Julius stepped forward, mouth already opening to tell her she had nothing to apologize for. That what had happened in her room was the actually the best thing that had happened to him in years, and he wouldn’t forget it for the world. In the end, though, he just looked away again with a bitter sigh, because while she had the why of it all wrong, Marci was still absolutely right.
She’d been the one to kiss him, but Julius had had no business enjoying it. She was human, and—as his conversation with his mother had so pointedly reminded him—he was most likely a dead dragon. Even if he did somehow manage to survive, he liked Marci too much to drag her into the snake pit that was dragon politics. He really should go ahead and tell her goodbye right now, before he got her into any more trouble, but he didn’t feel right leaving her alone while Bixby was still at large.
That was grasping at straws and he knew it, but Julius grasped gladly. His mother’s call had turned a fire hose on the new spark of confidence he’d been nurturing all morning, and Chelsie’s follow-up had stomped on the ashes. If he lost Marci, too, he might go out entirely.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said finally, grabbing his new shirt and pulling it over his head so he wouldn’t have to look her in the eyes. “Consider it forgotten.”
“Oh.” He couldn’t see her expression, but Marci’s voice sounded surprised and a little disappointed, though that last part might have been Julius’s imagination. “Well, that’s settled then. So what’s the job for today?”
“Same as yesterday: find Katya.” And fast, he added to himself, checking his phone again on the off chance he’d missed something in all the chaos, but he had no more messages than he’d had this morning. Frustrated, he sent a quick inquiry to his contact and got a near instant reply. Everything was working; there was just nothing to report.
“Julius?” He looked up to see Marci watching him, her face worried. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he breathed, determined to make sure that wasn’t a lie. He would be okay, he decided. He would be calm and rational and figure out how to make Ian’s courtship of Svena an unquestionable success with absolutely no need for a scapegoat, because if he didn’t, he’d be dead.
That thought filled him with just as much dread as always. This time, though, he managed to get through it a little better, sliding his phone back into his pocket as he turned to Marci. “Do you have anything you need to do today?”
She blinked. “I thought you were in a hurry?”
“I will be once the trace comes back, but until she actually uses her phone, we’re stuck in limbo.” And if he had to sit around waiting with nothing to do, the worry would destroy him. “Can I help you with something in the meanwhile?”
Marci still looked pretty skeptical, but she nodded anyway. “I’d like to swing back by my house, if that’s okay. I didn’t exactly pack for a long trip last night, and I need to grab some stuff.” She paused, her face suddenly brightening. “All of it, actually. Now that I have some money, I’m never spending a night there again.”
She sounded so excited at the idea of finally getting out of her cat-infested basement that Julius couldn’t help smiling back. Helping Marci move actually sounded like exactly the sort of steady, mindless work he needed to calm back down to a functional level while he waited for Katya to make a move, and who knew? Maybe if he chilled out, he could come up with the sort of brilliant, outside-the-box plan he needed to save his life.
“Let’s go, then,” he said, tapping over to his phone account to leave a large tip in the room’s AR for the maids who’d have to deal with the fallout of his water-catching practice. “I’m ready when you are.”
Marci ran back to her room. “Just give me a moment to pack!”
Julius nodded and shut the connecting door behind her. When he was alone again, he grabbed Svena’s silver chain from where he’d hidden it inside the nightstand and slipped it into his pocket.
It was a truly glorious afternoon. The late summer sunshine was bright and clear, and the DFZ skyways were crowded with beautiful people out enjoying the fine weather. Even Marci’s car was running better thanks to a complementary battery charge and software update from the hotel’s valet system. Marci seemed recharged as well, keeping up a steady stream of conversation as she touched up the marker on the inside of her chunky spellworked bracelets.
Julius said nothing. Even though they’d agreed it was forgotten, it was painfully obvious that Marci was covering up her discomfort over what had happened in her hotel room with an impenetrable shellac of cheerfulness. He wanted to tell her she didn’t have to pretend, but he had no right to call out her deception and nothing to offer her even if she did admit she was hurt. He could only handle so many crises at a time, anyway, and so though it made him feel like a coward, he took the out she offered and pretended along with her, nodding where appropriate as the car took them down the ramps from the rich Upper City and into the desolation that was the DFZ’s north side.
The sunlight dimmed noticeably when they drove into the old University District. It had been dark the last time they’d driven through, so while Julius had noticed the dilapidated buildings, strange magic, and giant fence that marked the edge of Algonquin’s spirit land, he hadn’t been able to see the haze that hung over the old neighborhood like a greasy film. Just trying to read the street signs through that muck gave him an instant headache, but what really got him was the strange feeling of being watched that only seemed to get worse as the streets got emptier. No wonder no one wanted to live out here. This place was creepier than the Underground.
His feelings of foreboding only got worse when Marci took over the car and turned them off the main road into the hoarded mansion’s driveway. This struck him as odd, because the brick house’s wildly overgrown garden and sagging overhangs actually looked much less scary in the bright afternoon than they had at night. But the intense sunlight did nothing to stop the chill that crept up Julius’s spine as the car pulled them around to the back of the house.
He squinted up at the sagging eaves as they rolled to a stop in front of the collapsing garage, trying figure out what was making him so uneasy, but he saw nothing. There was no movement at all, actually. Even the vines that covered the rear of the house like a parasitic colony were still, but it wasn’t until he looked through the equally quite, dust-caked windows that he realized he hadn’t seen a single cat.
Fear shot through him like a spear, and he whipped back to Marci, who was already getting out of the car. He’d already sucked in a breath to tell her to stop when he saw it. There, in the wall of privet that separated the yard from the next one over, the sunlight was glinting off the long, silenced barrel of a pistol.
After that, he didn’t bother with a warning. Even if he could have yelled something that made sense, Marci wouldn’t be able to react fast enough. But Julius had been practicing being fast all morning, and he moved before he could think, launching over the driver’s seat to tackle Marci around the waist just as the shot went off.
Chapter 11
The bullet passed so close, Julius felt the heat of it on his back as he tackled Marci to the ground. They landed together in the overgrown grass hard enough to knock Marci’s breath out. He was moving again before she caught it, yanking her back toward the car. But just as he grabbed the edge of the driver’s seat to haul them both inside, a second gun barrel poked through the tangled wall of vines and bushes on the other side of the car.