Chapter 15
Marci was falling through the night sky.
It had happened so quickly. One second she was clinging to the building, watching the city come alive. The next she’d been flung into the chaos, her body spinning wildly. Then she’d started to drop, plummeting toward the ground faster and faster and faster. And then, just as the words terminal velocity were repeating like a chant in her mind, she crashed into a yielding mass of soft, royal-blue feathers.
“Marci!”
The familiar voice was frantic in her ears. Bigger and deeper than she remembered, but no less recognizable as she looked around in shock to see she was clinging to a dragon’s back. A blue-feathered dragon with wide wings and beautiful, frantic green eyes.
“Julius.”
The name slipped out of her, which was a miracle in itself, because the rest of Marci seemed to be shutting down. After everything that had happened—of which falling off a superscraper had been just another turn in the road—to have him suddenly there, right here under her fingers…It was too much. She’d fought her way back to life for a lot of reasons, including saving the world, but her deepest, most selfish desire had always been to get back to him. To her dragon.
And he was right here.
There was no playing it cool after that. Marci grabbed Julius with all her strength, hugging him so hard she almost spoiled their landing as he set them down on the broken street. The moment he touched down, Julius grabbed her back, coiling his long body around hers like a snake as he hugged her with everything he had.
“It’s really you,” he whispered, squeezing her tight. “You’re alive.” He pressed his broad forehead against hers with the happiest gleam in his green eyes she’d ever seen. “Marci, you’re alive!”
Marci nodded against him, too happy to speak. Too happy to think. Too happy to do anything except cling to him for dear life, which was fitting since he had, in fact, just saved hers.
I would have caught you, Ghost grumbled.
“Don’t ruin this for me,” Marci hissed, shooting a warning look at her spirit over Julius’s wings. When she turned back to her dragon, though, his giddy happiness was quickly giving way to confusion.
“I can’t believe it,” he said, pulling back a fraction to look her up and down. “I’m so happy, but how…How is this possible?”
Marci bit her lip. “It’s kind of complicated.”
“Complicated?” He stared at her in disbelief. “Marci, you died. I saw it. Chelsie buried you.”
That would explain the dirt she’d had to dig through. But as much as Julius deserved an explanation, there simply wasn’t time.
“I promise there’s a perfectly reasonable story behind this,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice calm. “But I can’t get into it now. Algonquin’s trying to destroy the DFZ. If I don’t stop her, the two of them will bring this whole city down.”
As if to prove her point, an echoing crash sounded in the distance, followed by an equally enormous splash. When Marci tried to turn to see what new bit of the city had just gone into the drink, though, Julius grabbed her shoulders with his forefeet.
“Why do you have to stop her?” he asked, sheathing his curved talons before they could touch her. “You just came back from the dead! I’m not going to let you die again fighting Algonquin. I’ve already got a way out. Just come with me and—”
“No,” she said firmly, staring straight into his green eyes. “I can’t run from this, Julius. This mess is partially my fault. I’m the one who cut the spirit of the DFZ loose.”
Now he looked even more confused. “Since when does the DFZ have a spirit?”
“Since about six hours ago,” she said with a helpless smile. “Again, no time to explain, but the short version is that if I don’t fix this, we’re all going to be in a lot of trouble on a lot of different levels.”
That was a ridiculous cop-out even by Marci’s standards. To her surprise, though, Julius didn’t launch into a barrage of questions. He just sighed and reluctantly uncoiled his body from hers. “What do we have to do?”
She blinked in surprise. “We?”
“Yes, we,” he said, incredulous. “I just got you back from the dead. That’s a miracle, Marci. I don’t care if you’re marching straight down Algonquin’s throat. I’m not leaving your side. Whatever you have to do, we’re doing it together, so hop on and tell me where we’re going.”
He lay down on the ground after that, lowering his wings so she could climb into the space between them, but Marci could only gape. “You want me to ride you?”
“It’s the fastest way to get around, and it lets me stay by you,” he said stubbornly. “And I did promise you a flight.”
That he had. “It’s going to be nuts,” she warned as she climbed onto the ridge of his feathered back.
“All the more reason to stay close,” he said, swiveling his head to look at her with an intense expression. “I lost you once, and it was the worst experience of my life. I am never losing you again.”
He sounded so serious, Marci almost cried again. It was a ridiculous way to react, but she couldn’t help it, because he was always like this. No matter what happened, Julius had always stayed by her side. He’d always helped her, always had her back. Even now, when he had no idea what they were up against and the whole city was coming apart, he didn’t hesitate. He was right there with her, ready to jump into the fire feet first, and as she had since the very beginning, Marci loved him for it.
“Thank you,” she whispered, her voice thick.
He pressed his head against her shoulder, breathing her in deep, and then he jumped them into the air, forcing Marci to hold on tight as his wings pumped on either side, lifting them into the cloudy night with astonishing speed. Or not so astonishing. For all his claims that he was a mediocre dragon, Julius had always been fast, and now was no exception. Even Ghost had to scramble to keep up as they shot through the gaping holes in the collapsed Skyways and back into the shaking city.
Or what was left of it.
“What the…”
All her life, the DFZ had been the city of the future. A famously huge, neon-lit, double-layered wonder of human magic, commerce, and ingenuity in all its forms. Now, though, it looked like an active war zone.
Every bit of construction was damaged. Buildings were cratered or collapsing or on fire, filling the sky with plumes of black smoke. Most of the elevated Skyway bridges were down, and those that hadn’t collapsed outright were cracked and sagging. Without their support, the city’s famous superscrapers were leaning like poles in quicksand, but the damage wasn’t limited to the upper city.
