Bethesda’s voice sharpened until the words dug into him like claws. “Don’t fail me.”
The call cut out right after that, but it took Julius a full thirty seconds to unclench his fingers enough to set the phone down safely below Jessica’s never-used collection of copper cookware. When it was out of harm’s way, he dropped his head to the cold marble counter with a thunk. He was still lying there when his phone buzzed again with Ian’s terse message to meet him at a club halfway across town in fifteen minutes.
In the end, he had to take a cab.
He couldn’t afford it, not really, but there was no other way to keep Ian’s deadline, and Julius wasn’t about to get himself eaten by his mother because he was too cheap to hire a taxi. It ended up being a good choice, though, because the drive across the elevated skyways gave him his first real look at the Detroit Free Zone in the daytime.
Not surprisingly, it looked exactly like it did in the pictures: an impossibly clean city on the banks of the Detroit River with blindingly white, thousand-floor superscrapers rising from a beautiful, whimsically spiraling lattice of elevated skyways held high off the ground by huge concrete pillars. Pressing his face against the car window, Julius could catch glimpses down through the gaps at Old Detroit, the ruined city that still lay beneath the new one like a rotting carcass, but not enough to see anything interesting. No packs of death spirits or ghouls or any of the others horrors that supposedly terrorized the Underground. But while that was disappointing, the DFZ’s other most interesting attraction was impossible to miss.
Rising from the blue depths of Lake St. Clair, Algonquin Tower looked like a spire made by gods to hold up the sky. Even here in downtown, a good ten miles away, Julius could still make out the sweeping curls of stonework that made the two-thousand-foot tall granite pillar look like an endlessly swirling waterspout instead of static rock. Supposedly, there was a leviathan that lived underneath it, but even without the giant sea monster, the tower was a fitting and undeniable reminder of who ruled Detroit, and why.
When the meteor crashed into Canada in 2035, sending magic surging back into a world that had long forgotten such things existed, human mages weren’t the only ones who had reawakened. The sudden influx of power had also roused spirits of the land forced into hibernation by almost a thousand years of magical drought. They’d woken with a vengeance, too, but none so much as Algonquin, the Lady of the Lakes.
Even now, sixty years after magic’s return, people still talked about the night Algonquin rose to sweep the Great Lakes clean. Her purifying wave had come from nowhere, washing away centuries of pollution in a single night, and most of the cities that lined the Great Lakes with it. No place, however, felt her wrath like Detroit.
While other cities were merely flooded, Detroit was nearly swept off the map. Those who survived claimed Algonquin’s wave had been over a thousand feet, a black swell of all the poisons dredged up from the bottom of the Detroit River and the bed of Lake St. Clare that she’d emptied on the city without quarter, crushing buildings and drowning millions in the process.
When the flood waters finally receded, Algonquin had claimed the ruins of Detroit as her own, and with the rest of the world still reeling from the return of magic, the U.S. government hadn’t been able to tell her otherwise. From that night on, Detroit, Michigan became the Detroit Free Zone, an independent territory of the United States and the only city anywhere governed by a spirit. Algonquin had wasted no time changing the rules, either, dumping almost every law on the books, especially those limiting business and immigration, and she’d refused to regulate the new practice of magic at all. The resulting sorcery research boom had made the DFZ one of the largest, wealthiest, most magical cities in the world. It was also the most dangerous, especially for him.
For reasons Julius didn’t know, but could easily imagine, the Lady of the Lakes hated dragons with a passion. His kind were tenuously accepted in the rest of the U.S., and ruled outright in China, but in the Algonquin’s city, where everything from drugs to guns to prostitution was legal, dragons were strictly forbidden. Even small ones like him fetched bounties in the millions. He had no idea why his mother had decided to force him to “be a dragon” in the one city where doing so would automatically make him a target, but at least it gave Julius a reason to be happy about the seal. Awful as it was not to be able to fly or breathe fire or stretch his tail properly, he didn’t have to worry about accidentally revealing his true nature and getting killed for it. So, that was something.
He’d barely finished this exercise in extreme positive thinking when his cab pulled to a stop beside a crowded, elevated square lined with trees, fountains, and high-end restaurants. Very high-end restaurants, the sort with unpronounceable names and dress codes that involved jackets. Julius looked down at his own ancient green T-shirt and slightly singed jeans with a sigh. The part of him that was still trying to stay positive pointed out that he should be glad he’d at least been wearing a shirt when his mother had burst into his room, but the rest of him just wanted to get this over with.
The automated cab had taken its fare out of his phone’s account the second it reached the requested destination, so Julius got out of the bright yellow, driverless car without looking back. It took him a few minutes to push through the crowd of fashionable professionals and the tourists taking pictures of them to the address Ian had given him; a slick club/restaurant hybrid with tinted glass doors and no name at all, just a picture of a tree laser etched into the windows.
As expected for such a high-end establishment, the first set of doors was just for show. The real doors were inside a dimly lit foyer guarded by three cameras and a doorman. Normally, a human wouldn’t have worried Julius too much, but this one was clearly packing some augmented implants—human arms just didn’t get that bulky without medical help—and he didn’t look shy about using them.
Considering how sorry he looked right now, Julius fully expected the bulky doorman to pick him up by the fraying neck of his shirt and toss him right back out into the square. From the expression on the man’s face, he clearly wanted to do just that, but when Julius gave his name, the doorman simply pushed open the leather-covered inner door and told him that his party was waiting at the back.
After the bustle of the crowded square, the inside of the restaurant was shockingly silent in the way only real money could buy. Even the silverware didn’t seem to clink as Julius wove his way between the white clothed tables and high-backed booths. The place smelled rich, too, a deep, subtle mix of hardwood, leather, truffle oil, and other things his sensitive nose wasn’t cultured enough to recognize.
The VIP area was in the far back corner, separated from the rest of the restaurant by a wall of malachite-beaded curtains. Julius pushed them open with only a slight hesitation, pointedly ignoring the well-dressed couples who turned to gawk at him as he looked around for his brother.
He didn’t have to look long. He might not have been able to place Ian’s name earlier, but now that he was here, he spotted his brother at once. He also saw why their mother was so fond of him.
From the first glance, it was obvious that Ian was a dragon’s dragon. Even dressed in a black suit sitting in a black booth, he effortlessly overshadowed the well-dressed men with their jewel covered women and thousand dollar bottles of champagne like a panther lounging in a flock of peacocks. Julius, on the other hand, felt a bit like a mangy dog as he slid into the leather booth across from his brother and dipped his head in greeting.
Ian did not return the gesture. He just sat there, regarding Julius through slitted, Heartstriker-green eyes before letting out a long, vexed sigh. “What on earth are you wearing?”