The Burning World

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Harold frowned. “Do we enter his house, or wait until they come out?” He tapped his foot. “Nakajima will see us coming.” He glanced at Dunn. “No offense, ma’am.”

  She couldn’t enthrall cameras. They’d been careful so far. Staying under the radar. What if her gut was correct? What if Trajan was up to something and this was a way to pull them into the open?

  Perhaps everything was a spy game.

  “Recon, first,” she said.

  Harold nodded.

  Marcus walked toward the SUV. “We go.”

  She’d seen posture like his before—the straight back and the indignant annoyance. It manifested more so in Fates than in other Shifters, mostly because Fates believed they always knew everything. If this little revelation told her anything, it was that fate was not bound to the seeings of Fates.

  “You are a past-seer, Marcus. They could have moved him recently,” she said.

  Harold looked up at the sky.

  Marcus’s lips pinched. He did not respond.

  Harold glanced at Mount Hood, then at the Portland glow. His lips pinched into a similar shape to Marcus’s, and he watched his husband slowly situate himself into the front passenger seat of their vehicle.

  “Thank you for the healing, ma’am,” Harold said, and walked away, to drive them into the sweaty belly of the Praesagio beast.

  Chapter Nine

  Daniel Drake did not enjoy life with tender breasts too easily smashed by seatbelts and tight clothes. He did not enjoy monthly menstrual flows and cramps, or the wide-hipped infrastructure that supported both. He found the decrease in height and upper body strength detestable.

  But the targeting because his form was now female caught him off guard.

  The male behind the convenience store’s register tapped his foot as his gaze moved steadily upward from the t-shirt covering Daniel’s breasts, to the Legion insignia that stood in for his true talisman on a chain around his neck. Like all insignia, it had been forged by a Dracae’s hand and touched by a dragon’s talon, which, like his brothers, he had learned long ago was enough for his seer to function.

  The clerk’s gaze moved to the red gem in the talisman-choker around his throat—Addy’s section of her triad’s talisman. Then the man’s gaze turned to the scar on his cheek. From there, it snagged on the opaque glasses over Daniel’s eyes before quickly shifting to the leather-wrapped ponytail swinging behind his head. Then it dropped back to the stack of snacks and the box of tampons on the counter.

  His period had started an hour ago.

  “Long drive ahead?” the clerk asked.

  The frightened, pouting, rage-filled, psychopathic French child in the back of Daniel’s mind stirred. If he let Addy out, she would either go on a murder spree or find some lonely, dark room and slice open their shared arms.

  She had not taken well to becoming the secondary personality in their head. Her flat, distracting terror now radiated from the back of Daniel’s mind as a constant buzz.

  Daniel did not have time for tantrums, so Addy’s little problems would have to stay that way for now—little and tiny and huddled away where they bothered no one.

  Which left Daniel in charge of their body’s functions. All of its functions. The tight ball of cramps in his belly yanked on his kidneys.

  God, how he hated being a woman.

  The convenience store reeked of car exhaust and cheap plastic and sugar. Some random, grating country song shrieked through tinny overhead speakers. Harsh fluorescent lights removed all shadows and stripped the depth from the space, and made it difficult to parse distance.

  Every time the exterior doors opened into Portland’s winter, a wave of water-laden cold rolled in on the back of even more nauseating fumes and exhaust.

  Eric Nakajima, Daniel’s Praesagio Special Medical handler, had decided that a foray into the greater wilds of the city would do them both good. Mostly, though, Daniel suspected that an overall lack of feminine care products within the vast walls of Eric’s lovely estate, combined with Eric’s overall lack of shopping wherewithal, was what had landed them in a gas station convenience store.

  Eric filled his large, comfy, German sedan and had offered Daniel enough trust to send him into the store alone.

  Progress, he thought. Though what type of progress he was currently experiencing, he really could not say.

  The store’s lights flickered.

  So many stimuli to attend to. So many different bags of crisps and tubes of cookies. Daniel could get a cup of horrid coffee, as well, if he wanted. Throw caffeine after the female-specific pain reliever sitting on the counter next to the tampons.

