Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers Book 5)

by Rachel Aaron

  “Well, I’m looking forward to it,” Svena said with a proud lift of her chin. “Algonquin shot my mothers out of the sky. Vengeance is overdue.”

  “Please,” Bethesda said, rolling her green eyes. “You’ve been praying for your mothers to die for centuries so you could take over.”

  “That doesn’t mean I can leave their deaths unanswered,” Svena snapped. “Some of us still have honor.”

  Bethesda rolled her eyes again, and Julius reached up to rub his temples. “Whatever our reasons, the goal is clear. If Leviathan gets full control of the Great Lakes, everything is done for. We must protect Algonquin’s remaining water at any cost, but the area we have to cover is huge, so communication will be key. We don’t want to accidentally hit any of the UN forces that will be coming to help us.”

  “I think you mean getting hit by the UN,” Arkniss said. “I’ve tangled with Emily Jackson before. The UN’s Phoenix is a dragon slayer to her core. How can we be sure she won’t shoot us down the moment our backs are turned?”

  Considering that was exactly what she’d done to Marci, Julius had a hard time answering. But if he’d learned anything about Raven’s construct, it was her steadfast dedication to results over personal feelings. She’d happily kill every dragon in the world to save one human life, but she’d just as happily work with them if that was what was needed to secure humanity’s survival.

  “So long as we’re fighting together, I don’t think we have to worry about betrayal from the UN side,” he said. “General Jackson doesn’t like or trust us, but she knows we’re necessary to achieving her goal of protecting humanity. So long as that’s true, I think she’ll be a good ally.”

  “What about after?” the black dragon pressed. “The Phoenix can overlook, but she does not forget, nor forgive. She will tolerate our help while she needs us, but the moment the operation is done, those jets she’s sending will turn on us, mark my words.”

  “We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Julius said grimly. “But right now, we can’t afford to be picky. We don’t even know if we’ve got enough dragons to do our part properly. If we start mistrusting our human allies as well, this fight will be over before it begins.”

  No one seemed to like that, but no one argued with him, either. “We’ll just have to hope for the best,” Amelia said at last, shoulders slumping as she looked at Julius. “I’m glad you’re taking point on the UN thing, Baby-J. You’re the only one of us who knows how to play nice.”

  “He doesn’t ‘play’ nice,” Bethesda said, her voice disgusted. “He is nice.”

  “But that’s to our advantage right now,” Marlin Drake pointed out. “He’s the right tool for the job.”

  “That doesn’t make him any less embarrassing,” Bethesda snapped, pressing a dramatic hand to her temple. “How did I end up with such a son?”

  Julius knew better than to bother with that one. He was about to move the conversation on when Raven—who was normal bird-sized again—swooped out of the shadows to land on Amelia’s shoulder.

  “Finally,” she said, grinning at her fellow spirit. “Are you here to clear us for takeoff?”

  “Alas, I am not,” Raven replied. “The ground convoys are moving thanks to absurd amounts of shielding, but flight is still too dangerous.”

  “Then why are you butting your beak in?” Amelia asked. “This is dragon business.”

  “Because you and I need to go,” Raven replied, his voice dropping. “It’s started.”

  Amelia’s face turned deathly pale, and a heavy lump formed in Julius’s stomach. “What does that mean?” he demanded. “What’s started?”

  “Nothing you can help with,” Raven said, flapping into the air. “This isn’t a matter for mortals. We’ll handle it. You just focus on killing the bits you can reach.”

  Every dragon in the circle looked dangerously offended at being lumped in with mortals, but the bird spirit had already vanished, winking out of existence in front of Julius’s eyes. Amelia followed suit, vanishing in a lick of flame.

