Nice Dragons Finish Last

Chapter 3

Considering the sorry state of Marci’s car, Julius expected her to drive them somewhere truly scary, like one of those hourly Underground motels where they always found the body in DFZ crime movies. He was pleasantly surprised, then, when her route took them out of the dark undercity altogether, driving north away from the water and the skyways into one of Detroit’s few surviving historic neighborhoods.

By some miraculous happenstance, the old University District had avoided the worst of Algonquin’s initial wave. There was still visible flood damage on the rotting telephone poles, but most of the area’s quaint brick and stone houses with their odd little towers and arches were still intact. Unlike the heavily renovated buildings of the packed Underground they’d just left, though, there were no shops or vending machines or noisy crowds. There didn’t actually seem to be anyone out here at all.

After experiencing the oppressive, cave-like atmosphere of living below another city first hand, Julius though people would be fighting tooth and nail to live out here where there was still sky and fresh air. The moment Marci had driven them out of the shadow of the skyways, however, the crowds had shrunk to a trickle. Even stranger, most of the nice houses here seemed to be abandoned. Some had even been grown over entirely by yards turned wild over years of neglect, which didn’t make any sense at all.

“Why is this place so empty?” he asked, glancing in the side mirror at the cliff-like edge of the two layered city behind them. “We’re only fifteen minutes from downtown, and there’s so much space. Why isn’t it all one giant suburb?”

“Those are all on the south side,” Marci said. “I mean, if you want to see the corp towns, I can totally take you later, but no one builds that stuff up here.”

“Why not?”

She looked at him like he was joking and pointed out his window. When Julius turned to look, though, he didn’t see anything but the same collapsing houses that had prompted him to ask the question in the first place. He was about to ask again when he spotted a glimmer of silver above the rooftops, and he realized he’d been looking too low.

About a hundred feet behind the houses lining the street on his right, a chain link fence topped with razor wire rose high into the evening sky. This far away, it was almost invisible, but now that he was staring straight at it, Julius could feel the faint hum of magic coursing through the air like electricity. “What is that?”

“Reclamation Land,” Marci said. “All the area east from here until the skyways pick up again by the shores of Lake St. Claire is designated for spirits. It’s sort of like a refuge. Spirits live a very long time, which makes them kind of curmudgeonly. A lot of them haven’t adapted well to modern life after the comet woke them up. Some people say that’s the real reason the Lady of the Lakes took Detroit in the first place; she wanted to give her fellow spirits somewhere safe to adjust to their new world. Personally, I think that’s giving Algonquin way too much credit for selflessness, but the Reclamation Land does seem to be a legitimately safe space. Humans aren’t even allowed inside unless they work for the Algonquin Corporation.”

Julius looked at the fence again. He couldn’t see any spirits beyond it—just collapsed houses surrounded by trees and open fields—but after Marci’s story, he could feel their power stronger than ever. The magic here smelled of wild places, of forests and water and mountains. Magic like this did not belong so close to a city, and yet here it was, layered over the rundown homes and overgrown lawns like a blanket of wet snow.

“Anyway,” Marci went on. “That’s the reason this strip of land hasn’t been developed. None of the big companies wanted to build this close to the spirits, and no one else can afford to live here. The lots are spaced so far apart that there aren’t enough people to split the fees for roads, trash, and cops down to an affordable level, and that’s not even counting the wards you’d need.”

“Wards?”

“That fence is to keep people out.” Marci said, nodding at the Reclamation Land border. “The spirits don’t mind it at all. Plus, look at all this open land. Trees and grass and open ground attract supernatural activity everywhere, but this close to Algonquin, the pull is super charged. If you wanted to live in one of those houses, you’d practically need a mage on staff just to keep your property from being overrun.”

Julius leaned away from the car door. “Overrun by what?”

Marci laughed. “Everything. Spirits, magical animals, feral dogs—you name it, it lives out here. I actually chased a water nixie out of a guy’s bathtub just this morning in exchange for breakfast. I should have charged him, but he was such a nice old man, and he was clearly dead broke anyway. It worked out okay, though. He made really delicious pancakes.”

Julius was about to ask if chasing away spirits was how Marci made her living out here when the car’s automated route ended. Marci took over with a jerk, grabbing the steering wheel for the final turn into the driveway of a house that left him speechless.

