Part-Time Gods

by Rachel Aaron

  “I heard rumors,” White Snake replied, her Yellow Sea-colored eyes—a perfect mirror of his own—flicking down to the girl in his lap. “True ones, apparently.”

  Yong said nothing. He just sat there petting the child’s hair as she played with the abacus until his sister couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Really, brother?” she snarled, making his daughter jump. “You adopted a human? Did you not stop and think for one second how that would make you appear to the rest of the world?”

  “The rest of the world is not my concern.”

  “It should be,” she said, her voice desperate, though he didn’t know her well enough anymore to say if that was artifice or true emotion. “Yong, brother, you are the only dragon in the world who insists on ruling alone. Every other clan rules together, works together, and with good reason! A modern country as big as Korea is far too large for one dragon to manage on their own. You’ve made do with mortals, but they’re no substitute for actual family. You need someone who understands how you think, another dragon who can assist you with the heavy burden of—”

  “The last time you ‘assisted’ me, I ended up stabbed in the back,” he reminded her.

  “You were weak,” his sister said, as if that excused everything. “You would have done the same to me.”

  “Don’t compare me to you.”

  “But we are the same,” she said, flashing him a red-lipped smile. “You killed Father when he was weak.”

  “I killed Father because he was running our territory into the ground,” Yong replied crisply. “And then, when I was still bleeding from my victory, you planted a claw in my back and tried to take it from me, and I still won.” He sneered. “That makes you a traitor and a failure.”

  “That was a thousand years ago,” White Snake said dismissively. “We’re both different dragons these days, and you haven’t even seen what I can offer.”

  She reached as she finished, pulling the silken cover off the closest of the trays her humans had brought in. Beneath the silk were ten identical statues of a coiled dragon. Each one was roughly a foot tall and covered in a metal that appeared from a distance to be gold but was actually hammered bronze. Yong knew that for certain, because he had the exact same statues. They were part of the Thousand Dragons, a tribute paid to his father by the ancient Korean kingdom of Koguryo to bribe the old dragon so he wouldn’t burn their fields. He still had, of course, because his father didn’t understand the concept of restraint, which was why Yong had killed him. What was the point of ruling a land if you kept burning it to the ground? He had coveted the impeccably made statues, though. They’d been scattered in the chaos after his father’s death, but he’d managed to find most of them in the centuries since. No matter how hard he looked, though, he’d never been able to complete the set. Now he saw why.

  “You took them,” he growled.

  “I had to take something,” his sister said, exasperated. “You claimed everything else. But look.” She pulled the silk covers off the remaining three trays. “I have the last forty here, all just as perfect as the night I stole them from Father’s treasury. That should complete your collection. I know how much you’d like that, because I understand you in a way no mortal ever could.”

  “The only thing you understand is opportunity,” Yong said, forcing his eyes away from the glittering statues. “You think I can be won over by mere trinkets?”

  “Why is that so wrong?” White Snake asked, nodding at the treasure-covered walls. “You seem to value your trinkets very highly.”

  “Not higher than my life,” Yong snapped, finally losing his patience. “Did you honestly think this was going to work? You’re not getting back in. I killed Father and took his land precisely so I wouldn’t have to deal with creatures like you. I have worked tirelessly for a thousand years now to build a kingdom where I am the only dragon I have to worry about. Why would I pollute that sublime happiness with poison like you?”

  “Because you need me,” White Snake said, looking him in the eyes. “There is more to the world than Korea. The dragon clans are changing. Bethesda the Heartstriker is breeding at a monumental pace. All those young dragons are hungry for territory, and they’re not making any more land. If they decide to attack, you’ll be alone.”

  Yong sneered. “You think I’m afraid of some century-old whelps?”

  “Enough of anything can be a threat,” White Snake argued. “The world is full of new enemies and new fronts, far too many to face on your own. I may not be your equal in strength or fire, but I’ve used my years of exile to win a position at the Qilin’s court in China and build inside connections with several of the major European clans. I know the current politics, what they’re all plotting. I can help you.”

