Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers Book 5)

by Rachel Aaron

  “We’ve lost,” she said quietly.

  “No, we haven’t,” Julius said. “We’ll think of something else.”

  “Not this time.” Marci shook her head. “It’s over, Julius. Everyone went above and beyond anything we could have asked, and it wasn’t enough. Even if I came up with something else to try, I don’t think we have the oomph left to pull it off. Ghost is stuck as a cat, Myron’s a wreck, I’m exhausted, and I don’t even see Amelia—”

  “I’m here,” said a small voice, and Marci looked down to see a cat-sized dragon made of fire appear on the ground beside Julius’s foot.

  “Just like old times, huh?” the little dragon said with false cheerfulness. “I nipped back to the Sea of Magic to try and scrounge up enough power to get back to my old incredible self, but all that exploding really mixed things up. It’s chaos over there. Even Raven’s not up yet, and he’s normally the first to get himself together.”

  “What about the dragons?” Julius asked. “Where are they?”

  Amelia shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Like I said, the magic’s all scrambled, including mine. I can still feel their fires, so they’re alive, but I can’t pinpoint my own nose in this mess.” She glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. “If I had to guess, though, I’d say they’re feeling about as peppy as we are right now.”

  It was pretty quiet out there. Other than the Leviathan, there was nothing in the sky. No dragons, no planes, no helicopters. The entire counterattack had ceased, leaving the black monster hovering completely unopposed.

  “They’re probably taking cover,” Julius said, breaking the grim silence. “Can’t blame them, really. I told everyone from the start that we were only holding out until the banishment.”

  “Which didn’t work,” Marci said, her shoulders sinking as the reality of their situation landed hard. “I failed you.”

  “You didn’t fail,” Julius said. “You did everything right. It just didn’t work.”

  “But I told you it would,” she said, lowering her eyes as her vision grew blurry. “I promised that if you could just keep the Leviathan busy, I’d take care of everything. You all did your part, but I—” She stopped, scrubbing the tears off her cheeks. “I wasn’t enough. I’m the Merlin. I had everything, all the magic in the world, and I still couldn’t do it. Even if I had a plan B, we don’t have the resources left to try it, and we’re out of time. The lakes have to be almost dry now.” She slumped forward, pressing her wet face against Julius’s blue-feathered chest. “I’m sorry. I wasted all our time.”

  “You didn’t waste anything,” he said, leaning down to nuzzle her cheek with his soft nose. “You tried your best, we all did, but it’s not done yet. We’re still alive, and I mean to keep us that way.”

  Marci looked up at him. “How?”

  She hadn’t meant for the question to come out quite that disbelieving. Fortunately, Julius didn’t look offended. “Because I do have a plan B,” he said. “It was my plan A before everyone shot it down, but I see no reason not to try it now. It’s not like we’ve got anything left to lose.”

  That was certainly true, but… “What plan are you talking about?”

  He smiled down at her, his green eyes warm. “The one where we talk to Algonquin.”

  Marci stared at him for a good ten seconds before her tact ran out. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Why would I be kidding?” Julius asked, looking genuinely confused. “Algonquin’s always been the heart of this problem. It only makes sense that she’d be the key to getting us out.”

  “B-But you can’t be serious,” Marci stuttered. “I know you’ve talked people into some truly crazy stuff, Julius, but Algonquin wouldn’t even listen to her fellow spirits, and she hates dragons. You could make the best case in the world, and she still wouldn’t listen.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll never know if I don’t try.”

  “She’ll kill you,” Marci snapped.

  “She might,” Julius said. “But I won’t be any more dead than I’d be if I stayed here.” He dug his claws into the ground. “We have to do something, Marci.”

  “Yeah, something that will work!” she cried. “Something not insane!”

  “I don’t think it’s insane,” he said. “Algonquin’s not some evil overlord. She’s just a spirit who’s hurt and upset and doing stupid things because of it. Look at it that way, and she’s not so different from Ghost, and you talked him around.”

  “That was different.”

