“Don’t look like that, darling,” she scolded as Conrad hopped up to open the exterior door. “This is the most use you’ve been to me in years. You should be happy, especially since you don’t actually have to do anything. In fact, if you behave yourself tonight and this all works out like it should, Imightjust be happy enough to unseal you. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”
She paused there, waiting for his answer, but Julius said nothing. What was there to say? If he agreed, he’d condone the use of his good reputation to trap those who trusted him. If he didn’t, she’d accuse him of being ungrateful, revoke the offer, and use him anyway. That was how his mother worked: by leaving you no option but to dance to her tune and thank her for the opportunity.
When he didn’t answer, Bethesda’s smile fell. “You truly are a miserable excuse for a dragon,” she said, turning away. “I give you opportunity after opportunity, but do you take it?”
He took a breath to defend himself, but his mother cut him off. “Do yourself a favor, Julius,” she said as she started down the stairs the human crew had just finished rolling into position. “Keep that mouth shut. When we get to the party, find a corner and stand in it until I tell you to do otherwise. Can you manage that?”
“Yes, Mother,” he said quietly, following her down the stairs to the tarmac where Frieda, the Heartstriker who served as his mother’s secretary, was already waiting to walk them into the mountain.
Given how much he’d hated living here, Julius didn’t even want to look at the place again. Before he could think of dragging his feet, though, a voice behind him growled, “Move.”
Julius looked up with a start to see Conrad standing on the stairs behind him, his massive arms crossed over his inhumanly wide chest. He looked pointedly at the doors on the other side of the airstrip, and Julius got the hint, scurrying after his mother like a mouse. His terrifying brother followed right on his heels, bringing up the rear as they left the jet to the human crew and stepped through the automatic, sound-proofed doors into the massive complex that was Heartstriker Mountain.
It looked the same as always. Julius wasn’t sure what else he’d expected. He’d only been gone a month. Given how much his life had changed in the last four weeks, though, coming back to the same spotless green carpet, overly ornate gold light fixtures, and arched stone hallway full of human servants all scrambling to bow to Bethesda as she passed felt oddly surreal. The fortress didn’t even feel like home anymore, an uncomfortable realization given that, up until a few weeks ago, this was the only home he’d ever known. He was still trying to decide how to feel about that when his mother marched them past the multiple elevators leading to the various family floors and into the special, gilded elevator at the far end that connected the public base of the mountain with her private lair at the peak.
Julius stopped with a gulp. He’d lived his whole life in Heartstriker Mountain, but he’d only taken this elevator a handful of times, and only when he was in deep, deep trouble. There was no other reason a dragon like him would be invited up to Bethesda’s throne room or treasury. Considering clan parties were always thrown in the grand ballroom on the first floor, he was surprised they were going there now. Perhaps Bethesda was just going up to her rooms to change? If so, then he might be able to duck back down to his old room to grab something as well. He was sure he had something that could pass as formal wear in his old closet. Assuming, of course, Bob had been kidding when he’d said he’d sold everything.
When he mentioned going back to his room to his mother, though, Bethesda just scoffed. “Don’t be stupid,” she said, yanking him into the elevator without looking up from the tablet Frieda was holding for her to read. “This is an intimate gathering of the Heartstriker elite, not a cattle call. The ballroom is for the masses.We’regoing to the throne room.” Her reflection in the elevator’s golden mirrored doors smirked at him. “Now do you understand what an honor it is to be included?”
Julius muttered something about it being an honor, indeed, but inside he was fighting down panic. Any party hosted by his mother was a terrifying ordeal, but the Heartstriker gatherings he’d been forced to attend growing up had always been big enough for him to count on hiding in the crowd. A small, elite party was another matter entirely. Julius didn’t even have a strategy for something like that, and there was no time to think of one. The swift, silent elevator had already rushed them to the mountain’s peak, the great doors opening to reveal a stone hallway big enough to drive a tank down.
As the home of a young, modern clan who’d come into their power during the magical drought, most of Heartstriker Mountain had been designed to a human scale. Here, though, in the place that was the top of Heartstriker in all ways, things were built for dragons. Just stepping out of the elevator made Julius feel like an insignificant speck, but, as always when entering his mother’s lair, what really got him were the heads.
The giant stone tunnel that ran from the elevator to the throne room’s enormous double doors a hundred feet away was lined with severed dragon heads. They hung in a grid from floor to ceiling, each one a grisly trophy from the clans the Heartstriker had destroyed during her rapid rise to power, mounted on a custom mahogany plaque the size of a car. Since Bethesda’s first conquests had been in the Americas, most of the skulls were feathered, including those from her two older brothers, but there were plenty of scaled heads from the European clans, fish-like heads from the Sea Serpents who ruled the Pacific, even two narrow, snake-like skulls from the Asian clans, and these were just the intact ones she liked to show off. Bethesda had even more trophies stored in her treasury, but the entry hall was reserved for the most impressive specimens, the defeated dragons big and famous enough to serve as a proper reminder of just who lived here, and what she was capable of.
Juliushatedwalking down this hall. Even knowing the severed heads were stuffed and their eyes were glass, he swore he could feel the dead dragons watching him and plotting revenge. His mother, on the other hand, loved it. She’d rushed them all the way from the plane to the elevator. Now, though, she took her time, smiling up at each head like she was greeting old friends. But creepy as it was to stroll through a postmortem gallery of your enemies, Julius was actually grateful for the slow pace. It gave him time to adjust to the growing scent of dragons coming from the doors at the end.
