Nice Dragons Finish Last

Chapter 2

She was a dragoness. Of that there was no question. Even in human form, she radiated danger of the casually cruel, playful kind. She was not, however, a Heartstriker. Julius didn’t know his entire family by sight—only his mother could do that—but he was pretty sure he’d remember someone like this.

She was beautiful, of course, but as a snow leopard taking down a stag was beautiful. Every feature, from her pale, pale skin to the white blond hair that slid over her bare shoulders in a snowy stream to the razor-sharp nails at the ends of her elegant fingers, was cold and otherworldly. Even her smile was deadly, the sort of delicate half smirk ancient queens must have worn when ordering slaves to fight to the death for their amusement. But what really got Julius was the calculating look in her ice-blue eyes as she gave him the speculative once-over dragons always performed when sizing up newcomers. Player or pawn? it asked. Tool or threat?

For Julius, the assessment was over in an instant. He could almost feel the word “pawn” being affixed to his forehead before the female dismissed him completely and shifted her gaze to Ian. “This is the one you told me of?”

Her accent was as cold and strange as the rest of her, a mix of Russian and something much, much older. Ian, of course, seemed completely unaffected. “My brother, Julius,” he replied, gesturing with his drink.

“Julius,” the dragoness repeated, her accent slicing off the J so that his name came out more like Ulius. “He is one of your youngest brothers, then? Or did Bethesda clutch again while I wasn’t paying attention?”

Ian and Julius winced in unison. No Heartstriker liked to be reminded of their mother’s ridiculous naming system, or the reason such a thing was required. Most dragonesses who chose to dedicate the enormous amount of magic required to bring new dragons into existence laid no more than two clutches of eggs in their entire lives, usually with five hundred years or more in between. Bethesda had laid ten, once with fewer than fifty years between broods. This fecundity had made her something of a legend among the other dragon clans, and to help her keep track of her unprecedented number of children, she’d named each clutch alphabetically. A names for her first, B for the second, and now finally down to J. At least the new dragoness hadn’t called their mother Bethesda the Broodmare, or Ian and Julius would have been honor-bound to attack, and that wouldn’t have ended well for anyone.

“No,” Ian said crisply, setting down his drink. “We’re still on J. But as you can see, he’s decidedly non-threatening. No guile I’ve witnessed, but I’m led to believe he’s not an idiot. Just soft.”

“Soft?” The dragoness said this the same way a human would say leprous.

“Non-aggressive,” Ian clarified. “But clever in his own way, I think. And if he fails, my mother will kill him, so motivation won’t be an issue.”

Julius knew better than to offer his opinion to this summation. He was used to powerful dragons talking about him like he wasn’t there. Still, he didn’t like the way the female was eying him now. Family would threaten him all day, but no Heartstriker would risk Bethesda’s wrath by actually killing him. This foreign dragon, on the other hand, was studying him like she was trying to decide which of his organs would make the best hat.

“I think you may be right,” she said at last. “He will do well enough.” With that, she sat down next to Ian and turned to Julius like she hadn’t just been ignoring him for the last few minutes. “I am Svena, daughter of the Three Sisters. Ian assured me you will be of assistance.”

She paused like she was waiting for a reply, but Julius couldn’t manage more than a choking sound. The Three Sisters were among the oldest and most powerful dragons left in the world. They were so magical, legend had it that they’d created their eggs one at a time using only their own power, no male consort needed. The offspring of this unconventional arrangement, all daughters, were in turn some of the most mysterious and feared dragons alive, which meant that Julius was sitting across the table from, at minimum, a thousand-year-old dragoness who was also one of the Heartstriker clan’s sworn enemies. The Three Sisters hated Bethesda, and as far as he knew, the feeling was mutual. What was Ian doing?

He glanced at his brother to ask just that, but Ian was shooting him a lethal caliber version of the shut up and play along look. So, with effort, Julius turned back to the dragoness, who he now knew for a fact could turn him into a gooey puddle with a snap of her fingers, and plastered what he hoped was an obliging smile across his face. “What kind of assistance did you have in mind?”

