“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?”
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 other 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. Clair that she’d emptied on the city without quarter, crushing buildings and drowning millions in the
