She nodded, waiting, but Julius couldn’t continue. He didn’t even know if there was language to describe how painfully happy he was that Marci was back safely, or how much what she’d done tonight meant to him. After a lifetime of being a failure, the shame of the Heartstrikers, the most worthless piece on the board, the idea that she, a human, had stood against something like Vann Jeger to protect him—him, the very worst dragon—was more than Julius could articulate. Just thinking about it did things to his insides, shifting priorities and assumptions around like landmasses in an earthquake, and when it was over, the world looked very different.
The closet, for example. When she’d first pulled him in, he’d been too worried to think about anything but what was going on. Now, the thing that struck him most was how small the space was. Even standing on opposite sides, he and Marci were almost chest to chest. He could actually feel the heat of her body radiating across the inches that separated them, tempting him to lean even closer.
This afternoon, that exact temptation had been enough to send him into his usual lecture about how this was all a Very Bad Idea. Now, though, Julius was having a hard time seeing the point. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about their friendship anymore—he cared more than ever—but the future was no longer something he could take for granted. There were no guaranteed years of partnership waiting to be irrevocably ruined by a single impulsive moment. There was only now, and now was very short. Short and precious, the sort of thing that shouldn’t be squandered.
With that, his heart started hammering harder than ever. This time, though, Julius didn’t try to calm it. Slowly, carefully, giving her plenty of time to back out, he reached down to rest his hands on Marci’s shoulders.
Her breaths stopped when he touched her, but she didn’t push away like she’d done before. She moved closer, stepping in until their bodies were touching and Julius could feel her heart racing as fast as his own as he leaned down. Marci rose up on her toes at the same time, lifting up to meet him halfway. She didn’t have far to go, Julius wasn’t that tall, but it still seemed to take forever. And then, just when he could feel her soft breath against his lips and the kiss he’d wanted for so long finally seemed on the verge of being inevitable, the closet door behind him flew open.
For a baffled moment, Julius just stood there, frozen by the sudden blaze of light and roar of returning sound, and then a hard hand grabbed his shoulder and yanked him backwards. The next second was spent flailing in free fall before his training finally kicked in, spinning him around into a crouch right in front of his scowling brother.
“Thisis what you made me wait for?”
“Justin!” Julius shouted, his face burning. “What are you doing?”
“You said five minutes,” Justin growled. “I normally give people in closets seven, but I’m not in a giving mood tonight. Now.” He turned and fixed Marci with a killing stare. “Start explaining.”
“I don’t have to explain anything to you!” she shouted, her cheeks flushed with embarrassed fury. “Why are you even here?”
“I invited him to stay with us,” Julius explained quickly.
“Not that a dragon needs a mortal’s permission to do anything,” Justin added, giving Marci a superior look
She flashed him a killing glare of her own, and Julius sighed. Marci barely tolerated his brother under the best of circumstances, which definitely did not include right now. It didn’t help that Justin seemed to be going out of his way to be even more of an arrogant jerk than usual. Clearly, if Julius wanted any peace tonight, he was going to have to make it himself.
“Justin, back down,” he said calmly. “We have an emergency.”
The dragon rolled his eyes. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“Would you lay off?” Marci yelled. “Do you even know what kind of day I’ve had?”
“No!” Justin shouted back. “That’s what I’m trying to find out!”
“Guys,” Julius said, stepping into the middle before either of them did something he’d regret. When no one tried to punch or shoot a fireball past him, he turned to Justin. “Marci was late because she was captured by Vann Jeger.”
He paused there, because that was what you did after a bomb drop, but his brother didn’t look scared at all. Quite the opposite. He looked delighted, his eyes flashing with excitement as he motioned for Julius to continue.
With a sinking feeling, Julius obliged, quickly repeating the parts of the story he knew and encouraging Marci to fill in what he didn’t. Since she clearly didn’t want to share any of this with Justin, it was a struggle, but Marci had always been a stickler for accuracy. In the end, she told him the whole thing plus some extra bits that hadn’t made it into the version she’d given Julius, like how Vann Jeger was specifically hunting the dragon from the Pit.
Hearing that made Julius more nervous than ever. Justin, however, looked like a kid who’d just woken up to an unexpected Christmas morning. “So let me get this straight. You,” he pointed at Marci, “are going to be short one head unless you bring Vann Jeger a dragon by sundown tomorrow, which, since we’re now well into the AMs, actually means tonight, right?”
“Yes,” Marci said after taking a moment to work her way through that convoluted sentence. She tapped the bandage over her mark. “The mage wrote the exact time as seven-thirty-eight p.m. on Saturday, September the sixteenth.”
Julius paled as he checked his phone. “That’s only seventeen hours away.”
“So it is,” Justin agreed. “Where’s the problem, again?”
Julius stared at him. “Is that a joke?”
“You’re a joke if you think so,” Justin said, grinning. “Didn’t you hear your human? She just said the curse compels her to bring a dragon to Vann Jeger, but she didn’t say anything about that dragon having to do anything. Sounds to me like all we have to do is show up and the thing’s broken.”
“Technically, maybe,” Marci admitted. “But I don’t think Vann Jeger’s going to let us just walk up, wave, and leave.”
“Of course not,” Justin scoffed, crossing his arms over his chest with a look of absolute superiority. “That’s why you two lightweights are going to focus on getting in and getting out whileItake on the dragon hunter.”
Stunned silence followed that pronouncement. Then, because someone had to, Julius asked the obvious question.
“Are you insane?”
