Svena waved her hand dismissively. “You can’t. If Katya could be convinced of anything, she would never have run in the first place. You only need to get close enough to put this on her.” She reached out as she spoke, placing something on the table with a soft clack. When she removed her hand, Julius saw it was a thin, silver braided chain. “There’s a binding spell woven into the metal,” she explained. “I created it specifically to placate my sister, but it must touch her skin to work, and I haven’t been able to get closer than a kilometer to Katya since this nonsense started.”
Julius stared at the chain glistening like frost on the white tablecloth, heart sinking. He had no interest in getting tangled up in another clan’s family drama. He especially didn’t want to trick a runaway into going back to a home she clearly wanted to escape. As someone who’d seriously considered running away himself dozens of times, tricking this Katya out of her freedom and forcing her back into the kind of situation that would make a dragon flee felt unspeakably cruel, but what was he supposed to do? Argue against his qualifications as a failure?
“This is a great opportunity for you, Julius,” Ian said, his voice calm and rational and completely not open to negotiation. “You’ve gotten an unfortunate reputation for being softhearted over your short lifespan, but there’s still time to turn yourself around. Mother has entrusted me with your rehabilitation, but if you insist on being lazy—”
“I’m not lazy.”
Julius regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, but he didn’t try to take them back. Backpedaling would only make him look even weaker, and anyway, hehatedbeing called lazy. Staying alive in their clan was a full time job for someone like him, because Julius wasn’t just the youngest Heartstriker, he was also the smallest. Big dragons like Ian never understood just how much work it took to fly under the radar in a family of magical predators with a sixth sense for weakness and a pathological need to exploit any opening just because it was there.
Speaking of which, Ian was already watching him, his calculating eyes weighing Julius’s hasty words as much for what they didn’t say as what they did. “So resentful,” he said. “But you have no one to blame but yourself. The fact that I didn’t even know your name until this afternoon perfectly illustrates your complete and utter failure to be an asset to anyone. That you are alive today is due entirely to our mother’s magnanimity, and since we both know how ficklethatcan be, I suggest you stop making a spectacle of yourself and consider your next words very carefully.”
He didn’t even need to addbecause they might be your last.By the time Ian finished, the threat in his voice was like a noose around Julius’s neck. Beside him, Svena was observing the back and forth with the sort of bored impatience of a sports caster watching a veteran boxer taking on a volunteer from the audience.
That was how Julius felt, too—punch drunk, completely overpowered and outmatched. He still didn’t think it was right, and he knew he’d regret his actions, but Ian had his back against the wall, and they all knew it. So, with a heavy sigh, he reached out and scooped the silver chain off the table, shoving the unnaturally cold metal into his pocket as quickly as he could. “Where can I find her?”
“I have word she’s going to a party tonight,” Svena said, reaching into her silver-spangled clutch purse to pull out a sleek, expensive phone. “Some kind of gathering for human mages.” She paused. “Youcanstill do magic, can’t you? Your mother didn’t seal that as well?”
She hadn’t, but then, she hadn’t needed to. Unlike humans, who drew magic from the world around them, dragons made their own. But while J clutch had been one of Bethesda’s more magically inclined broods, Julius hadn’t been keen on the idea of competing with his cutthroat siblings in an arena where it was perfectly acceptable to banish your rivals to another dimension. He’d learned the basics he needed to survive, but everything else he knew about sorcery, draconic or otherwise, could probably fit on a small note card. Not that he was going to admit that to Svena, of course.
“No problem,” he lied. “Where is it, and when should I show up?”
Svena looked down at her phone to find the information. Beside her, Ian met his eyes across the table and mouthed,good job.Julius nodded and quickly lowered his head over his own phone, trying not to look as nauseated as he felt when Katya’s information, including pictures, movement notes, and Svena’s practical instructions on where and how to deliver her runaway sister’s unconscious body once the deed was done, popped up on his screen.
Sometimes, he really, really,reallyhated being a dragon.
***
Thirty minutes later, Julius was sitting at the club’s bar, ignoring the bitter and expensive cocktail Ian had bought him as a fancy way of sayingget lostwhile he finished his “discussion” with Svena, and he wasn’t feeling any better. Thanks to the information Svena had given him, he’d had no problem finding the party Katya was supposed to attend tonight. Getting in, however, was another matter entirely.
