“I didn’t know this was happening until fifteen minutes ago!” Julius said frantically. “And when I did find out, Mother wasright there. What was I supposed to do?”
At the mention of Bethesda, both dragons looked her direction to see their mother coldly detaching herself from her clinging daughters. “I have to go,” Ian growled. “Thanks for nothing.”
“Wait!” Julius said, grabbing his brother’s perfectly tailored sleeve. “Do you know why there are two fangs in grandfather’s skull?”
Ian’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Why do you care?”
An honest answer to that would reveal more of himself than Julius was willing to show a cut-throat dragon like Ian, so he went with a half-truth instead. “I’m just curious, and you know everything that goes on.”
His brother rolled his eyes at the obvious flattery, but to Julius’s great surprise, he answered. “Mother took Justin’s Fang.”
Julius gasped, and Ian shook his head in disgust. “How can you possibly be surprised by this? Your idiot brother turned into a dragoninsidethe DFZ Underground. What did you think was going to happen?”
“But,” Julius said. “He’s Bethesda’s favorite.”
“Bethesda’s favor is fickle and doesn’t extend to morons who make her look bad,” Ian reminded him, yanking his sleeve out of Julius’s grasp with a haughty look.
Julius cringed. It wasn’t that Ian’s words had actually surprised him, just that he’d been reallyreallyhoping they weren’t true. True, Justin had broken some pretty big rules when he’d turned into a dragon in the Pit, but he’d done it to save them, and Katya. Julius might have the life debt, but Katya wouldn’t have been alive to grant it if Justin hadn’t done what he’d done. And sure, maybe he’d gone too far, but being a Knight and wielding the Fang of the Heartstriker was Justin’s entirelife.It was his great dream, the goal he’d worked their entire childhood to achieve.Taking that away, especially for something that had actually helped the clan, just felt unnecessarily cruel. “I hope he’s not taking it too badly.”
“Justin?” Ian scoffed. “Don’t be stupid. He’s taking it exactly as badly as you’d expect. But that’s none of our business, and we have far more important things to worry about than Mr. Ex-Fifth Blade’s hurt feelings.” He glanced back at Bethesda, who was now glaring at them from across the crowd. “I have to go deal with her,” he said quickly. “Call Katya and let me know the instant you find anything.”
“But you just said not to bother,” Julius reminded him.
“I know,” Ian said as he strode off. “But you’re a sentimental fool who’ll do it anyway, so I might as well get something out of it.”
Now that was just uncalled for, but as much as Julius wanted to do nothing just to spite him, Ian was right. Worried as he was about Justin, he’d lost his Fang a month ago. Katya’s crisis, on the other hand, was going downright now.As her friend and part of the reason this was happening at all, it was Julius’s duty to warn her as soon as possible. But when he dug his phone out and hit her number, the call instantly came back as disconnected.
He tried two more times with the same result, and a cold weight started to form in his stomach. Logically, he knew there were plenty of perfectly benign reasons why Katya’s number would be disconnected, but none of them could chase away the feeling that something was very, very wrong. When Ross, Katya’s crocodile shaman boyfriend,alsofailed to pick up, the feeling became dead certainty.
Julius hunched over his phone, pulling up his contacts as he counted out his strategies. Now that he was sure something was wrong, there were plenty of other contacts he could call to try and find out what. Unfortunately, his talk with Ian had drawn some curious stares, undermining his plan to stay beneath the room’s notice. The general population of Heartstriker might not yet know about his connection to Katya, but Ian was the dragon of the hour. If he’d come over to talk to Julius, others would follow soon enough to find out why.
Just the possibility of that kind of attention was threatening enough to overcome even his fear of Conrad. The clan champion could give orders all he liked. Julius wasn’t going to stand around and let himself be cornered. So, sucking in all his courage, he composed his face in what he hoped was a purposeful look and set off across the throne room to find a place where he could make his phone calls without being watched by a peanut gallery of predators.
