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have this natural resource nationalized through the back door.”
    The President scoffed at the accusation, but subsequent efforts to claim the Portal through everything from the Defense Department to the National Parks Service showed that Rayburn was prescient. While the legal battles between city and federal government rolled up toward the Supreme Court, Congress made the point moot. The federal legislators—a majority of whom belonged to a party that wasn’t the President’s, and made much political hay over limiting the interference of the federal government in people’s lives—saw a grand opportunity to thumb their nose at their least favorite executive without damaging their own power base. They sent up a veto-proof bill that granted the Portal exclusively to Cuyahoga County.
    It was later uncovered that, during this whole time, Mayor Rayburn had established several unilateral trade agreements across the Portal that rendered FEMA assistance unnecessary.
    Once Cleveland got out of that first year, Rayburn’s decision began paying off. Once city and social functions resumed some sort of normalcy, the Portal began to grow us its first cash crop. Tourism. Nearly two million people the first year. All to see a place where things now existed that were never seen outside a Tolkien novel or a Grimm fairy tale. The money that came in the second year undid the damage of the first. The year after that helped undo the last quarter century of urban neglect. The year after that, and the census found that for the first time since the seventies, the city’s population was growing. There were people who moved here simply because a herd of unicorns had taken up residence in Hunting Valley.
    Magery itself became a major industry. The powers wrapping northeast Ohio could be used to do many things that couldn’t be done elsewhere, everything from removing an inoperable brain tumor to giving you a whole-body makeover that could go as far as gender and species.
    Last, but not least, the Portal itself was the ultimate money-maker. How much would you pay for a chance to start over on another world, one with completely different rules? A lot of people would pay considerably, and the city charged what the market would bear—slightly less than a passenger ticket on the space shuttle.
    Over the course of a decade, the home of the Portal had grown more and more secure. Where the stadium was once surrounded by barbed wire and AA batteries, it was now contained within a forty-foot-tall brick wall that tried to look vaguely like a castle. The anti-aircraft batteries now stood in handsome cylindrical towers where people could ignore them if they wanted to. Not a hint of razor wire.
    And every week a bus would pull into the stadium, drop off our émigrés and pick up the Portal’s latest refugees.
    Above, the sky was always swirling and black. Marking the place where our world ends, and another one begins. A connection between here and there. An unexplained freak of (super)nature that had become the backbone of this city’s economy. And the fact that no one really could explain it, mages and scientists alike, meant that everyone here was living on borrowed time.
    The door opening was chaotic enough. Something about Aloeus’ death made me wonder what would happen if the door ever shut?

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    I DECIDED that, if I was going to focus on the dragon himself, I needed to start with the dragon. I headed my Volkswagen up Euclid to see the legal residence of the late dragon Aloeus up
     
    1000 Euclid. The address had sounded familiar, but it wasn’t until I reached the light at East Ninth that I realized why.
    The intersection of Euclid and East Ninth has been a financial nexus since the 1900s. The Huntington Bank Building lorded over the northeast corner, a massive gray stone pile over a century old. Across from it on Ninth was the characterless white facade of National City Bank, an architectural cipher perpetrated in the