“It’s only temporary,” she said quickly. “And it’s not nearly so bad on the inside.”

Julius nodded dumbly, staring out the window at the ruin that had once been a Tudor style brick mansion.

If the neighborhood’s other houses were in decline, this place was nearing the bottom of a nosedive. Technically, it was two stories tall, but the top floor was caved in completely, the collapsed roof utterly overgrown with ivy. The bottom level didn’t look much better. The brick was cracked in several places, and one corner of the foundation was sinking, causing the whole structure to tilt. Given the state of the roof, it was probably even worse on the inside, but Julius couldn’t tell for sure since every window was blocked by huge, dusty piles of boxes and furniture pressed right up to the glass. Apparently, whoever had lived here before Marci had had a serious hoarding problem.

The lot was just as bad. Though clearly once a fanciful garden full of benches, stone paths, and cutesy statuary, the side and front yards were now a jungle of ornamental plants gone wild. Bushes ten feet tall battled elephant-sized tufts of pampas grass for every inch of arable land, devouring the poured cement garden statues of cupids and angels until all that remained were their weather-stained hands reaching up out of the vegetation like victims of the Blob. And then, of course, there were the cats.

Julius didn’t normally see cats. Felines of all types had a natural nose for magic that could sense a dragon a mile away, sealed or not. Here, though, there were cats everywhere. Maybe they were too muddled by the thick magic of this place to notice his arrival, or maybe they just didn’t care, but everywhere Julius looked, there they were, hiding in the overgrown bushes and peering out through the ivy of the collapsed roof. Still more watched from the house’s dusty windows, their eyes bright with feral wariness as they followed Marci’s car around the back of the house where it eventually rolled to a stop in front of the collapsing back porch.

“I can see why you were desperate,” Julius said as they got out of the car.

“Yeah, well, a roof’s a roof,” Marci grumbled, walking around the tree sized azalea bushes to the dug in cement stair that led down to the house’s basement, scattering cats as she went. “Mrs. Hurst was my first customer when I got into town. I took care of a spirit that was giving her trouble, but she didn’t have the money for my fee. We were still working it out when her son heard about the incident and sent his mother a plane ticket to come live with him in Chicago. So, since she wasn’t going to be here anymore, the old lady said I could stay rent-free in lieu of payment until they sold the house. Free was about my price range at the time, so I took it. Not exactly the Ritz, I know, but something’s better than nothing, right?”

Not always, Julius thought, casting another skeptical look at the house’s sagging foundations. He didn’t want to be insulting, though, and it wasn’t like he was going to be living here, so he followed Marci down the steps and into the basement without a word.

Given the state of the house above, he’d braced for the worst, so Julius was shocked when he stepped through the basement door into a neat, well-lit space. It was still a basement with a cement floor and ground-level windows set high on the cracked brick walls, but unlike anything else he’d seen in this place, it was immaculately clean. Or, at least, part of it was.

The basement was as huge as the house above it, but only half of it was nice. The half by the door was bordered by a strip of yellow plastic caution tape covered in spell scribbling. On their side of the plastic line, it was a clean, orderly space that smelled faintly of artificial lemon. On the other side, it was chaos.

Beyond the line made by the yellow tape, filthy, sodden trash lay in huge piles. Julius couldn’t even see far enough back to spot the stairs that led up to the house itself. His view was blocked by mountains of discarded boxes, old clothes, broken furniture, stacks of old magazines, and cats. Uncountable cats, their eyes gleaming from the shadows as Marci clicked on the tall parlor lamp sitting on top of the mini fridge in the corner.

“Don’t worry,” she said, nodding at the caution tape. “The cats can’t get through the ward. It keeps out the smell, too. You would not believe what this place was like when I got here.”

Julius believed it just fine. “Free or not, why would you live down here?”

If he’d thought better of it, he wouldn’t have put the question quite that way. Fortunately, Marci didn’t seem offended.

“It fit my needs,” she said with a shrug. “My father died suddenly Tuesday night, and I ended up having to move in kind of a hurry. I haven’t had time to pick up my Residency ID yet, and I don’t have a stable source of income, which makes it kind of hard to get a lease even in the DFZ. I’ve just been trying to roll with the punches and make do.”