  With the Spirit of Dragons gone and everything on hold until they could fly, the rest of the circle broke up as well, the clan heads walking back to inform their dragons of the plan. Since Bethesda and Ian were already explaining the situation to the Heartstrikers, Julius took the opportunity to head for General Jackson so they could discuss how the UN and dragon forces were going to fight together, hopefully without anyone shooting anyone else in the back. This left Bob sitting forgotten and alone on the front porch step—the only part of the house that was still standing now that Bethesda had flattened it—slowly chewing his apple with his eyes closed and his pigeon on his shoulder, keeping him company as he searched and searched through the ocean of the future for the one drop where they lived.

  Chapter 9

  Marci clung to Ghost’s freezing back, looking nervously over her shoulder at the debris-scattered spiral of on-ramps that had once hidden their house, and now hid every dragon in the world. “Are you sure they’ll be okay? We’ve never tried anything like this before. What if your shield goes down because you got too far away?”

  “It will be fine,” the Empty Wind said, sweeping them through the dark city on a gust of grave-cold wind. “The only reason I never did this before was because I didn’t have the power. With the magic I have now, maintaining a barrier is so simple, I don’t even have to think about it.”

  “Please think about it a little,” Marci begged. “We’re playing fast and loose enough as it is. The last thing we need is for our entire army to get crushed because we weren’t paying attention.”

  Her spirit harrumphed, but she felt his magic shift through their connection, pushing more power behind them. “Satisfied?”

  She nodded, grabbing Ghost’s shoulders to pull herself up taller. She was riding on his back like a monkey with her feet planted on his hips and her hands gripping the freezing, ropey muscles on either side of his neck below his helmet. It was extremely undignified, but Marci far preferred it to being carried around in his arms like a fainting damsel. If nothing else, it was easier to see where they were going this way, not that she liked what she saw.

  “Wow,” Marci breathed, eyes growing wide.

  Other than the streets immediately surrounding their house, the city was in ruins. She’d known it would be bad—she’d been standing on one of the buildings the DFZ had thrown at Algonquin, so it wasn’t as if any of the destruction was new—but seeing the full extent of it lying still and dead under the dark of the Leviathan’s shadow was gut wrenching. The famous double-layered city of Skyways and underpasses looked more like a pile of rubble. Everything—the superscrapers and the megafactories, the elegant treed boulevards by the water and the giant apartment bricks that held up downtown—was destroyed. Even the famous neon streets of the Underground were dark and empty, their long-hidden roads exposed under the broken Skyways, most of which had been wiped out completely, leaving lines of skeletal support pillars sticking up from the ruined city like jagged bones.

  It felt dead too. A few fires still sputtered in the wreckage, but otherwise there was no light at all. Aside from their house, all the power in the city was out, leaving the ruins a broken jumble of muted blacks and grays beneath the stain of the Leviathan’s shadow. Nothing moved in the dark, nothing made a sound. Even the seagulls were gone, leaving the banks of Lake St. Clair empty save for the corpses of thousands of dead fish. The stench was enough to make Marci retch even from this far away. She covered her nose with her arm, motioning for Ghost to take them west, toward the inland half of the city.

  “I hope the spirit of the DFZ will be okay,” she said as Ghost flew them over the pile of rubble that had once been Marci’s favorite discount magical supplies warehouse. “I don’t know how the city is going to come back from this.”

  “She’ll be fine,” the Empty Wind assured her. “She’s a Mortal Spirit. An idea, not a place. So long as people remember the DFZ, she will live on, and she will rebuild. The on
ly reason she hasn’t started already is because she’s been busy with the Leviathan.”

  “He certainly does dominate the conversation,” Marci grumbled, glowering at the black shape that filled the sky high above their heads.

  The Nameless End looked even bigger now that they were out in the open. As fast as Ghost had to be flying, if Marci didn’t look at the ground, she wouldn’t have known they were moving at all. But implacable as the enemy above them looked, Ghost’s words gave her hope. When this was over, the DFZ would be the only place in the world ruled by a Mortal Spirit. A power that rose not of the land, but from the ideas and dreams of the humans that lived in it. Marci had already seen the DFZ move buildings like fingers and twist overpasses like vines during her fight with Algonquin. What could that power do when it came to rebuilding? Could she sprout new superscrapers from the ground? Lift the broken Skyways back into place like a surgeon setting a bone?

