Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds (17 page)

And under the haze of dirty ash clinging to the beast’s hide, Andreas saw the truth—this decision was not the unfolding of what should unfold. This decision sent out ripples.

Somewhere else out in the world created by the gods, something else responded, because all changes must be balanced.

But it wasn’t somewhere else. No. The scales altered in his chest, pressed on his bones, threatened to rip his insides into bleeding pulp. What happened was not a gain, though a grain needed sacrifice to calm the eddy. A slice had to happen and a sliver pressed into his eye.

Andreas’s throat tightened. Deep inside, down in his neck, below his voice but above his breastbone. In the place which birthed his calling scents.

He’d long ago tamed it, cinching tight its wiggles and spasms. He’d gained control and proven to the dragons that he alone had the strength to be trusted. He carried his gift-curse with purpose and reason.

But Ladon could not die.

“No,” he said. ‘Refusal’ wafted from his mouth with his words. He would not set the past-seer down. He would not let these Fates go. He’d sacrifice his soul and all he knew as family, to bring his body—and the bodies of his commander, man and dragon—out of the ash.

***

The present-seer looked over her shoulder at Andreas and her head tipped the same way it had when her ability washed over Ladon. “He uses his—” She shook violently and her seer suddenly ceasing its chiming.

‘Indignation’ hit Ladon’s nose in full, clawing glory. He squinted and his body wiggled as it mirrored what Andreas’s calling scents told him what to do.
He
wasn’t going to let these little whining whores lead him to his death under the mountain.
He
was better than that.
He
was a godling.

Human
! The beast staggered and a bright flame screamed from his open mouth into the ash-filled air. Bits of the volcano popped and fizzled, fusing together, and dropped into the hot mud now more glass than pumice.
Right your mind
!

The ‘indignation’ flipped over to ‘fear’ and just as quickly yanked on Ladon’s muscles. Vesuvius wasn’t done. It rose impossibly high, spit impossible quantities of death and shadow. He’d dropped into a pit and the mountain stood at the lip, silhouetted by a dying sun, and sneered down at him. It pissed on his head.

He wanted to take Dragon and run, to leave these three behind, and get to the coast before the mountain exploded again.

Ismene gasped under the scarf around her face. She yelled, her hands gripping Andreas’s arm. “Run… we have to run. I can’t
see
. What did you do, you vile Mutatae? Your kind is more dangerous than all of mine combined. It’s fated. You shift the world to evil. Evil born of your Progenitor…”

Andreas tossed the past-seer. She flew up, her arms flailing, and landed hard next to Dragon’s forelimbs. Her arm snapped.

She screamed.

The beast pranced back, his talons digging into the ground. The need to hunt, to kill, flashed to Ladon across their connection like the lightning flashing through the clouds around the mountain’s crest. She deserved to die. All her kind deserved to die.

“Andreas!” Ladon bellowed. Ash clung to his lips, filling his eyes and ears. But it did not filter what he smelled. His
tribunus
had unleashed his curse.

The big man looked up and he pointed at Ladon’s chest. “My charge is to protect you and your sister.” His finger whipped toward Dragon. “To protect the beast and his sister!”

His foot met the past-seer’s side. “Not to protect Fates!
Never
Fates.”

She screamed again.

Mira’s own fear must have broken through the ‘fear’ Andreas pumped to her. She screamed as harsh and shrill as her sister and ran at Andreas. Her fists hit, her teeth gnashed. She tried, in vain, to move a man twice her size away from her fallen family.

Ismene curled into a ball. Tears mixed into the ash.

“You murdered the
only
descendant of the Dracae and you think your petty outrage is justified?” Andreas pulled back his foot to kick again. “You lead one—probably both—of the dragons to want their own death? I will not allow you to kill those I serve and protect!”

If his foot came down on her body—anywhere on her body—he’d kill her. The past-seer of the Jani Prime would become another corpse left to be encased by Vesuvius.

“Andreas! You will not hurt them!” No more death. It stopped, now.

Ladon’s
tribunus
bellowed, his voice raw as much from his anger as the ash, and another blast of ‘refusal’ filled the grove. Ladon staggered back. What had Andreas become?

A dragon claw-hand cupped Andreas’s chest. And a dragon claw-hand pushed him toward Ladon.

Andreas hit the trunk of the grand olive tree with a bone-rattling thump. His head bounced, his breath forced from his body. The ‘calling scents’ vanished.

Ladon unsheathed his
gladius
and pushed its point into his
tribunus’s
shoulder.

Neither spoke.

In the ash, at Dragon’s forelimbs, Ismene whimpered. Mira hovered over her, her body an insignificant wall between her sister and the beast.

