“What happened?” Chelsie demanded, checking her dive with her wings.
“The stupidest thing possible,” said an irritated voice above them.
Chelsie’s head shot up, and then her eyes went wide as the giant red dragon with feathers made of actual fire swooped down to grin at her.
“What?” Amelia said. “No hello?”
“What are you doing here?” Chelsie yelled at her. “You’redead!”
“So people keep telling me,” Amelia said with chuckle. “But I’ll have to explain later. Algonquin’s hissy fit just broke the Merlins’ seal, which means we’re about to get one thousand years of pent-up magic in the face unless we move.”
“Move to where?” Julius said frantically. “That doesn’t sound like something you can dodge.”
He was looking at Amelia, but it was Marci who answered. “Got it covered,” she said, scrambling up onto Julius’s back. “Head for our house.”
Julius blinked. “Our house? You mean the one here in the city?”
She nodded rapidly. “Remember all the wards I put up? I know it feels like forever, but we’ve onlyactuallybeen gone for a week and a half, which is well inside the upkeep window. If the building’s still standing, all my protections should still be on it, but we gotta move fast. Ghost estimates we’ve only got a couple of minutes before the wave hits us.”
“Less than that,” the Empty Wind said, giving Julius a freezing push. “Stop talking andgo.”
Julius didn’t wait to be told twice. He took off like a rocket, keeping his wings tight to make sure Marci stayed on as he wove his way through the now bone-dry Pit. “What about the others? Myron and the rest?”
“Already ahead of us,” Marci yelled over the wind. “I told them where to go before I went looking for you.”
Any other time, hearing that would have made his heart skip. This time, though, Julius couldn’t do anything except fly, racing through the collapsed Underground on memory and instinct until he reached the spiral of onramps that hid the house Ian had rented them.
Please be there,he prayed as he dove into the tunnel that led through the spiral of cracked overpasses.Please don’t be destroyed. Please. Please.
He burst out into the open again, spreading his wings to check his speed before he slammed them into the opposite wall. It all happened so fast, he didn’t see anything at first but a blur of light and dirt. Once he was sure he wasn’t going to crash, he looked up and saw what he’d been hoping to see.
“It’s still here,” he said, staring in wonder at their miraculously uncrushed three-story house. “It’s still intact!”
“Except for the wall Conrad chopped in half when Estella came for me,” Amelia said, flying in right behind them. “Marci, help me fix it. Best ward in the world’s no good if you’ve got a big honking hole in the front.”
Marci nodded and hopped down, sliding off Julius to run after Amelia. Chelsie, Fredrick, and the Qilin were swooping in now as well. Raven was already here, and alotbigger. He barely fit inside the slashed-up porch where he and Emily were frantically fitting the front door and parts of the wall that Conrad had cut in half back together.
“Should we be doing this, sir?”
Julius looked over his shoulder to see Fredrick standing behind him. And above him, since the F was easily five times Julius’s size in this form.
“What else would we be doing?”
“Going back to Heartstriker Mountain, for a start,” Fredrick said, lifting his claws, which were still encased in his Fang. “Bethesda’s still there. Probably in her panic room. It’ll take a few trips, but I can cut us all back to her, and a bunker under a mountain seems much safer than—”
“NO!” Amelia yelled, appearing above them in a flash of red fire to smack Fredrick’s claws back to the ground. “No teleporting!”
“Don’t yell at him!” Chelsie snapped, getting physically between Fredrick and her sister. “It was a good idea.”
“Maybe under normal circumstances,” Amelia said. “But there’s nothing normal about this! Just because the ambient magic isn’t literally crushing us to death yet doesn’t mean it’s not going haywire. Do you have any idea what would happen if we opened a portal of any sort under these—” She froze, eyes going huge. “I have to warn Svena.”
“If you know not to do it, I’m sure the White Witch does, too,” Chelsie said, dropping her dragon form with a puff of smoke, which left her standing naked on the stairs with a baby dragon the size of a Doberman clutched in her arms. “If this is as safe as we’re going to get, we stay. Everyone inside.”
The other dragons changed, too, running after her into the house, except for Amelia, who stayed to help Marci, Myron, and Raven with the front porch. Julius should have followed suit. He might be small, but his dragon was still too big to fit through the newly repaired front door. Unlike Amelia, though, he couldn’t conjure up clothing at will, and there was no emergency in the world that could get him to be naked in front of so many, especially not at his own house.
So while everyone else was busy out front, Julius hopped into the air again to wing his way around to the back of the house. He landed on the roof, sliding the window to his bedroom open with one claw before changing shape and diving inside. The second he was in, he grabbed the first clothes he saw and started shoving himself into them. He was still pulling a shirt over his head when Chelsie burst in.
He had no idea how she’d managed it ahead of him, but she was wearing one of Marci’s college T-shirts and cut-off jean shorts. She didn’t even ask permission before she walked over to Julius’s dresser and started tossing clothes to Fredrick and the Qilin, who were right behind her. As for her daughter, she was still in dragon form and climbing the walls like a lizard, poking her claws through the drywall to keep herself up, and thoroughly enjoying the chaos.