Down in what had been the Underground, fires were raging as gas lines snapped and electrical boxes exploded. Other blocks were still flooded, the streets washed under several feet of dirty water. But as horrible as all of this was to see, what made everything a thousand times worse was the fact that the destruction was moving.
The city wasn’t just broken. It was undulating, the buildings and roads twitching and shifting and curling in on themselves like cornered animals. Across the smoking skyline, out in the middle of the shallow green waters of Lake St. Clair, Algonquin’s white tower was in ruins. Since she’d been falling at the time, Marci hadn’t seen what had happened, but the uprooted superscraper must have struck true, because the entire top of the Lady of the Lakes’ famous stronghold had been knocked clean off.
From Julius’s back, Marci could actually see the tower’s elegantly swirled peak—and all the speared dragon head trophies that’d been stacked on top of it—lodged in the dirt several hundred feet inland on the lake’s Canadian side. But crazy as it was to see Algonquin’s Tower, the icon of the city, decapitated, that was nothing compared to the spirit beside it.
Marci had seen Algonquin many times now, and in many guises, but never like this. This was no Lady of the Lakes, no personification or humanizing element. This was Algonquin as she must have appeared that very first night magic came back: a skyscraper-sized spout of furiously spinning water.
The only thing bigger was the shadow of the Leviathan behind her. At first, Marci thought he was just hovering, but then she saw his tentacles down in the lake, sweeping water into Algonquin as her swirling pillar rose higher and higher, bigger and bigger, until, without warning, she burst, collapsing on the writhing city in a crushing, skyscraper-sized wave.
“Julius!”
He was moving before she’d even opened her mouth. Wings pounding, he flew them to a safe height moments before the tsunami of lake water crashed into the buildings. The city screamed when it hit, an inhuman cry of pain and rage Marci felt to her bones. Even Ghost trembled, his fear shooting up their connection like a spear of ice.
We have to stop this! he cried in her mind. At this rate, Algonquin will drown the city before we even make contact.
“I know!” Marci yelled back, leaning recklessly off Julius’s back to scan the city below. “We have to figure out a way to talk to her, convince her to stop fighting.”
She’s not going to stop fighting while Algonquin’s trying to destroy her.
“Then we’d better get to her before Algonquin throws another wave,” Marci said desperately. “She can’t keep this up. The DFZ’s the bigger spirit, but she doesn’t have Myron feeding her magic anymore, and she’s burning through it fast. Look.”
She pointed down at the buildings, which were all waving frantically like water plants in a storm. “I don’t know how much power it takes to make cement move like a snake, but I’m guessing a lot. With the seal still in place and no Merlin to pump extra magic into her, the DFZ’s bound to be out of gas soon. Once that happens, Algonquin can pound her into grit at her leisure.”
So what do we do?
“Stick to the plan,” Marci ordered. “We find the DFZ, defuse the situation, bring in Myron, and move on with Raven’s ploy while there’s still some city left to save.”
Or we could let them fight, the Empty Wind suggested, his glowing eyes eager. The DFZ has no Merlin, but as of right now, she’s still bigger than Algonquin. If we fought with her, we wouldn’t have to depend on Raven’s ruse. We could defeat Algonquin the old-fashioned way, smashing her power and draining her magic before she has a chance to call out to her Leviathan.
“Or we could drive her right into his slimy tentacles,” Marci pointed out. “We can’t take that risk. For all we know, her watery finger is already on the trigger.” She looked down at the flooded city, her face grim. “We stay the course.”
If you say so, the Empty Wind said bitterly, moving directly in front of Julius, who gave no sign he saw anything. I’ll go search for her, but be careful, Merlin. Algonquin’s back is to the wall, and the dragon’s not as fast as I am.
“That’s why you’re the one doing the looking,” she said with a smile. “I’ll be fine. Just be fast.”
Ghost’s sigh whispered through her head one last time, and then he was gone, vanishing into the rumbling night.
“So I only heard half of that conversation,” Julius said nervously, darting behind a huge building to hide them from Algonquin’s water spout, which was already rising again. “But I take it we’re staying up here while Ghost goes to look for…what again?”
“The spirit of the DFZ, soul of the city.”
“Right,” he said, landing on the side of the superscraper with his claws like a lizard on a tree. “And how do we find something like that?”
“Honestly, I have no idea,” Marci admitted. “But I’m hoping Ghost will—”
An earsplitting boom cut her off. It was so close, Marci’s first thought was that something had hit them. The fact that they were still in one piece proved that wasn’t the case, thankfully, but reality wasn’t much better.
Unsatisfied with merely flooding her enemy, Algonquin was now catapulting water directly into the city, flinging truck-sized shots of water at high speed directly into the DFZ skyline. One of these shots, the boom they’d heard, had scored a direct hit on the building they were hiding behind. As a result, the entire superscraper was now falling like a toppled tree, and Julius and Marci were on the wrong side.
“Go!” she screamed.
Julius pushed them off the side, wings pounding as he struggled to get clear, but even he wasn’t fast enough. The falling building was simply too big, and the space for acceleration too short as the skyscraper fell over on top of them with a groan of bending steel and breaking concrete. But then, just when the falling side of the building was close enough that Marci could see her terrified face in the cracked glass windows, it stopped.
For a breathless second, the building hung suspended in the air, and then it rolled to the left like it was rolling away down a hill. Marci was still trying to understand how that had happened when the broken building finally rolled far enough out of the way to reveal the enormous golden dragon floating serenely on the other side.
