by Rachel Aaron
“Ugh,” Marci said, disgusted. “I hate those slimy things.”
“How many does he have?” Amelia asked at the same time.
“As far as I can tell, as many as he needs,” the general replied grimly. “Number, length, and size all seem to be as variable as the rest of him, but what else can you expect from a creature who’s not really here?”
Marci shivered. “He felt real enough to me.”
“Me, too,” Emily said, her frown deepening. “I wonder what he’s trying to—”
She cut off with a curse, jumping back as one of the black tentacles suddenly surged upward, smashing through the crack in the Skyways they’d been using as a peep hole. Marci jumped back, too, yanking Ghost with her as she scrambled backward down what was left of the elevated street.
And right into the second tentacle.
She yelped as cold slime touched her back. But just as she braced her feet to start running full tilt in the opposite direction, the tip of the tentacle whipped down to wrap around her chest.
Found you.
She choked in fear. Even Ghost jumped at the cold, liquid voice that whispered through them both. He dug his freezing claws into her arms to get away, but for once, even he wasn’t fast enough. The Leviathan yanked them both backward, snatching them through the crack in the Skyways and then down, down, down through the dark before unraveling suddenly, dropping Marci and her spirit in the trash at Myron’s feet.
The impact knocked the breath out of her. Marci was still trying to get it back when a cold voice said, “What is this?”
The question came from high above. Then Algonquin’s watery voice was enhanced by a bathtub’s worth of actual water as the spirit lurched down to grab her by the throat.
“What is this?”
Marci grabbed frantically at the whip of water that was wrapped around her neck, but though it was choking her, it was just water, and her fingers went right through it.
“Answer me, Leviathan!” the lake roared, thrusting Marci into the air as she spun around. “What trick is this?”
A low rumble went through the land like thunder, and the Leviathan leaned closer. “The Merlin.”
He spoke aloud this time. That was, if you could say a voice that was more pressure than sound was speaking “aloud.”
“You’ve been played, Algonquin,” he went on, bringing up his tentacles to poke at Marci’s kicking legs. “Look at her. See what she is. She is Merlin, too.” The rumbling morphed into deep laugher. “Myron Rollins betrayed you. He didn’t try two times. There were two Merlins.”
“How?” Algonquin demanded. “How did you know?”
“Because I knew better than to believe a mortal who’d bound death could be defeated by it,” he said simply. “Because I knew Raven had to be poking around your pile of dragon corpses for a reason. Mostly, though, I knew because I saw her flying around earlier.”
The tentacle came up again to pat Marci wetly on the head. “Next time you decide to fake your death, little creature, you might want to exercise a bit more discretion.”
Marci closed her eyes with a wince. Stupid, stupid, stupid. When she opened them again, though, she realized that blowing her cover might be the least of tonight’s fatal mistakes. The whole point of this farce had been to raise Algonquin’s hopes to the point where she felt safe enough to dismiss her Nameless End. Now, wrapped up in Algonquin’s water, Marci had a front-row seat as all those hopes crumbled.
“No,” the water whispered, the clear flow turning cloudy. “No!”
Her scream echoed through the Pit, and the water wrapped around Marci’s neck clenched tight. If she’d been alone, it would have cut her head off, but Marci was never alone now. She was a Merlin, and the moment Algonquin moved, Ghost moved back, his grave-cold magic exploding out to blast the water away, dropping both of them into the trash beside Myron.
The older mage helped her up at once, yanking her to her feet as the Empty Wind stepped protectively in front of them. The DFZ scrambled forward as well, hissing at Algonquin like an animal guarding its territory, but the lake spirit made no move to attack again.
She wasn’t even a towering pillar of water anymore. All that had fallen away, leaving just the soaked and wavering reflection of the old Native American woman that was Algonquin’s public face kneeling on the surface of the Pit’s black water.
“It was a lie,” she whispered. “It was all a lie.”
