Julius arched an eyebrow. “Bam?”
“Blew them up,” she said fiercely, glowering into the mirror as she put down the scissors. “Trust me, it was better than they deserved for killing my dad. ” She grabbed a brush next, running the stiff bristles through her now mostly even short-cropped hair. This went on for almost ten seconds before she realized what she’d just said.
“Oh, wow,” she whispered, going still. “I guess that counts as confessing to murder, doesn’t it?”
Julius put up his hands. “I’m not judging. If someone killed my parent, I’d do the same. ” If anyone actually managed to take out Bethesda, getting blown up would look like a holiday compared to what the Heartstrikers would do.
Marci dropped the brush on the marble counter with a loud clatter and leaned forward, resting her head dejectedly against the mirror. “You know,” she said softly, “believe it or not, I was a nice girl before all this. Never blew up anything bigger than a car, never killed anyone or went spelunking in the sewers or got in alley fights. They say people come to the DFZ to reinvent themselves, but I think I’ve taken the idea a bit further than intended. ”
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“I think you’re doing great,” Julius said, grabbing the package he’d ordered for her off the breakfast tray. “Come over here, I got you something. ”
She gave herself a final shake and pushed off the sink, padding over to the table by the window. When she came around the bed, he noticed that her feet were bare. They were also adorable, her toes painted with the same glitter polish that was chipping off her fingernails, creating little flashes of sparkle as she walked.
“What is it?”
Julius blinked, startled. “Sorry,” he said, quickly looking away. “Here. ”
He handed her the cardboard box, which she ripped open with focused curiosity. But instead of being excited as he’d hoped, her face fell into a confused frown. “But Julius,” she said. “This is a…”
“A phone,” he finished for her, plucking the slim, purple rectangle out of her hand and turning it on. “Here, let me show you the best part. ”
He flipped through the phone’s small AR, fumbling a bit with the unfamiliar interface. He’d already set this part up through his own phone, though, so even with the fumbling, it only took a few seconds to find and pull up her account and put it on the screen. When he handed the phone back, he was rewarded with the sight of Marci rendered completely speechless.
“You can change the security settings to whatever you want,” he said. “But as you see, it’s all there. That’s your half of this morning’s earnings plus your fee for the hours you’ve worked so far, full rate. ”
Marci didn’t say a word. She just stood there, staring at the five-digit number that was her new bank account balance. “But,” she whispered at last, “How? This account’s in my name. You need a DFZ Residency ID to have a phone in the city. I never got one since Bixby could use it to track me, and it wasn’t like I had any money to put in it anyway, but this…How did you do this?”
“I used to play some pretty popular full-immersion MMOs,” Julius explained. “You meet a lot of people in games, some of whom make their living doing less than legal work. It just so happens one of my old guildmates works as a data merchant, and he was happy to sell me a fake Residency ID for you at a discount. ”
Marci stared down at her phone again. “So this is fake?”
“The number is fake,” Julius said. “The money is real. As for the ID, my guy assures me it’ll pass any sort of routine check, though we probably shouldn’t do anything that might earn you a full background scan. ”
He’d meant that last part as a joke, but Marci looked stricken. “You didn’t have to do this. ”
“You earned the money,” he said with a shrug. “And I needed you to have a phone. Besides, I had to talk to this guy anyway since I’ve hired him to help us find Katya. ”
He’d debated that move a lot, actually. Now that he had Katya’s number, he’d been tempted to just call her and try to work something out. After much back and forth, though, he’d concluded that contacting her would be a waste of time. She probably wouldn’t answer, and even if she did, a call out of the blue on a number she’d only trusted to a few people might cause her to bolt for good. But a good hacker like his guildmate could take a phone number and work backward to find the Residency ID and bank account it was attached to. And since phone enabled electronic transfers were used for everything from restaurants to car rentals, tracking Katya’s movements had just become no problem.
“He’s got a search going to for her ID right now,” Julius explained. “The moment she uses her phone to pay for anything, the tracking program will message us with the location, and then all we have to do is drive over and say hello. ” And hope that Katya wasn’t so spooked she ran even from a sealed dragon. Still, Julius thought it was a pretty clever plan, and he was a little let down when Marci’s face remained frighteningly blank.
“So your friend did all of this for you just off a phone call?”
“Well, he’s not really my friend,” Julius admitted. “I don’t even know his real name, actually, but I was his healer in the game, and the bond between healer and tank runs deep. And it’s not like he’s working for free. I’m paying him like any other client would. He just did me a favor by moving me to the front of the line. ”
Marci nodded, but Julius got the impression she wasn’t really listening. The whole time they’d been talking, she’d been staring at her phone with a closed-off expression he didn’t like at all. Clearly, it was time to break out the big guns.
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“Here,” he said, sitting down at the table where he’d set the breakfast tray. “Come eat. I got you waffles. ”
He lifted the silver tray covers with a flourish, revealing the beautifully arranged piles of sugar dusted Belgian waffles and fresh cut fruit. But when he looked up to see if he’d gotten a smile at last, Marci was still just staring at him, and then her bottom lip started to tremble. She turned away a second later, raising her hand to her face, but it wasn’t until her shoulders started to shake that Julius realized she was crying.
