Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers Book 5)

by Rachel Aaron

  He finished with a smile, but Julius was close enough to feel the truth. Bob looked confident, but his heart was pounding so hard Julius could feel it through his coat. He didn’t even breathe while the ancient construct considered what he’d said, which was a problem, because Dragon Sees Eternity thought for a long, long time. Then, finally, the Black Reach lowered his arm, his impossibly giant claw shifting back to a normal hand as it fell to his side.

  The moment it was clear he wasn’t going to raise it again, Bob collapsed on the ground.

  “Bob!” Julius yelled, dropping down beside him. “Are you okay?”

  The seer burst out laughing, grabbing his brother in an enormous, joyful hug. “Julius!” he cried, rolling back and forth. “We did it!”

  “Did what?” Julius croaked, because he hadn’t heard the Black Reach say anything.

  “We lived!” Bob yelled, letting him go at last so he could grin wildly into his face. “Don’t you see? This was my death. I was supposed to die just now, but I didn’t! I’m alive!” The grin fell off his face, replaced by a look of dumbstruck wonder. “I’m the only seer who’s ever beaten the Black Reach.”

  “Don’t get cocky,” the construct growled, crossing his arms over his chest. “Just because I’ve decided to give you a chance doesn’t mean I won’t change my mind later.”

  “No, no, no,” Bob said quickly, waving his hands. “I am the epitome of humility. But…”

  He trailed off, fighting so hard to hide his grin, Julius was surprised he didn’t pull a muscle. “I knew it would work! I knew it. Every seer tries to avoid their death. We all have the vision, and then we all drive ourselves crazy trying to beat the Black Reach at his own game. I spent a good century making the same mistake before I finally figured it out: you can’t beat him. He’s a construct, a magical supercomputer. No born dragon can ever hope to match that. For a while, I was convinced the whole situation was hopeless, but then I realized that didn’t matter. I didn’t need to beat him at his own game. I just had to make sure that, when the time came, my solution would be so good, so in line with his own desires, the Black Reach wouldn’t be able to bring himself to kill me. I knew I couldn’t stop his sword, so I focused on removing his will to swing instead, and it worked! It worked, Julius! I’m still alive, and it’s all because of you!”

  He hugged Julius again, his chest heaving with what could have been laughter or sobs or both. “I knew I was right to choose you,” he said, his voice rough. “I knew you’d pull it all together in the end!”

  It certainly had come together, but Julius still wasn’t entirely sure what he’d done.

  “Wait,” he said, pushing his brother back to arm’s length. “So all that stuff you set up—overthrowing our mother, changing the Heartstriker clan, making Amelia a spirit, freeing Chelsie and F-clutch—wasn’t actually to help the clan or make a better world. It was so you wouldn’t die to the Black Reach?”

  Bob snorted. “Is there a nobler cause? He was going to kill me. Of course I did everything I could to prevent it! All those other things were just positive externalities… which I’d always planned from the start,” he added quickly at the Black Reach’s cutting look. “I’m sure a better dragon would have put the world peace stuff first, but as I keep telling you, Julius, I’m not a better dragon. You’re the nice one, which is why you—not me—had to be the lynchpin. No one else would do, because no one else would be foolish enough to spare Bethesda, or to form a council when he could have taken the Heartstriker clan for himself. No one else in our family would have worked with Katya instead of bringing her in, or won the trust of a human mage dedicated enough to become the First Merlin.”

  He reached out to pinch Julius’s cheeks. “That was all you, you darling boy, which is why I never told you to be anything but yourself. You were already the Nice Dragon I needed you to be. The only problem was you were too nice to use your power. If I hadn’t been constantly applying pressure, you would’ve happily run a magical pest control company in the DFZ until Algonquin’s purge caught you. But I knew you had the potential to be a lever large enough to move the world. Once I’d tested your conviction to be sure you wouldn’t break, I got you into position and used you exactly as you needed to be used, and just look how marvelously it all turned out!” He hugged Julius again, almost crushing his ribs. “I am a genius!”

