Chapter 13
Chelsie appeared in the empty darkness of Julius’s old house, the only place she was certain no one would be. Sure enough, it was deserted. There weren’t even signs of squatters, despite the fact that the entire front wall was still hanging open from where Conrad had cut it in half.
That was to be expected, though. Even if they didn’t know what they were looking at, humans instinctively avoided dragon lairs. Not that Julius had made much of a lair here, but it must have been enough, because Chelsie couldn’t so much as smell a human.
Her eldest brother was another matter.
After chasing his shadow for so long, Bob’s scent hit her like a punch. He was here, and he was close. So close, she didn’t even have to search. She just followed her nose, following his scent out of the house and through the dark of the rumbling DFZ Underground like the predator she was.
Not surprisingly, the scent led her straight to the empty lot from the picture: a flat, desolate stretch of mud wedged between the road and the river. The steep drop to the water was lined with rocks to prevent erosion, and the stretch of mud above it still bore the marks of a sunken foundation where some idiot developer had learned the hard way not to build on a flood plain. Beyond the shore, the Detroit River ran wide and silent, its night-black water glittering in the colored lights from the Skyway promenade that jutted out above the water like a cement boardwalk. Other than that, the only light came from the single orange streetlight that marked the end of the road, and beneath it, leaning against the battered wooden pole like a juvenile delinquent, was the dragon she’d come to find.
“You’re early,” Bob said, looking up from the glowing screen of his ancient brick of a phone. “Did I lay the trail too well?”
He smiled at her like he always did, but Chelsie wasn’t playing. “Give it back.”
“‘Give it back?’” he repeated, eyebrows shooting up in faux astonishment. “That’s it? No trademark Chelsie ‘Hello, brother,’ or ‘Why did you do it, Bob?’”
“You taught me long ago that asking you for explanations was useless,” she snarled. “But things are different now. I’m free, which means I don’t have to care about you or your plans anymore. I’m just here for what’s mine.” She thrust out her hand. “Give me my egg, Brohomir, or we’ll see how good your knowledge of the future really is.”
Bob heaved a long sigh. “There you go,” he said, pushing off the pole. “Straight to threats. No attempt at reasoning or to discover my motivation.” He shook his head with a tsk. “We really need to work on your conflict-resolution skills.”
“There’s nothing to resolve,” Chelsie said, looking around the lot for some sign of what she’d come for, but there was nothing. No bags or boxes, nothing that could contain a dragon egg. Bob wasn’t carrying anything, either. Not even his Magician’s Fang, not that he ever wore it. Still, his lack of a weapon or anything that could serve as a hostage made Chelsie nervous. She’d known this was a trap from the moment Julius had gotten the call. Everything was with Bob. But traps could be broken, and thanks to Julius, she was off the seer’s script. She just had to stay on target, and speaking of targets…
“Last chance,” she growled, looking him in the eyes again. “I’m prepared to do whatever I have to, but this doesn’t need to end in violence. Just tell me where my egg is, and we can both go our separate ways.”
“I didn’t go through all the trouble of getting you out here just so we could leave,” Bob said, exasperated. “Don’t you want to know why I stole your Precious? Because I’ll tell you. I’m dying to, actually. Do you know how hard it’s been to keep all of this brilliance to myself? It’s killing me. So go ahead. Ask, and I’ll tell you everything.”
He finished with his most charming smile, but Chelsie had seen this ploy go down too many times to fall for it herself. Bob might have fooled the rest of the clan into thinking he was an unpredictable mad genius, but Chelsie had watched him just as she’d watched every other Heartstriker. His motives were inscrutable to anyone who didn’t also know the future, but his habits were as ingrained as any other old dragon’s, and the only time he ever offered to explain himself was when he was stalling.
Whatever plot he’d called her out here for must not be ready yet, she realized. That meant if Chelsie was going to get her egg and escape before the trap closed, she needed to do it now. So she did, pushing off the dirt with her bare feet as she lunged at his throat.
As expected of a seer, Bob dodged her first strike, but no amount of precognition could save him from the second, which landed her balled fist right in his stomach. As he gasped in pain, Chelsie seized the chance to step in and wrap her arm around his throat, pinning him in a choke hold against her chest.
“That was… uncalled…for,” Bob choked out, gasping for breath as he grabbed at her arm. “Can’t we…talk about it?”
Chelsie’s answer was to squeeze tighter. She was trying to make him pass out when Bob somehow managed to hook his foot behind hers. She was repositioning when he kicked up hard, yanking her off balance just long enough to break free.
He scrambled away into the dark, getting as much distance as possible before whirling around to watch her with a wary expression Chelsie had never seen on her eldest brother’s face before.
“For the record, I did not expect that.” He swallowed against his bruised throat before flashing her a weak smile. “Brava. You’re faster than I anticipated.”
“That’s your fault,” Chelsie said, circling. “Bethesda’s Shade couldn’t afford to let anyone know the full extent of her abilities, even you. And who made me that?”
Bob sighed. “You can’t blame everything on me, you know.”
“Why not?” she growled. “Everything is your fault. You’re the all-knowing seer. You saw my disaster coming—all of it, from the very beginning—and you did nothing.”
“I did a great deal more than nothing,” he said, insulted. “Do you have any idea how hard I’ve worked to bring us to this point? How delicately and painstakingly I’ve planned every little detail leading up to—”
“You did this to me!” she screamed at him. “I owned my mistakes in China, but everything I’ve suffered since is your fault. You were Bethesda’s seer. One word from you was all it would have taken to free me and my children, but you said nothing.” She bared her teeth. “Nothing! For six hundred years!”
“What could I have said?” Bob asked, his voice tired. “I needed you, Chelsie. Bethesda was useful, but you were the glue that kept everything together. Fear of you is what united Heartstriker, or at least kept us from flinging ourselves apart. You were the one who enabled us to become the largest clan in the world. Larger than even the Golden Empire. Large enough to get us here.” He pointed at the ground between them. “To this moment. This future. Everything I’ve done leads right here, right now, and the only way I did it was you.”
“Save it,” Chelsie snapped, edging closer. “I don’t care if this was the only way to avoid the end of the world. You used me. You used my children. But all that stops today. You want to talk about the future? These are the only words you need: it’s over, Brohomir. You will never use me or my children ever again, and if you don’t give me back my egg right now, you’re not leaving this place alive.”
“Let’s not be hasty,” he said, putting up his hands. “You have every right to be upset. I know certain actions of mine look callous out of context, but there’s a good reason for that. I’d be happy to explain it to you if you’d just stop being such a Chelsie for a minute and just—”
She teleported behind him. The move got her so close, she actually felt the tips of his long hair before Bob leaped out of the way, dancing nimbly across the mud. But not far enough.
The moment he slowed, Chelsie teleported again, burning through her magic to reappear right on top of him. She wasn’t even aiming for a hit this time. She was just recklessly charging forward, pushing with everything she had until she was moving too fast to see, too fast to plan.
It was a terrifying way to fight. Chelsie was normally a careful hunter, the sort who always had a plan. When your enemy was a seer, though, no plan was good enough. Brohomir had already foreseen every possible iteration of every clever idea she could come up with, so Chelsie didn’t bother. She just attacked, going after her oldest brother with nothing but her bare hands, her killer’s instinct, six centuries of pent-up rage, and a roar that echoed to the Skyways as they both went down in the mud.
