by Rachel Aaron
“That’s right,” Chelsie said, her voice barely more than a whisper even over the magically augmented speakers. “That is who rules this city. I know you’re feeling backed against the wall at the moment. You might even be considering doing something reckless, so this is a courtesy call to remind you of the price of acting out in a city where the slightest failure in judgment could bring the Lady of the Lakes down on all our heads.”
“Wait,” Julius said, confused. “You want me to watch out for Algonquin? You’re not calling to tell me not to act out against Mother?”
Chelsie scoffed. “My job is to keep the Heartstriker clan alive and in line, not babysit her plans.”
There was a note of ingrained frustration in her voice that Julius had heard a thousand times in his own, and for a moment, he felt a whisper of empathy for the sister who’d had to deal with their mother far more and far longer than he had.
“I’m not telling you not to crack,” Chelsie went on, her voice flicking back to its normal sharpness like it had never left. “I’m just asking that you do it in a way that won’t cause trouble for the family. I’d hate to have to come down on you for something as stupid and preventable as making a scene in Algonquin’s city.”
“I have no intention of making a scene anywhere,” Julius said. “But I appreciate the warning.”
“Everyone gets one,” his sister replied. “And for what it’s worth, I wish you good luck. You’ll need it.”
Julius placed his hand on the cold glass, unexpectedly touched. “Thank you, Chelsie.”
“I’m not doing it for your sake,” Chelsie snapped. “I’m doing it for mine. I hate killing dragons under fifty. You’re barely more than hatchlings, and it’s just depressing. So don’t make me do it. And don’t forget I’m watching.”
Like Julius could. But before he could say anything else, the call cut out. He lowered his phone with a sigh, watching his sister’s tiny figure far below as she got up from the bench and vanished into the colorful, swirling crowds that mobbed the boardwalk. When he could no longer see her, he sank back down on his bed.
It was nice to know Chelsie didn’t relish the idea of killing him. That wouldn’t stop her, of course, but his sister’s unexpected warning had made him feel slightly less alone in the face of Bethesda’s plots. But while it was comforting to know he wasn’t the only one, his sister had been absolutely right. He was up against the wall, and his only hope of getting down again was to find Katya as soon as possible. He’d just started typing a message to his old guildmate to see if his tracking program had found anything when he heard a soft knock on the door that connected his suite to Marci’s.
It was a sign of how flustered he was that he went ahead and told her to come in before he remembered he wasn’t wearing anything but his boxers. Thankfully, he’d been working on his speed all morning, and he managed to grab his pants and shove them on before she opened the door.
“Hey,” she said as she came in, “I just—” Her voice cut out as she stopped short, eyes flicking to the bathroom full of soggy towels, then to the bed torn up by his tossing and turning, and finally to him, standing shirtless and sweaty in front of the window. “Rough night?”
“Sort of,” Julius said, wiping his face with the towel around his neck so she wouldn’t see his embarrassed wince. When he looked up again, Marci’s eyes were locked on his bare chest. She stared just long enough for Julius to see her cheeks turn bright pink before she whirled around and walked swiftly to the doorway that led into the relatively untouched living room portion of Julius’s suite.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said when she got there. “But I heard you talking, so…” She stopped with a frustrated sound, drumming her fingers on the door frame. Then, like she’d come to a decision, Marci turned around again and looked him straight in the eye. “I wanted to tell you I’m very sorry about what happened earlier.”
After the horrors of the last twenty minutes, it took Julius several seconds to figure out what Marci was talking about. By the time he remembered, she’d already blazed ahead.
“My actions were completely out of line,” she said, folding her hands in front of her. “I breached the bounds of a professional relationship, and I sincerely apologize. My only excuse is that I was exhausted and making bad decisions, but I’m feeling much better now, and I promise I’ll never put you in that position ever again. So, if it’s okay with you, I’d like it if we could just forget about the whole thing and move on with our business together.”
Julius stepped forward, mouth already opening to tell her she had nothing to apologize for. That what had happened in her room was the actually the best thing that had happened to him in years, and he wouldn’t forget it for the world. In the end, though, he just looked away again with a bitter sigh, because while she had the why of it all wrong, Marci was still absolutely right.
She’d been the one to kiss him, but Julius had had no business enjoying it. She was human, and—as his conversation with his mother had so pointedly reminded him—he was most likely a dead dragon. Even if he did somehow manage to survive, he liked Marci too much to drag her into the snake pit that was dragon politics. He really should go ahead and tell her goodbye right now, before he got her into any more trouble, but he didn’t feel right leaving her alone while Bixby was still at large.
That was grasping at straws and he knew it, but Julius grasped gladly. His mother’s call had turned a fire hose on the new spark of confidence he’d been nurturing all morning, and Chelsie’s follow-up had stomped on the ashes. If he lost Marci, too, he might go out entirely.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said finally, grabbing his new shirt and pulling it over his head so he wouldn’t have to look her in the eyes. “Consider it forgotten.”
“Oh.” He couldn’t see her expression, but Marci’s voice sounded surprised and a little disappointed, though that last part might have been Julius’s imagination. “Well, that’s settled then. So what’s the job for today?”