  “So much for the epitome of humility,” Chelsie said, reaching down to save Julius from Bob’s stranglehold.

  “I’m the epitome of many things,” the seer replied, releasing Julius reluctantly. “So,” he said, sitting back on his heels. “What do we do now?”

  Everyone gaped at him.

  “You mean you don’t know?” Julius cried.

  Bob shrugged. “I am unquestionably brilliant, but no seer can see past their own death. All my visions of the future ended thirty seconds ago.”

  “What about your plan to keep us alive?” Svena demanded. “You owe me my survival at least after I so benevolently spared you.”

  Amelia snorted at her. “Benevolent my tail. You couldn’t bring yourself to kill Julius any more than the rest of us.”

  “For your information, I was going to go around him,” Svena snapped back. “I am perfectly capable of stabbing Brohomir full of ice without putting a scratch on Julius Heartstriker. However, Katya’s words make me consider the larger picture, and I decided killing your cut-rate seer was no longer worth my time.”

  “Whatever you need to tell yourself,” Amelia said, shaking her head at Svena before turning back to Bob. “But seriously, what are we going to do? I don’t like the sound of a single future with no free will, but I’ll take it if that’s the only choice. I didn’t fight my way out of death just to get killed again the very next day.”

  “My original plan is still an option,” Bob said, lips curling into a smile. “But it might no longer be the only option.”

  “What do you mean?” Marci asked, glancing up at the Leviathan, who looked exactly the same. “What changed?”

  Brohomir turned to grin at the Black Reach. “He did. By making a decision he never would have made before I intervened, the Black Reach kicked off a cascade of shiny new futures. There are so many possibilities in front of us now, I don’t even know where to start, so unless you want me to sit here for a few days while I follow each new path to its conclusion, you’d do better to ask him.” He nodded at Dragon Sees Eternity. “He’s the seer supercomputer.”

  That was the best thing Bob had said yet, but when Julius turned hopefully to the Black Reach, the construct’s face was dour.

  “My decision to spare Brohomir has indeed created a host of new possibilities,” he said. “Unfortunately, none of them improve our situation. We are still under siege by a Nameless End, a power that acts on a planar level. It’s not something we can simply defeat.”

  “But do you have a plan?” Svena said, butting her way forward. “I agree that Brohomir’s idea to lock us all in a static future was unacceptable, but it’s the height of foolishness to shoot down a strategy unless you have an alternative.”

  “He has to have something,” Amelia agreed, moving to stand beside her best frenemy. “He’s the guardian of the future, and there’s not much future to guard if we’re all dead.”

  Both dragon mages glared at the construct, but where any sensible creature would have cringed before their combined fury, the Black Reach merely looked annoyed. “I have not been idle,” he said irritably. “I saw this coming as Brohomir did and prepared accordingly, but though I am and always shall be the better seer, even I can’t work miracles. Brohomir’s plan was desperate for good reason. There are no good options in this scenario, and while I was not so insane as to court a death of planes”—he shot the pigeon on Bob’s shoulder a nasty look—“I’m not certain you’ll like my solution any better.”

  “I knew you had a plan!” Bob blurted out. When everyone looked at him, he shrugged. “I knew he had a plan. What kind of guardian of the future doesn’t pla
n for the future?”

  “If you knew the Black Reach was planning something, why didn’t you go with that instead of messing with our lives?” Marci asked irritably.

  “Because I didn’t know what his plan was,” Bob said. “I’m supposed to be dead right now, remember? And I don’t see how you have room to complain. You came out of my plans very well, Miss One-in-a-Million-Chance-Merlin.”

  Marci put her hands up in surrender at that one, and the Black Reach sighed. “I would encourage you not to get your hopes up too high. As I said, I did make arrangements for this inevitability, but even I wouldn’t call them salvation.”

  “Our options right now are death by Leviathan or spending eternity trapped on Bob’s string,” Chelsie said with a shrug. “What could be worse than that?”

  Instead of answering the question, the construct reached into the pocket of his silk jacket and pulled out a golden orb the size of a softball. A very familiar golden orb filled with flecks of golden foil that glittered like tinsel in the glow of the broken porch light.

