Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers)

by Rachel Aaron

  “There’s a ladder right here,” Justin interrupted, reaching out to grab the condensation-beaded metal ladder bolted to the wall beside the ledge. “Let’s go.”

  Julius grabbed his brother’s sleeve. “I don’t think we should go down there,” he whispered, deliberately pitching his voice too low for Marci’s ears. “I don’t like the smell of this place.”

  “You don’t like anything,” Justin said. “It’s part of being a wuss.”

  Julius ignored the insult and tightened his grip. “I mean I really don’t like it.” Even just standing on the edge, he could feel the strange, oily power of the darkness below coating his lungs with every breath. “We shouldn’t do this.”

  His brother smacked his hand away. “Enough. Stop being an embarrassment and come on.” With that, Justin grabbed the metal ladder with one hand and swung out, pivoting like a hinge to land on the nearest rung. The moment he was steady, he clamped the insoles of both his boots against the ladder’s side rails and let go, sliding down the ladder into the blackness.

  Marci watched him vanish with a look of grudging respect. “Fearless, isn’t he?” she muttered, stowing the Kosmolabe back in her bag.

  “I think it’s more that his arrogance has created a shell so thick, no fear can get through,” Julius replied, reaching out to grab the disgustingly slick, cold ladder. “Let’s get this over with.”

  It took them forever to reach the bottom. Not because they had particularly far to go—the seemingly endless drop ended up being only about thirty feet—but because Marci’s pace down the ladder was only slightly faster than glacial.

  Julius didn’t blame her in the least. This place looked like a pit into the abyss even to his eyes, so he couldn’t imagine what it must look like for her. It didn’t help that the ladder’s metal rungs were strangely pitted, like they’d been etched with a strong corrosive. Some rungs had actually rotted through completely, forcing them to cling to the ladder’s edge and slid down to the next solid foothold. But though Marci’s breathing sped up to almost hyperventilating every time she had to skip a step, she didn’t complain, and she didn’t stop.

  By the time they finally reached the bottom, Julius had decided he was going to regain his ability to fly if it killed him. To add insult to injury, the climb hadn’t even gotten them anywhere. The ladder let out on wide cement platform beside what looked like an artificial underground lake. Justin, who’d gotten there way ahead of them, was already pacing the edge, his growling audible even in his human form. “There’s nothing here!”

  “This must be the spillway overflow,” Julius said, shining Marci’s flashlight, which he’d carried down the ladder in his teeth, directly into the murky water in a futile attempt to see how deep it went. “Somewhere for all the excess water in the system to collect until it can be pumped out and treated.”

  “I don’t care what it is!” Justin yelled. “It’s not mages. That stupid Cosmonaut led us to a dead end!”

  “Kosmolabe,” Marci corrected sharply, snatching the aforementioned golden ball out of her bag again. “And it’s not a dead end. According to this, our mages are right there.”

  She pointed at the water, and Justin threw up his hands. “What? Are you saying they’ve got a low-rent Atlantis down there or something?”

  Marci made an irritated sound. “I meant on another level.”

  “I don’t think there is another level,” Julius said softly. “If this is where the water’s resting, then this is probably as low as it goes.”

  “Well, that doesn’t make any sense at all,” Marci said, walking toward the water’s edge with a huff. “Let me look.”

  Julius caught her sleeve before she’d taken two steps. Now that they’d reached the bottom of the pit, the cold, oily pressure was stronger than ever. He wasn’t quite sure if it was the natural magic of this particular place or something more sinister, but there was a lot of it, and he didn’t want any of them getting closer than was absolutely necessary.

  “Come on,” he said, tugging Marci gently back toward the ladder. “Let’s get out of—”

  “Incoming!”

  Julius fell into an instinctive crouch, while Marci jumped a full foot in the air. They both whirled around to see Justin standing at the lake’s edge with his sword in his hands, and Julius’s breath caught. He’d only seen a Fang of the Heartstriker out of its sheath once before in his life, and never up close. He didn’t have a chance to gawk, though, because at that moment, the water in front of Justin exploded.

