One Good Dragon Deserves Another

by Rachel Aaron

  “I haven’t been keeping track,” Bethesda said with shrug. “He’s hardly relevant at the moment, and I don’t want to spoil the surprise when he finally does burst back onto the scene.”

  Julius couldn’t believe his ears. “So you don’t know where he is?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Watch your tone.”

  He shut his mouth at once, and, after a moment, Bethesda relaxed. “If you’re so concerned, you can ask Chelsie,” she said casually. “It’s her job to know what you’re all up to.”

  That was not the answer Julius was hoping for, but it was better than nothing and most likely all he was going to get. From her bored look, Bethesda was clearly done with him, so Julius took his chance to slip out of the crowd of better, more ambitious dragons competing for the Heartstriker’s attention and set off in search of his sister.

  He didn’t actually have high hopes of finding her. He’d seen her when Estella showed up, so he knew she was in the mountain, but Chelsie was called Bethesda’s Shade for a reason, and it wasn’t because she was easy to find. Sure enough, despite searching the throne room and its adjacent hallways for almost twenty minutes, Julius ended up back by the restrooms where he and Katya had spoken with nothing to show for his efforts.

  He sank onto the ottoman with a tired sigh, pulling out his phone to book a commercial flight back to the DFZ since he obviously wasn’t going to be getting a ride back home from his mother tonight. He was trying to decide between flying out of Albuquerque or Las Vegas when a dry voice whispered in his ear.

  “I understand you’re looking for me?”

  Julius almost had a heart attack. He jumped a good foot off his seat, clutching his chest as he looked up to see Chelsie looming over him. “Do you have to do that?”

  She gave him a cutting look. “I wasn’t trying to scare you,” she said. “You’re just critically bad at paying attention to your surroundings. Get better and this won’t be a problem.”

  Easy for her to say. By this point in the night, though, Julius was numb to dragons criticizing him. He was just happy he didn’t have to keep searching for her. “Mother said you knew where Justin was?”

  “Justin?” Chelsie frowned. “Why do you care?”

  “Maybe because he’s my brother?” Julius said, exasperated. Seriously, why did no one understand this? “I’m worried about him, okay?”

  “Don’t waste your worry on that idiot,” Chelsie said bitterly. “I warned him, just like I warned you. He knew exactly what would happen if he messed up in the DFZ, but he did it anyway, so I took his sword.”

  “But isn’t that a little harsh?” Julius asked, wringing his hands. “I mean, yeah, he broke the rules, but he also—”

  “There is no also,” she growled. “Rules are rules, Julius. Contrary to what some dragons might think, they’re not made to be broken. And for the record, I took Justin’s sword because it’s the only thing he cares about enough to actually be a punishment. I was planning to let him stew on it for a few months in the hopes that he’d have an epiphany and decide to stop acting like a moron, but then Mother filled his head with all that nonsense about earning his blade back, so now he’s off doing that.” She looked Julius up and down. “I don’t think he’d appreciate your assistance.”

  He probably wouldn’t, but, “It’s my fault he was in the Pit to begin with,” Julius said firmly. “The only reason he got into trouble was because he was helping me. I want to return the favor.”

  She snorted. “You want to get in trouble?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said quickly. “I just want to know where he is so I can offer my help if he wants it. Please, Chelsie.”

  By the time he finished, his sister looked even more coldly disdainful than usual. “It’s not my policy to give out information for free,” she said suspiciously. “Especially not to whelps who’ll only use it to make my life harder. But it just so happens that I was planning to have a talk with you tonight as well.”

  Julius stopped his cringe at the last second. “Really? Why?”

  She leaned down, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Earlier tonight, Bob and Estella talked. I know you were there, and I know you heard, so I want you to tell me exactly what was said. Give me that, and I’ll tell you where your brother is.”

