Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers)

by Rachel Aaron

  “And he’ll know he owes that to you,” Katya finished. “Since this was all your idea.”

  “Exactly,” Julius said, breaking into a grin. “Everyone wins! I come off looking like the miracle matchmaker who found a way to keep Ian and Svena together against all odds. You don’t have to go back to Siberia or spend your days hiding in dives like this. Svena doesn’t have to worry about you running away anymore, and Ian gets a long and lengthy courtship to try and convince your sister to throw in with him. And if he fails after all that, there’ll be no way my mother can possibly say it was my fault. It’s perfect.”

  Katya drummed her nails on the table, brows knit as she thought it over. “I thought you were pulling my tail at first, but now I’m starting to think this might actually work. I still can’t believe Svena would go for a Heartstriker, but I know she hates the glacier as much as I do. She’d love any excuse to stay away for a while, especially if she’ll have your brother to play with. Heartstriker wiles are not to be underestimated.”

  Julius cleared his throat. “Heartstriker wiles?”

  “Oh come on. You can’t be ignorant of your family’s reputation.”

  “Believe me, I’m not,” he said, blushing. “But ‘wiles’ is a much nicer word for it than I usually hear.”

  “It’s a much nicer word than I usually use,” Katya said with a coy smile, brushing her fingertips lightly over his folded hands. “Perhaps you are rubbing off on me, Julius the Nice Dragon?”

  He must have looked like a deer in the headlights, because Katya erupted into a peal of laughter. “Relax, I’m only teasing,” she said, still giggling. “You are so ridiculous. I can’t figure out if you’re just too young to be jaded or if you’re actually shy.”

  Julius decided it was time to change the subject. “Are there any remaining issues you’d like to discuss?”

  She thought for a moment. “No,” she said. “No, I like this very much. It’s a cunning plan that ties our victory to our enemies’, making them fight for us instead of against. Quite an impressive bit of draconic guile from someone who claims to be a terrible dragon.”

  He couldn’t tell if Katya was being sincere or not, but that didn’t stop her praise from lighting him up from the inside. After years of feeling like a fish out of water, a failure in his own skin, he’d finally done something right. And though he still couldn’t fly or eat properly or breath so much as a lick of flame, at that moment, Julius felt more like a real dragon than at any other point in his life, and it felt good.

  “Thank you,” he said, standing up.

  Katya stared at him like she’d never heard those words before. Of course, considering her family, maybe she hadn’t. “Thank you,” she replied, drawing out the phrase like she was testing it in her mouth. She must have liked the way it sounded, because she finished with a smile, reaching down with a napkin to pick up the spelled silver chain and drop it in her purse. “There,” she said, snapping the red clutch closed. “That’s done. Let’s go.”

  Her eagerness made him chuckle. “Ready to get back to your shaman?”

  “I am at no man’s beck and call,” Katya said with a toss of her hair. “Though I will admit I have become rather fond of him. Humans in love can be so adorably earnest, and he’s a mage as well.”

  She said that last part with such a breathy sigh, Julius couldn’t help himself. “What’s so special about mages?”

  Katya stared at him in wonder before breaking into a wicked grin. “You are so innocent I cannot believe you are real. Where have you spent your twenty-four years? In a monastery?”

  Julius’s answer was to shove his hands in his pockets with a sullen glower, which only made Katya’s grin wider.

  “Do yourself a favor, little Heartstriker,” she said as they walked together to the door. “Don’t rebel too hard against your family’s nature. Some parts of being a traditional dragon are very nice indeed, especially when it comes to humans.”