  Marci didn’t know, but she desperately wanted to see it. Reason number eighty thousand to beat the Leviathan and stay alive.

  As expected of the aftermath from a fight between a city and a lake, the damage was largely concentrated along the water. Downtown and the other shore districts were an absolute mess, but the farther inland they flew, the less dire things looked. By the time they reached the tumbledown houses of the old University District at the border of Reclamation Land, the landscape below looked almost normal. Better than normal, actually, because the hazy, pea-soup magic leaking over the fence from Algonquin’s spirit paradise was gone. True, it had been replaced by the even thicker magic of the crash, but that was already starting to feel natural. From the shimmer of Ghost’s magic surrounding them, Marci knew the ambient magic must still be crazy high, but at least there was no more glowing snow rising from the ground.

  “Looks like it’s finally fading,” she said as Ghost set them down. “How does it feel to you?”

  “Thinner,” the spirit reported. “Ten, maybe twenty more minutes, and we won’t need a shield at all.”

  “That’s good news,” Marci said, glancing again at the Leviathan, which still filled the sky in every direction for miles. “If our counterattack doesn’t get up in the air soon, there’ll be nothing left to defend.”

  The Empty Wind nodded grimly before they both turned to walk up the broken driveway toward the slanting, ivy-covered, ranch-style brick house that had been Marci’s first home in Detroit.

  The place looked even worse now than it had then. The basement windows were still shot out from the fight with Bixby’s goons, and the garden had been torn to pieces by the treads of Algonquin’s anti-dragon taskforce tanks. The roof had collapsed in places, probably due to all the shaking from the DFZ’s battle last night, but as battered and sad as it looked, the house was still standing, and in the broken, dusty, junk-piled windows, Marci could see the gleaming eyes of cats watching their every move.

  “We always end up back here,” Ghost said quietly.

  “Because it’s yours,” Marci replied, stepping off the driveway and onto the grassy path that led to the basement stairs. “Of all the death-filled places in this city, this is where you rose. It’s also where I was able to recharge you when your magic was almost gone. If there’s anywhere in the city that’s closest to your domain, this would be it.”

  Ghost nodded and followed her through the shot-off door into the basement, his glowing eyes watching the cats as they fled deeper into the ceiling-high piles of trash that filled the damp brick room. “I wish I could tell you why,” he said as Marci pulled magic into the circle of her bracelet to give them some light. “But I don’t actually remember why I picked this place. I don’t remember much of anything from the beginning. All I know was that I was in darkness, and I was so angry. Angry, hungry, and alone, just like them.”

  He knelt down on the stained cement floor, holding out his hand to the scrawny, bony cats watching nervously from the mounds of trash piled against the walls. “We were all forgotten. No one wanted us. No one remembered. No one cared if we lived or died.”

  “Maybe that’s why you rose here,” Marci said. “They needed you.”

  “They needed a champion,” Ghost agreed. “But I needed…” His voice fell off as he shook his head. “I don’t know. I knew I needed something, but I had no idea who I was or what I was meant to do back then. Helping them made me feel like I had a purpose, though. Even when I was killing that poor, sick old woman, I remember feeling righteous. She was the one who’d brought them all here and forgotten them, who’d left them to die buried under garbage without even a name. I thought killing her would make it right, but…”

  “But it didn’t,” Marci said, squatting down beside him. “The old lady’s long gone, but this place is even worse off without her. Algonquin’s DFZ has no animal control, no shelters other than what volunteers provide from the kindness of their hearts. Once their owner was gone, no one even knew the cats were here except for you.” She smiled. “You remembered them.”