  The asshole behind the counter didn’t care about why Daniel walked his dingy, plastic-smelling aisles. The man only thought Daniel’s opaque-lensed glasses meant he could sneer and then stare at Daniel’s breasts without getting slapped.

  So perhaps not as much progress as Daniel would have hoped.

  Cut him, Addy whispered. Slice out his tongue.

  Daniel’s lip twitched. The clerk’s eyes narrowed.

  You are not helping, Adrestia, Daniel thought.

  If he touches my body, I will gut him, she whispered. You touch my body and I will gut you, angry little boy.

  I am older than you, he thought, just like the child she accused him of being, or like the child she was.

  Connard.

  I have control of this body now, Addy. Remember that. Calling me names changes nothing. He needed her body to walk the world again. He needed it because he refused to remain a ghost. But mostly, he needed this body if he was to figure out the connection between sensing his brothers and the new.

  He knew Marcus disappeared shortly after Ladon found Rysa Torres. He’d picked up hints about why—neither Marcus nor Harold trusted Praesagio Industries and the old families woven into its core. Where there is Old World smoke, there is always long immortal fire, and Trajan Upton had been a high-temperature ember for two millennia.

  Marcus and Harold had done well to stay back.

  I will kill your brother. I will rip open his husband-pet.

  Addy seemed convinced that Marcus and Harold married while Daniel rode around inside her brain.

  Oh, how the world had changed.

  Addy, not so much.

  Shut up, he thought. He did not need the opinion of the woman who had murdered both him and his triad’s present-seer.

  Yet he felt Timothy. Sensed him out there in the what-was-is-will-be, a ghost inside the machine of the universe in much the same way Daniel was a ghost inside the machine of Addy’s body.

  Except Daniel was alive. His sensing of Timothy felt like an echo washing over him again and again and again.

  The clerk dropped the tampons into a plastic bag before squinting at Daniel’s face, presumably examining his cheek. Addy had earned the scar when she terrorized the wrong Burners.

  The visual optimizers did not work as well as eyeballs, but they did provide a blurry version of the world. Eric and Sandro Torres had placed a cortical port into the brain he shared with Addy shortly after she’d come into their care. The optimizers fed information into his occipital lobes via the port, and bypassed Addy’s nonfunctional eyes.

  Now that the fog in the what-was-is-will-be had rolled into the present, Addy’s radar-like sweeps only enhanced what the optimizers pumped into his brain. Colors brightened. Perceived objects took on a solidity which his semi-sight and his hearing only half-provided. But people’s intent became crystal clear.

  When Daniel walked into the store, the clerk had responded with standard boorish desire. There’d been plans to make some obnoxious comment about curves and leather-wrapped ponytails. Then he’d realized the glasses probably meant the body in front of him was blind.

  The boorishness had shifted into embarrassment, which quickly shifted into an anger he wished to take out on Daniel’s feminine frame. The woman in front of him needed to pay for making him feel the way he did.

  The clerk had run the en
tire gamut of his pathetic emotions while standing perfectly still behind his counter on the opposite side of the store from Daniel and the other customers. Now, he returned to staring at Daniel’s breasts.

  “Hey, lady, you gonna pay for this?” The clerk waved his hand at Daniel’s purchases.

  Daniel pulled a fifty-dollar bill out of his pocket and dropped it on the counter.

  The store’s door chimed and a puff of cold winter air rolled in. Eric followed, and sidled up to the counter. He grinned at the clerk before setting a candy bar on the counter. “Add this to her tab, please.” He straightened his expensive cufflinks.

  The clerk frowned but did as he was told. “Have a good day, now. Be careful on the roads. It’s icy out there,” he droned.

  Daniel took the bag. “Thank you,” he said.

  Slice him, Addy whispered.

  Daniel twitched at the same time a new, more intense wave of cramps yanked hard on the muscles of his pelvic floor. It cascaded into his hips and down into his thighs, and it took a great deal of effort for him not to buckle over.

