by Rachel Aaron
“Everything your mother says is true,” she said solemnly. “I was doing nothing at the bottom of my own clan, so Bethesda sent me to China to make myself useful by manipulating my way into your household. The original plan was only to gain a foothold for our family on this continent, but once I arrived at your court, I saw my own road to power. So, like any properly ambitious dragon, I abandoned my mother’s more modest plans and grabbed as high as I could reach. Too high, it turned out, but I have no regrets. Even though I got caught in the end, I still got farther than anyone expected.” Her look turned cruel. “All the way to you.”
By the time she finished, the Golden Emperor was staring at her like she’d stabbed him. “And this is the truth?” he said at last. “Are you certain this is what you mean to say, Chelsie?”
“What else could I be?” she asked callously, giving him her own version of her mother’s famous smile. “I am Bethesda’s daughter, and Heartstrikers always go for the heart.”
The false words hung like foul smoke in the air, and then the throne room began shake. Cracks appeared in the black marble beneath Chelsie, and porcelain vases tumbled from their stands along the wall, each one hitting the ground at the exact worst angle that would smash them completely beyond repair. Even the jade thrones were beginning to crack, and the Empress Mother lurched sideways, grabbing her son’s sleeve so hard, her claw-like lacquered nails tore straight through the golden silk.
“Remember yourself!” she hissed, her reptilian eyes gleaming with something very close to fear. “You are the Golden Emperor, the Qilin! You are good fortune made flesh! She is nothing but a scavenger. A lying, conniving, power-grasping harlot by her own admission.” She turned on the two Heartstrikers. “I will kill them myself! Once they are crushed, you will see how little the schemes of worms mean to powers like us!”
“No,” the Emperor said, clenching his fists. The earthquake died down moments later, though it had yet to stop completely when he turned back to Chelsie one last time, staring down at her with a hateful glare that was so out of place on his handsome face, he looked like another dragon entirely.
“You,” he said coldly. “Leave my lands and never return. If I ever hear that you or any of your wretched family have set foot in my kingdom again, I will take my mother’s advice and crush you myself.”
“Of course,” Bethesda said immediately. “Thank you, Golden Emperor. Your mercy is truly—”
“Don’t thank me,” he said sharply. “Just leave.”
The command was still echoing through the wrecked throne room when the Emperor turned on his heel and walked out, vanishing through one of the hidden doors behind his enormous throne. His mother followed a second later, pausing just long enough to give Bethesda a final, disgusted look before she hobbled after her illustrious son, leaving the Heartstrikers alone in the still-trembling throne room.
The moment the Empress Mother was out of sight, Bethesda shot to her feet. “This is all your fault!” she roared at her daughter. “I did everything Brohomir told me. I crossed the ocean. I begged. I humiliated myself for you, and for what? Your foolishness just lost us this entire continent forever!”
“I know,” Chelsie whispered, lowering her head. “I’m sorry. I—”
Bethesda grabbed a handful of her daughter’s waist-length black hair, yanking Chelsie up until her feet were dangling off the ground. “I don’t care about sorry!” she snarled. “You cost me more than China today. You cost me my pride. You cost me what I swore I would never give, and you’re going to pay for it.” Her green eyes narrowed as she bared her sharpening teeth. “Every day, for the rest of your life, you will pay.”
Point made, Bethesda dropped her youngest daughter on the ground like so much trash and walked away, her golden sandals clicking musically across the cracked floor. Chelsie was still lying where she’d landed in shock when a hand landed on her shoulder.
“Get up,” Brohomir said softly. “We have to go.”
Chelsie blinked in surprise. She hadn’t even realized her brother was here until he spoke. For a desperate moment, she almost interpreted that as a good sign before she remembered even a seer couldn’t save her now.
“Why should I?” she whispered, pressing her face into the mercifully cold stone. “You heard her. I’m going to pay for this forever.” And forever was a very long time for a dragon. “I think I’d rather die.”
