Nice Dragons Finish Last

Chapter 5

“Tell your human to wait and meet me in the alley on the left,” Chelsie said, her claws digging deeper into his flesh. “Now.”

Julius nodded, but the hand on his shoulder was already gone, vanishing as suddenly and quietly as it had appeared. He didn’t bother turning around to look after that. The sidewalk would just be empty, and Marci was already leaning over to give him a funny look through the passenger window. “Julius? Are you okay?”

“Just realized I forgot something in the restaurant,” he said quietly. “Give me two minutes.”

Marci nodded, but he was already backing away, trusting his feet to find their own path as he walked back to the barbecue shack’s screen door. When he knew Marci couldn’t see him anymore, he darted to the side and down the alley as Chelsie had instructed.

It was a tiny, dark, dirty place, a gap between factories barely wide enough for a car to squeeze through. The narrowness hadn’t saved the walls from being covered in advertisements, though. Posters covered every inch of the brick as high as a person could reach, mostly for the seedier kinds of services people loitering in alleys would find attractive. But while he found directions to thirteen different massage parlors just off the wall in front of him, he didn’t see any sign of Chelsie. He was starting to panic that he’d gone down the wrong alley when he suddenly felt someone standing right behind him.

The light here was bad even for dragon eyes, but Julius had made it a point to stay as far from the Heartstriker’s family enforcer as possible. As a result, the glimpse he got through the gloom when he whirled around was the best look at Chelsie he’d ever managed.

Oddly, the first thing that struck him was her height. At five eleven, Julius had always assumed his human form was the shortest of all Heartstrikers, but Chelsie was only a hair taller, and that might have been from her boots. What she lacked in stature, though, she made up everywhere else. Everything about her—her lean body packed into black, no-frills carbon-weave body armor, her short, ink-black hair, the long sword sheathed at her hip—spoke to her purpose as the Heartstriker’s bogeyman, but the scariest thing of all was how closely she resembled their mother.

It would have been hard for an outsider to see. Other than the family’s trademark green eyes and her high cheekbones, Chelsie’s physical resemblance to Bethesda the Heartstriker was limited. Her skin was darker, her cheekbones sharper, her body smaller and more compact. If Bethesda was a resplendent queen, Chelsie was a well-honed knife. Both were deadly, however, and Chelsie’s murderous glare was so like their mother’s that Julius had already backed himself up against the far wall before she could open her mouth.

“Well, well,” she said at last, her voice as cold and soft as the year’s first frost. “I never thought I’d have to pay you a visit, Julius.” She paused, tilting her head like a hawk considering the mouse trapped under its claws. “You know why I’m here, of course?”

Julius swallowed, mind racing. On the surface, Heartstriker family rules were simple: don’t do anything that made Mother angry. But what Bethesda took offense at varied according to her mood, the day, the political situation, and who was doing the offending, which was exactly why Julius had tried so hard to keep his head down for the last seven years.

When he didn’t answer, Chelsie narrowed her eyes. “One hour ago, six men in an alley by the river—ring any bells?”

Julius’s heart began pounding so hard he grew lightheaded. How did she know about that? The alley had been empty. Of course, just because he hadn’t seen her didn’t mean Chelsie hadn’t been watching. She’d already proven she could get right on his back without him noticing a thing. But just because she could follow him around didn’t explain why she would. Chelsie had the entire Heartstriker family to worry about. Julius was no one, the underperforming runt of Bethesda’s youngest clutch. It didn’t make any sense at all for her to be watching him, not unless she really did watch everyone. But that was impossible. No matter what the rumors said, no matter how old and powerful and all-knowing Chelsie was supposed to be, there was just no way she could actually watch all of Bethesda’s children all the—

“I do.”

Julius’s whirling thoughts screeched to a halt, and Chelsie gave him a slow, cruel smile. “I don’t actually read minds,” she said, her nails tapping idly on the wrapped hilt of her sword. “But then, I don’t need to. You all make the same face when you start thinking, ‘There’s no way she can do it,’ but I’ll let you in on a family secret.” She leaned in, her neon-green Heartstriker eyes bright with malice as she dropped her voice to a whisper. “I am always watching. I watch every single one of you conniving little lizards. I watch you every moment of every day so that the second you set one claw over the line, I’ll be there to cut it off.”

