by Rachel Aaron
“Where’s that?” Julius asked, getting more nervous by the step.
“My room.”
He stopped in his tracks. Like any Heartstriker with ears, Julius had heard rumors about Chelsie’s room. Some were obviously false, like the story about how she lived in a secret torture dungeon where she punished Heartstrikers who broke the rules. Others—like the one claiming she slept inside Bethesda’s secret armory, or that she didn’t live in the mountain at all—were slightly more believable. Whatever the truth actually was, though, there were enough stories to make even Julius, who ignored gossip as a rule, excessively curious as he followed his sister down the crack in the mountain’s roots until, at last, they reached what looked like a dead end.
“It goes without saying that you will never speak of what you’re about to see,” Chelsie said, turning to face him. “Enforcing Bethesda’s will earns me a lot of enemies, plenty of whom would give their left wing to know where I sleep.”
“Of course I won’t tell anyone,” Julius said quickly. “I—”
“I also expect you to keep any nosy questions to yourself,” she went on, her green eyes narrowing menacingly. “This is my private life. If you can’t respect that, you can sleep in the hall.”
“I’ll absolutely respect your privacy,” he said, slightly insulted. “Who do you think I am?”
“You,” Chelsie growled, glaring like she was trying to burn a hole right through him. “I know exactly how meddlesome you can be, Julius Heartstriker. You’ve kept my secrets so far, which is the only reason I’m trusting you with this one, but the moment you start trying to be nice, I will kick you out so fast your head will spin. Understood?”
Julius nodded, but even though his sister looked one step away from murdering him where he stood, he couldn’t stop himself from smiling. She was trying her best to be scary, but the idea that Chelsie—who trusted no one—trusted him enough to bring him into her private life made Julius feel unexpectedly warm and fuzzy inside.
“I won’t say a word,” he promised solemnly. “And I’ll make sure Marci doesn’t either. It’s the least we can do since we both owe you our lives.”
An odd look passed over Chelsie’s face. “You don’t owe me anything,” she said stiffly. “Everything I’ve done has been for me as much as you. I don’t like seeing whelps put through the wringers you’ve been through. And anyway, I don’t do debts.”
“You don’t?”
The question popped out of him before Julius could think better of it. The moment he asked, though, he realized he’d never seen or heard Chelsie demand a debt from anyone. Not even from Justin. Considering how many dragons she must threaten every day, that struck him as extraordinary. She could have easily gotten the entire clan under her talon at this point, so why hadn’t she?
“I know what you’re thinking,” she grumbled, looking away. “And you’re right. I could have every Heartstriker on the hook to me, some multiple times over. I don’t, though, because I’ve been on that hook myself. I know what it’s like to owe your life to someone who lords it over you, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
“That’s how I feel, too!” Julius cried. “I—”
“I know,” she growled, rolling her eyes as she turned back to the hall’s dead end. “Congratulations, we share a weakness. No need to celebrate it. Now stand back.”
Julius did as he was told, shuffling a few steps back as his sister placed her hand on the seemingly blank stone wall in front of them. The moment her fingers brushed the rock, the hallway filled with the bite of her magic. It was just a small snap, but when she let her arm drop, the wall was no longer a wall. It was a door. A huge, round, foot-thick metal door of the type you’d find on a bank vault.
“Nice,” Julius said appreciatively.
“Don’t let this trick you into feeling safe,” Chelsie warned, punching a long series of numbers into the multiple electronic locks. “No door is impregnable. Thinking otherwise is how you get caught with your pants down.”
That was a very paranoid way to live your life, but he supposed Chelsie had good reason for it. He was certainly happy she took security so seriously right now, especially when the door proved to be even thicker than he’d originally guessed as it rolled open, revealing not a secret torture dungeon or even a secure bunker, but a long hallway lined with doors that looked so much like his own, Julius was wondering if he was hallucinating.