She pursed her pale lips. “It is a delicate matter. My youngest sister, Katya, has run away from home. I want you to bring her back.”

Julius blinked. “You want me to find your sister?”

“Not find,” Svena snapped—a literal snap of her too-white teeth that gave Julius the distinct impression Svena didn’t spend much time in her human form. “I know where she is, but she is being headstrong and difficult. I have indulged her as long as possible, but I cannot afford to do so any further. Unlike your clan where a dragon might vanish for years before someone notices, there are only twelve of us. If our mothers discover Katya’s absence, things will become difficult. I need a neutral third party to stop her foolishness and bring her home before this happens.”

She was very good at keeping her voice haughty and superior, but Julius had been appeasing bigger dragons his whole life, and he’d become very good at picking up subtle changes in tone. Between her cool disinterest and the not-so-subtle digs at his family, Julius could just make out the faint trace of real worry in Svena’s voice. Whether that concern was for her sister or herself when her mothers found out, he wasn’t sure, but what he really wanted to know was, “Why me?”

“Because you’re a failure,” Ian said with a superior smile. “And you’re sealed. Katya’s running from her sister because she knows she cannot defeat Svena, but you’re another story. Unlike us, you’re completely benign, a non-threat, which means you alone will be able to get close to Katya with causing her to bolt.”

“And do what?” Julius asked. “Even if she doesn’t run from me, how am I supposed to convince a—” powerful, magical, likely centuries older than him and still in possession of her true form, “—dragon to go home when she doesn’t want to?”

Svena waved her hand dismissively. “You can’t. If Katya could be convinced of anything, she would never have run in the first place. You only need to get close enough to put this on her.” She reached out as she spoke, placing something on the table with a soft clack. When she removed her hand, Julius saw it was a thin, silver braided chain. “There’s a binding spell woven into the metal,” she explained. “I created it specifically to placate my sister, but it must touch her skin to work, and I haven’t been able to get closer than a kilometer to Katya since this nonsense started.”

Julius stared at the chain glistening like frost on the white tablecloth, heart sinking. He had no interest in getting tangled up in another clan’s family drama. He especially didn’t want to trick a runaway into going back to a home she clearly wanted to escape. As someone who’d seriously considered running away himself dozens of times, tricking this Katya out of her freedom and forcing her back into the kind of situation that would make a dragon flee felt unspeakably cruel, but what was he supposed to do? Argue against his qualifications as a failure?

“This is a great opportunity for you, Julius,” Ian said, his voice calm and rational and completely not open to negotiation. “You’ve gotten an unfortunate reputation for being softhearted over your short lifespan, but there’s still time to turn yourself around. Mother has entrusted me with your rehabilitation, but if you insist on being lazy—”

“I’m not lazy.”

Julius regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, but he didn’t try to take them back. Backpedaling would only make him look even weaker, and anyway, he hated being called lazy. Staying alive in their clan was a full time job for someone like him, because Julius wasn’t just the youngest Heartstriker, he was also the smallest. Big dragons like Ian never understood just how much work it took to fly under the radar in a family of magical predators with a sixth sense for weakness and a pathological need to exploit any opening just because it was there.

Speaking of which, Ian was already watching him, his calculating eyes weighing Julius’s hasty words as much for what they didn’t say as what they did. “So resentful,” he said. “But you have no one to blame but yourself. The fact that I didn’t even know your name until this afternoon perfectly illustrates your complete and utter failure to be an asset to anyone. That you are alive today is due entirely to our mother’s magnanimity, and since we both know how fickle that can be, I suggest you stop making a spectacle of yourself and consider your next words very carefully.”

He didn’t even need to add because they might be your last. By the time Ian finished, the threat in his voice was like a noose around Julius’s neck. Beside him, Svena was observing the back and forth with the sort of bored impatience of a sports caster watching a veteran boxer taking on a volunteer from the audience.

