She beamed at him. “Glad I could get the assist.” Her bracelet snuffed out, and she shook her hand like it stung. “Man, those bastards are tough. That blast should have sent it flying into Ohio.”
“I’m just glad it decided discretion was the better part of valor,” Julius said, grinning back. “I take it you’re finished, then?”
“Yep,” Marci said, stepping aside to reveal their client, who was no longer being crushed under the shimmering image of a spirit. More telling to Julius, he also no longer reeked of female tank badger. This was a huge improvement for everyone, but especially for the badger in the cage, who was already noticeably calmer.
“Is it gone?” the client whispered.
“Not really, but she’s banished for now,” Marci said, reaching down to help him up.
The man looked bewildered. “What does that mean?”
“Well, a spirit can never truly be destroyed,” Marci explained. “I drained enough of her magic to temporarily disperse her, but so long as there are tank badgers and magic, she’ll always come back, and so long as you have that summoning spell tattooed on your arm, she’ll come looking for you.”
“So if I get it removed, she won’t be?” he asked hopefully.
Marci nodded, her eyes sharp. “Next time, sir, I’d suggest you stick to qualified, licensed mages like myself for your spells, especially permanent ones.” She flicked her wrist, and a business card appeared in her hand. “Our rates are very reasonable, and as you see, we get the job done right.”
By the time she finished, the young man was gaping at her, but Julius could only smile. That was his Marci—she never missed a chance. Fortunately, the client was too happy to notice he was being hustled. Despite all the panicked complaining he’d done earlier, he was now staring at Marci and Julius like they were his own personal guardian angels. “Thank you,” he said, voice shaking. “You saved my life.”
“It was our pleasure,” Julius said proudly, and he meant it.Oh, how he meant it.
Technically, their business was magical animal removal. This being the DFZ, though, the scope of the jobs that came in was much larger. In the month since he and Marci had gone into business together, they’d done everything from banishments to home warding to clearing out an entire warehouse overrun with sentient snails. They’d seen some pretty crazy stuff, but while tank badgers were definitely too high up on the danger scale for Julius’s comfort, jobs like today’s were actually his favorites. Clients were always happy when you did a good job for a fair price, but when you saved someone from a monster in their home, they treated you like a hero. That was an incredible feeling for a dragon who’d been able to count on one hand the number of times he’d been thanked just four weeks ago, and Julius couldn’t keep the stupid grin off his face as he reached down to hoist the snarling cage containing the remaining badger onto his shoulder.
A mistake he didn’t realize until it was too late.
“Wow,” the man said, his eyes going wide. “You’re alotstronger than you look.”
“He works out,” Marci covered quickly. “Necessity of the job. Speaking of.” She whipped out her phone. “We’ve got a dangerous animal removal plus a banishment. Would you like to add on a ward as well? You know, just in case?”
The client began to sputter, and Julius took his chance to flee down the stairs so he wouldn’t have to hear her taking the man for all he was worth. He didn’t begrudge Marci her mercenary nature—it was the main thing that had kept them afloat since they’d started this business together—he just didn’t like to listen to it. All that up-selling felt…rude.
That was a terribly undraconic thought, but Julius let it roll off with a shrug. He didn’t care about stuff like that anymore. Ever since he’d left Jessica’s apartment the night they’d rescued Katya and foiled Estella’s plots, he’d barely thought about other dragons. Other than Ian’s occasional check-ins, he hadn’t talked to one either. Even his mother hadn’t called. It was like he’d fallen off the face of the dragon world, which was why—despite crazy animals jumping at his head nearly every day—the last four weeks had been the happiest of Julius’s life. He had nothing he’d been raised to think was important: no wealth, no power, not even a proper lair, plus he was still sealed, but he couldn’t care less. For the first time ever, he was living without constantly looking over his shoulder or worrying about when he’d be attacked. It wasn’t much by dragon standards, but to Julius, it was paradise, and definitely worth risking some tank badger bites for.
Like it knew what he was thinking about, the badger in the cage chose that moment to try and bite his fingers where they held the cage handle, whining when it couldn’t get through. Julius held the cage a little farther away as he took the rusted cement stairs down two at a time to the street where Marci had parked her car.
Technically, it was their car now, though Julius could never look at the rusted out, mustard yellow sedan without thinking of Marci. They could have bought a car ten years younger for what the old rust bucket had cost to fix, but the car had belonged to her father, and Marci was noticeably happier when she was in it, which, to Julius, made the repairs worth every penny. He’d still sprung for a few upgrades, though, like a better autonav and a ventilated, expanded trunk big enough to fit cages like the one he had now. He was strapping the metal box into place when he heard Marci’s footsteps on the stairs behind him.
“How’d we do?” he asked, closing the trunk.
“Medium,” she said, still tapping on her phone. “I couldn’t sell him on the ward, but he did tip. I think you impressed him with that cage catch. We’ll have to conjure another two calls before next Wednesday if we want to actually get into the black this month, but we won’t starve for now, so that’s something.”
“We’re not going to starve period,” Julius assured her, walking around to the driver’s door. “Speaking of, let’s go get some dinner. It’s nearly sundown.”
“How can you tell?” Marci asked, looking up at the unchanging, cave-like dark of the DFZ Underground.
“Because I’m hungry,” he said, plopping into his seat. “Come on. It’s Friday night. Let’s find a nice empty lot to dump Mr. Snarls where he won’t bother anyone, and then we’ll go for pizza.”
He looked up to see if that appealed to her, but Marci was still standing beside the car. “You know,” she said quietly, leaning down to look at him through the open door. “The bounty for an intact, living tank badger is currently listed at over two thousand bucks.”
Julius dropped his eyes.
“They’re pretty dangerous nuisances,” she went on. “And two thousand buckswouldgo a long way toward filling the hole in our budget…”
She trailed off, her voice painfully hopeful, but Julius couldn’t say a word. It wasn’t that he didn’t agree with what she was saying. Turning the animals they caught in for Algonquin’s animal control bounty had actually been his plan to start with. But that was back at the beginning, when he’d assumed every job would be like the lampreys: nasty, aggressive, violent menaces that needed to be put down for everyone’s benefit. Once they’d actually started going out on calls, though, he’d quickly realized that most of the animals they got hired to deal with weren’t like that at all. Even the tank badgers weren’t normally aggressive toward people. They were just animals doing their best to survive in the shadow of the enormous human city that had popped up like a mushroom on top of them, and as an illegal magical creature trying to make his own way in the DFZ, the thought of turning them in to be killed for Algonquin’s bounty hit a little too close to home. It must have shown on his face, too, because Marci let out a long sigh.
“Never mind,” she said, flopping into her seat. “Forget I said anything.”
Julius started the car. “I’m sorry.”