  “Hey!” Marci cried angrily. “That’s my Kosmolabe!”

  “A powerful and useful instrument,” the Black Reach agreed, rolling the delicate ball between his fingers until the spellworked gold foil that covered the orb’s interior fluttered like leaves in the wind. “I’ve been angling for this one in particular since I saw Estella bringing it into her plans a decade ago. I would have taken possession of it sooner, but the mage who was most likely to become the First Merlin was quite attached to it. The emotional impact of removing it would have sent inconvenient ripples through a very delicate phase of my plans, so I decided to wait until a more appropriate opportunity presented itself.”

  “You mean until you could steal it,” Julius said, unexpectedly angry. “I knew you took Marci’s bag! Did you think about the emotional impact that would have on me?”

  “Why did you even want it?” Chelsie asked at the same time.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Amelia growled, crossing her arms over her chest. “Why does anyone ever want a Kosmolabe?” She narrowed her eyes at the construct. “He’s going to run.”

  The Black Reach said nothing, but he didn’t have to. Now that Amelia had spelled it out, the plan made perfect sense. Why stay in a world that was about to die if you didn’t have to? There was even a precedent since fleeing through a portal was how dragons had arrived on this plane in the first place. The only thing Julius didn’t understand was why the Black Reach was only doing it now.

  “Aren’t you a little late?” he asked. “If you’ve known about the Leviathan for as long as you claim, why didn’t you start evacuating everyone weeks ago? Even with Amelia and Svena here for teleports, there’s no way we can possibly get everyone out before…”

  He trailed off. The Black Reach still hadn’t said anything, but again, he didn’t need to. The answer was right there on his face.

  “You never planned to save everyone, did you?”

  “No,” the Black Reach said quietly, looking down at Bob. “The reason Brohomir’s appeal worked so well on me is because he was right. I was created in our species’ moment of greatest regret. It was only through the absolute destruction of our home that the old clan heads, including your grandfather, the Quetzalcoatl, finally understood the damage their selfishness, greed, and constant war had wrought. In their sorrow, they created my brother to watch over the grave of our old home and myself to make sure nothing like this would ever happen again. You would think that after such a colossal failure, dragons as a species would learn, but it took barely a century before the fleeing clans were right back at each other’s throats.” He shook his head. “I was created to guard our future, but when I looked ahead down the stream of time, all I saw were the same mistakes repeated endlessly. After ten millennia of trying and failing to correct our course, even I, a construct built in hope for a better future, was forced to accept that dragons would always be conniving, selfish, violent beasts incapable of caring about anything but their own self-interest.”

  “That’s not true,” Julius said fiercely. “Sure some dragons are like that, but not all of us. Look around! You’re surrounded by dragons who prove the stereotype wrong.”

  That was meant to be an argument, but the Black Reach nodded excitedly. “Exactly,” he said. “You are an extraordinary group that represents everything I’ve always hoped dragons could be. Why do you think I allowed Brohomir to gather you all here?”

  Julius felt as if he’d just been punched in the stomach. “What do you mean ‘allowed’?”

  “I am the world’s greatest seer,” Dragon Sees Eternity said solemnly. “As I told you back in your mountain, the only thing I couldn’t see was Brohomir’s motive. His moves—what he did, how he did it, what he was going to do—were always perfectly clear. I saw him gathering all of you together as clearly as I see you standing before me now. I saw no reason to stop him, though, because he’d already chosen the pieces I myself would have selected, including a brand-new seer.” He smiled over his shoulder at Chelsie’s daughter, who was peeking out at him nervously from behind Fredrick. “Truly, I couldn’t have arranged a choicer group of dragons for our second try at a new beginning.”