She’d certainly done that, Julius thought, looking over the tiny island of order and cleanliness she’d carved from the vast, disgusting sea of trash and cats. In addition to the mini fridge and the lamp, she’d acquired a couch and a gigantic wooden wardrobe that looked like it might contain Narnia. There was also a large, open square of floor off to the side that was covered in chalk casting circles, which he assumed must be her workspace. Not bad at all for someone who’d only been here…

“Wait,” Julius said. “Tuesday? Like, three days ago?” When she nodded, he cursed himself for an insensitive idiot. “My condolences for the loss of your father.”

Marci’s face fell for a split second, but then she was right back to business, throwing open the doors of the huge wardrobe to reveal, sadly not fur coats and a snowy forest with a lamppost, but a neatly organized collection of magical paraphernalia, which was far more useful at the moment. “Thanks,” she said. “I miss him a lot. But hey, at least I haven’t had time to dwell on it, right? Hard to be sad when you’re under an endless siege of cats.”

Her voice was bright and cheery, but Julius’s ears were tuned for dragons, and he could hear the falseness of her words clear as a bell. But it was neither his problem nor his place to call out her deception, so he let it go. He had to, anyway, because Marci was shoving an intricately carved wooden box into his face. “Hold this a sec.”

He did, using both hands when the box proved much heavier than it looked. It was also vibrating slightly, the little motions making the paper seal on the lid flutter like a flag in a high wind. Julius grimaced and moved the box to arm’s length. Family competition aside, this sort of creepiness was the other reason he’d stayed away from serious magic.

“So,” he said as Marci climbed up into the wardrobe to grab a meticulously labeled box of multicolored casting chalk off the top shelf. “You’re from Nevada?”

“Las Vegas,” she said proudly. “My dad and I used to have a magical solutions business there.”

That explained her card. “What kind of solutions?”

“All kinds,” Marci said. “Though we specialized in curse breaking. Las Vegas is a vengeful town, and that makes good business for both sides of the curse market.” She paused. “I was also going to school at UNLV for my doctorate in Thaumaturgical theory, but I had to quit when my dad died.”

“That’s too bad.”

She shrugged. “Nothing to be done. It was probably for the best, though. I was getting tired of the limits of academic magic.”

The false ring in her voice was back again when she said this, and again, Julius ignored it. He didn’t think she was lying outright this time, more like telling only half the story. That was still enough to make him uneasy, but considering he hadn’t told her a hundredth of his story, it was far simpler to just let it lie. He kept his mouth shut as he followed her over to the interlocking magical circles she’d drawn on the cement.

“Give me a moment to redraw these and we’ll get started,” she said, grabbing a dry mop from the corner and using it like an eraser, scrubbing the circles off the cement with a few deft strokes.

“What was wrong with the old ones?”

“Totally inappropriate initial casting parameters,” Marci said, putting the mop away and selecting a fresh piece of gold-colored chalk from the box she’d pulled out of the wardrobe. “Is this your first time watching Thaumaturgy in action?”

This was his first time watching a human cast anything, but before he could say as much, Marci charged right ahead.

“Thaumaturgy is the best form of magic,” she said in the bright, excited tone of someone getting a chance to explain something she truly loved. “It’s the process of using logical spell notation to create detailed instructions that tell the magic how to behave. Watch, it all starts with a circle.”

She grabbed a metal folding chair leaning against the wall and taped the stick of chalk to its leg. Before Julius could ask why, she unfolded the chair halfway, stamped the back leg down, and then, using the half-folded chair like a protractor, she touched the foot with the chalk taped to it against the cement floor and spun the chair like a top, drawing a perfect circle. Julius watched, dumbstruck. Apparently, Marci Novalli’s ability to make do extended to all sorts of things.

“There,” she said, setting the chair back against the wall. “Now we have a place for the magic to gather before we use it, sort of like a holding tank.” She looked up expectantly, which Julius took as his cue to nod. This earned him a brilliant smile and the resumption of the impromptu lesson. “So, now that we’ve got a place for the magic to pool, it’s time to put down the instructions that will tell it what to do.”