That was how Julius felt, too—punch drunk, completely overpowered and outmatched. He still didn’t think it was right, and he knew he’d regret his actions, but Ian had his back against the wall, and they all knew it. So, with a heavy sigh, he reached out and scooped the silver chain off the table, shoving the unnaturally cold metal into his pocket as quickly as he could. “Where can I find her?”

“I have word she’s going to a party tonight,” Svena said, reaching into her silver-spangled clutch purse to pull out a sleek, expensive phone. “Some kind of gathering for human mages.” She paused. “You can still do magic, can’t you? Your mother didn’t seal that as well?”

She hadn’t, but then, she hadn’t needed to. Unlike humans, who drew magic from the world around them, dragons made their own. But while J clutch had been one of Bethesda’s more magically inclined broods, Julius hadn’t been keen on the idea of competing with his cutthroat siblings in an arena where it was perfectly acceptable to banish your rivals to another dimension. He’d learned the basics he needed to survive, but everything else he knew about sorcery, draconic or otherwise, could probably fit on a small note card. Not that he was going to admit that to Svena, of course.

“No problem,” he lied. “Where is it, and when should I show up?”

Svena looked down at her phone to find the information. Beside her, Ian met his eyes across the table and mouthed, good job. Julius nodded and quickly lowered his head over his own phone, trying not to look as nauseated as he felt when Katya’s information, including pictures, movement notes, and Svena’s practical instructions on where and how to deliver her runaway sister’s unconscious body once the deed was done, popped up on his screen.

Sometimes, he really, really, really hated being a dragon.

Thirty minutes later, Julius was sitting at the club’s bar, ignoring the bitter and expensive cocktail Ian had bought him as a fancy way of saying get lost while he finished his “discussion” with Svena, and he wasn’t feeling any better. Thanks to the information Svena had given him, he’d had no problem finding the party Katya was supposed to attend tonight. Getting in, however, was another matter entirely.

From the listing on the DFZ’s public mage forums, it seemed the gathering was being hosted by a circle of shamans, human mages who did their magic with the help of spirits and natural forces, something Julius decidedly was not. Despite Ian’s dismissive assurances that his little brother was “good with humans,” he had absolutely no idea how he was going to convince a bunch of secretive mages to let him into their exclusive magic-nerd night. He wasn’t actually sure how Katya had gotten in since dragon magic was entirely different from the human variety, though considering Svena’s “little sister” was a thousand years old if she was a day, she probably had her ways.

Julius’s ways, on the other hand, were decidedly more limited. Not surprising considering who ruled it, the DFZ was packed with spirits. The presence of so many powerful allies gave the local shamans a decided home-field advantage. With so much magic at their fingertips, a good shaman might be able to spot his true nature even with his mother’s seal, and then he’d be in real trouble. What he needed was a mage of his own, someone who actually understood how this stuff worked and could act as cover, but where was he going to find a mage on short notice in an unfamiliar city who would be willing to work on credit until Ian paid up?

He was still puzzling over this when he felt the telltale prickle on the back of his neck that meant someone was watching him. Probably Ian preparing to call him back to the booth so they could “discuss his plan,” or maybe Svena with some last-minute advice/threats. But when Julius turned around, it wasn’t a dragon watching him at all. It was a woman. A human woman sitting at one of the small tables by the door.

She got up the second he made eye contact and started straight for him, cutting through the expensively dressed crowd like an arrow with him as the target. Julius thought frantically, trying to remember if he’d met her before. It was true he knew a lot of humans for a dragon, but that was only over the internet. Face-to-face contact was limited to the residents of the New Mexico desert town his mother’s mountain complex supported, and this girl definitely wasn’t someone from home. She was sure acting like she knew him, though.