  “It wasn’t,” he said firmly. “We’ve always treated Algonquin as our enemy because that’s how she treated us, but we aren’t the root of her problem. Whatever convinced her to surrender to the Leviathan, it was bad enough that she was willing to abandon her fish and give up immortal life. That’s not anger. That’s desperation, and desperate people want to be helped. If we can figure out how to do that, give her a path out of this corner that doesn’t involve the Leviathan, I’ll bet you anything she’ll take it. But we’re never going to find out what that is if we don’t talk to her. Maybe she’ll listen, maybe she’ll kill us all, but if it’s over anyway, we might as well try.” He leaned down, resting the flat of his feathered forehead against hers. “We haven’t lost yet. I trusted you. Trust me.”

  Marci sighed. She still thought it was lunacy, but she couldn’t say no to anything when he asked like that. “Okay,” she grumbled. “I’m with you. How do we do this?”

  “I have no idea,” Julius said cheerfully. “But I’m pretty sure our first step is ‘get to Algonquin.’”

  “Right,” Marci said. “Just get to the spirit who’s inside the monster we can’t even hurt and whose magic will eat us if we do somehow get inside.”

  “Maybe not immediately,” Amelia said, tapping her little claws thoughtfully against her chin. “I’ve never actually seen a Nameless End eat a plane. Maybe it takes a while?”

  “Great, we can be digested slowly.” Marci glared up at the Leviathan. “I don’t even see how we’d get in to be eaten. That thing’s nothing but shell and eyes, no mouth or ears, no openings of any sort unless you want to crawl up a tentacle with the water.”

  “Could we portal inside?” Julius asked, glancing at Amelia. “Your magic is low, but Svena’s should still be fine. Could she get us in?”

  The little dragon thought about that for a moment, and then she shook her head. “No. Don’t get me wrong. Princess Snowflake is the best teleportation expert alive. She can get you anywhere in the physical world if she knows where she’s going, but that thing is ninety-nine point nine repeating percent magic. Metaphysically speaking, that makes teleporting into it the same as trying to teleport into another person’s soul, and there’s not a power in the world—dragon or otherwise—who can do that.”

  The group fell silent. Marci was wracking her brain for a solution that didn’t leave them all doomed when she heard the crunch of shoes on gravel. Her first thought was Myron, because the step was far too light for Emily’s metal body, but it wasn’t Myron or Emily, or even a human.

  It was Bob.

  “Please tell me you’re coming over because you’ve just spotted a brilliant way out of this mess,” Amelia said, flapping up to her brother.

  “Alas, we’re not there yet,” Bob said, holding out his arm so the little dragon could land on it. “But I might have a solution to your impenetrable Leviathan problem. First, though, you need to talk to General Jackson.”

  “Why?” Amelia asked.

  “Because she’s about to authorize a nuclear strike.”

  Julius’s eyes went wide, and then he was gone, darting across the cavern faster than Marci had known he could go to tackle the general, who was still standing hunched over her makeshift war table.

  “Get off me!” Emily Jackson snarled, shoving at Julius. The temporary body Raven had cobbled together for her must not have been a patch on her old one, though, because she couldn’t even budge him. “I have to do this!”

  Julius’s answer
to that was to grab her com unit and crush it with his claws. He crushed his own as well, shaking the sleek black headpiece off the crown of his transformed Fang and smashing it into plastic shards.

  “Are you insane?” the general yelled. “It’s over, Heartstriker! We tried, and we failed. Now we have to use whatever we have left to blow that thing out of the sky!”

  “No!” Julius yelled back. “If you call in those missiles, everything in North America will die!”

  “Better than losing the whole world!” Emily cried, her dark eyes wild. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but this is the only weapon we’ve got left. We have no choice!”

  “Incorrect,” Bob said, crouching down beside her. “I’m the local expert on choices, and I can tell you that there are at least twenty left. More importantly, though, it won’t work. The Leviathan is magic, not flesh. His tentacles were vulnerable to physical attack because they were disposable, but nuclear warheads won’t bother his main body any more than your other attacks did. I’ve already seen how that future ends. If you authorize a launch, all you’ll achieve is killing off the rest of us.”