Julius flinched as she finished, and Chelsie straightened back up, crossing her arms over her chest with a satisfied look. “Now that we’re clear on that point, let me explain what you did to trigger this little visit so we never have to see each other again.”

He nodded, breathing heavily. “I shouldn’t have attacked those men,” he said quickly. “I understand that. I should have stayed out of the human’s business and—”

Chelsie’s eyes narrowed, and Julius snapped his mouth shut. When it was clear he wasn’t going to try and talk again, she continued. “If I came after every idiot Heartstriker who got into a street brawl, half the clan would be dead by now. I also don’t care what mischief Ian has you up to in his hopeless courtship of that Three Sisters ice snake Svena, who, for the record, is going to chew him up and spit him out like a piece of gristle. I’m not even terribly concerned that you showed a bit of tooth and claw in the DFZ. Everyone does that from time to time. My problem, Julius, is that you left witnesses.”

Julius opened his mouth to explain, but Chelsie grabbed him first. Faster than he could react, faster than he could even see, she wrapped her hand around his throat and slammed him into the wall, scattering the layers of old advertisements in a rain of tattered paper.

“Six humans went into that alley with you,” she snarled in his face. “And when you left, six humans were still alive. Do you know what that is, Julius? That’s a mess. And when a Heartstriker makes a mess, it’s my job to ensure they never. Do it. Again.”

Her fingers squeezed tighter with every word, choking him by inches. Just when Julius was sure he’d suffocate, Chelsie let go, dropping him in a heap on the dirty asphalt.

The coughing fit hit him a second later. Julius rolled to his knees, clutching his throat until, after what felt like hours, his breathing returned to something like normal. When he looked up again, Chelsie was looming over him, a black shadow outlined by the lone factory floodlight five stories overhead.

“Poor little Julius,” she cooed. “You’re so nice. You don’t want to hurt anyone, don’t want to get into trouble. But you’re not in the mountain anymore, whelp, and there’s no more room for nice. From this moment forward, if a human who’s not under your direct control sees you doing anything that might make them think you’re not what you seem, you kill them. Not knock out, not threaten, kill. Do you understand?” When he didn’t answer at once, Chelsie slammed him back into the wall with her booted foot. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he wheezed.

She released him, and he slid back to the ground. She let him lie there a second before turning away with a little huff that was a perfect copy of the sound their mother made when she was particularly disappointed. “I can’t believe I’m having to explain something as basic as witness elimination. No wonder Mother kicked you out. I assumed she was exaggerating, but now I think you might really be the worst dragon we’ve ever had.”

Julius had heard this many, many times. He’d heard it in every variation imaginable, and he usually shrugged it off. It was always easier to go back to his room and bury himself in something better—a videogame, a book, a movie, homework for an online class, whatever was at hand—than to try to defend himself. Now though, he didn’t have a room to retreat to. He was stranded in an alley with his back literally against a wall, and he was so, so sick of being talked down to, the words just burst out.

“Maybe I don’t want to be a good dragon.”

Chelsie stopped, turning back to him with blood-chilling slowness. “Excuse me?”

He pushed up to his knees, wiping the dirt from his face with trembling hands, though whether the shaking was from anger or fear, even Julius didn’t know. “So far as I can tell, ‘good dragon’ is just another name for coldblooded sociopath,” he said. “No friends, no trust, no love. Why would I ever want to live like that? It’s not like any of you good dragons are happy.”

The taunt echoed down the alley, and for one heartbeat, Chelsie’s cold expression morphed into a mask of pure rage. As he saw the anger flaring in his sister’s eyes, Julius knew this was it. This was his death. When Chelsie was done, they’d be finding pieces of him all over the DFZ. But just as he was making peace with his final end, Chelsie’s anger vanished, covered up in an instant by the usual haughty disdain most dragons wore when looking down on him.

“Oh, Julius,” she said, her voice pitying. “You are so young. Too young and far too exposed to sentimental human idiocy to understand what it truly means to be a Heartstriker. But you will learn, little whelp, or you will break. Either way, consider this your first and only warning.”

