Nice Dragons Finish Last

Chapter 16

“I can’t believe you let a human do that to me,” Justin grumbled, glaring across the room at Marci, who was happily putting the finishing touches on the ward she’d built from his magic. “I feel used.”

“Nonsense,” Julius said, checking his phone yet again for some sign of Bob. Their hour was five minutes from being up, but the seer still hadn’t returned. “She didn’t pull a quarter as much magic out of you as she pulled out of me. You’re not even winded.”

Justin lifted his chin stubbornly. “It’s the principle of the thing. My own brother, ordering his human to yank out my magic like I was nothing but a battery, and now I can feel her using it.” He shuddered. “It’s degrading. How did I let you talk me into this?”

Fortunately, Julius didn’t have to answer that. His brother hadn’t even finished talking when Marci’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out at once, holding it awkwardly between her hands to avoid getting chalk dust all over the screen.

“Bixby,” she said gravely, glancing at Julius. “We ready?”

“I should hope so,” Justin snapped. “Considering how the magic you sucked out of me like a—”

A blaring horn outside cut him off, and Julius pounced on it. “There’s Bob!” he called, opening the door. “Let’s go.”

Justin was still grumbling, but he went, claiming the front seat of Bob’s car while Julius and Marci piled into the back. The 1971 Crown Victoria was too old to have a GPS, but Bob said he knew where the address was when Marci told him. She was trying to show him the location on her phone anyway when Bob peeled back out into traffic, driving down off the skyways just as crazily as he’d driven up.

Unsurprisingly since dragons and kidnapping were two of the only things that actually counted as illegal in the DFZ, Bixby had arranged for the trade off to be in the Underground. That suited Julius just fine. He hadn’t spent much time in the Upper City, but after two full days of being chauffeured all over by Marci, he was feeling pretty familiar with the underbelly of the DFZ. Or, at least, he thought he was, until Bob drove him into a part of the Underground he’d never seen before.

The meeting spot was in the north of the city, under the skyways that lined the shores of Lake St. Clare. The fancy hotel where he and Marci had stayed last night was actually right above them, but though they were beneath some of the most expensive real estate in the DFZ, the Underground was darker and emptier than ever. At first, Julius thought this was because the side of the skyways bordering the lake had been walled over for some reason, closing in the Underground until it looked like a cave in truth, darker even than the eight block blight where they’d found Katya. Even that place had had a diner, though. This place had nothing, no new construction, no shops, not even any lights. Just crumbling old houses that didn’t look like they’d been touched since the flood, which made no sense at all. How could the space directly below one of the most affluent financial centers in the world just be…empty?

It was a mystery, and since Julius didn’t want to meet the enemy on anything less than the firmest footing, he pulled out his phone to look it up. A few searches later, though, he was beginning to wish he’d stayed ignorant.

Back before the return of magic, this area had been known as Grosse Point, an affluent suburb of Detroit. Unfortunately, the same proximity to Lake St. Clare that made the city so desirable was also its undoing. The night Algonquin had woken in fury to clear her waters of a century and a half’s worth of pollution, the lakeside community Grosse Point had been Ground Zero for her rage. Now that Julius knew what he was looking at, he could actually see the darker shadows of old boats and rusted oil barrels littered among the collapsing houses, but what really got him was the forbidding chill in the air.

Between Algonquin’s wave and the chaos caused by the return of magic, no one knew for certain just how many people had died the night of the flood, but all sources agreed that the Grosse Point was the hardest hit. That much death changed a place, an effect that was only amplified by the waves of magic rushing back into the world like water into dry desert sand. The combination left a residual aura of magic so thick, even non-mage humans reported feeling it. Being a dragon, Julius was almost choking on it. Even sixty years after the fact, it was just as thick as the magic surrounding the Reclamation Area. But where that magic had felt like woods and wild places, this darkness felt like fear. Fear and cold and a sorrow so intense, he could actually feel it pulling him down like gravity. He also understood why Grosse Point’s original name had been abandoned for a new, more accurate title on the DFZ maps: The Pit.

