Marci hadn’t considered that angle. Again, though, Ghost had seen her at her worst and her best. He was surly and grumpy, and more than a little disobedient, but he was hers. When the chips were down, he’d come through for her every time, and Marci always repaid loyalty.
“I promise I’ll be careful,” she said, digging out her maxi-dress, the only item of clothing she had left that might fit Amelia. “But I can’t go up against Vann Jeger with anything less than my best, and Ghost is part of that. It’ll be what it’ll be.”
“I suppose that’s the most I can ask for,” Amelia said, holding out her hand to accept the dress Marci offered. “You’ve already made it clear I can’t order you around. But would you take some advice from an old dragon?”
“Always,” Marci said. “What?”
Amelia smiled, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes. “Don’t let him see you weak.”
“Why now?” she asked, instantly suspicious.
“Because the thing you think of as your loyal cat is actually a spirit with more potential than any other in the world right now,” Amelia replied, smoothing the borrowed dress in her hands. “That kind of power doesn’t stay subservient willingly. I’m not saying it’s guaranteed, but if you don’t want to end up being his pet instead, I suggest you make sure that, whatever happens, you always have the upper hand.”
By the time she finished, Marci was cold inside. She didn’t want to believe what the dragon was saying, but at the same time, it made a lot of sense, especially since she could still hear Ghost’s purring voice in her head.
We can be very powerful together.
The memory made her shiver, and Marci turned away, walking to the door in long, purposeful strides. “Thanks for the advice. I’ll keep it in mind.”
“See that you do,” Amelia replied, standing up. “I’m going to use your shower. Good luck tonight.”
“You too,” Marci said, hurrying into the hall without looking back.
She went down the stairs just as fast, rubbing her arms to get rid of the creepy feeling that still clung to her like glue. She didn’t have time for this right now. It wasn’t that she was not grateful for Amelia’s advice, but Marci had talked a big game to Julius earlier about banishing Vann Jeger. To actually pull that off, she was going to need her wits about her, not off worrying about Ghost.
With that in mind, Marci pulled herself together, plastered a smile on her face, and raced out the front door. “Sorry that took so long!” she cried as she bounded down the steps. “Amelia had some last minute advice for…”
Her voice trailed off. As she’d asked, Julius was waiting for her beside the running truck, but he was no longer alone.
***
When his sister had gone upstairs with Marci, Julius had quietly fled outside to focus on calming down.
He knew he was being a wuss, freaking out about wearing a disguise when everyone else was doing their part, but he hadn’t expected to feel so…different. It wasn’t that he had any complaints about the illusion. If anything, Marci and Amelia had done their job too well. They’d transformed him into a picture perfect specimen of an ancient, ruthless, tyrannical dragon, which meant he now looked like the thing he hated most in the world.
This was even more horrible than he’d imagine. He’d gone into this with low expectations, but now that the illusion was finished, he couldn’t even look at himself without feeling like he’d done something he should apologize for, and the magic itself was even worse. Where Marci’s magic had always felt like a comforting blanket, Amelia’s felt like being caught in a dragon-sized bear trap, changing him from the inside out. He felt different, he walked different, he even smelled different. And while that was probably a good thing if Vann Jeger had anything resembling a dragon’s sense of smell, having your nose constantly filled with the scent of ancient, terrifying predator was stressful to the max. Even knowing it was fake, Julius couldn’t stop his subconscious from constantly freaking out about the giant dragon it was convinced was standing right behind him, which was a real liability when your plan for survival depended on you looking confident.
But awful as all this was, it was way too late to change the plan now. Like it or not, the illusion was here to stay, and so, after carefully placing Marci’s bag inside the truck like she’d asked, Julius closed his eyes to focus on not making a fool of himself. He was still working on it when his nose caught a new scent that made his own constructed menace feel like nothing. A scent that, in hindsight, he really should have expected an hour ago.