From the listing on the DFZ’s public mage forums, it seemed the gathering was being hosted by a circle of shamans, human mages who did their magic with the help of spirits and natural forces, something Julius decidedly wasnot. Despite Ian’s dismissive assurances that his little brother was “good with humans,” he had absolutely no idea how he was going to convince a bunch of secretive mages to let him into their exclusive magic-nerd night. He wasn’t actually sure how Katya had gotten in since dragon magic was entirely different from the human variety, though considering Svena’s “little sister” was a thousand years old if she was a day, she probably had her ways.
Julius’s ways, on the other hand, were decidedly more limited. Not surprising considering who ruled it, the DFZ was packed with spirits. The presence of so many powerful allies gave the local shamans a decided home-field advantage. With so much magic at their fingertips, a good shaman might be able to spot his true nature even with his mother’s seal, and then he’d be in real trouble. What he needed was a mage of his own, someone who actually understood how this stuff worked and could act as cover, but where was he going to find a mage on short notice in an unfamiliar city who would be willing to work on credit until Ian paid up?
He was still puzzling over this when he felt the telltale prickle on the back of his neck that meant someone was watching him. Probably Ian preparing to call him back to the booth so they could “discuss his plan,” or maybe Svena with some last-minute advice/threats. But when Julius turned around, it wasn’t a dragon watching him at all. It was a woman. A human woman sitting at one of the small tables by the door.
She got up the second he made eye contact and started straight for him, cutting through the expensively dressed crowd like an arrow with him as the target. Julius thought frantically, trying to remember if he’d met her before. It was true he knew a lot of humans for a dragon, but that was only over the internet. Face-to-face contact was limited to the residents of the New Mexico desert town his mother’s mountain complex supported, and this girl definitely wasn’t someone from home. She was sure acting like she knew him, though.
As she got closer, Julius’s confusion grew, because she looked like she belonged in this club about as much as he did. Her combination of sparkly silver vest, long-sleeved white shirt with dramatic, oversized cuffs draped over chunky plastic bracelets, and tight black pants tucked into glossy black, calf-high leather boots reminded him of an old-school stage magician. It wasn’t unattractive, especially not on her. She was actually very cute in a warm, human way that was a relief after Svena’s chilling beauty. Still, her getup definitely didn’t fit in with the rest of the club’s too-cool aesthetic, and her hair was patently ridiculous.
The thick, dark brown strands had been chopped into uneven chunks ranging from almost buzz-cut short in the back to chin-length wisps around her face. It was uneven over her ears as well, with longer strands trailing down at odd places, like she’d pulled her hair back and chopped it off in a mad panic. She didn’tlookcrazy, though. Just determined as she walked up and slid between him and the stool on his left, leaning one elbow on the bar so that she was directly in his field of vision.
Under normal circumstances, a pretty girl coming at him out of nowhere would have sent Julius into defensive retreat. Today, though, half-panicked already and stuck in survival mode, he stared straight at her, holding his ground out of sheer desperation as he breathed deeply to catch some hint of the trap this had to be. When he didn’t smell so much as a whiff of draconic power other than the chain in his pocket, though, he said, “Can I help you?”
“No,” the girl said, flipping her hand with a flourish. “I can help you.”
A white card appeared between her fingers, and Julius jumped before he realized he hadn’t felt any magic. It had been sleight-of-hand that produced the card, not a spell. The paper itself, however, told another story.
Marci Novalli, it read.Socratic Thaumaturge, MDC. Curse breaking, magical consultation, warding services.Below that, a smaller line proclaimed,No job is too big or too small! References available upon request.
A mage, he realized dumbly, staring at the card with a growing sense of dread—an impressive feat, considering just how large his dread had grown today already. But a mage appearing out of nowhere at the exact moment he realized he needed one? If that wasn’t a set-up, then he was his mother’s favorite son.
He leaned away from her offered card like it was poison. “Sorry. Not interested.”
“Just hear me out,” the girl said, closing the distance he’d just put between them. “I can understand if you’re apprehensive about mages. You’re under a very nasty curse.”
Julius blinked. “Excuse me?”
“The curse,” she said, gesturing at him. “It’s all over you. I can’t imagine how you must be suffering, but you don’t have to worry any longer. I have a lot of experience in curse breaking, and I’m very gentle. Give me an hour and I’ll have that thing off you no problem.”
