Flux of Skin

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  AnnaBelinda glanced at the talon around Rysa’s neck, then down at the Legio Draconis insignia around her wrist. “I don’t hate you.”

  Rysa inhaled as her seers snapped back toward the elevator. They writhed, vibrating at different frequencies, but in harmony with each other. “Do you feel my seers? Do you hear their shape? Understand what they’re telling you to do?”

  AnnaBelinda inhaled sharply, her other hand up, gun out. “Yes.” She walked backward, stepping over random reams of paper and spilled bits of plastic with an ease a normal would not carry.

  No matter how quiet they tried to be, their boots gripped the anti-skid, sandpaper-like floor paint. They couldn’t be completely silent. But they could get into the tunnel before the door opened.

  Rysa’s seers snapped against the elevator door. Three Seraphim rode down, two big males and a female, all dressed as a work crew. They’d walked into the hospital this morning with the real crews, using the female’s enthralling ability to get past security.

  “I should shoot the female first?” AnnaBelinda tipped her head and leaned closer, rubbing the inside of her arm against Rysa’s. More skin contact must help her read Rysa’s seers better. Vague memories of the RV surfaced—Ladon pressed against her, his body syncing to hers.

  “She’s the enthraller.” Rysa didn’t want AnnaBelinda to shoot anyone, but she would not allow the irreality around Derek to become reality.

  AnnaBelinda nodded. They moved away from the elevator as fast as they could, Rysa watching for debris in front of them, on the floor and in the shadows, snaking through the spaces their feet needed to go. AnnaBelinda watched the elevator behind.

  The grinding noise of the cables stopped, followed by the lifting-up, lifting-down sound of the elevator adjusting its position.

  The light above the door pinged to green.

  Ahead of them, Derek moved rapidly toward the door as a flickering block of not-real. “AnnaBelinda, look right at Derek,” Rysa said. “You need to see what I see. Right now, you have no choice but to trust me.”

  AnnaBelinda glanced over her shoulder at her husband. She stopped walking. Stopped moving entirely. But her face didn’t change and she kept the gun trained on the elevator. “Is that…” she whispered.

  She’d seen it too. The irreality. Maybe heard it clicking, the way Rysa did. Maybe smelled the lack of smell that came with it, too. The ghostly nothingness that indicated this is wrong.

  Or maybe she smelled Ladon’s blood. “Yes,” Rysa whispered in return. “So please trust me. Please.”

  AnnaBelinda gripped Rysa’s hand so tightly she was sure no blood flowed to her fingers.

  The elevator began to open.

  “Derek!” Rysa said. “Against the wall!”

  He pressed himself against the cinderblock, behind a stack of boxes. She knew where he was, knew his body breathed, but the blocks stopped moving. And for a moment, Derek vanished like a dragon running silent.

  Sister-Dragon twisted onto the pipes overhead, and her talons gouged the sprayed-on insulation. Bits of foam dropped onto Rysa and AnnaBelinda.

  Rysa hooked into the energy flow between AnnaBelinda and Sister-Dragon. Her healer flexed, rearing up like a dragon, and ran outward on the tentacles of her seers. It jumped the disjointed blocks of irreality, rolling under them, running along the edges of each of the bubble-universes like Ladon running along the top of a wall.

  The elevator door opened revealing the dark wood veneer and the glinting stainless steel side panels.

  They’d moved to the sides, out of AnnaBelinda’s direct line of fire. But Rysa’s future-seer flicked between the three Shifters, feeling for trajectories, sensing for vulnerabilities, and Rysa swayed, her hand gripped tight to AnnaBelinda’s. “Fire,” she said.

  AnnaBelinda seemed to know before Rysa said the word. She sidestepped with Rysa’s sway, her pistol angling to send the bullets into the side of the elevator compartment.

  One of the male Shifters rolled forward with his gun arm up. AnnaBelinda’s shot entered the front of his forearm, shattering the bone. It ricocheted as it exited and hit his other elbow, shattering it as well, then buried itself in the chrome wall of the elevator.

  The second male had turned toward the elevator door at the same time. AnnaBelinda’s second bullet shattered his wrists.