And below them, unnoticed in the fray, the ground continued to tremble.
***
The moment he stepped through the portal, Julius knew something was deeply wrong. The DFZ had always felt more powerful than other places, but the pea-soup-thick magic he’d grown accustomed to while living here was now more like a boiling pot. He could actually feel it rumbling under his feet when Fredrick’s cut dumped them out into the empty dirt lot from Bob’s selfie, and under any other circumstances, that would have had his full attention. Now, though, the trembling pressure was relegated to the background, just another crisis to add to the list as he, Fredrick, and the Qilin looked up to find themselves in the middle of an assassination in progress.
As promised, the Defender’s Fang had dumped them practically on top of Chelsie, which was how Julius had a perfect view of his deadliest sister’s back as she launched herself at Bob. The seer dodged, of course—this was Bob, after all—but Chelsie didn’t even slow down. She just turned and attacked again, slamming her foot into the dirt to use as a pivot as she spun to grab the seer’s shoulder.
For a terrifying moment, Julius saw Bob’s eyes widen in surprise before Chelsie yanked him backward. She brought her unbraced leg up at the same time, slamming her knee into the small of the seer’s back for a kick that sent him flying into the dilapidated garage across the street like a cannonball, shattering the one remaining unbroken window and collapsing what was left of the roof.
Even for a dragon, that was a serious hit. Julius was already moving to go help his brother when Bob kicked his way out of the debris and rolled back to his feet. He took a second to shake the dust out of his long hair, and then stepped to the left just in time to avoid Chelsie as she teleported behind where he’d just been.
But while the quick move let him dodge her first punch, nothing could save him from the second. Julius hadn’t even seen her arm going up. Her hand was just suddenly there, slamming into Bob’s side as she took him down to the ground with her on top.
Chelsie shifted position the second they hit, turning in a flash so she ended up crouching above Bob’s chest with her knees on his arms and both hands free to go for the seer’s exposed throat. Julius was desperately grabbing his Fang to stop her before she clenched down for the kill when a calm, deep voice beat him to it.
“Chelsie.”
The name sailed through the dark like a warm breeze. Wherever it passed, the world stopped to listen, though none so much as Chelsie herself.
Julius had never seen anything go as utterly still as his sister did in that moment. For five long heartbeats, she was frozen. Didn’t twitch. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t even breathe. Then, with painful slowness, she turned her head, tearing her eyes away from her pinned prey to stare in horror at the golden dragon standing on the street behind her.
“Xian.”
The whisper was a terrified curse. If anyone had said his name that way, Julius would have been haunted, but the Qilin didn’t look upset. He looked relieved, his golden eyes almost hopeful as he watched her watch him. They were both still just staring at each other when Julius caught the scent of Bob’s blood.
With a nervous glance at his sister, Julius darted across the street and into the destroyed garage. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get his brother out from under Chelsie, but the Qilin’s effect must have been even stronger than he realized. His sister didn’t so much as twitch when Julius crept up beside her and grabbed Bob under the arms to ease him out of her hold.
It was still hairy. Chelsie was basically sitting on top of him, but Bob was twisty in more ways than one. With Julius’s help, he managed to wiggle out from under Chelsie’s weight, scooting several feet back into the relative safety of the collapsed garage door.
“Thank you, Julius,” Bob said, falling onto his back with a relieved sigh.
Julius was too angry to answer, so he just focused on removing the six-inch shard of twisted metal from Bob’s shoulder. There was an equally large shard of glass buried in his leg, probably from his crash through the garage door. The scariest wound by far, though, was the one Chelsie had left on his throat: two perfect handprints of bruised skin that wrapped around the column of his neck like a collar.
“Bob,” he said at last, voice shaking. “What were you thinking?”
“I know,” the seer said, looking down in dismay at the blood seeping through his red velvet coat. “I thought if I wore red, it wouldn’t stain as badly, but—”
“Who cares about your coat?” Julius hissed, glancing nervously back at Chelsie, who was still spellbound by the Qilin. “She almost killed you.”
“I’m not that soft,” Bob said, his voice insulted. “Though I admit things did go worse than anticipated.”
“You stole her egg and taunted her into coming after you!” Julius cried. “How did you think it was going to go?”
“Don’t blame me,” Bob said. “This is your fault. I told you not to set her free. If she’d still had her Fang, this would have been an entirely different fight. She’s used that sword for hundreds of years. Fighting her with it would have been like following a script. Barehanded conflict wasn’t nearly as predictable, as you can see.”
He nodded at his bloody leg, but Julius had had enough.
“You should be grateful you’re alive to complain,” he snarled, growing more furious by the second. “This was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do. You nearly got us all killed! You did kill Amelia, and you almost killed yourself just now by—”
Bob slapped a hand over Julius’s mouth, cutting him off. He pressed another finger to his own lips next, flicking his green eyes pointedly at their sister. Julius had been so caught up with Bob, he hadn’t even noticed Chelsie getting to her feet. She was on them now, though, her whole body poised to run as she eyed the Qilin. But while everything about her reminded Julius of a violent cornered animal, the Golden Emperor was still staring at her as if she were the most wondrous thing he’d ever seen.
“You…” he said at last. “You look well.”
Chelsie’s jaw tightened. “You never were much of a liar.”
“But you were,” he said, stepping closer. “Julius told me the truth, Chelsie. You did lie the day I banished you, but not about what I thought. You lied at the end, when you said it was all a ploy. Your brother claims he doesn’t know why, but I’ve decided I don’t care. I’m sick of living in the shadow of things that happened six centuries ago. I want to be alive now. I want to be happy again. I want…”
He trailed off, holding his breath like he was waiting for something to break. “I want you,” he finished at last. “Only you. Always.” He put out his hand. “Please give me a chance.”
Julius stared at the emperor in shock. That was not how he’d expected this to go. He’d thought the Qilin would demand answers, but it seemed he’d underestimated his own words earlier. Apparently, Xian really did just want to be happy again. Chelsie, though, looked more afraid than ever.
“I can’t.”
The emperor flinched. “Will you tell me why?”
“No,” she said sharply, crossing her arms tight across her chest. “I know how tempting Julius’s sweet talk can be. He got to me, too, but our past isn’t something we can just write off. It’s easy to say you don’t care when you don’t know, but—”
“Then tell me,” Xian said, taking another step closer. “I’m not afraid, Chelsie. Whatever happened, we’ll work through it. I know we can, because we’ve already tried the alternative, and it was awful. I have no illusion that this will be easy, but if I’m going to be miserable, I’d rather be miserable with you. Just tell me what happened.”
“I can’t,” Chelsie said, her voice starting to shake. “And you don’t want me to. You’ve got this idea that things can be okay again, but even if I told you everything, it wouldn’t make a difference. We can never go back to how we were before, because I’m not…” Her words trailed off as she curled her bloody hands into fists. “I’m not the girl from your paintings anymore.”