After that, she couldn’t do anything but stare. The dragon wasn’t the biggest she’d seen—that honor still went to Dragon Sees the Beginning—but he was hands down the most spectacular. The scales that covered his long, snaking body were pure gold, each one glinting like treasure in the light from the fires below. His shining eyes were golden, too, and he had no wings at all. If not for the white smoke curling like incense from his mouth, Marci would have sworn he was a giant floating statue.
Even when he began snaking through the air toward them, the movement looked too perfect to be real. She was wondering if he was some kind of conjured illusion when a slightly smaller—but still terrifyingly large—dragon with matte-black-dyed feathers and familiar green eyes appeared in the air beside him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the new dragon snarled in Chelsie’s voice, glaring murder at Julius, who was nearly hyperventilating from his race to get out from under the no-longer-falling building.
“You’re supposed to fly away from danger, idiot, not straight into...” She trailed off as her green eyes spotted Marci clinging to Julius’s back, and then the black dragon heaved a long, smoke-filled sigh. “Well, that explains a lot.”
“Who is she?” the golden dragon asked in a voice so beautiful, Marci almost fell off.
“His significant mortal.”
The golden dragon looked confused. “I thought she was dead.”
“So did I,” Chelsie said. “But I should know better by now than to assume anything with these two.” She flashed Marci a wall of teeth that was probably meant to be a smile. “Welcome back.”
Marci nodded slowly, but scary as the teeth were, she was far more interested in the tiny dragon she could now see clinging to Chelsie’s neck, its little golden eyes wide with excitement. “What is that?”
As usual, everyone except Julius ignored her. “It’s her daughter,” he whispered. “And the golden dragon is the Qilin Xian, also known as the Golden Emperor.”
“You mean the dragon who rules China?” When he nodded, Marci gasped. “What’s he doing here?”
“I’ll have to tell you later,” Julius said with a tired smile. “You aren’t the only one who’s had a lot going on.”
Clearly. Before she could say anything else, though, Julius turned to the golden dragon and lowered his head. “Thank you for saving us.”
“That wasn’t me,” the emperor said. “It was my son.”
He pointed down with a perfectly curved claw, and Marci and Julius both looked to see a third dragon hovering below them.
He was just as big as the Golden Emperor, but like Chelsie and Julius, he had wings and feathers. Glossy, true-black ones that set off his self-satisfied golden eyes beautifully as he shook the bits of building from his claws, which he’d clearly dug into the building before he’d pushed it away. But even that wasn’t the most impressive part. What really made Marci gasp were the bone-white sheaths covering each curving talon, augments she’d learned to recognize as the telltale sign of a transformed Fang of the Heartstriker.
“Who is that?”
“It’s Fredrick,” Julius said, eyes wide in amazement. “He’s huge.”
The Qilin smiled proudly. “He is my eldest son.”
“Fredrick’s your son?” Marci said incredulously. “The stuffy butler dragon?” When the Qilin nodded, she turned back to Julius in bafflement. “You’ve gotta tell me what happened while I was gone.”
“As soon as we get time,” Julius promised, glancing nervously toward the lake. “Right now, we have bigger problems.”
That was putting it mildly. Despite hurling what had to be an entire Great Lake’s worth of water at the city, Algonquin’s torrent was bigger than ever. She was now as tall as the Leviathan behind her, and she showed no sign of stopping.
Neither did the city. Down below, the flooded DFZ was rumbling like a drum. On the heavily built-up lakefront, the few buildings that hadn’t been flattened were shifting, curling over like fingers into a fist before crashing into the water below. One by one, the Lakefront developments punched into Algonquin’s water, forming a stone barricade against any new waves.
It was the same in the Underground. Old buildings, parked cars, even collapsed pieces of the Skyways rolled into position, stacking themselves like bricks to form a makeshift wall across the places where the lower city was open to the water.
Once the barriers were in place, the pounding magic in the air tightened like a pulled knot, closing so fast it made Marci gasp. Even the dragons winced, ducking for cover instinctively as the city roared and launched a new volley into the air.
This one was even bigger. The first attack had thrown a building into Algonquin’s Tower. This time, whole blocks went into the air, hurtling over the barriers at Algonquin herself. The buildings slammed into her water, breaking her apart and sending sprays of water flying so high into the air, they came down on the Canadian shore like rain. When she tried to re-form, the city hit her again, screaming with a triumphant wail of twisting metal as it continued to hurl buses, buildings, even whole hunks of overpass into the lake.
“That’s it,” Chelsie said as a car hurtled past her. “Time to go. Fredrick, take Julius and his mortal first. Xian and I can dodge until you—”
“I’m staying,” Julius said.
“Are you crazy?” Chelsie yelled, ducking the bus that flew by next. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it looks like the city’s gone to war with Algonquin!”
“Actually, that’s exactly what’s happening,” Marci said. “The DFZ—”
“This isn’t something we want to be in the middle of,” Chelsie said over her, swooping down to grab her brother. “Come on.”
“No,” Julius said stubbornly, dodging her. “I’m not leaving until I’ve helped her!”
There was only one person he could be talking about. Sure enough, all the dragons looked at Marci. But while the urge to cringe under the eyes of so many giant, magical predators was pretty intense, Marci was no longer just a mortal. She was a Merlin, and while she wasn’t as versed in the history of that title as Myron, she was pretty sure Merlins didn’t cower.
“I have to stop this,” she said, proud that her voice only shook a little. “Everything you see is happening because Algonquin is fighting the Mortal Spirit of the DFZ, and it’s going to get a lot worse. But despite what’s going on, the DFZ isn’t actually a violent spirit. If I can just get to her, I’m pretty sure I can talk her down.”
Chelsie looked unconvinced. “And you need Julius for this because…?”
“Because I’m not leaving her,” Julius growled. “Ever.”
