“Okay,” Chelsie said, crossing her arms in front of her daughter, who’d fallen asleep in her lap after she’d finished her second pizza. “What’s his plan, then?”
Amelia bit her lip. “I… don’t know,” she said after a long pause. “Knowing your future changes it, so he couldn’t tell me anything past my death, but Iknowhe’ll come through. He’s never let us down before.”
Chelsie looked away. “Speak for yourself.”
“Would you knock it off?” Amelia growled. “Your secret’s out, Chelsie. We all know that mess in China was entirely your own making. You’ve been blaming everything on Bob for centuries, but he wasn’t the one who panicked and bolted. Bob could have just let the Empress Mother kill you, butno. He pulled a miracle out of his ear and got Bethesda to China to beg for your life. It’s thanks to him that you’re still alive to hold your grudge. How can you be so ungrateful?”
Chelsie opened her mouth to retort, but Fredrick beat her to it. “Ungrateful?” he snarled, moving away from Julius to stand behind his mother. “Brohomir left us to be Bethesda’s slaves forsix hundred years! He only cares about his future, not about those who suffer to create it!”
Marci leaned back in her chair. She’d never seen the normally quiet F this angry. Amelia was looking uncharacteristically pissed off as well, with dangerous curls of smoke leaking out from between her lips. The atmosphere in the kitchen was getting so tense, Marci was considering preemptively ducking under the table when Julius suddenly stood up.
“You’re both wrong.”
The whole kitchen turned to look at him. His time as clan head must have done something, though, because Julius didn’t even flinch at all when all those predatory eyes landed on him. He just stared back, and when he spoke, his voice was steady and sure.
“Bob’s not nice,” he said. “But he’s not evil, either. He’s not like Bethesda, who steps on dragons for the joy of feeling taller, but he’s also not afraid to crush us under his heel if that’s what he feels he needs to do to guarantee the future he wants. Like Fredrick, I don’t think that’s right, but it also doesn’t mean that Amelia is wrong.” His green eyes flicked to Marci. “As someone very smart told me earlier today, Bob’s the reason we’re in a lot of these messes, but he’s also the one who made sure we got out,andhe’s the one who brought us all together here.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Fredrick asked angrily. “No offense, Great Julius, but we’re cowering in a hovel while an enemy we may not even be able to fight is coming to power above our heads. If this was truly the work of a seer and not mere chance, where is our advantage? Where are our weapons and our armies? Why would Brohomir put us through all of this just to leave us stranded and desperate now?”
“I don’t know,” Julius said. “But I’mcertainthis is Bob’s work, because she”—he pointed across the table at General Jackson—“is the Phoenix, and Bob told me ages ago that I would have lunch with the Phoenix on my birthday.” His face split into a smile as he turned back to Fredrick. “Don’t you see? This isallBob’s plan. Yes, we’re trapped, but we’re trappedtogether. All of us are here in this house because of Bob’s meddling. He’s the one who arranged to bring Marci back from the dead,andhe’s the one who finally fixed our troubles with the Qilin.”
“Both of which were problemshecaused,” Chelsie growled. “I’m not going to praise him for wagging the dog.”
“Did he?” Julius asked, turning to face her. “Did Bob tell you to run from the Qilin? Did he tell you to lie when Xian asked you why?”
Chelsie’s answer to that was a deadly glare, and Julius sighed. “I’m not trying to poke at old wounds. I’m just saying that Bob isn’t always the total villain you make him out to be. There’s no question he’s run roughshod over all of us, but you know as well as I do that he’s been building toward something huge for a long time now, and I can’t think of anything bigger than the end of the world.”
He smiled then. A big, warm, dazzling grin that made Marci’s breath catch in her throat. “I have faith in my brother. I don’t always understand what he’s doing or approve of how he does it, but I don’t believe for a second that Bob moved heaven and earth to bring us together—from China, from eggs that were never supposed to hatch, from death itself—only to drop the ball at the end. Whatever’s coming, Bobhasa plan, and we’re part of it. There’s just no other explanation for how we all ended up here. That’s why I think, if we want to survive what’s coming, we need to put aside our anger and help him make it work.”
Fredrick opened his mouth to argue, but Chelsie raised her hand. “I believe you, Julius,” she said quietly. “I can’t forgive him for all the years he left us to rot, but I believe you when you say that this is Bob’s doing. Even accounting for the Qilin’s fortune, this whole situation is simply too improbable not to have a seer’s fingerprints all over it. Also, if the Nameless End eats everything, Bob will die too, and he’s much too selfish for that. But if thisisall part of Bob’s grand plan, what does that mean? What did he bring us here to do?”
“Work together,” Julius said, looking pointedly at General Jackson. “All of us. The dragon clans, the UN, spirits, Merlins—we’ve all got our backs against the same wall. If we’re going to survive, we have to join forces.”
“And do what?” Myron asked. “The magic outside might not be deadly, but it’ll still knock any of us out cold before we make it three feet. Maybe dragons would fare better, but I don’t see how we’re supposed to work together when half of us can’t leave the house.”
“We’d make it more like ten feet, but the general idea still holds,” Amelia agreed. “Magical fallout is no joke. It’ll take you down in a heartbeat, and it’ll burn the entire time. But the good news is I think the magical crash is affecting the Nameless End as well.”
“How do you know that?” General Jackson demanded.
“Because, as Marci already pointed out, we’re not dead yet,” Amelia said. “It’s been sixteen hours since Algonquin kamikazed herself into the Leviathan. It takes time to eat your way through five Great Lakes, but notthatmuch time. I bet the Leviathan is just as stuck as we are. That buys us some wiggle room.”
“How much?” Julius asked.
“Not enough,” Raven said, hopping off Amelia’s shoulder to perch on the windowsill. “Heavy as it looks, the fallout’s actually been getting lighter for a while now. In my unprofessional and unresearched opinion, I’d say we have an hour, maybe two, before we can safely go outside.”
“Then we need to get to work,” Marci said, standing up.
“I thought we just agreed to wait for Bob,” Amelia said.
Marci rolled her eyes. “We can’t just sit here doing nothing until a dragon seer shows up and tells us what to do.”
“It worked last time,” Amelia said with a shrug.
“Only because he told you it would,” Marci pointed out. “Do you have any instructions for this crisis?”
The dragon spirit shook her head, and Marci spread her hands. “There you go. Maybe Bob will show up with a plan of action to save us all, but until then, I say we listen to Julius and pool our resources to come up with a plan of our own, because we don’t have time to mess around.”
“I agree,” the Qilin said, rising to his feet and turning to Julius. “You have the full support of the Golden Empire. My dragons are already on their way here. We will help you fight the Nameless End in whatever way we can.”