She retrieved her chalk as she said this, kneeling at the circle’s edge to begin writing a line of Greek symbols, numbers, and abbreviated words along the inner curve. “I use Socratic notation because it’s the most precise and I like it the best, but there are several other spellwork languages that all do basically the same thing. The idea is to create a progressive series of algorithms that tell the magic how to behave, kind of like writing a computer program. Once the spellwork is finished, all I have to do is pull the magic through the circle and voila, the spell is cast.” She glanced up at him. “Speaking of which, have you decided what kind of mage you want to be?”

He considered the question. “Well, it’s a shaman party, so probably a shaman of some sort. Preferably something quiet.” Because if anyone actually tried to talked to him about magic, he’d be revealed as a fraud in no time.

Marci thought for a moment, and then bent back over her circle. “I’ve got a good one,” she said, clicking chalk across the cement floor in deft strokes. “Just let me get it down and we’ll be golden.”

Julius nodded and settled in to wait, watching in fascination as Marci worked. He’d always thought of magic symbols as just that: random mystical shapes that controlled magic. Now that she’d explained what those long lines of spellwork actual did, though, he was surprised to see it really did look like code. Parts of it even looked almost readable. He was about to kneel down for a better look when something cold brushed against his leg.

He jumped before he could stop himself and glanced down to see a large, fluffy white cat. And then he jumped again, not just because this cat was inside the ward where cats weren’t supposed to be, but because this cat’s body was transparent. It was glowing, too, shining with its own strange, blue-white light, almost like a—

“Ghost!”

He looked up to see Marci kneeling with her hands on her hips and a furious scowl on her face. “You know you’re not supposed to bother customers,” she said firmly, pointing at the far side of the basement. “Go on! Get out of here!”

The transparent cat gave her a disgusted look and stalked off toward the couch. He turned his back on them when he got there, silently grooming his paws like this relocation business had been entirely his idea.

“Marci,” Julius said, very slowly. “Why do you have a ghost cat?”

“Technically, he’s not a ghost,” Marci said, going back to her spellwork. “That’s just his name. He’s actually a death spirit. You probably noticed Mrs. Hurst had a bit of a cat problem?”

Julius glanced over at the wall of reflective eyes peering at them from the shadowy mountains of trash on the other side of the yellow plastic ward. “I noticed.”

Marci shook her head. “Nice old lady, but way too soft-hearted. She told me she couldn’t stand to turn away strays but never had the money to get them fixed, so naturally the house began to fill up. They’ve had the run of the place for years, which sadly means a lot of dead cats hidden in the garbage, and dead bodies bring death spirits.”

Julius looked at the transparent cat sitting on the couch with a cold shudder. “You’re saying he’s the job you did for the lady who owned this place? The one you traded for free rent?”

“Yep,” Marci replied. “I was going through the public job boards when I saw this listing from an old lady who swore that a ghost cat was trying to kill her. I don’t normally take crazy jobs, but no one else had answered it and I needed the money bad, so I told her I’d come over and check it out. When I arrived, I found Ghost there sitting on top of my future client’s chest. He’d nearly sucked her dry by that point, and I ended up having to bind him just to make him detach.”

Julius recoiled. “That’s horrific.”

“You’re telling me,” Marci said, laughing. “I had to dodge furious cats the whole way in, and that was before I knew I’d be doing a binding.”

“But why did you bind him?” Julius asked. “Why not banish him?” He didn’t know much about human magic, but he knew binding was a serious commitment that tied spirit and mage for life. That didn’t sound like the sort of thing you did on the fly with something as openly hostile as a death spirit.

“I thought about that,” she said. “But if I banished him, he’d just come back again and bother someone else. Besides, he’s a bit of a rare specimen. It’s been hypothesized that cats have more natural magic than other domesticated animals, but this is the first time I’ve seen or heard of a death spirit specific to the species. He’ll be a great thesis topic if I ever get a chance to go back and finish my doctorate.”

Julius stared at her, mouth open, an expression that was rapidly becoming his default around Marci. “You mean you bound a death spirit to yourself for all time on the off-chance you can write a paper about him if you go back to school?”

“Well, he’s also pretty useful,” she said, brushing the chalk off her hands as she stood up. “When I can get him to obey, that is. Would you hand me the box, please?”

Julius did as she asked, silently handing her the shaking wooden box he’d brought over from the wardrobe. The soft rattling stopped when Marci broke the paper seal, and she reached inside to pull out something long, black, and slightly ridged, like an animal horn. “What’s that?”