“If that was actually true, you wouldn’t have put us through all this,” her brother said gently. “But like it or not, you lived, and now we have to move on.”
Easy for him to say. “You saw this would happen,” she growled, tilting her head to give the seer a hateful look. “Why did you let me come here in the first place if you knew it would end like this?”
“Because, believe it or not, this was the happy ending,” Brohomir said with a sad smile, reaching down to brush her long, tangled black hair out of her face.
“You still could have warned me.”
He shrugged. “Would it have made a difference? You already knew exactly how bad things could get when you embarked on this foolishness. If that couldn’t stop you, what hope did I have?”
The rightness of his words hit Chelsie like a punch, and she slumped back down on the stone, defeated. “I know,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around herself. “I know I was stupid. So, so stupid.”
“You were,” Brohomir agreed. “But there’s no point in dwelling on it. What’s lost is lost forever. All we can do now is move forward, and you should be glad you have that much. There were a thousand ways you died today. I bent over backwards to steer us down the one path where you didn’t. You might not thank me for that in a few minutes when you see what Mother has planned for you, but trust me when I say this was the best of bad options. Now.” He reached down to help her up. “Let’s go home, before any more of the ceiling falls on our heads.”
His hand hovered just above her own, but Chelsie couldn’t bring herself to take it. She knew he was right, that the only choice left was to accept what had happened and find a way to live with it, and with herself. But when she tried to imagine her future, all Chelsie could see was her mother’s boot coming down on her throat over and over again forever, and…and she just couldn’t. She couldn’t move forward. Not if that was all she had left to look forward to.
“You see all our futures, right?” she whispered, looking up at him. “Tell me it gets better.”
The seer didn’t answer. He just sighed in that way of his, as though he’d already gone through this a thousand times before. To be fair, maybe he had, but Chelsie refused to give up.
“Please,” she begged, reaching out to grab his hand with both of hers. “You always tell us never to ask about the future, but I need to know it won’t be this way forever. I don’t care if it’s a one-in-a-million chance that won’t come for a century, just tell me a way out exists. Give me hope that I won’t actually be paying for this stupid, foolish mistake for the rest of my life. Please, Brohomir!”
She was crying by the end. Big, ugly, hopeless tears running down her cheeks as she clung to her brother’s hand. Again, though, the seer said nothing. He just leaned down and picked her up off the ground, carrying her out of the throne room to the palanquin waiting outside, where Bethesda was already writing out the details of the blood oath Chelsie now knew for certain she would never, ever escape.
Chapter 1
Heartstriker Mountain, New Mexico, USA, 2096
The desert was full of dragons.
It had been just over ten hours since Algonquin, Spirit of the Great Lakes, had broadcast her intention to wipe dragons off the face of the Earth, and the Heartstriker stronghold in the New Mexico badlands was seething like a kicked-over anthill. Dragons had been arriving all night, clogging the mountain’s tiny airstrip and two-lane highway with their limos, motorcades, private jets, and the requisite human entourages all of that luxury implied. A few even arrived under their own power, their giant feathered wings casting huge sha
dows in the bright desert moonlight as they flew in from all over the world. No matter how they arrived, though, all of them wore the same grim, cautious scowl, their green eyes constantly sizing up the competition as they crowded into their ancestral home.
Even for Julius, who’d grown up in the mountain, it was more dragons than he’d seen in his life. Bethesda liked to keep her true strength a mystery, so there was no official number for just how many Heartstrikers there were, but Julius had always assumed the true count was somewhere near one hundred for the simple reason that keeping more than a hundred dragons in line at any one time was impossible. But it seemed he’d underestimated his mother, because his dragon count had passed a hundred an hour ago, and the arrivals hadn’t slowed down a bit. At this point, he couldn’t even guess what the final tally would be, but staring out the window at the never-ending parade of monsters, Julius was certain of one thing: this was more dragons than anyone should ever have to deal with.
“I can’t do this.”
“Nonsense,” Marci said. “You’ll do fine. You just need to get away from the window and stop freaking yourself out.”
