“You three are no longer the Draki Prime,” Dunn snarled. “You are not the triad in charge. You were never in charge.”
“Besides the pilots, we’re the only triad here, ma’am,” Harold said.
Dunn pinched the bridge of her nose. “Attend to my words.”
Daniel’s confusion and cramps no longer mattered. They were no longer even worthy of a shrug-off. They became trivial.
The two security personnel up front stood. Harold oriented his body to Dunn, as did Marcus and Daniel.
Their headsets clicked. “Ma’am?” said the co-pilot.
Dunn held up her hand.
The air shimmered around her fingers, and when she curled her hand into a fist, the shimmering collapsed into a bubble-like skin. She pulled a small, delicate ring out of her pocket with her other hand.
She set the ring on the back of her other fist. The stone gleamed in a way not unlike the skin of a dragon. The band glinted silver in the low light.
It did not slide off her hand. The copter jostled and banked, and they all swayed, but the ring floated a fraction of an inch above Dunn’s skin.
She swallowed as if she remembered something she did not want to share. “I used Janus’s talisman to pin the Maker of Burners to the rock of Vesuvius days before the mountain took Pompeii,” she said.
Why was she telling them this now? But he listened, because she’d told him to attend.
“Janus brought many swords but couldn’t get near enough to Terry—he called himself Terry, the Burner Progenitor—to do damage.” She flipped her hand around so the ring floated above her palm. “Of all the Progenitors, I am the only one who can extend her hand into the chaos and pull it back whole.”
She stared at the ring for a long moment. “We all knew Terry was too dangerous to be allowed to walk free. Janus knew the mountain was about to blow. The whispers…” She inhaled. “The Whispering One told me that he had to be sequestered until he was needed. Needed for what, though, I never did glean.”
She looked directly at Daniel. “The Tsar’s ring with its pretty ruby was not the first time I’ve touched an object and altered its place in the universe.” She wiggled her hand and the delicate opal ring tilted upward so that it floated at a forty-five degree angle from her skin.
The ring rotated slowly and set off an odd helix-like impression in Addy’s seer, as if Daniel watched the beginnings of a tiny, shiny cyclone just off Dunn’s palm.
“I took Janus’s sword from him,” she said. “I sent him back into that tunnel without his talisman and I felt the Whispering One place her hand with—in—mine. I felt the blade change as I slammed it into the Burner Progenitor’s belly.”
Dunn closed her eyes. The little ring’s rotational speed increased. “I changed the blade so that it cut through Terry’s chaos and I locked him to that rock, and I think I changed him.”
They all knew the story. Both the Fates and the Shifters had their fairy tales.
“I caged him.” The ring floated upward. “He laughed and babbled in what at the time we thought was nothing more than gibberish but I remember some of it. I remember him speaking modern German.” She blinked and frowned as if as surprised as everyone else.
Harold’s mouth opened and closed. “Trajan sent a team to get the Burner Progenitor,” he said. “I was coming back to tell you.”
She nodded. “Of course he did. Trajan’s special.” She grinned. “The Whispering One told me to father him, too.” Her grin faded. “I do not enjoy playing male any more than you enjoy your new female form, little Daniel, but we all do what needs doing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “We all do what needs doing.”
“Do you all know how the Progenitors came about our names?” She waved a free finger at Daniel and Marcus. “Your brother gave AnnaBelinda her name shortly after Ladon found you three, correct?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Marcus. “She had been the Dracas-Human up until then. Ladon was given his name by a Roman Senator’s daughter.”
“Yes,” said Dunn. “Janus named himself after the two-faced god of luck and doorways. A tribe of barbarians decided that I reminded them of their goddess of birth and fertility, which is how I became Idunn.”
She shrugged. “But Terry was always Terry. We woke naked under that damned olive tree. Ladon’s beast slammed him into the trunk, and Anna’s beast screamed. Janus bled from a long wound on his thigh—a wound from which he drew his talisman. And I woke with the Maker of Burners curled around my body. He embraced me the way a terrified child would cling to his mother.
