Flux of Skin

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  You should vent before coming down, Ladon pushed. The longer the beast stayed invisible, the longer they held their tactical advantage.

  A silent affirmative bounced through their energy.

  The beast backed away from the edge of the roof. He stepped carefully, avoiding spots he knew caused the ceiling to creak and the skylights to groan. Five Seraphim wait outside the doors.

  An image popped to Ladon—five men, all big as Shifter males tended to be, all dressed with hard hats and safety vests. No visible weapons.

  So they’d sent escorts without large guns.

  He and Dragon would have to be careful not to disable the Shifters too quickly. Sister needed time to lead Rysa and Derek out the tunnel and around to the van.

  Sister takes them out now. Dragon dropped flat against the roof above Ladon and slowly, carefully vented flame to cool himself as much as possible.

  Behind the desk, Julie shifted her posture. The rustling sounds of paper hitting a carpeted floor followed. She grunted, her arms rose in frustration, and a clear expression of annoyance thrust out her jaw.

  Muttered curses drifted to Ladon on the back of the lobby’s amplifying acoustics.

  He nodded as he walked by.

  “Mr. Drake!” Julie slapped the papers down next to her keyboard. “I heard about the accident.” She nodded down the corridor. “Everyone’s okay?”

  Ladon adjusted the jacket he’d borrowed from Derek so as to keep the holster concealed. He didn’t have time to chat. But Julie was obviously concerned.

  Several of the female staff had crushes on Derek. They hid it well, always acting professional, but they’d watch him longer than they watched other men and go out of their way to say hello.

  “Derek’s fine.” Ladon smiled, hoping to put Julie at ease. He pointed at the door. “I need to go.”

  Julie blushed. She looked away, making a show of straightening the papers, before looking up at him again. She sat straight, though a strand of hair had fallen out of her ponytail and wisped across her angular features.

  “Your… girlfriend? …is okay, too?” She played with the wedding band on her finger as she asked.

  Of course Julie was interested in his bachelorhood. He also got his share of stares. “We’re all fine. Got to go.” He smiled his best charming smile and winked as he pointed toward the door, hoping to avoid more questions.

  “The construction crews are everywhere.” Julie’s brows crunched together. “They didn’t tell us there’d be so many trucks today.” But she smiled big for him. “They’re all around the building, so take care, okay?”

  “I will.”

  Julie nodded. “You look good in blue.” The chair creaked as she scooted back and returned her attention to her papers.

  “What?” His clothes were not his focus and the statement caught him off guard.

  A big grin lit up her face when she pointed at the jacket and the denim jeans he wore. “Not that the black is bad. But this is a nice change of pace.”

  Ladon shrugged. No sense making any other comment. Grinning as well, he waved and walked toward the entrance and the five waiting Seraphim outside.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Where’s the dinosaur?” The ugly flat-nosed Shifter in the center of the group pointed at the roof before waving his arm around like a drunken magician. He pushed back his fake hard hat and sneered his fake construction worker sneer as he stood surrounded by his lackeys on the board sidewalk leading to the sliding glass doors of the hospital’s front entrance.

  Behind Ladon, between the well-manicured landscaping and the large “No smoking” and “No guns allowed on hospital grounds” signs, the doors hissed shut. Bright sunlight reflected off the wide span of concrete under his feet and he blinked once, to adjust his sight.

  The five Shifters stood in an arrow formation, their leader, the flat-nosed bastard who seemed to take great delight in terrifying Rysa, a step in front of the others. The two in the back wore obnoxiously colored jackets, the kind designed to make workers visible in all situations, day or night.

  They both carried two guns under their jackets, in double holsters, a weapon under each arm. And they both watched the building, their posture full of concentration and tension. The other two squinted at the brick wall, trying to track changes or movement of debris, attempting to locate Dragon. If they carried weapons, they were small enough to hide in tight-fitting clothes.

  The beast ran silent. He’d snapped his connection to Ladon into a tight stream, minimizing it as much as possible, and slowed all communication. Even Ladon had a difficult time locating him.

