“That’s all right,” the Black Reach replied. “He will be.”
“He won’t,” Julius said angrily. “I’ve already figured out his plan. We’re all in position to fight the Leviathan. He doesn’t need to be here.” And he definitely wouldn’t come if he knew the Black Reach was waiting, which he must. “He won’t come.”
“He doesn’t have a choice,” the Black Reach said, meeting Julius’s determined scowl with a sad look. “Hemustcome, because you are here. You are the point around which his entire life’s work revolves, and now, fittingly, you will be his end.” He smiled, a cold turn of his lips that didn’t touch his eyes. “I like things to be fitting.”
Julius didn’t know how to respond. He wanted to shout that the seer was wrong, that Bob would never be stupid enough to walk into such an obvious trap, but that was a trap of its own. He’d learned long ago that seers didn’t lie. They didn’t have to. They were the only ones who saw the entire board, but unlike everyone else in the house, Julius had changed his future before. He’d beaten Estella when every vision of the future said it was impossible. He could beat this too. But just as he was opening his mouth to say so, he was knocked off his feet by an enormous crash as something very large going very fast collided with his house.
***
Three minutes earlier, Brohomir, Great Seer of the Heartstrikers and topic of much conversation, was standing in the bed of the once swollen Detroit River, digging the point of his Mage’s Fang into the too-dry mud and muttering to himself like the madman most dragons assumed he was.
“Not good. Not good, not good.”
A coo sounded a few feet farther down, and he jogged over to his pigeon, who was drinking from a small pool left in the hollow of a long-abandoned oil drum. The only water left in the entire riverbed.
“This is not good,” Bob said again, scrubbing his hands through his long black hair. “How much water does she have left in Lake Erie?”
His pigeon shrugged her wings, but it didn’t matter. Bob knew exactly how much water was left in every Great Lake because he’d already seen this future a thousand times. He’d seeneverypossible incarnation of this day, enough to know that this wasn’t the one he’d been hoping for.
“Very not good,” he muttered, pulling out his phone to glance at the clock on the tiny greenish screen. “Looks like we’re stuck on a faster-than-preferred track. It’s going to be tight.”
The pigeon hopped onto his shoulder with a reassuring coo, and he turned to kiss her feathered neck. “I suppose it had to be late, didn’t it? I promised you a grand adventure, and no grand adventure has ever ended with time left on the clock.”
That was supposed to be a joke, but he couldn’t keep the tremble out of his voice as he raised his head to look at the shadow above them. The pigeon looked as well, her dark eyes ancient and calm.
We are big from your perspective, aren’t we?She tilted her head.How interesting. I’ve never seen an End from this perspective before.
“I told you I’d show you new things,” Bob said, craning his neck as he tried to spot the Leviathan’s end.
There wasn’t one. The devil Algonquin had bargained with took up the entire sky, blocking out the sun behind an endless expanse of matte black shell and thousands of beady insect eyes. Below the giant body, thousands of whipping tentacles were hard at work, sucking up every bit of the remaining water from Algonquin’s lakes. One actually dropped down beside him as he watched, descending from the sky like a long, undulating pipe to suck up the small puddle of water his pigeon had just been drinking from. When it was done, the tentacle moved on, its bulbous tip digging through the riverbed like an anteater’s snout as it hunted for more water to absorb. Bob kicked the black flesh as it went past, earning himself a bruised toe for his efforts.
“Time to go,” he said, taking one last look at his bloody clothes. The scarlet jacket had been one of his favorites, but it was getting a bit frayed at the edges, which was why he’d decided to wear it. A duel with Chelsie was a fine way for any garment to go out. Between his shoulder and the bloody finger holes his furious sister had put in the front, the jacket was definitely done, so Bob didn’t spare it another thought as he changed to his true shape, shredding the once beautiful clothing to ribbons as he flapped into the sky with his transformed Fang of the Heartstriker sitting across his claws like gauntlets, protecting him from the swirling, glowing magic below.
“Hop on!” he called to his pigeon, who was struggling to keep up with his much bigger wings. “We’ve got to move fast. I’ve already seen every way this ends, and if we don’t stick millimeter-tight to the schedule, this whole thing could blow up in our—”
He cut off with a pained grunt. Behind him, absolutely silent, the tentacle he’d kicked had suddenly whipped back around. Bob had calculated the chances of the monster noticing such a tiny blip as minuscule, but he clearly hadn’t given the Nameless End enough credit, because the black appendage curled up into the air like a coiled whip to smack him out of the sky.
If he’d been human, the blow would have killed him instantly. As a dragon, it merely sent him rocketing toward the ground, crashing through the broken Skyways and into the roof of what had been one of the last intact buildings left in the DFZ.
Chapter 3
Julius grabbed Marci and dove, rolling them both out of the way just in time to avoid the hunks of splintered wood. The dragon came in like a meteor, shooting straight through the attic and the second floor right above their heads before landing with a crash in the gravel driveway out front. It was still rolling over and over when Julius felt the familiar burn of Marci’s magic snap like a broken rubber band. The ward, he realized numbly. The ward protecting the house had been broken, which meant…
“Ghost!”
Marci screamed the name beneath him, and suddenly, the spirit was there, but not as Julius remembered. This was no fluffy transparent ghost cat. It wasn’t even the shadowy figure of the faceless Roman legionnaire that seemed to be the Empty Wind’s preferred combat form. This was a giant. A mountain of a man eight feet tall who blew in on a wind even colder than Svena’s ice. His dusky flesh was still dark, but it was no longer shadowy or see-through. Quite the opposite, the spirit now looked even more solid than Julius himself. With so much magic crammed inside him, Ghost had a weight to him that no living thing could match. Julius could actually feel his own magic bending toward the spirit like metal shavings toward a magnet as Ghost held up his hand to stop the flood of iridescent power rising up to swallow them.
He also stopped the collapse of the house, which, now that there was a dragon-sized hole blasted straight through the middle, was no longer structurally stable. The chimney fell over as Julius watched, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the living room. He was looking up to make sure the roof wasn’t about to follow suit when he saw Marci’s spirit looking down at them.
As always, the Empty Wind’s face matched his name—an empty helmet with two blue-white glowing eyes floating like fireflies inside—but here, too, something was different. It wasn’t just shadows in there anymore. This was a deeper darkness. Staring into it, Julius could almost feel himself being forgotten, as if his bones were already crumbling dust. It was horrifying, but he couldn’t force himself to look away. He was trapped in the sudden realization of his own mortality, the truth that even a dragon like him would eventually die and be forgotten. They wouldallbe forgotten, and—
Marci reached up and slapped her hands over his eyes, breaking the spell. Julius collapsed into her the moment the darkness let him go. He was still gasping when he heard her yell at Ghost. “I thought that only worked on the other side!”
“So did I,” replied a thousand empty voices.
“Well, can you tone it down or something?”
There was a long pause, and then the freezing wind began to slack off. “Sorry,” Ghost said in a far more normal—but still incredibly creepy—voice. “It’s just… I’ve never had this much magic before. It’sincredible.”