His sister blew out a frustrated huff of smoke. “What is it with you? Why do you never run from danger like a sensible dragon?”
Julius clenched his jaw. “Because I—”
“That was rhetorical,” she snapped, turning around to face Algonquin’s pillar of water, which was now nearly to the sky. “You want to stay? Fine, but let’s not be stupid about it. You go with your human. I’ll head down there and find a way to keep the waterspout distracted. Fredrick, you get the emperor and your sister back to the mountain.”
Julius blinked at her. “What?”
“That’s my question,” Fredrick growled, flying up to join them. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Nothing I want to,” Chelsie growled back. “But Julius isn’t going to leave his mortal, and since I owe him pretty much everything at this point, that means I don’t get to leave her, either.”
“I never said you had to stay!” Julius cried.
“I’m not leaving you to fight alone,” Fredrick said at the same time. “You’re good, Chelsie, but even you can’t beat Algonquin.”
“If a single dragon could beat Algonquin, we would have fixed this problem years ago,” she said. “But I’m not going to fight her. I’m just going to buy Julius time so his mortal can do whatever she’s here to do and we can leave.”
“For the last time,” Julius growled. “You don’t have to—”
“Then I’m going with you,” Fredrick said, ignoring him. “I also owe Julius, and I’m not letting you do this alone.”
“Neither am I,” the Qilin said, moving closer to Chelsie. “I didn’t go through all of this to leave your side now. Besides, if you want your distraction to last longer than sixty seconds, you’re going to need my help.”
“Luck would help,” Chelsie admitted, though she didn’t look pleased. “But we do this my way. No heroics, nice and clean.”
“NO!” Julius yelled, shoving his way between the other dragons. “Do none of you have ears? I said no! N-O. No. You are not fighting Algonquin.”
“Now who doesn’t have ears?” Chelsie snapped. “We’re not fighting her. We’re occupying her attention.”
“Same difference,” Julius snapped back, his breaths coming fast and panicked. “I won’t let you do this.”
“That’s not your choice to make,” Fredrick said calmly, glaring at Julius in a way that did not fit the subservient F Marci remembered at all. “This debt is ours to pay. If you want to stay with your mortal, we’ll keep the lake spirit off you as long as we can. At the very least, she’ll be shooting at us instead of the city.”
“That would be really useful, actually,” Marci put in. “It’ll be a lot easier to talk the DFZ down if she’s not being actively punched in the face by Algonquin.”
“So she should punch my family instead?” Julius cried.
Chelsie sneered in disgust. “Like we’d let her get so close.” She started flying toward the lake. “Decision’s already been made, Julius. Take it and go, because we won’t be able to get you much.”
With a bob of his head, the Qilin took off after her, snaking through the night like a golden ribbon.
“Looks like that settles it,” Fredrick said, smiling at Julius as he turned to follow the others. “Good luck, sir.”
“Wait!” Julius yelled. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to…”
But the three dragons were already gone, shooting through the night toward Algonquin.
“Go,” Julius finished, head sagging.
Marci bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for—”
“It’s okay,” he said quickly. “Not your fault. It’s just…” He blew out an angry huff of smoke. “Dragons are very stubborn.”
Marci was tempted to tell him to look in the mirror on that one, but there wasn’t time. She wasn’t entirely sure about the dynamics of the dragon debts at play here, but if Chelsie, Fredrick, and the Qilin were determined to use this as an excuse to pay Julius back, she wasn’t going to waste it. Especially since Ghost was tugging on their connection.
Found anything? she thought at him.
There was a long pause, and then an image slipped into her mind. A dark, man-made cavern filled with water and debris and the lingering reek of death.
“Gotcha,” Marci said, looking down at Julius. “She’s in the Pit.”
He shuddered, his feathered body shaking under hers. “Of course she’d be there. Why would we ever go somewhere nice?”
He heaved another smoky sigh and cast one last look at the dragons flying toward Algonquin. Then, like he’d come to a decision, he dove down, flying toward the cluster of miraculously still-standing Financial District superscrapers and the polluted Pit that was hidden beneath them.
***
This trip to the Pit was very different from the last time Julius had been here.
It was still terrible, of course. Even the boiling magic that swelled up to cover the city wasn’t enough to overpower the deathly, oily feel of the DFZ Underground’s most polluted magical wasteland. Instead, the two mixed, forming a noxious amalgam that reeked of old decay, motor oil, and fetid lake water. In fairness, though, that last one was probably more physical than magical thanks to the five-foot-deep layer of dirty floodwater that currently covered the Pit’s silted floor.
“Lovely,” Marci said, holding her nose as Julius flew them in. “And here I thought this place couldn’t get any worse.”
“At least it’s not as dark as before,” he said, looking up at the Skyway ceiling, which, like all the other overpasses in the city, was now laced with cracks letting in light from above. Mostly the orange glow of the fires that were springing up all over town, despite Algonquin’s flood, but light was still good.
“We have to end this,” Marci muttered, her fingers clenching on his feathers. “At this rate, there’ll be nothing left to save.”
“No argument here,” Julius said. “But what are we looking for?”
She sighed against him. “No idea. The last time I saw her, the DFZ couldn’t make up her mind between smallish human and giant rat, but since spirits are just sentient magic, that doesn’t mean much. She could be anything, but I have a feeling we’ll know her when we see her.”
Julius hoped so, because right now, he couldn’t see much of anything. The last time he’d been here, the Pit had looked like a flattened, abandoned suburb buried like a body under the thickest part of Algonquin’s elevated city, which made sense since that was exactly what it was. As the first victim of Algonquin’s flood, the Pit—or Grosse Point as it was known in those days—had never really recovered.