  That wasn’t an unreasonable request at all. In fact, Julius was incredibly relieved to find someone besides himself who was willing to take this Estella stuff seriously. He didn’t like how she’d asked. Trading information like this about family members felt slimy, especially since he’d have gladly told her whatever she wanted about Bob and Estella without the bargaining. But explaining all of that would just further confirm Chelsie’s low opinion of him, and it was far too late for this nonsense, so Julius just sucked it up and told her, repeating Bob and Estella’s conversation as best he could remember.

  By the time he finished, his sister looked even grimmer than usual. “I don’t like it,” she muttered. “The trap you can see is never the real one.”

  Julius could have hugged her for that. “That’s what I said!” he cried. “Can you please talk some sense into Mother?”

  “If I could do that, life would be very different,” Chelsie grumbled, pulling out her phone. “Our problem is that Estella knew exactly how to bait her trap. Bethesda’s always resented the Three Sisters for looking down on her. Now she has a chance to destroy the clan that made her feel inferior and get her mating flight at the same time. That’s an offer she can’t refuse, and if we’re going to get through it alive, we’re going to have to be prepared.”

  Julius winced. “How do you prepare for a seer?”

  “That’s not your concern,” Chelsie said coldly, tapping the air above her phone. “Here.”

  His phone beeped in his pocket, and Julius pulled it out to see a series of messages from a number he didn’t recognize. “What’s this?”

  “Clearance to take the second jet back to the DFZ.”

  Julius couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re sending me home?”

  “You shouldn’t have been here in the first place,” she snapped. “I don’t know why Bob keeps dragging you into situations like this, but you’re way too short for this ride, and I don’t have time to babysit you while Mother turns the mountain upside down.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, but Chelsie cut him off. “You want to be helpful?” she asked. “Take the out when it’s offered. Go home to your mage and your little animal control business and leave the plotting to the dragons who can handle it.”

  Julius lowered his head. His sister was right, he was too short for this ride. He’d wanted to go home since he got here, and now he had a chance to do just that, and on a private plane no less. He should be delighted by this turn of events, but the way Chelsie had offered it made him feel…useless. Lower than low. Plus, there was still the matter of Justin.

  “I told you what you wanted,” he said, standing up from his seat. “Now, where’s my brother?”

  Chelsie folded her arms over her chest with an inscrutable look. “Why do you think I’m sending you to back to Detroit?”

  The why? was already on his lips before Julius read between the lines. “He’s in the DFZ?”

  She nodded. “I don’t know what he’s doing there since I can’t follow idiot plans, but I don’t have to explain why Justin heading back into Algonquin’s territory would raise warning bells. I was actually planning to go retrieve him tonight, but then this Estella nonsense happened, and now I’ve got more pressing issues than your brother’s stubbornness. But if you want to go and bash your head against that brick wall, be my guest.”

  “I will, thank you,” he said with a smile. “But, um, could you give me something a little more specific? The DFZ’s a pretty big place.”

  Chelsie’s lips quirked like he’d just told a joke. “You run a business hunting down nuisance animals in the city, don’t you?” she said, turning away. “Figure it out.”

  Julius gaped at her. “A drag
on’s different from a tank badger!” he cried, but it was too late. Chelsie was already walking back toward the party, moving down the hall in long, purposeful strides.

  “Not my problem anymore,” she called over her shoulder. “You wanted Justin? You got him. Now go home, Julius.”

  He took a step after her, but stopped again almost immediately. There was no point in arguing further. She was already gone in any case, vanishing into the crowded throne room like the shade she was supposed to be. So, with nothing left to do, Julius turned and started down the hall in the other direction, opening an unmarked door that led to the hidden service area to beg one of his mother’s employees to smuggle him out.

  This was where decades of sneaking around Heartstriker Mountain came in handy. Unlike most of his family, Julius had always made it a point to maintain friendly relations with the employees who kept the stronghold ticking. Barely ten minutes after Chelsie had left him, he’d convinced his mother’s manager to let him use the service elevator back down to the public levels. Ten minutes after that, he was safely aboard his mother’s second, far less luxurious high-speed jet getting his final clearance for the flight back to Detroit. All in all, it was a pretty fantastic change of fortune, but eager as Julius was to get away from his mother’s madhouse, he was having trouble concentrating. It was now almost midnight, and Marci still wasn’t answering his calls.

