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I look at Ornix, expecting him to be absolutely furious.

“I’m sorry.”

“Do not worry. Becoming obscured by emotion will not help you sense the seal any easier. Relax. Let yourself sense it.”

I can’t relax. I know every second I’m here my wings are going to be growing. I can feel them tingling. I have mental flashes of falling, and then of hell. What if I die? I am definitely headed down. I feel it in my gut. I’ve never been very good.

“Why don’t we get a drink,” Equinox suggests. “Relax. If anything terrible happens with the seal, we’ll know about it.”

“I don’t want to know about it. I want to get ahead of the chaos.”

“Sometimes you can’t,” Equinox says. “Sometimes you get a drink and wait for it all to blow over.”

Ornix agrees with this plan, so we go into a bar. Thank God this is a city where everybody is over the top, so although we are dressed in a borderline outlandish and outrageous fashion, no brows are raised in our direction.

We sit at a booth and we get drinks. I order a cocktail. The waitress pauses like she’s about to card me, but then she catches Ornix’s eye and decides not to.

“I never thought I’d be at a bar with you, Uncle,” Equinox says. “We never spend any time together in the human world.”

“Because we’re not supposed to both be here at the same time. Right now, the entire lineage is absent from the realm. If anything were to happen to us here, bloodlines would be ended.An entirely new dynasty would have to rise. War would likely break out.”

The waitress brings our drinks. I sip mine; it tastes of cherries and chocolate with an alcoholic kick that starts my head spinning quicker than I have any intention of letting on.

“I guess we’d better find the seal before that happens,” Equinox smiles. “Or maybe we split up, so we can be certain nothing can happen to both of us at the same time.”

I flag the waitress down and order fries. There’s something about grease, carbs, and salt that I think would really set this chocolate cocktail right off.

She delivers them way faster than I expected, and I eat them while listening to Ornix and Equinox verbally spar. There’s palpable tension between the two of them, love and hate in equal measure, I think. They’re not the same sort of people. They’re not the same kind of creature. Ornix is an emperor. He expects to be respected and obeyed. He carries so much weight on his shoulders, and he does it without seeming to notice. Equinox has built something outside his uncle’s realm. He has the blood of a leader too, but nowhere to express it in the dragon realm. So he made his own. Very creative.

I still don’t feel the seal. I’m starting to wonder if I ever brought it here at all, or if I ever felt it in the first place.

“What if someone else already attuned to it?” I mumble the question into my drink, but Ornix hears it. I know, because I feel him get instantly more still.

“Possible,” he says. “I hope not, but if the artifact can attune to one human, it can do it to another. We might not find it again. Not until it acts. Or someone acts. Or you feel it again.”

“We’re going to give up after looking for thirty minutes?” Equinox says. “We should get some meals.”

“Equinox, go and tend to your company,” Ornix says. “I will be in touch if you are needed.”

Equinox gets up. “Fine,” he says. “Call me if you need me. I never get a chance to visit the offices in person. I’m going to be taking new computers back, too. Hope you know that.”

Ornix narrows his eyes. He cannot do much here in this public human space, which is precisely why Equinox is pushing things now.

Equinox flashes a bright smile and walks away. Ornix waits until he is out of earshot, out of the bar entirely, before he comments.

“I love the boy,” he sighs. “But he is too much like my brother was.”

“What was your brother like?”

“In the end? Dead.”

It’s a conversation-killing response if ever I have heard one.

“I’m sorry.”

“It is not your fault, but thank you. Our bloodline runs hot with conquest. We have these urges for power. They are built into us. My younger brother wanted…”

I have that tingling feeling you get when someone is on the verge of telling you some incredible tea. Whatever is happening here is deep. I almost want to fill in the blanks without knowing them.