“I did not change!” she snarled. “Your family took my rival and betrayed me! I had every right to be enraged!”
“But not without me,” Ian said, getting closer. “I would have fought them with you, Svena, and I don’t fear your rage. It’s part of what attracted me to you in the first place. You should have known that and kept me close. Instead, you shut me out. That was your choice to make, but you have no right to keep my children from me.”
Svena looked extremely distressed by that, and Amelia rolled her eyes. “Can’t you two save the custody battle for when the world isn’t ending?” she snapped, glaring at Svena. “Just take him with you and work it out on the battlefield or something. I don’t care what you do so long as you do it on the move, because while you two were bickering, the rest of your clan was falling behind.”
The cluster of white dragons in the distance was looking a bit harried, and Svena sighed. “Ian,” she said primly. “Your idiot sister makes a good point. I admit I was hasty in my decisions before, but—”
“Hasty?” Ian growled. “You freaked out over assumed information, broke our treaties, stole my children, and locked me out in a magical apocalypse after I flew all the way to Siberia to talk to you!” He crossed his short forefeet in front of him. “I deserve an apology, but since part of the reason I admire you is because you never give those, I’ll settle for full reinstatement as your consort and a life debt.”
Amelia whooped with laughter as Svena’s eyes grew wide. “Scale’s on the other foot now, snowball!”
“Shut up, fire chicken,” Svena snapped, but she really did look nervous as she watched Ian. Then, finally, she nodded, and the binding magic of the life debt landed on all of them like frozen teeth.
Ian sucked in a breath as the cold struck him, and his face split into a triumphant smile. “There,” he said, reaching out to the whelps, who happily leaped to him, their little noses quivering as they sniffed his feathers. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“That was amazing!” Amelia cackled, grinning at Svena, who looked ready to blast her in the face again. “Svena giving a life debt to her lover! Now I know the world is ending.”
Julius was feeling the same way, but not because of Svena and Ian. The whole time they’d been talking, he’d been watching the battle—both with his eyes and on the radar screen his com had picked up from the incoming jets. From what he could tell, their end of the fight was going as well as he could have hoped. Justin was having the time of his life blasting endless targets to his violent heart’s content, Conrad was a powerhouse, and the Golden Emperor had all of Lake Michigan on lockdown, leading his dragons in such perfect harmony, it looked as if they’d choreographed the whole thing in advance.
But while the Golden Empire was hands down the best, they weren’t alone. All the dragons were fighting together rather than with each other. Even Gregory was fighting. The clanless dragons were a little far away, but Julius had seen enough of Gregory’s fire to know it anywhere, and it was pushing just as strong as the others. So far as he could see, everyone was doing their part, including the wing of planes that had just arrived over Lake Erie. The humans had just entered the fight, but already they were shooting down tentacles almost as fast as the dragons were, and—more importantly—not shooting dragons. It was incredible, the greatest display of unity he’d ever seen or heard of.
And it wasn’t working.
No matter how fast they burned them, the Leviathan’s tentacles always came back faster. Destroy one, and two more would pop up in its place, shooting down at the tiny pools of water like kamikaze bombers. For every one they caught before it touched the ground, another got through, sucking up gallons of water before their forces could destroy it. Julius knew their efforts had to be slowing down the Leviathan’s consumption compared to when he’d been drinking unhindered, but he couldn’t shake the horrifying feeling that they weren’t actually making much of a difference, and what progress they were achieving was coming at a heavy cost.
As he’d seen with Amelia and Svena, the Leviathan’s tentacles were no longer just going for water. Several were actively attacking dragons now, swatting them out of the air every time they left an opening. So far, everyone he’d seen get hit had come back up, but the damage was evident in their slowed wings and uneven flight. He’d come into this knowing it would be a battle of attrition, but as he watched it unfold, Julius became more and more worried that they were already on the losing end of it.
Please, he thought silently, turning toward the western edge of the city where he could still smell a hint of Marci’s scent. Please, Marci, hurry.
He was still begging when a huge, slimy tentacle smacked him from behind, sending him spinning through the air.
Chapter 11
The Sea of Magic was even worse than Marci remembered.
It was still black, still nauseating, and still chaos, but there was just so much more of it. Even though her human eyes couldn’t process it, Marci could feel the weight of all that power pushing down on them like they were being crushed at the bottom of the ocean. It was even more terrifying now than it had been when she’d been dead, because while her soul was definitely firmer this time around, the safety zone provided by her spirit was much, much smaller, pushed nearly to her skin by the pressure outside.
“What now?” Ghost said, his terrifying face set in a nervous frown as he stared at the swirling magic above them.
“Find some spirits,” Marci said.
“That won’t be hard. They’re everywhere. But getting them to listen is another matter.” His frown deepened. “I’ve never seen them so worked up, and I was here for the madness that broke out once we realized the Merlins were cutting off the magic.”
“It gets harder, I’m afraid,” Marci said. “You heard what Myron said. If we’re going to make this thing work, we need all the spirits on board, and we need them fast. That means we can’t do this one by one. We need to talk to everyone, preferably all at the same time.”
“That’s impossible,” Ghost said immediately. “No one can talk to every spirit at once.”
“Just hear me out,” she said, flashing him a smile. “I’ve been doing some thinking about how you got me in here. One of the fundamental rules of all spirits is that they are strictly defined by their domains. Inside your area of influence, though, you’re basically a god.”
“Obviously,” the Empty Wind said. “I couldn’t have brought you here were it otherwise. But I fail to see how the Forgotten Dead can help us in this particular situation.”