  The female ducked into the shadows, dodging carts and boxes. Her yellow t-shirt made her stand out, even in the gloom. Rysa’s seers snapped into a straight line, pointing where AnnaBelinda needed to fire.

  A cloud of ‘do not perceive’ breathed out by the enthraller rolled down the tunnel, hitting them both.

  The world turned gray. Not the weird sliding and locking of the irreality blocks, but a hazy fog Rysa could not see or hear through. She felt AnnaBelinda swear, her words vibrating along Rysa’s seers, but she didn’t hear it.

  Blinded, deaf, Rysa froze. Her balance whipped with her seers, now only grounded by the extra senses she wasn’t supposed to have, and she almost fell to her knees.

  AnnaBelinda’s grip on her arm tightened. Her body moved against Rysa’s, hip to hip.

  Her brain channel changed—Dragon-perception clicked on and suddenly, clearly, Rysa saw herself from above. She smelled the ‘do not perceive’ wafting to the beast and Sister-Dragon countering it with a complex mix of dragon hormones and dragon scent-detection organs. Rysa saw her own human body not responding in the same manner, and it stirred the dragon’s already rising fury.

  And she saw the heat wafting off of her body. It rose as a steady updraft, an unnatural venting the dragon above her did not like.

  Next to her, hip pressed against hers, the dragon’s human exhaled hard, blowing the ‘do not perceive’ out like the bad air it was. She said something Rysa didn’t hear.

  Where was the Shifter? Rysa’s orientation couldn’t handle the jump to the tunnel ceiling. Nausea kicked her gut again. Hot, violent nausea as much from the fever as from the fluctuating dragon-sensing.

  AnnaBelinda said something again. Information snapped between her and Sister-Dragon and the word finally made it into Rysa’s fogged mind as a push to action more than an image—Run.

  Take Derek.

  Behind them, the elevator door closed and the light pinged over to “up.” It climbed to the first floor to retrieve more Seraphim.

  “If I let go, you’ll lose the connection to my seers.” She was the Draki Prime, and she took her role seriously. “I can’t help you.”

  AnnaBelinda pushed. Rysa saw her own body stumble away from the dragon woman and toward Derek.

  AnnaBelinda said something else. Again, Rysa heard only the grayness of the Shifter’s ‘do not perceive.’ And again, Sister-Dragon thrust the meaning into her head—Who is the better fighter?

  In less than a breath, centuries of images pounded through Rysa’s head—AnnaBelinda in armor, her eyes shimmering with fury, a mace in her hand. Sister-Dragon snapping backs and spears and swords, her brother at her side.

  AnnaBelinda, a single shot pistol in one hand and a rapier in the other, dressed in silk and dark leather, facing down Fates more powerful than any Rysa had yet met.

  So Rysa had better listen. She’d better go. And she’d better take Derek with her.

  No more waffling. But she had to run this maze like a video game, controlling her body by watching, not feeling. The path ahead of her brightened against the gloom of the background—the stack of office paper boxes between her and Derek tilted slightly, off kilter. The top two were too heavy and they’d slide if knocked. Rysa twisted, moving her body around them but staying as close to the wall as possible.

  Sister-Dragon’s view altered faster than Rysa’s brain could follow—she ran forward and swung down to the side wall, behind Derek.

  He popped—full color and without the weird irreality—into the images Rysa pulled from the beast, peering around a file cabinet, gun up as he watched Rysa stop, disoriented, next to the boxes of paper.

  Through Sister-Dragon
’s eyes, Rysa saw the truth of what AnnaBelinda and Derek saw when they looked at her—an ashen girl, paler than she should be but flushed with fever, eyes sunken and hollow. Hair a wild mess, with clothes askew and rumpled, stumbling through the world.

  AnnaBelinda saw someone who made her life just that much more difficult. Derek, though, saw something else.

  He snatched her toward the wall and pulled her close to him, and words dropped off his lips. But as far as Rysa could tell, he’d spoken Russian.

  “Sign,” she croaked out. If he signed, she could understand.

  He held up the gun, shrugging. He couldn’t sign well while holding his weapon.

  He’d heard her words, though. And he obviously saw her. She waved her hand behind her back, pleading with Sister-Dragon to stop pushing the images. Maybe they were far enough away from the Shifter that she could see again.