“And he started talking. Words none of us understood. We felt language—its cathedrals and its bright, shining lights. Images. Whispers. Sometimes I wonder if the Whispering One is like us. A Progenitor of Ghosts who is, right now, telling me I must activate my daughter.”
She stared at the ring. “At the time, none of us knew what language Terry spoke.” She shrugged again. “It didn’t take any of us long to learn Latin.
“We knew we were in the Empire. We knew we were Progenitors. I knew how dangerous Terry was. His sneezes toppled villages.”
She tipped her head to the side. “Shifters cannot be Burnerized. We always die. Our liquid, living order is the key to containing Burner chaos and if it’s not applied correctly, the entire system implodes.”
She snatched the spinning ring out of the air. “I altered Janus’s talisman. The mountain shattered it. Trajan has been collecting the shards since his reign.”
“Trajan encased those shards in property-mirroring glass,” Harold said. “He’s made replicas of the talisman.”
Dunn snorted. “Not exact replicas, boys.”
She looked down at the ring on her palm. “The closer we get to Minneapolis,” she said, “to the future, to Daisy, the more this ability surfaces.” She looked directly at Daniel as she flipped over her hand.
She stuffed the ring back into her pocket. “It’s a portent. Do you see, future-seer? Speak the truth.”
Daniel unfurled his future-seer. Next to him, Marcus unfurled his past-seer. They harmonized, but nothing of the future showed itself. Nothing but the fog.
“No,” he said.
Dunn looked up at the fuselage over their heads. “I think fate has abandoned us and that is why your seers are full of fog,” she said. “I think we have moved out of the time when fate had enough control of the what-will-be that a Fate could read the future. I think we are on our own.”
She looked to the side and cocked her head. “I don’t think you can see the future any better than Daniel,” she said to the air.
Dunn pointed at each of them, one at a time. “You will all do what needs doing to get us through what’s coming. Do you understand? We must all do what needs doing.”
That spot at the back of Daniel’s mind, the place where he connected to Marcus and Timothy, wavered. It strengthened.
“Yes, ma’am,” both the pilot and co-pilot said through their headsets.
“Yes, ma’am,” said both Daniel and Marcus. Yes, ma’am, echoed Addy.
Harold dropped into the seat on the other side of Marcus. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
And somewhere not here, not real, Timothy answered: Yes, ma’am.
They all had jobs to do, and if those jobs killed them, so be it. They would do what needed doing. And if they had to, they would do it again.
Chapter Fifteen
Mount Vesuvius, Italy…
Billy Bare slid his hand over the sharp, broken tephra of Vesuvius’s slope. Dust collected on his fingertip—real dust made from real rock out here in the real world. Living dust instead of the acidic, burning haze produced by the death of one of his kind. The dust on his hand came from the planet that had so graciously allowed him to walk her surface these past fifty years.
Perhaps that blowhard asshole Trajan would find Billy’s family when this was done. His cousins had been hooligans when the Professor turned Billy into a Burner that night in Texas. He doubted they were any
better now, but finding them seemed the right thing to do.
He needed a few strings of correctness. A few threadbare banners of good he could point to and tell himself that if he found the strength, all he needed to do was grab hold.
Right now, his only handholds consisted of the jagged rocks of Vesuvius’s side. Ismene hadn’t led him into the cinder cone proper. He’d followed her up a steep, hidden trail on the north face of the volcano’s outer half-ring wall. This ridge circled the new, smoking center, and was all that remained of the mountain from its Roman salad days.
Along the ridge, the mountain god dressed himself in his finest winter-choked dead brambles. Like Billy, Vesuvius had seen better times.
The volcano shimmered in all possible browns: warmed, muddy water leaked from vents. Rock, dust, and the proto-soil crackled under his boots into hazy, flat, brown dirt. The grass, the leaves, the branches varied only by their shades of beige. Even the sky here looked like the skin of a nauseated child.