  The Black Reach held up the Kosmolabe. “This world was chosen at random and in haste, but with the compass of the Kosmolabe and my knowledge of what was coming, I was able to search at my leisure until I located the perfect hospitable plane. A place where we can survive the Leviathan and keep our futures under our control. Those of you gathered here—Svena and Katya of the Three Sisters, Svena’s children, Julius and Chelsie of Heartstriker, and I suppose Brohomir now as well. Also Xian the Qilin and his eldest son, Fredrick, and of course the new seer—you are all dragons who’ve proven you can overcome the inherent evils of our race. Once I move you to a new plane, you will become the foundation for a reborn dragonkind.”

  Julius had no idea what to say to that. His sister, however, had plenty. “Your invitation list is missing a pretty big name there, buddy,” Amelia growled. “Where am I in all of this?”

  “You were not included,” the Black Reach replied. “You are a selfish alcoholic who was willing to risk the fire of every dragon and this world’s entire magical system in your quest for personal power. Even if you were less typically draconic, however, I couldn’t take you with us because you are now a spirit, bound to this plane. The same goes for you.” He turned to Marci. “You are a Merlin, a human whose magic is inextricably linked to a concept of this world. You can visit other planes, but you cannot survive without this one, which I’m afraid means you can’t come with us.”

  “I didn’t want to go, anyway,” Marci said stubbornly. “I’m not running like a coward and leaving everyone else to die!”

  “Me, neither,” Julius said, taking her hand. “I’m not going anywhere Marci isn’t. And what about Justin and Ian and all the other Heartstrikers? Don’t they deserve to live?”

  “It’s not about who deserves life,” the Black Reach said angrily. “It’s about who is best. I could not put this plan into motion until after I’d done my duty and punished Brohomir, but I wouldn’t have chosen differently even if I’d had centuries. You are all the absolute best candidates to ensure my desired outcome. I don’t need anyone else.”

  “Then you’d best come up with a B-list, because I’m not going, either,” Svena snarled. “I will not abandon my sisters to Algonquin’s tantrum now that we’re finally free of Estella and our mothers.”

  “I, too, will not run,” the Qilin said, his beautiful voice as steady and immovable as bedrock. “I am an emperor, the pillar of twenty clans. I will not abandon my subjects, or the rest of F-clutch. They are all Chelsie’s and my children. I will not leave them behind.”

  “Nor will I,” Fredrick snapped. “Those are my brothers and sisters. We just got free. I haven’t even told them who our father is yet, or that we have a new sister.”

  Everyone started talking after that, the whole group launching i
nto all the reasons they couldn’t, wouldn’t, and shouldn’t run away. It was starting to get deafening when Bob’s maniacal laughter broke through the din.

  “What are you cackling about?” Svena demanded.

  “Nothing, nothing,” Bob said, trying and failing to get a hold of himself. “I’m merely appreciating the irony. The Black Reach chose all of you for salvation precisely because you were the sort of good, compassionate, responsible dragons he’s always dreamed of having. But now that the chips are down, you’re all so responsible, no one will take his out.” He laughed again, turning to grin at the Black Reach. “Surely you saw this coming?”

  “I did,” the construct said. “But I’ve also foreseen every one of them will take my offer in the end. Responsible they might be, but there’s a line between doing what is right and throwing your life away for no reason, which is what they will be doing if they dawdle much longer.”

  All the arguments cut off like a switch after that. “What do you mean?” Marci asked.

  “He means there’s no way out of this corner,” Bob said. “Not unless we’re willing to pay for it.” He smiled sadly at the Black Reach. “I’d really hoped you had something brilliant up your sleeve. Some miraculous plan that would save everything at the last second. Alas, you do not, but I think I actually like this outcome better, because it proves I was right. If even the great Black Reach has been forced to cut and run, that means I really did find the only future where we survived.”

  “No one claimed you were incorrect,” the Black Reach said irritably. “I wish I did have something brilliant, but we’re dealing with a Nameless End. Survival of any kind is the best we can hope for against a foe like that.”

  “If that’s the baseline, then my way was better all along,” Bob pointed out. “At least in my plan, everyone lived.”

  “If the future you’d saved for us could have been called living,” the construct growled. “Your plan would leave us puppets. My way, fewer survive, but they are the best dragons this world has to offer, and their futures would still be full of possibilities.”