again, he yanked back his hand before Billy could respond.

  Terry peered up at Billy’s eyes, then squatted next to Ismene again. A small cyclone of daisy-shaped sparkles formed around his dangly bits and then burst upward between his thighs like a little rain of flowery fireworks.

  The daisy fireworks turned into a Medusa-head of writhing Burner implosion snakes.

  Terry extended his hand to help Ismene off the ground. “I apologize, Schätzchen.”

  Ismene groaned and pulled in on herself again. “He’s trying to touch me, isn’t he?”

  Terry shrugged. “Did either of you bring an extra uniform?” He waved at his chest. “Mine disintegrated about a century after my supposed-brethren locked me behind those rocks.”

  Terry cocked his head the way all Burners twisted their necks—a little too far and a little too angled to be truly human. His eyes narrowed.

  He lightly, just-touching, ran a fingertip over Ismene’s cheek.

  She shivered.

  A deep, glowing valley opened in her flesh, one that burned away her skin and muscle all the way down to her skull.

  She screamed and flung herself toward Billy. The stench of bubbling Burner flesh filled the small cave and the tunnel behind them. Haze lifted from her shoulders and her skin.

  Ismene whimpered and wrapped her arms around Billy’s legs.

  “Why did you do that?” he yelled. They were supposed to bring this thing down the mountain with them? He was going to kill them. He’d eat the entire security team before they made it back to the main road. He’d eat Italy before they got the fucker on a plane to The States.

  Terry did not react to Billy yelling at him; he just put his finger in his mouth. “Lecker,” he said around his digit.

  Billy hauled Ismene to her feet. She might be a selfish bitch, but she didn’t deserve a hole in her cheek. “Oh, dove, hold on. I’ll get you out of here.”

  She touched her face and growled like a terrified, cornered animal—like the frightened, wounded badger she was.

  Terry frowned. “The reports said the Emperor sent the vessel to Vesuvius.”

  Was Terry coherent enough to explain why they were all up here? “Tell us why you need a vessel and what you are supposed to do once we take you back to The States.”

  Medusa snakes changed to horse tails and manes, which morphed into waterfalls. Then they all vanished into a haze of tiny sparkles. Terry narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest. “I am here because I was too dangerous to walk among the normals for the twenty-three centuries between when we awoke and when we would be needed.” He rolled his shoulders. “I made just enough of you before they locked me up to ensure there’d always be enough Burners around to cause problems.”

  He grinned. “Cecilia and that South African asshole who started calling himself Janus needed to be out there.” He pointed down the tunnel. “Needed to be continually infecting the normals so that when the Incursion opens, there will be fighters.”

  He shrugged and the sparkles flowed from red to green to blue.

  Billy’s entire body stiffened. His entire person took on the same frightened, wounded-badger stance as Ismene, but not because of Terry.

  Because of the words Terry said. “Incursion?” Billy asked.

  Incursion was not a kindly word. Not one used in an agreeable fashion. No one said “I’m so happy about the rat’s incursion into my basement!” No one, except those doing the incursing, thought of such a moment as a good thing.

  Terry bounced on the balls of his feet. “Oh, yes. The Incursion. It’s bad shite, my friend from Manchester, though if I remember correctly, Manchester survives.” He shrugged again. “Pity, really, considering.”

  He winked. “It’s all bad shite either way.”

  Terry’s wound-up dancing, his babbling, his neck-cracking, all pointed toward a Burner who was about to do something random. Billy had been there before as, he suspected, had Ismene. But a wound-up godling of chaos was not the same as a random Burner’s attacks or explosions.

  Their Progenitor was, as he said, locked up for a reason.

  “Obviously it’s bad shite, friend.” Billy leaned Ismene against the rock wall. “Dove, does your future-seer see anything about an incursion?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m not immune to the fog.”