As she got closer, Julius’s confusion grew, because she looked like she belonged in this club about as much as he did. Her combination of sparkly silver vest, long-sleeved white shirt with dramatic, oversized cuffs draped over chunky plastic bracelets, and tight black pants tucked into glossy black, calf-high leather boots reminded him of an old-school stage magician. It wasn’t unattractive, especially not on her. She was actually very cute in a warm, human way that was a relief after Svena’s chilling beauty. Still, her getup definitely didn’t fit in with the rest of the club’s too-cool aesthetic, and her hair was patently ridiculous.

The thick, dark brown strands had been chopped into uneven chunks ranging from almost buzz-cut short in the back to chin-length wisps around her face. It was uneven over her ears as well, with longer strands trailing down at odd places, like she’d pulled her hair back and chopped it off in a mad panic. She didn’t look crazy, though. Just determined as she walked up and slid between him and the stool on his left, leaning one elbow on the bar so that she was directly in his field of vision.

Under normal circumstances, a pretty girl coming at him out of nowhere would have sent Julius into defensive retreat. Today, though, half-panicked already and stuck in survival mode, he stared straight at her, holding his ground out of sheer desperation as he breathed deeply to catch some hint of the trap this had to be. When he didn’t smell so much as a whiff of draconic power other than the chain in his pocket, though, he said, “Can I help you?”

“No,” the girl said, flipping her hand with a flourish. “I can help you.”

A white card appeared between her fingers, and Julius jumped before he realized he hadn’t felt any magic. It had been sleight-of-hand that produced the card, not a spell. The paper itself, however, told another story.

Marci Novalli, it read. Socratic Thaumaturge, MDC. Curse breaking, magical consultation, warding services. Below that, a smaller line proclaimed, No job is too big or too small! References available upon request.

A mage, he realized dumbly, staring at the card with a growing sense of dread—an impressive feat, considering just how large his dread had grown today already. But a mage appearing out of nowhere at the exact moment he realized he needed one? If that wasn’t a set-up, then he was his mother’s favorite son.

He leaned away from her offered card like it was poison. “Sorry. Not interested.”

“Just hear me out,” the girl said, closing the distance he’d just put between them. “I can understand if you’re apprehensive about mages. You’re under a very nasty curse.”

Julius blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The curse,” she said, gesturing at him. “It’s all over you. I can’t imagine how you must be suffering, but you don’t have to worry any longer. I have a lot of experience in curse breaking, and I’m very gentle. Give me an hour and I’ll have that thing off you no problem.”

Julius stared at her, uncomprehending, and then it dawned. She was talking about the seal, the one his mother had put on him to trap him in his human shape. After that, it was all Julius could do not to burst out laughing, both at the notion of a mortal mage breaking his mother’s seal in an hour and how Bethesda would react if it actually worked. He glanced at the girl again, just to make sure she wasn’t kidding, but her expression was deadly serious, and all he could do was shake his head.

“I’m afraid my curse isn’t the sort you can remove,” he said. “Thank you for offering, though.” That last bit came out surprisingly heartfelt. Her unexpected sales pitch was the nicest thing anyone had said to him all day.

The girl stared at him a moment, and then her shoulders slumped. “Well, do you have anything else you need done? Wards? Spirits banished? I can show you my portfolio.”

She’d started pulling a binder out of the enormous black messenger bag on her shoulder before she’d even finished the question, and Julius fought the urge to sigh. Humans.

“I’m good, really,” he said, putting up his hands. “You don’t have to show me anything. I’m not interested.”

The girl stopped short, and then she stuffed the binder back into her bag, her face falling in utter defeat. “Sorry,” she muttered, flopping down on the barstool beside him. “I’m not normally so…” She waved her hands as she searched for the word, making the chipped silver glitter polish on her nails sparkle in the club’s low light. “Car salesman-y,” she said at last. “It’s just that I really need the work. If you have anything magical you need done today, anything at all, I’ll give you a huge discount. I swear I’m completely legit. I’m fully licensed in Nevada, actually, but I’m new in town and, frankly, getting a little desperate. So if there’s any work you need a mage for, just say the word. If not, I’ll stop bothering you.”