The others must have felt the magic, too, because by the time the lights of the normal Underground behind them vanished, all conversation in the car had stopped. Even Bob was uncharacteristically silent as they made their way down the empty, silted over streets past the washed out remains of houses and shops. He cut his lights a few blocks later, rolling through the dark on superior dragon eyesight and probably no small amount of seer’s intuition before finally pulling to a stop in what appeared to be a parking lot strewn with old nets and other lake bottom garbage. Julius wasn’t actually sure why Bob had chosen that particular lot until he caught a glimmer of light across the street.

His head jerked up immediately, but it still took him several seconds of squinting before he realized that the large, strangely rectangular shape in the dark was a high school—one of those mid twentieth century reinforced cinder block monstrosities built to double as fall out shelters, which explained why it alone was still standing. Mostly, anyway. The light he’d spotted was shining through the cracks in the double doors of what must have been the gym, and, oddly, out of the roof. Julius wasn’t sure why light was shining through the roof, but it suited his plans nicely.

“Justin,” he said. “Do you—”

“Way ahead of you,” his brother said, getting out of the car. “Let’s move.”

Julius opened his own door to follow, but before he got out, he turned to Marci. “Are you still okay with this? The magic here is a bit unpleasant.”

From the expression on her face, she clearly thought that was the understatement of the century, but she nodded all the same, meeting his eyes with a determined stare. “I’ve got my end,” she said, clutching her bloody shoulder bag.”Just be ready to back me up.”

“We will,” he promised, flashing her a final reassuring smile before running after his brother into the dark.

The strange blackness of the Pit was even worse outside the car. Even knowing it was just a magical echo, Julius would have sworn the air clung to him, leaving an oily sheen of loss and foreboding that made him want to weep and look over his shoulder at the same time. That last part was actually good since he and Justin were going to have to sneak past any lookouts, but even with the magically induced paranoia, they didn’t see a soul. Whatever backup Bixby had hired for this job must not have been willing to brave the Pit alone, because though the school’s lot was filled with cars, they didn’t spot so much as a doorman standing watch as they snuck around the side of the gym and up the crumbling wall to the sagging metal roof.

The flood had apparently dropped multiple large objects on the school when the wave passed over, punching massive holes in the gymnasium’s steel roof, the source of the light Julius had seen earlier. Between this and the three story elevation at the roof’s peak, Julius would have expected a lookout up here for sure, maybe even a sniper. But Bixby must really have been putting his eggs in one basket, because the roof was just as empty as everything else. Julius was starting to worry this whole thing was even more of a set up than he’d anticipated when his brother gave a soft whistle and motioned for Julius to join him at the edge of one of the larger holes near the roof’s center.

“Gotta hand it to your human,” he said as Julius crept over. “She sure knows how to stir up the hornet’s nest.”

Julius could only nod, staring down in horror at massive crowd of humans standing in the dusty basketball court below.

“I don’t believe it,” he whispered. “I mean, I knew he’d have a bigger force than the one he sent to the house, but that’s just ridiculous. There must a hundred guys down there!”

“Eighty-one,” Justin corrected, breathing deep through his nose. “No mages, and no heavy ordinance.” He sniffed again. “Mostly smells like assault weapons and semi-automatic side arms—Glocks, Desert Eagles, Beretta Twenty-Fifties—that sort of thing. Someone down there definitely has a taser, though, so watch out for that. Getting electrocuted sucks.”

By the time he finished, Julius was staring at his brother with his mouth hanging open. “How is your nose that good?”

Justin gave him a haughty look. “If it’s important, I’m good at it.”

“So if you’re not good at it, it’s not important?”

“Exactly,” Justin said, leaning down. “You see Katya?”