  She gave him a wicked smile, and Julius looked away, cheeks flaming. Not because he was embarrassed by her words—or, at least, not only because of that—but because as soon as she put the idea in his head, his mind had gone straight to Marci. Lovely, talented, magical Marci, who knew he was a dragon and didn’t mind. Marci, who’d stood by him more in one day than anyone else had in his entire life, and whose soft lips he could still recall in perfect detail…

  But these were thoughts he had no business having, and he put them firmly out of his mind. Life was hard enough without tempting himself with what he couldn’t have. He was too entangled with Marci as it was, but at least he could still claim their relationship was strictly business. If he took things further, she’d end up a weakness other dragons would exploit just because they could, and that wasn’t a fate he’d wish on anyone, much less someone he liked as much as her.

  But all of this perfectly sensible reasoning couldn’t quite squash the surge of delighted happiness he felt when he opened the diner door to find Marci waiting for him. Katya, however, didn’t spare her a look.

  “I can drive,” the dragoness said, pulling a cheap, disposable phone, the kind they sold at airport vending machines, out of her pocket. “My rental still has fifty miles before it locks down, and I don’t want to leave it in a place like this. Just tell your servant to follow.”

  Marci’s eyes went wide, and Julius leapt to her defense. “She’s not my servant,” he said quickly. “This is Marci Novalli, my business partner, and I’ll ride with her if you don’t mind.” He needed to bring Marci up to speed before they got to Ian’s.

  Katya looked her up and down before turning back to Julius. “Seems I’m not the only one with plans to stay in the DFZ,” she said, her singsong voice laden with innuendo.

  “We’ll lead the way,” he said quickly before she could make Marci any more uncomfortable. “Just follow us. I’ll call Ian right now and let him know we’re coming.”

  Katya shrugged and started down the street toward a dirty but otherwise quite nice baby blue luxury sports car parked around the corner. Julius waited until he saw her open the door and get in before pulling out his phone to look up Ian’s number. He was about to hit the call button when Marci tapped him on the shoulder.

  He turned to find her bouncing nervously on her toes. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Can it wait a moment? We’re heading to my brother’s, and if I don’t give him advanced warning, he’s going to skin me alive.”

  He’d opened the passenger door of her car without looking as he said this, and as a result, he nearly sat on Ghost. He jumped out again when the cat hissed, glancing down just in time to see the death spirit vanish through the seats into the trunk. “Was that what you wanted to talk to me about?” he asked, settling into the now empty seat.

  “No,” said Marci as she hurried around the car. “Your brother was just here.”

  “You mean Justin?”

  Marci shook her head, dropping into her own seat. “It was—”

  A horn cut her off as Katya’s coupe pulled up beside them. “Where are we going?” the dragoness called through her open window.

  Julius sent her phone the address for Ian’s penthouse. He sent it to Marci’s ancient GPS as well. The route took them straight down the dark, blocked off street Marci had directed them around on the way here, but she didn’t bother correcting the map this time. She just sat in her seat, biting her nails, and Julius decided Ian could wait a few more minutes.

  “Okay,” he said, putting his phone down. “What happened?”

  “I told you,” she said, her voice tense and angry as the car pulled itself out onto the dark, crumbling road. “Your brother showed up.”

  “Which one?”

  Marci sighed. “He didn’t give me his name, but he was tall with long black hair.”

  That described most of his brothers. “Anything else?”

  “He was very weird,” she said. “He just appeared on the hood of my car like he’d fallen out of the sky, and he didn�
�t even try to hide that he was a dragon. He also had a pigeon on his shoulder, like a pet or something.”

  Julius’s stomach sank so fast, he thought it would fall right through the seat. Bob. The Great Seer of the Heartstrikers had been here, talking to Marci. “What did he say?”

  “Oh, a whole bunch of nonsense about tests and crucibles and how it was too late to start over. He also told me to tell you that you should buckle up, because people die in traffic accidents.”

  The words were barely out of her mouth before Julius was fumbling for his seatbelt, snapping it into place so fast he pinched his fingers.

  Marci watched him warily. “Is that significant or something?”

  “I have no idea,” he admitted. “But when Bob tells you to do something, you should always do it, no matter how stupid it sounds.” He glanced pointedly at Marci’s seatbelt, and she grabbed it with a sigh. “Did he happen to say what he was testing me for?”