Julius opened his mouth to say sorry, he had nothing, but the words stuck in his throat. The girl was looking at him so earnestly, and that word desperate kept rolling around in his head. Bob had told him to be a gentleman and help desperate women. Of course, Bob had also once told Julius that he would have dinner with a phoenix on his birthday.

Turning away from the human, he pulled out his phone and reread the seer’s message, but he hadn’t made a mistake. There was the warning from his maybe-insane, maybe-future predicting brother who’d mailed him a phone loaded with a Detroit ID and money four months before he’d needed it, and here was the desperate woman said brother had told him to help, and now Julius had to make a decision.

On the one hand, years of well-honed paranoia told him for certain that this was a trap. No one’s luck was good enough to have a random mage walk up and offer her services at the exact moment she was needed. Far more likely was that this Marci Novalli was working for someone else from the Three Sisters who didn’t want Katya found, or maybe another clan entirely. If he took her offer, he’d be playing right into the clutches of his family’s enemies like the idiot failure his mother always said he was. On the other hand, though, rejecting her meant he’d be going against his brother’s advice, and therein lay the quandary. Unlike most of his family, Julius didn’t think Bob was crazy, or, at least, not only crazy. He wasn’t sure if his brother actually saw the future, but Bob definitely saw something. Trouble was, Julius wasn’t sure which side this particular warning fell on: the crazy or the something. He was still trying to figure it out when the girl slid off the barstool.

“I’m really sorry to have wasted your time,” she said quietly, looking down at her feet as she adjusted her bag on her shoulder. “Thank you for listening, and I hope you have a nice—”

“Wait.”

The girl looked up in surprise. Julius was surprised, too, because he hadn’t thought he’d made up his mind yet. But while he still wasn’t sure if the mage was a trap, a vision of Bob’s unsettled mind, or some combination thereof, he had come to a decision. The sorry had been the deciding factor, but the thank you had sealed the deal. Julius couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard those words from anyone’s mouth except his own and, trap or not, he couldn’t let the person who said them just walk away.

Of course, now that he’d stopped her, he had to come up with something to say.

“Marci, right?” he asked, clearing his throat as she sat back down on the stool. “Can you do illusions?”

“Absolutely,” Marci said, counting off on her fingers. “Area, personal, spatial, full sensory immersion, though I’ll need a day to set that last one up if you want it on something bigger than a ten by ten square.”

Julius didn’t know enough about human magic to gauge whether that was good or not, but Marci certainly sounded like she knew what she was talking about. “I guess it would be a personal illusion,” he said. “On me. But I’d rather not explain it here. Do you have somewhere else we could talk?”

Marci nodded and hopped to her feet. “I’ll need my workshop to do a credible illusion anyway. We can discuss terms on the way over. Would that be okay?”

Julius glanced over his shoulder, but his brother and Svena were still sitting in the VIP area with their heads together, and he was loath to interrupt. Really, though, he saw no reason to deal with Ian again at all. He had the chain, he had the information about the party, and now he had a mage to help him get inside. If he moved quickly, this whole mess could be over by midnight.

“That sounds great,” he said, smiling at Marci as he slid off his own stool. “Let’s get out of here.”

Getting out of the club was much simpler than getting in. Rather than running the gauntlet past the augmented bouncer, Marci led them out a side door and down the alley, away from the tree-lined square and its well-dressed crowds. Then she led them down from the street, descending a long set of cement stairs from the elevated skyway.

“I swear I’m not taking you off to mug you,” she said as they walked away from the evening sunlight and the bright glow of the Upper City’s ubiquitous halogen street lamps. “It’s just that you don’t have to pay for parking down here.”

“No worries,” Julius said, glancing around. Even with his dragon sealed, he wasn’t terribly worried about a human mugging him, and he was far more interested in his first look at the underbelly of Old Detroit.