Seemed appropriate, considering who they climbed to find.
He did not press his luck with Ismene. Asking questions about the night the mountain exploded in 79AD—the night Ladon took the life of her niece and triggered the suicides of her own boys—would only cause her pain. And no matter how she deserved any and all of the karmic ribbing he could mete out, now was not the time.
Nor, he believed, would the princess approve. The world already had enough assholes. He could be kind this once.
A spike of Ismene’s Burner stink washed down the crag and she stopped climbing just ahead of him.
“What’s wrong, dove?” Billy worked his way up until he stood on the same outcropping as the Fate.
Slowly, Ismene pressed her back into the sharp, snagging rock. He had no reason to worry about her frothing Burner blood—the Praesagio-provided jacket she wore protected her skin. But what little life the woman carried had drained from her already-ashen face.
She slid down the rock until her backside landed on the outcropping.
Billy pointed up the crag. “Shouldn’t we move?” It widened into a shadow-filled tunnel not far ahead, one that looked to be blocked by boulders.
Nothing two Burners couldn’t handle.
Ismene’s gaze followed his finger. She frowned, then sighed, and dropped her hands onto her lap. “How many normals have you consumed, rock star?”
Billy sat next to her. He crossed his legs under him and adjusted Poke’s scabbard, and took up the calmest, most meditative pose he could muster.
Her clothes were already showing signs of singeing. The collar of her jacket frayed. The gloves she wore had bleached. The knees of her protective leggings were on the verge of developing holes.
Ismene was not holding herself together.
“As many as I needed,” Billy said.
Ismene laughed. “My brother was a monster, Mr. Barston.”
Billy nodded once. “Yes, he was.” Faustus of the Jani, her brother and the man she consumed to gain her future-seer, was a monster in all senses of the word.
“My sister also believes me to be a pitiful monster.”
Mira Torres, the princess’s mother. She was a right fine bird, Rysa’s mum. Strong as an ox, too. She’d taken from a burndust implosion and survived.
No wonder the princess had the strength to knit Boyfriend and his dino-dog back together. She got it from her mum.
“Does it matter if we are pitiful?” Billy looked up the crag at the tunnel. “Does it matter how the Fates judge us?”
Or how they judged themselves? Did it matter if they stuck to their word or if they forgot who and why they were? Did it matter if he considered his expectations the one part of his life worth remembering?
“I am Parcae, my dear Ambustae father.” Ismene almost sounded apologetic.
Almost.
“And I’m a rock star.” Billy strummed the air as if playing a guitar, lighting his fingertips as he plucked a chord.
Ismene smiled. “We’re on top of the world, aren’t we?”
He pointed up the crag. “Literally, dove.”
She laughed again, but it quickly vanished. “This is the place. It happened here.” She slapped the rock next to her ass. “Right here.”
He wouldn’t ask what, nor would he comment. This was the moment in which his princess would want him to be kind.
“Faustus was up ahead.” She nodded toward the tunnel. “Mira in the middle. I was at the back.” She leaned against the rock again. “The walls were higher, then. The mountain belched stink not unlike us.”
Billy sniffed.
“The ground shook. My brother froze. He knew first.” Her eyes glowed when she looked at Billy. “Then Mira.” She paused. “Then me.”
“I am sorry, Ismene.” He didn’t know what else to say. He’d never lost a child.
“They were not my first, nor were they my last.” She closed her eyes again. “But they were the only ones who killed themselves.”
He squeezed her knee.
“Many of the Jani triads descend from me.” She chuckled. “Mira likes big, handsome Shifter boys.”
For a second, an image of many versions of Rysa flickered through Billy’s mind. Boy Rysas, blonde girl Rysas, Rysas with attitudes, and Ambusti Prime Rysas who dressed all in black and who unleashed their sorrows via a honed blade of Burner fire.
But they vanished as if the hole in the universe through which he peered to see them moved out of sight. Not closed—it could never close now. But it rotated like tumblers in a lock.
