The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  They stalked. They followed. They hid in plain sight until the moment they lived for—the moment they pounced.

  Dragon hit the hellhound broadside as it leaped. An explosion of yellow shock radiated from the impact point, across the hound’s belly and back, to the tip of its snout. It howled again, louder this time, and twisted in the air.

  It meant to land on its feet, but Sister-Dragon caught it by the neck.

  They weren’t all that different from Earth creatures, the hellhounds. Their necks broke with a wet grinding snap, just like everything else.

  The hellhound flopped onto its side when it hit the ground.

  Out in the field beyond the scope of light thrown by the bus, out in the snow and the wind, the darkness moved.

  The night itself inched closer.

  Rysa tried to inhale. She tried to tell Ladon and Anna and Andreas that they needed to run, but the words wouldn’t come out.

  “Love?” Ladon lifted her off the cold ground. “Andreas, she can’t breathe.”

  It didn’t matter. The darkness moved.

  A massive packet of information moved between the dragons and their humans. Anna froze where she stood. “Quiet!” she said.

  Ladon blew into Rysa’s mouth. “Rysa. Breathe. Please.”

  Let me out, little Draki Prime, her dark Fate whispered. It’s time.

  A wall of white light washed over them and the hellhound corpse. Daisy had opened the bus’s door.

  And Daisy Reynolds Pavlovich turned the world upside down.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Moments earlier…

  Daisy had slept for fifteen hours after her first activation. She’d also eaten a twelve-ounce porterhouse, three baked potatoes, and half The Land’s salad bar, which she’d followed with an intense-if-disappointing evening with an ex-boyfriend.

  She should have asked Ladon, but she did have her hang-ups and her issues, and at the time, she’d still been just a tad bit scared of him.

  Not anymore. Now the only person who scared her was Ladon’s wife.

  Rysa’s seers visibly shimmered like three massive, pulsating tentacles moving through the air, and everything they touched changed.

  Officer Seaver’s cruiser brightened. Its structure intensified, and for about ten seconds Daisy saw every flaw in its frame, every pulse of its electrical system, and every point of potential energy.

  Somehow, her new alchemist ability was interacting with Rysa’s seers almost as if they were connected via dragon perceiving.

  Officer Seaver’s cousin—Jason was his name—splayed his hand over the bus’s window. “Is that thing one of the creatures from the reports, Mike?” he asked. “It looks like a dragon-bear.”

  Officer Seaver snapped a picture with his phone. “I got a bit of information before the emergency channel cut out.” He looked down at the photo and shook his head. “They’re calling the creatures hellhounds. There have been reports of at least three distinct-but-related species other than the obvious teched-up soldiers exiting the dropships. That’s one of the medium-sized ones.” He fiddled with his phone. “Maybe someone can enhance this photo.”

  That wasn’t the biggest? Daisy should be out there helping. “I’m an animal enthraller.” At least she used to be an animal enthraller. Who knew if her original abilities still functioned?

  She pushed past Jason. “I can help them.”

  “Whoa, miss,” Officer Seaver stepped in front of her. “Mr. Sisto said that you were, what, activating?” He glanced out the window. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Daisy said. The man was huge and completely blocked the access to the bus’s front exit. She looked over her shoulder. Jason was now between her and the rear exit.

  They had her hemmed in.

  “He said that you need to stay quiet until you’re done.” He frowned. “Are you going to come out wrong if you don’t? Like a butterfly with a damaged chrysalis?”

  Daisy opened her mouth. “What?” What an odd analogy.

  “My boy’s favorite book when he was a baby was ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’.” He glanced at her belly.

  Did they all know she was pregnant? “What, exactly, did Andreas tell you about my activation?” She was going to knock that man’s head when this was done.

  “No, no, miss.” Seaver held up his hands. “He didn’t have to say anything. It’s kinda obvious from how you and everyone else have been acting.” He looked away again. “And there was all that yelling at the park.”

  Then everyone on the planet knew she was pregnant. They also knew she was the First Alchemist. Her mother hadn’t been shy about her yelling and that camera crew hadn’t been shy about recording it all.