He had several options. Despite (or perhaps because of) its size and grandeur, the Heartstriker throne room had several hidden hallways branching off it to connect the enormous room with other parts of the mountain’s upper infrastructure. Unfortunately, being the obvious out-of-the-way places meant that all of the side halls were already full of dragons gossiping in secret. In the end, the only place connected to the throne room that wasn’t infested with Heartstrikers was the balcony.
Jutting out a good thirty feet from the side of Heartstriker Mountain, the throne room balcony served more as a landing pad than anywhere you’d actually want to stand. There was no railing, no windbreak, no consideration of any sort for those who couldn’t fly. Just a half-moon disk of smooth, reinforced rock and the night wind howling up from the desert below. But terrifying as it was to stand on the edge of what was essentially a cliff several hundred feet in the air, the balcony—with its strong winds and dusty air—was fashion suicide for the perfectly coiffed and dressed dragons. That made it the safest spot in the throne room by Julius’s standards, especially once he found the spot where the balcony edge overlapped the side of the mountain, creating a hidden nook where—if you flattened yourself against the rock—no one inside the throne room could see you without risking walking into the wind.
Given the obvious money spent on hair and make-up for the crowd behind him, this was as close as Julius was ever going to get to actual privacy, and he collapsed against the stone with a sigh of relief. The mountain’s face was digging sharply into his back and the night wind was blasting and cold, but none of that mattered. The ledge was still by far the most comfortable place Julius had found since the moment he’d walked in to see his mother sitting on his couch. He was pulling out his phone again to call one of Ross’s shaman circle buddies and ask if she knew anything when an unfamiliar scent drifted by on the wind.
Julius clenched his fists with a curse. Seriously, could he not get five minutes to himself in this stupid mountain? Was that too much to ask? He didn’t even know what the scentwas, but after a night of nasty surprises, he wasn’t taking any chances. He just pressed his back harder into the mountain and breathed deep, sorting through the expected scents of desert and dragon for the one that didn’t belong.
And that was where things got weird, because even though Julius found the scent again easily, he still had no idea what he was smelling. He wasn’t even sure how to describe it. The best he could say was that it smelled very strongly of nothing. He was trying to decide what that meant, exactly, when someone laughed above him
Julius jumped like he’d been shot, almost falling off the mountain. He caught himself at the last second, grabbing the wall behind him and craning his head back to see a dragoness he didn’t recognize perched on a tiny irregularity in the stone mountainside directly above him. She waved when she saw him looking and hopped down, taking the eight-foot drop like it was nothing, but it wasn’t until she landed beside him on the narrow ledge that Julius realized hedidactually recognize her.
It was the dragoness in the red dress. The one who’d made his mother freeze.
Sweat began to bead on his neck. The strange dragoness was as tall as Bethesda with the same imposing, statuesque build, but that was where the similarities stopped. Where his mother was painfully fashionable, this dragoness’s knee-length, crimson A-line dress was at least a century out of date. Likewise, her hair was almost comically bad: a nest of wildly uneven black braids that looked like she’d done them herself in the dark. But while all of this was a clear sign that he was dealing with a very odd dragon indeed, what really got him was the fact that her eyes were a light hazel brown.
This wasn’t to say they weren’t beautiful. She was a dragon in her human guise;everythingabout her was beautiful. But in a supposedly exclusive Heartstriker gathering, the lack of the iconic green eyes was as good as a billboard that she didn’t belong. Julius was thrashing his brain to figure out who in the world she could be when the dragoness suddenly laughed.
“Easy, Tiger,” she said, leaning against the wall beside him. “I’m not going to turn you in. I’m out here hiding myself.”
That was probably the one thing Julius hadn’t been worried about, though it was surprisingly thoughtful of her to say. Still, the thought of hiding out with a strange dragon Bethesda apparently hated wasn’t exactly comforting, especially since his motherhadto know they were out here. He wasn’t actually sure why Bethesda hadn’t done something about that already. She didn’t normally tolerate interlopers on her mountain. He was trying to think of a way to just ask the dragon what was going on without being unforgivably rude when the dragon turned to dig down into the ancient, burn-marked leather bag she carried slung over her shoulder.
“Here,” she said, holding something out.
He looked down in surprise to see a dented metal flask in her outstretched hand. “What is that?”
