“I know!” Marci yelled back, leaning recklessly off Julius’s back to scan the city below. “We have to figure out a way to talk to her, convince her to stop fighting.”
She’s not going to stop fightingwhileAlgonquin’s trying to destroy her.
“Then we’d better get to her before Algonquin throws another wave,” Marci said desperately. “She can’t keep this up. The DFZ’s the bigger spirit, but she doesn’t have Myron feeding her magic anymore, and she’s burning through it fast. Look.”
She pointed down at the buildings, which were all waving frantically like water plants in a storm. “I don’t know how much power it takes to make cement move like a snake, but I’m guessing a lot. With the seal still in place and no Merlin to pump extra magic into her, the DFZ’s bound to be out of gas soon. Once that happens, Algonquin can pound her into grit at her leisure.”
So what do we do?
“Stick to the plan,” Marci ordered. “We find the DFZ, defuse the situation, bring in Myron, and move on with Raven’s ploy while there’s still some city left to save.”
Or we could let them fight,the Empty Wind suggested, his glowing eyes eager.The DFZ has no Merlin, but as of right now, she’s still bigger than Algonquin. If we fought with her, we wouldn’t have to depend on Raven’s ruse. We could defeat Algonquin the old-fashioned way, smashing her power and draining her magic before she has a chance to call out to her Leviathan.
“Or we could drive her right into his slimy tentacles,” Marci pointed out. “We can’t take that risk. For all we know, her watery finger is already on the trigger.” She looked down at the flooded city, her face grim. “We stay the course.”
If you say so,the Empty Wind said bitterly, moving directly in front of Julius, who gave no sign he saw anything.I’ll go search for her, but be careful, Merlin. Algonquin’s back is to the wall, and the dragon’s not as fast as I am.
“That’s why you’re the one doing the looking,” she said with a smile. “I’ll be fine. Just be fast.”
Ghost’s sigh whispered through her head one last time, and then he was gone, vanishing into the rumbling night.
“So I only heard half of that conversation,” Julius said nervously, darting behind a huge building to hide them from Algonquin’s water spout, which was already rising again. “But I take it we’re staying up here while Ghost goes to look for…what again?”
“The spirit of the DFZ, soul of the city.”
“Right,” he said, landing on the side of the superscraper with his claws like a lizard on a tree. “And how do we find something like that?”
“Honestly, I have no idea,” Marci admitted. “But I’m hoping Ghost will—”
An earsplittingboomcut her off. It was so close, Marci’s first thought was that something had hit them. The fact that they were still in one piece proved that wasn’t the case, thankfully, but reality wasn’t much better.
Unsatisfied with merely flooding her enemy, Algonquin was now catapulting water directly into the city, flinging truck-sized shots of water at high speed directly into the DFZ skyline. One of these shots, the boom they’d heard, had scored a direct hit on the building they were hiding behind. As a result, the entire superscraper was now falling like a toppled tree, and Julius and Marci were on the wrong side.
“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 flyawayfrom 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 isthat?”
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.”