Dragon sniffed her hair, then twisted his head back toward Ladon.
I do not desire more death, Human
. His great tail whipped, and he moved back.
Neither do you
.

No, he did not.

This cycle of revenge—this inciting to violence he’d allowed—would never happen again. He’d never again be driven to murder by the manipulation of Fates.

Or the enthralling of a Shifter.

“Get up.” He lowered his
gladius
.

Andreas blinked. He slumped against the tree, stunned.

Dragon blew out a flame and stepped between the woman and Ladon’s
tribunus
.

Mira’s ability chimed through the grove. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for allowing us to live.”

“I should not.” Ladon pointed his
gladius
at the Fate. “He is right. You should die.” But he no longer had the will to take the life of another child, even this adult child of his fellow Progenitor.

Ladon walked toward the women, sheathing his
gladius
. The satchel he carried over his shoulder shifted. He stopped within arm’s reach. Mira stood and a new wave of indignation rolled from her, but this time he saw it in her posture, not smelled it in the air. Her sister whimpered, but did not move.

What had these two women lost? One, her children. The other, Ladon suspected, what little joy her family offered. “What were their names?” He’d never learned the children’s names. Not when they walked the halls of the Emperor’s estates and not when he caused their deaths.

Mira’s eyes, the color the sky should be, looked at him through the folds of the cloth wrapping her face. “Junonius. Jupiter.” She glanced at her sister, then back to him. “Minerva.” A pause. “Her name was Minerva. She was nothing like her father.” Mira looked down at her hands.

No. Ladon saw that now. Only one Fate would push such pain into the world and it wasn’t the woman in front of him. Or the girl she so obviously cared for.

The girl named Minerva.

“Why did he allow this?” Ladon asked.

Mira’s chest rose and fell, a silent sigh under the scarf wrapped so tight around her face. “Ismene asked the same question. On the mountain.” She pointed at Vesuvius. “We’d gone to help Father. Why he called us, I could not see. We did nothing when we were there. Only climbed. We followed and did not interfere.” Her eyes narrowed. “Followed the chafing fate tied tight around our necks.”

The girls—his niece, the one named Minerva, and the two boys, Junonius and Jupiter—were nothing more than knots in Janus’s coiled hate. Knots he’d thrown around all their necks.

Mira’s entire body shook as her seer’s chiming filled the grove. “This stops with you. It has to stop with you, Dracos, man and beast.”

She is correct
. Dragon twisted and shook, an attempt to dislodge more ash.
I do not like Fates, but she speaks the truth, Human.

Mira blinked, looking between Ladon and the beast. “The Great Sir understands, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.” Of course Dragon understood. Of all of them, he saw the world with the greatest clarity.

Ladon bowed his head once, quickly, toward the Fate. “As do I, present-seer.”

Mira returned the gesture. “This new path you choose will be difficult.”

All paths but death were difficult.

They must leave
.
The mountain makes more ash
. Dragon pointed his snout inland, toward Vesuvius.

“He’s telling me it is time for you to take your sister and go.” Ladon reached into the satchel. “Take this.” He offered an olive. “Go north along the coast. You will find a captain. The Carthaginian. Give him the fruit and tell him his son Andreas wishes him to tend your sister’s arm.” He nodded to the present-seer. “He will take you as far as you need to go.”

She stared at his palm. Her hand snaked out. She snatched the olive, nodding once. “Thank you.”

The ground rocked, a wave from the distant mountain, and she grasped his arm, her hand cupping his elbow—an unconscious gesture to keep herself from dropping to the mud. He steadied her as best he could.

“What of him?” She let go, her fingers releasing slowly, as she nodded toward Andreas.

Ladon looked over his shoulder at his Second. He didn’t know what the future held. He never dared to believe he understood—or could comprehend
what-will-be
. “
Legio
business does not concern you, present-seer.”

She blinked and backed away, her gaze low, and carefully pulled her sister to standing.

Ismene babbled and refused her sister’s help, much like a small child.

She will not learn
. Dragon rubbed against the olive’s trunk to dislodge the mud-ash on his back, but it only smeared across his hide.
I do not like her
.

Andreas stared at the beast, still silent.

The two Fates argued, their heads together, doing their best to hide their words from him. But Ladon heard Mira as clearly as if she spoke into his ear: “I am the present, and I want to live, sister.” Mira glanced at him one last time as she vanished into the ash, her sister in tow.

They’d survive. How they would face their future, though, Ladon did not know.

Dragon knocked against his side and he patted the beast’s neck. Then he hauled his
tribunus
to his feet. “Come,” he said. “We go to the coast.”

