“Mortals.They’resodramatic. But I must say I was impressed with how you handled her. For a moment there, I could almost imagine you were one of my other, less embarrassing children.”
She paused expectantly, a cruel smile on her red lips, but Julius was in no mood for his mother’s games. He wasn’t even that scared anymore. He just wanted her to leave so he could go upstairs and apologize to Marci. “Why are you here?”
“Watch your tone,” Bethesda said sharply, rising from the couch to loom over him. “Do you even know how lucky you are that I’ve deigned to visit your little…” Her voice faded as she looked around the sparsely furnished room. “What is it you’re doing here again?”
“Running a business,” Julius replied, standing a little taller. “We’re called New Horizons Magical Solutions, and—”
“That’swhat you’re calling it?”
When he nodded, she laughed. “What? Were you trying to stand out in the listings by having the longest name, or were you trying to make a clever acronym and got confused?”
Julius scowled. Itwasa bit of a silly name, but he liked it. It was fitting, because even after he’d messed up on the killing-animals-for-the-bounty end of things, New Horizons had remained exactly that: a new horizon for his life. A promise for a better future. But his mother would respect that kind of sentimentality even less than a harebrained scheme to game the business listings, so he decided to just move on.
“We’re a magical animal control company,” he explained patiently. “It’s a booming business here in the DFZ. We’ve haven’t even been operating for a month, and already—”
“So you’re a rat catcher.”
Julius couldn’t exactly argue with that since he’d just gotten back from a job catching what were essentially giant magical rodents, but he didn’t appreciate her tone. “It’s a major industry!”
“Still waiting to hear why I should care,” Bethesda said, looking down to examine her knife-sharp, gold painted nails with a dangerously bored expression.
Julius clamped his jaw shut, forcing the growl back down his throat before it got him into trouble. “With all due respect, Mother, it’s only been a month. If you’d given me more time before checking in, I would have had something more impressive to show you.”
“Show me?” she scoffed. “Really, Julius? Did youreallythink I’d risk setting foot in Algonquin’s little playground to hear your humdrum tales of small business success?”
Well, not when she put it like that. “But,” he said, confused. “If you’re not here to check on me, whyareyou here?”
As always, Bethesda let him dangle for a moment before saying, “I’m taking you to a party.”
He couldn’t have heard that right. “A what?”
“A party,” she repeated. “A social event in a private home. A get-together.”
“I know what a party is,” Julius said. “But why would you want to takeme?”
“Because it suits me,” she replied, her voice growing dangerously sharp. “And if you want to be unsealed this decade, you’ll stop asking stupid questions and do as you’re told.”
The word “unsealed” had barely left her lips before the block she’d placed at the root of Julius’s power started to clench up. It was only moderately painful, nothing like when she’d actually put the seal on him, but it made him extremely aware of how cramped and uncomfortable he was in this shape. His wings, which he normally didn’t even think about, suddenly ached to uncurl, and his tail prickled like a limb that’d fallen asleep. Even his feathers were itching, making him want to roll around on the ground. Bethesda must have known it, too, because her smile only grew crueler. “Any more comments you’d like to add?”
“No, Mother,” he said softly, lowering his head.
“Good boy,” she cooed. “Now let’s go. This detour has taken far too long already.”
She and Conrad were already halfway out of the room before Julius realized she meantright now. “Wait!” he cried, looking down in a panic at his padded work clothes, which still reeked of tank badger. “At least give me a moment to change.”
“Why?” Bethesda said, sweeping down the short hall toward the kitchen. “No one expects anything of you, so why should we pretend? It’s not like you have something nicer to wear.”
Julius did not, in fact, have anything in his closet at the moment that wasn’t second-hand jeans and t-shirts, but that didn’t make her assessment sting any less. “I can still—”
His mother growled deep in her throat, an inhuman noise that vibrated through the floor and set his hair on end. After that, Julius didn’t say another word. He simply lowered his head and scurried after her, ducking through the kitchen and out the back door Conrad held open into the gravel alley behind the house where Bethesda’s limo was waiting.
Chapter 2
And this was how, an hour later, Julius found himself flying over the Great Plains in his mother’s private sub-orbital jet.
Under different circumstances, this wouldn’t have been so bad. Like everything else she owned, Bethesda’s private jet was luxurious to the point of absurdity. It didn’t even have seats, just couches and lounges strewn across a cabin that looked more like a flying living room. But it was hard to enjoy the luxury when he didn’t know where they were going, or why Bethesda had decided to takehim. His mother wasn’t helping, either. She hadn’t actually said a word to him since they’d left the house.
This wasn’t to say she’d been silent. His mother had talked the whole time, just not to him. Instead, she’d been lounging on her throne-like couch, using her phone and smart mic to have multiple, simultaneous conversations with at least a dozen of his brothers and sisters, switching seamlessly between each call so each dragon thought she was talking only to them.
