Nice Dragons Finish Last

by Rachel Aaron

  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—”

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  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.

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  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, there’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.

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  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. ”

  Marci nodded and turned around, her steps picking up as she starting back down the alley. “Let’s get going, then. ”

  Thanks to Katya’s headlights, it was much brighter inside the crumbling building than it had been out in the alley now that the dust had settled. Marci was already on her hands and knees beside the upside-down car by the time Julius came in, her head stuck through the shattered driver’s window.

  It was the only place she could have stuck her head in, Julius realized with a lurch. The passenger side of Katya’s car was completely crushed where the van had struck it, leaving the roof of the upside down car strewn with glass and the tattered remains of the deflated airbags. Only the driver’s side was still intact, though there was a bloody dent on the dash where Katya must have knocked herself unconscious. The driver’s side seatbelt was still neatly in its place, clearly unused, which only made Julius even more certain that his brother had been behind this.

  That thought made him angry all over again. He didn’t want to scare Marci, though, so he took a deep, calming breath. Unfortunately, this actually made things worse.

  Now that the initial rush of panic had faded, the smell of the wreck was overwhelming. The stench of burning rubber and plastic mixed with the reek of fresh blood was nauseating. There was quite a lot of blood, actually, which was strange. Other than the splatter on the dash, he hadn’t though Katya was so injured. It smelled odd, too, not like dragon blood at all. It wasn’t until Marci ducked back out of the shattered window, though, that he realized the truth.

  Marci’s shirt was soaked in blood. There was so much, he thought she must have been stabbed at first. On the second look, he saw the blood was actually coming from her neck, not that that was any better. “Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”

  He didn’t realize how sharp his voice was until she winced. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said, but Julius was already reaching for her. When he examined her neck, though, he saw she was right.

  Though the bloody stain down the front of her shirt had made it look like she was dying, the cut on Marci’s neck wasn’t actually that deep. It was more long than anything else, a shallow slice that ran fro
m just below her right ear down to the soft skin covering her trachea. Minor as it was, the cut had still bled like a faucet, which accounted for her horror-movie appearance. But while her face looked deathly pale in the glare of Katya’s halogen headlights, she was clearly alive and functional, a fact that helped Julius drag his panic back down to a more or less functional level.

  “How did this happen?” he said, tearing a strip off the bottom of his shirt. “You seemed fine before. ”

  “I am fine,” she protested, wincing as he pressed the cloth against her wound. “I keep telling you, it’s just a cut. I didn’t even know I was bleeding until I noticed my shirt was wet. Really, though, I’m okay. It doesn’t even hurt that much. ”

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  She clearly meant this to make him feel better, but Julius barely heard it. Now that he’d seen her wound, all he could think about was how close she’d come to having her throat cut. If the slice had been just a little deeper, or a bit farther to the left, it would have gone through her windpipe. A few centimeters’ difference, that was all it would have taken, and Marci wouldn’t be here complaining about his fussing. She would be dead.

  His body began to shake, though whether it from was fear or anger, Julius couldn’t say. He tried to keep calm by focusing on the rise and fall of Marci’s breath under his fingers, the undeniable proof that the worst hadn’t happened, but it didn’t work. No matter how hard he tried to ignore it, Julius couldn’t shake the feeling that, unlike the rest of this ridiculous situation, Marci’s survival had been luck. She was only human, and to dragons, human meant disposable. Bob probably hadn’t even considered her a factor. Her death would have been a throwaway, a meaningless detail in the larger draconic scheme, and that made him angriest of all.

  “Julius?”

  He blinked and glanced up to see Marci watching him with a worried frown. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he grumbled. “You’re the one who’s hurt. ”

  “It’s really not that bad. I was going to bandage it up, but I wanted to secure a material link before the trail got too cold. See?”