While the rest of Detroit had been either rebuilt or built over, this place had been sealed up like a tomb, covered with Skyways and locked in the dark like a dirty secret. Nothing had been improved or changed. Even the silt from the first flood was still here, lying like a blanket over the broken streets and the foundations of the houses crushed by Algonquin’s wave, making it looked like the suburb was at the bottom of a dark and unpleasant sea.
The illusion was only made stronger by the new layer of water that covered everything. But while there were streams of water falling from the broken Skyways overhead, Julius didn’t think this flooding was from the wave earlier, or even from the river’s flood before that. He couldn’t say why, exactly, but he felt certain that this water was from before that, the fallout of some earlier disaster.
It smelled old, he decided. Old and very strongly of lake. He was trying to figure out if that was important or not when Marci yelled out.
“There!” she cried, pointing.
Once he saw it, Julius had no idea how he’d missed it. Even in the Pit’s strangely thick darkness, it should have been impossible to miss the giant pile of trash rising from the lowest point of the Pit’s bowl-like landscape.
Pile was the wrong word, he decided as they got closer. This was a tower, a leaning column twenty feet in diameter made from busted cars, washing machines, bricks, drywall, outdated computer parts—all sorts of nonsense.
The sideways-tilting stack went all the way from the Pit’s flooded floor to the ceiling of the broken Skyways thirty feet overhead, connecting the ground to the city like a giant root. Not being a mage, Julius had no idea what that meant, but the structure definitely hadn’t been here before.
“Is that our target?”
“Nothing else it could be,” Marci said excitedly, pointing at the rusted hood of one of the cars at the bottom of the pile. “Set down there. Ghost’s already headed inside to check it out.”
Even for a death spirit, going inside a giant pillar of mysterious trash that might be the heart of an enraged spirit sounded like a really bad idea. Julius didn’t even want to get near it. Now that they were closer, he could actually feel the thing pulsing with the same magic he’d felt roaring through the city. But this was the whole reason they were here, so he sucked it up and landed where Marci had pointed, setting down on the edge of the car’s bumper like a bird landing on a windowsill.
An extremely disgusting windowsill.
“Ugh,” he said, lifting his feet. “It’s all slimy. Like that time we walked through the storm drain.”
“It does feel slimy,” Marci said, hopping off his back to touch the car for herself. “Weird. I wonder if that’s from the flooding or something else?”
Given how creepy this place was, Julius’s money was on something else. He’d felt more of Algonquin’s magic than any dragon should at this point, but while her lake water was cold and clammy and unpleasant in the extreme, it had never felt polluted. This stuff felt like the filthy magic of the Pit turned physical, and the more Julius thought about that, the less he liked this whole situation.
“I don’t think this is a good place for the spirit of the DFZ to be.”
“Me neither,” Marci agreed, walking across the car hood to stand in front of the wall of debris that formed the pillar. “I’ve noticed that Mortal Spirits seem to be highly influenced by emotions in their magic. Remember back in Reclamation Land when Ghost got all huge and scary? It was because he was channeling the anger of everyone Algonquin had killed. I wonder if the same thing is happening to the DFZ? I mean, she was already pissed at Algonquin, but this is the place where the wave first crashed down. Not a good memory.”
“Definitely not,” Julius said, covering his nose with his wing. “The magic smells awful.”
“Really?” Marci turned around with an excited smile. “You have to let me study how you smell magic sometime!”
The demand was so like her, it made his heart clench. It still didn’t feel real that Marci was back, alive and smiling and asking to study him. It really was a miracle, and perversely, that bothered him. As happy as he was, she was too important for him to just accept all of this on faith. The whole idea of mortality was that no one came back from death, and while he was used to Marci doing the impossible, it never came without a cost, which begged the question, what had Marci paid? What had she suffered or promised or given up to return, and how could he help her? He was working up the courage to ask when she went still.
“What?” he asked, instantly alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, scowling. “Ghost was just in the middle of telling me something, and then he stopped.”
“Do you think something happened?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He didn’t sound alarmed, but it’s not like him to just drop out in the middle of a conversa—”
Marci cut off with a gasp. From deep inside the slimy column of trash she’d been poking, two arms had shot out. They were long and slender, like a thin woman’s, but they grabbed Marci like a steel trap, wrapping around her neck and waist before snatching her backward into the trash.
“Marci!”
Julius threw himself after her, crashing into the wall of random objects, but he wasn’t fast enough to snatch her back. The last thing he saw was her eyes wide with surprise as the trash ate her, opening like a mouth before snapping shut again in his face.
“No!” he roared, clawing at the wall. No, no, no.
He’d lost her. He’d had her and he’d lost her again. He’d lost—
Julius roared, shaking the Pit to the Skyways as he slammed his full weight into the slimy wall of random debris. The tower shook like a tree, sending bits of trash splashing into the water around him. He was about to hit it again when a croaking voice called out.
“I wouldn’t do that.”
Julius’s head snapped up. Even with his excellent night vision, though, it took several seconds to spot the enormous black bird perched in a shadowy nook beneath the broken Skyway ramps, much as the magic eaters had the last time Julius had been here. That wasn’t a pleasant connection, and Julius growled low in his throat as the giant bird spread his wings and hopped off, coasting down through the dark to land on the broken antenna of the car the dragon was standing on.
“Hello again, Julius Heartstriker,” Raven said. “You remember me, I’m sure.”
“How could I forget?” Julius replied, baring his teeth. “Your human killed Marci.”
“Now, now, let’s not bring poor Emily into this,” the spirit said. “You already took your chunk out of her, and you should be delighted to see me.”
“Why?” he growled, because he couldn’t think of a single reason.
