Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers)

by Rachel Aaron

  “There,” he said, pointing. “Get me that one.”

  Justin looked deeply skeptical, but he got the sword down as requested. The moment the slender red leather scabbard came into view, Julius’s face broke into a huge grin.

  “That’s it,” he said, holding out his hand. “That’s the one I want.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Justin said, holding the weapon with his fingertips like he thought it might be contagious. “This isn’t even a sword.”

  It was a bit short. The golden handle was large enough to fit comfortably even in Justin’s big hands, but the sheathed blade was barely more than a foot long. For Julius, though, that was a mark in its favor, and he opened and closed his palm in a grabby hands motion until his brother relented and handed the sword over.

  “What are you going to do with that pocket knife anyway? Chop onions?”

  “I could chop you,” Julius said proudly, unsheathing the short, razor sharp blade. “For your information, this is Tyrfing, forged by dwarfs for Odin’s own grandson to never miss its mark.”

  Justin rolled his eyes. “You are such a nerd. How do you even know that?”

  “Because I looked it up years ago,” Julius said with a sly smile. “Remember those knife tossing competitions when we were kids?”

  Justin’s eyes went wide. “That’s how you beat me?” When Julius nodded, his brother's face contorted in fury. “I knew you cheated!”

  “There was no rule against using enchanted weapons,” Julius said, smiling at his reflection in the sword’s mirror-bright surface. “I wonder how it ended up here, though? It might not be pretty, but Tyrfing is old. Even if she was redistributing her treasure, I’d have thought Mother would keep all the really good stuff back at the mountain.”

  “She did,” Justin said, still scowling. “She just doesn’t consider swords to be ‘good stuff.’ Why else do you think she let us play with them? Jewelry’s another matter. Remember the time Jessica tried to touch one of her diamond tiaras?”

  Julius remembered it fondly. “I thought her hair would never grow back.”

  They both snickered. Marci, however, was still staring at the sword in Julius’s hands like he’d threatened to kill her with it.

  “What I want to know is how a relic like that ended up with you guys at all,” she said, pointing at Tyrfing. “That’s an honest-to-God ancient artifact! A girl in my History of Lore class gave a freaking presentation about how the Tyrfing legend was a prototypical example of a cursed weapon cycle.” Then, like she’d just realized what she’d said, Marci took a quick step away from the naked blade. “Wait, isn’t Tyrfing cursed to kill a man every time it’s drawn?”

  “Oh, that was broken ages ago,” Julius said, sheathing the sword again to prove it. “Mother would never let something as valuable as a still-functional cursed weapon out of her private hoard. I’m pretty sure she took it from another dragon during the centuries she spent in Europe preparing to kill her father the Quetzalcoatl and take his lands. Considering how plain it looks, though, I’m pretty sure the only reason she bothered to keep it is because it’s famous.”

  “I don’t care if it’s a sharpened stick, so long as you actually use it,” Justin grumped. “You are going to use it, right? Because I’m not risking Mother’s stuff if you’re just going to stand around talking to everyone again.”

  “I don’t think talking’s going to be an option this time,” Julius said sadly, undoing his belt and sliding it through the loop on the sword’s red scabbard. “But this should be good enough. Tyrfing might not be as powerful as it used to be, but it still never misses. So long as I know what I’m aiming at, all I have to do is swing and the sword will do the rest.” He grinned. “Sounds about right for my skill level.”

  Justin made a disgusted sound and walked out of the small treasury, locking the door behind him, to Marci’s evident dismay. “So,” he said when they were all out in the living room again. “What’s the plan?”

  “We haven’t gotten the location yet,” Julius said. “But we know it’s a trap. One for Marci specifically, set by a seer.”

  “You pissed off a seer?” Justin gave Marci a scathing look. “That was dumb.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose!” she cried. “And she’s not pissed at me. She wants the Kosmo—”

  “Well, if a seer’s pissed, I don’t know if there’s anything we can do,” Justin said over her, walking across the room to grab his shirt off the back of the couch. “They command the future. We might as well try to beat back the ocean.”