“Same as yesterday: find Katya.” And fast, he added to himself, checking his phone again on the off chance he’d missed something in all the chaos, but he had no more messages than he’d had this morning. Frustrated, he sent a quick inquiry to his contact and got a near instant reply. Everything was working; there was just nothing to report.
“Julius?” He looked up to see Marci watching him, her face worried. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he breathed, determined to make sure that wasn’t a lie. He would be okay, he decided. He would be calm and rational and figure out how to make Ian’s courtship of Svena an unquestionable success with absolutely no need for a scapegoat, because if he didn’t, he’d be dead.
That thought filled him with just as much dread as always. This time, though, he managed to get through it a little better, sliding his phone back into his pocket as he turned to Marci. “Do you have anything you need to do today?”
She blinked. “I thought you were in a hurry?”
“I will be once the trace comes back, but until she actually uses her phone, we’re stuck in limbo.” And if he had to sit around waiting with nothing to do, the worry would destroy him. “Can I help you with something in the meanwhile?”
Marci still looked pretty skeptical, but she nodded anyway. “I’d like to swing back by my house, if that’s okay. I didn’t exactly pack for a long trip last night, and I need to grab some stuff.” She paused, her face suddenly brightening. “All of it, actually. Now that I have some money, I’m never spending a night there again.”
She sounded so excited at the idea of finally getting out of her cat-infested basement that Julius couldn’t help smiling back. Helping Marci move actually sounded like exactly the sort of steady, mindless work he needed to calm back down to a functional level while he waited for Katya to make a move, and who knew? Maybe if he chilled out, he could come up with the sort of brilliant, outside-the-box plan he needed to save his life.
“Let’s go, then,” he said
, tapping over to his phone account to leave a large tip in the room’s AR for the maids who’d have to deal with the fallout of his water-catching practice. “I’m ready when you are.”
Marci ran back to her room. “Just give me a moment to pack!”
Julius nodded and shut the connecting door behind her. When he was alone again, he grabbed Svena’s silver chain from where he’d hidden it inside the nightstand and slipped it into his pocket.
***
It was a truly glorious afternoon. The late summer sunshine was bright and clear, and the DFZ skyways were crowded with beautiful people out enjoying the fine weather. Even Marci’s car was running better thanks to a complementary battery charge and software update from the hotel’s valet system. Marci seemed recharged as well, keeping up a steady stream of conversation as she touched up the marker on the inside of her chunky spellworked bracelets.
Julius said nothing. Even though they’d agreed it was forgotten, it was painfully obvious that Marci was covering up her discomfort over what had happened in her hotel room with an impenetrable shellac of cheerfulness. He wanted to tell her she didn’t have to pretend, but he had no right to call out her deception and nothing to offer her even if she did admit she was hurt. He could only handle so many crises at a time, anyway, and so though it made him feel like a coward, he took the out she offered and pretended along with her, nodding where appropriate as the car took them down the ramps from the rich Upper City and into the desolation that was the DFZ’s north side.
The sunlight dimmed noticeably when they drove into the old University District. It had been dark the last time they’d driven through, so while Julius had noticed the dilapidated buildings, strange magic, and giant fence that marked the edge of Algonquin’s spirit land, he hadn’t been able to see the haze that hung over the old neighborhood like a greasy film. Just trying to read the street signs through that muck gave him an instant headache, but what really got him was the strange feeling of being watched that only seemed to get worse as the streets got emptier. No wonder no one wanted to live out here. This place was creepier than the Underground.
His feelings of foreboding only got worse when Marci took over the car and turned them off the main road into the hoarded mansion’s driveway. This struck him as odd, because the brick house’s wildly overgrown garden and sagging overhangs actually looked much less scary in the bright afternoon than they had at night. But the intense sunlight did nothing to stop the chill that crept up Julius’s spine as the car pulled them around to the back of the house.
He squinted up at the sagging eaves as they rolled to a stop in front of the collapsing garage, trying figure out what was making him so uneasy, but he saw nothing. There was no movement at all, actually. Even the vines that covered the rear of the house like a parasitic colony were still, but it wasn’t until he looked through the equally quite, dust-caked windows that he realized he hadn’t seen a single cat.
Fear shot through him like a spear, and he whipped back to Marci, who was already getting out of the car. He’d already sucked in a breath to tell her to stop when he saw it. There, in the wall of privet that separated the yard from the next one over, the sunlight was glinting off the long, silenced barrel of a pistol.
After that, he didn’t bother with a warning. Even if he could have yelled something that made sense, Marci wouldn’t be able to react fast enough. But Julius had been practicing being fast all morning, and he moved before he could think, launching over the driver’s seat to tackle Marci around the waist just as the shot went off.
Chapter 11
The bullet passed so close, Julius felt the heat of it on his back as he tackled Marci to the ground. They landed together in the overgrown grass hard enough to knock Marci’s breath out. He was moving again before she caught it, yanking her back toward the car. But just as he grabbed the edge of the driver’s seat to haul them both inside, a second gun barrel poked through the tangled wall of vines and bushes on the other side of the car.
