“You shouldn’t have been here in the first place,” she snapped. “I don’t know why Bob keeps dragging you into situations like this, but you’re way too short for this ride, and I don’t have time to babysit you while Mother turns the mountain upside down.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but Chelsie cut him off. “You want to be helpful?” she asked. “Take the out when it’s offered. Go home to your mage and your little animal control business and leave the plotting to the dragons who can handle it.”
Julius lowered his head. His sister was right, hewastoo short for this ride. He’d wanted to go home since he got here, and now he had a chance to do just that, and on a private plane no less. He should be delighted by this turn of events, but the way Chelsie had offered it made him feel…useless. Lower than low. Plus, there was still the matter of Justin.
“I told you what you wanted,” he said, standing up from his seat. “Now, where’s my brother?”
Chelsie folded her arms over her chest with an inscrutable look. “Why do you think I’m sending you to back to Detroit?”
Thewhy?was already on his lips before Julius read between the lines. “He’s in the DFZ?”
She nodded. “I don’t know what he’s doing there since I can’t follow idiot plans, but I don’t have to explain why Justin heading back into Algonquin’s territory would raise warning bells. I was actually planning to go retrieve him tonight, but then this Estella nonsense happened, and now I’ve got more pressing issues than your brother’s stubbornness. But if you want to go and bash your head against that brick wall, be my guest.”
“I will, thank you,” he said with a smile. “But, um, could you give me something a little more specific? The DFZ’s a pretty big place.”
Chelsie’s lips quirked like he’d just told a joke. “You run a business hunting down nuisance animals in the city, don’t you?” she said, turning away. “Figure it out.”
Julius gaped at her. “A dragon’s different from a tank badger!” he cried, but it was too late. Chelsie was already walking back toward the party, moving down the hall in long, purposeful strides.
“Not my problem anymore,” she called over her shoulder. “You wanted Justin? You got him. Now go home, Julius.”
He took a step after her, but stopped again almost immediately. There was no point in arguing further. She was already gone in any case, vanishing into the crowded throne room like the shade she was supposed to be. So, with nothing left to do, Julius turned and started down the hall in the other direction, opening an unmarked door that led to the hidden service area to beg one of his mother’s employees to smuggle him out.
This was where decades of sneaking around Heartstriker Mountain came in handy. Unlike most of his family, Julius had always made it a point to maintain friendly relations with the employees who kept the stronghold ticking. Barely ten minutes after Chelsie had left him, he’d convinced his mother’s manager to let him use the service elevator back down to the public levels. Ten minutes afterthat, he was safely aboard his mother’s second, far less luxurious high-speed jet getting his final clearance for the flight back to Detroit. All in all, it was a pretty fantastic change of fortune, but eager as Julius was to get away from his mother’s madhouse, he was having trouble concentrating. It was now almost midnight, and Marcistillwasn’t answering his calls.
That was enough to send him into a panic. He hadn’t been too worried by her silence earlier—scratch that, he’d been obsessively worried, but he’d known why she wasn’t talking to him, so he hadn’t beenscared.Now, though, Julius was petrified. It was nine o’clock in New Mexico, which meant he’d been gone for a little over five hours. It didn’t matter how mad Marci was, there was no way she’d ignore his calls for that long. Not unless she was in trouble. Or hurt. Or worse.
That was a horrible realization to have when you were trapped in a plane, but there was nothing Julius could do. He’d already called, texted, and pinged her though every social media account she had a dozen times each. At this point, the only option he had was to wait until he was back in Detroit and go after her personally. Until then, though, he was stuck, and so, rather than sit and grip the chair white-knuckled all the way home, Julius distracted himself by staring out the window into the dark, silently rehearsing what he would say to Marci when he finally found her.
Chapter 4
The DFZ is a surprisingly small place when you don’t want to go home.
Marci stared glumly through the windshield, watching the red river of taillights move sluggishly down the eight lanes of the Underground’s last functional highway. Normally, she avoided the congested mess that was the I-94 at all costs, but the highway was the only direct route between the southern and northern halves of the DFZ that didn’t require paying skyway tolls, and it wasn’t like she was in a hurry. She’d already released their poor, confused tank badger in an abandoned lot by the border of Algonquin’s Reclamation Land. Now, other than a vague plan to head uptown and check out what was new at the discount magical supply warehouses, Marci had nothing.