“Only parts of it,” Marci said quickly, coughing. “We didn’t cap the magic, but the seal is still in place. You don’t have to give in to him, Algonquin. He’s a monster from outside. He’s not part of this world. We are. We can help you.”
“No, you can’t,” the spirit said as her human form began to melt. “You’re not part of my world, because my world is gone. I tried to save it, but Raven was right. Our paradise is gone, and it’s never coming back.”
With every sorrowful word, she collapsed further. “There’s nothing to look forward to. Just gods and humans and dragons and monsters walking all over us, crushing the land forever. We have no escape, not even death. Nothing—”
“Algonquin!”
The name was an earsplitting war cry as Raven swooped down, but not the Raven Marci knew. That spirit was just a big black bird. This one was a god in truth, a giant Raven the size of an elephant with clever eyes that flashed like lightning as he landed on the water.
“Algonquin, listen,” he said, his croaking voice booming. “Nothing is lost unless you give it up. The Nameless End is your enemy, not us. Send him away, and we will help you rebuild.” He ducked closer, his eyes desperate. “Come back to us, old friend.”
Algonquin lifted what was left of her head to give him a glare so hateful, it didn’t fit on her human face. “I was never your friend, and I have nothing to go back to.”
She sank as she finished, the final remains of her human disguise vanishing into the black water without a sound. The Leviathan disappeared at the same time, his giant body melding into the shadows as though he’d never been anything but one of them. When they were both gone, the water covering the floor of the Pit began to drop.
“What’s happening?” Marci asked.
Raven shook his huge head in dismay. “Nothing good.”
The words weren’t out of his beak before Marci felt the truth for herself. It wasn’t the water that was receding. It was Algonquin. The lake spirit was collapsing into herself, her waters pulling back into her lake like the tide going out. And as the water drained, the pressure began to build.
“Not good,” Raven said, spreading his enormous wings to fly back up to the Skyways. “Not good, not good, not—”
A horrible sound cut him off. Marci covered her ears, but that didn’t help at all, because the violent roar wasn’t a physical noise. It was magic. Algonquin’s magic was roaring like Niagara Falls as she pulled everything—every drop, every wave, every bit of magic in every lake—into the center of Lake St. Clair. Through the new cracks in the Pit’s protective walls, Marci could actually see the water rolling itself into a giant ball as Algonquin pressed herself tighter and tighter, and still the pressure rose.
And then, just when it felt the tension would keep building forever, something big cracked.
***
Under normal circumstances, Julius would have struggled to keep up with the larger dragons flying around him. Tonight, though, they were struggling to keep up with him.
“Slow down!” Chelsie yelled over the wind. “I know you’re in a hurry, but it’s all for nothing if you tear a wing.”
“Something’s gone wrong!” he shouted back. “We have to get to Marci!”
“I’d be more worried about ourselves,” Fredrick said, flying up beside him. “Look down.”
Julius didn’t have to look. He could feel Algonquin’s magic sucking in as she curled herself into what he could only assume was the spirit equivalent of the fetal position. Either that, or she was building up for an all-out final attack. Whateve
r it was, it wasn’t good, and he had to get everyone he cared about far away from it as fast as possible. Especially his sister, who was doing all of this with her child clinging to her back.
“I still can’t believe you brought a baby into this!” he shouted at her.
“What else was I supposed to do?” Chelsie shouted back. “I couldn’t leave her alone! She’s a hatchling, and Bob’s still down there somewhere. As is the Empress Mother.”
“And taking her into a fight with Algonquin is better?”
“Absolutely,” his sister said. “She’s a dragon. Going into battle with your mother used to be a rite of passage. If Amelia were still alive, she could tell you all kinds of stories about the ridiculous things Bethesda made them do.”
“Actually,” Julius said, smiling for the first time since this started, “I meant to tell you, Amelia is—”
He cut off with a choke, eyes bulging. Behind him, the others gasped as well. Even the Qilin faltered, his golden body jerking.
