Marci sighed. This again. “I figured it was something like that,” she said, petting Ghost, who was crouching in her lap like a little fluffy tiger ready to pounce. “But I’ve got job offers flying fast and furious these days. If you want to win me over, it’s going to take more than a room with a view and a pastry tray.”
“Don’t get cocky, mortal,” the Lady of the Lakes said, her watery voice going choppy. “You want to know what’s in this for you? How does not dying sound?”
Marci shrugged. “Honestly, pretty weak. I’ve been threatened alotrecently, and the effectiveness is starting to wear off. Especially since we both know you’re not going to follow through.”
Algonquin arched an eyebrow. “What makes you think that?”
“Because I’ve got him,” Marci said, patting Ghost on the head. “If I was just another mortal with something you wanted, you’d have had your Thunderbird crash our plane the moment we entered your airspace. You certainly wouldn’t have staged such an expensive and overwhelming trap, but the very fact that you rolled so hard to make sure I had no choice other than to go with you tonight proves that I’mnotjust another mortal. I’m not going to go so far as to say irreplaceable, but I think you’ve proven I’m not someone you’re ready to idly kill. So if you want me to cooperate, you’re going to have to try another line. Because I’ve been down the ‘obey me or die’ road before with other gigantically powerful beings who could squash me like a bug, and I’m not buying it anymore.”
Marci ended with a smile smug enough to make a dragon proud. She knew how this game was played. Immortals always thought they could push her around, but for all their power and age, none of these spirits or dragons seemed to grasp that power was fluid, and that it had nothing to do with age or magic or strength. When it came to making others do what you wanted, the only thing that counted was who had the upper hand, and so long as Marci had the potential to become the Merlin, that was her.
Knowing this was how Marci had stayed alive and free as long as she had despite always being horribly outclassed. But rather than growing surly in her defeat as Amelia had, the Lady of the Lakes just gave her a pitying look.
“Poor little mortal,” she said, shaking her head. “Now I see how you’ve lasted so long among the dragons. You play their games very well, but I’m afraid you fail to grasp the reality of your position in my realm. You see, I don’t actually need you or your Mortal Spirit, because I’ve already got one of my own.”
Marci’s eyes went wide. “What?”
Instead of explaining, Algonquin got up and walked to the edge of the cliff. When she reached it, she lifted both hands in front of her with her palms pressed together. When her arms were straight out in front of her, she whipped them apart, and the swirling night mist blanketing the forest parted like the Red Sea.
“Come,” she said, beckoning to Marci. “See for yourself.”
Trembling, Marci obeyed. Clutching Ghost to her chest, she walked to the cliff’s edge and peered down, looking out over what was now averydifferent landscape. With the mist gone, she could now see that the forest, which she’d assumed covered everything, actually ended less than a hundred feet from where the limo had stopped, giving way to what looked like another world.
Open fields stretched out as far as she could see. The massive clearing ran in a giant circle from the tree line to the shore of Lake St. Clair itself. Along its inner ring, trees the size of DFZ superscrapers stood like sentinels over the beautiful, perfectly round pools of glowing water that nestled like jewels in their gnarled roots. Some of them were festooned with spring flowers, others were covered in autumn leaves. All were bigger than any natural tree could ever hope to grow, but the longer Marci stared, the more she realized bigger was the theme here.
Beyond the giant tree’s shadows, wolves the size of SUVs chased equally giant golden deer across the open fields. They ran like the wind, their bodies moving with supernatural grace, but no matter how they raced, the hunt never seemed to end. The chase just kept going, the wolves and deer moving in endless, interconnecting circles that matched the one made by the clearing itself. It wasallcircles, she realized. The giant trees, the hunt, even the mushroom rings she could see in the shadows were all locked together in a pattern of circles within circles within circles, all spinning around a rise at the clearing’s center. It was much smaller than Marci’s mountain, more like a very tall hill, but it was clearly the spoke around which all the wheels were turning, and as she watched the whole thing spin, Marci finally realized what she was looking at.
“They’re channeling magic,” she said, eyes wide. “That’s why the power is so thick here. You’re collecting it. This whole place is a giant casting circle!”
“Oh, it’s much more than that,” Algonquin said, gazing down on the circles within circles with obvious pride. “What you see before you is the end result of the largest unified effort my kind has ever put forward. Save for a few stubborn holdouts, I’ve recruited every spirit in North America, plus many others, to join my work.”
Marci’s eyes went wide. Just going by what she could see, that had to be hundreds. No wonder the magic in the DFZ was so much crazier than everywhere else. It was sitting right next to the world’s largest spirit pile. It also explained where Algonquin had gotten the magic to shoot the Three Sisters out of the sky, which was probably the entire point.
“This is the weapon you’re going to use to wipe out the dragons.”
Algonquin blinked in surprise. “Dragons? Why would I waste all of this on worthless parasites like them?”
Marci felt like she’d just had the mountain jerked out from under her. “But…” she got out at last. “You killed the Three Sisters.”
“I did,” Algonquin said, nodding. “But that was merely a target of opportunity. My spirits and I are very powerful, but we build at a fixed rate that’s tied to the natural magic of the Earth itself. Dragons, being interlopers from another dimension, run on their own system. When Estella came to me for help, I saw the chance to harvest a great deal of power off the standard curve while ridding myself of a troublesome infestation in the process.”
The way she said that made Marci cringe. “What do you mean harvest?”
Algonquin looked even more surprised this time. “You didn’t see it?” she asked, frankly disbelieving. “It’s right there in the middle.”
Marci was about to point out that it was dark and her eyes were only human when Algonquin placed a cold, wet hand on her scalp. “Look again,” she ordered, forcing Marci right to the cliff’s edge.
Frustrated, Marci looked again. Thankfully, the moon had risen a bit while they’d been talking, shedding new light over the ever spinning circles. Even with the added light, though, it took her forever before she realized that the hill at the center of the circular clearing—the one all the circles were revolving around—wasn’t a hill at all. It wasn’t even land. It was bodies. Amassivepile of headless dragon bodies of every color, size, and kind imaginable, including three absolutely enormous white ones, all stacked neck down so their blood would run down into the ground.
And it was at this point that Marci really regretted eating that bagel, because she was going to be sick. “Ugh,” she said, clapping a hand over her mouth as she stumbled back. “Youbutcheredthem.”
“I did,” Algonquin said proudly. “And good job of it, too. Since it’s based around a living fire, dragon magic can be finicky once the creature is dead. I still had a few turn to ash despite my best efforts, but overall, I’m quite pleased. Thanks to the Three Sisters’ hissy fit, I had the perfect excuse for the purge I’d been planning for a while now. They’re not even done draining yet, but the power I’ve already gathered from their blood has put us nicely ahead of schedule, proving yet again that the only good dragon is a dead one.”
She finished with a grin, but Marci was still fighting to keep her stomach down.
“Don’t act so disturbed. It’s no worse than what you mages do when you pull magic out of chimera horns or whatever other body part is in vogue these days, or what the dragons do themselves for that matter. They’re the ones running around using their dead grandfather’s teeth as weapons.”
Much as she hated to, Marci had to give her that one. “Fine, I get it,” she grumbled. “Everyone is horrible. But that still doesn’t explain why you’re doing this.” She glanced at the circle again, doing a rough calculation in her head. “From circle size and magic density, I’d estimate you’re hoarding enough power here to drown the DFZ another dozen times. Why? What’s it for?”