She crouched down as she finished, her face hovering over his like she was going to bite off his head. When she spoke again, her voice was barely more than a breath.

“You make one more mess,” she whispered. “You set one talon out of line, make one ounce of trouble for our family in this place, and you won’t have to worry about being a good dragon any longer. Because I will end you, right then, right there. You won’t even see it coming, and no one except your little human girlfriend will mourn you. Nod if you understand.”

Julius nodded, and Chelsie’s lips curled into an icy smile. “Good boy,” she murmured, straightening up. “And on that note, I hope you didn’t need any of those humans, because they’re fish food now.”

He swallowed against the bile that rose in his throat and ducked his head. Of course she’d killed them. Chelsie was a C, one of two surviving children from their mother’s third clutch, which meant she had to be seven hundred years old at least. She’d probably killed more humans in the name of ‘cleaning up messes’ than Julius had met in his entire life. He didn’t even care that Bixby’s goons were gone; he just couldn’t get the image of Chelsie casually breaking the unconscious men’s necks before tossing them in the water out of his head. By the time he pulled himself together enough to look up again, the alley was empty.

After his first shaky attempt at standing landed him back on knees, Julius used his hands to pull himself up the wall until he was back on his feet. He brushed off his worn jeans and shirt as best he could, but it was hopeless. His clothes had been ratty to begin with, and life in the DFZ was proving to be too much for them. Still, he took the time to make himself as presentable as possible and not like he’d just gotten kicked around an alley before heading back to the car.

To his enormous relief, Marci was right where he’d left her. He hadn’t actually realized how scared he’d been that she’d leave until he saw her sitting in the front seat of her car, examining something round and golden under the cabin light. From this distance, it looked kind of like a gilded softball, or maybe an oversized Christmas ornament. Whatever it was, she shoved it back into her bag when she heard him coming, leaning over to push open the passenger door for him instead.

“What happened?” she cried, eyes flicking over his disarrayed clothing as he sat down. “You look like you got mugged! Are you okay?”

“No,” Julius said, forcing himself to sit normally instead of collapsing, which was what he really wanted to do.

“No, you’re not okay, or no, you didn’t get mugged?”

Yes, Julius thought. “No, I didn’t get mugged,” he said, pulling his phone out of his pocket to pull up the address Lark had given him for where Katya was supposedly shacking up with her shaman. “It’s not important. We need to get mov—”

He froze. Two new messages from the Unknown Caller had arrived on his phone while he’d been in the alley with Chelsie. One looked like a copy of the first message, just the word duck, but the final message was new.

“Goose,” Julius read, staring at the glowing letters. “Duck, duck, goose.”

“What are you talking about?” Marci asked.

Julius didn’t answer. He just leaned forward and banged his head against the scuffed dash. He brought it down a few more times for good measure before sitting up again. “I don’t know,” he said tiredly, waving his fingers through the hazy sphere of augmented reality above the phone’s screen to delete both of Bob’s messages forever. “I don’t understand anything. I’m terrible at this, apparently.”

Marci looked more confused than ever. “Terrible at what?”

Being a dragon, he wanted to tell her. Being a scheming lizard who didn’t need to be reminded to murder witnesses and understood cryptic messages from crazy seers. And right then, he wished Marci actually was his human girlfriend, because he could really use a hug.

“It’s nothing,” he muttered, leaning over to type the address Lark had given him into the car’s autonav. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Marci didn’t look convinced, but to Julius’s relief, she didn’t ask any more questions. She just let the car pull them into the dark, canyon-like streets between the factories, back toward the city.

When his retrieval team failed to check in, Bixby ordered the rest of his employees to cancel their evening plans. They were going to Detroit.

“All of us?” cried the mage he’d hired to replace the one the Novalli girl had blown up. “To the DFZ? But—”

Bixby’s second, Oslo, cut the man off with a wave of his huge hand, saving his life. Not that that was why Oslo had done it, of course, but the mage was too new to recognize when Bixby was in killing mood. If his ignorance got him shot, Oslo was the one who’d have to find them another replacement mage on short notice, and if there was anything Oslo hated, it was doing more work than was absolutely necessary.