Under more normal circumstances, that would have been enough to send him over the edge, but apparently there were only so many shocks a dragon could take. He mostly just felt a sense of resignation as he turned to face the terrifying dragon who was actually standing behind him.
“Hello, Chelsie.”
The Heartstriker enforcer stepped out of the shadows beside the front porch, her green eyes glowing. “Not surprised to see me?” she said, resting her hand on the hilt of the Fang at her waist. “You’re getting better, Julius.”
“Never too late to improve,” he replied, trying for a smile only to fail utterly. “I guess you’re here to kill me, then?”
“If I was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Julius’s eyes widened. “So, Mother didn’t order you here to…you know…”
“Oh no,” Chelsie said. “Bethesda’s orders were very specific. I’m to kill Amelia first, then you, and then your human, just for good measure. After that, I’m supposed to sneak into Algonquin’s Tower and kill Justin so he can’t be used against us. You know, just make a nice, clean sweep of things.”
She swept her hand through the air as she finished, and Julius swallowed. “So why aren’t you?”
That was a suicidal thing to say, but Julius was genuinely curious, and it wasn’t like he could stop his sister from doing whatever she wanted anyway. Also, despite the cold, casual way she was talking about killing them all, Chelsie didn’t look half as deadly as she usually did. She looked more tired than anything. Tired and sad, her face haggard in the porch light’s dim glow.
“It’s been a long day,” she said at last, walking over to lean on the rusted truck beside him. “And surprising as you might find it, I don’t relish the idea of killing the one sister I’ve ever been close to and my baby brother in the same swoop. Especially not when said baby brother has finally grown the fangs to say something to Bethesda that wasn’t ‘yes’ or ‘I’m sorry.’”
Julius winced. “You heard that?”
“I was in the room when she called,” Chelsie said, her lips quirking in what might have been the ghost of a smile. “Ironic, isn’t it? The one time you actually act like a dragon, Mother decides to kill you for it.”
“But not you?” he said hopefully.
Chelsie frowned up into the dark. “I don’t believe in punishing whelps for learning what we teach them,” she said slowly. “And I don’t think you were wrong.”
“You don’t?”
He hadn’t meant for that to come out sounding so skeptical, but his sister just nodded. “Mothers shouldn’t ransom one family member against another,” she said quietly. “I told her as much a long time ago, and I’m still paying for it.”
There was a lifetime of anger simmering under that last sentence. It made Julius curious, but he knew better than to poke at old wounds, especially now. “So what are you going to do?” he asked instead. “If you’re not here to kill me, why are you here?”
“Because I can’t disobey,” she growled, turning to glare at him in the dark. “I don’t do this job because I enjoy it, Julius. I’m bound by oaths I can never break to obey the Heartstriker until she dies or I do. Fortunately, when Mother ordered me to go to the DFZ and kill you all, she neglected to set a time limit. By coming here tonight, I’ve obeyed her order to the letter, if not the spirit, but that’s still enough to free me from my obligations for the time being. So now the question becomes, what are you goi
ng to do?”
Julius blinked. “Me?”
“You’re all dolled up for something,” Chelsie said, looking him up and down. “Unless you’ve taken up cosplaying as an actual dragon, I can only assume this get-up is part of a plan to take down Vann Jeger, and I want in.”
He couldn’t have heard that right. “You want to help us fight Vann Jeger?”
Chelsie nodded.
“Why?”
“Weren’t you listening?” she snapped. “I. Don’t. Want. You. To. Die. I told you that last month. I told you that this morning. I’ve been bending over backwards to keep you alive ever since Mother booted you out of the mountain. I’m not about to throw all that work away just because you’re overly attached to your human and your brother’s a pig-headed moron.”
Julius stared at her in wonder. The way she said it made it sound like he was being chewed out, but that didn’t change the fact that Chelsie’s rant was still the nicest thing anyone in his family had ever said about him. “Thank you.”