“What?” he cried, jumping up. “I’m sorry, what did I do? Do you not like waffles?”
“No, no,” Marci said. “Waffles are perfect, it’s…” She stopped and scrubbed furiously at her face. “I’m sorry, I’m not normally this emotional. It’s just, it’s been a really hard week for me, and you’re being really, really nice. ”
Julius flinched instinctively at the word nice. Before he could hide it, though, Marci whirled back around to face him.
“I can’t accept this,” she said, holding out the phone. “The payment for my work is one thing, but the lamprey money and the phone and getting me an ID and the room and, and…” She trailed off, swiping at the tears that were still rolling down her cheeks. “Sorry,” she whispered in a shamed voice. “I don’t mean to be such a fountain, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to be clean and safe and not surrounded by cats or afraid the house is going to fall on my head. And I know you saved my life back in the sewer when you bounced that blue fireball. No one’s ever done that for me before—saved my life, I mean—but now you’ve done it twice in one night, and I don’t know how I can ever pay you back. I will, though, I swear, but I owe you so much already, and if I take this, I’ll—”
Julius’s hand landed on her shoulder, grabbing her so hard she jumped. He felt guilty immediately, but he couldn’t let her say another word. “Stop,” he said. “Please, just stop and listen. You don’t owe me anything. There is no debt between us. ”
She blinked at him. “But…”
“I did this because I wanted to,” he said firmly. “Because we’re a team, and how are we supposed to work together if I can’t call you? As for the money, you earned it fair and square. You were the one who found the nest, and it was you who pointed out the lampreys had value. We wouldn’t have any money at all if you h
adn’t been there, so I’m not accepting it back. If you don’t want it, you can throw it away, but you need to understand that we are even. ”
Even as he said it, he knew he was being ridiculous. A human would never make such a big deal out of this, but Julius had spent his entire life watching dragons use debts as leverage to gain power over others. He’d been there numerous times himself, but always as the one on the bottom, the one being squeezed. Now, when he was finally in a position to be the indebted instead of the debtor, he wanted nothing to do with it. He’d told Justin he was through and he meant it. He didn’t even want to pretend to be a good dragon anymore, especially not if it meant holding money over Marci.
“You are my ally,” he said earnestly, filling the word with all the conviction he had so she would know just how rare such a thing was for him, and how much it meant. “Everything I do, I do because of that. Because I value your help and your company and because it makes me happy to see you happy. So please don’t ever think that you have to pay me back, because you don’t, and you never will. ”
He could have said more. He could have gone on forever until he was positive she understood. But instead of being relieved by his reassurances, Marci looked like she was going to start crying again.
The sight sent Julius into a panic. His mind whirled frantically, searching for the right thing to say that would undo whatever he’d done to cause this. In the end, though, it didn’t matter, because Marci didn’t cry. She did something different, something completely unexpected.
She kissed him.
Chapter 10
If Marci hadn’t put her hands on his shoulders, Julius would have jumped out of his skin. But she held him in place, gently sliding her arms up to encircle his neck as she tilted her head, slanting her lips against his own. Her body followed, pressing against his, and Julius jumped again, because she was soft and warm and pretty and she was kissing him and…and that was as far as he got before his mind started fogging over and his hands sank down to rest on her hips of their own accord.
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Vaguely, in a tiny, dusty corner of his brain that hadn’t gotten the message to shut down yet, it occurred to Julius that this was his first real kiss. Oh, he’d had a girl’s lips on his before. Thanks to Bethesda’s love of attention, the Heartstrikers weren’t exactly secret, and there were lots of humans who came to the town at the foot of his mother’s mountain in hopes of sleeping with a dragon. Julius had been jumped several times, once in his own room while he was asleep by a girl who’d wandered in after one of his sisters had sent her away. But while other dragons accepted such attentions as their due, Julius had always found the setup extremely distasteful. He had just enough pride to resent being chased after solely because he was a dragon and for absolutely no other reason. Marci, on the other hand, had no idea what he was, but she was kissing him anyway, and it was very, very nice.
Cautiously, Julius lifted his hands to her face, cradling her head as he started to kiss her back. Her breath hitched at his touch, a little gasp of pleasure and surprise that set his heart pounding wildly. Emboldened, he leaned closer, pressing his body tighter against hers as he breathed her in. Not surprisingly, Marci smelled of human and magic, but also of soap and casting chalk and deep down, the smell that was just Marci, a warm, welcoming, feminine scent enhanced by the faintest tang of tears.
He stopped cold, fingers stuttering to a halt against her skin. What was he doing? Marci was upset. She’d been crying not thirty seconds before, and now he was groping her?
At this point, the part of him that really wanted to keep going loudly reminded Julius that she’d started it, but the rest of him knew it wasn’t that simple. Marci had just lost her father and had her life turned upside down. She’d been alone, basically homeless, living off barter and whatever money she could scrounge for the last four days, and that was before he’d made her stay up all night chasing dragons. Now she was exhausted, overwhelmed, and feeling excessively grateful to him, and if Julius took advantage of that, if he took advantage of her, he would be the absolute worst user in his entire family.