Going below the skyways was like entering another world. All the brilliance of the Upper City—the fancy tree-lined square, the towering superscrapers, the elegant curving roads full of luxury cars and computer driven taxis—was like a model sitting on a table, and underneath it, an entirely different city thrived in the dark.

After all the stories he’d heard, Julius had expected Underground Detroit to look like a war torn ruin, but this looked more like Shinjuku in Tokyo. The buildings, many of them apparently dating from before the flood given the high water marks on their second stories, had been completely renovated to hold as many shops as possible. Every window seemed to have at least two signs hanging in it, and the combined glare of all the neon, back-lit plastic, and flashing LEDs, actually made it brighter down here than it had been up top in the sun.

If there was any organizational system, Julius couldn’t see it. Bars, restaurants, and theaters shared walls with banks, private schools, and massage parlors in a chaotic jumble. Some establishments didn’t even bother making divisions, advertising salon services and gambling at the same time. Even the buildings themselves were mismatched. Some, the short ones, looked like the normal office buildings and strip malls they must have been before Algonquin had built an entire other city on top of them. Others, ones that had collapsed and been completely rebuilt in the years since the flood, or the ones had been too tall to fit under the skyway’s eighty foot clearance and had been cut to fit, reached right up to ceiling, using the huge cement base of the Upper City in place of an actual roof.

The chaos continued on the ground as well where food carts and semi-permanent kiosks competed with cars for room on the ruler-straight grid of the old roads. Trash and advertisements and people were absolutely everywhere, crammed into every nook and cranny and selling everything under the sun to anyone who was willing to pay regardless of age. The only breaks in the madness were the enormous, city-block-long cement support pillars that held up the skyway overhead, but even these were plastered with billboards advertising everything from concerts and exotic pets to drugs and pay-as-you-go augmentation clinics. Just trying to wrap his brain around the chaos of capitalism gone crazy was making Julius feel overwhelmed and dizzy, but most astonishing of all were the people.

Back in Arbor Square, the crowd had been ethnically diverse, but still so uniformly wealthy and well dressed that they’d all blended together. In the Underground, though, there was some of everything: ethnicity, class, religion, occupation, everything. It was like some power had swept the world, picked people at random, and dumped them all here. It was nothing short of extraordinary, and Julius almost fell down the stairs in his eagerness to get a better look.

“First time below decks?”

Julius winced and glanced up to see Marci grinning at him over her shoulder. “That obvious, huh?”

“You are gawking a bit,” she said, slowing her pace until they were climbing down side by side. “Not that I’m judging, of course. I was shocked too, my first time.”

“It’s actually a lot nicer than I’d thought it’d be,” Julius admitted, nodding down at the young, excited crowd waiting to get into a five-sense theatre. “I’d always heard, you know…”

“What? That the whole place was a giant slum of rotting buildings and desperate characters straight out of a corporate dystopia? Oh, don’t worry, there’s plenty of that, too. This is actually one of the tourist areas the DFZ Visitor’s Board pays to keep colorful and edgy, but not so scary that outsiders won’t spent money.”

Julius looked over at the brightly colored, music playing, fully automated gun, alcohol, and party drug vending machines that lined the landings of the stairwell. “This is the tourist area?”

Marci spread her arms wide. “Welcome to the DFZ!”

A proper, crafty dragon would have shut his mouth after that and kept his ignorance hidden, but Julius was curious, and this seemed kind of important. “What about security? I mean, I know everything is legal here, but isn’t this kind of excessive? How can so many corporations have their headquarters in the DFZ if there are vending machines selling drugs to tourists only fifty steps down from Arbor Square?”

There’s plenty of security,” Marci said. “It’s just reserved for people with money, spirits, and fish. Especially fish, actually. Life’s great here if you live underwater.”

