“Opal!”
I jumped. Dr. Kowalski was waving at me from the new trellis site across the garden, but the voice that had called my name wasn’t hers. It was younger and infinitely more powerful. The doctor’s wrinkled face looked decades younger as well, which could only mean one thing.
The DFZ was here for her daily check-in.
I caught my wince just in time. I was still only a priestess on a trial basis, but it was never good to insult a god, and as creepy as it was to have my teacher get randomly possessed by the living spirit of the city, this was actually the DFZ’s way of being polite. My first week here, she’d just popped into my head whenever she’d wanted to talk, which I hated. I’d accepted that my life wasn’t going to be my own until my dad was up and my debt to the city was repaid, but was it too much to ask for privacy in my own brain?
Thankfully, the DFZ had been able to feel my displeasure along with everything else, so she’d started speaking through Dr. Kowalski instead. I didn’t know if that was better since I was pretty sure the god was still inside me at all times, but at least this gave me the illusion of autonomy, and Dr. Kowalski didn’t seem to mind at all. As she loved to remind me, she was already dead. Technically, her body was only a manifestation of the DFZ’s will, which I guess made being turned into a telephone whenever the city wanted to chat seem pretty trivial by comparison.
“Hey!” the DFZ said, bounding over to me with a boisterousness that looked absolutely ridiculous in Dr. Kowalski’s stocky old-lady body. “Dr. K tells me you’re making fantastic progress on your magic. Great job! I knew you could do it!”
“Thanks,” I said, flattered despite myself. I was perfectly aware that I was being buttered up, but dammit, it was so nice not to be seen as a failure anymore. “How are you doing? You only stopped in once yesterday.” She normally popped in on me three or four times. I didn’t know if that was because I was really that important or if her divine ability to be in multiple places at once enabled her micromanaging, but it was a remarkable day when I only saw the DFZ once.
“It’s been hectic,” the spirit said with a shrug. “Who knew smacking a dragon out of the sky would cause so many problems?”
I had. I could have told her exactly how big a hornets’ nest she was kicking by taking Yong and me in. If she’d known, though, she might not have done it, so now as then, I kept my big mouth shut.
“It’s only temporary, though,” the DFZ went on. “Technically, I’m violating my agreement with the Peacemaker to leave all dragon affairs in the city to him, but since he’s only here by my goodwill in the first place, he’s not complaining. And compared to my predecessor Algonquin, who had every dragon shot on sight, I’m practically a champion of the species, so really, what’s he gonna say?”
She looked pleased by that logic, but I couldn’t stop my nervous shaking. “Is the Peacemaker mad?”
“Yeah, but he’s being a good sport about it as always,” she said. “But I don’t know how much longer he’ll be able to hold things up. The pressure on him is getting intense. Apparently the various draconic powers started divvying Korea among themselves the moment I sucked you two in. They’ve been pressuring the Dragon of Detroit to declare Yong dead for weeks so they can officially fight over his land. So far, the Peacemaker’s been living up to his name, but things are getting heated at the Dragon Consulate.” Her orange-glowing eyes looked hopefully at me from Dr. Kowalski’s transformed face. “Yong hasn’t woken up yet, by any chance?”
“You’d be the first to know if he had,” I promised, which was silly. In addition to being in my brain at all times, the DFZ was the one keeping my apartment hidden from the rest of the world. There was nothing I did or thought that she wasn’t privy to. Hell, for all I knew, she watched me pee.
“I don’t watch you pee!”
I gave her a look, and she held up her hands. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry in the slightest. “I know you hate it when I do that, but in my defense, your mind is really loud. That huge magical draw of yours acts as a megaphone. It’s what makes you such great priestess material. And speaking of!”—she waved her hand between us, and a wooden desk covered in papers popped out of the garden’s turned-up dirt like a mushroom—“it’s time for our monthly accounting.”
Fighting the urge to wince, I sat down hard on the cushioned office chair that had popped out of the ground behind me. Unsurprisingly for the soul of a city of commerce, the DFZ was a big fan of accounting. She kept meticulous records of everything: how much rent she was owed, who was behind, who was ahead, maintenance costs, subcontractor fees, etc. And as the current leaseholder on over four hundred units, a depressing number of the lines in the old-fashioned ledger book she pulled out of the desk’s bottom drawer were for me.
It was my own damn fault. Thanks to my brilliant decision to raid units for salables to pawn for gold so I could beat my dad, my name was attached to apartments, lofts, houses, garages, and storage lockers all over