A second later, Julius realized it wasn’t just them. The whole world was jerking. The air, the ground, the buildings—everything he could see was hitching and splintering like the epicenter of a magnitude-nine earthquake. Terrifying as that was, though, what nearly dropped Julius out of the sky was what was happening on the inside, deep in the core of his fire.
There was no pain, no injury he could identify. Just an unyielding pressure accompanied by the absolute knowledge that something had gone horribly, fatally wrong.
“Julius!”
He forced his head up to see Chelsie hovering beside him, her green eyes pained. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, forcing the words out.
“It’s magic,” the Qilin said, his normally calm voice on the edge of panic. “Everything is in uproar. What is happening?”
“I don’t know,” Julius said again, forcing his wings to keep flapping. “But Marci will. We have to get to her.”
Chelsie scowled. “I don’t know if that’s—”
But he was already gone, putting on a burst of speed before folding his wings to dive down past the now-dry lakebed and through the broken walls that were supposed to protect Algonquin’s water from the Pit. The others followed a second later, matching his speed as they raced through the no-longer-flooded Underground cavern following Marci’s scent...and then nearly ran over Marci herself, who was flying up with Ghost to meet them.
Julius was too relieved to speak. He didn’t even mind her freezing spirit as he landed hard to grab her in his wings. “Are you okay?”
“Right now? I’m fine,” she said quickly. “Long term, not so much.”
“What happened?” Chelsie demanded, checking her dive with her wings.
“The stupidest thing possible,” said an irritated voice above them.
Chelsie’s head shot up, and then her eyes went wide as the giant red dragon with feathers made of actual fire swooped down to grin at her.
“What?” Amelia said. “No hello?”
“What are you doing here?” Chelsie yelled at her. “You’re dead!”
“So people keep telling me,” Amelia said with chuckle. “But I’ll have to explain later. Algonquin’s hissy fit just broke the Merlins’ seal, which means we’re about to get one thousand years of pent-up magic in the face unless we move.”
“Move to where?” Julius said frantically. “That doesn’t sound like something you can dodge.”
He was looking at Amelia, but it was Marci who answered. “Got it covered,” she said, scrambling up onto Julius’s back. “Head for our house.”
Julius blinked. “Our house? You mean the one here in the city?”
She nodded rapidly. “Remember all the wards I put up? I know it feels like forever, but we’ve only actually been gone for a week and a half, which is well inside the upkeep window. If the building’s still standing, all my protections should still be on it, but we gotta move fast. Ghost estimates we’ve only got a couple of minutes before the wave hits us.”
“Less than that,” the Empty Wind said, giving Julius a freezing push. “Stop talking and go.”
Julius didn’t wait to be told twice. He took off like a rocket, keeping his wings tight to make sure Marci stayed on as he wove his way through the now bone-dry Pit. “What about the others? Myron and the rest?”
“Already ahead of us,” Marci yelled over the wind. “I told them where to go before I went looking for you.”
Any other time, hearing that would have made his heart skip. This time, though, Julius couldn’t do anything except fly, racing through the collapsed Underground on memory and instinct until he reached the spiral of onramps that hid the house Ian had rented them.
Please be there, he prayed as he dove into the tunnel that led through the spiral of cracked overpasses. Please don’t be destroyed. Please. Please.
He burst out into the open again, spreading his wings to check his speed before he slammed them into the opposite wall. It all happened so fast, he didn’t see anything at first but a blur of light and dirt. Once he was sure he wasn’t going to crash, he looked up and saw what he’d been hoping to see.
“It’s still here,” he said, staring in wonder at their miraculously uncrushed three-story house. “It’s still intact!”
“Except for the wall Conrad chopped in half when Estella came for me,” Amelia said, flying in right behind them. “Marci, help me fix it. Best ward in the world’s no good if you’ve got a big honking hole in the front.”
Marci nodded and hopped down, sliding off Julius to run after Amelia. Chelsie, Fredrick, and the Qilin were swooping in now as well. Raven was already here, and a lot bigger. He barely fit inside the slashed-up porch where he and Emily were frantically fitting the front door and parts of the wall that Conrad had cut in half back together.