“So what?” the Qilin said angrily, taking another step. “You think I’m the same? It’s been six hundred years. Of course we’ve changed.” Another step. “I want to know who you are now, Chelsie. I want to talk to you again, see you again. I miss you. You can throw that back in my face if you want, but I’m done pretending that I don’t love you. That I don’t still think about you every single day. That’s why I’m not afraid, because there’s nothing you can say, no secret you can tell me that could hurt me more than all the years I spent thinking you didn’t care.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Try me,” he growled, closing the final distance. “Tell me the truth, Chelsie, and we’ll work from there, but don’t write me off before we even start. You owe me that much.” He smiled down at her. “And you never used to be a quitter.”
Chelsie cringed at that, but she didn’t back down. She was actually leaning toward the emperor now, her hands fisted hard at her sides as if she was struggling to keep them from reaching out for his. But then, just as she seemed to be losing the fight, a new voice cut through the dark.
“An emperor shouldn’t be so quick to promise pardon before he knows the crime.”
The Qilin’s head whipped around like a shot. Chelsie jumped, too, turning to look at something across the road. Fredrick and Bob were already looking, which meant Julius was the last one to turn and see the Empress Mother stepping out of a dark car hidden behind the Skyway support by the river.
“Mother,” the emperor said, clearly as surprised by this as the rest of them. “What are you doing…”
His words trailed off. The Empress Mother was carrying something in her arms. As she stepped into the light of the lone street lamp, Julius saw it was a child. A little girl, barely more than a toddler, with a head full of straight, fine, ink-black hair. She was dressed haphazardly in striped leggings and a purple sweatshirt with a pigeon embroidered on the front, but while the clothes were human, the child was obviously not. Julius had never seen a dragon that young in human form before, but there was nothing else the little girl could be, and she smelled of his clan. It wasn’t until the child raised her eyes, though—giant, beautiful eyes that flashed like golden coins in the orange glare of the streetlight—that he finally understood.
“No,” Chelsie whispered, her face pale as ashes when she whirled on Bob. “What did you do?”
“Seems to me that question should be turned around,” the Empress Mother said, thumping across the dirt with her cane in one gnarled hand and the little girl clutched tight against her hip with the other. “What did you do, daughter of the Heartstriker?”
Chelsie cringed, eyes flicking nervously to Xian, but he wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was staring at the baby dragon like he’d never seen one before.
“Who is that?”
“I see the shock of her betrayal has blinded you, my emperor,” the Empress Mother said sadly. “Allow me to make her crime clearer.”
She swept her gold-handled cane at Fredrick, who was also staring at the child in speechless wonder. Magic followed. Not much, not even enough to label a spell, but with Fredrick’s illusion already on the edge, a flick was all it took to shatter his false green eyes completely. He cursed as the magic snapped, which only made things worse, because it made the Qilin look, and there was no hiding the truth after that.
“You, too?” he whispered, staring into the mirror image of his own golden eyes before finally turning back to Chelsie. “What is this?”
There was no accusation in his voice, no anger. He just sounded lost. Lost and terrified and clearly counting on Chelsie to say something that would explain what he was seeing, but Chelsie couldn’t even look at him. A fact that did not escape the empress as she moved in for the kill.
“I warned you,” she said, clutching the little girl so tight she squirmed. “I told you the Heartstriker was using us. Now, at last, we see how.” She bared her teeth. “Like mother, like daughter.”
The emperor held up his hand, silencing her, but his eyes never left Chelsie. “What is she talking about?”
Chelsie took a shuddering breath. Again, though, she couldn’t seem to find the words, and again, the empress took her chance.
“She was pregnant,” the old dragoness said. “That’s why she ran, and it’s why she wouldn’t accept your forgiveness just now. Even she knows there can be no pardon for this crime. She stole your children, my emperor. She lied to you and secreted them away to Bethesda’s mountain in the Americas, where they lived as Bethesda’s Shame.” She pointed her cane at Fredrick. “Your son works as Julius Heartstriker’s servant. Your eldest son.”
“No,” the Qilin said, taking a step back. “That can’t be true.”
“It is true,” the empress said firmly. “Look on him, great emperor, and see for yourself. See with your own eyes what she has taken from us.”
She pointed her cane at Fredrick until, at last, the Qilin dragged his eyes away from Chelsie and turned to face him. Fredrick stared right back, his golden eyes locked on his father’s. Face to face like this, golden eye to eye, it was impossible not to notice how alike they looked. You’d have to be blind not to see the family resemblance, but the emperor seemed determined to try as he turned to face Chelsie once again.
“Is it true?”
She lowered her head and said nothing, which only made him angrier.
“Is he your son, Chelsie?”
Everyone was looking at her now, but despite the naked fear on her downturned face, her voice was clear when she said, “He is.”
“But he can’t be,” the Qilin said desperately. “I’m still alive. There’s only ever one Qilin.” He lurched forward, grabbing Chelsie’s shoulders in his hands. “Tell me you’re lying! Tell me he’s not—”
“I can’t!” Chelsie yelled at him, her head coming up at last. “I can’t lie anymore, Xian. Fredrick is my son, the first of my clutch.” She took a deep breath. “And yours.”
The whole world fell silent. There were no cars on the Skyways, no people on the street or noises from the city. Even the river behind went still as it waited for the Golden Emperor to realize what this meant.
“No,” he said softly, releasing Chelsie’s shoulders as he stumbled away. “No.”
“Yes,” the Empress Mother said, turning to glare at Chelsie with pure, naked hate. “Our line is destroyed. The work of generations, a hundred thousand years of magic, gone. You are now the last Golden Emperor.” She bared her yellowed teeth. “And it’s all her fault.”
That was going too far, but Julius didn’t get a chance to come to his sister’s defense. The Qilin was already falling to his knees on the broken street, and as he landed, a tsunami of dragon magic rose to meet him. It was the same pressure Julius had felt before at the mountain, but exponentially bigger, and growing by the second. Then, just when he was sure it couldn’t get any worse, the spiking pressure snapped, and it did.
From the moment the Qilin arrived at the mountain, Julius had been warned over and over of what could happen if the emperor got upset. He’d thought he’d understood the danger. He even thought he’d experienced it for himself. It wasn’t until now, when it was far too late, that Julius finally realized he’d had no idea at all. There was nothing—no magic, dragon or otherwise, no single force he’d ever felt—that could have prepared him for the tidal wave of misfortune that crashed into them as the Qilin’s magic crashed.
It wasn’t just that the ground shook—it was how it shook, twisting and moving exactly as needed to hit each tiny weakness in the Skyway supports’ earthquake-ready joints. Even then, the supports didn’t merely break. They crumbled like rotten wood, falling away from their steel cores in huge chunks that crashed to the ground like boulders ahead of a landslide.
With nothing left to support them, the Skyway bridges began to buckle next, the giant slabs that supported the buildings, sidewalks, and roads of the DFZ’s famous upper tier cracking like plates before sliding into the city below. They would have slid right down onto Julius’s head, but while he was transfixed by the collapse going on above him, other dragons had better instincts. By the time Julius realized he should probably run, Chelsie was already screaming.
“Go!”
