A Dragon of a Different Color

by Rachel Aaron

  “Go!” she screamed.

  Julius pushed them off the side, wings pounding as he struggled to get clear, but even he wasn’t fast enough. The falling building was simply too big, and the space for acceleration too short as the skyscraper fell over on top of them with a groan of bending steel and breaking concrete. But then, just when the falling side of the building was close enough that Marci could see her terrified face in the cracked glass windows, it stopped.

  For a breathless second, the building hung suspended in the air, and then it rolled to the left like it was rolling away down a hill. Marci was still trying to understand how that had happened when the broken building finally rolled far enough out of the way to reveal the enormous golden dragon floating serenely on the other side.

  After that, she couldn’t do anything but stare. The dragon wasn’t the biggest she’d seen—that honor still went to Dragon Sees the Beginning—but he was hands down the most spectacular. The scales that covered his long, snaking body were pure gold, each one glinting like treasure in the light from the fires below. His shining eyes were golden, too, and he had no wings at all. If not for the white smoke curling like incense from his mouth, Marci would have sworn he was a giant floating statue.

  Even when he began snaking through the air toward them, the movement looked too perfect to be real. She was wondering if he was some kind of conjured illusion when a slightly smaller—but still terrifyingly large—dragon with matte-black-dyed feathers and familiar green eyes appeared in the air beside him.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the new dragon snarled in Chelsie’s voice, glaring murder at Julius, who was nearly hyperventilating from his race to get out from under the no-longer-falling building.

  “You’re supposed to fly away from danger, idiot, not straight into...” She trailed off as her green eyes spotted Marci clinging to Julius’s back, and then the black dragon heaved a long, smoke-filled sigh. “Well, that explains a lot.”

  “Who is she?” the golden dragon asked in a voice so beautiful, Marci almost fell off.

  “His significant mortal.”

  The golden dragon looked confused. “I thought she was dead.”

  “So did I,” Chelsie said. “But I should know better by now than to assume anything with these two.” She flashed Marci a wall of teeth that was probably meant to be a smile. “Welcome back.”

  Marci nodded slowly, but scary as the teeth were, she was far more interested in the tiny dragon she could now see clinging to Chelsie’s neck, its little golden eyes wide with excitement. “What is that?”

  As usual, everyone except Julius ignored her. “It’s her daughter,” he whispered. “And the golden dragon is the Qilin Xian, also known as the Golden Emperor.”

  “You mean the dragon who rules China?” When he nodded, Marci gasped. “What’s he doing here?”

  “I’ll have to tell you later,” Julius said with a tired smile. “You aren’t the only one who’s had a lot going on.”

  Clearly. Before she could say anything else, though, Julius turned to the golden dragon and lowered his head. “Thank you for saving us.”

  “That wasn’t me,” the emperor said. “It was my son.”

  He pointed down with a perfectly curved claw, and Marci and Julius both looked to see a third dragon hovering below them.

  He was just as big as the Golden Emperor, but like Chelsie and Julius, he had wings and feathers. Glossy, true-black ones that set off his self-satisfied golden eyes beautifully as he shook the bits of building from his claws, which he’d clearly dug into the building before he’d pushed it away. But even that wasn’t the most impressive part. What really made Marci gasp were the bone-white sheaths covering each curving talon, augments she’d learned to recognize as the telltale sign of a transformed Fang of the Heartstriker.

  “Who is that?”

  “It’s Fredrick,” Julius said, eyes wide in amazement. “He’s huge.”

  The Qilin smiled proudly. “He is my eldest son.”

  “Fredrick’s your son?” Marci said incredulously. “The stuffy butler dragon?” When the Qilin nodded, she turned back to Julius in bafflement. “You’ve gotta tell me what happened while I was gone.”

  “As soon as we get time,” Julius promised, glancing nervously toward the lake. “Right now, we have bigger problems.”