  Julius frowned, thinking back to what Bob had told them in the car. “I don’t think that’s right. They don’t command the future any more than we do. They’re just able to see what’s coming.”

  “And push you in front of it,” Marci added, crossing her arms over her chest. “You know, as much as I hate to say this, I think I might actually have to agree with Captain Bring Down. If seers really do work like Brohomir says, I can’t see how we’re going to win. If this Estella lady can see all our decisions before we make them, then it doesn’t matter how great a plan we come up with—she’s already seen it and thought up a counter.”

  “Unless she knew we’d know she knew,” his brother added, pulling on his shirt. “Then she’ll have counters for both our best plan and the one we’re going to come up after that because we know that she knows the first one.” He stopped, frowning like he’d just confused himself. “This is too complicated. It’s probably best to just assume she has a counter for every contingency and leave it at that.”

  “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Julius said gently. “First, even a seer can’t plan for every outcome. There are millions of variables, it’s just not physically possible. Second, Bob said specifically that Estella was rushed, and therefore being sloppy.” And the more he thought about that, the more he realized that Bob’s seemingly random seer crash course in the car wasn’t random at all. He’d been feeding Julius the information he needed to make a decision, a decision a seer could see. And then he’d promptly left, probably so Julius could make his decision where Bob wasn’t blocking him, which meant whatever Julius decided, Bob had wanted Estella to see it, and…and…

  And this was where seer plotting got to be too much for him. “Give me a second,” he muttered, pulling out his phone. When the AR flashed on, he pulled up the last message he’d received from Bob and began typing. Can Estella see us right now?

  The reply was immediate. No. My brothers = my turf. This decision is purely for my own edification. Just try to forget I’m watching your every move while silently judging you and make the decision as you normally would based on the information provided. Thank You! <3 <3

  Julius didn’t think the hearts were strictly necessary. Of course, he didn’t think any of this was necessary. This situation was hard enough without his brother getting all cryptic on him. Doing nothing wasn’t an option, though, and he turned back to Justin and Marci with a heavy sigh.

  They’d been bickering about something he hadn’t been listening to while he’d been on the phone. When they saw him looking, though, they both went quiet, turning to him expectantly. That threw Julius for a moment. Marci he could understand—unless the subject was magic, she was generally happy to listen to his ideas—but Justin never looked to him for orders. Then again, the parts of being a dragon that required skills other than smashing had never had been Justin’s forte. He was probably just letting Julius do all the work of planning before he tried to take over. Whatever the reason, though, Justin was listening, and that made Julius more determined than ever not to mess this up.

  “Estella’s moving quickly,” he said. “And no one, not even dragons, not even seers, can move fast without sacrificing something. She simply does not have the time to cover every contingency, and if we want to break her trap, our best bet is to take advantage of that. We need to do something she won’t have bothered to prepare for, something completely unexpected.”

  His brother
frowned. “You mean like crashing in through the roof?”

  “Crashing in from any direction is exactly the sort of thing she’ll expect,” Julius said. “So is just going along and giving up Marci for Katya.”

  “Does that mean we’re not doing that?” Justin asked, eying Marci, who’d gone very still. “Because trading a human for a dragon sounds like a pretty good—”

  “No,” Julius snapped. “We’re absolutely not going to sacrifice Marci. In fact, I don’t plan to sacrifice anything. We’re just going to look like we have.” The first wisps of a plan were already taking shape in his head, and he turned to his mage. “Do you think you can make yourself a full body illusion and a strong ward in”—he checked the time—“twenty minutes?”

  “The illusion shouldn’t be a problem if it’s just me and I can find a good source to pull off,” she said. “But what kind of ward are you talking about?”

  Julius smiled. “One against bullets.”

  Marci pursed her lips in an O and began digging through her bag for her casting chalk, dislodging Ghost in the process.

  Justin jumped back with a curse as the see-through cat landed on his feet. “What is going on?” he cried. “Why does she need a ward against bullets? And why does your human have a dead cat in her purse?”