~ ~ ~

The Fates tell their children a story:

You are descended from our Progenitor, a god more powerful than his namesake Janus, than Manu the Great or Shai or any of the other figments of the normals’ imaginations. You are descended from one of the true gods who walks this earth—a real man, a real god—and that is what makes you exceptional.

When the Progenitor of Shifters tricked the first Burner to his end, your Progenitor knew her plans. When she would leave the Burner to the mountain, your Progenitor sacrificed his talisman to ensure the ghoul’s fate. And to this day, if you walk the haunted streets of Pompeii, you may tread upon the shards of his sword—and upon cost and purpose.

So remember, my children, you are exceptional. But you must follow our Progenitor’s example: See what must be seen. Do what must be done.

Because
no one is as bound by fate as the Fates themselves
….

~ ~ ~

Now…

A new talking head popped onto the television’s screen
. “—and rescue teams scour the rubble for survivors.”

Mira’s stomach clenched. A warehouse in Indiana had detonated yesterday afternoon, then this happened yesterday evening. She set the remote next to her breakfast.

The scene cut to a German shepherd in a special Kevlar dog-vest and a firefighter in full gear crawling over smoldering concrete. The animal barked frantically as he dug between two bent steel girders.

“As the Chicago area reels from last night’s tragic explosion in Schaumburg, the nation wonders. Could this be another attack on our—”

Pressure cinched tight around Mira’s left eye. She leaned forward, her palms flat on the kitchen counter. Something moved in
what-was-is-will-be
and spread over the threads of the universe like burning grease. She couldn’t read it directly, but it had ignited the present.

Her seer had been screaming for a full twenty-four hours. Screaming to run, to hide, to do something, but she didn’t know what. Answers weren’t coming through because a wall of chaos blocked off all understanding.

She glanced at the television again.

Burners. Flames and acid and randomness so thick no Fate could see through it rampaged across the Midwest. They’d eat every normal and Shifter they caught.

Her finger tapped the remote. Two thousand years she’d been living each day, dancing with her seer, doing her best. But it still got away from her sometimes. Especially now, with the pain in her joints.

She flicked the television to a different feed from Chicago. Another explosion ripped through the crumpled shopping mall. Screams burst from the television’s speakers and the picture fractured. A black screen followed, then the anchor’s slack-jawed horror.

Thumps from the bedroom above boomed through the kitchen. Shadows moved—the light fixture swayed.

Mira looked toward the stairs. In thirty seconds, her daughter Rysa would burst down the steps, her pack dangling from her hand, and rush into the kitchen. She’d mutter and purse her lips and turn in a circle. Then she’d ask Mira why the news flashed across their television.

Twenty seconds, now.

One of Mira’s hands poured orange juice without her willing it to move. The liquid sloshed as it hit the glass. The other hand braced her neck.

Ten seconds and flustered energy would bounce through the room, worries about grades and graduate school dropping from her daughter’s lips. Rysa would look into Mira’s eyes and ask how she felt this morning. Then she’d promise to be home early enough to make dinner, so Mira wouldn’t have to cook.

Rysa could have moved into an apartment near campus. Started her own life. Mira was thankful she hadn’t.

Her throat constricted. The skin under her fingers warmed. Her body did what it would do, her seer screaming
Now!
Do it now!
She needs it now!

Mira leaned forward and an iridescent glop fell from her mouth into the drink.

Three, two, one…

“Mom, I’m late!” Rysa’s pack thumped onto the hallway tile. In the kitchen door, she turned in a circle and tugged down her t-shirt, her dark auburn hair swishing around her face.

Mira gripped the glass. In the juice, patterns, bright and swirling, playing over the glop’s surface. It dispersed, taking on the color of the juice, and vanished.

The same footage playing all morning flashed onto the television: Shaky, grainy cell phone images. Young people laughing followed by three explosions arching across the far side of the mall—pop, pop.

Boom
.

The voiceover thundered, full of the perfect resonances needed to ramp up horror in the minds of the viewers. “
Fourteen dead. Thirty-nine remain missing. Chicago mayor Em
—” Click.

Rysa turned off the television as she stepped in front of the blank screen. “Mom, are you okay?”

Mira held out the juice.
What-is
danced through the corridors of her mind, ignorant of the past and future, as it always was. How many times over her two millennia had she bent to the whims of her seer? Running from the ashes of Vesuvius, across the cold north of Europe, to this new world. Crossing this continent more times than she remembered.

