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 the city. If I’d actually done my job as a Cleaner, all of those units would be sorted, scrubbed, and back on the rental market, but I hadn’t been doing my job. I’d been ransacking, taking the valuables and leaving the rest a filthy mess.
Worse, due to my busy schedule as the DFZ’s newest priest-prospect, I hadn’t had a spare moment to go back and fix any of my mistakes. All of the units Nik and I had bought were still in the exact same state of chaos we’d left them in, which meant they couldn’t be re-leased to new tenants. But just because the spaces weren’t being lived in didn’t mean the rent didn’t still come due every month, and since my name was the one on the lease, it came to me. Six hundred thousand dollars and change, every damn month.
“So here’s the total of what you owe for all your units, plus maintenance fees and utility bills,” the DFZ said, pointing at the terrifyingly huge number rounded to the nearest tenth of a cent at the bottom of her ledger page. “How will you be paying?”
I couldn’t. She knew I couldn’t pay, but she also knew that I couldn’t default. If I failed to honor even one of those leases, I’d be in violation of my Cleaning contract, which meant I’d lose my Master Key. Without my key, I couldn’t be a Cleaner anymore. Staggering debt or no, I wasn’t ready to give my old life up. Dammit, I’d just gotten rid of my dad’s bad luck curse! If I could only get out of this situation, I could go back to Nik and we could actually make the bank I’d promised him so many times. I refused to let that hope go just yet, but until my dad woke up, there was nothing I could do.
“I see,” the god said when I didn’t reply, her face lighting up in a salesman’s dazzling smile. “Looks like you’ll be working for me for another month, then!”
I nodded, fighting the urge to cry. It wasn’t that I was unhappy here. I enjoyed the work I did for the city, and I loved having Dr. Kowalski as a teacher. I’d made more progress on my magic in the last eight weeks than in all the rest of my life combined. I also had no right to complain. Working off what I owed for all those apartments had been my idea, the only thing I could think of to save my dad without actually signing my soul over to the DFZ’s priesthood. It had seemed like a great plan at the time, but now that the emergency was over, I was trapped again. All that work to get clear, and here I was right back in debt, only this time I was on the hook for a lot more money to a much greater power.
It was depressing in the extreme. No matter how hard I worked, I only ever seemed to end up digging myself deeper. At this rate, I’d be a billion dollars in debt to multiple gods by the end of the year.
Hyperbole aside, I actually did have a plan to get out of this mess. Like everything else in my life, though, it depended on my dad waking up, which reminded me, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” the DFZ said, making a note on my rolled-over debt and shutting her ledger. “A god is always there for her loyal followers. What can I do for you?”
“Actually, it’s about my dad.”
To her credit, the city spirit made a solid effort at looking concerned. “Is he getting worse?”
“No, but he’s not getting any better, either,” I told her. “He still looks exactly the same as when you rescued us. He doesn’t move, he doesn’t eat, he just…lies there. It’s freaking me out.”
Honestly, it was doing a lot more than that. Despite living in the shadow of one my entire life, I knew jack squat about how dragons actually functioned. I knew they generated their own magic in the form of dragon fire, but when I’d poked at my father’s chest where his flames normally lived, I hadn’t felt a thing. If he hadn’t been breathing, I would have sworn he was dead. He certainly looked like a corpse, all still and pale and haggard. But dragons were famously hard to kill, so I’d left him alone on the assumption he’d get better, except he hadn’t. He hadn’t healed, hadn’t changed, hadn’t moved at all, and after two months, I was starting to lose hope that he would.
“You could ask the Peacemaker,” the DFZ suggested as she did every time I brought this up. “He’d help you.”
“I’m sure he would,” I said. “But as I told you last time, I can’t go to him. My dad isn’t part of the Peacemaker’s Accord. I know everyone says the Dragon of Detroit is different, but he’s still a dragon. I’ve never met one of those who could resist exploiting weakness, and a kitten could kill my dad right now. Even if the Peacemaker did agree to help us without demanding some kind of horrible debt in return, word of my father’s condition is bound to get out. The only reason we’ve stayed safe this long is because I’ve been super careful to stay off the internet and never go anywhere that’s not under your direct control, like this garden. I know the moment there’s even a whisper of a rumor that the Great Yong is one pillow-to-the-face away from dead, we’ll be up to our eyeballs in murderous dragons. From what you said earlier, they’re already circling, which means going to the Peacemaker would put my dad at more risk, not less.”