Raven turned his head to peer at him with one bright black eye. “Because I’m the one who brought your beloved Marci back from the dead.”
Julius’s growling grew louder. “Why should I believe a famous trickster?”
“Because I’m also famous for bringing souls back from the dead,” Raven croaked cheerfully. “Look it up sometime, but not right now. We have to go after our Merlin.”
Julius lifted his head. “Merlin?” he said, smiling despite himself. “Marci’s a Merlin?”
“The greatest one we have,” Raven assured him. “Also the only one we have, which is why we’re in a hurry. I carried Marci’s soul back to her body as part of a rather brilliant plan, the details of which I don’t have time to go into and, quite frankly, you lack the expertise to understand. Marci’s actually still on track to hold up her end, but I’m worried because things have gone a little strange.”
“Strange how?” Julius demanded. “And what is Marci supposed to be doing in there?”
Raven looked pained. “The answer to both is the DFZ. Again, I don’t have time for a proper explanation, but the quick-and-dirty version is the city’s gone mad with power. Marci’s supposed to be talking her down, but only after she starts to run out of power. That should have happened several minutes ago, but as I’m sure you’ve noticed, her fight against Algonquin hasn’t exactly washed out.” He chuckled. “That’s a pun.”
Julius growled, and the spirit quickly moved on.
“Anyway, since the DFZ’s still going strong, I can only conclude she’s found another way to keep her magic flowing, and I don’t like that. She and Algonquin are holding toe to toe right now, but if the battle starts to turn and Algonquin gets desperate, things will get very bad very quickly.”
“Wait, Algonquin?” Julius sputtered. “You’re worried about Algonquin?”
“I’m worried about a lot of things,” Raven said. “Including a certain human girl who’s almost guaranteed to be in over her head right now. I can help you go in there after her, but you have to do exactly as I say.”
To get Marci back? “Anything.”
The spirit chuckled. “That’s what I thought.” He hopped off the antenna to land on the bend of Julius’s wing, glaring at the wall of trash. “The creature in that pile has taken something precious from both of us. Neither of us is enough on our own, and I’m not sure if we’ll be enough together, either. But if my hunch is correct, we won’t be too much longer.”
Julius had no idea what any of that meant, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to get to Marci. “Just tell me what to do.”
The spirit’s black eyes glittered. “Burn it down.”
Julius blinked. “What?”
“You breathe fire, don’t you?” Raven said, bobbing his head at the slimy trash. “Use it. Burn it down.”
“But Marci’s inside!” he cried. “I can’t just—”
“If she was close enough to get hurt by your flames, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” the spirit said. “Like I told you, things have gone a bit strange. But that can work to our advantage, too. Just give it a try.”
Breathing fire was the last thing Julius wanted to do. He’d never been good at it, and he couldn’t get over the idea that Marci was on the other side of that wall. If he went too hot, he might cook her before he knew it. But fear of losing Marci again made a dragon do crazy things, so he breathed in deep, reaching down into the fire that burned inside him until his skin heated and his throat tingled.
Not including his attack on General Jackson, which he barely remembered and thus didn’t count, Julius hadn’t breathed fire in a very long time. As a result, his first try came out both too fast and too wide. His second attempt was much better, a blast of flame that turned from orange to yellow to white as he pushed harder and harder.
He melted the wall Marci had vanished through in seconds, then the car waiting behind that. Next came a large stretch of drywall that he turned into a blackened hunk, then a washing machine and a dumpster, but still there was more. The column of trash was only twenty feet across, and yet the more he burned, the more there was. Soon enough, he’d made a tunnel of slag he could walk inside, folding his wings tight against his body to avoid the glowing edges of the hole he’d cut.
He was now far deeper into the pillar than it was wide, but there was no end in sight. Every time he tried to stop, though, the Raven on his shoulder cawed for him to keep going, keep pushing.
He was in serious danger of overheating when the spirit suddenly flew up to perch on top of his head, his black eyes shining in the light of Julius’s flames as he leaned toward them to whisper, “Ready?”
The word went through him like a knife. He could actually feel it traveling down his fire, and then, deep inside, deep down in the parts Julius didn’t touch easily or often, something clenched. It was like teeth had bitten down on the source of his flames, but not to yank them out. Instead, a strange breath breathed him hotter, filling his fire with new color and heat as a familiar female voice spoke through the flames.
Ready.
The word was still dancing when Julius’s fire leaped out of his mouth. Literally jumped, the flames moving with a life of their own as they twisted and roared together into the shape of a dragon. An enormous red one with wide, flaming wings and sharp, sharp teeth that ripped into the endless wall of trash like flaming swords, but didn’t harm it. This flame didn’t touch the physical world Julius had been slowly burning his way through. It burned the slimy magic itself, cutting through the muck like a blowtorch through paper until the pillar of trash was completely consumed, and in the ashes, a new world appeared.
Julius stumbled back in surprise, coughing as the smoke filled his lungs. They were standing in the Pit. Not the current flooded one, but the Pit as he remembered it from their fight with Bixby.
A few seconds later, Julius realized that wasn’t quite it either. This Pit was far bigger than what he remembered, a huge open cavern that smelled like a grave. Strange as that was, though, Julius couldn’t spare it more than a glance. His instinctual focus was pinned on the new dragon in front of him.
The one that had come out of his fire.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
The dragon looked over her shoulder, her red flames flickering like laughter. Don’t you recognize me, Baby J?
Julius jumped. Like before, the words had come from inside him, but not from his mind. This was deeper, down in the roots of his fire. Weird as that was, though, what really knocked Julius for a loop was the part where she was right. He did recognize that voice. It was one he knew well, but never thought he’d hear again.