“I want this taken care of fast and right,” Bixby went on, leaning forward on his desk as he swept his eyes menacingly over the hired muscle crowding his normally spacious office. “I don’t care what you spend, I don’t care who you piss off, and I don’t care what you break. I just want that overhyped golden grapefruit back in Vegas in time for the drop-off tomorrow night, and I want that little thief delivered to my office trussed up like a pig.”

Oslo sighed and removed his hat to wipe a white handkerchief across his smooth shaved, and completely dry, head. It was his favorite stalling technique when he wanted to say something he knew his boss wouldn’t like, so Bixby wasn’t at all surprised when his second finally said, “I know you’re pissed, sir, but if you don’t mind me asking, what’s all this with the girl? Aldo was the one who stole the thing from you in the first place, and he’s been coyote food for days now. It don’t matter how much money you throw at this, it’s gonna take a miracle for us to get your stolen property out of the DFZ and back here before the deadline. If we have to worry about the girl, too, I don’t think we can—”

“Oslo,” Bixby said, drumming his fingers on the arm of his leather chair. “There are times when you’re paid to think and times when you’re paid to do what I tell you. Guess which one this is?”

Oslo put his hat back on with a sigh. “Sure thing, boss. Thief trussed up like a pig. Got it.”

“And no killing,” Bixby said, jabbing his finger at his men. “Rough her up, scare her, cut off her arms, I don’t care, but she keeps breathing or you all don’t. Got me?”

When Oslo nodded, Bixby waved his hand. “Good. Now get out of here. I’m expecting a phone call.”

Actually, his phone call had been scheduled for two hours ago, but this client never called on time. If it had been anyone else, Mr. Bixby wouldn’t have tolerated such behavior for love or money, but this client was his seer as well as his buyer, and real seers were a lot harder to replace than mages.

Now that the marching orders had been given, Oslo jerked his head, and the room cleared out. When his men were gone, Bixby messaged his numbers guy to start moving money into the operational budget. Out-of-town work was always more expensive than one expected, and Bixby didn’t want Oslo to have any excuses if this fell through. He also sent notes around to his Detroit contacts to make sure no one up there took offense when Oslo’s war party rolled into their territory. He’d covered nearly half the DFZ before his private phone finally began to buzz in his pocket.

Bixby set the sleek black device on his desk. The no expense spared enchanted glass picked up the phone’s AR at once, throwing the incoming message up like a marquee in the air in front of him.

Having trouble, are we?

Bixby grit his teeth. This was another of his seer’s obnoxious peculiarities. The bastard set the call times, but never actually phoned. He only messaged, and none of Bixby’s hackers had ever been able to crack the number behind the Unknown Caller ID.

If the man’s predictions weren’t air tight every time, Bixby would have cut this nonsense off at the throat ages ago. Instead, he tapped his hand on the desk’s glass surface, bringing up the glowing virtual keyboard to type his reply. Since he was alone, he spoke the words out loud as he typed them, just to make himself feel like he was still in charge of this conversation. “It’s being taken care of. We’ll have everything in time for the pick-up tomorrow.”

That’s not what I heard.

Bixby almost put his fist through the glass. He checked his temper at the last second, closing his eyes instead with a deep breath. When he opened them again, several more messages were hanging in the AR.

Poor little Bixby, time’s running out. Of all the predictions I’ve made for you, every single one has come to pass, except the last. You’re courting your own death with this incompetence.

“Screw you!” Bixby yelled at the floating letters, but his fingers were shaking as he began to type his reply, because the seer was right. From the moment the first mysterious message had come into his life last year, everything the seer had predicted had come true exactly as promised, and Bixby had become very, very rich. But this latest prediction was the only one that really mattered, because the last thing the seer had told him was the story of Bixby’s death, and the role Aldo Novalli’s daughter would play in it if he couldn’t get her contained.

“I’ll find her,” he growled as he typed. “You think I don’t know how to catch runners? Even if my men don’t get her in time, I’ve been in this business for thirty years. I’ve had real assassins die just trying to get into my building. There’s no way I’m going down to some little mage girl no one’s ever heard of.”

