The Burning World (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 7) Read online




  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  The Burning World

  Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon Book Seven

  Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Copyright 2017 Kris Austen Radcliffe

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Six Talon Sign Fantasy & Futuristic Romance

  Edited by Annetta Ribken

  Copyedited by Terry Koch and Juli Lilly

  Cover designed by Lou Harper

  Series dragon design and art by Christina Rausch

  Plus a special thanks to my Proofing Crew.

  Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidences are used factitiously. All representations of real locales, programs, or services are factitious accounts of the environments and services described. Any resemblances characters, places, or events have to actual people, living or dead, business, establishments, events, or locales is entirely unintended and coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  For requests, please e-mail: [email protected].

  Second electronic edition, October 2017

  Updated and reformatted

  version 9.16.2017

  ISBN: 978-1-939730-52-7

  Contents

  The Burning World

  Get Free Books

  Vanish into the Fire

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Untitled

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Untitled

  Like Urban Fantasy?

  MONSTER BORN

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  The Worlds of

  About the Author

  The Burning World

  Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon

  Kris Austen Radcliffe

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  Fate - Fire - Shifter - Dragon

  The Series

  Games of Fate

  Flux of Skin

  Fifth of Blood

  Bonds Broken & Silent

  All But Human

  Men and Beasts

  The Burning World

  We vanish into the fire

  You and I

  Vanish into the chaos

  With stones under my feet

  Guitar in my hand

  I’ve gone invisible

  Invisible

  Gone invisible, I have nothing left of me.

  We vanish like a dragon

  Like a ghost, you and I

  Vanish into the fire

  With snow in your hand

  Gun in my fist

  You shine too bright

  Bright

  And I’m gone because you don’t need me.

  We vanish into the fire

  Because of a liar

  I won’t make me a pyre

  I won’t be the liar

  We won’t vanish into the fire

  You and I

  We won’t vanish

  With clouds in our fists

  Fire in our hands

  We shine too bright

  Bright

  And we are what’s left of me.

  Chapter One

&n
bsp; Punches thrown? Souls pricked? Milk and bread stolen from the mouths of babes?

  A Fate did it.

  Fates push buttons on purpose, and Fates rarely apologize for causing violent responses. They simply sit back and smirk.

  Which was why Dunn, the Mother of Shifters, had no time for Fates.

  She did her best to ignore every past-, present-, and future-seer on Earth, and up until Harold Demshire stepped back into her life, she’d forgotten about the original Draki Prime. Why would she care about their whiny issues? Daniel, Timothy, and Marcus Drake weren’t her children. They were Fates.

  Her curiosity about Daniel’s plight and his new, ovary-laden body made her giggle though, so she’d listened to Harold’s plea for help. Then she’d walked out to that Missouri road with Marcus and Harold, gotten into their SUV, and agreed to help them liberate the Brothers Draki from their supposed bonds.

  Then the first Burner attack happened. A three-block warehouse complex in New Jersey exploded. The normals’ media claimed a “gas leak”—with Burners, it was always a “gas leak”—but she knew better.

  Something deep in the back of her mind stirred. Something forgotten and unconscious. The attacks were harbingers. Her body knew the truth of it deep within her bones, and though she did not ache—she was the Shifter Progenitor and only ached when she wanted to—she did carry a weight that compressed her neck and tightened her jaw anyway.

  What that weight meant, she did not know, but she knew she should pay attention.

  Marcus Drake, of course, past-saw nothing. Burners were invisible in the what-was-is-will-be. Nor did the whispers—the unreal voice that had haunted her since the moment she and her fellow Progenitors awoke under that olive tree twenty-three centuries ago—offer anything beyond choppy, cryptic instructions telling her to continue working with the Fates.

  Then another major explosion occurred in North Carolina. Three hours later, an entire computer parts factory complex in Southern China went up in a dramatic blaze of glory.

  The Chinese attack had to have been at least three Burners. One alone could not cause so much destruction. The Chinese, though, gave no explanation—and Dunn had been looking forward to learning how to say “gas leak” in Mandarin.

  Again, the sense of foreboding, and… déjà vu.

  The biggest surprise, though, had been the overall lack of casualties. Suicidal Burners tended not to care where they exploded, but with no less than fifteen obviously Burner-caused craters in less than a week’s time, so far the total body count hovered under fifty bodies.

  Plus add in close to a billion dollars of property damage, none of it owned by Praesagio Industries, and she was wondering if the supposed “fog” blocking Marcus’s abilities was… manufactured. How, she didn’t know, though like so much of what was happening, it felt familiar.

  Or maybe she didn’t trust her wayward son, the I-still-believe-I’m-Emperor Trajan.

  Because Trajan was up to something. Trajan was always up to something, and the explosions were good enough proof as far as Dunn was concerned.

  Which made finding the future-seeing Daniel Drake all the more important. Teasing apart déjà vu from foreboding from actual possibility was the domain of Fates, and the Brothers Draki were among the best.