She crashed into him like a train, knocking him out of the way seconds before a garbage-truck-sized chunk of Skyway landed where he’d been standing. And that was just the first. Whole buildings were collapsing now as the Skyways gave out beneath them. This time, though, Julius didn’t stay to watch. He was already running, feet barely touching the ground as he raced across the empty lot toward the safety of the river, diving headfirst into the swift water beyond the stony bank.
The cold of the November water nearly shocked him numb. For a terrifying moment, he was tumbling blind in the dark current, and then his feet found the muddy ground. He pushed up, breaking the surface with a gasp. When he turned to see what had happened to the others, though, all he saw was dust.
The empty lot was gone, crushed completely beneath a block-sized chunk of the upper city. For several heart-stopping seconds, Julius was sure everyone else had been crushed as well, and then he saw Fredrick burst out of the water several feet downstream. Chelsie was right beside him and already swimming for the bank. Bob, however, was nowhere to be seen.
Now that he thought about it, Julius realized he hadn’t seen the seer since the Empress Mother had appeared. Whether he’d sneaked off while everyone was distracted or fled during the crash, though, Julius didn’t know and didn’t have time to find out. Bob could look out for himself. Right now, Julius was far more concerned about the Qilin.
Given that he’d been directly below the Skyway when it fell, he should have been crushed with everything else. That would have been the logical outcome, but logic didn’t seem to touch the Qilin any more than dirt did. For all the chaos all around him, the Golden Emperor was perfectly safe beneath a slab of roadway that, miraculously, had landed sideways, plunging into the dirt at the perfect angle to create a thick shelter of cement and asphalt above his head. His mother was there as well, smiling at the Heartstrikers’ misfortune with the golden-eyed girl in her arms. A smile that only grew wider when Chelsie pulled herself out of the river.
“You hag!” she snarled, lunging at the empress. “Give me my daughter!”
The scream was still leaving her throat when a car-sized boulder that had been hanging from the ledge above them by a thread of steel rebar suddenly broke free. Chelsie dodged being crushed, just barely, but the force of the falling rock’s impact knocked her right back into the river.
“You deserved that,” the Empress Mother said when Chelsie came back up with a gasp. “All of you.” She turned her red glare on Fredrick, who was helping Julius to the bank. “Your horrible family has destroyed everything I sacrificed for centuries to build. Thanks to you, the line of the Qilin is broken, and this world is forever diminished.” She lifted her chin haughtily. “You deserve everything you get.”
Chelsie bared her dripping teeth, but Julius grabbed her shoulder. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because she took my child!” his sister roared.
“Not you,” he said quietly, grabbing the rocky bank so he could face the Empress Mother without being pushed downstream. “Why are you doing this?”
He pointed at the Qilin, who was still doubled over on the ground at her feet. “That’s your son who’s suffering. He told me how much he respected you, what a good mother you’d been to him. Just hearing him talk about you was enough to make me jealous, which is why I can’t understand what you’re thinking now.” He looked around at the destruction. “What kind of mother does this to her child?”
“A fine question, coming from a Heartstriker,” she snarled back. “But I do not do this as a mother. I do this as an empress.”
She stabbed her cane into the dirt and reached down to place a gnarled hand on the Qilin’s back. “My son is the heart of our power. I raised him to be incorruptible, to always put duty first, as I did. And in almost every way, he was perfect, but he had a secret weakness. By the time I realized what it was, your sister had already ruined him.”
“Ruined him how?” Julius demanded. “Love made him happy. That’s when his luck is greatest, isn’t it?”
“Why do you think I tolerated it for so long?” she growled. “Do you know how relieved I was when Bethesda took her away? I thought here, at last, was my chance to get my son back, to pry her hooked claws out of him. But I did not yet understand the extent of her crimes. When I heard the Heartstriker had laid a new clutch within a year of the last, all became clear.”
Chelsie went still. “You knew?”
The empress sneered. “I’m not stupid. Even the Broodmare can’t manage two clutches in two years, not to mention she hadn’t been pregnant when she’d left China. By the time I heard, though, your ill-gotten spawn were already a year hatched. Even if my worst fears were true, everything was already lost, so I buried my worries and pressed on. I had an emperor to console and lands to manage, and there was no proof. I didn’t think of you again until the seer called me.”
“Seer?” A cold lump formed in Julius’s throat. “What seer?”
The old dragoness gave him a pitying look. “Which do you think?”
There was no question. Even if Julius had been willing to delude himself into thinking she was talking about the Black Reach, the little girl in the empress’s arms made it impossible. There was only one egg that child could have hatched from, and Bob had taken it. Right before the Golden Emperor had landed on their heads.
“Why?” he said, his voice cracking. “Why did he betray us?”
The empress shrugged. “I didn’t bother to ask. All I cared about, all I have ever cared about, is my empire. Really, though, Brohomir’s treason just confirmed what I’d always known in my heart: that your sister is a grasping snake who cares nothing for others. She already broke my son once with her selfishness, and that’s before we knew the depths of her sin.” She looked away with a sneer. “It’s only fitting she die for it here.”
Julius couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You think Chelsie wanted this?”
“I don’t care about what she wanted,” the empress snapped. “I care about what she did. She broke my son and destroyed my clan!”
“If that’s what you think, why are you finishing the job?” he yelled back, pointing at the Qilin. “Maybe he is the last Golden Emperor, but your son was fine until you got here. You did this to him. Why?”
“Because he was already broken!” she roared, red eyes flashing. “No matter what I did, no matter how I tried, he never got over her! He should have been the strongest Qilin ever born. Fortune should have rained on us from the heavens, and yet we have no more than we got under his father. No new conquests, no new lands, nothing. For six centuries, the Golden Empire has been stagnant, and then he suddenly announces his intention to conquer Heartstriker?”
She shook her head. “I knew. Even before the seer removed all doubt, I knew the end was upon us. I knew that he would break, so I took it upon myself to make sure it happened in a place where it would only hurt our enemies.”
By the time she finished, Julius could only stare in horrified awe. “That’s why,” he whispered, looking up at the evening sky through the jagged circle of the broken pavement. “I thought you were just being callous, but now I understand. You broke the news to him in the worst way on purpose. You used him as a weapon.”
The Empress Mother said nothing, but she didn’t have to. The evidence was all around them. They were temporarily safe since there was nothing directly over their heads left to fall, but the Qilin’s bad luck was still raging through the city. Julius could actually feel the dragon magic like hungry, malevolent teeth on his skin. It had no target, no purpose. It was just fury blindly lashing out, and everywhere it struck, disaster followed.
All over the city, more Skyways were crumbling, filling the air with the sound of cracking stone. Helicopters fell out of the sky as he watched, their engines just stopping as the emperor’s bad luck crashed into them. With every second that ticked by, the noise of crashes and collapse and disaster grew louder and louder and louder, until the whole city was consumed. Already, the adjacent Skyways down the river were starting to tilt as everything that could go wrong did. If this went on much longer, the whole DFZ would collapse, and as much as Julius hated Algonquin, he couldn’t let that happen. Not the city where he’d met Marci, and not to Xian.
“I know that look,” Chelsie said quietly, moving closer to him in the water. “You’ve got a plan.”
Julius nodded, glancing at Fredrick, who was grimly holding onto the bank beside them. “Can you get us up there?”