“What…”
He hadn’t even finished the word when a dragon stuck his head out of the nearest door, looking at Chelsie with guarded green eyes.
“It’s okay, Felix,” she said quickly, reaching back to grab Julius and drag him inside. “He’s with me.”
The dragon, Felix, nodded cautiously and stepped back through his door, which, now that he was inside the vault, Julius could see was labeled with his name. All the doors had names, actually, and every one of them started with an F.
“F-clutch lives with you?”
“More like I live with them,” Chelsie said. “And what did I just say about questions?”
“I know, but…why do they live down here? Is someone trying to kill them, too?”
Chelsie sighed, clearly debating whether or not to come down on him. In the end, though, it must have been easier to explain than to pummel, because while she had every right to snap his nose off for it, she just shook her head and answered the question instead.
“Not that I should have to explain this to you, but it’s dangerous living at the bottom of the ladder,” she said as she heaved the vault door shut. “Bethesda has forbidden the Fs from fighting the other clutches even if they’re the ones being attacked, and too many dragons see that as an excuse to take whatever they want.”
Fredrick had said something similar. “I see,” he said, smiling at her. “So you let them live with you. To protect them.”
“Don’t say it like I’m some kind of idiot nice dragon,” Chelsie snapped. “It’s a matter of practicality. It was too much work protecting the Fs when they lived up top where anyone could find them, so I moved their clutch down here with me, and you are never to say a word about it.”
“I won’t,” he promised, smiling as they passed Fredrick’s door. Not that he would ever tell her, but he thought it was incredibly kind of Chelsie to watch over the Fs, especially after what Fredrick had told him about how their clutch was treated. His sister could be as prickly as she was terrifying, but no matter how she tried to hide it, Julius knew Chelsie had a good heart. He was feeling smug about being one of the only dragons in the mountain who got to see that when she stopped in front of a door at the hall’s end.
Unlike the F’s doors, which had been perfectly normal, modern construction, the door in front of Chelsie was clearly very old. It was made of heavy oak planks held together with cast-iron nails and cross beams, and it positively reeked of magic. There was no nameplate, but none was needed. One sniff of the magic that saturated the ancient wood made it obvious which dragon lived here, as did the glare on Chelsie’s face when she turned to stare him down.
“Once again,” she said, producing a heavy iron key from somewhere up her sleeve. “Not a word. I am doing you a huge favor, and I don’t want to hear any commentary. Just go in and go to sleep, and we won’t have any problems.”
She stopped there, waiting. When Julius finally nodded, Chelsie turned and unlocked the door, snaking a hand inside to turn on the lights. “Make yourself at home.”
Julius’s eyes went wide. In his experience, living spaces in his mother’s mountain came in two types. There were the giant caves, which were meant to be comfortable for dragons, and there were the apartments, which were meant for the comfort of dragons in human forms. Some apartments, like Bethesda’s, had spaces for both. Chelsie’s rooms, on the other hand, looked like a bomb shelter mixed with a badger hole.
The front room was long, low, and bare, with a ceiling barely higher than Julius’s head. The floor was smooth poured concrete with a drain in the mid
dle, and the whole place was harshly lit with small, high-efficiency string light LEDs that had been hung like Christmas lights from hooks on the ceiling. One corner was entirely taken up by a metal wardrobe containing multiple suits of Chelsie’s usual black body armor, while the other housed a massive (and very well used) first aid station complete with an automated surgery table and a glass-door fridge containing multiple bags of blood for transfusion with Chelsie’s name clearly marked on the labels. He was wondering why she needed her own blood supply when the mountain’s medical bay kept a full stock of Heartstriker blood on hand at all times when his sister walked across the room to the narrow, tunnel-like hallway that branched off the end like a root.
“You can put your mage back here.”
Julius tore his eyes off the medical bay and hurried after her, ducking down the tunnel only to immediately turn again into a small, seemingly natural cave containing several bookcases packed full of dog-eared paperbacks and a long, surprisingly comfortable-looking couch, which Chelsie was currently piling blankets on from the battered trunk that served as the coffee table.
