His mother sighed, a long hiss so familiar he could almost feel the heat of her flames through the phone. “This is harder on me than it is on you, you know,” she said at last. “But you gave me no choice. Something had to be done. All your brothers and sisters are getting along splendidly. Even Jessica managed to work her doctor nonsense into a position of power. She’ll be running that hospital in five years. But you! You are hopeless. If I hadn’t watched you hatch myself, I’d doubt you were a dragon at all.”
She’d told Julius as much almost every day of his life, but for some reason, the insult never stopped smarting. “Sorry,” he said again.
His mother went on like he hadn’t spoken. “You’re not ambitious, you don’t make plans, you don’t try to take things over. It’s like you were born with no draconic instinct whatsoever. All you’ve done since I let you out of training is hide in your room, avoiding the rest of us like the plague.”
He’d always thought of it more as avoiding jumping into a pool of hungry sharks, but he knew better than to say so. “I wasn’t bothering anyone.”
“That’s exactly the problem!” Bethesda roared. “You’re a dragon! Dragons don’t worry about bothering. We demand, Julius, and the world gives. That is the rightful order of things. I thought if I left you alone, your instincts would kick in eventually, but it’s been seven years and you’re as bad as ever. Clearly, something in that head of yours is broken beyond repair, and I don’t have the patience to wait any longer.”
He swallowed. “I—”
“Twenty-four-year-old dragons should be out making names for themselves! Not living at home with their mothers! People are beginning to talk, Julius. I had to do something. ”
“So you decided to seal me?”
The second the words were out of his mouth, Julius’s stomach, which was already clenched to the size of a marble, threatened to vanish entirely. But there was no taking it back. The horrible truth was out, and, in a raw, painful way, it felt good to hear it spoken. So, since he was a dead dragon anyway, he kept going.
“Why, Mother?” he asked. “You wanted me to be a dragon, so why did you lock me into this?” He waved his hand down at his lanky, too-skinny human body before he remembered she couldn’t see him, which only upset him more. “Why did you send me away? Why did you send me here?” He shot a panicked at the forbidding wall of superscrapers outside the window. “This is the DFZ. They kill dragons on sight here. If I’m—”
He cut off with a choked gasp as his mother touched the seal she’d placed at the root of his magic. She might be hundreds of miles away, but he could still feel her claws in his mind, the sharp tips pressing painfully on the wound she’d made nineteen hours ago when she’d cut into his soul and locked him away from his true nature. It was only for a second, but by the time she let him go, Julius felt like he’d been sliced open all over again.
“That’s better,” his mother said, her words punctuated by the clink of gold coins as she shifted her position. “Honestly, Julius, do you even listen to yourself? Complain, complain, complain, when all your life you’ve been coasting, never even considering the position that puts me in.”
He hardly thought that being sealed from his powers and stranded in the one city in the world where dragons were illegal was a frivolous complaint, but he couldn’t have said as much even if he’d dared. His mother was on a roll, and there was no stopping her now.
“You don’t even know what I suffer for this family!” she cried. “Every day, every hour, our enemies are looking for ways to cut us down. The other clans would like nothing better than to see the Heartstrikers brought low, and you’re helping them! Being a disappointment within your own family is one thing, but can you imagine what would happen if the rest of the world found out that my son, my son, spends his days locked in his room playing video games with humans? Humans, Julius! And you don’t even win!”
Julius began to sweat. “I don’t see—”
“That is exactly the problem!” she yelled, making his ears ring. “You don’t see. If one of your siblings was doing something I wanted them to stop, I’d just threaten their plans or thwart their ambitions, but you don’t have any of those. You don’t have anything, and so I was forced to take the only thing I could.”
She touched his seal again as she said this, and suddenly, Julius couldn’t breathe.
“You are the worst excuse for a dragon I’ve ever seen,” she snarled. “But even you still need to actually be a dragon. So if you don’t want to spend the rest of your soon-to-be very short life as little more than trumped-up mortal, you’ll listen closely to what I’m about to say.”
She released him after that, and it was all Julius could do not to flop panting on to the counter. But showing weakness would not improve his mother’s mood, so he forced himself back together, breathing deep until he could trust his voice enough to say, “I’m listening.”
“Good,” Bethesda replied. “Because I’ve fought too long and too hard to get where I am to be made a fool of by my youngest child. I really should have eaten you years ago, but a mother’s hope springs eternal, so I’ve decided to give you one last chance. A final opportunity to make something of yourself.”
Julius didn’t like the sound of that at all. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re a dragon,” she said flippantly. “Be draconic. Take something over, destroy one of our enemies, win a duel, capture an advantage for our clan. I don’t really care what you do, but you will do something to make me proud to call you my son before the end of the month, or I will do to you what I did to my other under-performing whelps.”
Julius didn’t need the snap of her fangs at the end. His blood was already running cold, especially when he realized today was already August 8th. “But…that’s not even four weeks.”
“Think of it as a trial by fire,” Bethesda said sweetly. “You’ll come out of this a real Heartstriker or not at all. Either way, you won’t be an embarrassment to the clan anymore, which makes it a win-win for me, and we all know that’s what really matters.”
Julius closed his eyes. Trial by fire. How excessively draconic.
“I can hear you moping,” she warned. “Don’t be so defeatist. That’s exactly the type of behavior this little exercise is supposed to correct. And sorely as I’m tempted to let you dangle, I’m not throwing you out completely on your own. It just so happens that your brother Ian has some work he’s agreed to let you take on, a little jump-start to get you going on the path toward respectability.” Her voice turned rapturous. “Now there is a dragon, and an excellent son.”
Julius frowned, trying to remember which brother Ian was. He had the vague recollection of an icy demeanor and a calculating smile, which probably meant Ian was one of those plotting, ambitious siblings he normally stayed far, far away from. Of course, if Mother liked him, the ambitious part was a given. Bethesda never loved her children more than when they were trying to engineer each other’s downfalls.
“I already sent him your information while you were whining,” she continued. “He should be contacting you soon. And Julius?”
He fought the urge to sigh. “Yes, Mother?”