Julius didn’t think that was going to help. Looking out the window might not be good for his blood pressure, but if he turned around, the only other thing to look at was Marci lying propped up in her hospital bed, fixing the spellwork on her damaged bracelets while Ghost slept on her lap.
That was not a sight that made him feel better. Despite being patched up by one of Katya’s sisters (Julius had already forgotten which. Other than Svena and Katya, the terrifying blondes all looked the same to him), Marci had still had a whole chest full of broken ribs thanks to being thrown into a wall by Estella. Fortunately, Heartstriker Mountain was equipped with a state-of-the-art mortal infirmary to handle the inevitable injuries that cropped up when hordes of human groupies spent too much time around dragons, and they’d treated Marci very well. If it weren’t for the fact that everyone referred to the place as “the vet,” Julius would have had no complaints. Other than Marci being injured in the first place, of course.
“You’re doing it again,” she said, rolling her eyes. “For the last time, Julius, I’m fine. Ysolde the Frostcaller already handled all the actually dangerous stuff. The doctor just said I was pretty much healed. They’re releasing me today, for crying out loud.”
“I know, I know,” Julius said, plopping down on the foot of the bed. “It’s just…I hate that you got hurt. You shouldn’t have to suffer for my mistakes.”
“What mistake?” she cried. “Dude, we won! Things might have been a little hairy at the end, but who cares? We did it! Estella’s gone, the Three Sisters are dead, and you’re legit friends with the new head of their clan. And let’s not forget that you also took over your clan, which means Bethesda no longer has the authority to ruin your life. That’s a victory by any definition. You even got a fancy sword for your trouble.”
“But I didn’t,” he said frantically, placing a hand on the Fang that dangled awkwardly from his hip. Justin had dug up a sheath and belt for him to use, but having the blade covered did nothing to hide just how ridiculous he looked wearing a Fang of the Heartstriker. “The only reason I was able to pull it at all was because I had a seer super-weapon forcing the universe to keep me alive. I didn’t do any of it on my own!”
“Maybe not initially,” Marci said. “But the chain Dragon Sees the Beginning gave you is long gone, and you can still use the sword, right?”
“Yes,” Julius admitted. “But—”
“But nothing,” she said, grinning wide. “Justin won’t shut up about how Fangs choose their wielders. Assuming your brother’s not full of it—and I realize that’s a big assumption—but if he’s right, then the fact that that sword will even let you touch it means that it must at least tolerate you on your own merits.”
“That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement,” Julius muttered, nervously eyeing the window where he could see yet another massive feathered Heartstriker coming in for a landing. “But even if you’re right and the Fang is legitimately mine, I still can’t do this. I couldn’t even handle one of my mother’s parties! How am I supposed to help run an entire clan?”
“Hey, the Council was your idea.”
“But I never thought I’d be on it!” he cried, running his hands through his already rumpled black hair. “I just wanted to make a system where we weren’t ruled by Bethesda’s whims. I didn’t think they’d put me on top of the stupid thing!”
Marci sighed. “Julius…”
“I’m completely unqualified to run a clan,” he went on, getting up from the bed so he could pace. “I’m supposed to have the first meeting with my mother in half an hour, and I have no idea what I’m going to say. Zip. Zero. I don’t even know—”
“Julius.”
He stopped short to see Marci glaring at him. “Quit panicking and listen,” she said, reaching out to take his hand. “I agree. You are completely unqualified to run a clan. But what you’re not understanding is that that doesn’t matter. You’ve been completely unqualified to do everything we’ve been through, and yet you’ve always pulled it off. Maybe it didn’t always go smoothly, but we made it in the end because you refused to accept anything except what was right. So if you just keep doing that and avoid becoming one of the selfish, power-hungry dragons that got us into this mess in the first place, I’m pretty sure everything’s going to work out just fine.”
Julius didn’t believe that for a second. He’d taken history classes. He knew that incompetent leaders could be far worse than the tyrants they replaced. But it was hard to keep arguing when Marci was holding his hand.