  “I’ll explain everything in a second,” Julius said, clapping a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “But Justin, you’re a strong dragon, right?”

  “Fifth strongest in the clan,” Justin said instantly.

  Julius had no idea how he’d come up with that number, but it served his purposes nicely. “Wow,” he said. “That’s even better than I thought. Would you mind sparing some of that power, then? Just to speed things up?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Marci, who knew exactly what Julius was talking about, looked up from the pizza boxes she was clearing off the floor with a wide smile. “Oh, he’ll do great! Bring him over.”

  “Great for what?” Justin asked suspiciously. “What am I doing?”

  “Helping Marci,” Julius replied. “I did it earlier today, but I wasn’t strong enough, and she really knocked me for a loop. I still haven’t recovered enough to do it again, so I was hoping you could step up. If you think you can handle it, of course.”

  And just like that, an entire childhood’s worth of living with Justin paid off. “Of course I can handle it,” his brother snapped, puffing out his chest. “Anything you can do, I can do better. Now where do I stand?”

  Julius stepped back to let Marci take over, grinning as she ordered his brother into the center of the spellworked circle she was drawing on the newly cleared stretch of floor in front of the couch.

  Chapter 16

  “I can’t believe you let a human do that to me,” Justin grumbled, glaring across the room at Marci, who was happily putting the finishing touches on the ward she’d built from his magic. “I feel used.”

  “Nonsense,” Julius said, checking his phone yet again for some sign of Bob. Their hour was five minutes from being up, but the seer still hadn’t returned. “She didn’t pull a quarter as much magic out of you as she pulled out of me. You’re not even winded.”

  Justin lifted his chin stubbornly. “It’s the principle of the thing. My own brother, ordering his human to yank out my magic like I was nothing but a battery, and now I can feel her using it.” He shuddered. “It’s degrading. How did I let you talk me into this?”

  Fortunately, Julius didn’t have to answer that. His brother hadn’t even finished talking when Marci’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out at once, holding it awkwardly between her hands to avoid getting chalk dust all over the screen.

  “Bixby,” she said gravely, glancing at Julius. “We ready?”

  “I should hope so,” Justin snapped. “Considering how the magic you sucked out of me like a—”

  A blaring horn outside cut him off, and Julius pounced on it. “There’s Bob!” he called, opening the door. “Let’s go.”

  Justin was still grumbling, but he went, claiming the front seat of Bob’s car while Julius and Marci piled into the back. The 1971 Crown Victoria was too old to have a GPS, but Bob said he knew where the address was when Marci told him. She was trying to show him the location on her phone anyway when Bob peeled back out into traffic, driving down off the skyways just as crazily as he’d driven up.

  Unsurprisingly since dragons and kidnapping were two of the only things that actually counted as illegal in the DFZ, Bixby had arranged for the trade off to be in the Underground. That suited Julius just fine. He hadn’t spent much time in the Upper City, but after two full days of being chauffeured all over by Marci, he was feeling pretty familiar with the underbelly of the DFZ. Or, at least, he thought he was, until Bob drove him into a part of the Underground he’d never seen before.

  The meeting spot was in the north of the city, under the skyways that lined the shores of Lake St. Clare. The fancy hotel where he and Marci had stayed last night was actually right above them, but though they were beneath some of the most expensive real estate in the DFZ, the Underground was darker and emptier than ever. At first, Julius thought this was because the side of the skyways bordering the lake had been walled over for some reason, closing in the Underground until it looked like a cave in truth, darker even than the eight block blight where they’d found Katya. Even that place had had a diner, though. This place had nothing, no new construction, no shops, not even any lights. Just crumbling old houses that didn’t look like they’d been touched since the flood, which made no sense at all. How could the space directly below one of the most affluent financial centers in the world just be…empty?

  It was a mystery, and since Julius didn’t want to meet the enemy on anything less than the firmest footing, he pulled out his phone to look it up. A few searches later, though, he was beginning to wish he’d stayed ignorant.

