“He doesn’t ‘play’ nice,” Bethesda said, her voice disgusted. “Heisnice.”
“But that’s to our advantage right now,” Marlin Drake pointed out. “He’s the right tool for the job.”
“That doesn’t make him any less embarrassing,” Bethesda snapped, pressing a dramatic hand to her temple. “How didIend up with such a son?”
Julius knew better than to bother with that one. He was about to move the conversation on when Raven—who was normal bird-sized again—swooped out of the shadows to land on Amelia’s shoulder.
“Finally,” she said, grinning at her fellow spirit. “Are you here to clear us for takeoff?”
“Alas, I am not,” Raven replied. “The ground convoys are moving thanks to absurd amounts of shielding, but flight is still too dangerous.”
“Then why are you butting your beak in?” Amelia asked. “This is dragon business.”
“Because you and I need to go,” Raven replied, his voice dropping. “It’s started.”
Amelia’s face turned deathly pale, and a heavy lump formed in Julius’s stomach. “What does that mean?” he demanded. “What’s started?”
“Nothing you can help with,” Raven said, flapping into the air. “This isn’t a matter for mortals. We’ll handle it. You just focus on killing the bits you can reach.”
Every dragon in the circle looked dangerously offended at being lumped in with mortals, but the bird spirit had already vanished, winking out of existence in front of Julius’s eyes. Amelia followed suit, vanishing in a lick of flame.
With the Spirit of Dragons gone and everything on hold until they could fly, the rest of the circle broke up as well, the clan heads walking back to inform their dragons of the plan. Since Bethesda and Ian were already explaining the situation to the Heartstrikers, Julius took the opportunity to head for General Jackson so they could discuss how the UN and dragon forces were going to fight together, hopefullywithoutanyone shooting anyone else in the back. This left Bob sitting forgotten and alone on the front porch step—the only part of the house that was still standing now that Bethesda had flattened it—slowly chewing his apple with his eyes closed and his pigeon on his shoulder, keeping him company as he searched and searched through the ocean of the future for the one drop where they lived.
Chapter 9
Marci clung to Ghost’s freezing back, looking nervously over her shoulder at the debris-scattered spiral of on-ramps that had once hidden their house, and now hid every dragon in the world. “Are yousurethey’ll be okay? We’ve never tried anything like this before. What if your shield goes down because you got too far away?”
“It will be fine,” the Empty Wind said, sweeping them through the dark city on a gust of grave-cold wind. “The only reason I never did this before was because I didn’t have the power. With the magic I have now, maintaining a barrier is so simple, I don’t even have to think about it.”
“Please think about it a little,” Marci begged. “We’re playing fast and loose enough as it is. The last thing we need is for our entire army to get crushed because we weren’t paying attention.”
Her spirit harrumphed, but she felt his magic shift through their connection, pushing more power behind them. “Satisfied?”
She nodded, grabbing Ghost’s shoulders to pull herself up taller. She was riding on his back like a monkey with her feet planted on his hips and her hands gripping the freezing, ropey muscles on either side of his neck below his helmet. It was extremely undignified, but Marci far preferred it to being carried around in his arms like a fainting damsel. If nothing else, it was easier to see where they were going this way, not that she liked what she saw.
“Wow,” Marci breathed, eyes growing wide.
Other than the streets immediately surrounding their house, the city was in ruins. She’d known it would be bad—she’d been standing on one of the buildings the DFZ had thrown at Algonquin, so it wasn’t as if any of the destruction was new—but seeing the full extent of it lying still and dead under the dark of the Leviathan’s shadow was gut wrenching. The famous double-layered city of Skyways and underpasses looked more like a pile of rubble. Everything—the superscrapers and the megafactories, the elegant treed boulevards by the water and the giant apartment bricks that held up downtown—was destroyed. Even the famous neon streets of the Underground were dark and empty, their long-hidden roads exposed under the broken Skyways, most of which had been wiped out completely, leaving lines of skeletal support pillars sticking up from the ruined city like jagged bones.
Itfeltdead too. A few fires still sputtered in the wreckage, but otherwise there was no light at all. Aside from their house, all the power in the city was out, leaving the ruins a broken jumble of muted blacks and grays beneath the stain of the Leviathan’s shadow. Nothing moved in the dark, nothing made a sound. Even the seagulls were gone, leaving the banks of Lake St. Clair empty save for the corpses of thousands of dead fish. The stench was enough to make Marci retch even from this far away. She covered her nose with her arm, motioning for Ghost to take them west, toward the inland half of the city.
“I hope the spirit of the DFZ will be okay,” she said as Ghost flew them over the pile of rubble that had once been Marci’s favorite discount magical supplies warehouse. “I don’t know how the city is going to come back from this.”
“She’ll be fine,” the Empty Wind assured her. “She’s a Mortal Spirit. An idea, not a place. So long as people remember the DFZ, she will live on, and she will rebuild. The only reason she hasn’t started already is because she’s been busy with the Leviathan.”
“He certainly does dominate the conversation,” Marci grumbled, glowering at the black shape that filled the sky high above their heads.
The Nameless End looked even bigger now that they were out in the open. As fast as Ghost had to be flying, if Marci didn’t look at the ground, she wouldn’t have known they were moving at all. But implacable as the enemy above them looked, Ghost’s words gave her hope. When this was over, the DFZ would be the only place in the world ruled by aMortalSpirit. A power that rose not of the land, but from the ideas and dreams of the humans that lived in it. Marci had already seen the DFZ move buildings like fingers and twist overpasses like vines during her fight with Algonquin. What could that power do when it came to rebuilding? Could she sprout new superscrapers from the ground? Lift the broken Skyways back into place like a surgeon setting a bone?
Marci didn’t know, but she desperately wanted to see it. Reason number eighty thousand to beat the Leviathan and stay alive.
As expected of the aftermath from a fight between a city and a lake, the damage was largely concentrated along the water. Downtown and the other shore districts were an absolute mess, but the farther inland they flew, the less dire things looked. By the time they reached the tumbledown houses of the old University District at the border of Reclamation Land, the landscape below looked almost normal. Better than normal, actually, because the hazy, pea-soup magic leaking over the fence from Algonquin’s spirit paradise was gone. True, it had been replaced by the even thicker magic of the crash, but that was already starting to feel natural. From the shimmer of Ghost’s magic surrounding them, Marci knew the ambient magic must still be crazy high, but at least there was no more glowing snow rising from the ground.
“Looks like it’s finally fading,” she said as Ghost set them down. “How does it feel to you?”
“Thinner,” the spirit reported. “Ten, maybe twenty more minutes, and we won’t need a shield at all.”
“That’s good news,” Marci said, glancing again at the Leviathan, which still filled the sky in every direction for miles. “If our counterattack doesn’t get up in the air soon, there’ll be nothing left to defend.”
