by Rachel Aaron
She stopped, pressing her palms over her eyes, but Julius didn’t push. He just sat there, waiting, until Marci continued. “I stormed out. I knew it was a childish thing to do, but I was just so angry. When I came back an hour later, he was already gone. I never saw him alive again. ”
She did start crying then, little sniffles she quickly hid behind a long sip off her beer. “Sorry,” she whispered, wiping her eyes.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” Julius said, handing her a paper napkin.
She took it without a word, wiping her eyes. “It just all happened so quickly. I left for the DFZ that same night, and I’ve been running ever since. I don’t even know where I’m running to anymore, other than away. ” She balled the napkin in her fist and shot him a watery smile. “Some professional I am, huh?”
“Professional doesn’t mean superhuman,” Julius said quickly. “And for what it’s worth, I think you’ve done amazingly well considering what happened. I have no complaints at all about the work you’ve done for me, and it was my pleasure to send a few thugs packing on your behalf. Good exercise, too. I haven’t done anything like that in years. ”
He finished with a wide smile, but Marci was staring at him in wonder, like she was seeing him for the first time. And then, without warning, she smiled back. A warm, radiant, open smile he wasn’t quite sure how to respond to. Fortunately, the food chose that moment to arrive, and they both seized on the distraction.
As Julius’s nose had predicted, it was all delicious. He wolfed his first plate down while Marci was still putting sauce on her sandwich, but the second took him much longer. By the time he was ready to start on his sides, Julius was astonished to find he was full.
“Eyes bigger than your stomach?” Marci asked.
“Guess so,” Julius grumbled, trying not to sound as upset as he felt. Apparently, even his appetite was limited to a human scale now, which meant he’d lost food and flying to his mother’s seal. That realization almost made him weep. He loved eating.
There was no point in wasting good food, though, so he offered his untouched sides to Marci. She took them gladly, eating the fries so quickly he started to wonder when she’d last had a proper meal. But as he watched her eat, the story she’d told him circled around and around in his head, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized the ending didn’t add up.
“Marci?” he asked, leaning on the table. “Can I ask you a rude question?”
She shrugged. “Go for it. ”
“If your father wronged Bixby and died for it, why is Bixby still after you?”
Marci looked down, poking at the fries left in the basket. “I know a lot about his operations in Vegas. ”
“We’re a long way from Las Vegas,” Julius said. “Not to say your knowledge isn’t valuable, but unless you’ve got material evidence against him that could be used in a court of law”—he paused until she shook her head—“I don’t understand why he’d send men all the way up here just to hush you up. ” Maybe he did have a plotting draconic talent in him somewhere, because the more Julius thought the situation out from Bixby’s angle, the less sense it made. “And the fight,” he continued. “The man who grabbed you could have just as easily broken your neck instead, but he didn’t. They clearly wanted you alive. Why? Do you have information Bixby wants? Something to do with your father, maybe?”
“Not that I know of,” Marci said, keeping her eyes locked on the fry she was stabbing into a glob of cheese sauce. “My best guess is that this is about pride. Bixby always made a huge deal about how no one who wrongs him gets away with it. That’s probably why he’s putting in so much effort to catch me. If he lets me run, other people might start thinking they can get away, too. ”
Now that Julius could understand. Dragons were just the same. Unfortunately, pride was a much more troublesome enemy than greed or fear. If Bixby was determined to make an example of Marci, he couldn’t be reasoned with and he wouldn’t give up, not until his ego ran out.
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Considering what Marci had said so far and his own observations of Bixby’s penchant for employing giant, suited men to do his dirty work like he was the villain in a crime drama, Julius didn’t see that happening any time soon. If it had been any other human, he would have said she was screwed. But Marci was clever and resourceful, and she had him now. As she’d said, they made a good team, and Julius was determined to hold up his end. So long as he was here, Bixby wouldn’t touch a hair on her head.