  That was enough to send him into a panic. He hadn’t been too worried by her silence earlier—scratch that, he’d been obsessively worried, but he’d known why she wasn’t talking to him, so he hadn’t been scared. Now, though, Julius was petrified. It was nine o’clock in New Mexico, which meant he’d been gone for a little over five hours. It didn’t matter how mad Marci was, there was no way she’d ignore his calls for that long. Not unless she was in trouble. Or hurt. Or worse.

  That was a horrible realization to have when you were trapped in a plane, but there was nothing Julius could do. He’d already called, texted, and pinged her though every social media account she had a dozen times each. At this point, the only option he had was to wait until he was back in Detroit and go after her personally. Until then, though, he was stuck, and so, rather than sit and grip the chair white-knuckled all the way home, Julius distracted himself by staring out the window into the dark, silently rehearsing what he would say to Marci when he finally found her.

  Chapter 4

  The DFZ is a surprisingly small place when you don’t want to go home.

  Marci stared glumly through the windshield, watching the red river of taillights move sluggishly down the eight lanes of the Underground’s last functional highway. Normally, she avoided the congested mess that was the I-94 at all costs, but the highway was the only direct route between the southern and northern halves of the DFZ that didn’t require paying skyway tolls, and it wasn’t like she was in a hurry. She’d already released their poor, confused tank badger in an abandoned lot by the border of Algonquin’s Reclamation Land. Now, other than a vague plan to head uptown and check out what was new at the discount magical supply warehouses, Marci had nothing.

  It probably wouldn’t even be worth the trip. Reagents from big box stores were always of dubious quality. But wandering aimlessly through aisles stacked with pre-made spells and bins of slightly broken casting chalk still sounded better than going home.

  Not that the distance could stop her from thinking about it.

  Marci dropped her head to the car’s control dash with a thunk. Of all the embarrassing things she’d done in her life, tonight had to be some kind of record. She’d had Bethesda the Heartstriker, a creature of myth from before the disappearance of magic, in her living room, and she’d screwed it up. She’d made a fool of herself in front of everyone, and then Julius had yelled and sent her away like she was a child bothering the adults.

  That was the part that had stung the most. Marci didn’t blame Julius snapping—she had been going overboard—but she’d never felt the distance between them more pointedly than at that moment. Living with him, it was easy to forget—not that Julius was a dragon, Marci never forgot that—but that he was part of a world that considered her disposable, beneath consideration. Tonight, though, she’d had a sharp reminder, and like all reality checks, it hurt. To a girl who’d just started to hope that maybe she and Julius could be something more than business partners, it hurt a lot.

  Marci shook her head with a frustrated sigh. She had to snap out of this. It was stupid to be upset. This was all her fault, anyway. She’d let herself get comfortable over her month with Julius and forgotten the standard she was trying to measure up to. Well, one look at Bethesda had solved that. No mortal could come close to the supernatural beauty dragons took for granted, and this was assuming Julius even liked humans in that way. Since she’d only ever seen him as a human, it was too easy to forget that the Julius she knew and loved was only a disguise. It wasn’t his real face, it probably wasn’t even the one he preferred, and it was foolish for Marci to just assume that he had a human standard of beauty. Or that he’d choose her even if he did.

  That toxic thought threatened to send her right back down into the pit, but really, what else could she expect? She’d always known Julius was out of her league, and she had no right to cry foul when reality kept being reality. But just as Marci was reaching new depths of feeling sorry for herself, her phone chimed in her pocket.

  The sound made her flinch. She’d set the thing to reject all, the modern equivalent of locking herself in her room. But while that super-mature decision kept her from having to face the outside world, it didn’t apply to her internal alarms. It was too late in the evening for any of her work notifications, though, which meant this was her other alarm. The one she’d been putting off for a week.

