The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “Holster your weapons,” she commanded.

  The cops did as they were told.

  “See me,” she said. “Not Daisy.”

  The pretty-boy cop gasped and stepped back from Daisy. “You’re one of them,” he breathed.

  Daisy held out her hands in frustration. “Really, Mom?”

  The cop moved to pull his weapon, but stopped short because of her enthralling.

  Daisy peered at his face again. “Officer,” she said. “Hi. I’m the woman you met in the bar the night that hotel worker was murdered.”

  He waved his hands like a blind man. “Where are you?”

  Daisy gripped his palm. “I am right in front of you. That other woman, the one you see, she’s my mother. We are both one of them, though I do not play stupid games.” She looked over her shoulder at Dunn. “My abilities do not include reversing my mother’s enthrallings.”

  He cupped her waist with his other hand. “I hear and feel you. Are you saying that the woman next to the car has made it so I cannot see you?”

  “Yes,” Daisy said. “But as weird as that might seem, her enthralling of you and your fellow officers is the least of our problems right now.”

  A couple of the other cops muttered about Trajan and his little show.

  Why were they wasting time at the end of the world? Dunn wanted to breathe the air. To enjoy her last moments. Talking to cops was not at all enjoyable.

  “I am the Mother of Shifters,” she said. “I am the Progenitor of the Mutatae.” She held out her hand and thought of all things of this earth: fate, fire, shifter, and dragon.

  A flame danced over Dunn’s palm. “Many of you carry my genetics even though you do not manifest my abilities.”

  The cop’s mouth opened and closed.

  Go! Now! the Whispering One said. We still have a chance!

  Dunn closed her hand. “The Emperor Trajan is my son.”

  “So the video is real,” one of the other cops said.

  Dunn adjusted the bag. “Yes,” she said. Probably best that these men and women not struggle with their own distrust when the world ends.

  The cop’s grip on Daisy tightened. “Do you need help, miss?” he said.

  “Let go of my daughter,” Dunn said.

  He let go.

  “I hate you, Mother,” Daisy said. “If Daniel is right and we only have three hours, then you need to know just how much I hate you right now.”

  All her children hated her. If they didn’t hate her, they would never have fended for themselves. Growing to hate their mother was an important part of being a First.

  She ignored Daisy’s outburst. “There are other Progenitors,” she said. “A man whose sneezes topple buildings. Another whose descendants see all that what-was-is-will-be. And two more who live with dragons.”

  Dragons! screamed the Whispering One.

  “And a sixth who haunts me.” There was no other explanation.

  Yes! Listen! You can still fix this! Return to the base!

  The cop spread out his arms. “If you need help, we can—”

  “Quiet.”

  His mouth snapped shut.

  “Help,” she said. “Yes. Do your best.”

  The cop nodded, as did the other six.

  “Go,” Dunn said.

  The cops nodded in unison, and as one, turned away to attend to matters more pressing than the sudden appearance of a Progenitor.

  Dunn walked to the open wall of the parking garage. Downtown Cheyenne spread out before her in all its early evening glory. The sun blazed between the buildings in all its golden, honeyed brightness. Warmth bounced between windows and street signs, to the arches and the open parks between the ramp and the state capitol buildings not far away. It kissed the traffic and it danced over the chilled, frantic-and-frightened pedestrians.

  Seemed the news had gotten out.

  She’d driven by an open playground about two blocks away, one with a nice, tall slide and all the room she needed for dealing with her dueling voices—her own, telling her to live the final moments of her life as herself, and the whispers, telling her to fall in line and to take Daisy with her into the abyss.

  She looked over the edge. They were three stories above the cold and icy sidewalk below. The stairs would probably bring more cop-provided interference. A climb down, attention.

  Dunn rolled her shoulders. She’d hidden for two thousand three hundred years behind faces and names not her own. She’d birthed her share of powerful people, and danced out of the way of others. She’d done the bidding of the whispers. She’d made monsters and she’d made heroes.

  She jumped onto the concrete barrier between her and the open air of Cheyenne. A pedestrian looked up, pointed, and yelled.

  “Daisy,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Her daughter obediently followed her onto the concrete barrier. Daisy dug her alchemistic fingers into the concrete. Handholds appeared.

  And Dunn, a goddess of birth and life, followed her daughter down the open side of a parking garage in a small city on the edge of the frontier.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Sister drove the bus. They traveled too fast on a too-slick road, but if anyone could control their rolling hotel, Sister could. Ladon should spell her soon, but he doubted she would give up the wheel before they reached Cheyenne.

  He wouldn’t, if he were driving. He fielded calls instead.

  The two dragons curled around each other in the back and continued to throw massive amounts of information between themselves. Neither seemed all that upset that Rysa had volunteered to help Andreas get the midnight blades to his mother. They—and Sister—agreed that she was the best choice for the job. Andreas would not hurt her. She had the Legion’s Second at her back, even if he was enthralled.

  Dunn had taken Daisy with her when she ran from a place Harold called “the base.”

