Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers)

by Rachel Aaron

  “No problem,” he lied. “Where is it, and when should I show up?”

  Svena looked down at her phone to find the information. Beside her, Ian met his eyes across the table and mouthed, good job. Julius nodded and quickly lowered his head over his own phone, trying not to look as nauseated as he felt when Katya’s information, including pictures, movement notes, and Svena’s practical instructions on where and how to deliver her runaway sister’s unconscious body once the deed was done, popped up on his screen.

  Sometimes, he really, really, really hated being a dragon.

  ***

  Thirty minutes later, Julius was sitting at the club’s bar, ignoring the bitter and expensive cocktail Ian had bought him as a fancy way of saying get lost while he finished his “discussion” with Svena, and he wasn’t feeling any better. Thanks to the information Svena had given him, he’d had no problem finding the party Katya was supposed to attend tonight. Getting in, however, was another matter entirely.

  From the listing on the DFZ’s public mage forums, it seemed the gathering was being hosted by a circle of shamans, human mages who did their magic with the help of spirits and natural forces, something Julius decidedly was not. Despite Ian’s dismissive assurances that his little brother was “good with humans,” he had absolutely no idea how he was going to convince a bunch of secretive mages to let him into their exclusive magic-nerd night. He wasn’t actually sure how Katya had gotten in since dragon magic was entirely different from the human variety, though considering Svena’s “little sister” was a thousand years old if she was a day, she probably had her ways.

  Julius’s ways, on the other hand, were decidedly more limited. Not surprising considering who ruled it, the DFZ was packed with spirits. The presence of so many powerful allies gave the local shamans a decided home-field advantage. With so much magic at their fingertips, a good shaman might be able to spot his true nature even with his mother’s seal, and then he’d be in real trouble. What he needed was a mage of his own, someone who actually understood how this stuff worked and could act as cover, but where was he going to find a mage on short notice in an unfamiliar city who would be willing to work on credit until Ian paid up?

  He was still puzzling over this when he felt the telltale prickle on the back of his neck that meant someone was watching him. Probably Ian preparing to call him back to the booth so they could “discuss his plan,” or maybe Svena with some last-minute advice/threats. But when Julius turned around, it wasn’t a dragon watching him at all. It was a woman. A human woman sitting at one of the small tables by the door.

  She got up the second he made eye contact and started straight for him, cutting through the expensively dressed crowd like an arrow with him as the target. Julius thought frantically, trying to remember if he’d met her before. It was true he knew a lot of humans for a dragon, but that was only over the internet. Face-to-face contact was limited to the residents of the New Mexico desert town his mother’s mountain complex supported, and this girl definitely wasn’t someone from home. She was sure acting like she knew him, though.

  As she got closer, Julius’s confusion grew, because she looked like she belonged in this club about as much as he did. Her combination of sparkly silver vest, long-sleeved white shirt with dramatic, oversized cuffs draped over chunky plastic bracelets, and tight black pants tucked into glossy black, calf-high leather boots reminded him of an old-school stage magician. It wasn’t unattractive, especially not on her. She was actually very cute in a warm, human way that was a relief after Svena’s chilling beauty. Still, her getup definitely didn’t fit in with the rest of the club’s too-cool aesthetic, and her hair was patently ridiculous.

  The thick, dark brown strands had been chopped into uneven chunks ranging from almost buzz-cut short in the back to chin-length wisps around her face. It was uneven over her ears as well, with longer strands trailing down at odd places, like she’d pulled her hair back and chopped it off in a mad panic. She didn’t look crazy, though. Just determined as she walked up and slid between him and the stool on his left, leaning one elbow on the bar so that she was directly in his field of vision.

  Under normal circumstances, a pretty girl coming at him out of nowhere would have sent Julius into defensive retreat. Today, though, half-panicked already and stuck in survival mode, he stared straight at her, holding his ground out of sheer desperation as he breathed deeply to catch some hint of the trap this had to be. When he didn’t smell so much as a whiff of draconic power other than the chain in his pocket, though, he said, “Can I help you?”

  “No,” the girl said, flipping her hand with a flourish. “I can help you.”

  A white card appeared between her fingers, and Julius jumped before he realized he hadn’t felt any magic. It had been sleight-of-hand that produced the card, not a spell. The paper itself, however, told another story.

  Marci Novalli, it read. Socratic Thaumaturge, MDC. Curse breaking, magical consultation, warding services. Below that, a smaller line proclaimed, No job is too big or too small! References available upon request.

  A mage, he realized dumbly, staring at the card with a growing sense of dread—an impressive feat, considering just how large his dread had grown today already. But a mage appearing out of nowhere at the exact moment he realized he needed one? If that wasn’t a set-up, then he was his mother’s favorite son.

  He leaned away from her offered card like it was poison. “Sorry. Not interested.”

  “Just hear me out,” the girl said, closing the distance he’d just put between them. “I can understand if you’re apprehensive about mages. You’re under a very nasty curse.”

  Julius blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “The curse,” she said, gesturing at him. “It’s all over you. I can’t imagine how you must be suffering, but you don’t have to worry any longer. I have a lot of experience in curse breaking, and I’m very gentle. Give me an hour and I’ll have that thing off you no problem.”

