She looked up just in time for the black bag to slide over her head.
***
By the time Julius landed at the private airport on the Canadian side of the Detroit river, the only place that aircraft registered to dragon clans could touch down near the DFZ, it was almost one in the morning. Thankfully, the auto-cabs ran twenty-four hours a day. Fifteen minutes after leaving the airport, Julius was pulling up to his house.
His dark, obviously empty house.
He ordered the cab to wait and jumped out, racing across the conspicuously empty driveway and up the front stairs. The second he opened the door, though, his nose confirmed what he already knew. Marci wasn’t here, and hadn’t been for some time. Five minutes of searching revealed she hadn’t left a note, either, and her phone was still in ignore mode, which meant Julius still had no idea where she was and no way to contact her.
Julius being Julius, this sent him immediately to the worst-case scenarios: she’d left him forever, she’d been in a wreck, she’d been kidnapped, she was dead. Logically, of course, he knew he was overreacting. Marci was a grown woman and a ridiculously competent mage. Why would she sit at home alone? She was probably out having a night to herself, blowing off steam after the horrible things his mother had said. But even though he knewhe was being ridiculous, he couldn’t seem tostop. The idea that Marci was out there and angry with him and he couldn’t talk to her to fix the problem was more than Julius could take on a normal day. After everything else that had happened tonight, it was nearly enough to break him. Marci was his best friend, the spot of sanity in the storm that was his family. If she left, he’d haveno one.
Also, he’d been counting on her magic to help find Justin.
Just thinking that made Julius feel like the worst kind of user, but he really did need her help. The DFZ was a massive area, over five hundred square miles, and that wasn’t counting the extra landmass added by the double layer of the skyways. He supposed he could hire his hacker again to trace Justin’s phone like he’d done with Katya, but seeing how Justin hadn’t answered a single one of Julius’s multiple calls, he wasn’t sure his brother even had his phone on him. But even if he found Justin tonight, though, it wouldn’t change the fact that Marci was gone.
That thought was enough to make his knees buckle. He sat down hard on the floor, burying his head in his shaking hands. It wasn’t until he started feeling like he was actually going to throw up, though, that Julius realized he needed to get a grip.
Yes, he’d had a terrible, stressful night, and yes, something was probably horribly wrong with Marci, but freaking out was only making things worse. Now more than ever, he needed to dig down and find the calm, plotting dragon that had to be in him somewhere. It wasn’t impossible. He’d found Katya when all seemed lost, surely he could find his brother and his best friend.
That line of thought didn’t do much to relax the terrible choking panic inside him, but itdidget him up off the floor. He was psyching himself up to think of a brilliant plan when he noticed a strange glow coming from the living room.
After everything that had happened tonight, it would be just his luck to findanotherdragon waiting on his couch. But fate must have finally decided to throw him a bone, because the source of the strange glow wasn’t draconic or monstrous or any of the other horrible things his brain could imagine. It was Marci’s cat.
It said something about your state of mind when discovering a ghost cat sleeping on your couch was the high point of your evening. “Ghost!” Julius cried, rushing over to pet the spirit’s icy fur. “Thank goodness! Where’s Marci?”
The cat didn’t answer. This wasn’t actually a surprise—Ghostnevertalked to him—but he’d at least hoped the spirit would wake up. No dice. No matter how much he poked or yelled, the cat refused to open his eyes. He just rolled over onto his back, his transparent feet kicking slightly as he dreamed. But while this wasn’t the reaction Julius had hoped for, the spirit’s presence alone was a huge relief. He didn’t know the specifics of Ghost and Marci’s relationship, but there was no way the spirit would be here sleeping if she was dead or in danger, right?
