Marci’s shirt was soaked in blood. There was so much, he thought she must have been stabbed at first. On the second look, he saw the blood was actually coming from her neck, not that that was any better. “Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”
He didn’t realize how sharp his voice was until she winced. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said, but Julius was already reaching for her. When he examined her neck, though, he saw she was right.
Though the bloody stain down the front of her shirt had made it look like she was dying, the cut on Marci’s neck wasn’t actually that deep. It was more long than anything else, a shallow slice that ran from just below her right ear down to the soft skin covering her trachea. Minor as it was, the cut had still bled like a faucet, which accounted for her horror-movie appearance. But while her face looked deathly pale in the glare of Katya’s halogen headlights, she was clearly alive and functional, a fact that helped Julius drag his panic back down to a more or less functional level.
“How did this happen?” he said, tearing a strip off the bottom of his shirt. “You seemed fine before.”
“Iamfine,” she protested, wincing as he pressed the cloth against her wound. “I keep telling you, it’s just a cut. I didn’t even know I was bleeding until I noticed my shirt was wet. Really, though, I’m okay. It doesn’t even hurt that much.”
She clearly meant this to make him feel better, but Julius barely heard it. Now that he’d seen her wound, all he could think about was how close she’d come to having her throat cut. If the slice had been just a little deeper, or a bit farther to the left, it would have gone through her windpipe. A few centimeters’ difference, that was all it would have taken, and Marci wouldn’t be here complaining about his fussing. She would be dead.
His body began to shake, though whether it from was fear or anger, Julius couldn’t say. He tried to keep calm by focusing on the rise and fall of Marci’s breath under his fingers, the undeniable proof that the worst hadn’t happened, but it didn’t work. No matter how hard he tried to ignore it, Julius couldn’t shake the feeling that, unlike the rest of this ridiculous situation, Marci’s survivalhadbeen luck. She was only human, and to dragons, human meant disposable. Bob probably hadn’t even considered her a factor. Her death would have been a throwaway, a meaningless detail in the larger draconic scheme, and that made him angriest of all.
“Julius?”
He blinked and glanced up to see Marci watching him with a worried frown. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he grumbled. “You’re the one who’s hurt.”
“It’sreallynot that bad. I was going to bandage it up, but I wanted to secure a material link before the trail got too cold. See?”
She held up her hand, and Julius saw three of Katya’s gleaming, white-gold hairs pinched between her fingers. That was what she’d been doing inside the wrecked car, he realized. She must have pulled them off the headrest.
“I can’t claim to be an expert tracker,” she said, winding the long hairs around her fingers. “But any idiot can follow a trail this hot. Unless that van is warded, this should be more than enough to take us right to her, especially since she’s a dragon. Not that I’ve tracked dragons before, of course, but you guys are so magical I could probably follow you from space.”
Julius froze. “You knew Katya was a dragon?”
Marci gave him anoh, come onlook. “It was kind of obvious. Humans don’t look like that.”
“Like what?” Because he’d thought Katya had looked remarkablyundraconic.
She ducked her head, and he was relieved to see a bit of color come back to her cheeks. “Never mind. Just let me go so I can start on the tracing spell.”
Julius stilled her with a firm push. “Not until I’m done.”
Marci froze, but it wasn’t until he saw how wide her eyes had gotten that he realized he was growling deep in his throat. He stopped at once, keeping his attention on his work as he carefully wiped the blood from Marci’s neck. Still, it was hard to keep his hands steady. He was just soangry, angrier than he could ever remember being, and he didn’t know how to handle it. But there was nothing he could do while Marci was bleeding, so he poured himself into the present, tearing off another piece of his shirt to bandage the cut. He was trying to think of the quickest way to get her to a real, sterile bandage when he heard the faint rumble of a car on the road outside.
He stilled, bracing for fight or flight. Since it was unlikely their enemy would be returning to the scene of the crime so soon, he was betting on flight. This might be a nearly abandoned section of a terrible neighborhood in the Underground, but the wreck had beenloud. That sort of thing was sure to draw human attention. Not cops, of course, this was still the DFZ, but nosy humans of any sort were the last thing Julius wanted, and when he saw an ancient Crown Victoria drift to a stop behind Marci’s totaled sedan, he knew it was time to go.
“Do you need anything from your car?”
Marci stared at him like he was stupid. “OfcourseI need the stuff in my car. Do you have any idea how expensive casting markers are?”
“I’ll buy you new ones,” he said, grabbing her arm. “Come on, we have to—”
The blare of a horn cut him off. In the street, the Crown Victoria’s driver was beeping out aShave and a Haircutpattern, and Julius’s poor stomach clenched again. He turned around, watching in stunned silence as the antique car’s tinted window rolled down to reveal the smiling, too-handsome face he really should have been expecting all along.
“Hello, little brother! I had an inkling you could use a ride.”
When Julius didn’t answer, Bob climbed out of the car. “What? No hello for the loving brother who came all this way just to offer his assistance?”
He was never able to say later what part of that had been the last straw. He couldn’t even explain his thought process, most likely because he hadn’t been thinking at all. He was furious and frightened and the smell of Marci’s blood was all over him. Bob, on the other hand, was standing there grinning like this was all a hilarious joke, and something inside Julius just snapped.
Before he knew he was moving, before he realized he’d even made the decision, Julius was standing right in front of his brother with his hands fisted in the seer’s midnight blue jacket. “You,” he snarled. “Iknowyou did this!”
Bob didn’t answer, just stared down at his little brother with his all-knowing green eyes, and in the silence, the magnitude of what he’d just done hit Julius in a rush. He’d grabbed his brother, hiseldest brother, a dragon nearly forty times his age who could swat him like a fly.
This dawning realization must have been plain on his face, because Bob’s lips pulled into a smug smile. “Ah, there it is,” he whispered. “There’s thefear. I was beginning to worry I’d lost my touch.”
