Chelsie’s eyes narrowed, and Julius snapped his mouth shut. When it was clear he wasn’t going to try and talk again, she continued. “If I came after every idiot Heartstriker who got into a street brawl, half the clan would be dead by now. I also don’t care what mischief Ian has you up to in his hopeless courtship of that Three Sisters ice snake Svena, who, for the record, is going to chew him up and spit him out like a piece of gristle. I’m not even terribly concerned that you showed a bit of tooth and claw in the DFZ. Everyone does that from time to time. My problem, Julius, is that you left witnesses.”
Julius opened his mouth to explain, but Chelsie grabbed him first. Faster than he could react, faster than he could even see, she wrapped her hand around his throat and slammed him into the wall, scattering the layers of old advertisements in a rain of tattered paper.
“Six humans went into that alley with you,” she snarled in his face. “And when you left, six humans were still alive. Do you know what that is, Julius? That’s a mess. And when a Heartstriker makes a mess, it’s my job to ensure they never. Do it. Again.”
Her fingers squeezed tighter with every word, choking him by inches. Just when Julius was sure he’d suffocate, Chelsie let go, dropping him in a heap on the dirty asphalt.
The coughing fit hit him a second later. Julius rolled to his knees, clutching his throat until, after what felt like hours, his breathing returned to something like normal. When he looked up again, Chelsie was looming over him, a black shadow outlined by the lone factory floodlight five stories overhead.
“Poor little Julius,” she cooed. “You’re so nice. You don’t want to hurt anyone, don’t want to get into trouble. But you’re not in the mountain anymore, whelp, and there’s no more room for nice. From this moment forward, if a human who’s not under your direct control sees you doing anything that might make them think you’re not what you seem, you kill them. Not knock out, not threaten, kill. Do you understand?” When he didn’t answer at once, Chelsie slammed him back into the wall with her booted foot. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he wheezed.
She released him, and he slid back to the ground. She let him lie there a second before turning away with a little huff that was a perfect copy of the sound their mother made when she was particularly disappointed. “I can’t believe I’m having to explain something as basic as witness elimination. No wonder Mother kicked you out. I assumed she was exaggerating, but now I think you might really be the worst dragon we’ve ever had.”
Julius had heard this many, many times. He’d heard it in every variation imaginable, and he usually shrugged it off. It was always easier to go back to his room and bury himself in something better—a videogame, a book, a movie, homework for an online class, whatever was at hand—than to try to defend himself. Now though, he didn’t have a room to retreat to. He was stranded in an alley with his back literally against a wall, and he was so, so sick of being talked down to, the words just burst out.
“Maybe I don’t want to be a good dragon.”
Chelsie stopped, turning back to him with blood-chilling slowness. “Excuse me?”
He pushed up to his knees, wiping the dirt from his face with trembling hands, though whether the shaking was from anger or fear, even Julius didn’t know. “So far as I can tell, ‘good dragon’ is just another name for coldblooded sociopath,” he said. “No friends, no trust, no love. Why would I ever want to live like that? It’s not like any of you good dragons are happy.”
The taunt echoed down the alley, and for one heartbeat, Chelsie’s cold expression morphed into a mask of pure rage. As he saw the anger flaring in his sister’s eyes, Julius knew this was it. This was his death. When Chelsie was done, they’d be finding pieces of him all over the DFZ. But just as he was making peace with his final end, Chelsie’s anger vanished, covered up in an instant by the usual haughty disdain most dragons wore when looking down on him.
“Oh, Julius,” she said, her voice pitying. “You are so young. Too young and far too exposed to sentimental human idiocy to understand what it truly means to be a Heartstriker. But you will learn, little whelp, or you will break. Either way, consider this your first and only warning.”
She crouched down as she finished, her face hovering over his like she was going to bite off his head. When she spoke again, her voice was barely more than a breath.
“You make one more mess,” she whispered. “You set one talon out of line, make one ounce of trouble for our family in this place, and you won’t have to worry about being a good dragon any longer. Because I will end you, right then, right there. You won’t even see it coming, and no one except your little human girlfriend will mourn you. Nod if you understand.”
Julius nodded, and Chelsie’s lips curled into an icy smile. “Good boy,” she murmured, straightening up. “And on that note, I hope you didn’t need any of those humans, because they’re fish food now.”
He swallowed against the bile that rose in his throat and ducked his head. Of course she’d killed them. Chelsie was a C, one of two surviving children from their mother’s third clutch, which meant she had to be seven hundred years old at least. She’d probably killed more humans in the name of ‘cleaning up messes’ than Julius had met in his entire life. He didn’t even care that Bixby’s goons were gone; he just couldn’t get the image of Chelsie casually breaking the unconscious men’s necks before tossing them in the water out of his head. By the time he pulled himself together enough to look up again, the alley was empty.
After his first shaky attempt at standing landed him back on knees, Julius used his hands to pull himself up the wall until he was back on his feet. He brushed off his worn jeans and shirt as best he could, but it was hopeless. His clothes had been ratty to begin with, and life in the DFZ was proving to be too much for them. Still, he took the time to make himself as presentable as possible and not like he’d just gotten kicked around an alley before heading back to the car.
To his enormous relief, Marci was right where he’d left her. He hadn’t actually realized how scared he’d been that she’d leave until he saw her sitting in the front seat of her car, examining something round and golden under the cabin light. From this distance, it looked kind of like a gilded softball, or maybe an oversized Christmas ornament. Whatever it was, she shoved it back into her bag when she heard him coming, leaning over to push open the passenger door for him instead.
“What happened?” she cried, eyes flicking over his disarrayed clothing as he sat down. “You look like you got mugged! Are you okay?”
“No,” Julius said, forcing himself to sit normally instead of collapsing, which was what he really wanted to do.
“No, you’re not okay, or no, you didn’t get mugged?”
Yes, Julius thought. “No, I didn’t get mugged,” he said, pulling his phone out of his pocket to pull up the address Lark had given him for where Katya was supposedly shacking up with her shaman. “It’s not important. We need to get mov—”
He froze. Two new messages from the Unknown Caller had arrived on his phone while he’d been in the alley with Chelsie. One looked like a copy of the first message, just the word duck, but the final message was new.
“Goose,” Julius read, staring at the glowing letters. “Duck, duck, goose.”
“What are you talking about?” Marci asked.
Julius didn’t answer. He just leaned forward and banged his head against the scuffed dash. He brought it down a few more times for good measure before sitting up again. “I don’t know,” he said tiredly, waving his fingers through the hazy sphere of augmented reality above the phone’s screen to delete both of Bob’s messages forever. “I don’t understand anything. I’m terrible at this, apparently.”