Just thinking that made him feel worlds better, and he gave Marci a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out to get him off your back. In the meanwhile, the DFZ’s a very big place. ”
“And his goons will think twice about taking us on after the beating we gave them,” Marci said proudly, tipping her beer bottle toward him in a one-sided toast.
Julius wasn’t at all sure about that, but he like how prominently and confidently she included him in her plans. In fact, he liked the idea of being Marci’s competent partner so much more than being Bethesda’s failure that he didn’t even rush her as she slowly worked her way through the rest of his food.
“So, that’s my story,” Marci said between mouthfuls. “What about you? Where are you from?”
“New Mexico,” Julius said, which was the truth. “I just arrived in the DFZ this morning, actually. ”
“I knew you were green,” she said with a chuckle. “Though I couldn’t tell if you were new to the city or just to the Underground. Where are you staying?”
“I hadn’t figured that out yet,” he confessed. “I also came here on a family emergency, and I haven’t had a lot of time to get the details straightened out. ”
“Family emergency, huh? Is that why you’re looking for that girl?”
“Sort of,” Julius said. “My brother asked me to find her. ” And pleasant as this was, they really needed to get moving on that.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket to pay their check quietly, because despite Marci’s insistence that she was buying, she didn’t have a phone. No phone meant no electronic bank account, and he wasn’t going to sit here and wait while the register validated every piece of cash she handed them. But when he clicked on the AR to check his account, a message was waiting for him.
Duck.
That was it. The sender was listed as Unknown Caller, but Julius had no doubt who was behind it. What he didn’t know was if Bob wanted him to duck now, or four months from now.
Just to be safe, Julius dutifully dropped under the table, motioning for Marci to do the same. She obeyed instantly, crouching down on the padded bench. They stayed that way for a good thirty seconds before Julius got up again with a sigh.
“What was that about?” Marci asked, looking over her shoulder.
“Sorry,” he said, glowering at the message. “I think my brother is confused. ”
“Oh,” she said, brightening. “The one looking for the girl?”
“No, another brother,” he said, standing up. “Come on, we’d better get out of here. ”
“How many brothers do you have?” Marci asked, following him to the counter.
“Too many,” Julius grumbled, paying for dinner with the last of the money Bob had given him and hustling Marci out before she realized what he’d done.
They’d nearly made it back to the car when the hairs on the back of Julius’s neck begin to prickle. He looked over his shoulder, eyes darting to find who was watching him, but the street was deserted.
He forced himself to walk normally to his side of the car, only half listening as Marci berated him for stealing her chance to pay for his dinner while he focused on his nose. He’d always been better at smelling than listening, but no matter how deeply he breathed, he caught nothing out of the ordinary. Just the chemical smell of the factories, rust from Marci’s car, and the warm scent of delicious barbecue mixed with the faint reek of oil from the truck yard across the street.
He shook hi
s head with a sigh, trying and failing to stomp down on the instinctual urge to run for cover. But then, why should his body calm down? Between his mother, Bob’s cryptic messages, guns shoved in his face, and Ian playing games with powerful females from other clans, he’d had enough stress today to last a lifetime. A little jumpiness was a perfectly natural reaction. It didn’t mean there was actually someone sneaking up behind—
A hand grabbed his shoulder.
Julius nearly jumped out of his skin, but the hand kept him in place, four knife-sharp nails pressing into the tender hollow just beneath his collar bone as a cold, soft, female voice whispered in his ear.
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“Hello, brother. ”
And that was when Julius knew for a fact that he was dead.
Chapter 5
“Tell your human to wait and meet me in the alley on the left,” Chelsie said, her claws digging deeper into his flesh. “Now. ”
Julius nodded, but the hand on his shoulder was already gone, vanishing as suddenly and quietly as it had appeared. He didn’t bother turning around to look after that. The sidewalk would just be empty, and Marci was already leaning over to give him a funny look through the passenger window. “Julius? Are you okay?”