Julius didn’t, and that was a problem. He could smell her—a sharp, ancient, icy scent that rose over the haze of gunmetal, human sweat, and cheap cologne—so he knew she was here, but even though he could see the whole of the dust-covered basketball court and most of the fold out wooden bleachers beside it, he didn’t see a single person in the crowd of heavily augmented muscle who could possibly be their dragoness. He did, however, see Bixby.

Marci had never actually described him, but there was no one else the man standing under the portable floodlights clipped to the remains of the home basketball goal could be. If the flashy suit and slicked-back mobster hair hadn’t been a big enough tip-off, the way he was ordering the battalion of hired guns around, despite being the only non-augmented person in the building, was a dead giveaway.

“There’s one at least,” he whispered, inching closer to the torn, rusted edge of the hole. “But we have to find Katya. If we can’t get a bead on her, this won’t work.”

Justin shrugged. “Fine with me. If your overly complicated scheme falls through, we’ll just go back to my original plan of ‘beat up humans, take dragon.’”

“I don’t think even you can beat up that many humans.”

“Then you clearly haven’t seen me fight in a while,” Justin said, shifting his weight as he scowled up at the dark. Something he’d been doing a lot since they’d gotten up here, Julius realized with a start.

“What are you looking at?”

“I don’t know,” Justin said. “That’s the problem. I’m normally great in the dark, but I can’t see a thing.” He shifted his weight again. “I don’t like it.”

That was the closest Julius had ever heard his brother come to admitting he was nervous. Then again, this place would make anyone uneasy. The creepy, depressing magic wasn’t actually as bad up here on the roof, but thanks to the light coming up from below them, the rest of the Pit was darker than ever. Even trying to see across the street to where Bob had parked felt uncomfortably like staring into the abyss, and Julius grimaced, returning his gaze to the gym full of hired murderers, which suddenly seemed like a much safer thing to look at.

“I wish Bob would stop being so cryptic and just help us for real,” he grumbled. “He’s older than all of us put together and multiplied by ten. He could take that whole room without breaking a sweat.”

“Then it’s better that he’s waiting in the car. He’s got enough glory already, we don’t need him here hogging ours. Besides, we still don’t know why Estella’s actually doing all of this. It could be this whole setup is just a ploy to lure Bob out and assassinate him.”

Julius froze. He hadn’t even thought of that angle, and he was even more surprised that his brother had. Of course, Justin was a knight of the Heartstriker. It was a knight’s job to think about things like assassinations. When he turned to ask what else his brother thought might be important, though, Justin was no longer beside him. He was standing several feet away, glaring up into the dark like he was trying to clear the air with the force of his disapproval.

“Justin!” he hissed. “Stop that! It’s almost—”

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and Julius ground his teeth. “There’s the signal,” he whispered, waving his hand. “Get over here, we’re about to start!”

Justin ignored him entirely, holding up his hand for silence before cupping it to his ear like he was listening.

Julius was about to get up and drag the stupid dragon back into position when a crash echoed through the Pit’s eerie silence. Forgetting about his brother, he whirled back to the hole, almost falling in as he leaned down to see the gym’s double doors slam open, and then Marci strode into the room.

Even though they’d planned her entrance together, actually seeing it happen sent a surge of pride all the way to Julius’s toes. She marched out into the gym like she owned it, stopping at old basketball court’s free throw line to stare down the wall of guns that had immediately locked onto her with all the self-possession of a queen. Not a flicker of fear showed on her face as she eyed the army that had been hired to trap her, and when she spoke, her voice was so calm and confident, Julius didn’t even catch the illusion she’d woven to hide her nervousness until he realized Marci sounded almost nothing like herself.

“I’m here,” she announced. “Alone, as requested.”

Not wanting to be outdone, Bixby pushed out of his circle of guards and stepped forward. Unlike Marci, though, he had no magic to hide behind, and he couldn’t keep the telltale quiver out of his voice. “All alone?”

