Lao bared his teeth. “Do not speak that name!”
“If you can’t talk about the problem, that’s a problem,” Julius said stubbornly. “If you really cared about him, you wouldn’t be enabling this.”
“That’senough,” the emperor snarled, hands curling into fists as the mountain shook again. “You aredismissed, Heartstriker!”
That was a final warning if Julius had ever heard one. This time, though, he took it, hurrying out the door as fast as his feet would carry him.
Fredrick pounced on him the moment he got into the hall. “What happened?”
“Tell you later,” Julius promised, grabbing his arm. “Right now, we need to go.”
He started to run, but Fredrick didn’t follow. No matter how hard Julius yanked on him, he remained frozen in the doorway, staring at the unveiled Qilin’s face as though he’d never seen a dragon before. It wasn’t until Lao starting marching toward them that the F finally snapped out of it, letting Julius pull him back into the hall seconds before Lao slammed the door in their faces.
“What was that about?” Julius yelled at his brother.
Fredrick raised a shaking hand to his face. “I—”
He cut off, his head snapping up. Julius jumped, too, hand going instinctively for his missing sword as he looked around to see what had alarmed his brother.
It wasn’t a long search. At the end of the hall, one of the twin red dragons who served the Empress was standing at the door to Bethesda’s treasury. Since they tended to come in pairs, Julius looked immediately for the other one. Sure enough, the second red dragon was behind them, blocking the doorway that led back to the throne room. This meant Julius and Fredrick were now trapped in the hallway between them. A trap that was rapidly closing now that the Qilin had kicked them out.
“Looks like the empress hasn’t forgotten about killing us,” Fredrick whispered as the red dragons began to move, stalking down the hallway toward their pincered prey in deadly, silent strides.
Julius had been thinking the same thing. “Is there another way out?”
“Not without going through them.”
Fat chance of that. Fredrick might be old and bigger than expected, but Julius was still just a J. A fast one, perhaps, but definitely not Justin. He didn’t even have his Fang thanks to Lao’s requirement that he disarm.
He could actually see his sword from where they were standing, leaning against the wall right where he’d left it by the door to his mother’s sitting room. It was barely twenty feet away, but it might as well have been with Ian in Siberia for all the chance Julius had of getting to it before the red dragons caught him. Unless he was hiding something under his fitted jacket, Fredrick didn’t have a weapon either, which meant not only were they facing superior opponents in tight quarters, they were doing it completely unarmed. Julius was still processing how epically screwed that made them when a hand grabbed his shoulder.
It was a tribute to the insanity of his optimism that Julius’s first thought was that Justin had somehow known he was in trouble and come back to do his knightly duty. The biggest J did have a sixth sense for violence, and it wouldn’t be the most unlikely stunt Julius had seen his brother pull off. When he snapped his head back to look, though, it wasn’t Justin who was standing behind him.
It was Chelsie.
Both red dragons froze. For several heartbeats, no one moved, and then one of the dragons said something in Chinese. Chelsie answered in the same language, speaking the unknown words in the low, terrifying voice she normally saved for siblings who’d particularly pissed her off. Even not knowing what was being said, the sound was enough to send chills up Julius’s spine, and he wasn’t the only one. Both of the approaching dragons were now backing off, putting up their hands in the universal gesture of surrender. When they’d shuffled all the way back to their respective ends of the hall, Chelsie’s hold on Julius’s shoulder turned into a shove.
“Move.”
“But my sword’s still—”
“We’ll get it later,” she growled, leading the way into Bethesda’s human bedroom, the one she used on the rare occasions she didn’t feel like sleeping on a pile of gold. “The fearsome twosome learned not to try me in close quarters a long time ago, but they won’t stay cowed for long. They’re probably already getting help, which means we need togo.”
That explanation raised more questions than it answered, but Julius didn’t have time to ask any of them. Chelsie had already shut the door, locking them inside their mother’s bedchamber, which was apparently the only room the Qilin’s kamikaze cleaning squad hadn’t touched yet. Julius was still wondering why Chelsie had sealed them inside an apparent dead end when she herded them both into the sprawling maze that was Bethesda’s walk-in closet. Once there, Chelsie went straight to the back, shoving aside a curtain of million-dollar dresses and hauling up the crimson carpet beneath them to reveal a wooden door the size of a porthole set flush into the stone beneath.
“Get in,” she ordered, yanking the wooden door up to reveal a narrow hole going straight down.
Fredrick obeyed first, jumping down the dark chute feet first without hesitation. Julius wasn’t quite as brave, sitting on the floor as he eased himself into the bolt-hole. “Where does this go?”
Chelsie looked nervously over her shoulder. “Somewhere safe.”
“Good,” Julius said. “Because we need to talk.”
Chelsie didn’t look happy with that announcement, but she didn’t waste time arguing. She just shoved him down the escape and hopped in after him, catching her fall on the edge one-handed before reaching up with the other to close the secret door, plunging them all into the dark.
***
Fenghuang, Consort to the last Qilin, the Empress Mother, kept the look of relief off her face only through untold centuries of practice. “So he’s chased the meddling Heartstriker out?”
