Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers) (9 page)

“I’ll take your word for it,” Julius said. “But why are you doing two illusions?”

“Because I’m coming with you.” Marci gave him a sideways look. “What? You didn’t think I’d let you go alone, did you?”

“Well,” Julius began. “I—”

“You’re my client,” she said, clearly appalled. “I can’t let you just go in without backup. What if you get dispelled? Also, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but you talk like a total null. It doesn’t matter how good a cover I slap on you, you’ll be outed in a second if you don’t have someone standing by to feed you lines.”

Julius couldn’t argue there. “I’d be happy to have you along, but I still don’t understand why you need a disguise. You’re already a mage.”

Marci’s eyes widened like he’d just called her a dirty name. “Weren’t you listening? I’m a
Socratic Thaumaturge.
You know, logical thinking, repeatable results, known best practices, all the tenets of
real
sorcery? We’re sneaking you into a
shaman
party. Shamans consider themselves artists at best, spiritual gurus at worst. Most of them just throw magic around and hope it works out. There probably won’t be a single person in that place who could write out a spell in proper notation if their life depended on it. They’ll take one look at my personal magic and know what I am for sure. The real challenge will be masking my well-maintained aura in enough random nonsense that they don’t see the good stuff underneath.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” Julius said quickly. “I’m sure your way is better, but theirs can’t be all bad. I mean, they might not do magic the way you do, but there are a lot of shamans around.” Including a guy he’d been in a gaming guild with last year who’d been really decent, if a little odd. “They must be doing something right, or they wouldn’t keep getting work.”

Marci made a face. “I guess you could say that shamans are better at casting on the fly. Thaumaturgy does require some set-up time since we’re not just, you know,
making things up
as we go along
.
For the sort of illusion you need, though, Thaumaturgy is waaaaaay better.”

Julius had the feeling Marci would claim Thaumaturgy was better for everything, but he was perfectly ready to let it lie. “I’m lucky you found me, then.”

She rewarded him with a beaming smile as she placed the bit of chimera tusk into the middle of the meticulously marked chalk circle. “Ready?”

Julius nodded and stepped into the circle where she indicated. He felt the hum of her magic as soon as his body crossed the chalk, an intense vibration that sang like a tuning fork against his bones before fading to a pleasant buzz.

Marci put her hands on his shoulders and moved him around until he was standing directly over the bit of tusk in the center. “I’m going to start pulling magic through,” she warned him, stepping out of the circle. “You might feel a little pressure.”

He took a deep breath. “Go for it.”

The words were barely out of his mouth before the chalk circle flared up like phosphorus. Magic landed on him at the same time, nearly sending him to his knees.

The sudden panic at being buried by foreign magic almost caused Julius to throw it off with his own. He stopped the reflex just in time, clutching his magic tight and breathing through the pressure until it felt more like a wave than a landslide. When he was sure he could take it, he opened his eyes again to find Marci giving him a funny look.

“Did you ever get tested to see if you could be a mage?” she asked, moving her hands through the air between them like she was conducting an invisible orchestra. Every time she moved, another line of the notation she’d written on the floor lit up, and the magic pulled tighter around him. The process felt uncomfortably like being tied up, and it took Julius several seconds before he got himself together enough to shake his head.

“Maybe you should. You have a surprising amount of natural magic. Your curse seems to be warping it, though. I’ve never worked with magic that feels like yours.” She gave him a concerned look. “Are you
sure
you don’t want me to try breaking it? Because that can’t be healthy.”

“Positive,” Julius said. Now that he’d felt Marci’s magic, he was more sure than ever that she couldn’t break his mother’s seal. Their magic was just too different, and trying would likely only end up with Marci getting hurt, not to mention blow his cover. That said, the seal was actually working out astonishingly in his favor right now. It was much easier to let Marci assume that his magic felt odd because of a curse and not because he wasn’t actually human.

She didn’t look happy with his answer, but she didn’t press again. She just kept working until, at last, she lowered her hands, and Julius felt the magic lock around him like a buckle clicking into place. “All done,” she said with a proud smile. “What do you think?”

Julius looked down… and saw he was exactly the same. “Um, did it work?”

“Of
course
it worked,” Marci said. “If anyone looks at your magic, you’ll look like a rock. That’s what I made you, a stone shaman: flat, boring, and naturally silent. Will that do?”

He blinked and looked again. He saw magic naturally as a dragon, so he’d never bothered learning how to do it as a human. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult, but if he squinted, he could just make out the haze of Marci’s magic hanging over his own like a golden curtain, and the more he looked at it, the more he saw that she was right. He
did
look like a rock.

“I thought I’d go for a badger shaman, myself,” Marci said, motioning for him to step out of the circle. “Something nice and nasty no one will want to mess with.”

As she bent down to rub out the end of the spellwork notation and rewrite it for herself, Julius stepped back a bit to focus on getting used to the weight of Marci’s illusion. To his surprise, it was actually fairly pleasant once he’d adjusted. Dragon spells tended to be as sharp as their fangs, but Marci’s magic was soft and thick, like a heavy blanket.

He was just starting to settle into it when a flash of light caught his attention, and he looked up in time to see Marci lower her hands with a thrust that blasted the chalk circle at her feet into a cloud of dust. “There,” she said, turning around. “What do you think?”