  Julius stared at her, uncomprehending, and then it dawned. She was talking about the seal, the one his mother had put on him to trap him in his human shape. After that, it was all Julius could do not to burst out laughing, both at the notion of a mortal mage breaking his mother’s seal in an hour and how Bethesda would react if it actually worked. He glanced at the girl again, just to make sure she wasn’t kidding, but her expression was deadly serious, and all he could do was shake his head.

  “I’m afraid my curse isn’t the sort you can remove,” he said. “Thank you for offering, though.” That last bit came out surprisingly heartfelt. Her unexpected sales pitch was the nicest thing anyone had said to him all day.

  The girl stared at him a moment, and then her shoulders slumped. “Well, do you have anything else you need done? Wards? Spirits banished? I can show you my portfolio.”

  She’d started pulling a binder out of the enormous black messenger bag on her shoulder before she’d even finished the question, and Julius fought the urge to sigh. Humans.

  “I’m good, really,” he said, putting up his hands. “You don’t have to show me anything. I’m not interested.”

  The girl stopped short, and then she stuffed the binder back into her bag, her face falling in utter defeat. “Sorry,” she muttered, flopping down on the barstool beside him. “I’m not normally so…” She waved her hands as she searched for the word, making the chipped silver glitter polish on her nails sparkle in the club’s low light. “Car salesman-y,” she said at last. “It’s just that I really need the work. If you have anything magical you need done today, anything at all, I’ll give you a huge discount. I swear I’m completely legit. I’m fully licensed in Nevada, actually, but I’m new in town and, frankly, getting a little desperate. So if there’s any work you need a mage for, just say the word. If not, I’ll stop bothering you.”

  Julius opened his mouth to say sorry, he had nothing, but the words stuck in his throat. The girl was looking at him so earnestly, and that word desperate kept rolling around in
his head. Bob had told him to be a gentleman and help desperate women. Of course, Bob had also once told Julius that he would have dinner with a phoenix on his birthday.

  Turning away from the human, he pulled out his phone and reread the seer’s message, but he hadn’t made a mistake. There was the warning from his maybe-insane, maybe-future predicting brother who’d mailed him a phone loaded with a Detroit ID and money four months before he’d needed it, and here was the desperate woman said brother had told him to help, and now Julius had to make a decision.

  On the one hand, years of well-honed paranoia told him for certain that this was a trap. No one’s luck was good enough to have a random mage walk up and offer her services at the exact moment she was needed. Far more likely was that this Marci Novalli was working for someone else from the Three Sisters who didn’t want Katya found, or maybe another clan entirely. If he took her offer, he’d be playing right into the clutches of his family’s enemies like the idiot failure his mother always said he was. On the other hand, though, rejecting her meant he’d be going against his brother’s advice, and therein lay the quandary. Unlike most of his family, Julius didn’t think Bob was crazy, or, at least, not only crazy. He wasn’t sure if his brother actually saw the future, but Bob definitely saw something. Trouble was, Julius wasn’t sure which side this particular warning fell on: the crazy or the something. He was still trying to figure it out when the girl slid off the barstool.

  “I’m really sorry to have wasted your time,” she said quietly, looking down at her feet as she adjusted her bag on her shoulder. “Thank you for listening, and I hope you have a nice—”

  “Wait.”

  The girl looked up in surprise. Julius was surprised, too, because he hadn’t thought he’d made up his mind yet. But while he still wasn’t sure if the mage was a trap, a vision of Bob’s unsettled mind, or some combination thereof, he had come to a decision. The sorry had been the deciding factor, but the thank you had sealed the deal. Julius couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard those words from anyone’s mouth except his own and, trap or not, he couldn’t let the person who said them just walk away.

  Of course, now that he’d stopped her, he had to come up with something to say.

  “Marci, right?” he asked, clearing his throat as she sat back down on the stool. “Can you do illusions?”

  “Absolutely,” Marci said, counting off on her fingers. “Area, personal, spatial, full sensory immersion, though I’ll need a day to set that last one up if you want it on something bigger than a ten by ten square.”

  Julius didn’t know enough about human magic to gauge whether that was good or not, but Marci certainly sounded like she knew what she was talking about. “I guess it would be a personal illusion,” he said. “On me. But I’d rather not explain it here. Do you have somewhere else we could talk?”

  Marci nodded and hopped to her feet. “I’ll need my workshop to do a credible illusion anyway. We can discuss terms on the way over. Would that be okay?”

  Julius glanced over his shoulder, but his brother and Svena were still sitting in the VIP area with their heads together, and he was loath to interrupt. Really, though, he saw no reason to deal with Ian again at all. He had the chain, he had the information about the party, and now he had a mage to help him get inside. If he moved quickly, this whole mess could be over by midnight.

  “That sounds great,” he said, smiling at Marci as he slid off his own stool. “Let’s get out of here.”

  ***

  Getting out of the club was much simpler than getting in. Rather than running the gauntlet past the augmented bouncer, Marci led them out a side door and down the alley, away from the tree-lined square and its well-dressed crowds. Then she led them down from the street, descending a long set of cement stairs from the elevated skyway.

