Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers) (21 page)

“Okay,” he said with a sigh. “So we’re closing in. What’s the plan when we get there?”

He directed the question at Justin, partially because he needed to know, and partially to prevent his brother from snipping at Marci again. He’d taken to playing peace-keeper for the last quarter hour just so he wouldn’t have to hear them bicker, and he’d quickly discovered that the key to keeping harmony between his mage and his brother was to keep each of them focused on their respective jobs. Fortunately, both Justin and Marci were highly distractable when it came to their areas of expertise.

“Recon comes first,” Justin said, drumming his fingers on his sword hilt. “We need to know what we’re up against. Once we’ve got that, we make a battle plan from the information and proceed from there.” He glanced back at Julius. “I’ll do the actual fighting, of course. The way you’re panting like an old woman, you’d probably just give yourself a heart attack.”

“I am not panting like an old woman!” Julius protested, albeit breathlessly. This hike through the pipes had been a lot more exercise than he was used to. “I’m just a bit out of shape.”

“I can’t tell you ever had a shape to start with,” his brother said, giving him a caustic look. “Seriously, what happened to you? You used to be the fastest of all of us, but I think even Jessica could run circles around you now. Did you completely stop training when you exiled yourself to your room?”

More or less, Julius thought with a sigh. He’d hadn’t liked combat training even back when he’d been relatively good at it, and once he’d turned seventeen and his clutch had been declared ready to enter the world, he’d seen no reason to continue. This was especially true living at home since the nature of combat training meant it had to be done in the same gym used by the exact hyper-competitive, aggressive older siblings he’d hidden in his room to
avoid
. Before he could think of a more flattering way to explain his lapse to Justin, Marci’s voice rang out down the tunnel.

“Found it!”

Justin was moving at once, racing down the pipe and around the corner Marci had turned. Julius followed hot on his heels… and nearly crashed into him when he rounded the corner to find both Justin and Marci standing right on the other side. They were perfectly still, staring at what appeared to be a black wall. A second later, though, Julius saw it wasn’t actually a wall at all. It was a precipice.

Beyond the cement lip, the sewer fell away into a space so huge, Marci’s flashlight couldn’t penetrate the darkness to find the edges. Julius couldn’t even guess how big the room beyond must be, but what really bothered him was the smell. The air here was still, far too still for such a large space, but the draft that did reach him had a cold, oily thickness to it that he didn’t like at all.

“What’s down there?” he asked, covering his nose.

“No idea,” Marci said, glancing at the golden ball in her hands. “But the Kosmolabe says our target is dead ahead.”

She pointed straight down into the inky dark, and suddenly, Julius was more certain than ever that this was not something they should be doing. “I—”

“There’s a ladder right here,” Justin interrupted, reaching out to grab the condensation-beaded metal ladder bolted to the wall beside the ledge. “Let’s go.”

Julius grabbed his brother’s sleeve. “I don’t think we should go down there,” he whispered, deliberately pitching his voice too low for Marci’s ears. “I don’t like the smell of this place.”

“You don’t like anything,” Justin said. “It’s part of being a wuss.”

Julius ignored the insult and tightened his grip. “I mean I
really
don’t like it.” Even just standing on the edge, he could feel the strange, oily power of the darkness below coating his lungs with every breath. “We shouldn’t do this.”

His brother smacked his hand away. “Enough. Stop being an embarrassment and come on.” With that, Justin grabbed the metal ladder with one hand and swung out, pivoting like a hinge to land on the nearest rung. The moment he was steady, he clamped the insoles of both his boots against the ladder’s side rails and let go, sliding down the ladder into the blackness.

Marci watched him vanish with a look of grudging respect. “Fearless, isn’t he?” she muttered, stowing the Kosmolabe back in her bag.

“I think it’s more that his arrogance has created a shell so thick, no fear can get through,” Julius replied, reaching out to grab the disgustingly slick, cold ladder. “Let’s get this over with.”

It took them forever to reach the bottom. Not because they had particularly far to go—the seemingly endless drop ended up being only about thirty feet—but because Marci’s pace down the ladder was only slightly faster than glacial.

Julius didn’t blame her in the least. This place looked like a pit into the abyss even to his eyes, so he couldn’t imagine what it must look like for her. It didn’t help that the ladder’s metal rungs were strangely pitted, like they’d been etched with a strong corrosive. Some rungs had actually rotted through completely, forcing them to cling to the ladder’s edge and slid down to the next solid foothold. But though Marci’s breathing sped up to almost hyperventilating every time she had to skip a step, she didn’t complain, and she didn’t stop.

By the time they finally reached the bottom, Julius had decided he was going to regain his ability to fly if it killed him. To add insult to injury, the climb hadn’t even gotten them anywhere. The ladder let out on wide cement platform beside what looked like an artificial underground lake. Justin, who’d gotten there way ahead of them, was already pacing the edge, his growling audible even in his human form. “There’s nothing here!”

“This must be the spillway overflow,” Julius said, shining Marci’s flashlight, which he’d carried down the ladder in his teeth, directly into the murky water in a futile attempt to see how deep it went. “Somewhere for all the excess water in the system to collect until it can be pumped out and treated.”

“I don’t care what it is!” Justin yelled. “It’s not mages. That stupid Cosmonaut led us to a dead end!”