  Eric patted his elbow. “I’m surprised it’s so bad.” He looked Daniel up and down. “I can give you something stronger than aspirin when we get back.”

  Daniel shrugged.

  Eric sighed. “You need to integrate into the modern world, Daniel.” He waved his hand in Daniel’s general direction. “You need to learn to live in her body.”

  Whatever, Daniel thought, but did not say it. Best not to throw odd phrases he’d picked up from television at Eric, especially since only Eric seemed to care.

  Daniel needed to find his brothers.

  “Come.” Eric took the bag from Daniel’s hand and motioned toward the door. “We’re not far from home.”

  Daniel didn’t move. Perhaps if he held still, his belly would loosen and he’d be able to walk again.

  Eric frowned.

  Daniel followed him toward the exit. “This is distracting.” And painful, he thought.

  “I know,” Eric patted his arm again as he led Daniel out their car. “I know.”

  Neither of them noticed the stinky homeless-looking man in the ratty, semi-charred coat walk into the convenience store, nor did they notice him set a phone live-streaming his actions on top of the chocolate bar display.

  No, the acrid-smelling man walked right past the Fate with two seers as if he was invisible in the what-was-is-will-be.

  Invisible, that is, until his slightest touches began setting fire to snacks and magazines.

  Chapter Ten

  Mira Torres stuffed her mittened hands into her coat pockets. Portland’s wet winter weather annoyed her bones. Would it rain? Would it snow? This close to the coast, Oregon never made up its mind. At least in Minnesota, January weather understood the season and dressed accordingly.

  Though for the last few years, the entire planet’s sense of a normal winter had evaporated into muddy puddles at solstice and rain splatters on tacky New Year’s Day hats.

  What surprised her the most was that Praesagio’s dislodged CEO, the ex-emperor Trajan Upton of the Ulpi, did not stop the resource stripping and the blatant overuse hundreds of years ago. But then again, Trajan did like to wash his hands of any culpability.

  If Trajan was half as dangerous as his ego made him believe, humanity would not be destroying her homeworld right now, and Mira of the Jani Prime would not be shivering in Portland, Oregon’s demi-winter.

  Nor would she be standing with a Shifter prince in front of the motorized iron gate at the end of Dr. Eric Nakajima’s driveway.

  She’d called. Multiple times. Several after the reception. Three times today. Mira was not happy about Eric’s ongoing ignoring, especially since he’d taken the job of watching over Daniel-in-Adrestia.

  Daniel was Draki. Addy, Jani, like Mira. Eric should know better than to ignore the calls of the Jani Prime’s present-seer, so she and Andreas drove up to his estate.

  Nakajima, like Trajan, had a pretentious streak. He was her husband’s co-Head of Special Medical and they’d spent more evenings socializing at Eric’s house than she cared to remember. She knew his grandiose need to impress all too well.

  No one was home, so out at the base of Eric’s driveway, she and Andreas stood.

  Andreas Sisto only scowled and responded in exactly the manner Mira had expected. Here they were, in the cold, fiddling with Eric’s gate on the verge of breaking and entering just to prove a point—that Eric had better remember his place in the grand scheme of Fate relations.

  Mira was fully aware of the posturing occurring in this moment, including the invisible, testosterone-drenched, Ulpi passive-aggressiveness. Eric would not act the cretin unless ordered to do so, and the only person capable of ordering Eric to ignore Dmitri’s call for cooperation was Trajan.

  Trajan, who might very well have something to do with the what-was-is-will-be fog. To Mira, the fog shimmered with a randomness that reminded her a little too much of the time she’d ingested Burner implosion.

  For the first time in her long immortal life, Mira Torres could not read the best option in the current situation.

  At the reception in Branson, there’d been a flare in the what-was-is-will-be—Rysa had sensed it as well—a sudden sense of Dunn, the Shifter Progenitor, plus a connection to Praesagio, then nothing. Mira was sure the flare made it through the fog because of Daisy Pavlovich’s revelations.

