Fredrick smiled. “I believe that’s my line. It seems I owe you another debt. Thanks to you, my clutch has a history for the first time in our lives. After six centuries of being Bethesda’s shame, we have a lineage with a mother and a father we can be proud of.”
“That wasn’t me,” Julius said, biting a chunk off of the tasteless, rock-hard ration. “You’d already figured out all the dots. I just happened to be there when they connected.”
“But you were the one who convinced Chelsie to own them,” Fredrick countered. “You got her to talk, which is more than I could ever do. You’d already freed us from being servants, but with this, you’ve freed us from Heartstriker as well, and for that we can’t thank you enough.”
He said this with absolute sincerity, but Julius was staring at him in horror. “Wait,” he said at last, swallowing the hard lump of ration. “What do you mean ‘freed us from Heartstriker?’ You’re not leaving, are you?”
“Why would we stay?” Fredrick asked, his not-quite-green eyes staring straight into Julius’s. “We were servants in this mountain for six centuries. To most Heartstrikers, that’s what we’ll always be. We were already dreading the fight for our rightful position as an upper-alphabet clutch, especially since we suspected we weren’t actually Bethesda’s children, but now we don’t have to worry about any of that. Thanks to you, we’re no longer the lowest clutch in Heartstriker, but the first clutch of the Golden Emperor.”
“We still don’t know how he’s going to take that.”
“It doesn’t matter how he takes it. It’s the truth. Even if he’s furious, unless the Qilin is ready to disavow us—and I think you’ll agree the dragon we met this morning is far too honorable for that—he has no choice but to welcome us as his children.” Fredrick broke into an excited grin. “Don’t you see? In one stroke, we’ve gone from servants in our own home to royalty. The children of an emperor! Do you know how much that will mean to my brothers and sisters? How much it means to me?”
Julius didnow. The truth had come out so quickly earlier, he hadn’t stopped to think about what these revelations would mean to the dragons of F-clutch. He hadn’t even considered the idea that they would leave, which was ridiculous in hindsight. Who’d want to stay and fight for recognition in the clan that had always treated them like trash when they could have a new start as the children of an emperor? Assuming the backlash of the Qilin’s luck didn’t kill them all, Julius could easily see Xian being over the moon to discover he had children. Once he got over his shock, he’d probably welcome all of them with open arms, and to his shame, Julius wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Heshouldhave been delighted. Ever since he’d learned the truth of their situation, he’d been fighting to free F-clutch, and what better future could he wish for them than one full of love and stability? At the same time, though, Julius had been really been looking forward to having at least one faction of Heartstrikers who didn’t view him only as a tool. He was also afraid of losing Chelsie, because if the Fs left, she would too, and why not? With the exception of Julius, their entire family hated and feared her. Without her children, she had no reason to stay, and selfish as it was, that made Julius incredibly sad. All of it did. Even if the cause was happy this time, he was sosickof losing the ones he cared about.
He was still trying to work through that tangled knot of emotion when his phone went off in his pocket.Loudly, which was strange since he distinctly remembered muting it. Once the ringtone made it past the first three notes, though, he understood why. His phone was playing the Imperial March fromStar Wars, which was the ringtone he’d assigned to the Unknown Caller.
Bob’s number.
Julius threw his half-eaten ration on the ground, grabbing the phone from his pocket as fast as he could. When the AR display popped up, though, he saw that it wasn’t actually a phone call. Bob had sent him a picture. A selfie, to be precise, and a bad one. His face was hardly in the shot at all. Instead, the focus was on the landscape behind him, which was one Julius realized with a jolt that he recognized. Bob was standing in the dirt lot under the Chance Street Skyway, just a couple blocks away from Julius and Marci’s old house in the DFZ. He was racking his brain over why Bob would send him a picture like this when the phone was snatched out of his hand.
There’d been no sound of a door opening, no footsteps on the stone floor, but given whose rooms they were in, Julius wasn’t surprised at all when he looked up to see Chelsie standing next to him with his phone clutched in her hands and a killer’s terrifying snarl on her face.
“Found you,” she growled.
“Chelsie,wait,” Julius said. “Let’s not jump to—”
But when had she ever listened? His phone clattered to the ground, flung from Chelsie’s hands as she lashed out at the empty space between them. Dragon magic followed the movement like a razor, slicing the air open like a claw through blubber before she dove into the gap, disappearing right in front of his eyes.
“No!”
Julius lunged after her, but all his reaching hands caught was empty air as the rip snapped shut again. When it was obvious she was really gone, he whirled on Fredrick. “What wasthat?”
“She teleported,” the F said grimly.
Julius had figured out that much already. “But how? She doesn’t have her Fang.” She hadn’t been carrying a weapon at all. Julius didn’t even think she’d been wearing shoes.
“She doesn’t need the Fang anymore,” Fredrick said proudly. “In case you couldn’t tell from all the wards she put on this place, my mother’s not a bad mage, and she used that Fang for six hundred years. That’s more than enough time for any reasonably clever dragon to reverse-engineer a spell.”
Julius still couldn’t believe it. “You mean Chelsie’s been able to teleport on her own thisentire time?”
“How else do you think she manages to be everywhere at once?” Fredrick said with a shrug.
That would explain a few things. “So she can teleport at will to anyone in the family?”
“No, that partwasthe sword,” Fredrick said. “As a relic of the Quetzalcoatl, the Defender’s Fang is directly connected to Heartstriker’s clan magic, and all of us through it. On her own, Chelsie can only cut to places she knows, and she can’t transport others. Without a blade, the holes she cuts are only big enough for her, and only if she’s fast.”
“But shecouldteleport to the DFZ?”
“Easily,” Fredrick said. “But don’t worry. Sword or no sword, she won’t lose to Bob.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Julius said, reaching down to grab his phone off the floor.
The seer’s picture was still on the screen. Julius flicked it away, pulling up his news feed instead. Sure enough, the ongoing evacuation of the DFZ was the top story on every network, followed by warnings about the unprecedented elevation of ambient magic levels.
“This is bad,” he muttered, turning the screen so Fredrick could see. “I don’t know what or why, but something terrible is about to happen, and Bob just lured Chelsie right into the middle of it.”