“As you see,” she said, gesturing back through the doors at the empty dark behind her.

Bixby didn’t look convinced. “And the Kosmolabe?”

Marci reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out the glistening golden ball that had started this whole mess. “Right here,” she said, holding it up for all to see. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Fine by me,” Bixby replied, jerking his head.

At the signal, one of the goons walked behind the ancient bleachers and picked up a long, wrapped bundle tucked against the wall that Julius had initially dismissed as trash. Now, though, he saw that thing inside the black plastic tarp moved and slumped like a body. Sure enough, when the goon reached his boss, Bixby reached over and yanked the dusty plastic away to reveal Katya’s unconscious face.

“No funny business,” he warned, pulling a big, old-fashioned revolver out of his jacket pocket and aiming it at Svena’s little sister. He pointed his other hand at a folding card table that had been set up on the old basketball court’s center line. “Put the Kosmolabe there and step back. Once I’m sure you’re not cheating us, we’ll bring the girl over.”

Marci shook her head. “You first.”

Bixby cocked his gun and pressed the barrel to Katya’s temple. “You’re in no position to make demands. I’ve told you what to do, now do it, or kiss Blondie the Magic Dragon goodbye.”

Julius winced at the casual mention of Katya’s true nature. What was Estella thinking, playing so loose with their identities in the DFZ? Still, so far, Bixby was acting exactly as predicted. Likewise, Marci was playing her part to the hilt, putting on an almost too dramatic show of thinking it over before slumping her shoulders in apparent defeat and starting toward the table.

She placed the sparkling Kosmolabe on the square of blue jeweler’s velvet Bixby had provided and stepped back again, raising her hands as she went. At the same time, a pair of men stepped in to shut the gym doors behind her, blocking her escape. Only then, when the trap was seemingly closed, did Bixby re-holster his gun and walk to the table, leaving Katya in the care of the giant human who’d picked her up.

“Julius,” Justin said.

Julius waved for his brother to shut up. It was almost their cue.

“Julius.”

“What?”

“You know how the Underground is supposed to have all sorts of nasty creatures since it’s super magical spirit land or whatever?”

“Yes,” Julius said, keeping his eyes locked on Bixby as he approached the Kosmolabe. Just a few more steps. “What about it?”

“Can any of them fly?”

That question was just odd enough to make Julius risk a look. He tilted his head back, staring up into the dark, but he didn’t see a thing. He couldn’t even see the bottom of the skyways he knew must be above them, just blackness. But as he turned to ask Justin what on earth he was talking about, something enormous, heavy, and full of jagged teeth fell out of the dark right onto his head, knocking Julius straight through the rusting roof and into the gym below.

Marci was ninety percent sure she was going to mess something up. She’d played it off to Julius back at the house, but now that she was actually here, wrapped in so many wards and illusions her hands were shaking from the effort of keeping them all up, she knew, just knew she was going to blow it.

If she’d been alone in the gym, there wouldn’t have been a problem. She’d held down this many spells plenty of times before, but those had always been in practice rooms back at the university, usually to win bets against her fellow doctoral candidates. Field experience, she was learning, was a completely different animal.

Even with her anti-bullet ward roaring around her like a furnace thanks to the enormous bank of power she’d siphoned off of Justin, she’d underestimated just how terrifying it would be to have an entire room full of guns pointed at you. But even that might have been tolerable if it wasn’t for the toxic ambient magic of the Pit itself.

Any mage with even a year of formal training had heard of the Pit. It was one of the most famous magical fall-out zones in the world. Everyone studied it whether they were going to be working with magical ecosystems or not. Again, though, academic knowledge was letting her down. Reading about the magical pollution left by so much death was one thing, but actually being in the middle of all that cold, empty, stagnant power was quickly becoming more than she could take. Even loaded up on Justin’s clean, high-grade magic, just standing in the filth made her feel dirty from the inside out. Add in the Bixby situation, and all Marci wanted to do was run away as fast as she could. But while her instincts were in complete agreement that fleeing was the best course of action, she didn’t move, because Julius’s plan was working perfectly.