He looked pointedly at the triangular shelter beneath the fallen road where the Empress Mother was standing above the collapsed Qilin with the baby dragon in her arms, and Fredrick scowled.
“I can try,” he whispered back, glancing down at his Fang. “But this thing only works on Heartstrikers, so I’m not sure—”
“It’ll work,” Chelsie said confidently. “She’s your sister, Fredrick. That makes her one of us.”
He didn’t look convinced. “But—”
“If you’re going to try, do it now,” Julius said, glancing nervously down at the water. “Because I don’t think this is going to be a safe zone much longer.”
It hadn’t seemed important during all the other disasters, but since they’d been in it, the river had dropped several feet. Julius wasn’t sure if that was due to the Qilin or because of the other magical weirdness going on in the DFZ, but it was getting worse by the second. Just in the time he’d been talking to the Empress Mother, the water by the bank had sunk from his chest to below his waist, and he couldn’t imagine it was due to anything good.
“Go,” he whispered, grabbing on to Fredrick. “Now.”
With a final nervous look, Fredrick obeyed, slicing his Fang through the water under their feet. Since he’d done it right beneath them, they didn’t even have to step through this time. They simply fell from one place to another, dropping out—along with several gallons of icy river water—onto the pristine, still-untouched dirt directly behind the Golden Emperor, and directly in front of his mother. Her red eyes were still widening in surprise when Chelsie lunged forward, arms shooting out to snatch her daughter away from the old dragoness.
It happened so quickly, the Empress Mother had no chance to dodge. Or at least, that was what Julius assumed when she failed to move. As Chelsie’s arms extended, though, he realized that he was wrong. The Empress Mother hadn’t failed to dodge. She hadn’t needed to, because the moment Chelsie reached out, a car had slipped off the collapsed road above them, and was now plummeting straight down toward her head.
If Chelsie had been alone, that would have been the end. It took more than a car to kill a dragon even in human form, but it would definitely have knocked her out. Probably worse with the Qilin’s terrible luck making everything go so catastrophically wrong. For once, though, Chelsie wasn’t alone. Fredrick was right behind her, and he yanked her out of the way at the last second, spinning them both to the side as the car plummeted past. Unfortunately, this put the two of them directly in the path of the truck that fell immediately after, crushing both dragons into the mud.
“No!” Julius screamed, rushing forward. He was trying desperately to push the truck over when it moved on its own, quivering and then launching out of the way entirely as Chelsie tossed it aside. She was muddy and bloody but alive. So was Fredrick, though he looked decidedly more shaken. The Empress Mother just looked smug, smiling at the two of them with the insufferable confidence of someone who knows they’ve won.
“Care to try again?” she said, beckoning them closer to her safe position beside the silent, kneeling Qilin. “Charge me all you like. The end will always be the same for the emperor’s enemies.”
“How are we his enemies?” Julius said angrily. “You’re the one who did this!”
“I did nothing but tell him the truth,” she said, glaring at him. “I am his mother and his empress. It is my duty to tell him what he needs to know when he needs to know it. Xian understands and respects that. The duty he owes me has been drilled into him since birth. I could spit in his face, and his magic still wouldn’t allow me to be harmed, but you’re another matter entirely.”
Her red eyes flicked to Chelsie. “You are the source of his suffering, and your children are living proof of his greatest failure. Now that he knows, his luck will correct the problem, and none of you will leave this city alive.”
Chelsie’s face was ashen by the time she finished, and for once in his life, Julius knew exactly why. What the empress described was exactly what Chelsie had been afraid of all this time. But while everyone else seemed convinced this was the only end, Julius refused to give up.
“He won’t kill them.”
The Empress Mother snorted and looked pointedly at the truck that had nearly crushed Chelsie and Fredrick. “Don’t be delusional.”
“You’re the one who’s delusional,” Julius growled. “You might not care about your son, but I know you need your emperor. You want to talk about ruining him? How do you think he’s going to react when he snaps out of this and realizes you let his luck kill Chelsie and his son?”
“Nothing worse than what’s already happened,” the empress said with a shrug. “But you misunderstand what’s happening here, whelp. I’m not doing this. He is. Look.”
She bent over, reaching down to brush the Qilin’s long, dark hair aside. When she lifted the curtain, though, the emperor’s face was a stranger’s. His beautiful features were completely slack, as though he were asleep, but his golden eyes were wide open and terrifyingly blank.
“And now you know the truth,” she said, letting the emperor’s hair fall back into place. “The Qilin’s magic has never been controllable, and my son is the strongest yet. He can rein it in to a point, but when he encounters something that goes too far, breaks too sharply, the luck takes over. Once that happens, he’s as good as gone, and he won’t come back until his magic has eliminated everything that makes him unhappy.”
“You mean eliminated everything period,” Julius said, voice shaking.
The empress shrugged. “It’s not a precision tool, but one suffers the bad to enjoy the good, and who knows?” She flashed Julius a cruel smile. “Maybe when your hateful sister finally dies, he’ll get over her at last.”
“Or he could break entirely.”
“She saw to that already,” the empress growled, turning to glare hatefully at Chelsie’s bloody face. “But no matter what comes of this, I won’t let the Heartstrikers win. By breaking him here, I’ve snatched a measure of success from our clan’s greatest disaster. My son may never be the same, but at least he’ll have destroyed you, this city, and all of Algonquin’s lands in the process. When this is over, the world will be a better, safer place for our empire, which, if Xian were aware, he would agree is the only thing that matters.” She laid a proud hand on the emperor’s motionless shoulder. “I raised him well.”
“No, he came out well despite you,” Chelsie snarled, her eyes locked on the little girl clutched in the crook of the empress’s arm. “What about our daughter? Will you sacrifice her, too?”
“Of course not,” the empress said. “You ruined the line of the Golden Empire forever. We are owed recompense, and Brohomir has informed me that this little urchin is the next seer. A fortune teller who reeks of Bethesda is no replacement for a Qilin, of course, but in times of trial, one must take what one can get.”
Chelsie growled low in her throat. Julius felt the same way. He had no idea what game Bob was playing here, but he’d never felt more betrayed in his life. Working with the Empress Mother was bad enough, but to give her his niece—their niece, because as Chelsie’s daughter, she was Julius’s niece as well—it was unforgivable. He was as bad as Bethesda, throwing away his family like pawns for his end game, and now, as always, Julius had had enough.
“She doesn’t belong to you,” he snarled, taking a menacing step forward. “She’s a Heartstriker. One of us. She’s not recompense.”
“I won’t let you have anything,” Chelsie said at the same time, reaching down to snatch a broken length of steel rebar off the ground. “My children, Xian, they’re mine. I won’t let you touch them!”
“Then you should have thought about that before you carelessly destroyed what was mine,” the empress snarled back, moving closer to the emperor. “But what’s done is done. Everything is already broken beyond repair. All I can do now is try to make something out of the ashes.”
“Or save it before it becomes ashes.”
Julius and Chelsie both jumped. The growling voice had come from behind them, but it was so angry, Julius didn’t even recognize it as Fredrick’s until he stepped forward, sword in hand.
