Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers Book 5)

by Rachel Aaron

  “But he’ll die!” Julius cried.

  “Better him than you,” the Qilin said quietly, stepping up beside them with his arms wrapped firmly around his youngest daughter, who was still desperately trying to get to Bob. “The White Witch is one of the most dangerous dragons in the world. Even I would not wish to tangle with her when she’s this angry.”

  “Amelia’s the only one who could have done it safely,” Chelsie agreed, tightening her grip on Julius. “Now that she’s locked down, our chances of stopping Svena are nil to zero. Even if we could win, though, I wouldn’t get involved. Bob brought this on himself. He always knew she’d never get her seer, but he let her think she’d won for his own benefit.” Her eyes narrowed. “He deserves everything he gets.”

  Julius couldn’t argue with that logic, but just because Bob deserved it didn’t mean it was right. “He’s still our brother!”

  “And I was his sister!” Chelsie snarled, her voice shaking with old anger. “But that didn’t stop him from letting Bethesda make me a slave, did it? He put us all on the block, and for what?” She looked over her shoulder at the Black Reach. “His stupid plan didn’t even work.”

  “Only because he didn’t get a chance to finish!” Julius said frantically, turning to look her in the eyes. “Are you really going to stand here and let him die?”

  “He’s a thousand-year-old dragon,” Chelsie said with a shrug. “Let’s see him act like one for once. He picked this fight. He can finish it.”

  Something was definitely going to be finished in the next few seconds. Svena had already hopped up onto the rim of the broken cement crater Bob had made when she’d kicked him, standing over him with painfully cold magic pouring off her like a fountain. The frost on the ground was arctic-thick now, transforming the drab dirt and dingy concrete of Julius and Marci’s hideaway into a pristine blanket of white save for the places where Bob’s blood had stained it bright red. There was an awful lot of red, actually, and Svena reveled in it, leaning down to scoop up a handful as she gloated over her fallen enemy.

  “What’s the matter, fortune teller?” she asked, tossing the bloody snow in his face. “Forgot how to dodge now that I’m no longer handicapped by pregnancy and your horrible desert?”

  “What is it with your family and grudges?” Bob muttered, his face tight with pain as he finally managed to sit up. “But surely you must see that this is ridiculous. I had the advantage last time. There’s no shame in—”

  “This won’t be like last time,” Svena hissed as her ice climbed the broken ramp behind him. “I’ve cold and water in plenty here, while you have nothing. Even your pigeon has abandoned you.”

  She was right. After the first chunk of ice had hit Bob, his pigeon had fluttered to safety. She was now perched on a tilting piece of the house’s roof, which was only still standing because Ghost was holding it up. Julius held his breath as he watched her, waiting for something to happen, but the pigeon just sat there cleaning her feathers as if she really was the dumb bird she’d always appeared to be. He’d always assumed Bob’s pigeon was special, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe his brother really was just crazy.

  Either way, in that moment, two things became painfully clear: Svena was going to kill Bob, and no one was going to stop her. Svena’s grievance was running the hottest right now, but every dragon here, and most of the mortals as well, was someone Bob had used terribly. Even the Qilin had been played, ramped up by Bob and his mother and then broken to weaken Algonquin and empower Amelia. As for Julius, he’d been a pawn too many times to count. From the moment Bethesda had kicked him out of his room, he’d danced on Bob’s string. He’d been a tool, a puppet, a domino Bob had knocked down and set back up over and over and over. He should have hated his brother for that. For using all of them with no care for whom he hurt. And yet…

  And yet…

  “Here it comes,” Chelsie said as frost began to gather in Svena’s raised hand. “Look away, Julius. This is going to be—”

  But Julius was already gone.

  He’d never been a particularly strong dragon, but he was a fast one. Julius used that now, darting out of Chelsie’s hold before she realized what was going on and sliding across the thick sheet of ice to throw himself in front of Bob, flinging his arms around his brother seconds before the avalanche of razor-sharp dragon magic crashed down. He squeezed his eyes shut, clinging to Bob as he braced for the death that never came. Instead, the freezing air went still, falling into a silence as deep as midwinter before Svena’s frustrated voice growled, “What are you doing?”

