“Crud,” she muttered, shooting whatever it was a nasty look. “We’ve got company.”
“So send them away,” Julius said frantically, leaning forward in the bed. “Please, keep going.”
“This isn’t the sort of voyeur I can just ‘send away,’” she said, blowing out a frustrated breath. “But it’s probably for the best. I didn’t want to say this over the phone, anyway. We’ll finish this when I get back tomorrow,withoutan audience.”
There was an odd croaking sound from her side of the call, but Julius barely heard it. The moment Marci had promised they’d continue this tomorrow, inprivate, his poor heart had started thudding so hard he was amazed he hadn’t set off the heart rate monitor beside his bed. “I’ll be waiting for you,” he said in a rush. “I swear, Marci, the moment this vote is over, we are taking a vacation from everything. I’ll fly you anywhere in the world you want to go.”
“Now that sounds like heaven,” she said wistfully. “I can’t wait.” The odd croaking sounded again, and Marci rolled her eyes. “I have to go. Good luck with the vote. Call me when it’s done, okay?”
“I will,” he promised. “Andpleasebe careful.”
“Hey,” she said. “It’s me. I’m always professional,andI’m human. We don’t go around pulsing magic like you guys do, plus there’s nine million of us in the DFZ. I’ll be a glass needle in a backlit haystack. Algonquin won’t even know I’m there.”
Julius sincerely hoped she was right about that. He still hated the idea of her getting anywhere near the DFZ, but as she’d said, there was nothing else for it. Part of loving Marci was respecting her bond with her spirit, and if Ghost needed to be fixed, he wasn’t about to stand in her way. He only hoped he could keep from worrying himself sick in the meanwhile. “Just…please be careful,” he said again. “And call. Any chance you get, even if you don’t have anything to say, I’d still like to hear your voice and know you’re not a head on one of Algonquin’s pikes.”
“Aww, that’s sweetandgruesome,” she said, laughing. “Same goes for you, though. Heal up, and try not to let any more dragons take chunks out of you, or there’ll be nothing left when I get back.”
“I’ll try,” he promised.
This was the place where one of them should have said good-bye, but Julius didn’t want to be the one to do it. From the way she was also hovering, Marci obviously didn’t want to, either. But while Julius would have been perfectly happy to sit here looking at her forever, it was obvious she was no longer alone. While they’d both been avoiding saying good-bye, the large, black blur from before had hopped onto the back of Marci’s seat. When it dipped its head down into the AR camera’s frame, Julius saw it was a bird. A raven, to be precise, and ahugeone. Far larger than any natural bird could grow. He was already opening his mouth to ask if this wastheRaven, as in the spirit, when the bird began tugging impatiently at Marci’s hair.
“Would you stop it?” she snapped, batting the bird away before turning back to Julius with an apologetic look. “I’ve got to go. Take care, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow,” he replied. “And Marci, I—”
The call cut off before he could finish, and he lay back in the bed with a sigh. He was looking at his phone trying to calculate the minimum acceptable time period before he could call her again when he heard his door open.
He looked with a smile, eagerly expecting Fredrick with his second dinner tray, but the dragon standing in the doorway wasn’t an F. It wasn’t Ian come to roust him out of bed, either, or even Chelsie or Bob. It was, in fact, the very last dragon save for Bethesda herself that Julius had expected to pay him a visit, but nonetheless, it was clearly David who was walking into his room, his handsome face plastered with that unshakable politician’s smile as Julius’s hand instinctively went for his sword.
***
“Was that strictly necessary?” Marci griped, rubbing her scalp.
“Absolutely,” Raven said, hopping down to perch on the leather seat across from hers in the back of General Jackson’s extremely swanky military jet. “I’ve watched your kind go through the ritual of courtship millions of times, and I could see you were about to make a critical misstep.”
She sighed. “Which is?”
“Never tell a dragon you like them first,” he said sagely. “Even if it’s true, telling them you care gives them all the power, and you know how dragons get when you give them power.”
Marci sighed harder. That kind of thinking didn’t apply to Julius, but it was pointless to try and explain their unique relationship to something as old and, frankly, kind of alien as Raven. It was probably for the best anyway. If she was going to work up the courage to tell Julius she liked him, she wanted it to be face to face, where she could take advantage of whatever came next. That was something shedefinitelydidn’t want an audience for, so Marci told herself to be happy they’d been forced into a rain check and turned back to Raven to ask what he wanted.
“Just a question,” he said, turning to look at her with each of his beady black eyes in turn. “You seemed very familiar with the Seer of the Heartstrikers back there. Do you know him well?”
“Only in passing,” she said, shaking her head. “He likes to burst into our lives on occasion and make cryptic pronouncements.”
“It’s a seer thing,” Raven said, nodding. “What about his…companion, shall we say? Have you seen her before?”
“You mean his pigeon?” When Raven nodded, she thought back. “He’s had her as long as I’ve known him. To be fair, that’s only been about six weeks, but no one else seems surprised to see her, so I’d say she’s been with him for a while.”
Either that or all the dragons were just so used to Bob’s weirdness that they didn’t even react to things like a pigeon on his shoulder anymore. But Julius had taken it in stride as well, which made Marci think the pigeon was a standard Bob accessory. But therealquestion here was, “Why do you want to know?”
“Because she’snota pigeon,” Raven said. “I know Pigeon very well, and he’s as stupid as the birds who created him. Definitely not the caliber of intellect required for palling around with the Heartstriker’s genius fortune teller. Plus, the spirit of pigeons hasn’t left New York’s Central Park since he woke up there when the magic first came back sixty years ago, so I’m going to go withno.”
Marci frowned. It seemed silly in hindsight, but she hadn’t even considered the spirit angle before Raven brought it up. She’d always assumed Bob’s pigeon was just that: a bird. Not that she’d admit it anywhere he could hear, but Bob had always struck Marci as a lonely sort of dragon. Breeding a new kind of hyper-intelligent, magically awakened pigeon as a pet struck her as exactly the kind of thing he’d do to keep himself company. But Raven wouldn’t be here asking her questions if Bob’s pigeon were just a pigeon, so if she wasn’t an animal, and she wasn’t a spirit, what was she?
“You called her a Nameless End.”
“Did I?” the spirit squawked innocently. “I don’t recall—”
