Marci stared down at her phone again. “So this is fake?”
“Thenumberis fake,” Julius said. “The money is real. As for the ID, my guy assures me it’ll pass any sort of routine check, though we probably shouldn’t do anything that might earn you a full background scan.”
He’d meant that last part as a joke, but Marci looked stricken. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“You earned the money,” he said with a shrug. “And I needed you to have a phone. Besides, I had to talk to this guy anyway since I’ve hired him to help us find Katya.”
He’d debated that move a lot, actually. Now that he had Katya’s number, he’d been tempted to just call her and try to work something out. After much back and forth, though, he’d concluded that contacting her would be a waste of time. She probably wouldn’t answer, and even if she did, a call out of the blue on a number she’d only trusted to a few people might cause her to bolt for good. But a good hacker like his guildmate could take a phone number and work backward to find the Residency ID and bank account it was attached to. And since phone enabled electronic transfers were used for everything from restaurants to car rentals, tracking Katya’s movements had just become no problem.
“He’s got a search going to for her ID right now,” Julius explained. “The moment she uses her phone to pay for anything, the tracking program will message us with the location, and then all we have to do is drive over and say hello.” And hope that Katya wasn’t so spooked she ran even from a sealed dragon. Still, Julius thought it was a pretty clever plan, and he was a little let down when Marci’s face remained frighteningly blank.
“So your friend did all of this for you just off a phone call?”
“Well, he’s not really my friend,” Julius admitted. “I don’t even know his real name, actually, but I was his healer in the game, and the bond between healer and tank runs deep. And it’s not like he’s working for free. I’m paying him like any other client would. He just did me a favor by moving me to the front of the line.”
Marci nodded, but Julius got the impression she wasn’t really listening. The whole time they’d been talking, she’d been staring at her phone with a closed-off expression he didn’t like at all. Clearly, it was time to break out the big guns.
“Here,” he said, sitting down at the table where he’d set the breakfast tray. “Come eat. I got you waffles.”
He lifted the silver tray covers with a flourish, revealing the beautifully arranged piles of sugar dusted Belgian waffles and fresh cut fruit. But when he looked up to see if he’d gotten a smile at last, Marci was still just staring at him, and then her bottom lip started to tremble. She turned away a second later, raising her hand to her face, but it wasn’t until her shoulders started to shake that Julius realized she wascrying.
“What?” he cried, jumping up. “I’m sorry, what did I do? Do you not like waffles?”
“No, no,” Marci said. “Waffles are perfect, it’s…” She stopped and scrubbed furiously at her face. “I’m sorry, I’m not normally this emotional. It’s just, it’s been a really hard week for me, and you’re being really,reallynice.”
Julius flinched instinctively at the wordnice.Before he could hide it, though, Marci whirled back around to face him.
“I can’t accept this,” she said, holding out the phone. “The payment for my work is one thing, but the lamprey money and the phone and getting me an ID and the room and, and…” She trailed off, swiping at the tears that were still rolling down her cheeks. “Sorry,” she whispered in a shamed voice. “I don’t mean to be such a fountain, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to be clean and safe and not surrounded by cats or afraid the house is going to fall on my head. And I know you saved my life back in the sewer when you bounced that blue fireball. No one’s ever done that for me before—saved my life, I mean—but now you’ve done it twice in one night, and I don’t know how I can ever pay you back. I will, though, I swear, but I owe you so much already, and if I take this, I’ll—”
Julius’s hand landed on her shoulder, grabbing her so hard she jumped. He felt guilty immediately, but he couldn’t let her say another word. “Stop,” he said. “Please, just stop and listen. You don’t owe me anything. There is no debt between us.”
She blinked at him. “But…”
“I did this becauseIwanted to,” he said firmly. “Because we’re a team, and how are we supposed to work together if I can’t call you? As for the money, you earned it fair and square. You were the one who found the nest, and it was you who pointed out the lampreys had value. We wouldn’t have any money at all if you hadn’t been there, so I’m not accepting it back. If you don’t want it, you can throw it away, but you need to understand thatwe are even.”
Even as he said it, he knew he was being ridiculous. A human would never make such a big deal out of this, but Julius had spent his entire life watching dragons use debts as leverage to gain power over others. He’d been there numerous times himself, but always as the one on the bottom, the one being squeezed. Now, when he was finally in a position to be the indebted instead of the debtor, he wanted nothing to do with it. He’d told Justin he was through and he meant it. He didn’t even want to pretend to be a good dragon anymore, especially not if it meant holding money over Marci.
“You are my ally,” he said earnestly, filling the word with all the conviction he had so she would know just how rare such a thing was for him, and how much it meant. “Everything I do, I do because of that. Because I value your help and your company and because it makes me happy to see you happy. So please don’t ever think that you have to pay me back, because you don’t, and you never will.”
He could have said more. He could have gone on forever until he was positive she understood. But instead of being relieved by his reassurances, Marci looked like she was going to start crying again.
The sight sent Julius into a panic. His mind whirled frantically, searching for the right thing to say that would undo whatever he’d done to cause this. In the end, though, it didn’t matter, because Marci didn’t cry. She did something different, something completely unexpected.
She kissed him.
Chapter 10
If Marci hadn’t put her hands on his shoulders, Julius would have jumped out of his skin. But she held him in place, gently sliding her arms up to encircle his neck as she tilted her head, slanting her lips against his own. Her body followed, pressing against his, and Julius jumped again, because she was soft and warm and pretty and she was kissing him and…and that was as far as he got before his mind started fogging over and his hands sank down to rest on her hips of their own accord.
Vaguely, in a tiny, dusty corner of his brain that hadn’t gotten the message to shut down yet, it occurred to Julius that this was his first real kiss. Oh, he’d had a girl’s lips on his before. Thanks to Bethesda’s love of attention, the Heartstrikers weren’t exactly secret, and there were lots of humans who came to the town at the foot of his mother’s mountain in hopes of sleeping with a dragon. Julius had been jumped several times, once in his own room while he was asleep by a girl who’d wandered in after one of his sisters had sent her away. But while other dragons accepted such attentions as their due, Julius had always found the setup extremely distasteful. He had just enough pride to resent being chased after solely because he was a dragon and for absolutely no other reason. Marci, on the other hand, had no idea what he was, but she was kissing him anyway, and it was very, very nice.
Cautiously, Julius lifted his hands to her face, cradling her head as he started to kiss her back. Her breath hitched at his touch, a little gasp of pleasure and surprise that set his heart pounding wildly. Emboldened, he leaned closer, pressing his body tighter against hers as he breathed her in. Not surprisingly, Marci smelled of human and magic, but also of soap and casting chalk and deep down, the smell that was just Marci, a warm, welcoming, feminine scent enhanced by the faintest tang of tears.
He stopped cold, fingers stuttering to a halt against her skin. What was hedoing? Marci was upset. She’d been crying not thirty seconds before, and now he wasgropingher?
At this point, the part of him that really wanted to keep going loudly reminded Julius that she’d started it, but the rest of him knew it wasn’t that simple. Marci had just lost her father and had her life turned upside down. She’d been alone, basically homeless, living off barter and whatever money she could scrounge for the last four days, and that was before he’d made her stay up all night chasing dragons. Now she was exhausted, overwhelmed, and feeling excessively grateful to him, and if Julius took advantage of that, if he took advantage ofher, he would be the absolute worst user in his entire family.
That thought was the kick that finally made Julius let go. He took a full step back, snatching his hands off her face. From so far away, he had an excellent view of Marci’s dazed expression turning to confusion, then horror as she realized what had just happened.