  Her first impulse was to send it away again. She wasn’t normally a procrastinator, but some things were just too much to face with anything less than her best, which she was definitely not tonight. That said, though, she’d been putting this off for a long time, and it wasn’t like she was actually doing anything right now…

  Like it could sense her indecision, the alarm chimed again, vibrating in her pocket. Marci grabbed it violently, stabbing her finger through the projected AR notice to kill the annoying sound, but the blinking red warning remained. She stared at it for several long seconds, and then she tossed the phone into the empty seat beside her with a curse, reaching over with her other hand to change the autonav’s destination, because why not? Misery loved company, so why not pile everything together? It wasn’t like tonight could get any worse.

  That was a self-destructive line of thought and she knew it, but this really did need to be taken care of, and it wasn’t like she had to go far. By sheer coincidence, her aimless pity driving had already taken her into the right part of town. Barely ten minutes later, she was at her destination, pulling into the underground deck below the massive, five-story complex that was the downtown branch of the DFZ 24-Hour Private Postal Service.

  Even at this time of night, the place was packed. She had to drive nearly to the bottom of the deck before she found a parking spot, and the stairs up to the lobby were a highway of humanity. Crowded as it was, though, the Private Postal Service existed specifically to allow people to pick up packages without giving their name, so even though the crowd on the stairs was packed in shoulder to shoulder, no one said a word. That suited Marci just fine, and she dutifully avoided eye contact as she hurried up the cement stairs into what looked like a multilevel warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with aisle after aisle of locked metal post office boxes.

  Her pick-up number was for the fourth floor. The crowd thinned as she climbed, and by the time she actually found her box amid the endless rows of identical metal squares, Marci was alone. She still looked over her shoulder before punching the single use code the coroner’s office had sent her almost two weeks ago into the number pad. Her hands were shaking so badly, it took her two tries before the light turned green, and the metal door opened wit
h a click to reveal a plain, shoebox-sized cardboard container marked only with a barcode and a name printed in stark, Unicode font.

  Aldo Giovanni Novalli

  The letters grew blurry as she looked at them, and Marci closed her eyes. “Stop it,” she hissed, covering her face with her hands. “Don’t cry. Don’t you dare…”

  But there was no stopping it, not this time. She’d held on for so long, but the sight of her father’s ashes sealed up by some government mortician and mailed to her because she was too broke and scared to go back to Las Vegas for an actual funeral was the very last straw. She couldn’t fight it if she tried, so she didn’t. She just slumped over, sliding down the cold metal wall of pay-by-delivery mailboxes as she started to cry in big, ugly sobs.

  She cried for her father, who’d deserved so much better than to be shot and left in the desert like trash. She cried because Bixby was already dead, and she couldn’t kill him again. She cried because she’d never get to tell her daddy she’d met a dragon, or show him the DFZ. He’d always wanted to come here, and now he had. In a box. Not even a proper urn, but a stupid cardboard box. She hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye.

  That set Marci off all over again. Behind her, she heard the soft scrape of footsteps as other people came in to check their mail only to turn around again when they saw the crazy lady sobbing over a package, but mortifying as it was, she couldn’t stop. All the emotions and fears and regrets she’d been putting off since the night she’d fled her house were finally coming due, and she had no choice but to keep going until, at last, she’d cried herself dry.

  When she looked up again, she was sitting on the floor. The narrow aisles of mailboxes were deathly silent around her, probably because she’d scared off all the other customers. That was fine with her. Marci had always hated crying, but crying in front of others was the worst. Ironic, too, because her father had always encouraged her to cry. He’d claimed that tears were how you let go of the things that hurt too much to keep, but Marci didn’t feel like she’d let go of anything. She was still miserable, and her father was still dead, along with everything he’d wanted for her. She’d dropped out of school, first because she was running from Bixby, and then because working with a dragon in the DFZ had been so much more appealing than going home to Vegas where she’d be constantly reminded of her dad. She’d rationalized the situation by telling herself that if she just stuck with Julius, she was bound to meet a dragon who could teach her ten times what her professors knew. Then, tonight, she had, and she’d screwed that up, too.