Unlike the F’s doors, which had been perfectly normal, modern construction, the door in front of Chelsie was clearlyveryold. It was made of heavy oak planks held together with cast-iron nails and cross beams, and it positively reeked of magic. There was no nameplate, but none was needed. One sniff of the magic that saturated the ancient wood made it obvious which dragon lived here, as did the glare on Chelsie’s face when she turned to stare him down.
“Once again,” she said, producing a heavy iron key from somewhere up her sleeve. “Not a word. I am doing you a huge favor, and I don’t want to hear any commentary. Just go in and go to sleep, and we won’t have any problems.”
She stopped there, waiting. When Julius finally nodded, Chelsie turned and unlocked the door, snaking a hand inside to turn on the lights. “Make yourself at home.”
Julius’s eyes went wide. In his experience, living spaces in his mother’s mountain came in two types. There were the giant caves, which were meant to be comfortable for dragons, and there were the apartments, which were meant for the comfort of dragons in human forms. Some apartments, like Bethesda’s, had spaces for both. Chelsie’s rooms, on the other hand, looked like a bomb shelter mixed with a badger hole.
The front room was long, low, and bare, with a ceiling barely higher than Julius’s head. The floor was smooth poured concrete with a drain in the middle, and the whole place was harshly lit with small, high-efficiency string light LEDs that had been hung like Christmas lights from hooks on the ceiling. One corner was entirely taken up by a metal wardrobe containing multiple suits of Chelsie’s usual black body armor, while the other housed a massive (and very well used) first aid station complete with an automated surgery table and a glass-door fridge containing multiple bags of blood for transfusion with Chelsie’s name clearly marked on the labels. He was wondering why she needed her own blood supply when the mountain’s medical bay kept a full stock of Heartstriker blood on hand at all times when his sister walked across the room to the narrow, tunnel-like hallway that branched off the end like a root.
“You can put your mage back here.”
Julius tore his eyes off the medical bay and hurried after her, ducking down the tunnel only to immediately turn again into a small, seemingly natural cave containing several bookcases packed full of dog-eared paperbacks and a long, surprisingly comfortable-looking couch, which Chelsie was currently piling blankets on from the battered trunk that served as the coffee table.
“I know it’s not much,” she said defensively. “But I don’t exactly have a lot of company.”
“This is fine,” Julius assured her, setting Marci, who was probably drunk enough to sleep anywhere, gently down on the couch cushions. “Thank you.”
His sister nodded and tossed him a pillow, which he slid under Marci’s head. “You’ll be in here,” she said, walking back into the hall, which Julius now realized continued down even deeper underground. “It’s a bit cold, but unless you want to curl up on the floor beside Marci, it’s what I’ve got.”
Julius was about to say that whatever it was, it would be fine with him, when he saw something that stopped him cold.
Now that he was paying attention to things other than where he was going to put Marci, Julius saw that the round, tunnel-like hall had several other rooms branching off of it. Some—like the tiny bathroom he could see at the end—had obvious uses. Others—like the room at the end of the hall where Chelsie was currently digging around—he had no idea about. But the bedroom directly across from the library where he’d put Marci down must have belonged to Chelsie herself, and the door was wide open.
Just noticing that made Julius feel guilty. He had no right invading the privacy of a dragon who clearly valued it very highly, but he was too curious to look away. Despite everything they’d been through together, he still knew so little about his sister, and he couldn’t resist taking a closer peek.
Quickly, before she finished whatever she was doing at the end of the hall, Julius stepped forward and stuck his head inside her room. Not surprisingly given the rest of her living space, it was tiny. What little space there was was mostly taken up by a mattress on the floor, covered in a plastic sheet. He was wondering why Chelsie needed a plastic-covered mattress when he spotted the nightstand stuffed full of medical supplies as well as the rust-brown bloodstain on the floor in front of it. It wasn’t fresh, but the edges of the stain were fuzzy and overlapping, like blood had been spilled here and cleaned up so many times, it had become part of the rock itself.
