The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7)

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  The Burner Progenitor moved as a semi-solid-looking ghost-thing. Unreal chaos leaked through his skin and into the same ghost plane he occupied.

  She saw him. Right there, as a semi-new-space thing she perceived. He settled into leering at her from his place “inside” Billy.

  Perhaps this seeing was a side effect of Daisy’s upgrade. Perhaps this new ability was all that remained of her dark Fate fire. She really didn’t care. Visible assholes were dodge-able.

  Billy grinned. “Aye, luv. I had Poke then, too.” He patted the hilt of the midnight blade. He wore a singed Guard jacket, reinforced, uniform-like pants, and strong boots.

  And his fingerless gloves. He wouldn’t be Billy Bare without his gloves.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for taking this on. For the sacrifice, Billy. Thank you for everything. Thank you for helping us stop the invasion.”

  Trajan had used Billy and her aunt Ismene. The entire world was using Billy and his creepy, crazy Progenitor. Their fate was to do what Burners do, and Trajan had banked on fate to take its course.

  Did he bank on Billy’s humanity? On his selflessness? Because the Burner inside the containment unit was a better human being than three-quarters of the people they were trying to save.

  Billy placed his hand on the glass. “I figure I need to be a hero. Gotta keep up with the Drakes, you know.”

  She wouldn’t cry, even though crying right now would have been as human a response as Billy’s sacrifice.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t help you when we had the chance.” She reached for the glass, but pulled back her hand when the creepy little man clicked his tongue. “If we survive this, we’re going to do good by the world’s remaining Burners, okay? Trajan won’t use them anymore. I promise.”

  Billy held out his wrist. Smudged, blurred writing peeked out between the hem of his jacket and the cuff of his glove. “Haven’t had a chance to trace it,” he said.

  You are my King, it used to say. And here he was marshaling on with a sword through his side. He used to rewrite her words on his skin. Now they popped off his wrist like little clouds of might-have-been.

  Billy’s connection to the fate he wanted had vanished also, just like everyone else’s.

  She wouldn’t let it. If she survived this, she’d make sure the world knew about his sacrifice. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “For what?” Billy rocked on his heels. “The world’s not immune to magic, luv. We couldn’t stop a hole opening in the sky. We’re not that good. But we can close it.”

  She nodded.

  “Terry says this has all happened before. He says in previous versions of history, we weren’t able to do our job.”

  Billy, for all his chaos, had never been good at lying, and the baleful expression he wore clearly yelled that he believed his Progenitor. A good chunk of Billy Bare’s soul believed they wouldn’t this time, either.

  “You brought us targeting data,” she said. Not that she knew what do to with it, or how to access it, but she’d try. Daisy would try. They’d get to the right spot at the right time and she’d fire a Progenitor-shaped bullet at the sky.

  “That’s new, by the way. No version of you has ever had help aiming.” Billy nodded toward the back of the ramp. “Hiya, Boyfriend,” he said.

  Ladon walked up the ramp. He, too, picked up a headset so he could hear over the noise of the copter’s engine. “I have the optimizers.” He handed the glasses to Rysa. “Andreas and Sister want to leave before the hellhounds damage the bus.” He pointed out the open hatch.

  “Oh, Höllenhunde!” said the naked creep. “I bet you haven’t met the mean ones yet.” He giggled.

  Ugliness dripped off his arms and elbows in big glops of putrid-looking, cartoon-drawn, vomited meat.

  Rysa would have recoiled from the window if Ladon hadn’t been standing close enough for her to take his hand instead.

  Ladon leaned close to Rysa’s ear as he wrapped an arm around her waist. “I cannot see the Maker of Burners,” he said.

  “He’s pinned to Billy,” she said. “And naked.” The Maker of Burners didn’t seem to notice the cold. “And leaking… I don’t know what he’s leaking.” Cartoonish, disgusting chaos, she thought. How appropriate.

  But they had more pressing matters than Terry’s ickiness. The helicopter’s rotor continued to whip and whoop, and the warbird flooded the field with its spotlight.

