That was a terrifying thought, but this couldn’t wait, so with a final bracing breath, Julius jumped as high as he could. For a moment, he thought he was going to miss completely and land face-first on the ground three stories down. But then his fingers caught a piece of steel rebar sticking off the edge of the broken concrete. He hung there for a moment, swinging back and forth as he caught his breath, and then he hauled himself up onto the cracked overpass, pushing his body right to the edge of Ghost’s protective bubble.
It hurt. Julius had been in strong magic before, but nothing like this. The rising power might have looked like multicolored snow, but it felt like molten lead. Even with the barrier, magic pounded over him like a storm surge. Standing under these conditions felt blatantly impossible, but Julius couldn’t see anything from where he was crouching, so he forced his body to move, breathing out puffs of his own fire as he stoked his magic against the hammer that was still crashing into the world. It took forever, but finally, he made it to his knees, which was good enough to see what he’d come up here to see.
The city was absolutely silent around him. Smoke still rose from a few of the buildings that had been on fire last night, but the common sounds of the city—the horns and car alarms, the rumble of trash trucks and buses, all the clatter of people living their lives—had vanished. Even the birds were gone from the sky, leaving nothing except the Leviathan.
The Nameless End hung over everything like a storm front, his black body stretching as far as Julius could see in all directions. Below his floating bulk, huge tentacles hung down like streamers, their tips plowing through the dry riverbed and the empty basin of Lake St. Clair as they searched for every drop of Algonquin’s water. There had to be thousands of them, but apocalyptic as it looked, the news wasn’t all bad. With so many buildings down, Julius could see all the way to the edge of Lake Erie, and while most of the once Great Lake looked depressingly like a drained bathtub filled with dead fish, there was still a pool of water reflecting the Leviathan’s shadow in the far distance, its muddy surface rippling in the breeze.
“Julius!”
He looked over just in time to see someone land beside him, and then the horrible weight of the burning magic lifted as Amelia grabbed his shoulders. “Hey,” she said, looking him over with a worried frown. “Are you all right?” When he nodded, she smacked him. “What were you thinking, running up here without protection? You could have spent your last hour alive knocked out cold!”
“I didn’t know we had portable protection,” he said, looking up in wonder at the radiant shimmer of the magical bubble Amelia was holding over them like an umbrella.
“Neat trick, huh?” his sister said with a grin. “I copied it from Ghost. I can’t make mine as big as his yet, what with the whole I’ve-only-been-a-spirit-for-less-than-twenty-four-hours thing, but I’m still pretty stoked about my progress.” She looked around with a grimace. “So what did you bolt up here for? I hope it wasn’t something stupid.”
“It’s not,” Julius promised, pointing at the puddle of water in the distance. “Take a look at that.”
Amelia winced. “Not much left, is there?”
“Actually, that’s a lot more than I’d hoped,” he said. “If I can still see Lake Erie, we still have a chance.”
“A chance to do what?”
Julius smiled and jumped back down, falling a good fifty feet to land in a crouch beside Marci. She’d barely recovered from the shock when Julius shot up and grabbed her shoulders, his hands shaking with wild hope as he said the magic words.
“I have an idea.”
Chapter 5
Marci had a feeling she knew where this was going, but she asked anyway. “What sort of idea?”
Julius grinned down at her. “I’m going to talk to Algonquin.”
She’d known it.
“Talk to Algonquin?” Amelia cried, jumping down beside them. “Seriously, that’s your plan?”
“Why not?” Julius asked. “She’s the reason all of this happened, and she only gave in to the Leviathan because she thought all was lost. There’s still water in her lakes, though, which means we’ve still got a chance to convince her that’s not the case. It might not even be that hard. This is basically a suicide, but vengeful as she is, I’m pretty sure Algonquin doesn’t actually want to die any more than we do. If we can find a compromise, something she can live with, I’m betting she’ll change her mind and choose survival. Once she does that, she’ll withdraw her protection from Leviathan, and the plane will kick him out, just like Amelia said.”
The Spirit of Dragons pressed a hand to her forehead. “No offense, Baby-J, but that’s the most Julius-y thing you’ve ever said.”
“It’s ridiculous,” General Jackson added, striding over to join them. “Do you know how many times we’ve tried to negotiate with Algonquin? It’s impossible. She will not listen.”
“That was back when she still had an ace up her sleeve,” Julius argued. “Things are different now. I’ve lived in the DFZ. I know how deeply Algonquin loves her lakes. She’s been watching the slow destruction of everything she loves for sixteen hours now. If she was ever going to be open to changing her mind, this would be the time, but she can’t listen if no one’s there to talk.”
“Fair enough,” the general admitted. “But how do you propose we get to her? The Leviathan is drinking her down as we speak, and we’re still stuck in this bubble.”
“I don’t think he’s going as fast as we feared, though,” Julius said excitedly. “The river and Lake St. Clair are gone, but if the other Great Lakes are anything like Erie, we’ve still got a chance. Before he left, Raven said we had two hours tops before the magic dropped enough to go outside. If the Leviathan doesn’t finish her off before then—and at the rate he’s going, I don’t think he will—we can go out there and buy time to find Algonquin and convince her to stop her monster for us.”
“Buy time?” Svena asked. “How does one buy time against a Nameless End? What do you intend to do, talk it to death?”
Julius smiled. “I was actually thinking of something more traditional. We can fight it.”
“Fight a Nameless End?” Amelia said. “Like, with claws and fire?” When Julius nodded, she threw her hands in the air. “That’s it. You’ve officially gone from crazy optimistic to plain old crazy.”
“Just hear me out,” Julius said. “I’m not saying we should fight the Leviathan himself. That is crazy. He’s the size of the entire sky. But we don’t actually need to defeat him. We just need to stall long enough to convince Algonquin to do it for us.”
“Stalling, huh?” Marci said, tapping her fingers thoughtfully on her bracelet. “You mean like make a distraction?”
“I was actually thinking we should go for the tentacles,” Julius said. “That’s how he’s sucking up her water. If we start cutting them off, it’s bound to have some effect.”