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The Burning World
The Burning World 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
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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
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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
Punches thrown? Souls pricked? Milk and bread stolen from the mouths of babes?
A Fate did it.
&n
bsp; 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 h
and.
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.
Could she do the same now with the new opal ring in her hand? Affect the metal?