  And obviously Officer Seaver had a pretty good memory.

  “Stop calling me miss,” she said. “Don’t call Rysa ma’am, either.” She tried to push by, but he wouldn’t move. She poked him in the shoulder. “If you need to call anyone by a title, I suggest you use Legatus.” She pointed out the window at Ladon and Anna. “Those people, the two with the dragons? They’re Roman Military High Command.”

  Jason snorted.

  Officer Seaver threw him a look.

  “Roman as in Ancient Roman Empire. That guy who calls himself Trajan Upton? He’s Caesar Trajanus Augustus. The real Trajan. The Emperor Hadrian works for him and there have been rumors of a third emperor for quite some time now.”

  Confusion washed across Officer Seaver’s face.

  “Ladon and AnnaBelinda command the Legio Draconis, the Legion of the Dragons, known now as Dragons’ Legion. Andreas Sisto is the Legion’s Second. Rysa is their Prime Fate.” Daisy inhaled sharply. “They are godlings.”

  “We know this, miss… Ms. Pavlovich,” Officer Seaver said.

  “They are formidable. If anyone will get us to where we need to be, it’s them.”

  “Mr. Sisto said—”

  “But not one of them can enthrall an animal!” Daisy yelled. “Andreas could hit you with ‘die’ from twenty paces and you would have no idea why you stopped breathing. The two dragons could lift your cruiser and toss it into the field. But they cannot handle a hellhound!”

  Shots rang out.

  Both men ducked—and Daisy slipped between Officer Seaver and the seat next to his hip. She slammed her hand against the door opener.

  Her activation hadn’t yet settled. It still squirmed in her bones and belly. It heated some of her skin while it froze other patches. It made her head swim one minute, then turned time into a slow motion hell the next.

  And every second it worked through her cells and soul, it threatened to change exactly what could not be changed. It threatened her baby.

  Daisy spread her hand over her belly and willed her innate healer to focus on her abdomen.

  Then she stepped off the bus and into the biting night air.

  Ladon swung Rysa up into his arms. Andreas kicked a dead hellhound and Anna swung her gun around.

  Rysa’s seers snapped toward the field.

  Then her seers snapped out and up over the bus, toward something approaching from the west, and… Rysa’s seers popped like balloons.

  “Gavin?” Daisy felt a shadow, a hint that Gavin and Ian turned off at the same exit the bus had when the Incursion appeared on the eastern horizon.

  But they were supposed to go to Cheyenne. They were supposed to stay out of the blast radius.

  Damn it, she thought, and pulled out her phone.

  GPS put Gavin fifteen miles away.

  “Seaver!” she yelled. “That sedan I told you about? The one cops are supposed to leave alone?”

  He came down the steps to her. “Yes.”

  “They’re going to drive right into this.” She held up her phone. “I told him not to, but he’s stubborn.” She pointed at the GPS dot on the map. “Keep them safe, okay? They’re normals, like you.”

  He frowned, but nodded.

  Daisy jumped down to the frozen ground just as Andreas leaned over Rysa and blew into her
mouth. The energy density around Rysa loosened somewhat, but not enough. Not to what it should be.

  Daisy closed her eyes and shook her head. She didn’t have the energy overlay in the bus. Was it a manifestation of her new abilities? Was she still somehow interacting with Rysa’s seers?

  She opened her eyes again just as a dense packet of information moved between Ladon and Brother-Dragon.

  She didn’t see it, nor did she feel it against her skin. It sang by like a concentrated line of pressure between a mass of warm air and a cold front. It pushed against her mind as it swept by.

  Anna pointed at Daisy. “Get back on the bus!”

  Rysa’s seers pointed up and over the bus again.

  Daisy looked up. Nothing flew above them. No hellbirds or jumping hellhounds, or… Rysa’s present-seer grazed Daisy’s cheek.

  She smelled the acrid heat of a Burner. Or smelled the memory of a Burner.

  “Helicopter! Brother, do you hear it?” Anna pointed at the sky.