“Just realized I forgot something in the restaurant,” he said quietly. “Give me two minutes. ”
Marci nodded, but he was already backing away, trusting his feet to find their own path as he walked back to the barbecue shack’s screen door. When he knew Marci couldn’t see him anymore, he darted to the side and down the alley as Chelsie had instructed.
It was a tiny, dark, dirty place, a gap between factories barely wide enough for a car to squeeze through. The narrowness hadn’t saved the walls from being covered in advertisements, though. Posters covered every inch of the brick as high as a person could reach, mostly for the seedier kinds of services people loitering in alleys would find attractive. But while he found directions to thirteen different massage parlors just off the wall in front of him, he didn’t see any sign of Chelsie. He was starting to panic that he’d gone down the wrong alley when he suddenly felt someone standing right behind him.
The light here was bad even for dragon eyes, but Julius had made it a point to stay as far from the Heartstriker’s family enforcer as possible. As a result, the glimpse he got through the gloom when he whirled around was the best look at Chelsie he’d ever managed.
Oddly, the first thing that struck him was her height. At five eleven, Julius had always assumed his human form was the shortest of all Heartstrikers, but Chelsie was only a hair taller, and that might have been from her boots. What she lacked in stature, though, she made up everywhere else. Everything about her—her lean body packed into black, no-frills carbon-weave body armor, her short, ink-black hair, the long sword sheathed at her hip—spoke to her purpose as the Heartstriker’s bogeyman, but the scariest thing of all was how closely she resembled their mother.
It would have been hard for an outsider to see. Other than the family’s trademark green eyes and her high cheekbones, Chelsie’s physical resemblance to Bethesda the Heartstriker was limited. Her skin was darker, her cheekbones sharper, her body smaller and more compact. If Bethesda was a resplendent queen, Chelsie was a well-honed knife. Both were deadly, however, and Chelsie’s murderous glare was so like their mother’s that Julius had already backed himself up against the far wall before she could open her mouth.
“Well, well,” she said at last, her voice as cold and soft as the year’s first frost. “I never thought I’d have to pay you a visit, Julius. ” She paused, tilting her head like a hawk considering the mouse trapped under its claws. “You know why I’m here, of course?”
Julius swallowed, mind racing. On the surface, Heartstriker family rules were simple: don’t do anything that made Mother angry. But what Bethesda took offense at varied according to her mood, the day, the political situation, and who was doing the offending, which was exactly why Julius had tried so hard to keep his head down for the last seven years.
When he didn’t answer, Chelsie narrowed her eyes. “One hour ago, six men in an alley by the river—ring any bells?”
Julius’s heart began pounding so hard he grew lightheaded. How did she know about that? The alley had been empty. Of course, just because he hadn’t seen her didn’t mean Chelsie hadn’t been watching. She’d already proven she could get right on his back without him noticing a thing. But just because she could follow him around didn’t explain why she would. Chelsie had the entire Heartstriker family to worry about. Julius was no one, the underperforming runt of Bethesda’s youngest clutch. It didn’t make any sense at all for her to be watching him, not unless she really did watch everyone. But that was impossible. No matter what the rumors said, no matter how old and powerful and all-knowing Chelsie was supposed to be, there was just no way she could actually watch all of Bethesda’s children all the—
“I do. ”
Julius’s whirling thoughts screeched to a halt, and Chelsie gave him a slow, cruel smile. “I don’t actually read minds,” she said, her nails tapping idly on the wrapped hilt of her sword. “But then, I don’t need to. You all make the same face when you start thinking, ‘There’s no way she can do it,’ but I’ll let you in on a family secret. ” She leaned in, her neon-green Heartstriker eyes bright with malice as she dropped her voice to a whisper. “I am always watching. I watch every single one of you conniving little lizards. I watch you every moment of every day so that the second you set one claw over the line, I’ll be there to cut it off. ”
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Julius flinched as she finished, and Chelsie straightened back up, crossing her arms over her chest with a satisfied look. “Now that we’re clear on that point, let me explain what you did to trigger this little visit so we never have to see each other again. ”
He nodded, breathing heavily. “I shouldn’t have attacked those men,” he said quickly. “I understand that. I should have stayed out of the human’s business and—”
Chelsie’s eyes narrowed, and Julius snapped his mouth shut. When it was clear he wasn’t going to try and talk again, she continued. “If I came after every idiot Heartstriker who got into a street brawl, half the clan would be dead by now. I also don’t care what mischief Ian has you up to in his hopeless courtship of that Three Sisters ice snake Svena, who, for the record, is going to chew him up and spit him out like a piece of gristle. I’m not even terribly concerned that you showed a bit of tooth and claw in the DFZ. Everyone does that from time to time. My problem, Julius, is that you left witnesses. ”
Julius opened his mouth to explain, but Chelsie grabbed him first. Faster than he could react, faster than he could even see, she wrapped her hand around his throat and slammed him into the wall, scattering the layers of old advertisements in a rain of tattered paper.