  Terry pointed at her. “The fog! Ha!” He twirled around. “I remember the reports!” He danced again. “Is the Incursion causing the fog? Is it a causal reset point? Who knows!” He shrugged. “Not that I paid all that much attention. It’s all loops and redoes and everyone being bound up by fate.”

  “Terrance!” Billy yelled in his best Boyfriend voice as he pointed at Terry. Best to put to use the few days he spent with Ladon and get this situation under control.

  Their Progenitor stopped cold in the middle of a little jig with one arm raised over his head and the other reaching outward toward the rocks. His oozing Burner randomness froze also, with his fireworks and his lava flickering as if paused. “I would rethink your strategy, Sohn.”

  He snapped his fingers.

  The concussive wave knocked Billy against the wall. His head bounced, as did Ismene’s. They both slid down the jagged rocks.

  A rock snagged open Billy’s lip.

  I’m going to have a scar, he thought, even though he knew what a stupid thought it was. How dense and selfish and ridiculous. He’d be fine once the rock face exploded and showered them with obsidian shrapnel.

  So no, he wouldn’t have a scar. The dead don’t have scars. The dead explode.

  Terry did a little pirouette. “They’re coming.” He pointed upward at the ceiling of the cave. “No stopping that.” He pirouetted again, but in the opposite direction. “If our people had listened to me instead of locking me in here, we’d be up there.” He pointed at the ceiling again. “But no. Terry’s a fiend! Terry’s too dangerous!”

  Billy’s blood—the drop or two on the rock—whined.

  Not long now, he thought. There’d be a chain reaction, for sure. First the rock, then Billy. Then Ismene. Then their crazy wanker Maker and then the whole of Italy.

  Why’d he come up here? He was a Burner. Did he think he’d find a way to save his soul by taking on the Devil himself? Shrapnel was about to rip him into bits that would in turn make more and more shrapnel.

  Billy was about to become his own cycling pattern of smaller and smaller deaths.

  All because he thought he could be a better man. All because he thought he could save his princess and be the brave king she asked him to be.

  The bits and pieces, the levers and the levels of the universe seemed to have other plans. For him. For Ismene. For Death himself.

  Terry was right there, right over him, staring at Billy’s whining, imploding blood. “Well, well.” He inhaled as if savoring the aroma of a perfectly prepared steak with a butter-drenched baked potato and hearty, warm asparagus.

  Billy Bare, the perfect meal.

  Terry licked the rock. The whine stopped. He closed his eyes and licked his lips and wiped his mouth on the back of
his hand. “It took me two thousand years to figure out how to channel the rage,” he said. “I am rage, son. I am chaos. It’s literally me.”

  He held his hand, fingers splayed, between his face and Billy’s. “Body and blood. Yours. Mine. Hers.”

  Ismene growled again.

  He giggled. “And here the Emperor calls himself the Godhead.”

  What would Mira do in this moment? What would his princess do? The tsunami wave was so far over his head now he was for sure going to drown. But he’d promised Rysa he’d be a better man. So he had to try.

  “We need to get you down the mountain, friend,” he said.

  Terry nodded. “Ja, we do.” The clicking locked on to a nasty version of the Maker of Burners. An evil version who would love to end the world. “I’m the most explosive.” He frowned. “The only one with the blood concussive enough to reach the sky.”

  The only Burner powerful enough to take the mountain, if he wanted.

  “Why do you have that sword?” Terry asked.

  Billy gripped the strap of his scabbard. “It’s mine. Rysa gave it to me. I’m—”

  “You are nothing,” Terry snarled, but daisies appeared around his head again. Daisies and butterflies.

  He kicked Ismene. “You are not the vessel.”

  She whipped and screamed and hit at the air. “Leave me alone!”

  Was Billy watching Ismene react the same way to their Progenitor as normals reacted to him and to Ismene? Did they cause the same visceral, below-consciousness, intense fear? Was there something in the brain of a human—even a Burnerized human like Ismene—that knew when it was in the presence of evil?