So far, everything had gone exactly as he’d predicted: Bixby’s over-the-top setup, the army of hired thugs, his demand to inspect the Kosmolabe himself, everything. The only detail he’d gotten wrong was his assumption that Bixby would have a mage. But, unless he was keeping someone in reserve, Marci didn’t even feel the presence of another ward. A suicidally stupid oversight on their enemy’s part, and a very lucky break for her.

With no mage to worry about, all she had to do was hold on until Bixby reached the golden ball on the table, the illusionary Kosmolabe she’d spent twenty minutes putting together in the safe house with all that wonderful dragon magic. When Bixby’s fingers touched the false surface, Marci would backlash the spell right in his face. With so much power behind it, the shock would kill him instantly, at which point Justin and Julius would drop down and grab Katya while Bixby’s men wasted their bullets on Marci’s ward.

She’d been a bit skeptical about that last part, but Julius had reasoned that Bixby’s hired guns would be much more interested in protecting the man who paid them than the thing they’d been paid to protect. His hope was that by the time the goons realized their shots weren’t doing the job, the two Heartstrikers would be out the door with Katya. Once they were clear, Marci would dump the rest of her hoarded magic into her microwave spell for one final heat blast, opening a window for her to GTFO with the real Kosmolabe, which was safely hidden at the bottom of her bag.

That was the detail she’d argued with Julius about the most, actually. She would have felt much safer leaving the actual Kosmolabe in the car with Ghost and Bob where there was no chance if it being damaged in the chaos, but Julius had refused to back down. The Kosmolabe was the highest value target, he’d said, which meant Marci should have it on her to ransom for her own life if something went wrong.

Given her own misgivings about her ability to pull off the operation, she had to admit it was nice to have a backup. But they were nearly halfway through now, and everything was running smoothly. Bixby was almost to the table already, and she hadn’t messed up yet.

She wouldn’t, either. Even though the cut on her neck stung like crazy and the stress was making her sweat so badly she was worried the spellwork she’d painted around her body would start to smudge, Marci just clutched her illusion of perfect calm tighter and waited for her chance. Bixby was almost in position. Six more steps and she would finally be able to pay him back for all he’d done. All she had to do was hold on. Just five more steps and it was done. Four more. Three—

A crash exploded trough the room, followed by an animal roar that turned her blood to ice.

No, she thought frantically. Not yet. It was too soon. But Bixby had stopped in his tracks a good three feet away from the fake Kosmolabe to look for the sound, and he wasn’t alone. Everyone’s heads were jerking toward the roof, and Marci knew with crushing certainty that it was all ruined. There was no way she could draw the room’s fire now. All she could do was look up with the rest as Julius hurtled down from the roof to land on the dusty gym floor…

With an enormous creature right on top of him.

The sight drove all thoughts of ruined plans from Marci’s head, replacing them with pure, frozen panic. Julius had hit the ground so hard, part of her mind couldn’t accept that he was still alive even after he rolled over and started fighting the thing on chest. The thing Marci couldn’t actually put a name to.

Even with the glaring floodlights Bixby’s people had set up, the monster on top of Julius was unrecognizable. The best she could make out was a roughly eight-foot-long mass of black leathery wings, hooked claws, and teeth that seemed to be getting brighter every time they snapped. Whatever it was, Julius didn’t seem to be able to get out from under it, and the fear on his face was what finally broke Marci out of her shock and into action.

In the space of a heartbeat, she dropped every illusion she had, pulling the magic back into her like she was sucking in a breath. The power burned as it returned, a pointed reminder of why you were always supposed to release and redraw magic instead of reusing, but even in her scramble, she wasn’t about to touch the awful stuff in the Pit. She only had to bear the pain for a second, anyway, just long enough to bring up her arm and shove the power through the circle of her bracelet, sending a scorching spear of super-heated air straight at the creature that was currently trying to bite out Julius’s throat.