  Chapter 8

  His first thought was that a bomb had gone off. The lake, which up to this point had been silent and smooth as a polished stone, erupted like a volcano, sending water surging up in long, black streams. It wasn’t until the streams opened their mouths to reveal perfectly circular rings of razor-sharp teeth that latched on to his brother, however, that Julius realized what was actually going on.

  “Justin!”

  But Justin was already sweeping the curved, wickedly sharp blade of the Fang of the Heartstriker down, slicing through the mass of black, wiggling shapes like they were made of tofu. The toothed heads kept biting even after he’d separated them from their bodies, though, so Justin was forced to retreat, jumping back to where Julius and Marci were sheltered against the wall.

  “What the—” His words cut off in a bellow as he ripped a clamped jaw off his arm. “What’s with the snakes?”

  “They’re not snakes,” Julius said, leaning over to look at the head in his brother’s bloody hands before Justin flung it away. “I think they’re sea lampreys.”

  “Ugh,” Marci said. “You mean those things with the flat mouths and the rings of teeth that latch on to you and suck your organs out?”

  “I never heard of them sucking organs out,” he said as he helped his brother pry another severed head—which did indeed have a hinged jaw that opened to form a perfectly flat, round ring of sharp teeth—off his leg. “They’re an invasive species to the Great Lakes. I’d thought Algonquin had kicked them all out, but clearly these found a way back in.” He grimaced at the basketball-sized head in his hands and tossed it back into the churning water. “They’re not normally this big, though.”

  Marci gave him a funny look. “Are you a lamprey fan or something?”

  “I studied them in my New Ecosystems of the Great Lakes class,” Julius explained. When this only seemed to make her more confused, he added, “I have a bachelor’s degree in Applied Ecology from NYU Online.”

  Marci’s mouth fell open. “You’re an ecologist?”

  “Try professional student,” Justin said with snort, brushing the blood off his body like another man might brush off dirt. “If it’s online, undergrad, and useless, Julius has it. He also has degrees in Pop Culture, Art History, and Accounting.”

  “Accounting’s not useless,” Marci said.

  Justin ripped the final lamprey head off his shoulder. “It is if you don’t have any accounts.”

  “I like learning things,” Julius said irritably, though that was only a half truth. He did find school interesting, but the sad reality was that online classes and gaming had been the only things that kept him sane and connected to the outside world during the years he’d spent hiding from his family’s plots. Also, being in school had been a great way to keep his mother off his back, at least until she’d realized he was studying things that interested him instead of properly draconic topics like how to exploit the legal system or become a titan of international finance. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What I want to know is why there’s a lake full of super-sized lampreys below Detroit.”

  “Well, if there was a lake of super-sized lampreys anywhere, it would be here,” Marci said. “This place is Ground Zero for weird.”

  She crouched down beside one of the black, slimy bodies Justin had severed. Even without its head, the snake-like corpse was easily as long as she was tall, its slick, muscular flesh barely dimpling when Marci poked it. “They must have gotten washed into th
e storm water system at some point, and then the magic down here caused them to change.” She wrinkled her nose. “It is pretty thick.”

  ‘Pretty thick’ didn’t begin to describe the cold, pressurized magic Julius could feel pushing down on them from all directions. “I told you we should have turned around.”

  Marci shrugged. “Well, at least this explains why the Kosmolabe led us here. A lake full of magically altered wildlife would definitely account for the blip I was seeing.” She looked around at the bodies littering the cement floor. “I wonder if they’re worth anything?”

  “Would you stop talking about the stupid lampreys?” Justin growled, flinging the blood off his sword with a flick of his wrist. “We’re not down here for the fishing. Now let’s go find those mages for real before we waste any more— OW!”

  His cry was accompanied by a loud whack as he slapped his hand against to the back of his neck. “They spit at me!” he roared, whirling around to face the still-roiling water.

