A Dragon of a Different Color

by Rachel Aaron

  “Ah,” Bob said, setting the little girl back down on her feet. “But if you didn’t also think it was worth the risk, you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Raven snapped. “Algonquin’s got us all by the tail feathers. Next to that, even your madness seems sane.”

  He paused, looking at Bob like he expected the dragon to argue, but the seer just smiled. “Is everything ready, then?”

  “Ready as can be, given the circumstances.” The bird tilted his head at Bob. “You?”

  The seer pulled out his brick of a phone—an identical replacement to the ancient blue Nokia he’d sunk into a rice paddy in China, except that this one had slightly fewer scratches—and angled the green-tinted screen down so Raven could see the flashing message icon through the sun’s glare. He had over a hundred texts pending, mostly from Chelsie, but the newest was the one that mattered.

  Unfortunately—and probably spitefully, given the source—the text was in Mandarin Chinese. Not Bob’s strongest language considering he hadn’t used it in over six centuries. He studied the pixelated characters for several seconds before giving up and turning the phone to Raven.

  The bird gave him a horrified look. “Really?”

  “You’re famous for speaking every language,” Bob said with a shrug. “Make yourself useful.”

  He thrust the phone at the spirit again, and Raven shook his head wearily, hopping down from the branch to perch on the dragon’s shoulder where he had a better view.

  “‘We’re coming.’”

  Bob blinked. “Is that all?”

  “There’s another bit promising death to you and all your clan, but that’s the general gist,” Raven reported.

  “Marvelous,” Bob said, slipping the phone back into his pocket. “Then yes. I’m ready.”

  Raven looked more worried than ever. “You’re playing with a lot of lives, Heartstriker. Are you certain this is going to work?”

  “The future is never certain,” Brohomir said honestly. “But I’ve been setting up this domino chain for nearly my entire life, so I’m pretty sure. On the upside, though, if I’m not right, we’ll all be dead, and I won’t have to listen to you say ‘I told you so.’”

  The bird tilted his head, and for a brief moment, Bob felt what it was like to have every raven in the world staring at you at once. “This is no time for jokes, seer,” the Spirit of Ravens rumbled. “I’m taking a big gamble trusting you.”

  “We’re all gambling,” Bob assured him. “But that’s all we can do. The future is a moving target. You can make all the careful plans you want, but nothing is ever certain until the moment actually comes. Even then, the whole world can turn on a heartbeat. That said, if you follow my instructions to the letter—to the letter, mind—we stand a very decent chance of achieving the age-old dream of having our cake and eating it, too.”

  Raven blinked his beady black eyes. “You are a very strange sort of dragon.”

  “Nonsense,” Bob said. “I’m just a dragon, as greedy and ruthless and results-oriented as any other. But that’s why you can trust me. All of this is to my benefit even more than it is to yours, which is as close to Scout’s honor as my kind gets. And speaking of results, you’ve got your marching orders, which means it’s time to fly away home. I know you true immortals have a flexible relationship with time, but the rest of us are on a schedule.”

  Raven shot another dark look at Bob’s pigeon. “None of us has much time if you mess this up.”

  “Then let’s make sure I don’t by keeping our timetable,” the seer said, tapping the bare spot on his wrist where his watch would be if he’d been wearing one. “Hop hop, blackbird.”

  With a final roll of his black eyes, Raven spread his wings and flew away, vanishing between one flap and the next. When he was gone, Bob looked back down at the little dragon, who’d spent the entire conversation rolling in the dirt at his feet. “Shall we be off, too?”

  As usual, the girl didn’t even seem to hear the question, but her head shot right up a second later when the sound of a car engine broke the desert quiet. She scrambled up into the tree as the noise got louder, changing back into a dragon so she could snake through the tangled branches to get a better look at the SUV full of mortal tourists that had just pulled over at the trailhead down the hill.

  “Right on time,” Bob said cheerfully, holding out his hand to his pigeon. When he had her comfortably nestled on his shoulder again, Bob started down the hill. “Come, love,” he called. “It’s time for you to learn the joys of grand theft auto.”