It probably wouldn’t even be worth the trip. Reagents from big box stores were always of dubious quality. But wandering aimlessly through aisles stacked with pre-made spells and bins of slightly broken casting chalk still sounded better than going home.
Not that the distance could stop her from thinking about it.
Marci dropped her head to the car’s control dash with athunk. Of all the embarrassing things she’d done in her life, tonight had to be some kind of record. She’d had Bethesda the Heartstriker, a creature of myth from before the disappearance of magic,in her living room,and she’d screwed it up. She’d made a fool of herself in front of everyone, and then Julius had yelled and sent her away like she was a child bothering the adults.
That was the part that had stung the most. Marci didn’t blame Julius snapping—shehadbeen going overboard—but she’d never felt the distance between them more pointedly than at that moment. Living with him, it was easy to forget—not that Julius was a dragon, Marci never forgot that—but that he was part of a world that considered her disposable, beneath consideration. Tonight, though, she’d had a sharp reminder, and like all reality checks, it hurt. To a girl who’d just started to hope that maybe she and Julius could be something more than business partners, it hurt alot.
Marci shook her head with a frustrated sigh. She had to snap out of this. It was stupid to be upset. This was all her fault, anyway. She’d let herself get comfortable over her month with Julius and forgotten the standard she was trying to measure up to. Well, one look at Bethesda had solvedthat. No mortal could come close to the supernatural beauty dragons took for granted, and this was assuming Julius even liked humans in that way. Since she’d only ever seen him as a human, it was too easy to forget that the Julius she knew and loved was only a disguise. It wasn’t his real face, it probably wasn’t even the one he preferred, and it was foolish for Marci to just assume that he had a human standard of beauty. Or that he’d choose her even if he did.
That toxic thought threatened to send her right back down into the pit, but really, what else could she expect? She’dalwaysknown Julius was out of her league, and she had no right to cry foul when reality kept being reality. But just as Marci was reaching new depths of feeling sorry for herself, her phone chimed in her pocket.
The sound made her flinch. She’d set the thing to reject all, the modern equivalent of locking herself in her room. But while that super-mature decision kept her from having to face the outside world, it didn’t apply to her internal alarms. It was too late in the evening for any of her work notifications, though, which meant this was herotheralarm. The one she’d been putting off for a week.
Her first impulse was to send it away again. She wasn’t normally a procrastinator, but some things were just too much to face with anything less than her best, which she was definitely not tonight. That said, though, she’d been putting this off for a long time, and it wasn’t like she was actually doing anything right now…
Like it could sense her indecision, the alarm chimed again, vibrating in her pocket. Marci grabbed it violently, stabbing her finger through the projected AR notice to kill the annoying sound, but the blinking red warning remained. She stared at it for several long seconds, and then she tossed the phone into the empty seat beside her with a curse, reaching over with her other hand to change the autonav’s destination, because why not? Misery loved company, so why not pile everything together? It wasn’t like tonight could get any worse.
That was a self-destructive line of thought and she knew it, but this really did need to be taken care of, and it wasn’t like she had to go far. By sheer coincidence, her aimless pity driving had already taken her into the right part of town. Barely ten minutes later, she was at her destination, pulling into the underground deck below the massive, five-story complex that was the downtown branch of the DFZ 24-Hour Private Postal Service.
Even at this time of night, the place was packed. She had to drive nearly to the bottom of the deck before she found a parking spot, and the stairs up to the lobby were a highway of humanity. Crowded as it was, though, the Private Postal Service existed specifically to allow people to pick up packages without giving their name, so even though the crowd on the stairs was packed in shoulder to shoulder, no one said a word. That suited Marci just fine, and she dutifully avoided eye contact as she hurried up the cement stairs into what looked like a multilevel warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with aisle after aisle of locked metal post office boxes.
Her pick-up number was for the fourth floor. The crowd thinned as she climbed, and by the time she actually found her box amid the endless rows of identical metal squares, Marci was alone. She still looked over her shoulder before punching the single use code the coroner’s office had sent her almost two weeks ago into the number pad. Her hands were shaking so badly, it took her two tries before the light turned green, and the metal door opened with aclickto reveal a plain, shoebox-sized cardboard container marked only with a barcode and a name printed in stark, Unicode font.