  Daisy, a young woman almost as wrapped up in the Dracae’s lives as Rysa, was Dunn’s daughter, and not just one of Dunn’s random spawn. She, like Andreas, Vivicus, and Severo, was born of Dunn’s original form.

  Daisy could very well be a new Shifter First and not a single Fate could tell her yay or nay.

  At the gate, frustration flickered across Andreas’s face. He’d taken off his gloves and now fiddled bare-fingered with the wires.

  Mira rubbed her hands together again. “In some ways,” she said, “the fog feels like the chaos around a Burner.” She hadn’t really spoken to anyone about the fog. Not Rysa or Sandro, or any of the other Fates she knew. She hadn’t wanted to worry her family, and non-family Fates might be allies, but they were still Fates.

  She needed a friend.

  Andreas lifted his hand off the gate’s control box. “What?”

  Mira nodded in the general direction of greater Portland. “You know as well as I do that Trajan is not above complicated subterfuge.”

  Andreas frowned. “Is your seer telling you this?”

  Of course he’d ask about the source of her wild idea. If she was going to throw out craziness, he wanted to make sure the crazy came from a crystal ball he trusted.

  Mira frowned right back at him. “My gut, my dear.”

  Andreas shook his head and returned to poking at the control box on the post under the driveway’s one light.

  “Why don’t you get back in the car?” Andreas said. “It’s cold.”

  When the flare occurred in Branson, Mira’s seer had caught something shadowed and ghost-like from Andreas.

  He was slightly older than her and had been the Second of the Dragons’ Legion for as long as she could remember. It had taken several centuries to get beyond the hell that rained down on them all the night after Vesuvius exploded. She’d lost a niece and two nephews. Andreas lost a part of his naiveté. They’d bonded, if briefly. So she recognized the twisting, roiling gray erupting from his soul.

  Guilt had a hold on Andreas Sisto once again, but old or new, she did not know.

  He’d been as surprised by that Burner’s video—the one named Billy who’d helped save Ladon—as everyone else. He’d said that it had been Cordelia’s idea to leave the Chevy Impala with Billy. Andreas had agreed because he knew it would piss off his ex-wife. Dmitri’s lead manager at The Land, Ivan, left to retrieve the car after the video surfaced, anyway.

  So his guilt wasn’t because of recent events.

  The guilt, Mira suspected, stemmed from his mother’s actions.

  If her see
r worked, Mira might understand. For now, she would have to speculate in the same way she speculated about the fog and the Burners.

  Mira walked around the front of their SUV and toward the tasteful, sweeping gate. Eric Nakajima, like most men of his station, enjoyed the trappings of his high salary. His home had been designed to take maximum advantage of its view—old trees filled the almost five acres of land around it, and the drive up to the house wound through a forest.

  The gate, where Mira and Andreas fiddled with the wires, was just in from the main road and behind a small stand of trees. Though sheltered, it was still visible from the road.

  Eric did like to be ostentatious in his humility.

  Andreas frowned yet again and stepped back from the box. “So much for triggering the mechanism and driving up there.”

  A Land of Milk and Honey SUV parked at the foot of his driveway would remove any element of surprise they might have. Then again, she hadn’t been stitching, figuring the fog would take care of any Fates watching Eric’s property. And Dan-Addy might well be able to present-see what they were doing anyway.

  Andreas walked toward her and stopped just to the side so his bulk didn’t block the light from the gate’s fixtures. Like Mira’s Shifter husband, Andreas was a huge, athletic man. In public, he often pumped out a constant background blend of ‘ignore’ calling scents meant to put normals at ease. No one bothered him, or asked for his autograph because they thought him a professional American football player.

  Andreas never used calling scents on people he trusted, and never used his enthralling abilities for personal gain. He was one of the most honorable men alive—far more honorable than any Fate, and other than Mira’s husband, more honorable than any other Shifter.

  Dunn did well by the world when she birthed Andreas.

  He’d taken to shaving his hair and stood out in the chill with the bronze of his perfectly-shaped masculine scalp exposed to the winter air. A slight hint of warmth rose from his skin and shimmered in the air around his face.