He arched his eyebrows in question, and she pointed over at a giant yellow hazard sign posted on the nearest support beam. Julius hadn’t noticed that particular billboard amid all the other advertisements, but now that Marci had pointed it out, it was impossible to miss the giant wave crest logo of the Algonquin Civic Corporation followed by a list of substances that you were not allowed to dump into the water system and the horrible punishments that awaited anyone who did written in a world tour of languages. There were more signs when they reached ground level with similar warnings against littering and burning illicit materials, but nothing for human on human crimes like theft or assault, which made a pretty clear statement about the Lady of the Lakes’ priorities.

“I see what you mean,” Julius said, stepping closer to Marci as they pushed into the teeming, noisy crowd that smelled strongly of sweat and human at bottom of the stairs. “Crime here must be ridiculous.”

“It varies,” Marci said, turning them down an side street that, while still crowded, at least had breathing room. “If you stay in areas where people can afford to pay their police fees, it’s not bad at all. If you go where they can’t, well…better not to do that.”

Julius nodded silently. Now that they were actually down in it, he could see the glitz of the tourist area was only on the surface. The main streets were full of vendors and tourists, but the side streets were packed with a very different crowd. Humans in filthy clothes sat together against the buildings, their eyes glassy and empty. Others waited on corners, watching the crowds of tourists like predators eying a herd. Every now and then, one of them would duck off only to come right back with a purse or shopping bag tucked under their arms. Julius shook his head, rolling his eyes up to the sooty black underbelly of the elevated highway that served for a sky in this place. “Why do people put up with it?”

He’d meant that to be a rhetorical question, but Marci answered immediately. “Opportunity. The Lady of the Lakes might care more about fish than people, but this is still the Magic City. There’s no immigration office, no background checks. Anyone can come here with nothing and try to make a new life. That’s a powerful draw, and there are a lot of jobs here, especially if you aren’t too squeamish.” She shrugged. “I think of it as a gamble. The DFZ is dangerous and unfair and full of weird magic, but if you’re willing to brave the risks, you can win big.”

“Or lose everything,” Julius countered, eying a line of drugged out humans taking refuge behind a dumpster, several of whom were children. “I don’t know. It seems kind of like a step back.”

“Maybe,” Marci said. “But it is what it is, and the city’s held on this long, so something must be working.”

“I suppose,” Julius said, but only to be polite. Honestly, he didn’t see how a city ruled by an ancient spirit who clearly didn’t care at all for human life, where the rich lived literally on top of everyone else, and you had to pay a fee just to call 911 could be anything other than a dystopia. He didn’t want to rain on Marci’s enthusiasm, however, so he kept his mouth shut, sticking close to her side as they walked away from the bright, jangly tourist area into a slightly quieter, more residential part of the crowded Underground.

“So,” Marci said, smiling at him. “I probably should have asked you this way earlier, but what’s your name? Unless you want this to be a secret contract, of course. Again, not judging.”

“Not that secret,” he said, laughing. “And my name’s Julius.”

She nodded. “Julius what?”

Julius faked a cough to buy himself time and grabbed his phone in his pocket, popping up the AR display only he could see right through the fabric of his jeans. It still took him a few seconds of fumbling before he was able to navigate the new menus to see what last name Bob had put on his residence ID. “Quetz,” he read, gritting his teeth. “Julius Quetz.”

“Quetz?” Marci repeated incredulously.

“Short for Quetzalcoatl,” he explained, letting the phone go with a huff. “It’s an old family name.” And Bob’s idea of a joke. Or at least, Julius hoped it was a joke. There was no other reason a sane individual would think using the name of the most infamous feathered serpent ever to terrorize the Americas as a cover alias for a dragon in hiding was a good idea.

“Wait, you shortened your last name?”

Julius missed a step on the uneven sidewalk, eyes wide. Was that not something humans did? “Um,” he stalled. “It was too hard to spell?”

