“Not Vegas.”
Justin stared at him. “Why not?”
Because Marci was from Vegas. “Just not there.”
His brother crossed his arms over his chest. “This is about your human, isn’t it?”
When Julius didn’t reply, the knight began to growl. “You can’t mope about her forever, you know.”
“It’s only been three days,” Julius reminded him.
“Yeah, well, it’s not like you didn’t know this was going to happen,” Justin snapped back. “She’smortal. Death’s in her definition.”
Julius’s jaw clenched. “Drop it, Justin.”
“No,” he said angrily. “This is ridiculous. You’re a dragon. I’m not going to let you waste your time pining for a—”
“I said drop it!”
The words came out in a roar that made everyone jump, including Julius. He hadn’t known he was capable of making a sound like that. At the same time, though, he had no intention of taking it back. He might not be hiding in his room anymore, but the memory of Marci’s death was still an angry wound in his chest. If Justin didn’t stop poking it, Julius couldn’t be held responsible for his actions.
“I’m not going to Vegas,” he said, more calmly now. “I’m not goinganywhereuntil—”
A loud noise cut him off. All through the mountain, claxons were sounding, their high-pitched wails cutting through the stone. The emergency lights cut on a second later, filling Bob’s dark cave with a red glow punctuated by bright-white flashes.
“What’s that?” Julius yelled, covering his ears against the painfully loud noise.
“The panic alarm,” Fredrick yelled back.
Julius paled. He’d never heard the panic alarm before. “What does it mean?”
“That there’s something worth panicking about,” Justin said, grabbing Julius’s arm and yanking him toward the door. “We need to get to the bunker STAT.”
“Shouldn’t we be running?” Because if there was something a mountain full of dragons needed to panic about, a bunker didn’t seem like it would do much good.
“No time,” Justin said as he pulled his brother into the hall. “Fredrick?”
“On it,” Fredrick said, darting past them down the flashing hall to the elevator, and then pastthatto what looked like a blank space on the wall. A space that turned out not to be blank at all when Fredrick pressed his fingers against a crack in the stone.
“Here,” he said, swinging the wall open to reveal a small emergency stair leading down.
Justin grinned. “Always count on an F to know the bolt-holes,” he said, shoving Julius inside. “Move.”
Julius didn’t wait to be told twice. He was already running down the stairs after Fredrick. Justin followed on his heels, pausing just long enough to close the secret door on the alarms blaring behind them.
***
They changed tunnels several times, following Fredrick through a labyrinth of secret passages that crisscrossed the normal hallways and staircases before eventually stopping at an elevator. Not a nice one, either. This was a terrifying-looking steel box on a cable at the top of an open shaft that went straight down. In all his years in the mountain, Julius had never seen anything like it. He couldn’t even say where in the fortress they were after all those turns, but he didn’t waste time asking questions. He just followed his brothers through the elevator’s open gate, sticking close to Justin as he hit the lone red button to start the drop.
Even plummeting through the dark at nauseating speeds, it still took a solid minute of falling before the stripped-down elevator finally jerked to a stop. When the steel cage rolled open, the stone of the hallway outside wasn’t even the same color as the mountain above, which Julius took as a sign that they were even deeper than the basement tunnel where Chelsie and the Fs hid their secret rooms. Deeper than he’d ever gone before, down below the roots of the mountain itself.
“This is crazy,” Julius whispered as Justin herded them out. “I knew the emergency bunker was deep, but notthisdeep.”
“That’s because it’s not,” Fredrick said, moving out of the way as Justin stomped past to punch a key code into the pad beside the metal door at the end of the short tunnel. “The emergency bunker is a quarter mile above us. This is the deep bunker.”
Julius gaped at him. “How many bunkers do we have?!”
“When everyone wants to kill you? Never enough,” Justin said as the light above the door turned green. “In.”