“Don’t start,” she growled, looking away. “I’m doing this for me, not you. Mother loves a winner. I don’t know what crazy plan you’ve concocted tonight, but if I help you defeat Algonquin’s champion, there’s a chance Bethesda will be so impressed, she’ll rescind her order, and then I won’t have to kill you.”
Julius nodded rapidly. “And we can save Justin!”
Chelsie gave him a sideways look. “Say what?”
He quickly explained the plan to leverage banishing Vann Jeger against Algonquin to ransom Justin. Going through the steps again, it actually sounded a lot more solid than Julius remembered. By the time he finished, though, Chelsie was looking more skeptical than ever. “Do you really believe your human can banish an ancient spirit like Vann Jeger in thirty minutes?”
“She’s never been wrong about this sort of thing before,” Julius said. “I’m way more worried about my ability to keep Vann Jeger from crushing me before she finishes.”
“That makes two of us,” Chelsie said with a scowl. “But it’s too late to shift gears now. We’ll start with your plan, and when things go south, I’ll come and bail you out. If Vann Jeger doesn’t know I’m there, I should be able to land at least one good shot on him.”
“Thank you,” Julius said, sincerely touched. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate—”
“Then don’t.”
He winced at her harsh tone, and Chelsie sighed. “Save your gratitude until after I’ve actually done something,” she said, a little more gently this time. “Vann Jeger came by his reputation honestly, and I’m specialized to kill dragons, not spirits. If your plan to keep him distracted can buy us ten minutes, I can probably hold him off for the last twenty. After that, all bets are off.” She glanced up at the brightly lit house. “I just hope your mage isn’t a lot of hot air, or this is going to be a very short fight.”
“If she says she can do it, she can do it,” Julius said firmly. “I trust her.”
“That must be nice.”
Given who was speaking, Julius would’ve expected that to be sarcastic, but there was no venom in Chelsie’s voice. She actually sounded sincere, which, in turn, made him feel ridiculously grateful all over again. “I’m really glad you’re here,” he said, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder with a smile. “Thank you, Chelsie.”
His sister’s eyes widened and she jerked away, but not before Julius saw the flush that spread over her cheeks. “Yeah, well, you can consider it payback for you keeping your lips shut about how my Fang works,” she growled. “Which you are going to do, or I will take your lips off.”
“Of course,” he assured her, “I wasn’t going to say anything, anyway.”
Chelsie’s look told him she didn’t buy that for a second, but before she could say as much, Marci burst through the front door.
“Sorry that took so long!” she cried, running down the steps. “Amelia had some last minute advice for…”
She trailed off, her eyes jumping from Chelsie to Julius and back again, and then the air filled with the scent of her magic right before her bracelets lit up.
“Marci!” he cried, jumping between his battle-ready mage and his sister. “It’s okay! She’s here to help.”
“Is she?” Marci said coldly, not dropping her magic an inch. “Because the last time I saw her, she was trying to make you leave me to die.”
“That would have been easier,” Chelsie said, crossing her arms. “But Julius has convinced me you’re a vital part of the plan, so you may live for now.”
“And what about Amelia?” Marci demanded. “I’m no Heartstriker, but I know you’re Bethesda’s Shade. How do we know you won’t betray her to your mother while we’re gone?”
Chelsie shrugged. “Amelia is the Planeswalker. If she was injured, she would never be stupid enough to remain on this plane, so I see no reason to waste my extremely limited time looking for her until after the current crisis is resolved.”
That was some excellent logic if your goal was to avoid Bethesda’s orders. Terrible for everything else, of course, but Julius had the sneaking suspicion that his sister did this kind of mental side-stepping a lot. Not that he had a problem with that.
“Sounds great to me,” he said, yanking open the pick-up’s rusty door. “Shall we go? We’ve got a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in.”