  Hellhounds moved out there. Shadows widened, then contracted suddenly. Old corn stalks snapped.

  And they hadn’t met the “mean” ones yet.

  What else is out there? she asked her present-seer. If they were about to face dragon Special Forces, Ladon needed to know.

  “Rysa…” he said.

  He still didn’t trust that Daisy had fully healed her. She smiled and touched his cheek.

  “Tasty fried Fate,” said the creepy little man. He smacked his lips and looked particularly pleased with his assessment of Rysa’s health. “You killed the Dracae in my version of this loop. You survived. You killed all of us Progenitors and yet you walked free.” He hissed, clicked his tongue. “At least in the cycle before me, you also died.” He released a string of foul-sounding German.

  “Shut up, you repugnant troll,” Rysa said. “We don’t have time to deal with whatever whiny bug crawled up your disgusting ass.”

  Billy snickered. “Now that’s the princess I know and love!”

  Ladon pointed at the window. “You always were an asshole, Maker,” he said.

  The Progenitor named Terry half-lunged at Ladon. “I could still eat you and your pet, Nathaniel.”

  He called Ladon “Nathaniel?” Rysa looked at Billy.

  He lowered his chin. “I’ll tell you all I know, luv,” he said.

  She nodded. Terry could be messing with her, using a name he’d learned from Billy. Or he could have valuable information. Either way, they had other issues to deal with right now.

  We need to know, she told her seers. What else is out there?

  They quaked, but didn’t move. “Give me the optimizers.”

  Terry lunged at her again. Billy twisted with the force on the midnight blade, but he held his footing. “Quit it, troll,” he said.

  Terry unleashed another long string of nasty sounding German words.

  “He’s swearing at you in German,” Rysa said. She flipped the optimizers over in her hand. “I need to get these to Daisy. She’ll be able to feel how to activate them in a useful way.”

  Out of nowhere, fire erupted in her belly. The need for her Burner. The signs. The chaos. Part of her remembered. The dark part. This didn’t happen last time. Last time, they were in the base and she got into a shelter in the nick of time. But Ladon and Dragon didn’t. They couldn’t.

  “Billy…” She reached for her Ambusti talisman.

  Terry nipped at her fingers. Rysa snatched them back.

  Billy pulled away. “No, luv. He’ll hurt you.”

  Terry giggled. New chaos erupted around him like oozing lava. “You are worthless, you little bitch,” he sneered. “You never do your job.”

  “Fuck you too, asshat,” she said. “You aren’t my talisman.” She looked from Billy to Ladon, then back to Billy.

  Ladon took Rysa’s hand. “Dragon’s here. He says Officer Seaver left to escort Gavin and his brother to the bus. Andreas, Sister, and Jason defend against the hounds. Sister-Dragon circles. The pilot and the Praesagio guard keep the copter ready to lift off. Sister wants to get the bus back on the road though Seaver doesn’t want to lead the hounds toward the freeway.”

  “Smart,” she said.

  Ladon nodded toward the copter’s ramp. Daisy stood at the base staring at the road, waiting for Gavin to get himself killed.

  Terry swirled his finger through his popping, biting chaos. “This time you pay for fucking up, Schätzchen.”

  Rysa once told Ladon that it wasn’t all attention issues for her. Too many voices overwhelmed. Too many demands she cou
ld not fulfill squashed her nascent attempts to try.

  When the overwhelming happened, it felt like the tactile version of Terry’s chaos rubbed against the inside of her gut and there was nothing she could do about it. No way to ease the randomness. No way to counter the pain without hurting herself.

  So she always ran away.

  “Denk daran, wer deine Prime ist, kleiner Mann,” she said even though she’d never spoken German in her life. Never learned a word of it, and understood less. “Remember who is your Prime.”

  Terry’s creepy little eyes widened.

  Ladon pulled her close. “You speak German?”

  Rysa blinked. “Maybe,” she said. Or maybe a darker version of her had learned German instead of American Sign Language. “Daisy needs me.”

  Ladon nodded. “Thank you, Billy, for this. Thank you for everything you’ve done for Rysa and for me and Dragon.” He looked out at the sky. “The world thanks you.”