  So she stood in a scenic viewing area off a slippery road in the shadow of the mountains ringing Salt Lake City. Cold wiggled into her nose. Snow landed on her lips and touched her tongue with the slightly acidic, slightly bitter flavor of natural water. Wind howled. And Dunn, the Mother of Shifters, looked out over the frozen Utah hills while in the company of the original Draki Prime’s past-seer and his over-protective Praetorian Guard husband.

  Dunn stuffed her hands into the pockets of her new deep-indigo jacket. It fit well—a surprise, considering how much smaller her true self was than either of the males in her company—but then again, one of the males in question was a Fate.

  When she asked, Marcus had shrugged. “It’s winter. It’s cold. No need for you to freeze, ma’am, so I looked at your time in Perth before you vanished out of the what-was-is-will-be.”

  She did not ask how he knew to past-see those moments of her life, or why he thought it appropriate, or just how detailed his past-seeings were. He was a Fate after all, and Fates—even well-behaved, good men such as Marcus Drake—believed their intrusions into the fabric of the world were part of the world’s fabric.

  The jacket was pretty, though. It glimmered with the same deep, rich violets and indigos of the winter sky above the central forests of the Rocky Mountains, and it made her happy.

  Starlight reflected off the snow as tiny, just-perceptible twinkles. An animal rustled in the bush not too far from where Harold parked the SUV. Branches snapped. But mostly only the crackling of the highway and the clicking, ticking cooling of the SUV’s engine drifted through the space.

  Marcus worked his Fate mojo in the comfort of the big vehicle’s open back. Harold, weapon available but not out, watched over his husband. Dunn ignored them and instead focused on peering at the not-too-distant glow of Salt Lake City.

  A little over a week ago, polite behavior would have been to send Harold into the grand Dracae wedding reception inside Dmitri Pavlovich’s Middle American tourist trap. Yet there would have been questions. Marcus would have had to venture in, as well. Stories would have needed exchanging, and questions would have needed answering. The odds of someone seeing her—or bloodhound-scenting her presence—would have ratcheted up with each passing second.

  She’d gone to Branson to cleanse the world of the last vestiges of her disgustingly foul son, Vivicus. The whispers had at least finally told her where and when to go to take care of the world’s First Morpher problem. She took no responsibility for his murderous ways. He’d made his own bed centuries ago, and he paid the ultimate price.

  Dunn closed her eyes and inhaled. She had hoped that perhaps the whispers would grant her some clarity now.

  They did not. They never did. Directives over clarity and understanding was the way of The Whispering One. Two millennia of dancing to the whims of a ghost had taught Dunn that.

  So she followed the current directive: Edit in what had been missing for too long. Time to bring the Drake brothers home.

  At least Daniel Drake’s plight would likely prove entertaining, even if she found the whole idea of him occupying the same space as Adrestia distasteful. Daniel, it seemed, had been hiding in plain sight for the past one hundred fifty years. His “ghost” had hitched a ride inside his body’s murderer.

  Dunn rubbed at her cheek, refusing to go down the obvious line of questioning: How much did ghost-Daniel and ghost-Whispering One have in common? Was she, Dunn, the Shifter Progenitor, just another Adrestia?

  No. No one used Dunn. She turned toward the SUV.

  Both Marcus and Harold had acquired new information. Daniel-in-Adrestia was in the care of one Dr. Eric Nakajima, the co-Head of Praesagio Industries’ Special Medical Unit, and his team. That explained Marcus’s inability to see Daniel in the what-was.

  Eric Nakajima took precautions.

  They didn’t know if Eric was in Portland. He could have taken Dan-Addy to any of Praesagio’s West Coast facilities.

  Dunn, Marcus, and Harold traveled toward Portland via Salt Lake City anyway.

  Muffled sounds echoed from the back of the SUV.

  Harold’s warm voice followed. “Are you sure?”

  Dunn didn’t catch Marcus’s response.

  A semi rolled by on the highway behind them, first making itself known by the compressed, higher-pitched noise of its tires and engine. Then its lights swept across the pullover area and the snow-covered rocks outlining the edge of the highway department’s approved walking area. Once the light vanished, the tractor-trailer’s noise pulled away and Doppler-shifted downward.

  Eighteen-wheeled, long-haul trucks barreling into the night: the perfect metaphor for Fates.

  Dunn walked to the ridge of rock that bounded the stopping
area. Someone had left a bauble on a boulder—the semi’s lights had made it gleam in the night. She scooped it into her gloved hand.

  A thin, delicate ring. The opal nestled into the platinum setting shimmered, and for a second brought back memories of Australia and the stolen shard of her fellow Progenitor’s talisman.

  And of the Tsar’s massive, gaudy, ruby ring, which Dunn had altered.

  There’d been whispers then, too. Whispers that sent Dunn to collect the baubles, and whispers that told her how to correctly flow her Shifter Progenitor’s abilities into the metal of the heavy gold setting of the Tsar’s ring.

  She remembered a sense of geometry, and oddly, mathematics, and of manipulating properties at angles that could not be real. At the time, she’d felt as if she’d offered the ring a healing it did not want. It took the healing anyway, and she’d somehow upgraded its core internal plumbing and wiring.

  The metaphor made as much sense as thinking she could heal an object in the first place.