“Amelia?”
In the flesh, the fiery dragon said with a grin. Or not, as the case may be. But I see how all this awesomeness might be a little intimidating. Give me a second.
She spread her wings, and the fire that was her body shifted, the flames swirling into something far more compact. By the time they settled again, Amelia’s human form stood in front of him exactly as he remembered her from the first time they’d met, right down to the red dress and the flask on her hip.
“There,” she said in a physical voice this time, looking at Julius with eyes that gleamed like the fire she’d just been. “Man, it’s good to be back.”
She flashed him a cheeky smile, but Julius just stood there sputtering.
“How?” he got out at last. “You were—”
“Dead?” She laughed. “Only temporarily.”
“But Svena saw Bob kill you,” Julius said angrily. “I collected your ashes.”
“You did?” she said, her voice touched. “That was sweet of you, kiddo, but you should have known there was no need. This is me we’re talking about! I take ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ to a whole new level.”
“Modest as always, I see,” Raven said, flapping over to land on her shoulder. “But I have to say, you’re looking much better.”
“I feel much better,” Amelia said, looking down at her body. “Julius gave me one hell of a light.” She flashed him a grateful smile. “Thanks for that, by the way. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through today.”
Julius didn’t believe any of this. “So Bob didn’t kill you?”
“Oh no, he killed me good,” Amelia said. “But only because I asked him to.”
He stared at her in horror. “Why would you do that?”
“Because he was the only one who could,” she said, lifting her chin proudly. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a hard target. But it was all part of our plan. He killed me so I could hitch a ride on Marci’s death to the spirit world and become this.” She threw out her hands in a grand gesture as her voice echoed again through Julius’s fire.
Say hello to the Spirit of Dragons, your new god!
Julius stumbled backward. Even the joy at discovering his sister wasn’t actually dead and Bob might not actually be the murderer he’d feared couldn’t gain traction next to the incredible strangeness of feeling another dragon in his fire. “I don’t think I’m ready for this.”
“No one’s ready for this,” Amelia assured him, smiling her cockiest smile yet. “I told you I had bigger ambitions than Heartstriker. But I’ll have to fill you in on the details later. Right now, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
She turned as she finished, pointing through the dark of this new Pit at the structure that marked its center. In the same place the pillar of trash had been back in the real world, a silver casting circle glittered on the silted ground. Inside it, silver ribbons of spellwork crisscrossed like the net across a dream catcher, pinning down an older man Julius recognized immediately as Sir Myron Rollins, the UN’s undersecretary of magic. What he was doing there, Julius didn’t know, but though his eyes were closed, his hands were moving, clenching and unclenching around the dark, irregular object he held clutched to his chest. A head, Julius realized in horror. Emily Jackson’s head.
“Why is that here?”
“Because she’s the key,” Raven said, his croaking voice suddenly huge and terrifying. “So that’s how she was doing it.”
“Doing what?” he asked.
Both spirits ignored him.
“That would explain a lot,” Amelia agreed, looking around. “The only question now is where’s the owner of this house of cards?”
“That’s not the only question,” Julius snapped, his voice frantic as he realized there was no one else waiting in the dark.
“Where’s Marci?!”
***
Marci was getting pretty darn sick of being snatched into the dark.
The hands that had dragged her into the pile of debris let go almost immediately, leaving her to fall backwards through trash that felt increasingly like the world of spirits she’d just left. What little light there was in the Pit had vanished in the first inch, leaving her struggling in a crowded dark that reeked of fetid water, grime, and magic.
So much magic. More than she’d ever felt floating freely on this side. It was so strong, it burned her skin, making her hiss even as she reached out frantically with her mental hands, grabbing as much of the ambient power as she could to use as a barrier. And a megaphone.
“Ghost!” she cried, letting the power amplify her call. When there was no reply, she tried again.
“GHOST!”
Again, there was no answer, and Marci clenched the magic with a curse. She’d known something was wrong when he’d stopped talking. But when she went to grab another handful of magic to try blasting her way out of whatever this was, something struck her from behind, shoving her out of the dark and into a blinding sea of lights.
Marci fell on the ground with a grunt, blinking rapidly as she struggled to adjust her eyes. When she could more or less see again, she raised her head and found herself in a familiar place.
It was the DFZ. Not the ruined one, but also not the one she remembered. Instead, she was standing in the crowded square from the endless city she’d found inside the DFZ’s vessel in the Sea of Magic, and the DFZ herself was right in front of her.
“Welcome back.”
Marci shoved herself to her feet, glaring at the hooded figure of the girl who appeared to be the city’s self-image when she wasn’t being a rat. “Where’s my spirit?”
The DFZ’s glowing orange eyes twinkled cruelly in reply, and then she flicked her hand to drop something small, white, and limp at Marci’s feet. Something that looked terrifyingly like a dead cat.
“Ghost!”
She scooped her limp spirit into her arms. “What did you do to him?”
“Only what was inevitable,” the city replied casually. “He was weak. I was strong. He set himself against me. I struck him down. Cause and effect.”
“But he wasn’t against you!” Marci shouted. “Neither of us is. We’re here to help you!”
“Do I look like I need your help?” the DFZ said, looking up at the endless expanse of superscrapers that rose above their heads. “Where do you think you are?”
Now that she’d said it, Marci realized with a start that she didn’t know. It looked like they were back in the DFZ’s domain at the bottom of the Sea of Magic, but that was impossible, because they weren’t in the Sea of Magic. This was the physical world, not the land of spirits, and yet it felt all wrong. The magic here wasn’t the normal soft, ambient power she was used to. It wasn’t even the heavy magic of Reclamation Land, or the boiling magic she’d felt when Ghost had flown her through the city. Whatever was going on here, it was new, and it was getting stronger by the second.