  Julius’s heart was pounding so hard, it took him several seconds to form the words. “Saving my brother.”

  Without releasing his hold on Bob, he cracked his eyes open to see Svena staring down at them through a haze of frosted magic with a look that was half fury, half utter disbelief. “Are you out of your mind?” she cried, grabbing Julius with a hand so cold it burned. “Get out of my way!”

  The order was laced with magic that hurt even more than her grip, but Julius bore the pain and clutched Bob more tightly, looking her right in the eyes.

  “No.”

  Svena’s lips curled in a frigid sneer. “If you think I am soft like my sister, you are fatally mistaken. I have no problem going through you if that’s what it takes.” She lifted her hand again, and the magic above them sharpened to a deadly point. “Last warning, little Heartstriker. Move.”

  Julius had been threatened by enough dragons to know that wasn’t a bluff, but he still didn’t let go. He just sat there, kneeling on the ice with his arms around his brother’s neck and his eyes on Svena. It was a pointless resistance. His body wouldn’t even slow the ice before it crushed them, but that didn’t matter, because this wasn’t about winning. It was about Julius and the fact that no matter what Bob had done, he couldn’t stand by and watch his brother die.

  When it was clear he wasn’t going to move, Svena shrugged and started to bring her hand down. But then, just as the glacier’s worth of frozen magic she’d gathered was about to release on top of them, another body appeared in front of Julius’s.

  “Svena!” Katya cried, grabbing her sister’s hand with both of hers. “Stop this!”

  Svena was so surprised, she actually took a step back. “What are you doing, Last Born?” she roared when she’d recovered. “Move!”

  “No!” Katya roared back, planting her feet firmly on the bloody ice in front of the two Heartstrikers. “I don’t care what you do to the seer, but I will not let you harm Julius! He’s the one who saved us from Estella!”

  “That debt was paid,” Svena snarled. “This is diff—”

  “This is greater than debts!” Katya said angrily. “Julius is my friend and yours. Since we met him, he has done nothing but stand by our clan. Even after you broke the pacts, he was reasonable and fair. He could have branded you an oath breaker and thrown our whole clan down in shame, but he didn’t. He understood and accepted our weaknesses. Now he’s fighting for his brother as you once fought for me, and you’re too snow blind to see it!”

  “Brohomir stole our seer!” Svena yelled, her voice echoing to the crumbling Skyways. “He killed my enemy and stole our legacy!”

  “So what?” Katya snapped. “We all know you were never really going to kill Amelia, and you were the only one who wanted another seer in the clan anyway. The rest of us were looking forward to making our own decisions for once.”

  Svena stared at her in horror. “So you’re just going to let him get away with this? Let him take what is ours?”

  “It’s only stealing if we care,” Katya said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Way I see it, we dodged a bullet. You remember how crazy Estella was at the end. Brohomir’s not even half her age, and he has a complex emotional relationship with a pigeon. Why would we want to invite that lunacy back into our clan? Your daughter might not see the future, but she’ll still be every bit as clever, strong, magical, and ruthless as you are. Let that be enough, Svena! Tak
e that blessing and go, because if you’re going to stand here and obsess over the Seer of the Heartstrikers, then you’re as bad as Estella. Especially when we’ve got such bigger problems.”

  Katya lifted her arm to point at the hole Bob’s crash had left in the spiral of on-ramps that formed the ceiling of the hidden house’s urban cavern. Julius hadn’t had time to even glance at it during the chaos. Now, though, he followed Katya’s motion out of habit, lifting his eyes to the sky. Or at least, where the sky should have been.

  Julius sucked in a breath. Being stuck in the house since yesterday, he’d heard a lot about the crisis they were facing, but he hadn’t actually laid eyes on it until this moment. Now, doom was all he could see. An endless expanse of it, complete with a black shell, beady black eyes the size of blimps, and writhing tentacles that filled the sky from horizon to horizon.

  “Is that…?” He swallowed. “Are we seeing…?”

