She sank as she finished, the final remains of her human disguise vanishing into the black water without a sound. The Leviathan disappeared at the same time, his giant body melding into the shadows as though he’d never been anything but one of them. When they were both gone, the water covering the floor of the Pit began to drop.
“What’s happening?” Marci asked.
Raven shook his huge head in dismay. “Nothing good.”
The words weren’t out of his beak before Marci felt the truth for herself. It wasn’t the water that was receding. It was Algonquin. The lake spirit was collapsing into herself, her waters pulling back into her lake like the tide going out. And as the water drained, the pressure began to build.
“Not good,” Raven said, spreading his enormous wings to fly back up to the Skyways. “Not good, not good, not—”
A horrible sound cut him off. Marci covered her ears, but that didn’t help at all, because the violent roar wasn’t a physical noise. It was magic. Algonquin’s magic was roaring like Niagara Falls as she pulled everything—every drop, every wave, every bit of magic in every lake—into the center of Lake St. Clair. Through the new cracks in the Pit’s protective walls, Marci could actually see the water rolling itself into a giant ball as Algonquin pressed herself tighter and tighter, and still the pressure rose.
And then, just when it felt the tension would keep building forever, something big cracked.
***
Under normal circumstances, Julius would have struggled to keep up with the larger dragons flying around him. Tonight, though, they were struggling to keep up with him.
“Slow down!” Chelsie yelled over the wind. “I know you’re in a hurry, but it’s all for nothing if you tear a wing.”
“Something’s gone wrong!” he shouted back. “We have to get to Marci!”
“I’d be more worried about ourselves,” Fredrick said, flying up beside him. “Look down.”
Julius didn’t have to look. He couldfeelAlgonquin’s magic sucking in as she curled herself into what he could only assume was the spirit equivalent of the fetal position. Either that, or she was building up for an all-out final attack. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good, and he had to get everyone he cared about far away from it as fast as possible. Especially his sister, who was doing all of this with herchildclinging to her back.
“I still can’t believe you brought ababyinto this!” he shouted at her.
“What else was I supposed to do?” Chelsie shouted back. “I couldn’t leave her alone! She’s a hatchling, and Bob’s still down there somewhere. As is the Empress Mother.”
“And taking her into a fight with Algonquin is better?”
“Absolutely,” his sister said. “She’s a dragon. Going into battle with your mother used to be a rite of passage. If Amelia were still alive, she could tell you all kinds of stories about the ridiculous things Bethesda made them do.”
“Actually,” Julius said, smiling for the first time since this started, “I meant to tell you, Amelia is—”
He cut off with a choke, eyes bulging. Behind him, the others gasped as well. Even the Qilin faltered, his golden body jerking.
A second later, Julius realized it wasn’t just them. The wholeworldwas jerking. The air, the ground, the buildings—everything he could see was hitching and splintering like the epicenter of a magnitude-nine earthquake. Terrifying as that was, though, what nearly dropped Julius out of the sky was what was happening on theinside, deep in the core of his fire.
There was no pain, no injury he could identify. Just an unyielding pressure accompanied by the absolute knowledge that something had gone horribly, fatally wrong.
“Julius!”
He forced his head up to see Chelsie hovering beside him, her green eyes pained. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, forcing the words out.
“It’s magic,” the Qilin said, his normally calm voice on the edge of panic. “Everything is in uproar. What is happening?”
“I don’t know,” Julius said again, forcing his wings to keep flapping. “But Marci will. We have to get to her.”
Chelsie scowled. “I don’t know if that’s—”
But he was already gone, putting on a burst of speed before folding his wings to dive down past the now-dry lakebed and through the broken walls that were supposed to protect Algonquin’s water from the Pit. The others followed a second later, matching his speed as they raced through the no-longer-flooded Underground cavern following Marci’s scent...and then nearly ran over Marci herself, who was flying up with Ghost to meet them.
Julius was too relieved to speak. He didn’t even mind her freezing spirit as he landed hard to grab her in his wings. “Are you okay?”
“Right now? I’m fine,” she said quickly. “Long term, not so much.”
