When she followed Amelia downstairs from the workshop, Marci expected her to take them outside to a car, maybe even a limo like the one Bethesda had arrived in. Instead, the dragon led her into the kitchen, where a door-sized hole in reality was hanging in the air in front of their refrigerator.
Marci stopped cold, eyes wide. “Is-is that—”
“A portal?” Amelia finished, ducking through. “Naturally. Now come along so I can let the idiot go before he wastes all my magic.”
Marci could only suppose Amelia was talking about Justin. Another time, the implications of that comment would’ve been interesting to explore, if only to shed some light on how dragons actually cast spells. At the moment, though, Marci was too distracted by thefloating gatewayto properly follow up. “Is that really a portal to another dimension?!”
“Nope, this one goes uptown. Portals to the planes are way more dramatic. Now come on.”
She stuck her arm back through the hole and snapped her fingers impatiently. Eyes wide as they could go, Marci obeyed, carefully stepping through the door-shaped gap. The moment she reached the other side, the hole vanished, leaving her standing alone with Amelia in a small, cement room with a single metal door.
The similarities to the bleak prison cell where Vann Jeger interrogated her were enough to make Marci instantly nervous, but there was no drain in the floor this time, and the “door” was nothing but a flimsy, corrugated metal sheet that slid up on a track. Once she got over her initial shock, the little room actually reminded Marci more of a storage unit than anything else.
“That’s because itisa storage unit,” Amelia answered proudly when she asked. “Best security you can get for the price! Plus, no one bothers you.”
“Yousleepin a self-storage unit?” Marci said, horrified. The closet-sized room was barely big enough for the two of them to stand in.
“Of course not,” Amelia scoffed. “I just needed somewhere safe to hidethis.”
She reached out as she spoke, rapping her knuckles against the unit’s rear wall. A split second later, the painted cement bricks vanished to reveal the most beautiful beach Marci had ever seen.
Turquoise water lapped in small, gentle waves in a crescent bay under a pink and blue sky just on the cusp of sunset. The white sand beach was speckled with black, volcanic boulders and bordered by an explosion of tropical vegetation so dense, it looked like a wall of green. Directly in front of them, in the dry sand above the surf, someone had set up a wooden table shielded from the sun by a large beach umbrella with heaps of beautiful, ripe, tropical fruits and a metal bucket loaded with ice and what appeared to be bottles of high-proof rum.
The whole setup was so absurdly picture-perfect, Marci would have sworn it was an illusion, but even the best illusions covered only two to three senses at the most. Here, though, not only could she see the beautiful landscape stretching out in front of her, she could smell the warm sea air coming in like a caress. The setting sunlight that streamed through the gap was hot and balmy on her skin, and when Amelia kicked off her shoes and stepped through, her bare feet slid into the sand with a silkenkush.
After that, Marci had no choice but to accept that there really was a hole in the wall in front of her that led to paradise. But when she reached down to plunge her own fingers into the warm, white sand, pain shot through her neck like a knife, making her jump back with a strangled gasp.
“Interesting,” Amelia said, glancing back at Marci’s pained sound before resuming her stroll to the fruit-laden table. “Looks like your curse is pretty literal. You really can’t set so much as a finger outside the DFZ.”
“So it would seem,” Marci said, rubbing her throbbing neck. “So isthatanother plane?”
“Wrong again,” the dragon replied, grabbing the heaping bowl of fruit off the table. “Keeping a portal to the outer planes open for more than a few minutes is beyond even my abilities. This is a little island of no consequence in what you now call the Philippines. I’ve been using it as my base of operations in this world for centuries. The tropical climate agrees with my plumage.” She walked back to the portal and stuck the bowl through, placing the fragrant fruit just below Marci’s nose. “Mango?”
Marci took the offered yellow fruit without looking. She’d never been to the Philippines personally, but the island’s beauty certainly matched any tropical postcard. Also, being on the other side of the planet would explain why the sun looked to be on the verge of setting behind Amelia despite the fact that it was early morning in Detroit. But what she still didn’t get was, “How?”
Amelia arched an eyebrow. “How what?”
“How can you dothis?” Marci said, flailing her arms at the gently cresting waves. “Dimensional magic is one of the most competitive fields in modern sorcery. All the top universities are working on it, but the biggest portal I’ve ever heard of was MIT’s last year, and that was barely the size of a dime. You’ve got a whole wall! And you opened itinsidethe same dimension. I didn’t even know that waspossible.”
“Hey, they don’t call me the Planeswalker for nothing,” Amelia said smugly, grabbing a mango for herself before dropping the bowl back onto the table. “Don’t worry about it too much. Proper portal creation takes longer than a single human lifetime to master. You see those seams?” She pointed at the edge where the beach met the storage unit like a razor slice. “It takes centuries to get to that level of precision. But I had a lot of time to practice, and portals to my own private island are much more convenient than actually trying to live in Algonquin’s playpen. But enough about me.” She plopped down into the folding beach chair beside the table, leaning back to face Marci with a wide grin. “Let’s talk about your spirit.”
Her voice was still casual and friendly, but the abrupt subject change was enough to remind Marci that this wasn’t actually a beach trip. “Why are you so interested?” she asked, clutching her bag where Ghost was still snoozing, blissfully unaware.
“He’s a unique specimen,” Amelia replied, reaching into the ice-filled bucket beside her to grab a frosted bottle of rum. “So are you, for that matter. New sights are a rarity at my age, so when I find one, I don’t waste time.” She popped the cork with her teeth and took a long swig of the cold, amber liquor. “Assuage my curiosity,” she ordered when she finished. “Tell me how you ended up bound to him.”
Marci frowned. She hadn’t needed Julius to warn her that telling dragons anything before you knew their end goal was a bad idea. That said, Ameliahadanswered all of her questions so far. It seemed wrong not to return the favor. Besides, the entire reason she’d agreed to go with Amelia had been to get a chance to pick an ancient dragon’s brain. Maybe if she told the truth, Amelia would be able to shed some light on what had happened in the alleyway?
“I kind of got him by accident,” Marci confessed. “My very first job in the DFZ was a haunting job. Most so-called hauntings are actually caused by spirits, so I came prepared for a banishing, but when I reached my client, Ghost was sitting on her chest draining her magic. I’d never seen a spirit do anything like that before, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of time to investigate since my client was nearly dead by the time I got there. So, since banishing Ghost would have meant I’d never get to answer my questions, I decided to bind him instead. That was a little over a month ago. We’ve been together ever since.”
“Hold up,” Amelia said, leaning forward in her beach chair. “You found an unknown spirit sucking the life out of another human, and you decided to bind him to your own soul for the rest of your life just so you’d get a chance to poke at him later?”
Marci’s cheeks began to burn. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said quickly. “I’m no expert at spirits—my training is in Thaumaturgical spellwork theory—but even I could tell that Ghost was too small to be a threat. The only reason he was able to overpower my client in the first place was because she was already old and sick. I was perfectly safe, and I couldn’t send him away without at least trying to figure out what he was.”
That came out more defensive than she’d intended, but Amelia was grinning ear to ear. “You mistake me,” she said. “I wasn’t being critical. I appreciate your audacity. Were you successful, then? Do you know what he is?”
Marci had no choice but to shake her head. “My first hypothesis was that he was a death spirit. I’d never heard of a non-human one, but the house where I found him was overrun with cats, and there was more than enough death for a manifestation.”
“A death spirit of cats,” the dragon said, pausing for a long, thoughtful draw off her rum bottle. “That’s a new one. And do you still think that’s the case?”