Since his mother had come to pick him up herself, Julius had hoped he’d have some time to prepare himself before the others arrived, but leave it to Bethesda to be fashionably late to her own party. He didn’t have the experience needed to separate all the individual scents floating down the hall, but there were definitely alotof dragons already waiting on the other side of the doors at the end of the hall. Nothing like the massive gatherings of Heartstrikers that showed up for his mother’s annual birthday celebration, of course, but still more than Julius wanted to deal with in an enclosed space.
Just thinking about standing in that predatory crowd made him twitchy, but it was way too late to run. Conrad had already walked ahead of them to grab both of the massive door handles, looking over his shoulder at their mother for a signal. After taking a moment to pull herself to her maximum height, Bethesda nodded, and Conrad pushed the heavy, dragon-sized wooden doors open with a single shove to reveal Bethesda’s enormous, gilded throne room, which was packed nearly to the walls with the most terrifying crowd Julius had ever seen.
When he was a young dragon, his sister Flora, who’d been in charge of the new Heartstriker’s education, had shown J-clutch a scale model of the solar system. Years later, Julius could still remember how tiny and insignificant he’d felt coming face to face with the reality of interstellar distance, and it was the same feeling he had now. Even with his mother standing between him and the throne room, Julius could feel the force of the crowd’s attention like a pressure zone as every dragon in the room turned to look at Bethesda’s grand entrance.
Apparently, “small, elite gathering” was a relative term. There were so many deadly, beautiful faces turned toward them, Julius couldn’t begin to count them all, but one glance was enough for him to know to his bones that he was the smallest thing in this room by a power of ten. Bethesda, of course, took their notice as her due. Regal as a queen, she lifted her chin, surveying the well-dressed crowd like she was trying to decide if it met her minimum requirements.
Like all her displays of power, it went on forever. Since Julius was trapped up there at her side, this meanthehad to stand and be stared at forever, which was rapidly becoming a problem. Being the focus of this much draconic attention would have been the stuff of nightmares under any circumstances, but for some reason, the fear was hitting him even harder than he’d anticipated, weakening his knees even as it jacked up his body with the desperate need to flee.
It was this place, he realized, reaching up furtively to wipe the nervous sweat off his brow. Just looking at the gilded cave-turned-palace that was the Heartstriker’s seat of power brought back a lifetime of bad memories. It was here that he’d first had to prove to his mother that he could fly, jumping off the massive, open balcony at the room’s far end while Bethesda watched. He’d nearly crashed, too. Not because he was a bad flier—flying was actually the one part of being a dragon Julius had never had trouble with—but because his mother’s critical glare had made him trip all over himself. The throne room was also where she’d first singled him out for being a failure, calling him up to stand beside her on top of her throne in front of all his siblings so he could see the view he’d never earn. But bad as the old memories were, he had a sharper, far more recent reason to hate this place, because the throne room was where Bethesda had sealed his dragon form.
That was a night he never wanted to remember, but it was impossible not to think about it when he was standing on the threshold of the place where it had happened. Everywhere he looked—the massive throne on its dais, the walls set with gold and gemstone mosaics depicting his mother in all her feathered glory, the smooth stone floor with its numerous, tell-tale dark stains—reminded him viscerally of what he didn’t want to think about. Even just standing here in the doorway beside his mother, he could almost feel her claws in his flesh again as she dragged him up here from his room, but he couldn’t get away. He couldn’t even turn. So Julius did the only thing hecoulddo. He looked up, staring determinedly over the heads of the terrifying crowd.
Since he’d always had his head down in his mother’s presence, the roof was the only part of her throne room that didn’t trigger flashbacks of events he’d rather not revisit. But even this wasn’t a completely safe strategy, because looking up meant that Julius was now staring straight at what he used to consider the scariest part of his mother’s trappings of power: the massive, bus-sized skull that hung suspended from the domed ceiling by enchanted chains.
Unlike the preserved, taxidermy dragon heads they’d walked past on their way here, this one was nothing but bleached bone. But despite its shabbiness, the huge skull was Bethesda’s greatest trophy, because it was the head of her father, the Quetzalcoatl, the ancient dragon whose death by her hand had earned Bethesda the title of Heartstriker. It also looked different than the last time he’d seen it.
At least that was enough to shock Julius out of his fear. The Quetzalcoatl’s skull was the Heartstrikers’ most priceless family heirloom. His mother didn’t allow it to be dusted, let alone messed with, but something was definitely different. He was staring harder, trying to put his finger on what, when a dragon broke from the crowd to approach the still preening Bethesda.
Not surprisingly given the purpose of this party, it was Ian. The dragon looked as impeccable as always in his slim-cut tux, but his expression was uncharacteristically nervous as he bowed low over Bethesda’s hand. “Mother.”
“Darling,” she cooed back, eying Ian like a rancher would her prized bull. “Where is your date?”
There was only one “date” Ian could possibly bring tonight, but Julius didn’t smell Svena, or any daughter of the Three Sisters, in the crowd, which explained why Ian’s face was now the color of his white tie. “She’s running a little late,” he said, his voice impressively smooth, considering.
Bethesda’s smile fell. “Late?”
The word came out like a dagger, making Julius flinch, and he wasn’t even the one it was aimed at. But Ian was the dragon’s dragon, and he took it with barely a grimace. “I’m given to understand she had some difficulties with her sister,” he said calmly. “She will be here soon.”
“She’d better be,” Bethesda growled, turning away with a sweep of her shiny black hair. “Since we’re being made to wait, I’m going to make my rounds,” she announced. “Ian, you’re with me. Julius, go find a corner and stand in it. When Svena deigns to grace us with her presence, return to my side. Otherwise, I don’t want to see so much as a—”