  That was putting it mildly. Despite hurling what had to be an entire Great Lake’s worth of water at the city, Algonquin’s torrent was bigger than ever. She was now as tall as the Leviathan behind her, and she showed no sign of stopping.

  Neither did the city. Down below, the flooded DFZ was rumbling like a drum. On the heavily built-up lakefront, the few buildings that hadn’t been flattened were shifting, curling over like fingers into a fist before crashing into the water below. One by one, the Lakefront developments punched into Algonquin’s water, forming a stone barricade against any new waves.

  It was the same in the Underground. Old buildings, parked cars, even collapsed pieces of the Skyways rolled into position, stacking themselves like bricks to form a makeshift wall across the places where the lower city was open to the water.

  Once the barriers were in place, the pounding magic in the air tightened like a pulled knot, closing so fast it made Marci gasp. Even the dragons winced, ducking for cover instinctively as the city roared and launched a new volley into the air.

  This one was even bigger. The first attack had thrown a building into Algonquin’s Tower. This time, whole blocks went into the air, hurtling over the barriers at Algonquin herself. The buildings slammed into her water, breaking her apart and sending sprays of water flying so high into the air, they came down on the Canadian shore like rain. When she tried to re-form, the city hit her again, screaming with a triumphant wail of twisting metal as it continued to hurl buses, buildings, even whole hunks of overpass into the lake.

  “That’s it,” Chelsie said as a car hurtled past her. “Time to go. Fredrick, take Julius and his mortal first. Xian and I can dodge until you—”

  “I’m staying,” Julius said.

  “Are you crazy?” Chelsie yelled, ducking the bus that flew by next. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it looks like the city’s gone to war with Algonquin!”

  “Actually, that’s exactly what’s happening,” Marci said. “The DFZ—”

  “This isn’t something we want to be in the middle of,” Chelsie said over her, swooping down to grab her brother. “Come on.”

  “No,” Julius said stubbornly, dodging her. “I’m not leaving until I’ve helped her!”

  There was only one person he could be talking about. Sure enough, all the dragons looked at Marci. But while the urge to cringe under the eyes of so many giant, magical predators was pretty intense, Marci was no longer just a mortal. She was a Merlin, and while she wasn’t as versed in the history of that title as Myron, she was pretty sure Merlins didn’t cower.

  “I have to stop this,” she said, proud that her voice only shook a little. “Everything you see is happening because Algonquin is fighting the Mortal Spirit of the DFZ, and it’s going to get a lot worse. But despite what’s going on, the DFZ isn’t actually a violent spirit. If I can just get to her, I’m pretty sure I can talk her down.”

  Chelsie looked unconvinced. “And you need Julius for this because…?”

  “Because I’m not leaving her,” Julius growled. “Ever.”

  His sister blew out a frustrated huff of smoke. “What is it with you? Why do you never run from danger like a sensible dragon?”

  Julius clenched his jaw. “Because I—”

  “That was rhetorical,” she snapped, turning around to face Algonquin’s pillar of water, which was now nearly to the sky. “You want to stay? Fine, but let’s not be stupid about it. You go with your human. I’ll head down there and find a way to keep the waterspout distracted. Fredrick, you get the emperor and your sister back to the mountain.”

  Julius blinked at her. “What?”

  “Th
at’s my question,” Fredrick growled, flying up to join them. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing I want to,” Chelsie growled back. “But Julius isn’t going to leave his mortal, and since I owe him pretty much everything at this point, that means I don’t get to leave her, either.”

  “I never said you had to stay!” Julius cried.

  “I’m not leaving you to fight alone,” Fredrick said at the same time. “You’re good, Chelsie, but even you can’t beat Algonquin.”

  “If a single dragon could beat Algonquin, we would have fixed this problem years ago,” she said. “But I’m not going to fight her. I’m just going to buy Julius time so his mortal can do whatever she’s here to do and we can leave.”

  “For the last time,” Julius growled. “You don’t have to—”

  “Then I’m going with you,” Fredrick said, ignoring him. “I also owe Julius, and I’m not letting you do this alone.”