“
Kosmolabe
,” Marci corrected sharply, snatching the aforementioned golden ball out of her bag again. “And it’s
not
a dead end. According to this, our mages are right there.”

She pointed at the water, and Justin threw up his hands. “What? Are you saying they’ve got a low-rent Atlantis down there or something?”

Marci made an irritated sound. “I
meant
on another level.”

“I don’t think there is another level,” Julius said softly. “If this is where the water’s resting, then this is probably as low as it goes.”

“Well, that doesn’t make any sense at all,” Marci said, walking toward the water’s edge with a huff. “Let me look.”

Julius caught her sleeve before she’d taken two steps. Now that they’d reached the bottom of the pit, the cold, oily pressure was stronger than ever. He wasn’t quite sure if it was the natural magic of this particular place or something more sinister, but there was a lot of it, and he didn’t want any of them getting closer than was absolutely necessary.

“Come on,” he said, tugging Marci gently back toward the ladder. “Let’s get out of—”

“Incoming!”

Julius fell into an instinctive crouch, while Marci jumped a full foot in the air. They both whirled around to see Justin standing at the lake’s edge with his sword in his hands, and Julius’s breath caught. He’d only seen a Fang of the Heartstriker out of its sheath once before in his life, and never up close. He didn’t have a chance to gawk, though, because at that moment, the water in front of Justin exploded.

Chapter 8

H
is first thought was that a bomb had gone off. The lake, which up to this point had been silent and smooth as a polished stone, erupted like a volcano, sending water surging up in long, black streams. It wasn’t until the streams opened their mouths to reveal perfectly circular rings of razor-sharp teeth that latched on to his brother, however, that Julius realized what was actually going on.

“Justin!”

But Justin was already sweeping the curved, wickedly sharp blade of the Fang of the Heartstriker down, slicing through the mass of black, wiggling shapes like they were made of tofu. The toothed heads kept biting even after he’d separated them from their bodies, though, so Justin was forced to retreat, jumping back to where Julius and Marci were sheltered against the wall.

“What the—” His words cut off in a bellow as he ripped a clamped jaw off his arm.
“What’s with the snakes?”

“They’re not snakes,” Julius said, leaning over to look at the head in his brother’s bloody hands before Justin flung it away. “I think they’re sea lampreys.”

“Ugh,” Marci said. “You mean those things with the flat mouths and the rings of teeth that latch on to you and suck your organs out?”

“I never heard of them sucking organs out,” he said as he helped his brother pry another severed head—which did indeed have a hinged jaw that opened to form a perfectly flat, round ring of sharp teeth—off his leg. “They’re an invasive species to the Great Lakes. I’d thought Algonquin had kicked them all out, but clearly these found a way back in.” He grimaced at the basketball-sized head in his hands and tossed it back into the churning water. “They’re not normally this big, though.”

Marci gave him a funny look. “Are you a lamprey fan or something?”

“I studied them in my New Ecosystems of the Great Lakes class,” Julius explained. When this only seemed to make her more confused, he added, “I have a bachelor’s degree in Applied Ecology from NYU Online.”

Marci’s mouth fell open. “You’re an
ecologist?
”

“Try professional student,” Justin said with snort, brushing the blood off his body like another man might brush off dirt. “If it’s online, undergrad, and useless, Julius has it. He also has degrees in Pop Culture, Art History, and Accounting.”

“Accounting’s not useless,” Marci said.

Justin ripped the final lamprey head off his shoulder. “It is if you don’t have any accounts.”

“I like learning things,” Julius said irritably, though that was only a half truth. He
did
find school interesting, but the sad reality was that online classes and gaming had been the only things that kept him sane and connected to the outside world during the years he’d spent hiding from his family’s plots. Also, being in school had been a great way to keep his mother off his back, at least until she’d realized he was studying things that interested him instead of properly draconic topics like how to exploit the legal system or become a titan of international finance. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What I want to know is why there’s a lake full of super-sized lampreys below Detroit.”

“Well, if there was a lake of super-sized lampreys anywhere, it would be here,” Marci said. “This place is Ground Zero for weird.”

She crouched down beside one of the black, slimy bodies Justin had severed. Even without its head, the snake-like corpse was easily as long as she was tall, its slick, muscular flesh barely dimpling when Marci poked it. “They must have gotten washed into the storm water system at some point, and then the magic down here caused them to change.” She wrinkled her nose. “It
is
pretty thick.”

‘Pretty thick’ didn’t begin to describe the cold, pressurized magic Julius could feel pushing down on them from all directions. “I told you we should have turned around.”

Marci shrugged. “Well, at least this explains why the Kosmolabe led us here. A lake full of magically altered wildlife would definitely account for the blip I was seeing.” She looked around at the bodies littering the cement floor. “I wonder if they’re worth anything?”

“Would you stop talking about the stupid lampreys?” Justin growled, flinging the blood off his sword with a flick of his wrist. “We’re not down here for the fishing. Now let’s go find those mages for real before we waste any more— OW!”

His cry was accompanied by a loud
whack
as he slapped his hand against to the back of his neck.
“They spit at me!”
he roared, whirling around to face the still-roiling water.

Julius was opening his mouth to inform his brother that lampreys didn’t spit when he saw the streak of smoking black bile coating the back of Justin’s neck. A second lamprey broke the water as he watched, lifting its head above the surface just long enough to spit another line of burning goo at Justin’s shoulder.