  The hairs on the back of Ladon’s neck had bristled when he learned “the base” was a real place and not the imaginings of a ghost who’d hitched a ride in his head, but he’d kept that little bit of gut reaction to himself. Dunn had Daisy, and even though he was knotted up because Rysa went with Andreas, he knew—they all knew—that Daisy was in much greater danger.

  Dunn had activated her and she was manifesting some new ability to alter materials as if morphing or healing them.

  While pregnant. Sister’s response had been reserved to the point that Sister-Dragon had not passed much of its detail to her brother.

  This went beyond Dunn’s normal shenanigans. While she often hurt people, she very rarely caused this level of pain.

  If Andreas didn’t punch his mother, Ladon would. Then both dragons would pummel her with their tails while Sister broke her kneecaps.

  Not a nice thing to do to a normal—nor an acceptable modern response—but Dunn was not normal in any sense of the word, and often the only thing that broke a hole in her self-imposed bubble of bad behavior was a good swatting.

  This wouldn’t be the first time they swatted Dunn back to reality and forced her to rectify the damage she’d caused.

  Except now, if the multiple calls from Harold Demshire were to be believed, they did not have time to swat Dunn.

  Ladon plugged his phone into the charger station next to the driver’s seat.

  Sister watched his hands, then glanced into the mirror to look at the conferencing dragons. “Harold and Marcus vanish for eight months and then Harold calls with quite a tale,” she said.

  Ladon leaned back against the rail along the steps down to the bus’s front door. He could speak to Sister better if he sat on the steps. “Nothing of what Harold said conflicts with the information we already had,” he said.

  “If anything, he explained a couple of twenty-three-century-old mysteries.”

  Sister did not seem surprised by the revelations passed on by Harold Demshire. About Daniel and new-space. About rips in space and Dunn and the supposed Whispering One and the need to build some sort of cannon to sto
p the coming threat.

  The threat that he, Rysa, and Dragon had encountered before leaving the cave. The threat that now knew about them, and had adjusted up a timetable no one other than Trajan seemingly knew about.

  Threats he did not share with Ladon and Sister because of their dragons.

  Or about how Billy Bare was on his way back from Italy with the Burner Progenitor, and how Harold, Marcus, and Daniel-Adrestia were headed to Denver to talk to the Maker of Burners.

  How Billy caught the Burner Progenitor was a mystery Harold’s calls did not answer, yet it seemed to be true. Billy and his captive were on a high-speed Praesagio aircraft and would land in Denver in approximately six hours.

  A Burner. On a plane. Of all Harold’s tales, that one seemed the most farfetched. And, it seemed, Billy would land after the end of the world.

  The bit about time travel did, in a way, explain Nate’s presence in Ladon’s head better than any Daniel-like ghost haunting. And the fact that his memories of Nate’s presence—and Nate’s memories—seemed to mirror the slippery nature of the so-called Whispering One. At least then Nate had an excuse for camping in Ladon’s brain.

  Sister had laughed, but it had been one of her “I believe you though I need to process that I believe you” laughs Ladon knew all too well.

  Both dragons had shrugged it off and gone back to talking to each other.

  But the most frightening question still remained: Were they about to be attacked by other dragons? Dragons like Dragon and Sister-Dragon, or something completely different? Because what they met in the vision was not at all like the dragons he knew.

  Ladon rubbed his face. “What the hell is going on?” he asked.

  In the rear of the bus, the two dragons coiled into a ball. They slinked and they slid and for a moment, they looked like a brightly-colored swirling infinity symbol patterned with many more, smaller infinities.

  They, like Ladon and Sister, were trying to work out their shock.

  Sister checked the mirrors and moved the bus to the other lane. They’d make Cheyenne on Andreas and Rysa’s heels. All Rysa’s attempts to get Andreas to slow down and wait for them had gone unheeded by everyone but Sister, who responded by increasing the speed of the bus to technically unsafe levels.

  Hopefully, the highway patrol would leave them alone.

  She wiggled in the seat. Her pregnancy had moved to obvious now, though still small enough it didn’t interfere with her movements or her ability to steer well. But Ladon, like Derek, could tell that her body was adjusting to little Alexei’s presence.

  “Human sacrifices. Dogs and cats living together. It’ll be mass hysteria,” she said.

  “What?” His sister wasn’t making sense, though if her gallows humor had started to surface, then they really were in trouble.

  She shook her head. “Rysa is right. You do need to watch more movies.”

  Movies? “When have you been watching movies?” Watching movies was very un-Sister-like.

  “What do you think I’ve been doing these past few weeks of my husband-imposed resting time?” She tapped the steering wheel.

  “How very modern of you, Sister,” Ladon said. His sister was now a modernly literate American at the end of the world.

  She laughed. “It seemed like the best thing to do at the time.” She swirled her finger at his phone. “If I had known there’d be more issues, I would have been scraping the rust off my broadsword skills instead of watching Ghostbusters.”

  Now Ladon laughed. They shouldn’t be laughing. He should be on the phone gathering every available tidbit of information.

  Yet this kind of interaction with his sister had not happened in a very long time. Not since his melancholy took hold of his life after Charlotte died.

  Rysa had pulled him out of his pit and had brought movies into his sister’s life.