  “Neither am I,” the Qilin said, moving closer to Chelsie. “I didn’t go through all of this to leave your side now. Besides, if you want your distraction to last longer than sixty seconds, you’re going to need my help.”

  “Luck would help,” Chelsie admitted, though she didn’t look pleased. “But we do this my way. No heroics, nice and clean.”

  “NO!” Julius yelled, shoving his way between the other dragons. “Do none of you have ears? I said no! N-O. No. You are not fighting Algonquin.”

  “Now who doesn’t have ears?” Chelsie snapped. “We’re not fighting her. We’re occupying her attention.”

  “Same difference,” Julius snapped back, his breaths coming fast and panicked. “I won’t let you do this.”

  “That’s not your choice to make,” Fredrick said calmly, glaring at Julius in a way that did not fit the subservient F Marci remembered at all. “This debt is ours to pay. If you want to stay with your mortal, we’ll keep the lake spirit off you as long as we can. At the very least, she’ll be shooting at us instead of the city.”

  “That would be really useful, actually,” Marci put in. “It’ll be a lot easier to talk the DFZ down if she’s not being actively punched in the face by Algonquin.”

  “So she should punch my family instead?” Julius cried.

  Chelsie sneered in disgust. “Like we’d let her get so close.” She started flying toward the lake. “Decision’s already been made, Julius. Take it and go, because we won’t be able to get you much.”

  With a bob of his head, the Qilin took off after her, snaking through the night like a golden ribbon.

  “Looks like that settles it,” Fredrick said, smiling at Julius as he turned to follow the others. “Good luck, sir.”

  “Wait!” Julius yelled. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to…”

  But the three dragons were already gone, shooting through the night toward Algonquin.

  “Go,” Julius finished, head sagging.

  Marci bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for—”

  “It’s okay,” he said quickly. “Not your fault. It’s just…” He blew out an angry huff of smoke. “Dragons are very stubborn.”

  Marci was tempted to tell him to look in the mirror on that one, but there wasn’t time. She wasn’t entirely sure about the dynamics of the dragon debts at play here, but if Chelsie, Fredrick, and the Qilin were determined to use this as an excuse to pay Julius back, she wasn’t going to waste it. Especially since Ghost was tugging on their connection.

  Found anything? she thought at him.

  There was a long pause, and then an image slipped into her mind. A dark, man-made cavern filled with water and debris and the lingering reek of death.

  “Gotcha,” Marci said, looking down at Julius. “She’s in the Pit.”

  He shuddered, his feathered body shaking under hers. “Of course she’d be there. Why would we ever go somewhere nice?”

  He heaved another smoky sigh and cast one last look at the dragons flying toward Algonquin. Then, like he’d come to a decision, he dove down, flying toward the cluster of miraculously still-standing Financial District superscrapers and the polluted Pit that was hidden beneath them.

  ***

  This trip to the Pit was very different from the last time Julius had been here.

  It was still terrible, of course. Even the boiling magic that swelled up to cover the city wasn’t enough to overpower the deathly, oily feel of the DFZ Underground’s most polluted magical wasteland. Instead, the two mixed, forming a noxious amalgam that reeked of old decay, motor oil, and fetid lake water. In fairness, though, that last one was probably more physical than magical thanks to the five-foot-deep layer of dirty floodwater that currently covered the Pit’s silted floor.

  “Lovely,” Marci said, holding her nose as Julius flew them in. “And here I thought this place couldn’t get any worse.”

  “At least it’s not as dark as before,” he said, looking up at the Skyway ceiling, which, like all the other overpasses in the city, was now laced with cracks letting in light from above. Mostly the orange glow of the fires that were springing up all over town, despite Algonquin’s flood, but light was still good.

  “We have to end this,” Marci muttered, her fingers clenching on his feathers. “At this rate, there’ll be nothing left to save.”

  “No argument here,” Julius said. “But what are we looking for?”