And that was when things got weird.

Generally speaking, when Marci cast a spell, that was it. She’d been holding Justin’s magic for a long time at this point, though, and her connection to it lingered longer than it should have. As a result, part of her went along with the magic as it slammed into the monster’s side. But just as she felt the heat begin to scorch the creature’s hide, the spell vanished.

The loss was so sudden, she actually stumbled. Her body rebalanced itself instinctively, which was good, because her brain was no help at all. It was too busy trying to comprehend what had just happened.

Any way she approached it, it made no sense. She’d felt the spell work, felt it hit, and then the magic was just gone. But that was impossible. Magic obeyed the same laws as energy. It changed forms and lost quality, but it didn’t vanish. Apparently, though, no one had told the spell that. She’d thrown enough power at that monster to boil it alive from the inside out, but it didn’t even seem to notice her in its frenzy to dig its talons into Julius’s ribs.

After that, Marci forgot about impossibilities. She reached out desperately, swallowing her revulsion as she yanked in the cold, heavy magic of the Pit. Before she could gather enough to start on a movement spell to save him, though, a second shape plummeted through the hole in the ceiling like a shot.

Justin must have done something more than simply jump down, because the gym’s ancient rubberized floor cracked when he hit. The resulting wave of dust and debris sent the men, who until this moment had been standing around like gaping statues, scrambling to cover their faces. Justin ignored them completely, turning instead to Julius, his unsheathed sword flying at the winged creature’s head.

By the time the monster realized it had a new opponent, it was too late. Justin lopped its head off in one clean stroke, sending an arc of blue-black blood flying all the way to the back of the broken bleachers. For a shocked second, the wet splatter was the only sound, then Bixby shouted something unintelligible, and all hell broke loose.

The air filled with the pop of gunshots as the entire room full of hired thugs turned and fired on Justin. He grunted when the first shots hit, but though Marci could see the impact of the bullets rippling over Justin’s body, not a drop of blood appeared on his white shirt as he took up a defensive position over Julius, who was still on the floor. It was such an astonishing sight, Marci didn’t realize the thugs were also shooting at her until her ward, which she’d drained nearly dry in her attempt to save Julius, started to buckle.

She shored it up as best she could, pulling in more of the heavy, repulsive power of the Pit and forcing it through the spellwork she’d written in casting marker on her skin under her clothes. But the magic here wasn’t just disgusting to touch, it also wasn’t nearly as concentrated as the power she’d siphoned off Justin, and she simply couldn’t keep up.

A ward that was tuned to only stop bullets shouldn’t have taken so much magic. The general rule was the more specialized the ward, the more efficiently it worked. But there was a practical limit to everything, and there were a lot of people shooting at her. The ground at her feet was already carpeted with crumpled slugs, and the work of canceling all that force had left the protective bubble of magic around her dangerously dim. Another ten seconds and it would go out entirely, which would have been enough time if she’d been running for the door. But she couldn’t run. Not until she got the others out, too.

Swallowing against her fear, Marci glanced back at Julius to see what she could do to help. Not much was the answer. Obnoxious as his arrogant bragging could be, Justin was guarding his downed brother like a wall. There were actually more spent slugs around his feet than hers, but the dragon didn’t even look winded.

That sight did more to calm her panic than anything else, and Marci was finally able to move past Julius’s immediate danger and focus on the next most important thing: salvaging the job.

By this point, her ward was in serious danger. It hadn’t cracked yet, though, so Marci forced herself to ignore the bullets and look for Katya. The man who’d been guarding her earlier must have had other things to do, because when she finally spotted the dragoness, Katya was lying on her side against the gym’s far wall, alone and miraculously untouched by the violence around her.