That thought was the kick that finally made Julius let go. He took a full step back, snatching his hands off her face. From so far away, he had an excellent view of Marci’s dazed expression turning to confusion, then horror as she realized what had just happened.
“Oh,” she said, looking down at the carpet as her cheeks got redder and redder. “I, um, I don’t suppose you could just forget that happened? Because I’m really sorry. ”
“You don’t have to apologize,” he said lamely. When she didn’t respond, he felt like kicking himself. He knew he needed to say something else, something better. Before anything came to mind, though, Marci turned away to face the window.
“I just ruined everything, didn’t I?” she whispered, biting her nails.
“You didn’t ruin anything,” he assured her quickly, but she didn’t look convinced. He ran his hand through his damp hair, scrambling to think of a way to explain his logic that wouldn’t sound like he was pitying her, but his brain was a complete blank. He was exhausted, his mind still soft and stumbling from the kiss. So with no solution in sight and Marci pulling further away by the second, Julius went with the only out he could think of: procrastination.
“Let’s just get some sleep,” he said softly. “We’ll talk about this in the morning. ”
He knew that was the wrong thing to say when her shoulders stiffened, but he didn’t know the right thing, and she wasn’t looking at him. So, with no ideas left to try, he grabbed his plate off the breakfast tray and quietly went back to his room.
Back in his suite, he sat down at his own table by the window and ate his food mechanically, shoving the eggs and bacon he’d ordered for himself down as fast as he could before drawing the blackout curtains and falling face down into the huge and strangely lonely hotel bed. But tired as he was, sleep refused to come.
He lay in the dark with his eyes open, trying not to listen for Marci moving on the other side of the wall, trying not to think about the possibilities that kiss opened, or how badly he’d bungled them, trying not to think at all. Unfortunately, his brain refused to shut up. Two hours later, he was still wide awake and buzzing with nervous energy. So, since sleep was clearly impossible, Julius got up, stripped off his new shirt and jeans, and dropped to floor in a plank position to set about trying to recover the ground he’d lost during seven years of hiding.
Thirty minutes later, he was panting like he’d never done a day’s work in his life. If Justin had been there, the I-told-you-so’s would have gone on for a month, but at least the lack of oxygen stopped his brain’s constant obsessing over kissing Marci.
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Mostly, anyway.
***
One of the nice things about being a dragon was that, with a little food and effort, you could recover just about any amount of lost ground. It would take a lot more than one morning’s work to get his speed and endurance back to where it had been when Justin had moved out, taking all of Julius’s motivation to stay fit with him, but six hours, multiple exercises, three more calls to room service, and one power nap later, Julius was showing marked improvement.
By the time noon rolled around, he’d actually managed to get back enough speed to pull off his favorite trick of all: pouring out a full cup of water and then dropping down fast enough to catch it in the cup again before the stream hit the floor. Of course, back when he and Justin were in their prime, they’d done two cups at a time. Justin could probably do three by now, but one definitely wasn’t bad, especially considering where Julius had started, and he felt quite accomplished as he grabbed an armful of towels from the closet and set to work mopping up all the spilled water from the practice runs off the bathroom floor.
He’d started exercising as a way to get his mind off Marci. Now, though, Julius was genuinely glad he’d done it. He hadn’t thought about it in years, but for a while there, he’d actuall
y been the fastest dragon of his age group. Even faster than Justin, who’d been the undisputed king of J clutch from the moment he’d hatched. Back then, he’d actually wondered if his speed was a sign of true talent. His mother, however, had been quick to knock him back down, pointing out (correctly) that the only reason Julius had gotten so fast was because he spent so much time running away. By that point, all of his siblings had discovered other, more subtle ways to torment him anyway, so he’d traded running for hiding, and his speed had correspondingly fallen off.
Julius didn’t feel much like hiding now. For the first time in his life, things actually seemed to be going his way. Not only had he gotten his reflexes back to a respectable level, but he was closing in on Katya. True, the trace he’d bought from his old guildmate hadn’t turned up anything yet, but it was still early for a dragon who’d gone on the run late last night. She was probably still asleep wherever she’d gone to hide. Eventually, though, she’d wake up, and the moment she used her phone to buy anything, he’d be able to find and talk to her at last. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but he was absolutely certain he wouldn’t use Svena’s chain on her, and reckless as it was, that made him happier than he’d been in a long, long time. And then, of course, there was Marci.
His eyes flicked yet again to the door connecting their rooms. He’d practically memorized the woodgrain by this point, but while Julius knew for certain he’d made a mess of things earlier, he was just as sure now that he could fix it. After all, Marci was a reasonable, clever, practical human. Surely once Julius explained that he hadn’t been rejecting her when he broke their kiss, she would understand. She might even kiss him again, which was definitely something to look forward to.
That happy thought was enough to send his already soaring optimism through the roof. He actually started whistling as he mopped the last of the water off the tile. When he was done, he tossed his sopping towel into the bathtub and grabbed a fresh one to dry himself. He was still toweling off his hair when his phone began to ring.