  “We are,” Bob whispered, his body as still as the ground beneath them. “That is the Nameless End.”

  There was no laughter in his words now. No jokes, no smugness, nothing that made him sound like Bob. The voice whispering in his ear might as well have belonged to a stranger, but Julius just shivered and clutched his brother closer. “You have a plan, right? You can beat it.”

  “I have a plan,” Bob assured him. “But first…” His voice dissolved with a quiver as he nodded in front of them. “This is it.”

  Julius had no idea what Bob was talking about. All he saw in front of them were Katya and Svena, but while Katya was exactly where she’d started—standing in front of Julius with her finger stabbed up at the monster who’d taken over the sky—Svena looked like a different dragon. Maybe Katya’s words had gotten through, or maybe she’d had the same reaction to the Leviathan’s new form as Julius had, because she no longer looked ready to kill. She looked terrified, her fair skin even paler than the frost on her fingers as she stared at the death floating over their heads. She was still gawking when Katya grabbed her arm and pulled her to the side, away from Bob and Julius. This should have been their chance to escape, but when Julius tried to get up, Bob pulled him back down.

  “What is your problem?” Julius whispered frantically. “We need to go!”

  “There’s nowhere to go,” Bob replied, clutching his brother. “Look.”

  He nodded again at the space in front of them. This time, though, when Julius turned around, Katya and Svena were gone, leaving nothing between them and the Black Reach.

  The oldest seer hadn’t moved an inch since the fight began. He was still standing on the steps on the ruined porch, watching silently. Julius was trying to figure out what had changed to make Bob so spooked when the shattered light above their front door miraculously flickered back to life. It was very bright—security grade at Marci’s request—but due to the damage, the bulb was hanging down by a wire, dangling from its fixture directly behind the Black Reach.

  With the bright-orange light behind him, the Black Reach was now little more than a dark silhouette. The glare did funny things to his shadow too, throwing it out like a dagger across the white frosted ground, down the frozen driveway, and over the bloody, cratered ice to touch the tips of Bob’s shoes. A simple shadow, that’s all it was, but between the ice, the dark, and the Black Reach’s height, it looked as though someone had painted a line on the ground. A long, black arrow, pointed directly at Bob.

  “Julius,” the seer said, his voice little more than air. “Do you remember when I told you that a seer’s first vision is always their own death?”

  Julius nodded, scooting away from the shadow’s edge.

  “This is it,” his brother whispered. “This is what I saw all those centuries ago. The ice, the shadow, you and me. This moment, right now.” He looked up at the monster in the sky and swallowed. “My last moment.”

  The air changed as he spoke, growing sharper. Final. It was a little like when Julius had used Dragon Sees the Beginning’s black chain to beat Estella, only now, instead of every chance miraculously working out in his favor, Julius felt like a train car on rails. There were no more choices, no more chances. Every detail—him and Bob, the Black Reach, Marci and the others, Ghost holding up the collapsing house, even the spirals Svena’s frost left in the air—was part of a static picture, the backdrop of a stage where every line was scripted. Every moment that passed was just another dot on the line leading to this moment, and now that they were finally here, there was nowhere left to go but forward to the end.

  “I’d hoped Svena would kill you,” the Black Reach said as he walked down the steps. “There was a high probability, but once again, you skate through on the most unlikely of chances.”

  “It was never unlikely if you knew what I know,” Bob replied, his voice only shaking a little as he patted Julius on the head. “My brother has a very good track record for miracles.”

  The Black Reach said nothing. He just kept walking through the snow, his steps crunching across the frozen dirt until he was standing over them like a sword.

  “You should be proud,” he said. “In all my years as guardian, I’ve never been forced to act so directly. I much prefer to arrange things so that seers die from the consequences of their actions, as Estella did. But you have evaded every payback, sidestepped every threat that you created. No matter how many dragons you step on, you keep getting away with it.” He tilted his head. “If the situation were less dire, I’d be tempted to let you keep going, if only to see how long you could maintain this insanity. Alas, you have not left me that luxury. I am now the one left with no choice, Brohomir, and I cannot permit you to do what we both know you’re going to do.”