  “Nonsense,” Yong said, looking down on her. “The only dragon you help is yourself.”

  “But I—”

  “Enough,” he said, standing up. “This audience is at an end. Get out of my sight, and don’t come back.”

  His sister took a hissing breath he remembered from their youth. Sure enough, the explosion came right after. “You think you can do this without me?” she roared. “You don’t even know what they say! The rest of the clans think you’re mad, living in here alone with your endless collections and your hundreds of mortals. I defended you because you are flesh of my flesh, but now I think they were right.” She pointed at the child in his arms. “Look at you! Coddling that stupid, filthy little creature as if she were your own blood. Madness is the only explanation. She’s not even pretty.”

  White Snake finished with a nasty smirk, waiting for him to be offended. When he did not rise to her bait, she tried again. “Where is your pride, Yong?” she taunted. “You’re not going to defend her? I thought she was your child.”

  “There is nothing to defend,” Yong replied calmly, looking down at the girl, who’d gone very still. “Anyone with eyes can see that my daughter is not beautiful. I knew it from her birth. That’s why I named her Opal.” He reached down to slide a finger under the girl’s unfortunate jaw. “She is as she is named: a pretty stone of little worth. But while she will never be a diamond or a pearl or anything that is truly rare or beautiful, I keep her for the same reason I keep every other treasure in my hoard: because she brings me joy.” His lips curled into a smile as he slid his fingers up to pick a bit of pumpkin off the wide-eyed girl’s chubby cheek. “She is my loud, ungainly, bumbling little puppy, and I value her brief life a thousand times more than I do yours.”

  “Then you truly are delusional,” White Snake said scornfully. “Mortals are for viewing and eating. They are not a replacement for family. Think of your pride, Yong! If you keep this madness up, you’ll be the laughingstock of the world. The others will call you pathetic and soft, a sad, old dragon filling the emptiness with his pets, and they’ll be right. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I can help you.” She clutched her hands to her chest. “Take me back. Acknowledge me as your clan again, and I will go out in your name to tell the rest of the world you haven’t gone senile. I will—”

  “No,” Yong said coldly, straightening to his full height so that he could look down on her properly. “You assume too much, little snake. We may be related by blood, but you are not my family. You are a traitorous worm, worth no more to me than the dirt you crawl in. The only reason I have not yet slaughtered you for wasting my time is because I do not wish my daughter to witness such things. Now take the life I have so graciously spared and go. I tire of you.”

  “You cannot banish me from my birthright!” White Snake cried, her lovely face turning ugly with rage. “I am also a dragon of Korea! These are my lands as much as they are—”

  Yong breathed out a line of smoke, and magic slammed down on the room like a snapping jaw. The child in his arms yelped at the sensation, but he was shielding her. White Snake had no such protection. She fell to her knees, gasping for breath as Yong’s magic bit into her. He let her squirm there for a full minute, giving her time to
feel the difference in power all the way to her bones, to understand on a deep, animal level the true distance between someone like her, and someone like him. Only then did he speak, his voice rumbling through the building, through the very bedrock of the land he’d won in blood and fire.

  “I am the Dragon of Korea,” he said, smoke curling from his lips with every word. “I earned that name when I killed our father and took his fire, but you have earned nothing. You have done nothing worthy of the name dragon, and that’s why nothing is all you’ll ever have. Even the fact that you’re still alive to bother me is due entirely to my magnanimity, so you’d do best to slither back out of my sight before I change my mind.”

  By the time he finished, the magic in the room was as thick and sharp as a forest of knives. His sister clung to the points for five more seconds, and then she turned and fled, scampering through the doors like the rat she was. Yong didn’t even realize how fast she’d gone until his daughter jerked in his arms, looking around the room in confusion, her poor mortal eyes too slow to follow the panicked dragon’s flight.

  “Where did she go?”

  “She ran,” Yong said, reaching down to retrieve his abacus from her pumpkin-covered fingers. “The weak always run. That is what separates them from us.”