“Chimera tusk,” Marci said proudly, holding the black object out for him to see. “And before you ask, it’s from a licensed humane farm in Canada. I don’t buy from factory mills. It taints the magic.”

Julius hadn’t been about to ask, mostly because it had never even occurred to him there would be chimera farms in Canada. He was, however, suddenly feeling very uneasy about this spell. “Why do you need a chimera tusk?”

“Well, I don’t need it,” Marci said, placing the tusk squarely in the center of her palm. “But it takes a lot of magic to do two illusions thick enough to trick a room full of mages, and since I’m pretty sure you don’t want to stand around here all night waiting while I pull down that much power manually, I thought I’d employ an outside source. Think of it as using a battery.” She looked down critically at the tusk in her hand. “Besides, this one’s getting kind of old. Better to use it up now than wait and risk losing potency, you know?”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Julius said. “But why are you doing two illusions?”

“Because I’m coming with you.” Marci gave him a sideways look. “What? You didn’t think I’d let you go alone, did you?”

“Well,” Julius began. “I—”

“You’re my client,” she said, clearly appalled. “I can’t let you just go in without backup. What if you get dispelled? Also, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but you talk like a total null. It doesn’t matter how good a cover I slap on you, you’ll be outed in a second if you don’t have someone standing by to feed you lines.”

Julius couldn’t argue there. “I’d be happy to have you along, but I still don’t understand why you need a disguise. You’re already a mage.”

Marci’s eyes widened like he’d just called her a dirty name. “Weren’t you listening? I’m a Socratic Thaumaturge. You know, logical thinking, repeatable results, known best practices, all the tenets of real sorcery? We’re sneaking you into a shaman party. Shamans consider themselves artists at best, spiritual gurus at worst. Most of them just throw magic around and hope it works out. There probably won’t be a single person in that place who could write out a spell in proper notation if their life depended on it. They’ll take one look at my personal magic and know what I am for sure. The real challenge will be masking my well-maintained aura in enough random nonsense that they don’t see the good stuff underneath.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” Julius said quickly. “I’m sure your way is better, but theirs can’t be all bad. I mean, they might not do magic the way you do, but there are a lot of shamans around.” Including a guy he’d been in a gaming guild with last year who’d been really decent, if a little odd. “They must be doing something right, or they wouldn’t keep getting work.”

Marci made a face. “I guess you could say that shamans are better at casting on the fly. Thaumaturgy does require some set-up time since we’re not just, you know, making things up as we go along. For the sort of illusion you need, though, Thaumaturgy is waaaaaay better.”

Julius had the feeling Marci would claim Thaumaturgy was better for everything, but he was perfectly ready to let it lie. “I’m lucky you found me, then.”

She rewarded him with a beaming smile as she placed the bit of chimera tusk into the middle of the meticulously marked chalk circle. “Ready?”

Julius nodded and stepped into the circle where she indicated. He felt the hum of her magic as soon as his body crossed the chalk, an intense vibration that sang like a tuning fork against his bones before fading to a pleasant buzz.

Marci put her hands on his shoulders and moved him around until he was standing directly over the bit of tusk in the center. “I’m going to start pulling magic through,” she warned him, stepping out of the circle. “You might feel a little pressure.”

He took a deep breath. “Go for it.”

The words were barely out of his mouth before the chalk circle flared up like phosphorus. Magic landed on him at the same time, nearly sending him to his knees.

The sudden panic at being buried by foreign magic almost caused Julius to throw it off with his own. He stopped the reflex just in time, clutching his magic tight and breathing through the pressure until it felt more like a wave than a landslide. When he was sure he could take it, he opened his eyes again to find Marci giving him a funny look.

“Did you ever get tested to see if you could be a mage?” she asked, moving her hands through the air between them like she was conducting an invisible orchestra. Every time she moved, another line of the notation she’d written on the floor lit up, and the magic pulled tighter around him. The process felt uncomfortably like being tied up, and it took Julius several seconds before he got himself together enough to shake his head.

“Maybe you should. You have a surprising amount of natural magic. Your curse seems to be warping it, though. I’ve never worked with magic that feels like yours.” She gave him a concerned look. “Are you sure you don’t want me to try breaking it? Because that can’t be healthy.”