Save your bluster, the seer replied. You think you can rattle your saber and scare the future into doing your bidding like one of your hirelings? How absurd. Time is a river. It flows on and on with no care or notice for those caught in it. But while you can see nothing but the water around you, I have the ability to look downstream. I can see all the possible paths the future might take, and while even I cannot say for certain which way the water will bounce when the time comes, I can tell you without doubt that there is not one single possible future in which you survive past midnight tomorrow without the Novalli girl in your custody. Not a single one. Do I make myself clear?

Bixby let out a long, angry breath. “I’m working on it.”

The reply came instantly. Work harder. I’ve made you a rich man in many ways, Mr. Bixby, and I can make you richer still. I’ve even told you how to save your pathetic life, but you have to pay the price. I want my Kosmolabe. If you do not have my merchandise at sundown tomorrow as promised, the Novalli girl will be the least of your worries. I will contact you again tomorrow at six. See that the news is good.

Bixby slammed his hands on the desk, cutting off the AR with a curse. There was no point in replying after that. Once the seer posted the time of their next conversation, the current one was over, and any other messages he sent would be ignored. Being hung up on like this made him crazy, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. The fortune teller was the only person in the world he couldn’t squeeze. He didn’t know where the seer lived, he didn’t even know the jack off’s name. The best he could do was put the whole thing out of his mind and get back to work, and he was attempting to do just that when his phone buzzed again.

He grabbed it at once, but it wasn’t another message from his seer. It was Oslo.

“Why are you bothering me?” Bixby snapped when the call connected. “You idiots can’t even be at the airport yet.”

“Sorry, boss,” Oslo said. “I thought you’d want to know this. I just got a call from my mole in the DFZ dispatch office. One of Algonquin’s water patrols found our guys face-down in the river.”

Bixby cursed loudly. For a supposedly sweet little nerd of a PhD student, Aldo’s daughter was turning out to be much more of a killer than he’d expected. “Was it her?”

“Don’t know,” Oslo replied. “Someone with a lot of magic scrubbed the bodies clean before dumping them. Real professional work. Seems our girl got herself some protection.”

That made Bixby pause, but then he shook his head. “This changes nothing. Protection or no, you do whatever you gotta do to get Novalli and her golden ball back here ASAP or I swear to God, Oslo, I’m going to kill the lot of you.”

Normally, that was an idle threat, but not this time. This time, Bixby was deadly serious, because if he didn’t stop Aldo’s girl from playing her part in the seer’s prediction, he wasn’t going to be around to regret shooting his entire organization. He was going to be dead.

Oslo must have heard the truth in his boss’s voice, because he turned meek as a lamb, “Yes, sir, Mr. Bixby. Will do.”

Bixby nodded and hung up, spinning around to stare out the window overlooking the glittering Vegas strip. Normally, the sight of so much easy money was guaranteed to make him smile, but not tonight. Instead, his eyes went to the mountains, looking north and east over the desert toward the double layered city on the edge of a lake where his wannabe death was running free, completely oblivious to the hammer she’d just brought down on her head.

An hour later, back in Detroit, Julius was about ready to give up.

They’d gone straight from the restaurant to the address Lark had given them only to find a parking deck. No apartment, no house, nowhere a dragon could possibly stay, just a gated six story deck that served as a commuter lot for the office complex on the skyway above them.

Julius knew that last part for certain because he’d climbed all the way up the spiral stairs to the top street level on the off-chance Marci’s GPS had gotten the vertical location wrong, but there was no mistake. This was the address the albatross shaman had given him, and unless Katya was hiding under one of the forgotten sedans in the back, she wasn’t here. No one was at this time of night, and now Julius had a problem.

It was one he needed to deal with in private, though, so he left Marci with the car and walked across the street to call Ian. When his brother didn’t answer, Julius hung up and called again. Finally, on the third try, the ringing stopped, and Ian’s excessively put-out voice growled in his ear.

“This had better be to say you have her.”

“Well I don’t,” Julius snapped, slumping against the pole of a streetlight that probably hadn’t worked since the turn of the century. “We got into the party, but she’d already left with some guy before we arrived, and—”

“We?” Ian interrupted.

“I had to bring in a mage to help,” he explained, suddenly nervous. “A human.”

Julius hadn’t actually considered what Ian would think about Marci’s involvement, mostly because he hadn’t thought this job would take long enough for her to learn anything she shouldn’t. Apparently, though, hiring a human mage to find a missing dragon was nothing out of the ordinary for Ian, because all he said was, “Continue.”