  Or potential evil. Terry didn’t know what he was doing. Not really. None of them did. They were chaotic death and pain.

  But if that wasn’t evil, Billy didn’t know what was.

  How could he be the man Rysa needed him to be? How could he do the job the Emperor trusted him with?

  He was a Burner and all Burners were evil.

  Terry lit his thumb first, then his pointer finger, then his middle. “We are one, us Burners. We are the rage that will stem the tide.”

  “Vanished like a dragon,” Ismene whispered. She pulled herself away from both Billy and Terry. “You’re invisible.”

  “No, Schätzchen, I’m the Burning World.”

  Terry somehow got between Billy and Ismene. He was near the rock face, then he wasn’t, and now Billy inhaled his oozing sparkling rivers of Burner randomness.

  But he wasn’t between Billy and Ismene, either. He manifested adjacent to them as if he walked in a direction they could not.

  “You are not the vessel,” he yelled directly into Ismene’s face. “In my version of the future, you are the Usurper. The Burner Queen who changes dragons into demons. You rise from the ashes of the Burned World and you kill as many of our kind as you do theirs.”

  He bit into her neck. Bit deep, and tore off a massive hunk of her flesh.

  Ismene hit and swung, but her fists no more made contact with Terry than Terry’s words made contact with her ears.

  “Stop!” What was Billy supposed to do? How was he supposed to stop this shit show?

  Terry chewed away at Ismene’s shoulder. “You want to know what’s in the reports, boy?” He ripped another hunk off her arm.

  “You don’t have to kill her!” When would the Burner evil stop?

  Ismene blinked and her lips rounded. Her heart still beat. No whining. No implosion, but her skin had turned the same gray as the stone around them.

  She’d stopped fighting. Stopped whimpering. She might as well be dead.

  Terry wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Don’t you know anything about Fates, boy?” He poked at Ismene’s wounds. “You British like to ask the idiotische question about time travel and killing Hitler.” He took another bite off Ismene. “You’ve spent time with her. Think it through.”

  That didn’t mean this Ismene, this version of Rysa’s aunt, would become the monster who… what? Unleashed a torrent of hellfire? Billy did not know. He was not a Fate.

  She had a personality problem. This he knew well. But he could warn his princess. He could relay what little information Terry shared. Ismene’s fate was not set.

  Terry was going to consume her anyway.

  If Billy and Ismene both had been a Fates, this moment wouldn’t drip with absurdity. If they had been Shifters, there would be the drama, but at least they wouldn’t eat their own. If they’d been Boyfriend and Scary Girlfriend, Terry would already be down the mountain and in the containment unit, all contained, talked down from his Burner ledge, and calmly playing Go Fish with the two dragons.

  But Billy was not Fate. He was not Shifter, and he most certainly was not worthy of being dragon.

  He was, though, fire. He was unpredictable.

  His beloved Poke, his magic sword, his midnight-bladed friend, sank into Terry’s belly, and then into the rock behind him.

  Poke might not be Janus’s sword, but it did the job. Terry, now pinioned, could no longer reach Ismene.

  She slid down the wall into a heap on the tunnel floor.

  “Dove,” Billy said. “Oh, dove.” Ismene wasn’t healing. Terry had cracked through her collarbone and taken most of her arm. “I can carry you down.”

  She stared up at the ceiling. “Ghosts,” she whispered. “I am only afraid of ghosts.”

  Terry hung from the wall next to them, his face split by a stupid grin and his fingers drumming out a rhythm on the rock. Tap tap tap. Taptaptap. Ping. Ping.

  Ismene wrapped the fingers of her good hand around Billy’s. “My brother haunts me,” she said. “Our Progenitor is just like him. I never fought back against Faustus, either.”

  Jesus, Billy thought. He understood. He’d seen this before with so many women. With his mum. With the groupies. “It’s okay.” It wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay. But Ismene didn’t need to hear that.