Ismene leaned forward. “You see her, don’t you? The dark Fate? The Ambusti Prime?”
Billy opened his mouth, but snapped it closed. No, he thought. I’m hearing something completely different.
They’d been silent, the traffic control chatter, since they began climbing the mountain. They, too, seemed to have moved out of earshot.
He’d been relieved. Now he wondered.
Ismene pointed up the crag. “It’s as if since Aiden Blake stepped into the new, I’ve been seeing the could-have-been-is-not-might-still-be.”
Were his friends on their vessels they called “Sentinels” and what he guessed was probably a really big something-or-other called “Intrepid” speaking to him through the what-was-is-will-be?
Or were they in Ismene’s could-have-been-is-not-might-still-be?
Wherever they were, it was most definitely new.
Ismene dug her fingers into the rock. A breeze picked up the dust, and the ghost of Vesuvius moaned through the crag. “I don’t understand, Billy. I never have. The echoes, the phantoms, the visions, the dreams.”
She sighed. “Why did my boys take their own lives? I could have found them another triad-mate. They would have been fine.”
Ismene’s skin heated. Small wisps of smoke rose off her clothes. “I don’t understand how I can be the most essential part of this game and still have the world treat me like shit.”
Most essential part…? How was she the most essential part?
Rysa was the most essential part. Billy knew it all the way down to his brittle bones. He’d always known. She was the only one who cared enough to hold the world together.
Every ounce of rapport he’d allowed himself to build with Ismene contracted into its own special little implosion. Every thread of empathy he had for her plight. Every single connection where he thought that maybe, just maybe, she might have some empathy for him vanished.
And he prayed the princess’s mother was a better woman than the Burner in front of him now.
“Get up,” he said. “We came here to fetch our Progenitor.”
Billy unfurled his legs. The breeze picked up and the mountain’s moan slid upward in pitch. The ghosts here wailed, and Billy wanted to wail right along with them.
Ismene rubbed at her face. “Yes,” she said.
She jumped up. “Everything happens for a reason.”
Yes, it does, Billy thought. But that reason isn’t you.
The universe
was a self-playing game. They were all bits, pieces, levers, and levels. Bits broke off. Pieces failed. Levers didn’t click and levels wasted away unplayed. In the grand scheme, what Ismene thought of as a “reason” was nothing more than a flip of a bit or the breaking of a piece.
The universe didn’t give a fuck about her. It didn’t give a fuck about him, either. And that lack of fucks given was neither negative nor positive. The universe didn’t have it out for Ismene. It didn’t care if she liked her lot in life, or not. Unlike his princess, Ismene was nothing.
Billy looked up the crag. Yet here they were, climbing a volcano in order to make a difference. The board shifted into something new when the corpse-boy worked whatever magic he inflicted on the world. Magic Billy carried around in his neck as a splinter of Fate-made glass, and, perhaps, in the new-infected sliver of dragon talon he carried in his pocket.
They were bits, pieces, levers, levels. Echoes and maybes. Unknowns and the unknown unknowns.
Yet a man and a dragon managed to be in the right place at the right time to stop a woman from becoming the Prime Fate of Billy’s people, so that she could become their savior instead.
The Ambusti Prime, a might-have-been that did not become a what-was.
And now, a what-is that might help change a what-will-be that terrified Trajan, a Fate much worse—and a much more important piece of the game—than the whiny little brat guiding Billy to his Progenitor.
The board shifted, but the “reason” was not a singular fate. It had never been a singular Fate. The reason was the still-might-be ahead of them all.
Sentinel Three, hold for coordinates.
Copy that, Intrepid.
He looked down at his hands and slowly, deliberately lit each fingertip, then just as slowly, just as deliberately, returned them to near-normal.
Perhaps the princess gave him more than just control of his body, when she let him take a bite. Perhaps she fixed the electrical fires in his brain. He sure did feel smarter these days.
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