“I know it’s not much,” she said defensively. “But I don’t exactly have a lot of company.”
“This is fine,” Julius assured her, setting Marci, who was probably drunk enough to sleep anywhere, gently down on the couch cushions. “Thank you.”
His sister nodded and tossed him a pillow, which he slid under Marci’s head. “You’ll be in here,” she said, walking back into the hall, which Julius now realized continued down even deeper underground. “It’s a bit cold, but unless you want to curl up on the floor beside Marci, it’s what I’ve got.”
Julius was about to say that whatever it was, it would be fine with him, when he saw something that stopped him cold.
Now that he was paying attention to things other than where he was going to put Marci, Julius saw that the round, tunnel-like hall had several other rooms branching off of it. Some—like the tiny bathroom he could see at the end—had obvious uses. Others—like the room at the end of the hall where Chelsie was currently digging around—he had no idea about. But the bedroom directly across from the library where he’d put Marci down must have belonged to Chelsie herself, and the door was wide open.
Just noticing that made Julius feel guilty. He had no right invading the privacy of a dragon who clearly valued it very highly, but he was too curious to look away. Despite everything they’d been through together, he still knew so little about his sister, and he couldn’t resist taking a closer peek.
Quickly, before she finished whatever she was doing at the end of the hall, Julius stepped forward and stuck his head inside her room. Not surprisingly given the rest of her living space, it was tiny. What little space there was was mostly taken up by a mattress on the floor, covered in a plastic sheet. He was wondering why Chelsie needed a plastic-covered mattress when he spotted the nightstand stuffed full of medical supplies as well as the rust-brown bloodstain on the floor in front of it. It wasn’t fresh, but the edges of the stain were fuzzy and overlapping, like blood had been spilled here and cleaned up so many times, it had become part of the rock itself.
A discovery like that would have terrified Julius anywhere else. Here, though, it just made him sad. When he’d seen Chelsie bleeding this morning, he’d assumed it was a crisis. Now, looking at the plastic mattress and the bandages and sutures she kept within easy reach of her bed, he understood, and that made him sadder and angrier than anything else he’d seen tonight.
How many times? How many times had his sister patched herself up and gone to bed bleeding? How much of Chelsie’s blood had it taken to make the stain on the floor a permanent part of the mountain? He couldn’t begin to guess, but just thinking about the number made his hands ball into fists. There was so much to be mad at here—the fact that Chelsie was forced to live like this, that she was a tool, that his mother had ever thought any of this was okay—Julius couldn’t say which was worse. One thing, however, was absolutely certain: this had to change. He didn’t care what it took or how much it cost, he was going to figure out how Bethesda was controlling Chelsie, and he was going to break it. Because this kind of thing could not be allowed to continue. Not in his clan.
With that, a new, surprisingly draconic possessiveness came over Julius. Up until this moment, loyalty to one’s clan had always been a requirement, part of his duty as a Heartstriker. But though he’d accepted that he’d most likely be a Heartstriker until he died, Julius had never loved his clan. He still didn’t, but for the first time ever, he was thinking of the mountain and its dragons as his. His to protect, his to fix. All his life, he and Chelsie had both been trapped in the same system. Now, though, he had a chance to change things. For the first time since he’d signed the contract that had formed the Council, his new position didn’t feel like a burden. It felt like an opportunity, a chance to finally make the wrong things right. But as he turned to leave Chelsie’s room with a thousand silent promises to himself not to mess this up, he spotted something he hadn’t noticed on his first look through.
When he’d first glanced at Chelsie’s room, the only things he’d seen were the mattress, the medical supplies, and the blood stain. Now, though, he saw there was one more decoration. It was a painting. A Chinese watercolor scroll the length of his arm hanging from the back of Chelsie’s half-open door.