“Positive,” Julius said. Now that he’d felt Marci’s magic, he was more sure than ever that she couldn’t break his mother’s seal. Their magic was just too different, and trying would likely only end up with Marci getting hurt, not to mention blow his cover. That said, the seal was actually working out astonishingly in his favor right now. It was much easier to let Marci assume that his magic felt odd because of a curse and not because he wasn’t actually human.

She didn’t look happy with his answer, but she didn’t press again. She just kept working until, at last, she lowered her hands, and Julius felt the magic lock around him like a buckle clicking into place. “All done,” she said with a proud smile. “What do you think?”

Julius looked down… and saw he was exactly the same. “Um, did it work?”

“Of course it worked,” Marci said. “If anyone looks at your magic, you’ll look like a rock. That’s what I made you, a stone shaman: flat, boring, and naturally silent. Will that do?”

He blinked and looked again. He saw magic naturally as a dragon, so he’d never bothered learning how to do it as a human. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult, but if he squinted, he could just make out the haze of Marci’s magic hanging over his own like a golden curtain, and the more he looked at it, the more he saw that she was right. He did look like a rock.

“I thought I’d go for a badger shaman, myself,” Marci said, motioning for him to step out of the circle. “Something nice and nasty no one will want to mess with.”

As she bent down to rub out the end of the spellwork notation and rewrite it for herself, Julius stepped back a bit to focus on getting used to the weight of Marci’s illusion. To his surprise, it was actually fairly pleasant once he’d adjusted. Dragon spells tended to be as sharp as their fangs, but Marci’s magic was soft and thick, like a heavy blanket.

He was just starting to settle into it when a flash of light caught his attention, and he looked up in time to see Marci lower her hands with a thrust that blasted the chalk circle at her feet into a cloud of dust. “There,” she said, turning around. “What do you think?”

She didn’t look terribly different, but her short brown hair was now black with two white stripes, just like a badger. She’d also changed out her sparkly vest for an illusion of a long duster that looked decidedly homemade and replaced her boots with sandals that tied up her feet with rainbow ribbons. “I think the shoes are bit much.”

“Then you clearly don’t hang out with many shamans,” she said, wiggling her toes, which were also rainbow-painted. “I’m positively sedate. Now let’s get out of here. We’re already ten minutes late.”

Julius cursed under his breath. Between cats and ghosts and costuming, he’d completely lost track of time. Fortunately, Marci was ready to go in three minutes, though she insisted on stopping to lock the basement door behind them. This seemed pointless to Julius since the wooden door was so rotted he could have pulled the lock out with his hand, but when he saw the flare of a ward settling into place as she turned the key, her insistence on locking up suddenly made a lot more sense. It also made two wards of Marci’s he’d seen, counting the yellow tape, and he was ready to bet she had more he hadn’t noticed. This, in turn, made Julius wonder just how many thousands of dollars worth of magical work Marci had sunk into making her cat hole livable. It didn’t seem worth it to him, but then, he wasn’t in her situation. When magic was all you had, magic was what you used.

“How long do you think it will take us to get there?” he asked as they climbed back up the short run of stairs to the driveway.

She glanced at the address. “It’s over on the river by Belle Isle, so about twenty minutes.” When Julius winced, she added, “Don’t worry. It’s a shaman party. Those never start on time.”

He sincerely hoped she was right. He also hoped Marci’s car would make it. All the cats watched as they drove away from the rotting old mansion, and though Julius couldn’t be sure, he swore he saw Ghost sitting on top of the chimney, staring after them with gleaming blue eyes. Creepy as that was, though, dealing with a dead cat spirit felt like a vacation compared to what he was supposed to do next.

He slipped his hand into his pocket to make sure Svena’s silver chain was still there. It might have been his imagination, but the links seemed to jump up to meet his fingers, the metal still cold as frost even after an hour against his body heat. He snatched his hand back immediately, fingers curling into a fist. He really didn’t feel right about this, but then, he never felt right when he was doing the sort of things dragons were supposed to do. It wasn’t like his opinion mattered, anyway. If he didn’t chain and return Svena’s little sister as ordered, Ian would report his failure, and then Mother would make a chain out of Julius’s intestines, which put a definite damper on any plans to buck the system. It was hard to hold the moral high ground while also trying to hold in your innards.