  Julius was opening his mouth to inform his brother that lampreys didn’t spit when he saw the streak of smoking black bile coating the back of Justin’s neck. A second lamprey broke the water as he watched, lifting its head above the surface just long enough to spit another line of burning goo at Justin’s shoulder.

  His brother ducked just in time. “Oh, that is it!” he bellowed, brandishing his sword at the water. “I’m going to eat every last one of you slimy bastards!”

  “Justin!” Julius yelled, grabbing his brother by the shoulder. “Calm down! You can’t kill them all. There must be thousands in there.” Or more, he thought with a shudder. “Let’s just go before—”

  Pain exploded over his wrist, and he cut off with a gasp. When he looked down, his whole lower arm was covered in the same black slime that was on Justin’s neck. It burned like hot oil against his skin, but before he could wipe it off on his shirt, a full-scale volley of black goo shot out of the water, coating the wall above their heads.

  At first, Julius thought that was because the lampreys had terrible aim, then he looked up and realized the truth. “They’re aiming for the ladder!” he cried, ducking to cover his head. “They’re trying to cut us off!”

  Even as he said it, Julius knew it was already too late. He also knew how the ladder’s metal had gotten so pitted. This was clearly not the first time the lampreys had sprung this trap. They’d hit the ladder perfectly, coating the entire bottom half in thick, acidic spit that smoked and hissed against the old steel.

  The fumes were even worse. As if the rotted fish smell wasn’t bad enough, the acidic goo also reeked of magic. Dark, fetid, oily magic that was getting thicker by the second. Julius covered his mouth and nose with his hands and looking around for Marci, but she was no longer behind him. This sparked several seconds of panic before he spotted her on her knees at the far corner where the platform met the wall, yanking something out of her bag.

  It looked like a collapsible laundry basket, the kind with the plastic ribs that you could fold up into a tiny ball, but would still spring back to its original size the moment you let up the tension. That sight was absurd enough to make Julius forget the danger for a moment to wonder why she would have such a thing. He was still speculating when Marci dropped the basket on the ground.

  The plastic ribs snapped open the second she let them go, flattening out in a ring, and Julius realized it wasn’t a basket at all. It was a circle. A collapsible casting circle made of yellow tent cloth with layer upon layer of spell notation written around the edges in Marci’s meticulous handwriting.

  “Get in!” she shouted.

  Julius didn’t wait to be asked twice. He sprinted across the cement and into the circle just as the lampreys launched another volley of burning goo straight at their prey. It struck the wall behind them in hissing splats, but when the sticky stuff crossed Marci’s circle, it burned up in a white flash, landing in a patter of harmless ash against Julius’s chest.

  He let out a long, relieved breath. “Nice work.”

  “Always pays to carry an emergency shelter,” she said, nodding at Justin, who had miraculously managed to dodge every shot since the first one. “Is he coming?”

  Julius had no idea. He was spared having to say as much, though, because at that moment, Justin swung his sword with a roar that shook the ground. For a second, Julius couldn’t understand why. From what he could see, Justin was swinging at nothing, and then the air begin to change. All at once, the bite of dragon magic was all around them, surging up so fast and sharp, Julius thought he was going to be bitten in half. Just before the pressure became unbearable, Justin finished the strike, and the black lake parted in front of him like the Red Sea.

  Thanks to the glare of Marci’s magic, Julius saw the whole thing clear as a lightning flash. Justin’s strike had cut the water and everything in it, slicing through the enormous, tangled mass of lampreys hiding below the surface like a laser. He saw his brother, larger than life, the bloody wounds from the earlier bites already closing. More than anything, though, he saw the sword in Justin’s hands. The sword that wasn’t a sword at all.

  It still looked like a sword. It had a hilt and a wide, curved blade that was sharp on one side, like a long scimitar, but the blade itself was bone-white and slightly discolored at the tip, like an old tooth. An ancient fang of something very large and very, very deadly.