That bit of logic did more to soothe Julius’s panic than anything else. He still wasn’t convinced Marci was okay, but he was reasonably sure she wasn’t hurt or in an emergency. Unfortunately, that was more than Julius could say for his brother, which meant finding Justin was now his first priority. He just hoped he wasn’t already too late. Chelsie hadn’t mentioned how long he’d been in the DFZ, but an angry Justin with something to prove was a recipe for disaster anywhere. With no magic or phone trace to rely on, though, he wasn’t sure where to begin. Even if he limited his search to the Underground, the DFZ was way too big. If he didn’t want this to take weeks, he was going to have to come up with something to narrow the search area. With that in mind, the question became: if he were Justin, where would he go?
Julius sat down on the couch beside Ghost, staring at the cracks in the ceiling as he tried to remember if Justin had ever suffered a blow like this before, and how he’d dealt with it. He couldn’t remember anything specific. In fact, until this point, what he’d seen of his brother’s life had been almost suspiciously serendipitous. Still, given what he knew of his brother, Julius had the feeling that an upset Justin would go somewhere private to lick his wounds. Somewhere with no humans or dragons, but not so far that he couldn’t come back when he inevitably got lonely. Somewhere with food.
The last one gave him an idea. He pulled out his phone and typed in a search for pizza delivery places in the DFZ. This turned up thousands of results, so he shrank his search to only the local chain Justin had ordered from when he’d stayed in the Heartstriker family safehouse. The first four locations had nothing, and the fifth wouldn’t answer his questions, but the clerk working the phones at the sixth shop was all too ready to complain about the strange customer who called five times a day and ordered more pizzas than any one person could possibly eat.
“He’s a machine,” the man groaned. “He calls when we open and then every three hours until we close, and he doesn’t even get the same pizzas! If he was consistent we could bake ahead, but every order’s different, and it’s been going on forthree days.”
“I’m sorry,” Julius said with real sincerity. “I don’t suppose you could tell me where the orders are coming from? I wouldn’t normally ask, but he’s my brother, and I’m worried about him.”
The clerk gasped, and then there was a rustling sound as he muffled the phone with his hand to shout, “Hey!This guy knows the bottomless pit!”
A chorus of voices cheered in the background, and then the clerk said, “We’ll give you his address, man, no problem, just make him stop calling. Corporate doesn’t allow us to refuse his orders, but dude lives in the middle of nowhere and orders a hundred pizzas a day, no joke. Plus, he doesn’t tip.”
“I’mverysorry about him,” Julius said again, pulling up his bank account. “How much does he owe you?”
It took a few minutes for all the cooks and drivers to figure out how much Justin had stiffed them in tips over the last three days. The number they ended up with still sounded low to Julius, especially given what they’d put up with, so he doubled it, transferring the money as soon as they told him where to send it.
“Thanks a million, man,” the clerk said, his voice so bright Julius knew he had to be grinning from ear to ear. “You’re, like, our best friend now. Just sent the deets to your number, and if you ever need a pizza on the house, just let us know.”
“I will,” Julius said, grinning when the address for Justin’s pizza pick-up appeared on his phone. “Thank you.”
The clerk thanked him several more times before Julius finally got him off the phone so he could send Justin’s location to his still-waiting cab.
***
The party at Heartstriker Mountain was still in full swing when Conrad, First Blade of Bethesda and Champion of the Heartstrikers, left his mother happily toying with her more ambitious children and went back to his room. As the highest ranking warrior in the clan, it wasn’t much of a walk. His apartment—a lavish, seven-room setup complete with his own take-off balcony overlooking the mountain’s northern face—was located just below Bethesda’s own. He shut his door and locked it twice before walking into his armaments room to set his Fang on its stand. He was still unhooking the massive blade from his belt when he felt a familiar presence behind him.
“What are you still doing here?” he asked, not even bothering to look as his sister stepped out of the shadows. “I’d have thought you’d be after Justin by now.”
“I was planning to,” Chelsie said, walking over to stand beside him. “But I got some unexpected help in that quarter. Well-timed, too, since it seems that, for once, Justin isn’t our biggest disaster.”