That lovely mental image made him sigh, and he leaned his head on Marci’s window. He was being ridiculous. So what if the idea of cornering a runaway dragon and delivering her unconscious body back to the clan she feared made him feel lower than dirt? He should be focusing on how to appease his own family so he could remain alive and uneaten, not worrying about his conscience. Real dragons didn’t have consciences, anyway. His certainly hadn’t done him any good.

“What’s wrong?”

Julius jerked his head up to see Marci staring at him. “Excuse me?”

She bit her lip and looked back at the road. “You just made a really sad sound.”

He looked down at his lap, embarrassed. Great, now Marci thought he was pathetic, too. “It’s nothing,” he lied, sinking lower.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Her quick offer caught him off guard, but not nearly as much as how desperately he wanted to take her up on it. If she’d been a dragon, such a question would have been an obvious play for information. Of course, if she’d been a dragon, she wouldn’t have asked if he wanted to talk in the first place. She would have demanded.

But Marci wasn’t a dragon, and she wasn’t ordering him to do anything. He didn’t even think she was fishing for secrets. She was just being politely concerned. Being nice. Humans got to do that, and Julius was so tempted to take her up on the treasure she’d just unwittingly offered him that he actually started thinking up excuses for why spilling his troubles to her would be a forgivable offense.

In the end, though, he kept his mouth shut. Eager as he was to confide in someone who wouldn’t use every word against him later, revealing clan business to a human was a quick way to get that human killed. Fortunately, being inoffensively quiet was a survival skill Julius had perfected long ago, and he set himself to staring out the window, studiously ignoring to the concerned glances Marci shot him whenever she thought he wasn’t looking.

Considering the rates most mages demanded for their services, Julius had expected the party to be up on the skyways with all the rest of the money. Instead, the address took them back into the Underground, but not the flashing tourist part this time. Though clearly once a nice neighborhood by the water, nearly all of the original buildings were now gone, replaced by large brick warehouses built to serve the massive riverside casinos overhead.

“You’re sure it’s below the casinos, not in them?” Marci asked, eying the lower levels of the huge hotels that poked down through the suspended skyway like tree roots reaching for the real ground below.

“This has to be it,” Julius said, though even he wasn’t feeling so sure himself. Other than the warehouses, the only other things down here were the massive blocks of prefab tenements built to house the armies of workers who kept the big hotels above them ticking over. There were a few crowded family style restaurants and a cheap chain grocery store, but nowhere a bunch of mages would throw a party, and definitely nowhere he’d expect to find a dragon. Still, according to the listing Svena had shown him, this was the place, so he went ahead and told Marci to find somewhere to park.

The address itself turned out to be for a large warehouse right on the river. Julius didn’t want to risk scaring off his target, so he had Marci to park in an alley one block down so they could case the place first. When they approached the warehouse itself, though, Julius realized he needn’t have bothered.

Apparently, this “exclusive mage party” was about as exclusive as a frat kegger. Every door, window, and loading bay in the warehouse had been thrown open to let in the night wind off the water, and music was thumping so loud, Julius could feel the bass through the sidewalk. They walked right in through the front without challenge, and while Julius wanted to attribute this to Marci’s excellent illusions, he had the feeling that he could have crashed through the roof as a dragon and not turned a head.

“It smells like an Amsterdam canal in here,” Marci yelled over the music, batting at the smoky air in front of her face. “What are we doing at this party again?”

“Looking for someone,” Julius yelled back. “I’m going to go check the back. You stay here and try to blend in. I’ll message you if I need help. What’s your number?”

“I don’t have a phone.” When Julius gaped at her, she raised her hands helplessly. “What? You need a Residency ID to get a phone in the DFZ, and I don’t have one yet. I’m working on it.”

Julius heaved a deep sigh. “Just stay here, then. I’ll be back soon.”

He waited until she nodded before moving away, breathing deep as he walked to see if he could pick out the sharp, metallic scent of another dragon. Unfortunately, smelling anything through the overwhelming mix of river, humans, and pot smoke turned out to be impossible, so Julius began searching the old-fashioned way. Fifteen minutes later, he’d found two people who claimed to be dragon shamans, one white-haired young woman who called herself a human dove, and zero actual dragonesses. He was starting to worry Katya wasn’t here at all when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

Julius whirled around, furious and frightened that he hadn’t noticed someone sneaking up on him, and came up nose to nose with a tall, youngish human male with long hair and a pleasantly goofy grin plastered across his face.

