Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers) (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We?” Ian interrupted.

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

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

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

“So find out.”

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

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

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

Julius blinked. “Um, thank you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julius closed his eyes with a ragged breath.

“I’m waiting.”

“Yes,” he growled.

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

Julius almost choked.
“Tomorrow?
But—
”

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

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

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

Chapter 6

M
eanwhile, high atop a superscraper in the Upper City, far from the dirt and tawdry worries of the world below, Svena, White Witch of the Three Sisters, Terrible Serpent of the Sibirskoe and, once, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, the Savage Protector of Ljubljana, lay reclined in Ian’s enormous bed, regarding her newest lover through slitted eyes.

Said lover, however, was not looking at her. Ian was typing messages into the AR keyboard of his phone, an activity that had occupied his attention ever since he’d hung up on his whining puppy of a baby brother. But where a younger, less secure dragoness would have been deathly insulted by such divided attention, Svena did not mind. As the second daughter of her own clan, she understood the demands of having to report on the doings of absurd younger siblings, and anyway, the lull in their activities gave her a chance to enjoy the view.

And what a view it was. All dragons were pleasing to look on in their human forms, but Svena had always secretly considered the Heartstrikers a breed unto themselves. There was just something intoxicatingly exotic about their warm tanned skin, sharp, haughty features, and straight, ink-black hair that brought to mind equatorial climates and golden cities full of cowering humans who still remembered their rightful place. Even Ian’s eyes reminded her of bright green jungles, and this was just his mortal disguise. After hearing tales of Bethesda’s beauty for the last thousand years, Svena was perishing of curiosity to see if the Feathered Serpent’s glory had bred true in her son, enough that she’d actually asked him to change for her as they’d lain together in the aftermath. A request that Ian had refused, the clever little snake.

“I see what you are doing,” she said when he finally put down his phone. “You are teasing me. You think if you do not show me your feathers, curiosity will drive me back to your clutches.”

Ian leaned across the silk sheets to kiss her bare shoulder. “Naturally.”

She arched an eyebrow, and Ian gave her a serpentine smile. “If I wasn’t sure you could see through such a shallow ruse, I would not have pursued you in the first place. Fortunately for me, knowledge of the bait’s true nature does not lessen its temptation.” His smile widened. “Of course, considering how much you enjoyed being in my clutches, perhaps I didn’t need to bother with bait at all.”

He reached for her as he spoke, but Svena slid away at the last moment, rising from the bed with a languid stretch. “Arrogant creature. You talk very big for a hatchling not yet out of his second century.”

“You deserve no less,” Ian said, lying back on the bed to watch her. “A little youthful arrogance would serve you well, Svena, and you know it. That’s why you agreed to come home with me in the first place.”

She picked up her discarded dress off the floor and pulled it over her head. “Are you a seer, then, to predict what I do?” When he didn’t reply, she turned to face him and let her human form recede. Not fully, not even enough to change size. Just a hint, an icy whisper to remind him of the force he was daring to taunt. “Do not presume to know my mind, little dragon. Perhaps I only wished to see for myself if you were as wanton as your mother.”

For a moment, Ian’s green eyes flickered. That surprised her, but then, she’d never met a Heartstriker who could stand to hear his mother’s name impinged. A prideful idiocy, Svena had always though, and a pointless one. With ten clutches from ten different fathers in barely a thousand years, Bethesda the Heartstriker’s honor was an impossible thing to defend.

“My mother is my mother,” Ian said, lifting his chin with a look of such arrogance, Svena’s breath caught in delight. “A great and powerful dragoness who commands the largest dragon clan in the world. When the magic faded centuries ago, your mothers fled beneath the Siberian ice, sleeping and hoarding their power out of fear.
My
mother adapted, and now that magic has returned, she is already moving to make this world her own. It’s true she isn’t an ancient power, but no power lasts forever, Svena. By the time your mothers wake, they will find themselves forgotten, and Heartstriker will be the name all the world fears.”