  The Shifters would find it almost impossible.

  The flat-nosed bastard thrust out his chin. “I asked you a question, dino-boy.”

  Bad breath rolled to Ladon on the slight breeze, along with large doses of ‘comply.’ Calling scents pulsed from both the leader and those standing on either side of him, mixing in the air with the high mountain dust and the traces of fresh life that early summer air always carried.

  The brew was not pleasant.

  Bruises ringed the leader’s neck. Dark, ugly bruises Ladon could see clearly from where he stopped fifteen feet away. So the neck snap Ladon had laid on the son of a bitch in Council Bluffs had not yet completely healed. Neurologically, he most likely still felt its effects. Moved slower. Maybe lumbered.

  Not the best choice to put against Ladon in a fight, so why would the Seraphim send him in front and center?

  They were trying to manipulate his emotions by placing a distracting Shifter between him and the rest of the group.

  The idiot was cannon fodder, meant to distract Ladon and slow him down.

  Ladon angled himself slightly—his good shoulder back, his arm poised, in case he needed to draw his weapon—and stared at Flat-nose. Best to play along.

  “When Dragon snaps your neck,” Ladon said, his voice low and intentionally growl-like, “he won’t twist the way I did. He’ll wrap his talons around your face. He’ll gouge out your eyes. Then he’ll slowly pull back and to the side. More pain than you have ever felt—or could ever imagine—will burn through your body. You won’t comprehend. You won’t understand. This time, you will not wake.”

  Flat-nose flinched. The Shifter to his left snorted.

  Ladon pointed at their heads, each in turn, sweeping his finger between them. “How old are you idiots?”

  Flat-nose took a step forward, and thrust out his chest like a gorilla’s. “You’re supposed to come with us. The Bishop wants words.”

  Ladon ignored him and continued pointing at the other four. “Do you know what happened in ’84? Do you remember how we responded to the Seraphim then?”

  Three of the five balked. The two with the guns inched their hands toward their weapons. The one directly off the leader’s left elbow shuffled backward. Small, grating noises rose off the concrete as his boots ground against the sidewalk.

  Flat-nose’s breathing dropped into shallow pants. He blew out more ‘comply’ but it smelled half-hearted and tinged with ‘fear.’

  But the last of the five, the one standing off the leader’s right elbow, didn’t flinch. He didn’t move at all. He stood perfectly still with his safety vest glowing like a chemical fire in the bright sun.

  No one but a class-one morpher stood that still.

  Flat-nose wasn’t the true threat. He pranced around and put on a show, but snapping his neck again would be easier than Ladon cared to consider.

  As would snapping the necks of the other three, guns and all. But he’d promised no more killing.

  “Go back to your Bishop.” Ladon pointed into the parking lot. “Tell him to come up here himself. He and I will talk. Then you leave.”

  Angry ‘comply’ wove into the air, adding new notes of bitterness to their calling scents. As mercenaries, they’d probably slapped around a few Fate triads in their lifetimes. One or two of the bastards might have experience with Primes, or perhaps another Shifter with class-one abil
ities. It made them overconfident.

  But not one of them understood what a fight with Ladon or his sister meant. They might fear a repeat of ’84, but they didn’t understand.

  Vivicus did. And the bastard was here, somewhere.

  The perfectly still morpher’s head moved. Just a fraction of a twitch, a small twist, as if he’d heard something no one else did. Then another spark of reflected sunlight hit Ladon’s eyes—the morpher wore an earpiece.

  The other four did not.

  “You!” Ladon jabbed his finger at the morpher’s nose, drawing the attention of all five Shifters. The two with the guns both leaned forward, shoulders contracting and pulling inward as their bodies readied to draw their weapons.

  The morpher’s face did not move. His cheeks and his neck stayed perfectly still. But his lips moved. “The Dracas parked your dragon-buggy exactly two hundred and eighteen feet from the fire escape door closest to the room directly under your shed on the roof.” The morpher’s hollowed-out voice echoed between the four other Shifters and the building. He sounded distant and unreal, and as fake as the group’s costumes. “It’s a long distance. Hard to cover in the open.”