Julius cleared his throat. “As I was saying, the host told me Katya left early with a human shaman, but the address he gave me was bad, and now I have no idea where she is.”

“So find out.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” Julius cried. “In case you forgot, I was kicked off a plane into this stupid city not twenty hours ago. Going to a party to pick up a lost dragon is one thing, but it takes money to play detective, which is something I don’t exactly have a lot of at the moment. So unless you’re ready to give me an advance on my payment, we’re going to have to call this a wash for tonight, because I’ve got nothing.”

It wasn’t until ten seconds into the long pause that followed that Julius realized what he’d done. He’d lost his temper and yelled at his brother. His older brother, who was doing him a huge favor by letting Julius work a job to convince their Mother he deserved not to be eaten.

Before he could apologize for the outburst, though, Ian said, “Why, Julius Heartstriker, you almost sounded like a creature with a spine just then.”

Julius blinked. “Um, thank you?”

“Unfortunately, I’ve already given you everything I’m willing to,” Ian went on, talking right over him. “I’m not running a charity here. I hired you to fetch Katya, practically handed her to you on a platter, and if your failures have squandered that opportunity, I don’t see how that’s my responsibility.”

Julius closed his eyes with a stifled hiss. Don’t get mad, he reminded himself. Ian was the one who’d be reporting his progress to Mother, and Julius desperately needed him to give her a good one since Chelsie had undoubtedly already told Bethesda about his screw-up with Bixby’s goons. He was a little surprised he hadn’t gotten a call about that yet, actually. Surprised and relieved, because talking to his mother always put him in an abysmal mood, and if there was ever a time he needed to stay positive, it was now.

“I don’t think I’m being unreasonable,” he said when he could trust his voice again. “You’re in business, Ian. You know you can’t get something for nothing. I’m not even asking you to pay me extra, just give me some working capital so I can—”

“No,” Ian said, his voice hard. “The deal stands. I pay you when you get the dragoness. If you need additional resources to complete your task, then I suggest you stop whining to me for handouts and figure out a way to get the money yourself. Go take some from a human or something.”

Julius stared at the phone in horror. “Are you telling me to mug someone?”

“Well, I would hope you could come up with something more elegant than brute force,” his brother said. “But mugging will do in a pinch, yes.”

“No!” Julius cried. “I’m not going to start robbing random humans! That’s terrible!”

“Julius,” Ian said dryly. “That is what our kind has been doing for thousands of years. Where did you think the contents of Mother’s treasury came from? Donation boxes?”

He hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but Ian wasn’t finished. “You see, this is exactly why your life has come to this sorry state of affairs. You are simply unwilling to do what needs to be done.”

Julius was unwilling to believe they were actually having this conversation. “I don’t think my failure to cross the ‘petty crimes against innocent people because your brother is too cheap to give you an advance so you can do your job’ line qualifies as a summation of my existence.”

“Actually, I think it sums it up quite nicely,” Ian said, his voice growing irritated. “When are you going to understand that this isn’t about the money? It’s about you growing some fangs and finally learning that there’s no place in our world for nice. Nice dragons finish last, if they finish at all, and we have no room for losers in this family. So stop whining, get yourself straight, and get me some results, or I call Mother, and we cross one more Heartstriker off the roster. Do you understand me, little brother?”

Julius closed his eyes with a ragged breath.

“I’m waiting.”

“Yes,” he growled.

“Good,” Ian said, his voice smooth as silk again in an instant. “I’ll be expecting word of your success by tomorrow.”

Julius almost choked. “Tomorrow? But—”

“You’re a dragon,” Ian said. “Figure it out.” And then he hung up.

Julius lowered the phone with a muffled curse, kicking the dead street lamp as hard as he could. The metal pole rang like a gong, startling a small colony of bats that had taken up residence in the broken light fixture. It also startled the pigeon perched on top of the ancient NO PARKING sign directly above Julius’s head.

The bird took flight with a frantic spate of flapping, sweeping so low its tiny talons almost caught Julius’s hair before it found its wings and flew straight up into the dark, vanishing through a crack in skyways high, high overhead.