  Back before the return of magic, this area had been known as Grosse Point, an affluent suburb of Detroit. Unfortunately, the same proximity to Lake St. Clare that made the city so desirable was also its undoing. The night Algonquin had woken in fury to clear her waters of a century and a half’s worth of pollution, the lakeside community Grosse Point had been Ground Zero for her rage. Now that Julius knew what he was looking at, he could actually see the darker shadows of old boats and rusted oil barrels littered among the collapsing houses, but what really got him was the forbidding chill in the air.

  Between Algonquin’s wave and the chaos caused by the return of magic, no one knew for certain just how many people had died the night of the flood, but all sources agreed that the Grosse Point was the hardest hit. That much death changed a place, an effect that was only amplified by the waves of magic rushing back into the world like water into dry desert sand. The combination left a residual aura of magic so thick, even non-mage humans reported feeling it. Being a dragon, Julius was almost choking on it. Even sixty years after the fact, it was just as thick as the magic surrounding the Reclamation Area. But where that magic had felt like woods and wild places, this darkness felt like fear. Fear and cold and a sorrow so intense, he could actually feel it pulling him down like gravity. He also understood why Grosse Point’s original name had been abandoned for a new, more accurate title on the DFZ maps: The Pit.

  The others must have felt the magic, too, because by the time the lights of the normal Underground behind them vanished, all conversation in the car had stopped. Even Bob was uncharacteristically silent as they made their way down the empty, silted over streets past the washed out remains of houses and shops. He cut his lights a few blocks later, rolling through the dark on superior dragon eyesight and probably no small amount of seer’s intuition before finally pulling to a stop in what appeared to be a parking lot strewn with old nets and other lake bottom garbage. Julius wasn’t actually sure why Bob had chosen that particular lot until he caught a glimmer of light across the street.

  His head jerked up immediately, but it still took him several
seconds of squinting before he realized that the large, strangely rectangular shape in the dark was a high school—one of those mid twentieth century reinforced cinder block monstrosities built to double as fall out shelters, which explained why it alone was still standing. Mostly, anyway. The light he’d spotted was shining through the cracks in the double doors of what must have been the gym, and, oddly, out of the roof. Julius wasn’t sure why light was shining through the roof, but it suited his plans nicely.

  “Justin,” he said. “Do you—”

  “Way ahead of you,” his brother said, getting out of the car. “Let’s move.”

  Julius opened his own door to follow, but before he got out, he turned to Marci. “Are you still okay with this? The magic here is a bit unpleasant.”

  From the expression on her face, she clearly thought that was the understatement of the century, but she nodded all the same, meeting his eyes with a determined stare. “I’ve got my end,” she said, clutching her bloody shoulder bag.”Just be ready to back me up.”

  “We will,” he promised, flashing her a final reassuring smile before running after his brother into the dark.

  The strange blackness of the Pit was even worse outside the car. Even knowing it was just a magical echo, Julius would have sworn the air clung to him, leaving an oily sheen of loss and foreboding that made him want to weep and look over his shoulder at the same time. That last part was actually good since he and Justin were going to have to sneak past any lookouts, but even with the magically induced paranoia, they didn’t see a soul. Whatever backup Bixby had hired for this job must not have been willing to brave the Pit alone, because though the school’s lot was filled with cars, they didn’t spot so much as a doorman standing watch as they snuck around the side of the gym and up the crumbling wall to the sagging metal roof.

  The flood had apparently dropped multiple large objects on the school when the wave passed over, punching massive holes in the gymnasium’s steel roof, the source of the light Julius had seen earlier. Between this and the three story elevation at the roof’s peak, Julius would have expected a lookout up here for sure, maybe even a sniper. But Bixby must really have been putting his eggs in one basket, because the roof was just as empty as everything else. Julius was starting to worry this whole thing was even more of a set up than he’d anticipated when his brother gave a soft whistle and motioned for Julius to join him at the edge of one of the larger holes near the roof’s center.