A discovery like that would have terrified Julius anywhere else. Here, though, it just made him sad. When he’d seen Chelsie bleeding this morning, he’d assumed it was a crisis. Now, looking at the plastic mattress and the bandages and sutures she kept within easy reach of her bed, he understood, and that made him sadder and angrier than anything else he’d seen tonight.
How many times? How many times had his sister patched herself up and gone to bed bleeding? How much of Chelsie’s blood had it taken to make the stain on the floor a permanent part of the mountain? He couldn’t begin to guess, but just thinking about the number made his hands ball into fists. There was so much to be mad at here—the fact that Chelsie was forced to live like this, that she was a tool, that his mother had ever thought any of this was okay—Julius couldn’t say which was worse. One thing, however, was absolutely certain: thishadto change. He didn’t care what it took or how much it cost, he was going to figure out how Bethesda was controlling Chelsie, and he was going to break it. Because this kind of thing could not be allowed to continue. Not in his clan.
With that, a new, surprisingly draconic possessiveness came over Julius. Up until this moment, loyalty to one’s clan had always been a requirement, part of his duty as a Heartstriker. But though he’d accepted that he’d most likely be a Heartstriker until he died, Julius had never loved his clan. He still didn’t, but for the first time ever, he was thinking of the mountain and its dragons as his. His to protect, his tofix. All his life, he and Chelsie had both been trapped in the same system. Now, though, he had a chance to change things. For the first time since he’d signed the contract that had formed the Council, his new position didn’t feel like a burden. It felt like an opportunity, a chance to finally make the wrong things right. But as he turned to leave Chelsie’s room with a thousand silent promises to himself not to mess this up, he spotted something he hadn’t noticed on his first look through.
When he’d first glanced at Chelsie’s room, the only things he’d seen were the mattress, the medical supplies, and the blood stain. Now, though, he saw there was one more decoration. It was a painting. A Chinese watercolor scroll the length of his arm hanging from the back of Chelsie’s half-open door.
Art History was one of the few undergrad degrees Julius hadn’t gotten around to getting, but despite knowing nothing about Oriental art, he understood immediately that this was the work of a master. Even in the low light from the hall, the delicate colors seemed to glow with their own natural light. The style was abstract, but the subject—a nude young woman with green eyes and long black hair lying in a rumpled bed—was still immediate and real. Looking at her, Julius felt as if he could reach through the paper and touch her lovely face, which was turned up toward the viewer with a beautiful, warm smile that was clearly meant for the artist alone.
Out of all the wonders of the painting, that smile was what threw Julius most. The painter had captured the softness of the expression as perfectly as he had everything else, but it was such an unfamiliar sight on that face, Julius didn’t actually recognize the dragoness in the picture until the real version was standing directly in front of him.
“What part of ‘don’t invade my privacy’ do you not understand?” Chelsie snarled, jerking him out of her room before slamming her door shut.
The furious words were sharp as her claws, but Julius was too amazed to be properly afraid. “That was you,” he said, staring at his sister in wonder. “I’ve never seen you smile before.”
He realized how awful that sounded the moment he said it. Before he could apologize, though, Chelsie cut him off. “It was a long time ago,” she growled. “Leave it be.”
He nodded, though he couldn’t help adding, “It’s beautiful.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Chelsie grumbled, turning to walk back down the hall. “There’s something not right about your baby brother admiring yournudepainting.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Julius said, blushing furiously. “It’s just…I didn’t know you could look like that.”
“Digging yourself deeper,” she warned.
Julius cursed under his breath. None of this was coming out as he’d meant. “Well, you have to like it, too,” he said, hurrying after her. “It’s the only decoration you have.”
“Actually, I don’t like it,” Chelsie said. “I think I look like an idiot.”
Julius wasn’t buying that for a second. “Then why did you hang it on your door?”