Chelsie was in the car before he finished, settling into the passenger seat with her legs crossed and her sword resting on the dash like she was being chauffeured. Still scowling, Marci got in next, grabbing her bag from the back where Julius had set it and moving it to her lap. Ghost hopped out a second later, jumping up to sit under the windshield like he couldn’t wait to go on a trip. If Chelsie was surprised to see the spirit, though, she hid it perfectly, watching with her unnerving, all-seeing gaze as Julius climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the screwdriver, starting the engine for what would hopefully not be their final journey.
Chapter 15
They arrived at 8 Mile Road an hour before sunset.
As the official northern border of the DFZ, 8 Mile was the farthest you could get from the skyways and still be inside Algonquin’s domain. But where the other DFZ borders came with a buildup of businesses servicing state-side customers looking to jump the border just long enough to take advantage of the DFZ’s anything-goes vice laws, up here, there was nothing. Just grass, the rotting foundations of strip malls, and the perfectly straight skeleton of a road that hadn’t been used in decades.
“It’s kind of surreal,” Marci said, turning around to look back at the skyways rising like a double-layered reef behind them. “All this empty space not ten miles from downtown.”
“With good reason,” Julius said, covering his nose with his hand as he opened the door. “This magic’s even thicker than the stuff at your old place.”
That was a drastic understatement. Marci’s apartment at the hoarded cat house had been bad, but the magic here was like nothing Julius had ever experienced. Normally he had to focus to pick up on ambient magic, and even then it was only by smell. Now, he could actually feel the magic like a physical pressure on his skin. The only thing that even came close was the Pit where they’d faced Bixby last month. But while 8 Mile magic didn’t reek of death like the Pit had, it still made him nervous, prickling the back of his neck like he was being hunted.
“That’s because we are,” Chelsie said when he mentioned it, glaring at the landscape like it had insulted her. “The magic here is too thick for what you’d normally find this far from the Reclamation Land border. It could just be backlash from Justin kicking the anthill, but I wouldn’t bet on it.” She climbed out of the truck, stepping into the tall grass silently as a cat. “I’m going to have a look around. Keep your nose sharp.”
Julius nodded, but his sister was already walking away at a speed that would have been a run for a human. A few seconds later, she vanished into the long shadow of an abandoned car. There was no flash, no portal, not even
a blip in the pea-soup magic. The moment she stepped into the shadow, she was simply gone, leaving only the empty grass swaying in the evening breeze.
“Wow,” Marci said. “What is she, Heartstriker Batman?”
“Close enough,” Julius said, looking down the road at the line of abandoned gas stations, strip malls, and fast food joints. Or, at least, those were his best guesses. After sixty years of neglect, it was getting hard to tell what any of the crumbling buildings had been, especially since nature seemed to be working overtime to take the ruins back.
Everywhere his eyes fell, plants were growing. Huge tufts of grass had cracked the old parking lots and sidewalks into a lattice-work, while trees and bushes grew out windows and doors, exploding out of the old buildings wherever the sunlight touched. If it wasn’t for the creepy magic hanging over everything like an anvil in a cartoon, the view would have been peaceful in a return-to-nature, post-apocalyptic sort of way. With the magic, the lovely, overgrown ruins only served as a reminder of whose land this was, and how unwelcome they were in it.
Julius turned away with a shudder, holding out his hand to help Marci out of the middle seat. “Come on. Let’s get set up.”
“Way ahead of you,” she said, placing a brand new can of spell-ready spray paint into his offered hand.
He looked at it in confusion. “What’s this for?”
“We’re drawing a circle big enough to trap a fjord,” Marci explained, pulling two more cans out of her bag. “We’re going to need a lot of coverage. You take that can and paint a line on the ground going left until it runs out. I’ll go right and do the same. Once both cans are empty, we’ll come back, get two more, and do it again going north and south to form a cross. Once we’ve got our guide lines, we’ll just connect the four ends in a roughly circular fashion. Just make sure you arc out so we don’t end up with a diamond.”