“I’m going to mess everything up,” he muttered, sinking back down on the bed beside her.
“Maybe,” she agreed. “But whatever happens, it’s not like you can do worse than Bethesda sacrificing her youngest son in a play to scam her way into a mating flight. The bar is already on the floor here. Nowhere to go but up.”
Julius was opening his mouth to explain the difference between minimal competence and not being an absolute disaster when Marci leaned forward, resting her head on his shoulder.
And just like that, everything else became unimportant.
Between her hair and his shirt, she wasn’t actually touching him, but she was far closer than anyone normally got to a dragon. Close enough that he could feel the warmth of her skin and smell the tang of her magic, which was more than enough to set his heart pounding.
Of all the ways his life had been turned upside down in the last twenty-four hours, this was the one change Julius had zero qualms about. He wasn’t sure what he and Marci were, exactly. They’d had no time to discuss it since he’d kissed her in the field before fighting Vann Jeger, and he wasn’t about to corner her with the defining-the-relationship talk now while she was stuck in a hospital bed. But the fact that she didn’t move away when he put his arm around her shoulder struck him as a very good sign.
If the whole thing hadn’t felt so new and delicate, he would have tried to kiss her again. But even with all the other seismic changes in his life, that felt like a bridge too far, so Julius told himself to just enjoy it. Thankfully, Marci didn’t seem particularly inclined to move, either. For several beautiful minutes, they sat there in silence, staring out the little window at the endless parade of planes and dragons, until Julius’s phone went off in his pocket.
“That’s my death knell,” he said bitterly, silencing the alarm. “I have to go meet with Mother about the Council.”
“Good luck,” Marci said, moving back to her nest of pillows and sleeping ghost cat. “Because given how mad your mom looked last night, you’re going to need it.”
He shuddered at the memory. “Do you know when they’re letting you out of here?”
“The doctor said noon,” she said, poking her bandaged ribs through the hospital gown. “But it might be sooner. Like I said, I’m pretty much healed up. They do need you to come sign me out, though. Apparently, I was l
isted as your human when I came in, and that means I can’t just walk off on my own.”
The implications of that sentence were enough to make Julius wince. But as much as he hated the draconic habit of treating people like pets, he couldn’t deny he was a little relieved. Even for someone like Marci, Heartstriker Mountain was no place for a lone mortal, and that was on a normal day. Now, with the mountain packed to the rafters with nervous dragons, Julius was hard pressed to think of anywhere more dangerous.
“I’ll come back down to get you,” he promised. “But until then…” He trailed off with a smile as he reached into his pocket to pull out a brand-new, top-of-the-line Augmented Reality phone. “I got you a present.”
Marci’s eyes lit up as she snatched the shiny new toy out of his hand. “When did you get this?”
“From the concierge desk,” he said, grinning. “Being part of a giant and wealthy dragon clan does occasionally have its advantages.” He reached down to press his fingers against the phone’s mana contacts, and the augmented interface appeared instantly in the air around them, the neon icons floating like well-designed fireflies in the Augmented Reality bubble only those touching the phone could see. “Everything should be set up to let you transfer over all your old bank accounts and mail and so forth. I’ve already put my number into your contacts. Just message me when you need a pick-up, and I’ll come running.”
“You really have to stop giving me phones,” she said, blushing. “But are you sure you don’t mind? I know you’re going to be crazy busy today, and—”
“I’m never too busy for you,” he said quickly. “You’re…”
She glanced up innocently. “I’m what?”
The most important thing in the mountain to me.
That was what he wanted to say, anyway. But even after their moment earlier, blurting out his feelings now felt premature. With all they’d been through, it was easy to forget that he and Marci had only known each other for a little over a month. Kissing her before Vann Jeger was one thing, but without the looming threat of imminent death, he couldn’t think of a way to tell her how much she meant to him that wouldn’t make him sound like an overly attached weirdo. Marci was still waiting for an answer, though, so Julius settled for the truth, albeit a toned-down version.