She didn’t look terribly different, but her short brown hair was now black with two white stripes, just like a badger. She’d also changed out her sparkly vest for an illusion of a long duster that looked decidedly homemade and replaced her boots with sandals that tied up her feet with rainbow ribbons. “I think the shoes are bit much.”

“Then you clearly don’t hang out with many shamans,” she said, wiggling her toes, which were also rainbow-painted. “I’m positively sedate. Now let’s get out of here. We’re already ten minutes late.”

Julius cursed under his breath. Between cats and ghosts and costuming, he’d completely lost track of time. Fortunately, Marci was ready to go in three minutes, though she insisted on stopping to lock the basement door behind them. This seemed pointless to Julius since the wooden door was so rotted he could have pulled the lock out with his hand, but when he saw the flare of a ward settling into place as she turned the key, her insistence on locking up suddenly made a lot more sense. It also made two wards of Marci’s he’d seen, counting the yellow tape, and he was ready to bet she had more he hadn’t noticed. This, in turn, made Julius wonder just how many thousands of dollars worth of magical work Marci had sunk into making her cat hole livable. It didn’t seem worth it to him, but then, he wasn’t in her situation. When magic was all you had, magic was what you used.

“How long do you think it will take us to get there?” he asked as they climbed back up the short run of stairs to the driveway.

She glanced at the address. “It’s over on the river by Belle Isle, so about twenty minutes.” When Julius winced, she added, “Don’t worry. It’s a shaman party. Those never start on time.”

He sincerely hoped she was right. He also hoped Marci’s car would make it. All the cats watched as they drove away from the rotting old mansion, and though Julius couldn’t be sure, he swore he saw Ghost sitting on top of the chimney, staring after them with gleaming blue eyes. Creepy as that was, though, dealing with a dead cat spirit felt like a vacation compared to what he was supposed to do next.

He slipped his hand into his pocket to make sure Svena’s silver chain was still there. It might have been his imagination, but the links seemed to jump up to meet his fingers, the metal still cold as frost even after an hour against his body heat. He snatched his hand back immediately, fingers curling into a fist. He
really
didn’t feel right about this, but then, he never felt right when he was doing the sort of things dragons were supposed to do. It wasn’t like his opinion mattered, anyway. If he didn’t chain and return Svena’s little sister as ordered, Ian would report his failure, and then Mother would make a chain out of Julius’s intestines, which put a definite damper on any plans to buck the system. It was hard to hold the moral high ground while also trying to hold in your innards.

That lovely mental image made him sigh, and he leaned his head on Marci’s window. He was being ridiculous. So what if the idea of cornering a runaway dragon and delivering her unconscious body back to the clan she feared made him feel lower than dirt? He should be focusing on how to appease his own family so he could remain alive and uneaten, not worrying about his conscience. Real dragons didn’t have consciences, anyway. His certainly hadn’t done him any good.

“What’s wrong?”

Julius jerked his head up to see Marci staring at him. “Excuse me?”

She bit her lip and looked back at the road. “You just made a really sad sound.”

He looked down at his lap, embarrassed. Great, now Marci thought he was pathetic, too. “It’s nothing,” he lied, sinking lower.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Her quick offer caught him off guard, but not nearly as much as how desperately he wanted to take her up on it. If she’d been a dragon, such a question would have been an obvious play for information. Of course, if she’d been a dragon, she wouldn’t have asked if he wanted to talk in the first place. She would have demanded.

But Marci wasn’t a dragon, and she wasn’t ordering him to do anything. He didn’t even think she was fishing for secrets. She was just being politely concerned. Being nice. Humans got to do that, and Julius was so tempted to take her up on the treasure she’d just unwittingly offered him that he actually started thinking up excuses for why spilling his troubles to her would be a forgivable offense.

In the end, though, he kept his mouth shut. Eager as he was to confide in someone who wouldn’t use every word against him later, revealing clan business to a human was a quick way to get that human killed. Fortunately, being inoffensively quiet was a survival skill Julius had perfected long ago, and he set himself to staring out the window, studiously ignoring to the concerned glances Marci shot him whenever she thought he wasn’t looking.

***

Considering the rates most mages demanded for their services, Julius had expected the party to be up on the skyways with all the rest of the money. Instead, the address took them back into the Underground, but not the flashing tourist part this time. Though clearly once a nice neighborhood by the water, nearly all of the original buildings were now gone, replaced by large brick warehouses built to serve the massive riverside casinos overhead.

“You’re sure it’s
below
the casinos, not in them?” Marci asked, eying the lower levels of the huge hotels that poked down through the suspended skyway like tree roots reaching for the real ground below.

“This has to be it,” Julius said, though even he wasn’t feeling so sure himself. Other than the warehouses, the only other things down here were the massive blocks of prefab tenements built to house the armies of workers who kept the big hotels above them ticking over. There were a few crowded family style restaurants and a cheap chain grocery store, but nowhere a bunch of mages would throw a party, and definitely nowhere he’d expect to find a dragon. Still, according to the listing Svena had shown him, this was the place, so he went ahead and told Marci to find somewhere to park.

The address itself turned out to be for a large warehouse right on the river. Julius didn’t want to risk scaring off his target, so he had Marci to park in an alley one block down so they could case the place first. When they approached the warehouse itself, though, Julius realized he needn’t have bothered.