  Ladon looked up from Rysa and twisted his head to cock his ear at the clouds. “Less than ten minutes out. Rysa! No more seers.”

  Her present-seer popped again.

  Andreas pushed Ladon and Rysa toward the bus. “We need to get inside. Now.” He pointed at Daisy. “You too!”

  A pinpoint of bright blue light appeared on the dead hellhound’s back. It pulsed once, expanding into a three-inch-wide circle for a microsecond before dropping back into a pinpoint.

  Anna looked down at the corpse, then out at the field. “Move!” She pushed Andreas and bolted for the bus.

  The blue pinpoint on the dead hellhound changed to yellow as it pulsed outward again, this time into a circle approximately five inches in diameter.

  Ladon dropped Rysa’s legs and pulled them around his waist at the same time another packet of information moved between him and the dragons. He ran toward the bus.

  No matter how deeply her brain considered Ladon-Dragon and Anna-Dragon correct for this world—no matter how much of the Earth they were—the hellhounds were not right.

  The dragon soldiers who stepped off the ships that had dropped through the wound in the sky were not right.

  Humans might be ticks on the Earth’s hide, but at least they were the correct ticks.

  Daisy dodged Andreas’s grab attempt and ran to the dead hellhound. The light reflecting off the metal shed only grew brighter. The snow around the dead thing picked up the blue and began to twinkle.

  An illusion of snow fairies danced around a dead hellbeast. They arched and jumped, and gave Daisy’s awakening First Alchemist vital information about angles and vectors. Locations. Core functionality.

  Magic, she thought. Magic is nothing more than a brain piecing together an underlying system without the help of consciousness.

  The yellow pinpoint flashed over to red.

  Daisy pressed both her hands into the bright red, seven-inch-wide circle appearing on the back of an invader’s dead dog-thing and felt for the circle’s webbing under the hellhound’s many layers of photochromatic skin. She sensed the interspaced artificial nerves, and the connection points to the extra systemic processors the hound carried.

  Someone had grown an active camouflage enhancing system inside the animal’s naturally-occurring mimicking skin.

  The system did much more than allow the hellhound to mimic to full invisibility. Active trackers, upload protocols, and memory buffers pulsed under her hand, as well as something that felt like a reward and training interface.

  This alien animal could be controlled like a drone—and this drone was connected to all the other drones in the immediate area.

  She was too late to stop its last upload of location data. It had found what the advance scouts had been sent to locate: the traitors. But she could send a message.

  The intricate artificial webbing didn’t feel all that different from Brother-Dragon and Sister-Dragon’s hides. More alien, as if it were coded in a language different from what the dragons’ bodies ran on. But the underlying principles were the same.

  And they were the same as the retinal scanner. Or the bus engine. Or the spotlight blasting down onto the metal shed from the approaching helicopter.

  Every system had a normal functionality, an equilibrium state. If it broke, it could be healed. If it needed a push, it could be enthralled. If it needed changing, it could be morphed.

  The system under her hand needed breaking. It needed a violent push, and it needed to be transformed into something toxic to its makers.

  Frying the entire alien network from the carcass of a dead hellhound was not going to happen, nor was it possible. The invading dragons were not stupid, nor were they interconnected enough for such a plan to work.

  She could, though, make their capture of “the traitors” impossible.

  Daisy forced the red circle to flick back to yellow, then to blue, then to cycle very quickly to violet, green, and orange.

  She could break their camouflage system. “Brother- and Sister-Dragon! Don’t listen!”

  The system in the dead hellhound screamed.

  And the system broke.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Ladon forced three more breaths into Rysa’s throat. They made it through and into her lungs, but they weren’t enough. She opened her mouth wide and gasped again.

  Andreas touched her forehead. “Damn it, Rysa, do I need to enthrall you to stop using your seers?” He gripped the back of her head and locked his lips over hers.

  Her healer mainlined his brew like an IV full of her ADHD meds and revved itself up to maximum. If she were healthy, she would have come out ready for an Olympic triathlon.

  But she wasn’t healthy. His scents broke the constriction in her throat, but not a lot else.