  “We’re about a half hour out of Cheyenne,” Sister said.

  Ladon nodded. He twirled his phone’s charger cable around his finger. “I apologized to Rysa for the melancholy.”

  Sister glanced at him, then into the mirror at the dragons. “That’s for the best,” she said.

  Yes, it was for the best. At least they both had strong mate bonds going into the end. “I don’t think this is a run-of-the-mill apocalypse,” he said. Not if dragons were involved.

  She glanced into the mirror again. “Dragon thinks we are about to experience an extinction-level event.” She returned her gaze to the road. “The beasts seem…” She frowned, and didn’t finish her thought.

  Ladon watched the two dragons. They slowed their climbing over each other, but their colors and patterns continued to blend and combine, making it very difficult to tell visually where one started and the other ended.

  He closed his eyes and listened not just with his ears, but also with his sense of Dragon. The beasts threw dragon language at each other and listening to them was like watching explosion after explosion in one of Sister’s movies.

  Dragon and his sister were exploding, imploding, and rebuilding all sorts of cathedrals of meaning.

  “They’re synchronizing,” Ladon said. They synchronized before a battle. This was not new, though the intensity of the act was.

  Sister frowned again. “They both saw the monster in the vision,” she said. “Monsters lead to extinction-level events.”

  Ladon stood. “I will get our armored jackets.”

  She nodded. “I can’t zip mine anymore,” she patted her belly. “But bring it up anyway, please.”

  He touched her shoulder. “Nothing will happen to this babe, Sister. I swear to you I will not allow your son to be assassinated by Fates or Shifters.” He looked back at the synchronizing beasts. “Or by monstrous dragons.”

  She blinked but didn’t look up at his face. “Nor will I allow anything to happen to your new wife, Brother.”

  They would protect their family, including Andreas, Daisy, and Gavin Bower. And, Ladon was beginning to suspect, Billy the Burner and the people of Praesagio Industries.

  They would protect the entire planet. That’s what they did, he and his sister. They built and they protected no matter the damage it caused their own bodies.

  The dragons abruptly stopped moving. They stood side by side, in a perfect mirror stance, necks curved identically, one foot raised, hides shimmering in exactly the same way. Their language flowed from one dragon and back to the other. It slid from head to tail then to tail to head.

  They weren’t only talking to each other, they were talking to the world as one.

  Twenty-three centuries, and he and Sister had never grasped any true understanding of what their beasts said with their hides. Perhaps they never tried because it wasn’t necessary. Or perhaps it never happened because of their so-called blind spots, the behaviors he and Sister exhibited that everyone else thought strange but did not register as such for them.

  He shrugged and walked toward the two dragons. Ready? he pushed.

  Dragon twisted away from his sister at the same time she twisted away from him. They would interact with the world separately until they engaged in battle, but that separateness would be synchronized.

  Yes, they pushed at the same time.

  “Good,” Ladon said. “Goal one: Subdue Dunn.”

  They both nodded their heads.

  We must convince Dunn to remove all her enthrallings, they pushed.

  Ladon picked up his armored jacket from one of the back seats. “Yes. Once she’s under control, she will release Daisy and Andreas.”

  Yes, they pushed.

  Then we will figure out what ‘three hours until the end of the world’ means, he pushed.

  Sister-Dragon rolled toward the front of the bus, to be next to Sister. The words are precise enough, Brother-Human, she pushed.

  We are Legion, Dragon pushed. They mean we have three hours before we protect our own.

  They were three hours out from what was probably going to be the fight of their lives.

  Or
their deaths.

  He looked out at the sky outside. As long as Rysa survived. He couldn’t stomach the thought of losing her, too.

  Dragon touched his shoulder, but did not push a response.

  Ladon folded the jackets over his arm and returned to the front of the bus, and left the beasts to their preparations.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Cheyenne reminded Rysa of the small southern Minnesota towns she’d visited—clean, bright, with lots of low-slung, utilitarian buildings. Cheyenne also housed Wyoming’s lovely-if-generic state capitol building, with its dome and its Grecian columns.

  They were off the freeway, onto one of Cheyenne’s major streets, and less than six blocks from Dunn’s location. She’d parked in a garage connected to the Regional Medical Center—which, Rysa learned from her online stalking of the city, wasn’t that far northeast of where they were now.

  Her online searches also pulled up a video of a pair of dark-haired women climbing down the outside of the parking garage like two human geckos.

  Andreas tapped the screen of Rysa’s phone. “That’s my mother.” He glanced over his shoulder. “The other woman looks like Daisy.”

  “Yes.” Daisy climbed down the outside brick of a parking garage with her mother. This could not be good.

  Andreas’s grip on the steering wheel tightened yet again. “So this new ability allows them to scale buildings?”

  Why was he so disbelieving? Though the answer seemed obvious: He didn’t want to believe any of what was happening, and honestly, neither did Rysa.

  Andreas pointed at the screen again. “The brick looks damaged. Does it look like they morphed their hands?”

  Dunn and Daisy had manifested a new, Spider-man-like ability right before the world burst into flames. “Can they do that?”