  Marci wasn’t actually sure if Emily believed that dragon seers saw the future, but she must have believed Bob now, because she slumped beneath Julius’s hold. “Fine, fortuneteller,” she said bitterly, relaxing into the dirt. “If you see so much, what do you suggest?”

  “What I always suggest,” Bob replied, placing a hand on Julius’s head. “Listen to my brother.” He glanced at the smaller dragon. “You want to talk to Algonquin, right?”

  Julius nodded rapidly. “We don’t know how to get to her, though,” he said. “She’s inside the Leviathan, and nothing we’ve tried can get through his shell. Even Amelia couldn’t burn him.”

  “Hey, I burned him a little!” Amelia said defensively, scampering up Bob’s arm to perch on his shoulder opposite his pigeon. “I could have burned him a lot more if I’d had my old fire, but now that our magic’s hooked into the Sea of Magic, we’re trapped in the same sinking boat as everyone else.”

  “Why?” Marci asked, genuinely curious. “I used to use Julius’s magic all the time in my spells. It worked great. Why won’t it work now?”

  “Because we’re not casting spells,” Amelia explained. “Humans aren’t picky, so I’m sure you’ve never noticed, but dragon fire is fundamentally different from any other type of magic on this plane. We came from an entirely different system! Our magic was basically alien, which was why we never really integrated into our new home. I fixed that when I became a spirit, but in order to fit our magic into the rules of this realm, I basically had to turn fire into water. That’s great for us in the long term considering we have to exist in a Sea of Magic, but it’s hard to burn a hole in something like the Leviathan when you’ve traded your flame thrower for a fire hose, you know?”

  Marci wasn’t quite sure that she did, but Bob was shaking his head. “Don’t bemoan our fate yet,” he said. “You might have changed our fundamental nature, but there’s still one dragon whose fire isn’t connected to yours.”

  Amelia blinked at him. “How is that possible? I’m the Spirit of Dragons. If it’s a dragon, it’s mine.”

  “Not this one,” Bob said, smiling wider. “He’s got a loophole, because, despite appearances, he’s not actually a dragon.”

  He turned to point at the Black Reach standing alone in front of the tunnel that led out of the spiral of on-ramps, his tall body silhouetted by what was probably the last working streetlight in the DFZ, and Julius gasped. “Of course!” the dragon cried. “The Black Reach is a construct, a magical machine! He was built, not born, which means he’s not under your control!”

  “Are you sure about that?” Amelia asked, frowning. “My domain is pretty broad.”

  “Absolutely sure,” Bob said, giving his sister a flat look. “Do you think I would have put myself through that melodrama with Julius earlier if you could have pulled the Black Reach’s string to save me?”

  “Good point,” Amelia said, her voice growing excited as she launched off Bob’s shoulder to flap toward the Black Reach. “Let’s go get our super weapon!”

  “I don’t think he’s going to help us if you call him that,” Julius said as he hurried after her.

  Marci followed right behind, looking suspiciously over her shoulder at Bob, who was watching the unfolding events play out like a director on opening night. “Are you sure about this?” she whispered, catching Julius’s sleeve.

  “No, but it’s the best plan we’ve got,” he said, looking down at her. “What’s wrong?”

  Marci shot another glare at the seer. “I just don’t like how convenient it is. Bob’s normally subtler about his tip-offs, but he practically gave us a quest to go talk to the Black Reach.” She shook her head. “I don’t like it. Smells like a plot.”

  “Of course it’s a plot,” Julius said, laughing. “He’s a dragon seer. Plots are the air he breathes.”

  “That doesn’t make them okay,” Marci snapped. “Bob doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record. He’s already proven he’s fine with killing both of us if that’s what it takes to make his wheels turn. How do we know this time is different?”

  “We don’t,” Julius said. “But…” He trailed off, coming to a stop so he could face her properly. “Bob did a lot of things I hate, but he also did things I’d never want to change. He used us and hurt us, yes, but he’s also the reason we’ve made it as far as we have.”