  Derek looked over her shoulder. Something Russian rolled off his tongue and a perceptible flit of annoyance popped from the dragon, but the images stopped.

  The irreality slammed tight around him again, like walls dropping from the sky. Rysa almost expected cartoon dust to billow off the tunnel floor and the whole scene to blast into the ether as if he’d been sucked up by some horrible sci-fi monster.

  Behind them, down the tunnel, AnnaBelinda shot at the Shifter. The elevator door pinged again as it wiggled just before opening. And sexy sounding Russian words, words Rysa knew did not at all carry sexy meanings, rolled out of Derek in his brilliant baritone voice.

  How did she end up here, in this tunnel, between a pissed-off dragon and an honest-to-God Russian prince? And behind a tiny, lithe woman dressed head-to-toe in black like some goddess of war? Where were her dragon and her man?

  She had special abilities. She was a freaking superhero, so why did she feel like she was about to melt? Once, when she was a kid, one of the boys in her class had climbed the wall out back of the school yelling “With great power comes great responsibility!” and then he fell face first to the dirt and dandelions and broke his wrist.

  I’m falling. In that moment, at that split second, Rysa became blisteringly aware of the random sparking of her attention. Her special abilities gaped, all standing back on their heels, eyes wide, as they tried to track what the hell her mind was doing as if they watched a train wreck or something just as bloody.

  Those four little voices, her Greek chorus of Time and Place, all fell silent as Rysa’s ADHD reasserted itself.

  Derek, though, swore again. The brilliant sonic texture of spoken Russian washed over Rysa and she understood perfectly why this man had won the heart of a dragon woman.

  And why he was the best big brother a girl like her could ever want.

  Something told her she was blinking. An image of herself, of her body, as seen by someone else. Someone huge and angry and sleek. Someone beautiful beyond words and just as deadly. A beast.

  But she fell, dropping toward the rough surface of the tunnel floor, her body much, much too hot, and this beast wouldn’t catch her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The force of the explosion hit Ladon and he stepped back, to hold his balance.

  No shock, no slicing screamed across his connection to Dragon. No damage, no pain. Dragon escaped. Ladon didn’t know where the beast was, but he’d escaped.

  Behind Ladon, on the hood of the dump truck, Vivicus knelt, his hands stiff and spread in tents on the surface of the truck’s paint, as if his fingers formed a strong suction to hold him in place.

  “I had a wife and a son in Rome, Ladon-Human, when I used my skills to overcome the challenges of the arena. The Emperor came to me because of my fortitude. My family was the focus of my first trials. My test? Keep them safe.”

  Ladon carried some memories of the first time they’d met in one of the smaller, posh arenas for special events in the heart of Rome. Vivicus had been putting on a show for the Emperor and the richest of the Roman rich.

  Ladon had snapped Vivicus’s neck for imitating his face.

  “The Emperor took my wife and my son to the front of the dais when you stole my victory from me. He told his men to slice open their necks.” Vivicus stood tall on the hood and his fingers pulled off the paint with an audible pop. His weight shifted unnaturally, his morpher abilities stabilizing his stance on the hood of the truck. “I woke an hour later under my dead wife and son with my face in a puddle of their blood.”

  History looked kindly on the emperor responsible. Ladon knew better. But the cruelty of one man did not give Vivicus license to terrorize whomever he pleased.

  Real anguish twisted Vivicus’s body as he stood on the hood, silhouetted by the fire of the burning truck. Real hate he’d accumulated in the reality of Rome. But they’d all left the Empire behind millennia ago. Sister had. So had Ladon.

  Looking up at Vivicus, Ladon understood why they called him The Bishop. He mixed the simplicity of his call for vengeance and the weight of his victimhood, and he laid it out as his singular purpose. He offered it up as something from above, something not to be questioned. It gleamed, a holy relic to be cherished, and allowed Vivicus to not think, only to act.

  “I’ve walked your path, Vivicus.” Ladon talked to stall. Vivicus was beyond reason. He’d gone beyond reason into the riptide of his faith and revenge long ago. “We found our way out of Hell. You can, as well.” Ladon backed away, ready to bolt for the far side of the hospital.