The moment Julius saw it, instinct took over completely. He rolled without thinking, whirling with obviously inhuman speed as he dropped them back to the ground. Just in time, too. They’d barely hit the dirt before the next shot shattered the passenger window, cutting through the stuffing of the driver’s seat to lodge in the steel frame of the front wheel well not a half inch from Julius’s shoulder.
By this point, Marci had recovered from her shock enough to realize what was happening. The stifled whiff of the second silenced shot was still fading when she grabbed Julius’s hand and took off for the house, dragging him behind her as a third shot whizzed over their heads to blast a chunk off the sagging mansion’s brick foundation.
Marci jumped down the basement stairs and hit the ward on the rickety old door with both hands. The magic flashed, and then the basement door flew open as they both ran inside. As soon as they were over the threshold, the ward snapped back into place, covering the doorway in a glowing barrier while the door itself hung open, listing on its rusty hinges. Since the wood was half rotted anyway, Julius didn’t even bother kicking it shut. He simply spun to the side and slammed his back against the bare stretch of wall between the open door and the wardrobe in the corner. Marci followed suit, plastering herself against the house’s foundation as she gasped for breath.
“What is going on?” she panted.
“Not sure,” Julius said, arching his neck back in an attempt to look through one of the little ground-level windows that pierced the wall above them. “I think—”
What he thought was cut off by an explosion of gunfire. Apparently, whoever was attacking had completely given up on subtlety. Bullets began hitting the house like hail, shattering the window above their heads and shredding the basement door to splinters.
“I thought this place was warded!” Julius cried, pressing himself even tighter against the brick wall as bullets flew through the empty doorway to land in the piles of trash that filled the far end of the basement.
“Against living things!” Marci yelled back, covering her head with her arms. “Not bullets! Why would I ward against bullets?”
As though in answer, a second rain of shots came in from the side of the house, shattering the single ground-level window on their left. But while the bullets were quickly making powder of Marci’s couch and mini-fridge, nothing hit them, and Julius realized that they’d taken refuge in the one spot that wasn’t in line of sight for any of the basement windows. Before he could celebrate this fantastic stroke of good luck, though, someone outside yelled an order, and the gunfire stopped.
In the sudden silence, Julius could hear heavy shoes rustling through the undergrowth as their attackers checked the windows. One man even walked down to the door to push on the ward and got zapped for his trouble. Marci looked a little smug about that, but it didn’t last long, because while the ward kept the enemy out, it also kept the two of them in.
“Is there another exit?”
Marci nodded and pointed at the sea of trash that filled the non-warded half of the basement. “There’s a stairway up to the main house somewhere over there.”
Julius grimaced. Even if they could battle their way through all the debris, they’d expose their backs to the open door. Not a valid option. “What did you do to Bixby, anyway?” he grumbled, leaning out as far as he dared in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the driveway.
“Oh, no, this can’t be Bixby,” she said, shaking her head frantically. “I mean, yeah, he wants me dead, but there’s no way he’d send an army like this all the way to Det—”
“Novalli!”
Marci froze, her eyes going wider with stark, naked terror as the deep, booming voice bellowed her name. “Come on out, sweetheart,” the man continued. “We’ve got you surrounded, and this time we know you’re in there. Don’t make us torch the place.”
Marci threw her head back, squeezing her eyes shut as she mouthed a string of silent curses.
“Do you know that guy?”
“It’
s Oslo. He’s Bixby’s freaking second. What is he doing up here?”
Julius had no idea, but at least that answered the Bixby question. “See if you can stall them,” he whispered, pulling out his phone.
“Why?” Marci whispered back. “What are you doing?”
“Calling the cops. They’ll run when they hear sirens.” And so would he and Marci, but she was already shaking her head.
“That won’t do any good. This is the DFZ, remember? The police are all contractors. Even if we paid their fees in advance, it would take a riot to get them to take a job this close to the Reclamation Zone.”
Julius rolled his eyes. Of course. Why should he expect anything else from this capitalist dystopia of a city? He supposed he could call Justin, but his brother would have to fly to get out here fast enough to save them, and there was no way anyone could miss a dragon flying over the DFZ during the day. With his brother out of the picture, though, Julius was rapidly running out of ideas, and Oslo seemed to be running out of patience.
“Last chance, Novalli!” Bixby’s second yelled. “The boss gave orders that you weren’t to be killed, but he didn’t say anything about you not being shot. We even brought along a medic, just in case. Of course, that means we can be as rough as we want and you’ll still pull through, and my boys and I are mighty pissed about having to come all this way on short notice. So if you want to keep your limbs intact, you should stop wasting my time and get out here now.”
The color had completely drained from Marci’s face by the time he finished, but her jaw was set as stubbornly as ever. “You’re pissed?” she shouted at the open door. “I’m pissed you idiots can’t take a hint and shove off! But feel free to keep yelling at my ward. I’ve already called the cops. We should be hearing helicopters any second!”
Julius stared questioningly at her, and Marci shrugged. “What? If you didn’t know, they might not either.”