  His strike finished, Justin stepped back, resting the Fang of the Heartstriker on his shoulder as the bite of the dragon magic faded and the water fell back into place, covering the bodies of the unknown number of lampreys he’d just chopped in two. “There,” he said, his voice thick with self-satisfaction as he turned around to give Julius a superior look. “That’s how it’s done.”

  Julius sighed. It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy they weren’t going to be eaten by overgrown sea snakes, but he wasn’t exactly looking forward to the next several hours of inevitable bragging. Justin was already opening his mouth to begin when something long, black, and glistening shot out of the water and wrapped around his waist from behind, yanking him off his feet back into the water.

  “Justin!” Julius shouted, almost running out of Marci’s circle before he caught himself. Even if he had risked it, he would have been too late. Justin had already vanished beneath the black water without a trace.

  He was still watching the waves when Marci grabbed his hand. Julius glanced over his shoulder in confusion to see her staring at him with her heart in her eyes. She looked like she was about to cry, though with everything that had happened, it took Julius a stupidly long time to realize why.

  “Don’t write Justin off yet,” he said with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “He’s very hard to kill. But we need to make a safe place for him to come up.” Or a safe place for them to take shelter in case Justin lost his temper down there. “Can you move the circle closer to the edge?”

  Marci’s expression made it clear she thought he was being crazy optimistic, but she played along. “No. This circle’s a prototype. I haven’t figured out how to make it mobile yet.” She bit her lip. “I’m actually kind of surprised it worked just now. Maybe we can—”

  Her voice cut off in a yelp as a wave of black, wiggling bodies shot out of the water straight toward them.

  Julius moved instinctively, knocking the first lamprey away before it could smack Marci in the face. The next one made it past him, and though it began to smoke when it crossed Marci’s circle, the power that had incinerated the blobs of acidic spit must not have been strong enough to cook seven feet of wiggling, magically corrupted sea parasite. The lamprey crashed into Marci’s legs with a horrible, unearthly squeal before she kicked it away.

  “What is going on?” she cried. “I thought lampreys lived under the water!”

  Julius squinted through the glare of Marci’s circle at the black lake, now boiling harder than ever. Everywhere he looked, the lampreys were in a frenzy, flinging their long, black bodies out of the water. But it wasn’t until h
e saw the ones trying to slither up the slick, straight walls that bordered the lake like they were trying to get clear of the lake at any cost that he realized what he was actually looking at.

  “They’re not trying to attack us,” he said, wiping the greasy water from his face. “They’re trying to get away from something.” Justin, he added to himself with a shiver that was equal parts pride and dread.

  That was going to be a real problem. But when he leaned out over the edge of Marci’s circle to try and get an idea of what form of his brother they should be expecting, a strange glow began to fill the room.

  Up until this point, the only light in the cavernous spillway had been the flashlight he’d dropped when Justin was first attacked and the glare of Marci’s magic. Now, something beneath the water was shining with a blue, ghostly light that didn’t look like anything his brother could do. It was getting brighter, too, and as it grew, the cold, oily pressure that had been making Julius uneasy since they first arrived grew exponentially worse.

  Julius was very young for a dragon, and undeniably inexperienced, but even he understood there were some things you just didn’t want to look at. Some sights couldn’t be unseen, and immortality was a long time to carry those kinds of memories. Unfortunately, he was already looking at the water when the thing broke through, and the moment the hideous shape came into view, Julius knew that even if he lived to be as old as the Three Sisters added together, he was never going to be able to forget this.

  Other than their remarkable size, spitting ability, and supernatural aggression, the lampreys they’d seen up to this point had looked more or less like overgrown versions of the normal predatory sea creatures of the same name. This thing, on the other hand, was a true monster. Its skin wasn’t just black; it was a void, drinking in Marci’s light without leaving so much as a glimmer. He had no idea how big it was beneath the water, but what he could see above was nearly twenty feet tall, an enormous column of thick, serpentine body ending at a small, flat head ringed with snaking black feelers, almost like a mane. No part of it, however, was glowing, and Julius was starting to wonder what it was he’d seen under the water when the thing opened its mouth.