  Vivicus jumped down to the asphalt, his body rippling as if it flowed. His boots hit lightly, without noise, as if he’d dropped like a feather.

  Ladon suspected he’d done it on purpose, to insinuate he’d decreased his mass and softened his bones. But Ladon knew better; he’d seen the tactic before. If Ladon swung, his fist would smash into granite.

  Heat from the burning truck rolled across him. Smoke billowed, darkening the air. The few remaining standing Seraphim encircled Ladon and Vivicus, all standing back. All watching. Ladon assessed their stances. They postured, probably obeying orders to let Vivicus show his manhood.

  “Where is your beast, Ladon-Human?” Vivicus twirled a pistol around his finger, catching it, then spinning it the other way, like a Wild West showman. Puffs of acrid smoke, dark from the burning tires, slithered around him like theater curtains parting.

  “Killing your men.”

  Vivicus rolled his eyes. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice how carefully you respond? How few truly traumatic injuries my boys have received?” He tapped his temple. “I’m smart.”

  “Does it matter?” Ladon counted six remaining Seraphim. The trucks were more dangerous weapons than the guns. A truck could do true damage to either him or the beast.

  Vivicus pointed the gun at Ladon’s head. “Of course it matters. A smart mind finds opportunity and overcomes trials.”

  Alarm! pinged from Dragon. A large SUV entered the hospital parking lot. Its tire squealed as the driver slammed the brakes. The vehicle stopped between the smoldering dump truck and Ladon. The engine cut, its growl dying away, and the smoke from the burning dump truck billowed up and over the vehicle’s roof.

  The SUV door opened and slammed, and Ladon smelled the calling scents. ‘Ignore’ flooded the air, and, for the moment, rendered the enthraller invisible.

  This was a very strong enthraller, one capable of confusing him, Vivicus, and Dragon. Get back! Ladon yelled. If the beast stayed upwind, he’d be okay.

  He commands me to stay silent. Dragon vanished from Ladon’s mind again.

  Damn it, not now. Not—

  Someone large and strong knocked Ladon to the ground. Someone much bigger than him, bigger than Vivicus and the other Shifters in the lot. Someone much stronger than almost all other Shifters. Someone almost as strong as Ladon.

  Ladon’s anger snapped his perception through this class-one enthraller’s ‘ignore me’ calling scents. Only a few enthrallers were powerful enough to control him, and the majority of them knew better.

  Except one.

  L
adon looked up, past the giant’s knees and his wide shoulders, to a face almost as old as his own.

  “Legatus,” said Andreas Theodulus Sisto, the First Enthraller, and the giant looming over Ladon. The man who had been, for centuries, Ladon’s Second—and the true commander of the Legio Draconis. “Where is the Fate?”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Stay away from her!” Ladon roared. He pulled himself up to a squat, fury blanking out the pain from his ribs. The smoke from the burning truck stung his eyes and nose, but no one would get past him and to Rysa. Not Vivicus. Not Andreas.

  He and Andreas had had their issues in the past, but they’d always come to an understanding, mostly because unlike his half-brother Vivicus, Andreas wasn’t insane. But he dared to use his calling scents on Dragon. And now he glared down at Ladon.

  The last time they’d come to an understanding had been more than five centuries ago. When Fates murdered the First Healer, Andreas and Ladon had parted company on good terms. Andreas—and Vivicus, in his demented way—had taken it upon themselves to protect the most valuable assets their people had—the healers.

  Now Andreas looked down at him with narrow, ocean-colored eyes. He didn’t blast out more calling scents. “Where is the Fate?” he asked again.

  “Why?” Ladon narrowed his own eyes.

  “Brother!” Vivicus sauntered forward with his arms out in a gesture of family solidarity. The son of a bitch had holstered the gun and was now looking for a hug.

  Vivicus stopped two paces back, head cocked to the side as he peered first at Andreas, then Ladon. He threw his hands in the air. “Did Mother send you?” He thrust a finger upward, at Andreas’s nose. “Because I’ve got this. Don’t interfere. This is a delicate operation. One which took me a great deal of effort to set up. But it was worth it. The opportunities here are endless.”