Target in sight, Marci darted across the gym, dodging the gunmen who tried to grab her. She lunged for Katya the moment she was in range, yanking her out of the black tarp Bixby had wrapped her in. But as the covering came off, Marci saw there was something else hidden beneath it. A dark, padded band had been wrapped around Katya’s waist, almost like a weightlifter’s belt with wires sticking out of it, each one of which was connected to a sewn-in compartment filled with a gray, clay-like substance that reminded her of—

“Enough!”

The enraged shout cut through the racket, making Marci jump. She whirled around as the gunfire died to see a panting Bixby standing by the card table where the illusionary Kosmolabe had rested before Marci had been forced to drop it. His hand was out in front of him, his fist wrapped around something that looked like an old-style joystick. There was even a red button at the top that he was currently mashing down with his white-knuckled thumb as his wild eyes slid over the room to stop on Marci.

“Hands up!” he bellowed. “She’s wrapped in enough C4 to take this whole place out. One false move out of any of you, and I blow us all sky high.”

Marci snatched her hands away from Katya, raising them instantly over her head. All around the room, Bixby’s men were lowering their guns and regrouping, but even though the shooting had stopped, it was hardly quiet. A horrible sound was coming through the broken roof, a mix of flapping wings and shrill, inhuman shrieking. The combination made Marci shake from her toes to her fingers, but while she was desperately trying to get a hold of herself, Bixby began to laugh.

“Well, well, well,” he said, looking from Marci to Justin, who was still crouched protectively over a bleeding Julius. “Life just gets weirder and weirder, doesn’t it? But it all came together just like the seer said. Even them.”

He jerked his head up to the dark shapes fluttering around the hole in the roof, and despite the ridiculousness of her situation, Marci’s curiosity immediately got the better of her. “What are they?”

“Magic eaters,” Bixby said, his face breaking into a wide, slightly unhinged smile. “A little known local specialty. I’m told they don’t usually flock in numbers like this unless there’s wounded prey to be had, but magical predators aren’t so different from the normal variety. All it takes is a little blood in the water to start them circling.”

His looked pointedly at Marci’s feet as he said this, and she looked down to see something red coating the ground where Katya had been lying. It was on her arms, too, staining the dragoness’s white shirt crimson. But while the color suggested blood, the liquid was much too shiny, and there was a rainbow sheen on its surface, almost like gasoline floating on water…

And that was when Marci realized that dragon blood looked very different from human.

“Oh yes, Miss Novalli,” Bixby cackled as her expression turned horrified. “It’s done. Just listen to those wings. It’s only a matter of time before we’re up to our necks in those bastards, especially with all the new blood your little surprise attack there is dumping on the ground.”

Marci supposed he meant Julius, and scared as she was, that just made her mad. “You don’t know what you’re messing with, Bixby!” she yelled. “It never pays to piss off things bigger than you.”

“Save your threats,” Bixby said. “I’m perfectly safe. The magic eaters don’t care about humans—at least, not about ones who aren’t mages. That would normally put you in a lot of trouble, but you’re in luck tonight. There’s better meat to be had.” He jerked his head at Justin and Julius. “Your rescue squad is about to be the main course of a monster-on-monster feeding frenzy, and if you want them to have a prayer of escaping with their lives, you will shut up and do exactly as I say.”

“Don’t do it,” Justin barked, making Marci jump. When she turned to him, though, the dragon wasn’t even paying attention to her. He was glaring at Bixby, growling with a rumble Marci could feel through her shoes. “Don’t do a thing he says. I will not be used as a bargaining chip by a human!”

“You do not want to push me today, buddy!” Bixby snarled, brandishing the C4 remote in his fist. “Now shut up and back off before I turn you into dragon salsa.”

His finger began to lift off the trigger as he said this, and Marci gasped. “Wait!” she cried, pulling the Kosmolabe out of her bag. “Here it is. This is the real one. I’ll roll it to you right now, just don’t be stupid.”