That explanation seemed to fly, because Marci nodded. “I see. It’s too bad, though. I think Quetzalcoatl would have been a pretty awesome last name.” She shrugged and flashed that infectious grin of hers at him again, stopping to put out her hand. “Well, Julius Quetz, I’m happier than you can know to be doing business with you. And speaking of which, I hope you don’t mind signing a standard U.S. contract. As I said, I just moved here, and I haven’t had a chance to get my DFZ paperwork in order, such as it is.”

Julius shook her hand after only a slight hesitation. He was about to tell her a U.S. contract would be fine when Marci turned around and walked over to the dusty car parked on the sidewalk beside them. It was a beat-up old junker that looked a good ten years older than Marci herself, but it wasn’t until she walked around to the trunk and started wiggling the key—a metal key, not a wireless fob—into the ancient lock, that Julius realized this was her car.

With that, the last of his fears that Marci was a trap set by another clan vanished. If there was any draconic trait even more universal than their love of plotting, it was snobbery. No dragon, no matter how cheap or desperate, would be caught dead using a human who drove a car like this. With that settled, though, there was only one question left. Why had Bob set him up with this mage?

He was still wondering when Marci finally got the trunk open. “I normally charge a flat hourly fee plus expenses,” she said, pulling out a stack of slightly creased papers. “But I promised you a discount, so I’m cutting my rate in half and waiving my retainer.” Closing the trunk again to use its hood as a writing surface, Marci crossed several clauses off the top of the contract with an expensive-looking marker she’d pulled from her pocket. Once it was all marked through, she wrote in the new rates by hand before giving the contract to Julius. “Is that okay?”

Julius took the pages with trepidation. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an actual physical contract, let alone signed one. The paper felt odd, too, almost tingly. “Is there a spell on this?”

Marci’s eyes widened. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I forgot to mention that. Yes, a minor truth spell, just the usual security against falsification. It’s all on the up and up, though, see?” She pointed at the top of the page where the paper had, indeed, been notarized by the State of Nevada Magic Commissioner’s Office. “Nothing nefarious.”

Julius studied the seal for a moment, and then he glanced through the rear window of her car at the backseat, which was packed high with bags and boxes. There’d been boxes in her trunk as well. Clearly, Marci Novalli had left Nevada in a hurry. He wanted to ask why, but he wasn’t exactly in a position to pry, and with the discounted rate she’d written down, he was getting her services for almost nothing.

He felt kind of bad about that, actually, but he needed a mage, she needed work, and a paper contract would keep his name out of any databases that could come back to haunt him. So, before he could second-guess himself into paralysis, Julius took the pen she offered and signed his first name on the dotted line. Only his first name, since the truth spell would have outed his last as a fake. Marci arched an eyebrow, but she didn’t comment as she signed her own name on the line below.

“You won’t be disappointed,” she promised as she snatched the paper up, tucking it into a plastic envelope, which she then slipped into one of the many pockets of her shoulder bag. “Now, what kind of illusion did you need tonight?”

“Well,” Julius said, walking around to the old car’s passenger side. “I need to get into this party.”

Marci’s eyes widened in astonishment, and then, to his surprise, she blushed, her whole face turning bright red. “What kind of party wouldn’t let you in?”

He tilted his head curiously. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” she said quickly, hurrying around to the driver’s door to unlock the car. “It’s just, you don’t look like the sort of guy who has trouble getting in anywhere, if you get my drift.”

Julius didn’t, but Marci was still blushing for some reason, so he didn’t push the issue. “Not this one,” he said, getting into the car. “It’s some kind of exclusive mage thing, and I’m not a mage.”

“Say no more,” she said, tapping a destination into the flickering console that passed for an autodrive in this relic of a vehicle. “We’ll have you looking magical in no time. What kind of mage do you want to be?”

Julius winced as the car sputtered like an asthmatic old dog, but it made it out of the narrow parking space and down the road without dying, and he eventually relaxed into the threadbare seat. “What are my options?”

Marci’s enormous smile caught him completely off guard, but he had plenty of time to recover as she passionately recited the seemingly endless variety of magical vocations, with commentary, that he could choose from.