  The dragoness scurried down the tree, kicking her feet in the loose dirt as she ran after him down the desert hill toward the unsuspecting humans and the car that would soon be theirs.

  ***

  At that same moment, Julius Heartstriker, youngest son of Bethesda the Heartstriker and founder of the newly formed Heartstriker Council, was still trapped in the most frustrating meeting of his life.

  “For the last time,” he growled, glaring at his mother across their new three-sided Council table. “We will not vote to unseal your dragon until you vow—vow, in blood—that you will never try to undermine this Council again.”

  “And for the last time, I’ll vow to do no such thing,” Bethesda said with a toss of her glossy black hair. “Future rebellion is my right as a dragon. What sort of deposed clan head doesn’t try to take back her power?”

  “None,” Ian said quietly, his newly brown eyes gleaming with barely restrained violence. “Which is why deposed clan heads are usually rendered headless. But Julius showed you mercy, and you took it. Don’t cry now because it’s time to pay.” He stabbed his finger down on the pledge sitting on the table in front of her. “Sign it. Or you’ll never fly again.”

  That was harsher than Julius would have gone, but he didn’t say a word. It’d been two hours since they’d freed Chelsie and the Fs and moved on to the unsealing of Bethesda, and his willingness to tolerate his mother’s antics was long gone. He’d never expected her to meekly accept her fate—he wasn’t sure Bethesda the Heartstriker knew what ‘meek’ meant—but he hadn’t thought it would take fifteen drafts to find a version of “promise you won’t try to undermine the new system again and you can have your dragon back” that she would sign.

  “We’ve been more than fair,” Ian reminded her. “But it’s over. The Heartstriker Council is here to stay, and if you want to stay on it as anything more than this”—he pointed at her sealed human body—“you’ll stop being stubborn.”

  The Heartstriker gave him an ugly look. “This is extortion.”

  “Then you should be used to it,” Ian said, growling deep in his throat. “Sign it, Mother.”

  Bethesda’s face grew sullen, and then she reached out to grab the paper off the table. “Fine,” she snarled, stabbing her razor-sharp nail into the pad of her thumb. “You want to cement the doom of this clan? On your heads be it.”

  She stabbed the bleeding wound down on the paper, sealing the deal with her blood. When it was done, magic bit down sharp as her teeth, making them all gasp. Still, it was over, and Julius couldn’t help letting out a sigh of relief as he took the signed vow back from her. “Thank you.”

  “Enjoy it while it lasts,” she snarled, licking the blood off her finger. “It doesn’t matter what you make me sign—this enterprise is doomed. Dragon clans are ruled by fear and fire, not councils. If I can’t rebel, someone else will, and when the inevitable finally comes, the last thing you’ll hear is me saying ‘I told you so.’ Right before I bite off your heads.”

  Technically, that was exactly the sort of threat she was no longer supposed to be making, but Julius was too sick of arguing to care. He just signed his name at the bottom of the bloody contract with a normal ink pen as fast as he could before passing it to Ian, who did the same. When all three of their names were signed, magic bit down again. The Council’s magic this time, not Bethesda’s. As powerful as clan magic was, it couldn’t force a drago
n to act against her own self-interest. Only blood oaths could enforce behavior, which was why they’d had to go through all of this. Now that her blood and their names were on the same contract, though, they were bound together. Bethesda was now forbidden from undermining the Council’s authority by her own fire, which meant they could finally move on.

  “Now that’s finished,” Ian said, waving the bloody contract to dry it before placing it in his leather dossier, “I motion to unseal Bethesda the Heartstriker. All in favor?”

  They all raised their hands.

  “Motion passes,” Ian said, glaring at their mother as she shot out of her chair. “I trust future Council decisions won’t be this obnoxious.”

  “That depends on you,” Bethesda said flippantly. “All of this voting and talking was your idea, not mine. Now, if we’re quite finished, get this cursed thing off me. You wouldn’t believe the ache this seal is putting on my poor wings.”

  Seeing how she’d happily left him like that for a month and a half, Julius had little sympathy. But as fitting as it would have been to let her suffer, a promise was a promise. “Let’s go get Amelia.”