  “He claimed he didn’t know yet,” she replied, clicking her belt into place with a frustrated huff. “Honestly, it didn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Bob usually doesn’t,” Julius said. “He’s a—”

  A crash cut him off mid-word, jolting the car and throwing him hard against his seatbelt. For a second, he felt like the world had stopped around him, leaving him to fly forward alone, and then reality came back with an explosive crash as Marci’s entire car tipped sideways.

  It came down again with a jolt that cracked his teeth together, fortunately landing back on its wheels as opposed to its side. As soon as they were down, Julius turned to Marci, grabbing her shoulder. “You okay?”

  She must have been, because she wrenched out of his grip immediately, leaning out her shattered window in an attempt to look down the street. “What the hell was that?”

  Julius was wondering the same thing. The dark street was empty as ever in front of them. He was trying to figure out how that could be when he spotted the wall of metal in Marci’s rear view mirror.

  He wrenched around in his seat. The back of Marci’s car was completely totaled, crushed like a can under the bulk of an armored van so large, he couldn’t see the edges of it from inside the car. But even that glimpse was enough for him to know that something was off. The armored van was stuck at an awkward angle, almost like it had spun into them after hitting something else…

  And that was when he realized they weren’t the ones who’d actually been hit. Their accident was just the remainder of the truck’s momentum after slamming through the car behind them. The car Katya had been driving.

  That was as far as Julius got before he tore off his seatbelt and dashed into the street.

  Chapter 14

  All he saw was smoke.

  Huge, billowing clouds of black smoke poured off the front end of the enormous van currently stuck catty-corner through the back of Marci’s car. He couldn’t even see the driver between the smoke and the dark and the van’s heavily tinted windows, so he stopped trying, running instead toward Katya’s car. Or, rather, the place where her car was supposed to be.

  Julius skidded to a stop, staring at the empty street in utter confusion. She’d been right there, right behind them, but now there was nothing. Just Marci’s sedan and the giant, smoking van, which was already roaring back to life.

  The smoke pouring out from under its hood must have been from something non-vital, because a second after the engine gunned, the van rushed straight at him. If Julius had been human, he would’ve been run down. As it was, he managed to jump out of the way just in time, dodging the van by inches as it shoved Marci’s car out of the way like the old sedan was made of cardboard and surged down the empty street.

  By the time it occurred to Julius that he should do something to stop it, or at least look for identifying marks, the armored van was already flying through the abandoned intersection ahead of them, tires squealing as it took the turn on two wheels and vanished around the corner.

  He didn’t even try to chase it. Even with his speed, there was no way he could run down a van over a long chase. He had more important things to do at the moment in any case, so he put the van he couldn’t possibly catch out of his mind and shifted his focus to finding Katya.

  This proved more difficult than he’d expected. They were only a few blocks away from the diner, which meant they were directly under the heavy shadow of the towering monolith of the support beam that had cut this area off from the rest of the city. Still, it wasn’t so dark he shouldn’t be able to find a car. But everywhere he looked, the road was deserted. He was almost ready to believe she’d vanished into thin air when he spotted the huge hole in the condemned building across the street.

  Now that he’d seen it, Julius didn’t know how he could have missed it. The old storefront on the ground floor was smashed in like it had taken a direct hit from a wrecking ball. Smoke and dust were still pouring out of the breach, but through the thick clouds, he could just make out a pair of dimly flickering headlights.

  Julius didn’t waste another second. He ran for the wrecked building, vaulting through one of the broken windows to land inside what must have once been a retail sales floor. Now that he was inside, he spotted Katya’s car at once. He also realized why he hadn’t been able to find it earlier. The impact had thrown the little blue coupe clear through the building, taking out a line of old sales counters and at least one support beam in the process. It was now lying against the far wall of the building, but it wasn’t until he got past the wreckage of the old registers that Julius realized the blue sports car was actually lying upside down.