  Billy closed his eyes and tipped his head as if listening to someone whisper in his ear. “Aye,” he said. “The world.” He nodded out at the field. “Bower is a common name?”

  A flash from Dragon caressed Rysa’s mind, and big dragon hands touched her waist. “Not really,” she said.

  Billy nodded, then cracked his knuckles. “There’s a Bower with you, isn’t there?”

  He’s coming, her present-seer said. “Gavin and his brother are driving right into this. Why, Billy?”

  “Gavin, yes,” Billy said. “Is the other one named William?”

  Terry looked as confused as Rysa—confused and shocked.

  William Michael Pavlovich Bower, her future-seer hummed. She glanced at Daisy. “He won’t be here for a few months,” she muttered.

  Billy looked at the roof of the containment unit. “It’s nice that they name him William.”

  Ladon glanced at Daisy. “I’ll send Daisy on.”

  Billy pointed down the ramp. “Time to keep the bad beasties at bay, huh, Boyfriend?”

  Ladon nodded. “We’ll be right outside.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Rysa handed the optimizers to Daisy, who ran her hand over the onboard memory. She peered at the camera, then the cable hanging off one of the temples. Slowly, she picked at the blackout film over the lenses. “Look at this,” she yelled over the copter’s engine.

  She ripped the film right off the left lens, then did the same on the right. “My guess is that these…” She ran her finger down what looked like an added-on stick glued to the top of each temple. “…are translating hardware for Adrestia’s implant. The optimizers themselves are designed for sighted people.”

  Soldiers, most likely. Praesagio took an “off-the-shelf” military-grade system and modified it, which is probably why Rysa’s father had been able to outfit Addy with it so quickly.

  “The damn things look hot,” Daisy said. “They’re not, obviously, at least not physically.” She flipped them over in her hands and handed them back to Rysa. “Put them on.”

  Rysa placed the optimizers onto her face and stared out into the bitter, pre-dawn cold.

  Nothing but smudges and glare.

  “Open up your seers,” Daisy yelled.

  Show me what I need to see, Rysa thought, and unleashed her seers.

  Still nothing. Only the pulsing Incursion over their heads and the winds howling in the field. She frowned.

  Behind them, Dragon bellowed and a hollow, clanging thud topped the rotor’s thundering when a hellhound slammed against the metal shed.

  Daisy looked out over the field, then toward the road. “That blade of yours. It affects new-space. Try that.”

  She held out her hand. No blade formed around her wrist.

  Hey, she called to her dark Fate, you still here? Now’s the time.

  Nothing. No answer. No indication that she was still with Rysa, except…

  Her Ambusti Prime fire flowed out along her seers and into the data in the optimizers. It enhanced what they saw. It revealed along dimensions that she would not otherwise access.

  “Wow,” Rysa said. Lines of force materialized. Angles opened and closed. Colors faded and brightened depending on importance and proximity.

  The integration of her dark Fate’s blade into her seers must be why she saw Terry and why she could see and process the data.

  “Whoa…” she said.

  Andreas’s vague, smoke-like enthrallings hung in the air as if looking for a hellhound to attack. Dragon and Sister-Dragon occupied spaces nearby in a “I know you are in the other room” kind of way. They ran silent, but Rysa still had a hint of their presence, and could give general orders about where not to shoot.

  Anna shot a hellhound in the chest. It howled and continued its lunge anyway—until broadsided by a spare tire Sister-Dragon must have pulled out of Jason Seaver’s truck. Ladon punched another hellhound in the snout. It backed off and shook its head, then flew back into the field, obviously thrown by Dragon. Andreas started the bus, presumably to move it onto the road.

  They all seemed focused. The Dracae did not shrink from a fight, nor did they fear it. This was the first real battle against extended forces that they’d been in for probably centuries and it made them strangely happy.

  Information about the open spaces between the bus and the metal shed, and the helicopter, and Jason Seaver’s truck coalesced in a way that transcended Rysa’s brain’s ability to orient visually, almost as if she felt what the ground under her feet felt. As if the ground had the same hairs as the skin on her forearms. Every touch, every breeze, registered. And now Rysa felt it, too.