  The morpher inhaled, and his chest bowed out more than a normal’s could. “But it’s within view of your room. Because she’s smart and that’s what smart people do.”

  Loose tendons, stretched muscles, but still he stood unflinching and unmoving. Nothing about the set of his features looked odd, only commonplace and boring. He’d morphed himself an immediately forgettable face.

  Flat-nose snickered. “I wanted to cut your brakes, but The Bishop said that wasn’t playing fair.” He rolled his eyes and tapped his foot.

  The morpher ignored his companion, and instead concentrated all his attention on Ladon. “You can’t fit both your pets inside your delivery van. It’s too small. Too pathetic.” A cheek twitched—his first movement. “It’s a shame we totaled your sister’s lovely vintage motorhome.” He leaned forward onto the balls of his feet and kissed the tips of his fingers in a gesture of mock appreciation. The heels of his boots lifted slightly, but not enough to throw his balance. He’d respond fast if Ladon charged.

  He dropped his hollow voice low. “Oh, the trials the good Dracas must have endured to win that angel’s dream of a vehicle.”

  The morpher’s head bobbed in a quick jerk. His lips jerked at the same time—he attempted to hold in a sneer, but his top lip curled up, showing too-bright teeth.

  Ladon had seen the same expression on a multitude of flat, forgettable faces. The brain inside that skull always produced the same pulls and contractions, no matter what skin it wore. It always betrayed a singular hatred. Always showed the same warped perception of the same target—Ladon.

  They called him The Bishop. He fed them burndust and they followed him to the ends of the earth because he preached of trials, of finding in life moments of true strength. Because, he said, it was at those moments God granted clarity.

  This man in front of Ladon, the First Morpher, the first child born to any Progenitor, had lost his mind somewhere inside his personal history. Vivicus’s ever-changing body flowed and reformed, but his life, his reason, was tacked down and held immobile to specific times during his life. He held tight to those moments, and to the solidity of his anger and his pain.

  Anger and pain he blamed on Ladon.

  And he would never let it go. Never move on, no matter how the world changed around him.

  Vivicus sniffed again, and his body took on an air of smugness. He’d fooled Ladon, standing next to his cannon fodder, and he was proud.

  He’d played his own mercenaries. Morphed himself to blend in with the group. Just to get close.

  Every muscle in Ladon’s body screamed to attack. To smash faces into the pavement and to smear blood onto the high desert grass. But he held his place. He didn’t do what Vivicus expected.

  “Start walking, douchebag.” Flat-nose looked Vivicus up and down before nodding between Ladon and the parking lot. “And tell your dino-dog we’ll shoot you if he tries anything.”

  “He will gut whom he pleases.” Ladon stared at Vivicus. Flat-nose was irrelevant. “With great care and greater silence.”

  The other four turned as one toward their fake construction equipment in the parking lot. The three big fake dump trucks lined up in the spaces just off the curb of the walk they now stood on. The vehicles, all larger than Ladon’s van, formed a wall between Ladon and the rest of the world.

  Vivicus didn’t turn. “This hospital has fourteen fire exits beyond the big door behind you and the Emergency entrance. Smart planning. The best a hospital could ask for.”

  Plus one more. An odd exit, hidden in the back of the ambulance garage, in an outbuilding behind the hospital. One not likely to be considered by the Seraphim.

  Sister would have Rysa and Derek in the tunnel by now. If they moved swiftly, they’d be out before he and Dragon dealt with the remaining Seraphim.

  Vivicus’s sneer grew into a cartoonish death’s grin. “That makes a total of… seventeen.”

  The uneasiness draped over Ladon’s gut.

