“Is he?” Conrad said, glaring at Gregory, who was now breathing fire all over the much smaller blue dragon’s motionless body. “Thereisa great embarrassment occurring here, Bethesda, but for once, it’s not Julius.” He turned to face her, one hand resting on his sword. “Stop this,” he growled. “Or I will.”
“Why would I stop it?” she said flippantly. “I’mwinning.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before Conrad’s face changed from his usual scowl to a look Bethesda didn’t recognize, and very much didn’t like. “But you’re not,” he said, stepping toward the hole in the wall as he drew his Fang. “And if you can’t see that, then you truly have lost the right to call yourself Heartstriker.”
“You’re blowing this out of proportion,” Bethesda argued, backtracking. “He’s just a whelp. It’s not what I—Conrad!”
But it was too late. Conrad was already stepping out through the broken hole in the mountain. He changed the moment his boot left the cracked stone, and the sun vanished behind the shadow of a midnight-blue dragon the size of a battleship sweeping down the mountain toward the one-sided fight below.
Chapter 12
“You have to help him!”
Marci stood in the diner’s parking lot, watching in terror as the fighting dragons—one hateful, giant, and orange, one small and beautifully blue—flamed through the sky beside the mountain. “He’ll die!” She turned to Bob, pleading. “Please!”
When the seer said nothing, Marci’s panic turned to rage. “Fine,” she growled, whirling back around. “If you won’t help, then I’ll—”
“No.”
A hard hand caught hers, and Marci looked over her shoulder to see Bob glaring down at her, his long fingers wrapped around her wrist like iron shackles. “Let me go!”
“No,” the seer said again, raising his eyes pointedly to the smaller of the two dragons. “He has to do this by himself.”
That was insanity. Julius was a lot of things, but he wasnota fighter. He was also losing. Badly. If Marci didn’t do something soon, Gregory was going to roast him to a crisp, but the stupid seer wouldn’t let go. “He’s going to die!” she cried, planting a foot on his car’s bumper in an attempt to pry herself free.
“He’s not going to die.”
“You don’t know that!”
The words popped out of Marci’s mouth before she remembered whom she was talking to. Fortunately, the seer just rolled his eyes and moved on. “I know things look a little iffy at the moment,” he said, shielding his eyes against the glare as Gregory began to spew fire. “But if Julius is ever going to win the respect of his clan, he has to do this on his own. No help. Or at least noobvioushelp.”
Marci stopped fighting. “But you are helping him, right?” Because if Bob wasn’t, her dragon was a goner.
“I’m not exactly known for leaving things to chance,” the seer said with a sly smile. “But I can only see the future, not make it. Whether Julius lives or dies in the next five minutes depends on if he’s actually the dragon I believe him to be. But I’mprettysure it’ll work.”
Her stomach dropped. “Pretty sure?”
“That’s as good as we get in this business, I’m afraid,” Bob said as he finally released her arm from his death grip. “But as I once told an old and very foolish friend: the future is never set. No matter how certain things may seem, there’s always a chance for the unexpected. That’s why the smart seer invests in the tool rather than the plot. A plot can be upset, but a good tool does what you expect it to every time, and Julius is a very good tool indeed.”
That was the least flattering compliment Marci had ever heard. At the same time, though, it was oddly comforting to know a dragon as powerful as Brohomir had so much faith in Julius. Faith to dowhat, though, Marci had no idea, because from down here, it looked like Gregory was roasting him alive. The longer she watched, though, the more Marci realized that wasn’t quite right. Gregorywasdriving his little brother back, but not because he was stronger. He was only winning because Julius wasn’t fighting back.
If it were anyone else, Marci would have called that the stupidest plan in the world. But she liked to think she knew her nice dragon pretty well at this point, and from him, not fighting was the only course that made sense. There was no way he could win a head-to-head fight with a G, but by refusing to fight and denying Gregory his dominance, Julius was fighting in his own way. Everything he’d said about ending the cycle of violence and rejecting the might-makes-right system he’d hated all his life, he was actually doing it, and Marci was so proud of him it hurt.
That didn’t make the fight any less terrifying to watch, though. Especially once Gregory actually caught Julius, breaking his wing with a sickening crunch of his teeth. Marci almost lost it then. She’d already started sucking in magic from Amelia’s fire to blast Gregory out of the sky when Bob grabbed her shoulder.
“Wait for it.”
“Wait forwhat?” she cried, chest heaving as she watched Julius fall like a stone, vanishing out of her sight behind the line of buildings as Gregory shot down after him. “He’s killing him!”
“Not yet,” Bob assured her, raising his green eyes to the blasted-out hole that now marred the peak of Heartstriker Mountain. “It’ll all be over in three…two…one…”
The silence afteronedragged on for over a minute, broken only by the terrible sounds of Gregory’s rage and Marci’s own panicked breathing. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. She yanked out of Bob’s hold, pushing magic into her bracelets as she got ready to run for it. But before she’d even made it out of the parking lot, a shadow blocked out the sun, throwing them all into darkness.
When she looked up to see what it was, she nearly fell over. She had no idea where it had come from, but there was suddenly a new dragon in the sky. Anenormousone with a massive, heavily muscled body that rippled beneath sleek midnight-blue feathers. Strangest of all, he was armored. Marci had never even heard of an armored dragon, but this one boasted a full set of building-sized bone-colored plates that covered him like an exoskeleton from the crown of his crested, wedge-shaped head to the tip of his long, feathered tail.
“Who isthat?”
Just going by the size, her first guess—and greatest fear—was that this was Bethesda herself come down to finish the job. But while Marci had never personally seen the Heartstriker as a dragon, pictures of the Heartstriker Matriarch in all her rainbow-feathered glory were plastered all over town, and this monster was obviously not the same dragon. She also knew for a fact that Bethesda was still sealed, which prohibited this kind of display. But if the new battleship-sized dragonwasn’tthe Heartstriker, then who—