  Andreas pointed to the bus’s wide open door. “Get her on the—what the hell!”

  Ten feet away, Daisy leaned over the dead hellhound. She pressed her hands into its flesh. “Don’t listen!” she yelled. And she did something.

  The energy connection between Ladon and Dragon wavered, as did the connection between Anna and Sister-Dragon. Rysa’s seers responded as well, all three attempting to burst from her head once again like the tentacles of Athena that they were.

  The wave from Daisy crested, then crashed down on the metal shed, the bus, the cruiser, the other Seaver’s truck. Onto the approaching helicopter, and her present-seer whispers that Gavin had not listened to Daisy’s pleas.

  Daisy had just sent a message to the monsters hunting the Dracae: Welcome to Earth, motherfuckers.

  Watch your hellhounds die.

  Another, more localized pulse followed the first.

  A bright, clear shimmer extended around the red dot under Daisy’s hand as she burned out whatever system the hound carried that connected it to other hounds and to its masters. The shimmer flowed across the dead beast’s body like an electrical fire.

  Then it flowed outward, into the air.

  The shimmer hit the new hellhound stalking around the front fender of the cruiser. It hit the third hound—this one smaller and about the size of an ocelot—on the roof. It hit the fourth hound on the edge of the field.

  And it hit the one swooping down at Daisy.

  An invisible hand-claw snatched a leg and the hound slammed directly into the larger hellhound on the cruiser’s fender.

  Stalkers, her present-seer whispered. Hunters.

  You need to be a stalker and a hunter, her dark Fate said. She stood in the front of Rysa’s mind, a shimmering woman dressed all in black as if, all this time, she’d always been Rysa. Always been Dracae.

  The Dracae issued command after command about guns and shooting and invisible dragons running too silent for the safe use of firearms at the same time the dragons ripped hellhounds to shreds.

  Her dragons, neither of which would hurt a fly if their lives allowed it.

  The energy whipping around Daisy backed away from the hellhound corpse as if she, too, had tentacles. How stra
nge, Rysa thought. Energy and tentacles. Blades and shielding.

  Her blade wanted to expand from her fist, but it blossomed around her arm instead.

  Her dark Fate approved.

  “Why do you always wear black?” Rysa asked her dark Fate. Mourning, she thought. Her dark Fate came from a very different version of the world. A place where she spent her time alone and among Burners.

  The copter noise bounced off the metal shed and had built to deafening levels. “What?” Ladon said, thinking Rysa’s question had been for him.

  “Put me down,” Rysa said.

  Ladon helped her stand, then mouthed something about getting on the bus.

  “No,” she said.

  No, her dark Fate echoed.

  Daisy needed her. Billy needed her. Hellhounds roamed the world.

  Ladon touched her forehead. His face did the looking-at-distant-objects thing it did when he spoke to Dragon.

  She had a fever.

  Let me out! her dark Fate yelled.

  Let out the Ambusti Prime. Let out the viciousness when you can’t breathe, darling.

  Next to the cruiser, Daisy buckled over, her hands on her belly and her face rigid with pain, with Sister-Dragon over her and slapping away hellhounds.

  Andreas scooped Daisy up into his arms.

  Rysa’s dark Fate cupped Rysa’s cheeks. “Listen to me,” she said as if she was right there, with Rysa, alive and real, even if she wasn’t. Even if she was only in Rysa’s head.

  Moments like this had happened to Rysa many times in her life. Too much stimuli flooding in. Too many decisions needing to be made. Jagged, erratic, attention-deficit-fueled non-thinking about the world outside and the thoughts in her head.

  But she wasn’t that person anymore. She was the Draki Prime.

  She couldn’t breathe and her brain was oxygen-starved, but she was the fucking Draki Prime.

  “Listen to me!” her dark Fate floated naked now, in Rysa’s mind. Her dark Fate, the talking aspect of a version of Rysa that was-not, was as stripped to her core as Rysa’s panicking, starving, healer-can’t-save-me brain. Naked, vulnerable, and, Rysa realized, in need of a hug. “You need to suck it up and finish a task for once in your life,” her dark Fate said.