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.
Apparently, this “exclusive mage party” was about as exclusive as a frat kegger. Every door, window, and loading bay in the warehouse had been thrown open to let in the night wind off the water, and music was thumping so loud, Julius could feel the bass through the sidewalk. They walked right in through the front without challenge, and while Julius wanted to attribute this to Marci’s excellent illusions, he had the feeling that he could have crashed through the roof as a dragon and not turned a head.
“It smells like an Amsterdam canal in here,” Marci yelled over the music, batting at the smoky air in front of her face. “What are we doing at this party again?”
“Looking for someone,” Julius yelled back. “I’m going to go check the back. You stay here and try to blend in. I’ll message you if I need help. What’s your number?”
“I don’t have a phone.” When Julius gaped at her, she raised her hands helplessly. “What? You need a Residency ID to get a phone in the DFZ, and I don’t have one yet. I’m working on it.”
Julius heaved a deep sigh. “Just stay here, then. I’ll be back soon.”
He waited until she nodded before moving away, breathing deep as he walked to see if he could pick out the sharp, metallic scent of another dragon. Unfortunately, smelling anything through the overwhelming mix of river, humans, and pot smoke turned out to be impossible, so Julius began searching the old-fashioned way. Fifteen minutes later, he’d found two people who claimed to be dragon shamans, one white-haired young woman who called herself a human dove, and zero actual dragonesses. He was starting to worry Katya wasn’t here at all when he felt a tap on his shoulder.