  Bethesda cringed at the mention of her eldest daughter’s name. “Isn’t there someone else?”

  Julius shrugged. “Not unless you want to owe Svena another favor. The seal Amelia put on you is too complicated for anyone else.”

  “Assuming Amelia’s sober enough to manage it,” Ian added, glancing at his watch. “It is nearly five o’clock.”

  “It’s always five o’clock for the Planeswalker,” Bethesda said bitterly. “But if there’s one thing Amelia’s always been good at, it’s magic under the influence. So long as she’s not passed out, we should be fine.”

  The truth of that made Julius wince. It was on his list to stage an intervention for his oldest sister soon. Right now, though, Amelia’s high-functioning alcoholism was the least of his worries. “I just hope she’s feeling well enough to manage it. Last time I saw her, she didn’t look so good.”

  Not since Marci had died and taken half of Amelia’s fire with her.

  “That’s nothing,” Bethesda said flippantly. “I cut Amelia in half when she was just a little older than you. It was supposed to serve as an example to the rest of her clutch, but she ruined it by surviving. Anyway, if she could live through that, she can live through anything. I’m more worried about her ‘accidentally’ sealing something else, the spiteful little snake.”

  At this point, Julius wouldn’t mind if Amelia ‘accidentally’ turned their mother into a toad. Again, though, done was done, so he stood up and grudgingly motioned for Bethesda to lead the way.

  “I can’t believe we have to go and find her ourselves,” she complained as they walked out of the throne room. “How dare Frieda and the others abandon their positions! Now nothing works.”

  “I’m sure we’ll survive without the Fs,” Julius said. “We need to learn to run things for ourselves, and they deserve to fly free. All of them.”

  He glanced pointedly at Chelsie’s Fang, which was still lying untouched on the balcony where she’d dropped it when she’d gone for their mother’s throat, but Bethesda was too busy rolling her eyes to notice.

  “You say that now,” she growled as she yanked open the plain wooden doors that had been quickly installed to temporarily replace the ornate ones Bob had broken when he’d smashed his way into the throne room. “But when there’s no breakfast tomorrow, you’ll be singing a different—”

  She stopped short. The throne room doors opened into the Hall of Heads, the long tunnel that served as both a display gallery for the taxidermy heads of Bethesda’s enemies and a lobby for the golden elevator that connected the Heartstriker’s peak to the rest of the mountain, including Amelia’s rooms one floor down. But though they were still a good fifty feet away, the elevator doors at the hallway’s opposite end were already rolling open to reveal an extremely nervous-looking Katya.

  They must have spotted each other at the same moment, because the moment the white dragoness’s eyes met his, her expression changed to one of relief. “There you are!” she cried, running toward them. “I’ve been looking everywhere! I tried asking, but there was no one working the concierge desk. No one working anywhere, actually.”

  Bethesda shot her youngest son an “I told you so” look, which he pointedly ignored. “I’m sorry you had trouble,” he said, stepping forward to greet his friend. “What can we do for—”

  “Is it Svena?” Ian interrupted, pushing his way forward. “Is she ready to clutch?”

  Katya’s nervous look returned. “Actually, she finished clutching just a few minutes ago.”

  Which meant Ian was now a father. “Congratulat—”

  “So why am I finding out now?” Ian said angrily. “She promised she wouldn’t lay without me there.”

  “She did,” Katya admitted, dropping her eyes. “But that was before.”

  “Before what?”

  The youngest daughter of the Three Sisters sighed. Then, like a soldier facing a firing line, she drew herself to her full height. “Council of the Heartstrikers,” she said formally, her blue eyes looking at them each in turn. “Svena the White Witch, Queen of the Frozen Sea, has commanded me to inform you that all treaties, agreements, and other friendly relations between our two clans are hereby dissolved. Furthermore, effective immediately, Ian Heartstriker is removed from his position as consort and banished from our clan. He is also banned from contact with Svena’s offspring, all of whom shall now be raised as members of our clan regardless of gender.”

  The room was silent when she finished. Finally, in the scariest voice Julius had ever heard, Ian said, “What?”