  “Because we are dragons,” the girl said proudly.

  “No, you are a dog face,” Yong said, taking her with him as he stood up. “I am a dragon.”

  The girl pouted. “But I want to be one too. How can I be your daughter if I’m not a dragon?”

  “It’s because you’re not a dragon that you can be my daughter,” he told her, returning the abacus to the wall. “Dragons are conniving, nasty, greedy creatures who see any weakness as an invitation to attack. They have no loyalty to family or anything else save themselves. Every dragon running a clan right now got there because they murdered whoever was above them. I myself rule Korea because I killed my father and took his power. If you were my actual daughter, I’d have to constantly worry about you doing the same to me, but you’re not. You’re human, and that means I’m free to treasure you as much as I like.”

  “But you just said I’m a dog face,” she said dejectedly. “I can’t even do magic right.”

  “This is true,” her father said, carrying her out of the throne room. “You are indeed a foolish puppy who will never be what I was promised. But despite your many flaws, you are still my Opal, and I take care of what is mine.”

  His daughter still looked worried. “Always?”

  “Forever,” the dragon promised, pressing a kiss to her forehead as he carried his greatest treasure back into his lair.

  Chapter 1

  DFZ, Present Day

  After spending a year and a half working almost exclusively in the Underground, driving up onto the Skyways felt like entering another world. A cleaner, far better-smelling world with leafy green trees, well-maintained sidewalks, and a bright, blue sky crisscrossed by so many white commercial aircraft contrails it looked like a scratching post.

  “Ahhhhhh,” Sibyl’s voice moaned in my earpiece as she remote piloted the cheap rent-a-moving truck trundling behind Nik’s car. “It’s so nice to be back in civilization again. The Wi-Fi up here is incredible!”

  “It’d better be for what they charge,” I grumbled, pulling out my phone to switch us off the Skyways’ premium wireless to the much slower and infinitely more annoying—but free!—advertising-supported version.

  “This is your old stomping ground, right?” Nik asked beside me, leaning down to peer through his car’s steeply slanted windshield at the quaintly archaic brick buildings some developer had paid through the nose to make look older than anything on the Skyways technically could be. “I recognize it from the photo on your bookshelf.”

  I laughed. “That’s a little creepy, but yeah, this is where I lived when I was in school. The IMA main campus is five blocks that way.”

  I pointed down the tree-lined, pedestrian-friendly boulevard that, if not for the occasional stairway going down, you’d never know was actually suspended on a bridge eighty feet above the ground. That was entirely by design. This was College Walk—CoWa according to the developers who’d licensed the area from the city—and it had been engineered from the ground up to be exactly the sort of quirky bohemian neighborhood the trust-fund kids attending the Institute for Magical Arts dreamed of living in. Everything here was artsy and whimsical and social media ready right down to the faux-faded advertisements painted on the brick walls.

  Naturally, the price of living in what was basically an art student theme park was ludicrous. I couldn’t remember exactly what Heidi had charged me for my half of our two-bedroom loft, but I was pretty sure it would have covered my current expenses for a year. Hell, I could probably buy a week’s worth of food just off what I used to spend every day on fancy coffee drinks.

  But while it was horrifying to remember how much money I’d thrown away living up here, my wasteful old life was actually coming in useful today. A magic supplies shop I used to frequent when I was a student had shown up at this morning’s Cleaning auction. It was your typical overpriced hole-in-the-wall boutique where mass-produced items were repackaged in twine and brown cardboard and sold as “artisanal” at a thousand percent markup to rich kids who didn’t know better, so I wasn’t surprised it had gone out of business, but the pictures had shown the place looking exactly like I remembered. I didn’t know why a shopkeeper would abandon a store that was still packed full of inventory, but I wanted it. Froufrou or not, magical supplies always sold.