“You did this to us,” he growled, the words so low and bloody that even the empress stepped back. “You are a terrible empress and a worse mother, but awful as you are, it doesn’t have to end this way. The Qilin’s line is broken, but we’re still here. Our two clans, the biggest in the world, are united by blood now. We have a seer and a Qilin who’s still alive. I don’t care what Brohomir told you—we can still change our future if we work together.” He narrowed his golden eyes at her. “Grandmother.”
“You have no right to call me by that name!” she roared, crouching over her son. “You’re an embarrassment! Your mother and the Broodmare who bore her were both grasping, selfish harlots, and you’re just more of the same. The only blood of yours I’m interested in is when it’s spilled on the ground.”
She spat at his feet as she finished, and Fredrick growled menacingly, but it was too late. The empress had already reached down to grab the Qilin’s motionless shoulders, clutching him like a rock in the sea as she cried, “Save me, Xian!”
As always, the Qilin didn’t move, but when his mother cried his name, the rampaging magic jerked. For a terrifying second, Julius could feel it rising up like a viper readying to strike. Then, just like before, the magic snapped, and the whole world shook.
Julius covered his head instinctively, but it wasn’t the Skyways he had to worry about this time. Those had already fallen, and no amount of bad luck could lift them up again. But though the ground was shaking, the roar in the air wasn’t coming from collapsing buildings or breaking cement. It was coming from the river.
The water had been sinking since they’d first dived into it to avoid the falling Skyways. When Julius looked back now, though, the entire half-mile-wide Detroit River had shrunk to the size of a stream, leaving acres of mud, debris, and flopping fish exposed to the air. Julius had no idea what had caused the dry-up, but the Qilin’s magic must have reversed it, because the missing water was now rushing back down the empty riverbed straight toward them in a wave of violent, muddy water twenty feet tall.
It was wide, too. That was the noise Julius had heard. The wave wasn’t just coming down the river. It was crashing through the riverside Underground like a bulldozer, picking up everything in its path—fallen debris, dumpsters, even whole cars—and sweeping it downstream, straight toward them.
“Chelsie,” Julius gasped, grabbing his sister. “We need to—”
He never got to finish. He barely had time to brace before the building-sized wave was on top of them, crashing over the collapsed bit of Skyway that protected the Qilin and his mother to slam down on Chelsie and Fredrick, but not Julius. By a stroke of luck, he was still standing where he’d been when he’d moved closer to the Empress Mother, which meant he was in the lee of the collapsed hunk of Skyway. The water didn’t even touch him thanks to the perfect angle of the fallen road overhead. It just poured down like a waterfall behind him, hiding Chelsie and Fredrick as they were washed away.
“No!” he cried, lurching forward before he came to his senses. The wave was still crashing. If he walked into it, he’d just be washed off, too. The only reason he hadn’t been swept away already was because he’d happened to be standing in the exact right place. Because of luck, and the moment he realized that, Julius knew what he had to do.
Ripping himself away from the still-falling wall of water that had eaten his sister and Fredrick, Julius made a break for the kneeling emperor. He moved so fast, he actually made it to Xian’s side before the empress grabbed him.
“Stay away, Heartstriker,” she warned, her red eyes glowing like coals. “I don’t know why his luck spared you, but it’s over. There’s nothing more you can do.”
“There’s always something I can do,” Julius growled back, getting on his knees in the dirt beside the Qilin. “And it starts with talking to him.”
“To what end?” the empress said, moving so that she was physically between Julius and her son. “He’s gone. There’s no one left to hear you.”
“He heard you say his name just now.”
“That’s different,” she snapped. “I’m his mother. You’re no one.”
“Then you won’t mind if I try,” he said, reaching around her. But when he started to pull back the curtain of black hair that hid the Qilin’s face, the Empress Mother grabbed his wrist.
“Stop.”
Julius looked up at her, staring her right in the eyes. “No.”
“Arrogant whelp,” she snarled, digging her nails into his skin. “You think I won’t kill you?”
“Actually?” He shrugged. “I do.”
The empress sneered, but Julius wasn’t finished. “You said it yourself: the Qilin’s luck isn’t a precision tool. It’s an instinct lashing out at cues, as it did for you just now when you cried for help. But unlike you and Chelsie and everyone else here, the Qilin doesn’t care about me. At least, not on the deep, personal level he feels for the rest of you. I’m just another Heartstriker, one who’s done him no harm, and that makes me invisible.”
“And you think that will save you from me?” she growled.
“No, I think that really was luck,” Julius said. “Actual luck, as in I was standing in the right place at the right time. The reason I think you won’t kill me is simple: you haven’t already.”
“Then I will remedy that,” the empress hissed, letting go of his arm to wrap her hand around his throat. But even when her sharp nails bit into the soft flesh behind his windpipe, Julius didn’t flinch or fight. He just knelt there and took it, staring defiantly up at the empress until she was the one who looked afraid.
“What’s wrong with you?” she cried. “Defend yourself!”
“I am defending myself,” Julius said, letting his arms fall slack at his side. “The Qilin’s luck isn’t as uncontrollable as you claim. You’re trying to manipulate it right now. If I attack you, I make myself your enemy and get punished accordingly. But if I do nothing, I won’t be a threat, and his luck won’t care. You do, though, which is why I’m sure you won’t kill me, because if you could, I’d already be dead.”
The wrinkled hand on his throat began to shake. “That’s a dangerous assumption.”
“Not really,” he said. “I mean, I’m taunting you, and you still haven’t done it. I think I know why, too.” He smiled. “You said that Bob was the one who sold us out, and I’m the one dragon Bob can’t kill.”
The moment he saw her face go pale, Julius knew he was right. He still had no idea what game Bob was playing. For all he knew, the seer really had sold them all out. But if the Black Reach’s visit this morning had proved anything, it was that Bob’s investment in Julius was long term, and while his hatred of being a pawn was still very much there, Julius wasn’t above using it when the need was great.
And right now, the need was very great. Two families were on the line, including the little dragoness, who was still in her grandmother’s arms, watching the flood with a child’s fearless interest. She deserved better than to be traded between clans like a war prize. They all deserved better than this, so Julius held firm, trusting in his brother’s manipulations, if not his intentions, until, at last, the empress let him go.
“It seems you’re more of a dragon than you appear,” she said bitterly. “But knowing the rules of the game doesn’t make you safe. Brohomir warned me that if I killed you, Xian would die, but he never said anything about you falling victim to bad luck.”
“But I’m not going to have bad luck,” Julius said confidently. “Because I’m not going to hurt you, and I’m not going to hurt him.” He nodded at the motionless Qilin. “I’m going to do what you should have done. I’m going to help your son stop this, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“I don’t have to do anything!” the empress cried. “Don’t you understand? You’ve lost! Just because I can’t stop you from talking to Xian doesn’t mean he’ll listen. I raised him to be an emperor before all else, and now, thanks to your sister, he’s failed his greatest responsibility. The ancient line of the Qilin is dead, and there’s nothing you can say that will bring it back.”
“You’re right,” Julius admitted, turning back to the Qilin. “I can’t change the past, but I don’t have to, because that’s not where we live. We’re alive right now, and if there’s one thing being Bob’s tool has taught me, it’s that now can always be changed for the better.”