  The sight was enough to turn what was left of his stomach into an icy ball. Just as he was starting to fear the worst, though, he saw movement in the wreckage, and relief hit him like a punch in the gut.

  “Katya!” he yelled, tripping over his feet in his rush to run forward.

  No answer.

  Panic returned immediately, and not just because of the silence. Julius was halfway through the building now, close enough to see that the movement he’d spotted was not actually in the car, but beside it. Three large, man-shaped shadows were running down the back wall of the building toward the old emergency exit where an armored van—a second armored van that looked exactly like the one that had just crashed into Marci’s car—was waiting for them in the back alley.

  By this point, Julius was running full tilt through the debris, but he still wasn’t fast enough. By the time he reached the emergency door, the men had tossed themselves and Katya’s unconscious body into the back of the van. It lurched forward the moment their feet left the ground, roaring down the alley and around the corner into the street beyond. He ran after them on principle, but the van was already gone, vanished into the dark, decaying grid of old Detroit.

  “Julius!”

  He glanced over his shoulder to see Marci running up behind him. Or, rather, he assumed it was Marci. The alley was so dark, he wouldn’t actually have been able to tell it was her if she hadn’t called his name.

  “I heard another car,” she panted when she reached him. “Did they get away?”

  He nodded before he remembered she couldn’t see him. “Yes. They got Katya, too.”

  “What?”

  “It was a trap,” Julius said, hands shaking. “A setup. They were waiting for us.”

  He could almost hear Marci staring at him, and then she let out her breath in a huff.

  “Oh come on,” she said. “I mean, that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way someone could have known we’d be driving this direction in time to set something like this up. I didn’t even know we’d be driving through here until a few minutes ago. And even if they did somehow psychically know where we’d be before we did, there’s no way they could have set up a situation this specific. I mean, lining up a van to hit a car at just the right angle to throw it through a building on the other side of the street where another team is waiting to grab the driver and make a getaway? I don’t care if you had a year to plan, ther
e’s not enough luck in the world to pull off a stunt that. It’s a miracle they didn’t kill her.” She stopped short, breath hitching, “Um, they didn’t kill her, right?”

  “No.” Katya hadn’t been moving, but she’d clearly been all in one piece, and it took more than a car wreck to kill a dragon her age. Julius was far more worried about the rest of what Marci had said, because she was absolutely right. There wasn’t enough luck in the world, because it wasn’t luck at all. This was the work of a seer.

  The moment that thought crossed his mind, everything else fell into place: Bob’s sudden interest in his life, the perfectly timed text with Katya’s location, his appearance to Marci just minutes earlier. This was his eldest brother’s doing. It had to be. The only way anyone could make something like this work was if they had knowledge of the future, but when you added a seer into the mix, everything became perfectly clear. Everything, that was, except why.

  Julius closed his eyes. It was so dark in the alley this hardly made a difference, but it still helped him think, and he’d never needed to think faster than he did right now. Katya was the youngest daughter of their clan’s greatest enemy. What had just happened wasn’t technically his fault, but if he didn’t find Katya before Svena discovered she’d been taken, the White Witch of the Three Sisters wasn’t going to sit patiently and listen to explanations. She was going to blame him, and then probably kill him, which would start a clan war for sure. It didn’t matter that his mother considered Julius the least of her hatchlings—no one killed a Heartstriker except Bethesda and Chelsie. Bob knew that, so why would he put Julius in this position? Surely even he wasn’t crazy enough to involve a clan as powerful as the Three Sisters in his schemes, right?

  Julius scrubbed his hands through his hair, sending a rain of dust spattering across his shoulders. Trying to figure out seer logic was a quick route to madness. For all he knew, Bob was having tea with Katya in the back of that van right now. But while he had no idea what was really going on, or why, one truth was crystal clear. “We have to get her back,” he said grimly. “Tonight.”