  “I swear I’m not taking you off to mug you,” she said as they walked away from the evening sunlight and the bright glow of the Upper City’s ubiquitous halogen street lamps. “It’s just that you don’t have to pay for parking down here.”

  “No worries,” Julius said, glancing around. Even with his dragon sealed, he wasn’t terribly worried about a human mugging him, and he was far more interested in his first look at the underbelly of Old Detroit.

  Going below the skyways was like entering another world. All the brilliance of the Upper City—the fancy tree-lined square, the towering superscrapers, the elegant curving roads full of luxury cars and computer driven taxis—was like a model sitting on a table, and underneath it, an entirely different city thrived in the dark.

  After all the stories he’d heard, Julius had expected Underground Detroit to look like a war torn ruin, but this looked more like Shinjuku in Tokyo. The buildings, many of them apparently dating from before the flood given the high water marks on their second stories, had been completely renovated to hold as many shops as possible. Every window seemed to have at least two signs hanging in it, and the combined glare of all the neon, back-lit plastic, and flashing LEDs, actually made it brighter down here than it had been up top in the sun.

  If there was any organizational system, Julius couldn’t see it. Bars, restaurants, and theaters shared walls with banks, private schools, and massage parlors in a chaotic jumble. Some establishments didn’t even bother making divisions, advertising salon services and gambling at the same time. Even the buildings themselves were mismatched. Some, the short ones, looked like the normal office buildings and strip malls they must have been before Algonquin had built an entire other city on top of them. Others, ones that had collapsed and been completely rebuilt in the years since the flood, or the ones had been too tall to fit under the skyway’s eighty foot clearance and had been cut to fit, reached right up to ceiling, using the huge cement base of the Upper City in place of an actual roof.

  The chaos continued on the ground as well where food carts and semi-permanent kiosks competed with cars for room on the ruler-straight grid of the old roads. Trash and advertisements and people were absolutely everywhere, crammed into every nook and cranny and selling everything under the sun to anyone who was willing to pay regardless of age. The only breaks in the madness were the enormous, city-block-long cement support pillars that held up the skyway overhead, but even these were plastered with billboards advertising everything from concerts and exotic pets to drugs and pay-as-you-go augmentation clinics. Just trying to wrap his brain around the chaos of capitalism gone crazy was making Julius feel overwhelmed and dizzy, but most astonishing of all were the people.

  Back in Arbor Square, the crowd had been ethnically diverse, but still so uniformly wealthy and well dressed that they’d all blended together. In the Underground, though, there was some of everything: ethnicity, class, religion, occupation, everything. It was like some power had swept the world, picked people at random, and dumped them all here. It was nothing short of extraordinary, and Julius almost fell down the stairs in his eagerness to get a better look.

  “First time below decks?”

  Julius winced and glanced up to see Marci grinning at him over her shoulder. “That obvious, huh?”

  “You are gawking a bit,” she said, slowing her pace until they were climbing down side by side. “Not that I’m judging, of course. I was shocked too, my first time.”

  “It’s actually a lot nicer than I’d thought it’d be,” Julius admitted, nodding down at the young, excited crowd waiting to get into a five-sense theatre. “I’d always heard, you know…”

  “What? That the whole place was a giant slum of rotting buildings and desperate characters straight out of a corporate dystopia? Oh, don’t worry, there’s plenty of that, too. This is actually one of the tourist areas the DFZ Visitor’s Board pays to keep colorful and edgy, but not so scary that outsiders won’t spent money.”

  Julius looked over at the brightly colored, music playing, fully automated gun, alcohol, and party drug vending machines that lined the landings of the stairwell. “This is the tourist area?”

  Marci s
pread her arms wide. “Welcome to the DFZ!”

  A proper, crafty dragon would have shut his mouth after that and kept his ignorance hidden, but Julius was curious, and this seemed kind of important. “What about security? I mean, I know everything is legal here, but isn’t this kind of excessive? How can so many corporations have their headquarters in the DFZ if there are vending machines selling drugs to tourists only fifty steps down from Arbor Square?”

  There’s plenty of security,” Marci said. “It’s just reserved for people with money, spirits, and fish. Especially fish, actually. Life’s great here if you live underwater.”

  He arched his eyebrows in question, and she pointed over at a giant yellow hazard sign posted on the nearest support beam. Julius hadn’t noticed that particular billboard amid all the other advertisements, but now that Marci had pointed it out, it was impossible to miss the giant wave crest logo of the Algonquin Civic Corporation followed by a list of substances that you were not allowed to dump into the water system and the horrible punishments that awaited anyone who did written in a world tour of languages. There were more signs when they reached ground level with similar warnings against littering and burning illicit materials, but nothing for human on human crimes like theft or assault, which made a pretty clear statement about the Lady of the Lakes’ priorities.

  “I see what you mean,” Julius said, stepping closer to Marci as they pushed into the teeming, noisy crowd that smelled strongly of sweat and human at bottom of the stairs. “Crime here must be ridiculous.”