The Empress Mother looked baffled by that, but Julius had already put her out of his mind. He also banished the sick feeling of worry for Chelsie and Fredrick, whom he hadn’t seen since they’d been swept away in the flood that was still raging behind him. He let go of everything, focusing only on the dragon in front of him as he got down on his stomach in the cold mud so he could look at the Qilin face to blank face.
“Your Majesty?”
Nothing.
“Emperor?”
Nothing again.
“Xian?”
It was probably wishful thinking, but Julius would have sworn he saw the emperor’s golden eyes flicker at his name. It wasn’t enough to go on, but Julius took it anyway.
“Do you remember what I told you in the throne room?” he said softly. “Chelsie told you the truth today, and while you are the very last Qilin, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. You’ve been held prisoner by a power you can’t control for your entire life, holding everything in and making yourself miserable for centuries in the name of duty. But if misery is the price of the Qilin’s good fortune, then it’s not good fortune at all. It’s a curse. I wouldn’t wish your luck on my worst enemy, and I don’t think you would, either.”
He smiled. “Look at it that way, and this whole thing becomes a blessing in disguise. You haven’t lost an irreplaceable gift. You’ve spared your son from having to suffer as you have, and that’s more good fortune than your luck has ever brought you.”
He paused there, holding his breath, but the emperor’s face was still as blank as ever, and Julius sighed.
“Chelsie told me you always wanted children,” he said, trying a different approach. “Well, now you have twenty. Twenty-one, counting the baby. You’ve got Chelsie, too. She never wanted to cut you off. The only reason she lied was because she was afraid of this.”
He waved his hand at the destruction around them.
“But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can’t control your luck, but you can control how you react to things, and this isn’t the catastrophe your mother claims. Yes, the Qilin line is broken, but you’re still emperor. You’ve still got your dragons and your lands, but now you have a family, too. Your family, who needs you. You already lost Chelsie once because of this. How much more are you going to let being Qilin take from you?”
As he said that last part, Julius felt the ground shift under his hand. When he looked down, he saw that the Qilin’s fingers had dug deep into the soft dirt. He didn’t know if that was because of him or not, but it was the first movement he’d made since he’d gone down. Julius was scrambling to think how best to build on that when Fredrick burst out of the water with a gasp.
The giant wave had passed while he’d been talking to the Empress Mother, but the flood was still raging. Julius was high and dry thanks to the lee of the fallen Skyway and the little hill the emperor had chosen to collapse on, but the rest of the lot, the street, and the buildings on the other side were consumed beneath several feet of violently churning brown water.
It flowed so fast, the water dragged Fredrick right back off his feet. He fought his way up again a second later, grabbing a chunk of the collapsed Skyway to keep his head above water as he looked around frantically. It wasn’t until he dove back into the flood, though, that Julius realized Chelsie hadn’t come up yet.
An icy stab of dread went through him, and he turned back to the emperor. “Please, Xian,” he begged. “Don’t let them use you like this! You’re not a weapon. You’re a dragon. An emperor! Who cares what your mother wants? You can still have everything you want: Chelsie, your son, your children, your empire. You can have it all, but you have to come back right now and save it before—”
A splash interrupted him. When Julius looked over his shoulder, though, it was just Fredrick coming up for air. He looked panicked now, tossing his sword up onto the broken hunk of Skyway before diving back down. When he’d vanished under the swirling water, Julius turned back to the Qilin, grabbing the emperor’s head and forcing him to look.
“Your son is going to die,” he said, voice shaking. “He’s going to drown down there searching for Chelsie. She might be gone already. That’s a much bigger tragedy than losing the Qilin. You said you just wanted to be happy. Well your happiness is down there under that water, and if you want to save her, save them, you need to snap out of this and go help your son!”
He was shouting by the end, clutching Xian’s blank face between his shaking hands. And nothing happened. The emperor didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, didn’t do anything. Then, just as Julius let go and jumped to his feet to go help Fredrick himself, a tiny voice whispered, “My son?”
Julius whirled back around. The emperor was still exactly as he’d left him, his eyes blank as a doll’s, but there was a strain in his muscles that hadn’t been there before. A tightness that quickly became violent shaking as he forced himself to move.
“My son,” he breathed, prying his curled hands out of the ground. “I have a son.”
“Yes,” Julius said, dropping back down to his knees so he could help the emperor. “You have ten sons and eleven daughters, one of whom is apparently the next seer. You can’t let her go through that alone! She needs you. They all do, but Fredrick needs you now, so come back. You said you’d be our emperor, but what emperor leaves his subjects when they need him most? If you really cared about your duty, you’d come back and do it. Come help us. Right now.”
He stopped there, holding his breath, but the dragon didn’t move. Behind them, the water splashed as Fredrick came up for air and went back down, but Xian didn’t even flinch. Then, just when Julius was on the edge of giving up, the emperor blew out a long line of smoke.
What happened after that came in painfully slow bursts. Julius didn’t know what was actually going on, but from the outside it looked like the Qilin was trying to force his body through a wall of cold, heavy clay. He came back in bits and pieces, his muscles straining and giving up then straining again until, all at once, the magic released him, letting go as fast as it had taken hold to drop him in the mud beside Julius.
“Xian!” Julius offered him his hand at once. The Qilin grabbed it, lifting his face—which, of course, was completely free of mud—to look around in confusion.
“What happened?”
There was no nice way to put it, but Julius tried anyway. “You did,” he said. “But that’s over now. It’s time to make things right, starting with Chelsie.”
The emperor’s already pale face went even paler, and he shot to his feet. “Where is she?”
Julius pointed at the flooding water, and the Qilin started pulling off his golden robe to dive in. Before he’d gotten his arm out of the sleeve, though, Fredrick broke the surface again, and this time, Chelsie was with him.
“Julius!” he yelled, his normally calm voice frantic. “Help me!”
Julius was there before he could finish, charging into the water to help his brother haul Chelsie’s dead weight into the shelter of the broken skyway. When the emperor moved in to help as well, though, Fredrick turned on him with a snarl. “Don’t touch my mother!”
“It’s okay, Fredrick,” Julius said, putting up his hands. “He’s himself again.”
The Qilin nodded rapidly, but Fredrick wasn’t paying attention. He was leaning down to do CPR on Chelsie, breathing into her mouth five quick times before sitting up to press his locked hands into her chest for the compressions. He repeated the cycle twice, alternating between forcing air into her lungs and pushing it back out through her chest. Then, just as he was about to start the third round of breaths, Chelsie’s body convulsed.
She rolled over with a gasp, coughing out lungfuls of muddy water as Fredrick slapped her on the back. She was still struggling to breathe when a voice called the emperor’s name.
“Xian?”
Everyone looked up to see the Empress Mother standing in the farthest recess of the fallen skyway, her silk slippers pressed together on the last remaining dry patch of land.
“Come,” she said calmly. “Let’s go.”
The Qilin looked at her like she was insane. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You can’t possibly want to stay with her,” the empress said, sneering at Chelsie, who managed to glare back even while choking. “Whose fault do you think this is?”
“Mine,” Xian said firmly, rising to his feet. “And yours.”
He looked around at the destruction as if he was seeing it for the first time, which, to be fair, he probably was. “I did this,” he whispered, voice shaking. “But you helped push me to it.” His jaw clenched as he turned back to his mother. “You used me.”