“Welcome to our party, newcomer rock-man,” he said, offering Julius a weird half bow. “I’m Lark, albatross shaman and the head of the local circle here on the waterfront. Are you interested in joining our communion with the spirits of the land and such?”

It took Julius several seconds before he remembered what kind of mage he was supposed to be. Deciphering the rest of the greeting took a good bit longer. “Wait,” he said at last. “If you’re an albatross shaman, why is your name Lark?”

The young man threw up his hennaed hands. “Don’t get too caught up in labels, my brother. That way lies madness. You gotta just be with the magic inside you, ya know?”

Julius nodded blankly. Marci’s rant about shamans was starting to make a bit more sense now. “Well, if you’re the leader, maybe you can help me. I’m looking for a friend. Her name is Katya.”

When the shaman shook his head, Julius pulled out his phone and brought up the picture Svena had given him. The moment he saw it, Lark’s eyes brightened. “Oh! You mean Katie. You just missed her, man. She and the gator left ten minutes ago.”

Julius stared at him. “Gator?”

“Ross Vedder, alligator shaman,” Lark clarified with a wink. “They set up together last week. Great couple, really. Hilarious.”

That description was so undragonlike, Julius wasn’t sure they were talking about the same Katya. “Do you know where they went? I really need to find her.”

Lark shrugged and pulled out a surprisingly nice phone of his own. When he got it close to Julius’s, another picture of Katya appeared in their shared AR with the name KATIE beside it. In it, a happy Katya was smiling wide and hugging an equally ecstatic-looking Lark at a party just like this one, and her blatant joy hit Julius like a punch to the gut.

“Ross and the rest of his peeps have a commune downstream,” Lark went on, sending a map location to Julius’s phone. “Real nice setup, very ‘one with the powers of the place’ vibe. They’re doing some absolutely amazing work restoring magical ecosystems down in the pipes. I’ve been trying to get something similar going up on the old Ambassador Bridge for us bird types for years, but we’re kind of hard to manage. You’d think we’d flock better, right?”

Julius waited impatiently for him to stop laughing at his own joke before asking. “And you’re sure she’s at this place?”

“Who can be sure of anything?” Lark said sagely. “But I’m pretty sure. She said she was going home for the night, and that’s their home. Ergo, et cetera.”

Julius glanced back down at the address Lark had sent him. It wasn’t much, but it was the best he was probably going to get. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure to be of assistance to any creature,” Lark replied, clapping Julius on the shoulder. “Hey, you wanna drink? We got a full bar out back. Liquid, herbal, and nitrous, what’s your pleasure?”

“No thanks,” Julius said, ducking out of his grip. “I’ve got to go find my…” He paused, trying to think of an acceptable title for Marci. “Companion,” he said at last. “Maybe later.”

“Suit yourself, Mr. Rolling Stone. We’ll be here all night if you change your mind.” Lark pressed his hands together. “Namaste!”

Unsure what else to do, Julius returned the gesture before pushing back through the crowd to where he’d left Marci. When he reached the door, though, she was nowhere to be seen. This sparked a minute of frantic searching before he finally spotted her standing with a crowd of people in the corner, watching a man in some kind of tribal costume spin a halo of fire over his head.

Julius walked up behind her and leaned down to speak into her ear. “Let’s go.”

“Just a second,” she said. “I want to see if he’s going to blow himself up.” She scowled at the costumed man, who was currently waving his arms in a frantic motion as he tried to maintain the roaring ring of flames. “That is not how you cast that spell.”

Julius grit his teeth. “Come on, Marci.”

She heaved a long sigh and followed him out of the warehouse. When they were safely down the street, he filled her in on what Lark had told him.

“You mean we missed her by ten minutes?” Marci groaned. “That’s so unlucky.”

“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Julius said. It never did with dragons. “We need to find the alligator shaman. If she’s still with him, tonight won’t be a total—”

He never got to finish, because at that point, Marci vanished from his side with a gasp. Julius whirled around a split second later…and found himself staring straight down the silenced barrel of a gun.