Art History was one of the few undergrad degrees Julius hadn’t gotten around to getting, but despite knowing nothing about Oriental art, he understood immediately that this was the work of a master. Even in the low light from the hall, the delicate colors seemed to glow with their own natural light. The style was abstract, but the subject—a nude young woman with green eyes and long black hair lying in a rumpled bed—was still immediate and real. Looking at her, Julius felt as if he could reach through the paper and touch her lovely face, which was turned up toward the viewer with a beautiful, warm smile that was clearly meant for the artist alone.
Out of all the wonders of the painting, that smile was what threw Julius most. The painter had captured the softness of the expression as perfectly as he had everything else, but it was such an unfamiliar sight on that face, Julius didn’t actually recognize the dragoness in the picture until the real version was standing directly in front of him.
“What part of ‘don’t invade my privacy’ do you not understand?” Chelsie snarled, jerking him out of her room before slamming her door shut.
The furious words were sharp as her claws, but Julius was too amazed to be properly afraid. “That was you,” he said, staring at his sister in wonder. “I’ve never seen you smile before.”
He realized how awful that sounded the moment he said it. Before he could apologize, though, Chelsie cut him off. “It was a long time ago,” she growled. “Leave it be.”
He nodded, though he couldn’t help adding, “It’s beautiful.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Chelsie grumbled, turning to walk back down the hall. “There’s something not right about your baby brother admiring your nude painting.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Julius said, blushing furiously. “It’s just…I didn’t know you could look like that.”
“Digging yourself deeper,” she warned.
Julius cursed under his breath. None of this was coming out as he’d meant. “Well, you have to like it, too,” he said, hurrying after her. “It’s the only decoration you have.”
“Actually, I don’t like it,” Chelsie said. “I think I look like an idiot.”
Julius wasn’t buying that for a second. “Then why did you hang it on your door?”
“To remind myself not to be an idiot again.”
The old anger in those words should have been a warning visible from space, but Julius was too excited to care. He’d never had such a clear look into Chelsie’s past before, and the fact that he’d gotten it from a Chinese painting—presumably the same China Bob had told him to ask about when he’d needed to wake Chelsie up after E
stella chained her—only made him more curious.
“Who painted it?”
Chelsie’s answer was a long, pointed silence before she turned and pointed at the room she’d been digging around in earlier. “You sleep here.”
“But—”
She growled deep in her throat, and Julius froze. His curiosity was still burning like a fire, but that angry growl was enough to remind Julius just how much bigger Chelsie was than himself, and how rude he was being to his host. With that, he lowered his head at once. When it was clear he wasn’t going to push any more, Chelsie dropped her aggressive stance, though her body remained tense as she walked past him to the bedroll she’d set up on the floor of the final room of her cramped suite, which Julius now saw was another library.
Other than the painting, the only things Chelsie seemed to collect that weren’t directly related to her job were books. The front room where Marci was sleeping had held mostly paperbacks, but the back room was filled with huge, leather-bound manuscripts, the kind monks used to go blind illuminating. Unlike the paperbacks, which had been stuffed into shelves, the leather-bound books were protected behind glass to prevent them from deteriorating. Julius was about to try and win back some points with his sister by complimenting her collection when he realized books weren’t the only things behind the glass.
In the center of the room’s farthest shelf, resting on a velvet pillow in its own special box under a glowing heat lamp, was an oblong object with a dark, shiny surface that glistened like a beetle’s shell. At roughly the size of a bike tire, it was larger than the books surrounding it, though still remarkably small for what it appeared to be. Even so, Julius didn’t doubt for a second that it was real. He might never have seen one personally before this moment, but every dragon knew an egg when he saw one. At this point, the only thing Julius wasn’t sure of was why his sister had a dragon’s egg displayed on her bookshelf like a trophy.
Chelsie heaved a long sigh. “I can see it in your eyes,” she muttered, rubbing her hands tiredly over her face. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”