  Terry snickered. “It’ll be easier for me to stabilize if I’ve fed, Täubchen.”

  “Fuck you,” Billy said.

  Terry laughed. “I am what I am, said the scorpion to the frog.”

  “Shut. Up.”

  “I guess you’re my ride down the mountain, huh, Täuberichchen. You and me and chewed-up Usurper makes three.” He tapped at the rock again.

  Ismene panted. Her breathing slipped into too shallow and too fast. She wouldn’t make it down the mountain. She wouldn’t even make it out of the tunnel.

  “Don’t go boom, huh, dove?” Billy said. “Can you do that for me?”

  Ismene tried to laugh. “I’m no man’s slave, Father.”

  Billy kissed her forehead. Maybe they’d go boom. Maybe she’d fizzle. Maybe she’d simply die like a Fate.

  He didn’t know.

  Terry, it seemed, did. “You’d better let me down or we are truly fucked, my British friend.”

  The whine started with her final breath.

  Billy pulled the sword from Terry’s gut. The Maker of Burners dropped directly onto Ismene’s body but he didn’t chew this time.

  He cupped his hands over her heart.

  Her implosion wiggled and writhed the same way every Burner’s writhed and wiggled. Terry wiggled and writhed right along with it, dancing with it, holding it between his hands. And when it shrunk down into a single point, he plucked it from the air.

  There, between his fingers, a small, fluctuating, Burner-red ball that had transferred across into the space Terry occupied. Ismene might not have been able to see Terry, but with her death, he’d pulled her across the veil into his Hell.

  He popped the ball into his mouth as if it were a chocolate truffle and rolled it around on his tongue. “Hmm… salzig… salty,” he said.

  Maybe Billy should skewer him to the rock again and then call in reinforcements. But then again, he doubted reinforcements would help. Terry would skin the security team and the boys wouldn’t know what hit them.

  No, Terry needed a container who c
ould hold him in place. Billy looked down at Poke, then up at his Progenitor, then down at Poke again.

  Boyfriend had explained to him how Poke and Stab—and it seems Janus’s talisman—were based on a Roman design. They were technically gladii, short swords Roman soldiers and gladiators used in combat, though the Praesagio midnight blades had more prominent blade guards than a real Roman gladius.

  Poke was the same length as Billy’s thigh.

  Terry danced around and looked up at Billy.

  “So, you go all Billy Idol with the hair on purpose, mate?” Billy pointed at Terry’s white hair.

  He’d toured once with Billy Idol. Their tour manager had a field day with Billy One and Billy Two. Billy Bare, of course, had been Billy Two.

  One of his best tours. He and Billy One had gotten on smashingly. He was a good man and an excellent, talented artist, even if his leather jacket did stink to high heaven.

  Terry sniffed and his chaotic oozing sniffed right along with him.

  “Gross,” Billy said. He recoiled, but not too much. He wouldn’t let Terry get the upper hand.

  Terry patted the top of his head and said something in German Billy did not understand.

  His hand shot out. He grabbed Billy by the neck. “Stability, ja? Did you bring me Shifters to eat? Ah, tasty Shifters. They’re the lock. We’re the key. That’s why they always die when we try to turn one. The lock and key must match exactly otherwise there’s a boom.”

  Shifters always die. Fates, though, took effort. Normals took effort, too. But what about ghosts?

  “What does it mean to be a vessel?” Billy asked.

  “What?” Terry, his hand still around Billy’s neck, looked puzzled. “I will consume you. Then I will walk down the mountain and make my way to America. We are supposed to go to America, correct? That continent wasn’t yet America when they put me in here.”

  “Yes, Terry, we are supposed to go to The States.”

  Terry nodded. “Would be better if I could stay here. If they’d listened to me and advanced enough that they knew what the fuck they were doing, I probably could have stayed here. That’s the common thread, you know. Not understanding what the magic really is. How much of what you are seeing is real, Sohn?”