“You ask for my help, we do it my way,” Justin said when the door clicked open. “That means assault, and assault means you have to stop being a wuss and come get a sword.”
“No offense, Justin,” Marci said. “But I’m pretty sure Bixby’s men are going to have guns. Last I heard, you don’t bring a sword to a gun fight.”
“Then you haven’t heard of swords like these,” he said, pushing the door open.
Marci gasped, and Julius felt a little overwhelmed himself. Behind the door Justin had just unlocked, a small room glittered like an ancient hoard under tastefully recessed lighting. Though clearly meant to be a bedroom, the walls and windows had been been replaced with reinforced cement slabs lined with metal shelving, and on those shelves was a display of wealth greater than anything Julius had seen outside his mother’s throne room.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he whispered. “That’s not…”
“Of course it is,” Justin said, stepping high over a bag of gold coins stamped with the faces of long-dead kings. “You remember how Chelsie was always going on about how keeping all your treasure in one place was risky and stupid?”
Julius nodded. Even locked up in his room, there was no way he could have missed the fit his mother threw every time anyone suggested moving so much as a coin of her hoard.
“Well,” Justin continued. “Last year, Mother finally gave in and agreed to start redistributing some of her less valuable objects. Most of the safe houses have rooms like this now, alternate treasuries just in case something happens to the main hoard in the mountain, and they arenot to be touched.”
This last bit was directed at Marci, who was rushing the door in her hurry to get to all the sparkly, shiny beauty.
“I’m not going to take anything,” she protested as she stepped inside. “I just want to look.”
“So look from there,” Justin snarled, picking her up bodily and setting her firmly back on the other side of the door. “Minor treasury or not, this is all property of Bethesda the Heartstriker, and even a human should know how serious dragons are about their treasure. She’ll know the second you touch so much as a dust bunny, so if you don’t want your mortal life to be even shorter than usual, you’ll keep your sticky fingers to yourself.”
Marci huffed with disappointment, casting Julius a pleading look. When he spread his arms helplessly, she pointed at the far corner of the treasure room where an amber carving of an owl in flight had been propped haphazardly on top of a pile of velvet jewelry boxes. “Can you at least tell me what that one does? I can feel the magic pouring off it from here.”
Justin’s answer was a low growl, and Julius decided it was time to move things along before Marci got herself in real trouble. “What did you want to show me?”
“Not show,” Justin said. “Loan.” He reached up to grab an enormous jeweled sword off the weapon rack on the far wall. “Here, give this a try.”
Julius stared at the six-foot-long bar of sharpened metal and magical ornamentation with a sinking weight in his chest. “Justin, I can’t even lift that.”
“Oh, right,” his brother said. “I forgot you have baby arms.” He returned the large sword to its bracket and took down a pair of ancient looking jade hook swords instead. “What about these?”
“No,” Julius said again. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort, but I haven’t touched a sword since we were teenagers, and I wasn’t even good then. If you want to give me a weapon, how about a shotgun? Or a taser? You know, something point-and-click I can use without years of training?”
“Like Mother would ever keep anything so mundane in her hoard,” Justin said with a snort. “Don’t worry, I’m sure your training will come back once your life is on the line. Even if it doesn’t, you’re a dragon. We’re naturally good at killing stuff.”
“You’renaturally good at killing stuff,” Julius grumbled, leaning over Marci to look around the room for a weapon that would shut his brother up while still being light enough for him to actually carry. Unfortunately, everything in the corner by Justin was either huge or overly complicated. He was about to tell his brother to forget the whole thing when he spotted a familiar-looking golden hilt sticking out of a vase on the top shelf.
“There,” he said, pointing. “Get me that one.”
Justin looked deeply skeptical, but he got the sword down as requested. The moment the slender red leather scabbard came into view, Julius’s face broke into a huge grin.
“That’s it,” he said, holding out his hand. “That’s the one I want.”
“You can’t be serious,” Justin said, holding the weapon with his fingertips like he thought it might be contagious. “This isn’t even a sword.”
Itwasa bit short. The golden handle was large enough to fit comfortably even in Justin’s big hands, but the sheathed blade was barely more than a foot long. For Julius, though, that was a mark in its favor, and he opened and closed his palm in a grabby hands motion until his brother relented and handed the sword over.
“What are you going to do with that pocket knife anyway? Chop onions?”
“I could chop you,” Julius said proudly, unsheathing the short, razor sharp blade. “For your information, this is Tyrfing, forged by dwarfs for Odin’s own grandson to never miss its mark.”
Justin rolled his eyes. “You are such a nerd. How do you even know that?”
“Because I looked it up years ago,” Julius said with a sly smile. “Remember those knife tossing competitions when we were kids?”
Justin’s eyes went wide. “That’show you beat me?” When Julius nodded, his brother's face contorted in fury. “Iknewyou cheated!”
“There was no rule against using enchanted weapons,” Julius said, smiling at his reflection in the sword’s mirror-bright surface. “I wonder how it ended up here, though? It might not be pretty, but Tyrfing isold. Even if she was redistributing her treasure, I’d have thought Mother would keep all the really good stuff back at the mountain.”