  “I always remember,” the Empty Wind said, his eyes flashing blue as he rose to his feet. The wind rose with him, blowing away the pile of old advertisements and paper cups in front of them to reveal the corpse of a dead cat. From the look of it, the poor thing had been dead for at least a few days, but Ghost reached down to pet its rotting fur as if it were still alive and warm.

  “I was made to remember,” he said, running his frozen fingers along the small body. “Every person, every creature, every soul who dies with no one left to mourn them, I am there. No one is ever truly forgotten so long as I exist. That is my purpose. That is why they call to me.”

  “So answer them,” Marci said, nodding at the piles of trash. “I can tell from the smell that there are dozens more dead cats in here. They’re calling to you, right?”

  “The dead always call,” he said as his hands began to shake. “So many voices. They need so much.”

  “Then give it.”

  His head whipped toward her. “Now?”

  Marci shrugged. “If not now, when? The world could end in half an hour. I promised when I gave you your name that I would help you, and that’s what I’m doing.” She smiled. “Do what you were made to do, Empty Wind. Help the forgotten. Remember the dead. Give them peace. Make this place your domain, somewhere the dead don’t have to be alone, and maybe we’ll both find what we’re looking for.”

  The spirit’s glowing eyes widened as he finally realized what she was trying to do. “Very clever,” he rumbled. “But do you really believe this will work?”

  “If not this, then nothing,” Marci said. “But I think it will. Every time I’ve helped you help the dead, we’ve gotten closer, become a better team. I don’t think that’s coincidence. The whole idea of a Merlin is someone who helps a Mortal Spirit be their best self. I didn’t technically become one until I passed through the Merlin Gate, but it was only through your steadfast friendship that I was able to reach the gate at all. We’re clearly meant to be a pair on all levels, so it only makes sense that the way back to my job in the Merlin realm would be through helping you do yours. If nothing else, we’ll do some good before the end, and that’s never a waste.”

  “Helping the dead is never wasted,” Ghost agreed as the wind picked up. “Their gratitude is forever, the only warmth I feel.” The wind grew stronger as he spoke, whistling past the broken windows. This time, though, the gale did not disturb the trash. It blew through the piles, passing through the torn papers and broken bottles and piles of rotting clothes like water through soil, and everywhere it touched, the cats appeared.

  They came in droves, packing the room just as they had when Ghost had been one of them. As Marci watched, he became one of them again, transforming into a giant white cat while his ghostly voice echoed through the howling magic.

  Come with me.

  All through the dark basement, lights appeared. They glittered like mist, coming together to form faint outlines of cats of all ages and sizes walking out of the trash toward Ghos
t. They dissolved again when they reached him, their ghostly shapes blown away by his wind, but they were not lost. They were still there, their faint magic becoming part of the vortex that swirled around the Empty Wind.

  Marci couldn’t begin to count how many dead cats her spirit raised. The basement was full of them, and still they kept coming, filtering through the brick walls from the garden and down through the ceiling from the floors above. With each one that joined the Empty Wind, the grim aura that had hung over the house since she’d first come here lessened. It was still freezing, and the basement certainly didn’t smell any better, but a weight had most definitely been lifted. Even the living cats noticed it, their eyes growing less wary and fearful as the dead released their grip. Then, when the flow of ghostly shapes from the mountains of trash had slowed to a trickle, the Spirit of the Forgotten Dead turned to Marci.

  He was hard to see through the hurricane of magic that was blowing around him, but Marci didn’t need her eyes to know that Ghost was smiling. She could feel his happiness in her bones. The tide of joy flowing down their connection now was even stronger than the happiness she’d felt when he was playing in the magic. That had been mere giddiness. This was the absolute satisfaction of finally doing what he’d always been meant to do.

  Because of you.

  The voice in her head was a multitude. A haunting gale of sounds, most of them not human, threaded together into joyful words. Thank you, Merlin.

  “It was my pleasure,” Marci replied with a sincere smile, squinting at the outline of her giant white cat of a spirit through the whirling magic. “So what now?”

  She felt Ghost’s invisible smile widen.