  Vivicus pulled off his sunglasses and hung them from the neck of his t-shirt. “Smart Shifters can see what-will-be, Ladon-Human, as well as any Fate.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Rysa’s past-seer flickered over the hospital corridor’s bland walls. Decades of ghosts of sick people brushed along the edges of her vision. Old people, young people. People in cowboy hats and others dressed like urban corporate middle management. Doctors, nurses, volunteers. The infirm of Rock Springs and the spirits of the people who kept them alive.

  Derek walked in front of Rysa, toward the back of the hospital, safely between AnnaBelinda leading the way and the invisible Sister-Dragon following behind.

  The overhead lights flickered. In this part of the hospital, ceiling tiles had been removed so workers could access the pipes and cables. Coils of wires and buckets of wall spackle sat between the room doors. Fake walls with signs saying this office or that had been “temporarily moved” blocked off half the entrance and exit points.

  They walked through the construction listening to the echoes of saws and hammers. No dust touched Rysa’s tongue—the air here tasted as astringent as the air everywhere else in the hospital.

  But she saw things she didn’t want to see. Things beyond her past-seer’s flickering ghosts.

  The moment AnnaBelinda opened their room door and ushered them into the corridor, Derek had dropped out of the universe.

  All the threads of past, present, and future, all the cords that should tie Derek to his wife and the dragons and Rysa—all had been sliced away. This man who had not been born Derek Nicholson, who she’d sensed before this irrational reality—this irreality—encased him, had once split wood in the cold reaches of Siberia with his father. Derek, who’d died to the world once already, walked inside a whole new prison only Rysa could see.

  Derek Nicholson, this good man, was about to die. Death slipped and rolled around Derek in walls that moved when he moved. Walls her healer would not be able to break through.

  Rysa pinched her nose and pressed her eyelids together as hard as she could. She walked blind down the hospital corridor, following the tight ribbon of energy stretching between the woman in front and the beast behind. Each time she looked at Derek, the weirdness of what she saw jiggled the wordless panic on the edges of her perception. It flopped around and screamed for attention.

  Part of her wanted to run between the walls of the hallway and the gurneys and the big rolling crates of linens and babble and bounce and yell at AnnaBelinda that some terrible horridness was about to happen but she didn’t know what and she didn’t know when. She didn’t know if the tunnel was the best idea. Her seers whipped around but all she saw was blocked off sections of space and time.

  Some Prime Fate she was.

  Sister-Dragon nudged her around a corner. They’d circled almost the entire hospital and were n
ow at the end of one of the central corridors. The sign hanging from the ceiling pointed inward, saying “Emergency Department.” On the other side, a single elevator.

  They’d come through the construction into a hall—the open ceiling and the hanging wires looked like open maw behind which waited cinder blocks and pipes full of fire and screaming, spitting steam. Only a thin veneer of sheetrock and industrial white paint shielded the group. The walls didn’t line up in Rysa’s vision, though they did, and the odd irreality danced in her eyes.

  Her seers sparked in disjointed, four-dimensional tessellated blocks. She should turn them off. Yell Heel! and focus on following AnnaBelinda and getting out. But her seers didn’t want to shut down.

  Every person had their own block of space-time, their own bubble-universe. The bubbles overlapped, interacted with each other. Rysa’s fingers slipped from the bridge of her nose and she felt separated. Utterly alone. She was light-years from Dragon, though he was close enough that if she screamed for him he’d hear. He and Ladon would turn around. They’d come back.

  Between her and the elevator, AnnaBelinda glowed in colors that did not seem real and which Rysa’s brain should not even be able to see.

  Derek looked dead. Dead like the walking dead. Gray, ashen, not at all alive.

  AnnaBelinda’s face twisted in that piercing stare both she and Ladon displayed when they talked to their dragons. “They’re out. Escorts met them at the doors.”

  No emotion played across the dragon woman’s face. No changes twitched in her stance. She just checked her weapon and pressed the down button.

  Hospital noises blasted down the corridor from the Emergency Department. They fanned around Sister-Dragon’s bulk, lensing the way light from a distant galaxy broke around the gravity of a star cluster. The way the universe marked boundaries between one area and the next.