She said this like it was the best thing ever, but Julius’s grin faded. “I’m sorry you got hit,” he said, lowering his head until the soft feathers of his nose pressed against her cheek. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“Hey, you run with dragons, you’ve got to be willing to take your lumps,” she said, reaching up to touch his feathers again. “I’m not upset at all. I’m mostly happy that I finally get to see what you really look like.”
Julius froze, instantly bashful. “Do I live up to the hype?” he asked at last.
“Way better,” she assured him. “Blue’s my favorite color, you know.”
He gave her a skeptical look. “I thought your favorite color was purple?”
Marci grinned. “Not anymore.”
If Julius had been human, that would have turned him red from his head to his toes. Fortunately for his dignity, feathers hid blushes. He was sure he still looked stupidly, goofily happy, but Julius couldn’t really bring himself to care. Marci was alive, he was a dragon again, and except for Estella, everyone had lived, which meant they’dwon. Against all odds, they’d pulled it off, all of it. If he couldn’t be happy after that, when could he?
He was still smiling like an idiot when Ysolde finally reached them. Marci started bombarding her with questions immediately, completely immune to the dragon’s scornful looks. Julius was trying to find a spot where he wouldn’t be in the way when someone tapped him on the tail.
When he looked over his shoulder, Bob was standing behind him with an uncharacteristically serious look on his face. “If you’re not busy,” he said. “We need to borrow you for a moment.”
Julius glanced back at Marci, but she was still happily grilling Ysolde. Satisfied he wouldn’t be abandoning her, he turned back to his brother, keeping his head as low as possible so he wouldn’t have to look down on the Great Seer of the Heartstrikers. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing much,” Bob replied with a shrug. “But now that all this Estella business is wrapped up, there’s one last piece of family drama we need to settle.”
He looked back over his shoulder as he finished, drawing Julius’s attention back to the cracked throne in the center of the room where all the other Heartstrikers were now gathered in a circle around their mother, who was still frozen on her knees.
At the sight of Bethesda, Julius began to shake. It didn’t matter that he was currently five times her size, or that she was still bound by magic he didn’t understand. The fear of his mother was too deeply ingrained to be pushed away by minor details. “Do I have to?”
“Yes,” Bob said with a sharp look. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, Julius, which is saying something for a dragon. It took a great deal of effort to arrange this situation. If we don’t take it now, we might never get another chance.”
Julius’s eyes went wide. “Arrange?” he said. “You mean,you—”
Bob pressed a finger to his lips, and Julius snapped his mouth shut. When it was clear he wasn’t going to interrupt again, Bob continued.
“Sometimes you have to smash things to rebuild them,” he said, his eyes getting that faraway look they always had when he was peering into the future. “When I was your age, our grandfather told me that just as there are opportunities that only reveal themselves in defeat, there are victories that can’t be won through force. Being a properly ruthless dragon, I never really understood what that meant. Now, though, I’m beginning to understand.”
“I don’t,” Julius said.
“You will,” Bob promised. “Or, at least, you’d better, because if you don’t, I’ve just lost us the farm.”
He started walking away after that. When Julius hesitated to follow, Bob looked over his shoulder. “Come on, Julius,” he said with a cryptic smile. “Don’t you have anything you want to say to our mother?”
Julius had plenty he wanted to say to Bethesda, and his brother was right about at least one thing. Thiswasa once in a lifetime opportunity, because, for the time being at least, Bethesda was still frozen on her knees. That made now the perfect time to talk since the only way his mother would everactuallylisten to him was if she was physically unable to do anything else.
“Okay,” he said, starting after his brother. “Let’s go.”
“Fantastic,” Bob said. “Go change first.”
Julius looked down at his feathered body in alarm. “But I just got this back!”
“Ifyou’rea dragon,everyone’sgoing to want to be a dragon,” his brother pointed out. “And I’d rather not have Justin easily able to breathe fire for this conversation. Now.” He turned and pointed at the door behind the throne that led to Bethesda’s private apartments. “I had someone stash your clothes in there yesterday. Go change and join us as soon as you’re done.”
Julius still didn’t want to go back to being human yet, and hedefinitelydidn’t want to set foot in his mother’s private lair alone, but there was no point in arguing. Bob was already walking away, spinning his sword like a baton as he climbed up the dais steps to rejoin the others. So, with a final stretch of his wings, he turned and started toward the door to go change back into his usual self.
Chapter 21
Julius had never been in his mother’s personal lair before. Not surprisingly, it looked exactly like what you’d expect from Bethesda’s apartments: a dragon-sized maze of gilded rooms packed to the rafters with gold, jewels, designer clothes, and mounds of exceedingly expensive, over-designed furniture that somehow managed to be both ugly as sin and uncomfortable.
As Bob had promised, Julius found clothes waiting on the gold and glass coffee table in the front room. How the seer had managedthat, Julius was past trying to guess. He just focused on changing as quickly as possible and trying not to get crushed by his new Fang in the process.
Five minutes later, he reemerged dressed in a plain black turtleneck, jeans, and a pair of flip flops. The Fang, which had thankfully returned to the usual sword-shape as soon as he’d finished shifting back, he carried in his hands, mostly because he had no idea what else to do with it. It hadn’t come with a sheath, and Bob hadn’t given him a belt in any case. But while walking around with a naked blade felt wrong, just leaving the thing in Bethesda’s apartment felt worse. In the end, Julius made the best of it, carrying the sword tight against his side in an attempt to look like he knew what he was doing as he climbed up the dais steps to join the rest of his family gathered in a tight knot on top around his mother’s cracked throne.