  “But nothing we’ve tried has worked!” she cried. “The best plan I had bombed. Why didn’t he warn us about that?”

  “Probably because there was a chance it wouldn’t bomb,” Julius said. “And warning us might have made that future less likely.”

  “Why are you defending him?” Marci demanded. “He’s done nothing but use us! Everything good that’s ever come out of his plots for us has been a side effect, never the main purpose. His previous ‘solution’ for the Leviathan was to sell all of our futures to put us on rails without even asking where we’d like them to go. You hated that as much as any of us, so why are you okay with blindly trusting him now?”

  “It’s not blind trust to grab the only rope when you’re drowning,” Julius said firmly. “You’re absolutely right. Bob has treated us horribly, but things aren’t as simple as ‘never trust again.’ He did some very bad things, but I’m convinced he did them for good reasons. That doesn’t excuse how he treated you or me or Chelsie or anyone else, but it doesn’t make him the villain, either. He’s just a dragon who had to make some hard choices, and while I don’t agree with the solutions he came up with, the fact remains that he was always trying to save us.”

  “You mean save himself,” she grumbled. “Don’t forget why he started all of this. He admitted to your face that the only reason he picked you was to avoid being killed by the Black Reach.”

  “He also found us a way to save us from the Leviathan,” Julius reminded her. “Maybe it wasn’t the one we wanted, but he could have used the Final Future to save himself from the Black Reach, and he didn’t. He used his one sure shot to make sure everyone else was safe and relied on plots to save his own future. If he’d failed and the Black Reach had killed him, we still would have been safe in the future he died to buy. We could still be safe.” He nodded over her head at the pigeon perched on Bob’s shoulder. “His salvation is still on the table. Always was. We were the ones who said no, and when we did, Bob respected that. He let us try to make our own fate, knowing the results weren’t guaranteed.”

  “If Bob respects us so much, why does he seem fine with risking our lives?” Marci snapped. “He didn’t have a problem with letting me die.”

  “I hate how he handled that,” Julius said. “But I also think he would never have let that happen if he wasn’t sure you’d come back.” His lips curved into a soft smile. “I don’t think Bob actually likes killing.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because I’ve never seen him d
o it,” Julius said. “I’m sure a lot of his plots would have been much easier if certain pieces were permanently removed, but he never went there. He even tried to save Estella, and she was willing to destroy her entire clan to beat him. That has to mean something.”

  “I think you’re being too nice,” Marci grumbled. “Bob hasn’t even apologized for how he treated you, but you already seem like you’ve forgiven everything.”

  “Maybe it is too nice,” Julius said, smiling wider. “But it’s what feels right to me. Trusting my gut has worked pretty well so far. I might as well stick with it until the end.”

  Marci was pretty sure this was the end, but there was no point in arguing. It’d be easier to kill the Leviathan with a spoon than to make Julius stop being kind. Even now, when his willingness to forgive and forget might be literally the death of them, she couldn’t help but love him for it.

  “All right,” she said, reaching out to grab a fistful of his blue feathers. “We’ll trust the manipulative seer, but I’m staying with you every step of the way. The moment I spot a trap, we’re bailing.”

  Even as she said it, Marci knew that made no sense. You couldn’t bail from the end of the world. But where any other dragon—including Amelia—would have mocked her mercilessly for that lapse of logic, Julius just leaned down to bump his nose against hers.

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  ***

  “Finally,” Amelia said when Julius and Marci walked up. “What took you guys so long?” She narrowed her burning eyes at the Black Reach. “This cheapskate won’t let me take a look at his fire.”

  “You’ll have to get used to disappointment,” the Black Reach said bitterly. “Unlike every other dragon, I am under no obligation to you, Planeswalker.”

  “You see?” she cried, turning back to her littlest brother. “Talk some sense into him, would you?”

  “Why don’t you go back and wait with Bob?” Julius suggested.

  Amelia snorted. “Why would I do that?”

  Because convincing the Black Reach to help them instead of running to another plane as he’d planned was going to be hard enough without his impatient sister wheedling them both. “Because I have something private I’d like to discuss with him,” Julius said instead.