“Should we be doing this, sir?”
Julius looked over his shoulder to see Fredrick standing behind him. And above him, since the F was easily five times Julius’s size in this form.
“What else would we be doing?”
“Going back to Heartstriker Mountain, for a start,” Fredrick said, lifting his claws, which were still encased in his Fang. “Bethesda’s still there. Probably in her panic room. It’ll take a few trips, but I can cut us all back to her, and a bunker under a mountain seems much safer than—”
“NO!” Amelia yelled, appearing above them in a flash of red fire to smack Fredrick’s claws back to the ground. “No teleporting!”
“Don’t yell at him!” Chelsie snapped, getting physically between Fredrick and her sister. “It was a good idea.”
“Maybe under normal circumstances,” Amelia said. “But there’s nothing normal about this! Just because the ambient magic isn’t literally crushing us to death yet doesn’t mean it’s not going haywire. Do you have any idea what would happen if we opened a portal of any sort under these—” She froze, eyes going huge. “I have to warn Svena.”
“If you know not to do it, I’m sure the White Witch does, too,” Chelsie said, dropping her dragon form with a puff of smoke, which left her standing naked on the stairs with a baby dragon the size of a Doberman clutched in her arms. “If this is as safe as we’re going to get, we stay. Everyone inside.”
The other dragons changed, too, running after her into the house, except for Amelia, who stayed to help Marci, Myron, and Raven with the front porch. Julius should have followed suit. He might be small, but his dragon was still too big to fit through the newly repaired front door. Unlike Amelia, though, he couldn’t conjure up clothing at will, and there was no emergency in the world that could get him to be naked in front of so many, especially not at his own house.
So while everyone else was busy out front, Julius hopped into the air again to wing his way around to the back of the house. He landed on the roof, sliding the window to his bedroom open with one claw before changing shape and diving inside. The second he was in, he grabbed the first clothes he saw and started shoving himself in
to them. He was still pulling a shirt over his head when Chelsie burst in.
He had no idea how she’d managed it ahead of him, but she was wearing one of Marci’s college T-shirts and cut-off jean shorts. She didn’t even ask permission before she walked over to Julius’s dresser and started tossing clothes to Fredrick and the Qilin, who were right behind her. As for her daughter, she was still in dragon form and climbing the walls like a lizard, poking her claws through the drywall to keep herself up, and thoroughly enjoying the chaos.
“I’ll fix the damage,” Chelsie said before Julius could say a word. “Just get downstairs.”
Julius nodded and ran out the door, taking the steps three at a time down to the living room. He’d just hopped the banister on the last landing when everyone—Marci, Ghost, Myron, Amelia, Raven, Emily, even the DFZ, who was back to her giant rat—rushed in through the hastily repaired front door. Amelia came in last, slamming the freshly nailed and spellwork-covered wooden door closed behind her just in time.
Through the windows, Julius could see the faux cavern outside getting brighter and brighter. Then, when it was almost too bright to look at, the light broke apart. Just fell into pieces until it looked like snow. A soft, thick, glowing blizzard of pale light in all colors, only it wasn’t cold, and it wasn’t falling from the sky. It was rising from the ground, and it was beautiful.
“That’s it?” he said, walking to the window. “That’s what we’re afraid of?”
“Yes,” Amelia said, her face grim. “Don’t let the pretty light show fool you. That’s pure magic of a grade this side of the world has never seen.”
“It looks like the barrier between the Sea of Magic and the physical world absorbed most of the impact,” Marci added as she joined Julius by the window. “That’s better than I’d hoped, but there’s still way more magic out there than the physical world has ever experienced.” She bit her lip. “We are going to see some weird stuff coming out of this.”
“We’ll have a rash of new mages for certain,” Myron said, glowering at the beautiful glow from the window by the fireplace. “Everyone who was on the edge is going to get shoved right over, and it’s not going to be pleasant.”