But it had saved her just as often. Maybe it meant to save her daughter, too. Rysa would drink and attend her classes as the iridescence spread through her blood. And then
her
Fate’s ability would activate.

No matter what the future held.

The little gold eagle of Mira’s bracelet clinked against the rim of the glass. “Drink it. You need your vitamins.”

“Do your joints hurt again? Isn’t the new med helping?” Rysa touched Mira’s shoulder. Her lips thinned and her brow creased as concern darted through her green-gray eyes.

“I’m fine. Drink.” Mira pressed the glass into her daughter’s palm.

Rysa gulped down half the juice. Her face tightened, her eyes narrowing, as she watched Mira. “Don’t watch any more about the attack. It’s terrible and you don’t need that, okay? There’s nothing you can do.” One last gulp and she dropped the glass onto the counter. “I can stay home today if you need me.”

Mira shook her head. “No, no. I’ll lie down. You go to class.” The words, fated to be said, fell from her mouth. The burning world flicked behind her eyes and she clamped them shut, hoping to force it back.

“I’ll be home late. Gavin wants to have coffee.” Rysa waved her hand dismissively, her nose crinkling. “But if you need me, you text, okay?” Her long legs carried her toward the door.

“I will.” Mira planned to rest, like she said.

The Burners moved west. She didn’t need any sense of
what-will-be
to see their trajectory. They’d set more fires and eat more people. They’d kill in a random blaze of glory—the only predictable behavior the goddamned ghouls had.

“Bye, Mom.” The door slammed. Rysa’s key clanked into the lock tumbler. The sound of metal-on-metal erupted through the house, hot and angry.

Mira sat at the kitchen counter for a long moment and stared at the glass she’d handed Rysa. She’d never told her daughter what she was. Never explained about the Fates. Or about Burners or Shifters, either. She’d raised her as a normal. And Mira just sent her out the door, alone.

Without a word.

She wouldn’t call. Her seer jittered and jolted and stomped out demands that Mira prepare.
Rysa will be fine
.

Mira blinked, her gaze darting to the bottle of Rysa’s attention meds next to the bananas, behind the glass in front of her. She’d distracted her daughter and Rysa forgot to take her pill this morning.

Mira’s chest tightened. A lump sat just under her throat, a knot screaming she needed to pick up her damned phone and tell her daughter to come home. To say “I’m sorry, honey.” To make sure, like any real mother would, that her child was safe.

Her seer dropped an image into her mind: A beast stretched on the edges of a corn field somewhere in Wisconsin, then vanished, mimicking the stalks and the dirt and the sky.

The Dracos moved north to intercept the damned ghouls.

She’d never told Rysa about dragons, either.

Everything in Mira’s stomach came up in one violent retch. Her breakfast, her coffee, the pain meds she’d taken before she’d tuned into the violence on the screen, forced their way into her throat. She bolted across the kitchen to the sink.

The water ran down the drain in a static circle as she rinsed her mouth, held in place by universal forces she didn’t understand.

She let this happen. She let Rysa go.

Once, when Mira was a child, her father had given her and her brother and sister a task. A chore, he’d said, by the stream behind their villa. They were to follow his instructions exactly, no matter what happened.

No matter who got hurt. “You will do as I say,” he’d said. No one argued with Father. Her triad were children of the First Fate. They had a duty to the
what-was-is-will-be
.

She’d nodded, a good child.

The next day she lay on her bed as gray as stone, as the
medicus
splinted her broken arm. Her father watched from the door, his eyes hidden in shadow.

“Why?” she’d asked. He’d seen her fall. He knew what would happen.

He held his black-as-midnight
gladius
, his talisman, in his hand. “No one is as bound by fate as the Fates themselves.” He sheathed the blade and the sound filled every corner and room of their villa. “Always remember that, daughter.”

She remembered. Mira of the Jani Prime was bound, as was
her
daughter, Rysa Torres. Fate bound them both to the
what-was-is-will-be
and Mira was powerless to stop the approaching hellstorm.

Mira pushed away from the sink in her suburban Minnesota home. She might be bound, but that did not mean she would go to her fate unprepared. The news crews did a fine job delineating the path of the Burners. They would appear shortly.

She would find
her
blade.

Maybe, her seer wanted her to send Rysa away. Maybe, Mira reacted the way she did in the
what-is
because her behavior offered Rysa some unseen protection.

Maybe.

Maybe luck would buffer Rysa. And maybe, just maybe, her daughter would find a weapon of her own. A weapon as strong as beautiful as the dragons….

~ ~ ~

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~ ~ ~

Turn the page for the first chapter of
Games of Fate
, book one of the
Fate – Fire – Shifter – Dragon
series…