“I did,” she said, lifting her chin. “You are the Qilin. You exist to be used for the good of our Golden Empire. A weapon against the enemies who would—”
“Enemies?” he cried, flinging out his arm toward Fredrick. “Is my son the enemy? Is she?” He shifted to point at the little dragon the Empress Mother was still clutching in her arms. “How long have you known I had children?”
The empress’s jaw tightened beneath the sag of her wrinkled skin, and the Qilin began to growl. “How long, Mother?”
She sighed. “I suspected the truth shortly after hearing Bethesda had clutched two years in a row, but I knew nothing for certain until today. That is the truth, Xian, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d known from the beginning. I still wouldn’t have told you, because I knew you’d do this.”
She waved her hand at the flooded lot dotted with collapsed roads. “To allow such a disaster would have been a disgrace to my name and yours. But it had to be done eventually, so I chose to let it happen here. This way, it is Algonquin who suffers, not our subjects. I should think you’d be glad of my foresight.”
“I am glad,” Xian said quietly. “Glad it wasn’t worse. Glad I didn’t—” He cut off with a wince, and then he turned away, putting his back to her. “Go home.”
The empress’s red eyes went wide. “I will not be dismissed like a—”
“So long as I am emperor, you will be whatever I say,” he growled. “Go home, Empress. And leave the child.”
Her arms tightened on the little girl. Before she could say anything else, though, Chelsie blew a puff of fire into her hands to warm them.
The moment the magic flashed, the girl’s head popped up like a cork. She started to scramble, biting the empress with her baby fangs when the old dragoness wouldn’t let go. The empress dropped the whelp with a pained cry, and the little girl skittered across the ground before launching herself straight at Chelsie, latching on to her torso with all four limbs like a baby monkey.
From the look on her face, Chelsie was as surprised by this as everyone else. Julius, though, could only grin.
“I bet it’s your fire,” he said, smiling down at the little dragon, who seemed to be trying to burrow her way into Chelsie’s ribcage. “You did feed it to her every day for six hundred years. It makes sense she’d recognize it now.”
“I think you’re right,” Chelsie whispered, putting a hesitant arm around the little dragon. The shyness only lasted a second before she crumpled, wrapping herself around the little dragon with a sob. “I’ve got you,” she whispered, pressing kiss after kiss against the child’s fine black hair. “It’s okay. You’re safe now.”
In classic whelp fashion, the little dragon immediately tried to bite her. She actually landed one, sinking her teeth into her mother’s arm. It looked painful, but Chelsie didn’t seem to mind at all. She just laughed, prying the little dragon’s jaw off her arm with an indulgent smile while Julius stared in shock.
He didn’t think he’d ever seen his sister smile like that. He’d definitely never heard her laugh, but she must have been too exhausted to hold back, because she was doing both in earnest now, the relief making her look centuries younger as she beamed down at the daughter she’d never thought would hatch.
“A proper dragoness,” she said, bopping the whelp on the nose and then snatching her finger back before the little dragon could bite it off. “At least I can see Bob hasn’t been starving you.”
The baby dragon chuffed, and Chelsie laughed again, but the happy look fell off her face when she looked up to see Xian watching the interaction with an expression that could have been wonder or terror.
“I have a daughter,” he whispered.
“Actually, you have several,” Chelsie said, lowering her eyes. “I thought this one was a dud, but apparently, Bob found a way to hatch her.” She heaved a long sigh. “I suppose I owe him for that.”
Considering what Bob had put them through, Julius didn’t think she owed him anything. He was about to say as much when Xian dropped to his knees in front of Chelsie.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “It’s my fault. I was the one who ran.”
“Because you were afraid of me,” he said angrily. “I should never have made you fear. You were everything to me, and I let you go. I believed the lies, even when I should have known better. I left you alone with Bethesda, left you to suffer.” He clenched his hands. “I’m sorry, Chelsie. I’ve done you so much wrong, and I can’t—I’m just—” He cut off with a frustrated scowl that quickly turned into a regretful one. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t make this all your fault,” she snapped, meeting his eyes at last. “I was the one who panicked and lied. I should have trusted you more. I should have told you.”
“You did what was needed to protect yourself and them,” Xian insisted. “Someone had to protect them from…”
He didn’t finish, but his haunted eyes said the rest, and Chelsie sighed.
“Maybe I did,” she admitted. “But that doesn’t mean it was right. So much of this could have been avoided if I hadn’t tried to do everything myself. Even if my intentions were in the right place, I had no right. After all”—she smiled at him—“they’re your children, too.”
Julius had said the exact same thing, but he never could have gotten the look of pure joy that spread over the Qilin’s face when she said it. “They are, aren’t they?” he said, his golden eyes going from Fredrick to the little dragon and finally back to her. “We have children.”
“If you can call six-hundred-year-old dragons children,” Chelsie said, her dark brows furrowing. “I’m not even sure where most of them are right—”
She didn’t get to finish, because that was the moment when the Qilin swept down, throwing his arms around Chelsie and the little dragon on her lap. By some serendipitous stroke, he managed to snag Fredrick as well, dragging the tall dragon down with him as he pulled them all into a tight embrace.
“It’s not lost,” he said in a voice that was neither controlled nor serene but vibrant with relief and happiness. “I have you. We have a family.”
No one could say anything after that. Xian was squeezing them too tight for words, but other than the little dragoness, who was wiggling fiercely, no one seemed to want to escape. They were all just…happy, which Julius took as his cue to turn around before he got all maudlin about missing another warm family moment, which he was absolutely not going to do. They deserved their happiness, and he wished them nothing else. He just needed to look away for a while.
Thankfully, there was plenty to look at. The flood was receding now, the muddy river trickling peaceably back to its banks. He poked around the rubble for a bit in the vague hope of finding some trace of where Bob had vanished to, but the water had washed the seer’s scent clean away.
He was contemplating going to check on the Empress Mother’s car next. She’d made herself scarce once the baby had jumped ship, but Julius still wanted to make sure she’d really left and wasn’t waiting in the shadows to get revenge or anything stupid like that. He was about to walk over and check when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
It felt like Fredrick, but when Julius turned around, he found himself face to face with the Golden Emperor. It didn’t seem possible, but the Qilin looked even more astonishingly perfect now with his muddy robes and wild hair than he had when he’d landed in the desert. It was the smile that did it, Julius decided. He’d never seen anyone look as perfectly happy as Xian did right now, which made it even odder when the elegant dragon dropped to his knees.
“Julius Heartstriker,” he said solemnly, bending down to press his forehead to the dirt at Julius’s feet. “You have saved me and my family from my mother’s treachery. On behalf of the Golden Empire and all the dragons who benefit from my fortune, thank you.” His voice began to tremble, and he bowed lower still. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
Julius cringed in horror. He hated when anyone bowed to him, but this went beyond anything he could have imagined. The only thing that saved it for him was the thank you. That, he would treasure for the rest of his life, but the rest of this experience made him want to sink into the ground.
He was trying to figure out how to make the Qilin stop when the emperor raised his head on his own. And as his eyes met Julius’s, the full power of the thankful Qilin’s magic landed on him like a golden mountain, knocking everything else away.