That must have been what he was waiting for, because Bixby’s face lit up in a triumph. “Oh, no,” he said slowly. “You bring it to me, nice and easy.”

Marci swallowed and glanced at Julius. He was always the one with the plan. Surely he’d thought of something. But Julius was still down on the floor, his bloody chest rising and falling in shallow, pained gasps. Overhead, the shrieks were getting louder as the magic eaters grew bolder. A few had already come inside, crawling upside down along the ceiling like spiders.

Now that she knew what to look for, Marci could actually feel their presence sucking the magic out of the air, leaving an emptiness even more awful than the Pit’s creepy death magic. From the set of Justin’s shoulders, she knew he felt it too, and that only made things worse. If Justin was getting nervous, they were really screwed, and it was that more than anything that made Marci’s decision.

“Okay,” she said quietly, standing up and walking across the shot-up gym with the Kosmolabe held out in front of her like an offering. “Here. Just take the stupid thing and let us go.”

Bixby grinned as she closed the distance. “Oh, they can go at any time,” he said, snatching the golden sphere out of her hand and shoving it into a warded bag tied to his belt under his jacket. “But you? You’re staying right here.”

Marci was about to tell him exactly where he could shove that idea when his other hand, the one that wasn’t holding down the trigger, shot out to press something large, square, and black straight into her stomach.

Intense pain flared in every part of her body. It was like getting a massive charley horse cramp, only instead of just her leg, it was everywhere. The shock was so intense, Marci didn’t even realize she’d gone down until she was on the floor. But it wasn’t until the spasmodic pain forced her to drop every magical protection she had—the last of her anti-bullet ward, the remnants of her illusion of calm, even the low-level safeties that warned her when other mages started fiddling with her magic—that she finally understood what was going on. Bixby had tased her.

“Don’t move!”

Considering none of her muscles currently worked, Marci had no idea how he expected her to follow that command. A few seconds later, though, she realized Bixby hadn’t been yelling at her. He was shouting at the dragons.

“You stay right there!” he screamed, his voice high-pitched and frantic as he lifted the bomb trigger high with one arm and reached down to grab Marci’s still-twitching body with the other. He must have traded out his taser for a gun while she’d been on the ground, because when he yanked her into a choke hold against his chest, Marci felt the chamber of a revolver digging into her cheek. But even the warm pressure of gunmetal wasn’t enough to rouse her tasered body to fight as Bixby started dragging her backward toward the rear of the gym.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he grunted, panting with effort as he hauled her across the floor. “I’m not going to kill you, not quite. See, I know my future. My seer told me I’d die the moment Aldo Novalli’s daughter did, and my seer is never wrong. So once I hand off the Kosmolabe, you and me are getting on a plane back home to Vegas where I’ve got a doctor lined up to put you in a coma. A nice little sleep with nothing to bother you, because we’re both going to live a long, long time together.”

By the time he finished, Marci was so angry she could barely breathe, but she couldn’t do anything about it. The taser had left her whole body locked up and unresponsive, and her magic was an absolute mess. Even if she’d been herself, though, she couldn’t have cast anything. The air was so empty of magic now it felt shriveled, like a bit of fruit left out in the sun. She couldn’t even feel the dragons anymore.

They must have already left, she realized dimly. Well, good for them. Running was their only chance of escaping the epic disaster she’d dragged them into. She only wished she’d had a chance to tell Julius how sorry she was.

She was still contemplating this when she finally managed to get her muscles working enough to turn her head. She used this newfound power to look back down the gym on the off chance of catching a final glimpse of Julius’s back. When she got her head around at last, though, her still-stuttering body stopped working all over again, because Julius wasn’t fleeing. He was standing beside his brother, who had Katya over his shoulder.

The sight sent Marci into a panic. But as she fought desperately to get herself together enough to scream at Julius to just run already, he did.

Straight toward her.