  The Incursion glowed the same too-bright colors in the night sky overhead.

  Daisy touched her elbow. “Do you see where we need to go?”

  If she wove her seers into the force lines, maybe she could sort what they all meant, like staring at a map until you saw not just the roads, but the borders and the water features, too. But this wasn’t just a singular location. She needed to isolate the path through the map—the line of travel traced by the changing relative positions of the Earth and the Incursion.

  Changes that now, because of the data provided by Timothy Drake, they could accommodate.

  This was why closing the damned thing never worked in the “other times.” Trajan had always banked on ballpark guesses. Where should he build his nifty base? Somewhere around the Wyoming-Nebraska border. But where, exactly? He never knew.

  And what if the monsters caught the scent of the dragons? What if they got spooked and opened the Incursion early?

  “Do you see it?” Daisy asked.

  Not so much where they needed to be but a projection of where they needed to go. “I see a trajectory line.” Like those animations of satellite orbits. “Not a line. A swath.”

  Math made it possible to know where a satellite would be at any given time. The data in the optimizers were mapping onto the world a similar trajectory line for the Incursion. But Rysa was on the Earth too, so the line looked like a road in the distance.

  The edge of the “line” glimmered out on the edge of the field like the side of the yellow brick road. The swath itself extended behind the edge and wasn’t visible from where Rysa stood.

  It vanished at one end as if someone was rolling it up—and disappeared over the horizon into the black pre-dawn.

  “We need to go up,” she said. “I can’t see it from here anymore. It’s traveling.”

  Daisy looked out at the field. “We’re traveling under it,” she said. “Rotation plus revolution plus the Incursion’s movements.”

  “Yes.” Rysa pulled up the optimizers and set them on the top of her head like sunglasses. There wasn’t a lot of room in the copter. No way Dragon would fit onboard with the containment unit.

  She looked at Ladon and Dragon.

  Her dark Fate lost them. They died and she lived and she ended up haunting herself in the here-and-now because of it.

  Maybe they should stay here.

  What if she got them
killed again? Could she live without them if she survived?

  “We need to go,” she said. “You and me and Billy. We need to go right now.”

  If she thought about it too much she’d lose it. She’d go into a fit and she’d revert back to her old self and that would be the end of her thinking straight. If they left now, Ladon would live. He and Dragon would live this time, even if she didn’t.

  “What if we need cover?” Daisy pointed at the field. “You and I can’t hold off a pack of hellhounds or worse. Billy won’t be much help with a sword in his side. Besides, he needs to hold the Burner Progenitor inside the cage.”

  “They died! Will die.” Rysa closed her eyes. “I can’t—”

  A line of visibility appeared ten feet away and quickly ran down Dragon’s neck, to his back and tail. He snorted and lowered his head, then walked up the ramp toward Billy.

  Dragon opened the door of the containment unit.

  A puzzled Billy looked out the window at Rysa.

  Dragon snorted again. He lifted his hands, flattened his digits, and signed, Get out, Burner. Then he moved down the ramp again, to give Billy a wide berth.

  “Dragon!” Rysa yelled. “I’m your Prime Fate! You can’t come!”

  Daisy held Rysa’s arm. She frowned and shook her head. “Don’t make that decision for Ladon and Dragon.”

  Slowly, Billy exited the unit. Terry hollered and streaked burn marks onto the frame, but Billy yanked him toward the one open spot along the copter’s side wall.

  Dragon hooked his big hands into the unit’s door, gripped the frame, and pulled. The unit moved toward the ramp. One more yank, and it rocked forward, but didn’t slide down.

  Ladon jogged up. He dropped the duffle of midnight blades and the big Praesagio gun with its five magic bullets at the base of the ramp. “We will not argue about this, Rysa.”

  “But…” What should she say? Did she want to say it, anyway? A selfish part of her—very selfish, because she knew she’d be asking him to go to his death—wanted them with her. She wanted their strength and their support.