  At least, that was my logic. Nik must have been convinced as well, because he’d placed our bid without a grumble. We’d ended up winning the place for ten grand, which wasn’t that much by normal auction standards but a hell of a lot for me. I’d only been partnered with Nik for a week so far, and I was still getting used to the numbers he worked with. My nervousness was pretty sad considering I wouldn’t have blinked twice at dropping ten thousand on a good unit six months ago, but that was before my dad had cursed me to be a walking black hole for profits.

  These days, I couldn’t seem to make a dollar out of five quarters, which made pushing for such an expensive unit a Big Deal. If I hadn’t been so certain we’d make it all back and then some, I would have been panicking, but this was actually the safest bet I’d seen since we’d started going to auctions as a team rather than as rivals. The DFZ had the highest mage-per-capita population of any city on the planet. If we couldn’t resell an entire store’s inventory of casting chalk and ward tape for more than ten thousand here, we didn’t deserve to be in business.

  “It should be just around this corner,” I said, pointing out my open window. “There’s the wine bar where I used to go to poetry readings.”

  Nik snorted. “You went to poetry readings?”

  “Poetry is beautiful,” I said defensively. “And the best way to experience it is out loud.” And while slightly drunk. It also didn’t hurt that we’d had some world-class talent. IMA knew that its students—and, more importantly, their rich parents—expected a top-level cultural experience, and they’d spared no expense making sure we got it, up to and including hiring a Nobel laureate to sit around reciting poetry at us while we got blitzed on rare French wines. Ah, simpler times.

  “Sounds very refined,” Nik said in a monotone voice that made it hard to tell if he was making fun of me or not. “This is it. Tell your AI to stop the truck.”

  I relayed the command to Sibyl as Nik turned the wheel hard, whipping his sleek black sports car out of the orderly Skyways morning traffic into a brick-paved alley. There wasn’t enough room for the moving truck thanks to all the planters and patio furniture put out by the café next door, so I told Sibyl to circle the block while we got out to check our purchase.

  The shop we’d won was at the alley’s far end next to the lattice that hid the building’s dumpsters. The café and other stores that faced the main street behind us were as packed as you’d expect fo
r a beautiful Saturday morning, but none of those people had made it back here, which was probably why the magic shop had failed. Hard to maintain an overpriced boutique without a reliable flow of gullible foot traffic.

  That was good luck for us, though. Cleaning was always easier when you didn’t have to explain what you were doing to a bunch of curious onlookers. It was amazing the number of people who lived in the DFZ and had no idea that Cleaners existed. I’d had the cops called on me for doing my job more times than I could count. In a nice neighborhood like this, they might actually show up. Thankfully, nobody here seemed to care as Nik and I hauled our crates of Cleaning supplies out of the trunk of his car and walked over to the door of the shop I hoped would be the smash hit that made up for all the duds.

  It certainly looked promising. Just like in the picture Broker had put up at the auction this morning, I could see the shelves stacked with rows of product through the shop’s glass door. There had to be thousands of items in there. Nik must have been excited, too, because he’d already pulled out his Master Key. He was going for the door handle when I grabbed his wrist.

  “Wait!” I said. “You didn’t announce yourself yet!”

  “I don’t have to,” he replied, tilting his head at the glass door. “I can see inside.”

  “That doesn’t mean there couldn’t still be someone squatting in the back,” I argued nervously. “We still don’t know why the previous tenant abandoned a store full of inventory. He could be strung out and waiting behind one of those shelves with a shotgun.”

  Nik clearly thought that was far-fetched, but he didn’t have to worry like I did. He had a cybernetic arm and bulletproof metal plates across half his damn body, and he was wearing his armored black leather bomber jacket despite the fact that the temperature was already in the eighties. I, by contrast, was dressed for the weather in shorts and a tank top. I wasn’t even wearing my poncho, which was pretty stupid considering we were about to walk into a mage’s shop. There were bound to be all sorts of nasty wards against intruders, even legal ones like us, but I couldn’t bring myself to put my poncho on, and not just because I didn’t want to wear a plastic sheet in August. I didn’t want to wear it because activating my wards would hurt too much.