  “She doesn’t want to see you anymore,” Katya explained.

  “I understood that much,” Ian snarled. “But that’s not her decision to make. Those are my children. She can’t keep them from me!”

  “Forget the whelps!” Bethesda cried, shoving past him. “What about the defense of my mountain? Svena’s supposed to be protecting us from Algonquin. That’s the only reason I let you ice snakes in here in the first place!”

  “Then maybe you should have considered that before you let your seer betray her,” Katya snapped.

  That statement left Bethesda looking absolutely bewildered, and for once, Julius was right there with her. “What are you talking about?” he asked, squeezing between Ian and his mother so he could speak to Katya directly rather than through the taller dragons. “How did Bob betray Svena?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Obviously not,” Ian growled. “We’ve been trapped in a meeting all afternoon.” He grabbed her shoulders. “What happened, Katya?”

  Julius fully expected Katya to bite his hands off for grabbing her like that, but whatever had happened between Bob and Svena must have been a special kind of bad, because Katya just looked sad. “I was hoping you could tell me,” she said. “Two hours ago, Brohomir killed Amelia the Planeswalker.”

  Her words hit Julius like a punch. “Bob…killed Amelia?” When she nodded, his fists clenched. “Impossible.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Katya said. “But Svena saw it with her own eyes. She teleported into Amelia’s room just as Brohomir finished turning her to ash.”

  “But that can’t be true,” Julius argued. “Bob would never hurt Amelia. She’s his favorite sister. There’s no way he’d—”

  “Well, he did,” Katya said angrily. “And now my sister is furious. Svena’s always considered the Planeswalker her only true rival. By murdering her, Brohomir has stolen her victory. That’s more than an insult between clans. It’s personal, and Svena’s taking it very badly.”

  Obviously. “Can’t you talk her down?”

  “You think I didn’t try?” Katya said with an angry puff of smoke. “Our clan’s barely recovered from losing Estella and our mothers. The last thing we need is to break faith and make enemies with the biggest clan in the world. Svena knows this, but
she won’t listen. I’ve never seen her this angry.” She shook her head. “You’re lucky she didn’t bring your mountain down on top of you the moment she saw Brohomir do it.”

  “Did she actually see him do it?”

  Katya shot him a furious look, and Julius hurried to explain. “I’m not saying Svena’s lying, but Bob’s a seer. He often does things that look terrible on the surface but turn out to be fine once you realize what’s actually going on. Maybe he was just—”

  “This isn’t the sort of thing you can mistake,” Katya snapped. “If you want proof, go to Amelia’s room and see for yourself.”

  She said that like a challenge, and Julius was upset enough to take it, marching around Katya and into the elevator behind her. The rest of the dragons followed right on his heels, cramming into the gold-plated box as Julius repeatedly mashed the button for the floor Amelia shared with Bob.

  ***

  “I take no joy in saying this,” Katya whispered. “But I told you so.”

  Julius didn’t say a word. He was too busy staring at the pile of gray-white ash that had once been Amelia the Planeswalker.

  “Must’ve been some fight,” Bethesda said, poking at the puddles of water that covered the stone floor with the toe of her stiletto. “Svena launched enough ice to sink a battleship.” She eyed Katya suspiciously. “Are you certain your sister didn’t kill Amelia herself?”

  “If she had, she wouldn’t blame a seer,” Katya replied angrily. “She’d come and tell you herself.”

  “And she’d probably be throwing a party instead of a fit,” Julius added.

  “I don’t think Svena would ever take Amelia’s death well,” Ian said. “Not even if she was the one who caused it. That stated…” He knelt beside the divan where Amelia’s pile of ash was sinking into the cushions. “Svena didn’t do this.”

  “How can you be sure?” Julius asked.

  Ian shot him a scathing look. “Use your nose. Amelia’s magic is everywhere in this room, but it’s all old. The newest I can smell is twelve hours stale at least, certainly nothing from this afternoon. Whoever killed her, Amelia didn’t fight back, and Svena has invested far too much in this rivalry to accept such a cheap victory.”