  “What’s he going to do?” Julius asked.

  Both seers looked at him, and Julius fought the urge to roll his eyes. “I don’t know the future,” he reminded them. “Bob’s not perfect by any stretch, but he’s always come through for us in the end. Now we’re up against an enemy we can’t understand who might destroy everything. Bob says he has a plan to stop it, but you won’t even let him say what it is. Why? What could Bob possibly do that would be worse than that?”

  He pointed at the black shape of the Leviathan that filled the sky. When the Black Reach failed to answer, though, Raven filled the gap.

  “Because Bob has the other one.”

  Julius jumped as the spirit swooped down to land on the bloody ice beside them. “There’s more than one way for the world to end,” Raven said. “Algonquin was foolish enough to let herself be infected, but she wasn’t the only one. There’s another interloper here.”

  He glanced pointedly at Bob’s pigeon, who was still perched on top of the wrecked house, but Julius was having trouble following. “Wait,” he said, putting his hand to his suddenly throbbing temple. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me this whole thing is about Bob’s pigeon?”

  “That is not a pigeon,” Raven cawed. “I don’t know why it chose that form, but it’s no animal or spirit, nothing of this reality.”

  “It is an End,” the Black Reach agreed, his voice trembling with rage. “The same End that ended our true home ten thousand years ago. The Final Future.”

  “Now, now,” Bob said, holding out his hand to the pigeon, who immediately fluttered over to him. “It’s not polite to name the Nameless.”

  Julius ducked as the bird swept in to land on Bob’s arm, scooting as far from his brother as he dared to get away from the pigeon who apparently wasn’t so harmless after all. “That’s a Nameless End?” When Bob nodded, his eyes grew wide. “But what—how did you get—”

  “I wasn’t tricked into letting her in, if that’s what you’re implying,” Bob said, turning up his nose. “My ladylove isn’t a lawless glutton like Mr. Dark-And-Broody up there, and I’m not a fool like Algonquin. I invited her to join me here, and I’m continually delighted that she agreed.”

  His pigeon cooed happily, but the Black Reach looked angrier than ever. “And that is why you must die,” he growled. �
�That thing you claim to love is the extra-planar monster who ate our race’s eternity! The ancient dragon seers fed her potential timelines in exchange for certain ones until there was no future left at all! I should have killed you the moment you decided to bring her in, but you had not yet used her power, which meant my hands were tied.”

  “Why?” Julius asked, careful not to look at Bob. “Not that I want you to hurt my brother, but if he’d already brought in a Nameless End, well… that seems pretty damning.”

  “Oh, it was,” Bob said. “If he made decisions like Chelsie does, I’d be centuries dead. But the Black Reach isn’t like the rest of us. He’s not even really a dragon. He’s Dragon Sees Eternity, a construct created by our ancestors to be judge, jury, and executioner. With powers that vast, the rules governing his actions had to be very strict, and the strictest of all is that he’s forbidden from killing a seer until they actually break the rules.”

  “Why?” Julius asked. “I mean, that seems a little late.”

  “Because the future is never set until it becomes past,” the Black Reach said firmly. “So long as there is even the slightest chance remaining that they will take another path, I cannot move against them. That is why I send every seer a vision of their death at my hands. I want them to know what is coming in the hope that they will choose differently and be spared.”

  “But they never do, do they?” Bob said. “Because anything a seer decides to cross you over is something they’re willing to die for. That’s not a decision you go back on.”

  “I’ve seen the future you’re willing to die for,” the oldest seer growled. “That’s why I’m here. It’s bad enough that you brought the death of our old plane into this one, but I allowed it because consorting with a Nameless End is not the same as using one. This, however, I cannot permit. I will not allow any seer to repeat the mistake that destroyed our world!”

  That certainly sounded dreadful, but Julius’s original question still hadn’t been answered. “But what is he planning to do?” he pressed, frustrated. “You go on and on about how it’s the worst thing ever, but no one has actually explained what Bob’s supposed future-crime is.”