“What did you do?”
“What I had to,” the DFZ snarled. “Algonquin tried to smother me, to hold me back, but she’s no longer the biggest spirit around. I am. I have all the power now, and I will destroy her for what she has done to me.”
“You’re destroying yourself,” Marci said angrily. “Look outside! Your city is in ruins.”
“Because of Algonquin.”
“Because of you!” she cried. “You’re the one throwing buildings! Algonquin gets more water every time it rains, but you can’t grow new superscrapers.”
“Of course I can,” the DFZ said. “Detroit always rebuilds.”
You can’t rebuild lost lives.
Marci jumped, snapping her head down to the cat in her arms. He still looked terrifyingly faint, but his ghostly blue eyes were open and glaring at the spirit in front of them with righteous fury.
Can you not hear them? he growled. Algonquin evacuated your city to weaken you, to rob you of your heart, but she did a sloppy job. The poor, the forgotten, those who couldn’t leave, they’re all still here. Your people, the blood of your streets, they’re here, and you’re killing them.
The DFZ sneered. “They’re just mortals.”
WE are mortal! Ghost roared, his mouth opening in a silent hiss. We are the souls of humanity’s care, of its hopes and fears! We are them, they are us, and you are sacrificing both to Algonquin!
“I’m standing up to Algonquin!” the DFZ roared back, her orange eyes painfully bright. “I’m the only one of us with the guts to fight her and her monster! I don’t care if it takes every building I have. I will destroy her lakes. I will kill her as she tried to kill me!”
The spirit’s anger vibrated through the magic, and Marci shuddered. She had no idea where the DFZ was getting all this power, but for once, the amount of magic was less important than the source.
As a Thaumaturge, Marci had been taught that magic was magic. No matter where it came from, once it went through spellwork, it was all the same. The more time she spent with spirits, though, the more Marci realized this wasn’t the case with them.
Spirits weren’t spells. They were magic itself. Their vessels gave them shape, but the type of magic that filled that space determined the spirit’s mindset, or lack thereof.
She’d seen it happen at least twice with Ghost: once when they were fighting Vann Jeger and once in Reclamation Land. Both times, he’d been consumed by the rage of the Forgotten Dead, and both times, she’d had to pull him back. Now, Marci suspected the same thing was happening to the DFZ.
This wasn’t just righteous anger at Algonquin for hurting her. This was blind rage, self-destructive madness. The DFZ was willing to destroy her own city, her very self, to strike back at the Lady of the Lakes. Most telling, though, was that this kind of nihilism didn’t match the city Marci knew at all.
The DFZ was a city of hope and ambition, a place where fortunes were made. People came here to make a new start, not break themselves for revenge. The anger in the air, the rage that shook the girl in front of her—it wasn’t the magic of the DFZ she knew, but it was the magic of spirits angry enough to give their lives for Algonquin.
It’s more than that, Ghost said, his nose twitching. She’s drenched in old death. Old rage and revenge are all over her like oil.
That sounded familiar. “It’s the Pit,” Marci said, snapping her fingers. “She’s pulling in magic from the Pit.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” the DFZ cried, her voice taking on a terrifying, desperate edge. “That’s where I was born. Algonquin has always drowned me. From the very beginning, she’s held me under, made me suffer. But now it’s her turn.” The spirit lifted her face to the illusion city’s false sky. “I will bury her lakes and destroy her water! I will make her pay!”
The word came out in a scream, and the thrumming magic tightened like a fist. The resulting pressure crumpled the buildings and flattened the faceless crowds of her domain. It cracked the ground and shook the air and set Marci’s head ringing. Even Ghost looked pained, his ears pressed flat against his skull.
The only one who didn’t seem to feel it was the DFZ. She laughed at the cracking pressure, clenching her hands into fists to match. “I will kill her!” she cried joyfully. “I will make her suffer! I—”
There was more, but Marci had already shut the mad voice out, focusing instead on the magic around them, and how to stop it.
We have to cut her off, Ghost said in her head, his freezing claws digging into her flesh. She’s not just full. She’s overflowing. I don’t know where it’s all coming from, but no Mortal Spirit can control this much magic without a Merlin.
“She’s got a Merlin.”
Not one she wants.
“But he’s the one we’ve got,” Marci said, mind racing. “And actually, I think that’s why this is happening.”
She turned back to the DFZ, who was still ranting at the sky. It was a horrifying sight, but Marci forced herself to push past the fear and really look at her, noting all the details of the spirit’s black hoodie and plain clothes, the sort that came from the cheap clothing vending machines that were so popular all over the DFZ. Her streetlight-orange eyes and short, spiky, rat-brown hair. With the LED around her wrists, neck, and ankles shining like neon against the dark of her outfit, she really did look just like the stereotype of the DFZ street rat, and yet—
“There!” Marci threw out her hand, pointing at the flash of silver that trailed from the spirit’s left pinky. It was so thin, so fine, it was barely visible against all the other chaos, but it was there, falling from her hand to the sidewalk below, where it vanished into the cement like a fishing line into water.
“Gotcha,” she whispered, hugging her cat tight as she shoved up off the ground and ran across the false square toward the stairwell that, in this version of the DFZ at least, still led to the Underground.
Where are we going?
“To where it started,” she panted, racing down the stairs. She was taking them two at a time when the spirit in her arms transformed, leaving her hugging not a cat, but an angry solider with a shadow for a face and eyes that burned with blue-white determination.
“Then let’s go,” he growled, whisking them both off the stairwell and into the shadows of the sprawling Underground as fast as the wind could blow.