  She sighed against him. “No idea. The last time I saw her, the DFZ couldn’t make up her mind between smallish human and giant rat, but since spirits are just sentient magic, that doesn’t mean much. She could be anything, but I have a feeling we’ll know her when we see her.”

  Julius hoped so, because right now, he couldn’t see much of anything. The last time he’d been here, the Pit had looked like a flattened, abandoned suburb buried like a body under the thickest part of Algonquin’s elevated city, which made sense since that was exactly what it was. As the first victim of Algonquin’s flood, the Pit—or Grosse Point as it was known in those days—had never really recovered.

  While the rest of Detroit had been either rebuilt or built over, this place had been sealed up like a tomb, covered with Skyways and locked in the dark like a dirty secret. Nothing had been improved or changed. Even the silt from the first flood was still here, lying like a blanket over the broken streets and the foundations of the houses crushed by Algonquin’s wave, making it looked like the suburb was at the bottom of a dark and unpleasant sea.

  The illusion was only made stronger by the new layer of water that covered everything. But while there were streams of water falling from the broken Skyways overhead, Julius didn’t think this flooding was from the wave earlier, or even from the river’s flood before that. He couldn’t say why, exactly, but he felt certain that this water was from before that, the fallout of some earlier disaster.

  It smelled old, he decided. Old and very strongly of lake. He was trying to figure out if that was important or not when Marci yelled out.

  “There!” she cried, pointing.

  Once he saw it, Julius had no idea how he’d missed it. Even in the Pit’s strangely thick darkness, it should have been impossible to miss the giant pile of trash rising from the lowest point of the Pit’s bowl-like landscape.

  Pile was the wrong word, he decided as they got closer. This was a tower, a leaning column twenty feet in diameter made from busted cars, washing machines, bricks, drywall, outdated computer parts—all sorts of nonsense.

  The sideways-tilting stack went all the way from the Pit’s flooded floor to the ceiling of the broken Skyways thirty feet overhead, connecting the ground to the city like a giant root. Not being a mage, Julius had no idea what that meant, but the structure definitely hadn’t been here before.

  “Is that our target?”

  “Nothing else it could be,” Marci said excitedly, pointing at the rusted hood of one of the cars at the bottom of the pile. “Set down there. Ghost’s already headed inside to check it out.”

  Even for a death spirit, goin
g inside a giant pillar of mysterious trash that might be the heart of an enraged spirit sounded like a really bad idea. Julius didn’t even want to get near it. Now that they were closer, he could actually feel the thing pulsing with the same magic he’d felt roaring through the city. But this was the whole reason they were here, so he sucked it up and landed where Marci had pointed, setting down on the edge of the car’s bumper like a bird landing on a windowsill.

  An extremely disgusting windowsill.

  “Ugh,” he said, lifting his feet. “It’s all slimy. Like that time we walked through the storm drain.”

  “It does feel slimy,” Marci said, hopping off his back to touch the car for herself. “Weird. I wonder if that’s from the flooding or something else?”

  Given how creepy this place was, Julius’s money was on something else. He’d felt more of Algonquin’s magic than any dragon should at this point, but while her lake water was cold and clammy and unpleasant in the extreme, it had never felt polluted. This stuff felt like the filthy magic of the Pit turned physical, and the more Julius thought about that, the less he liked this whole situation.

  “I don’t think this is a good place for the spirit of the DFZ to be.”

  “Me neither,” Marci agreed, walking across the car hood to stand in front of the wall of debris that formed the pillar. “I’ve noticed that Mortal Spirits seem to be highly influenced by emotions in their magic. Remember back in Reclamation Land when Ghost got all huge and scary? It was because he was channeling the anger of everyone Algonquin had killed. I wonder if the same thing is happening to the DFZ? I mean, she was already pissed at Algonquin, but this is the place where the wave first crashed down. Not a good memory.”

  “Definitely not,” Julius said, covering his nose with his wing. “The magic smells awful.”