“Six humans went into that alley with you,” she snarled in his face. “And when you left, six humans were still alive. Do you know what that is, Julius? That’s a mess. And when a Heartstriker makes a mess, it’s my job to ensure they never. Do it. Again. ”
Her fingers squeezed tighter with every word, choking him by inches. Just when Julius was sure he’d suffocate, Chelsie let go, dropping him in a heap on the dirty asphalt.
The coughing fit hit him a second later. Julius rolled to his knees, clutching his throat until, after what felt like hours, his breathing returned to something like normal. When he looked up again, Chelsie was looming over him, a black shadow outlined by the lone factory floodlight five stories overhead.
“Poor little Julius,” she cooed. “You’re so nice. You don’t want to hurt anyone, don’t want to get into trouble. But you’re not in the mountain anymore, whelp, and there’s no more room for nice. From this moment forward, if a human who’s not under your direct control sees you doing anything that might make them think you’re not what you seem, you kill them. Not knock out, not threaten, kill. Do you understand?” When he didn’t answer at once, Chelsie s
lammed him back into the wall with her booted foot. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he wheezed.
She released him, and he slid back to the ground. She let him lie there a second before turning away with a little huff that was a perfect copy of the sound their mother made when she was particularly disappointed. “I can’t believe I’m having to explain something as basic as witness elimination. No wonder Mother kicked you out. I assumed she was exaggerating, but now I think you might really be the worst dragon we’ve ever had. ”
Julius had heard this many, many times. He’d heard it in every variation imaginable, and he usually shrugged it off. It was always easier to go back to his room and bury himself in something better—a videogame, a book, a movie, homework for an online class, whatever was at hand—than to try to defend himself. Now though, he didn’t have a room to retreat to. He was stranded in an alley with his back literally against a wall, and he was so, so sick of being talked down to, the words just burst out.
“Maybe I don’t want to be a good dragon. ”
Chelsie stopped, turning back to him with blood-chilling slowness. “Excuse me?”
He pushed up to his knees, wiping the dirt from his face with trembling hands, though whether the shaking was from anger or fear, even Julius didn’t know. “So far as I can tell, ‘good dragon’ is just another name for coldblooded sociopath,” he said. “No friends, no trust, no love. Why would I ever want to live like that? It’s not like any of you good dragons are happy. ”
The taunt echoed down the alley, and for one heartbeat, Chelsie’s cold expression morphed into a mask of pure rage. As he saw the anger flaring in his sister’s eyes, Julius knew this was it. This was his death. When Chelsie was done, they’d be finding pieces of him all over the DFZ. But just as he was making peace with his final end, Chelsie’s anger vanished, covered up in an instant by the usual haughty disdain most dragons wore when looking down on him.
“Oh, Julius,” she said, her voice pitying. “You are so young. Too young and far too exposed to sentimental human idiocy to understand what it truly means to be a Heartstriker. But you will learn, little whelp, or you will break. Either way, consider this your first and only warning. ”
