“I’m hungry,” Gary said, his scarf flapping around his head to keep his mane from suffering the effects of wind-rape.
“I offered to fly over a lake and hold you near the water so you could scoop up fish in your mouth,” Kevin said. “But you told me that was the stupidest idea you’d ever heard.”
“Well, yeah. You expected me to hold my head underwater with my mouth open and hope that something just came right inside.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.”
“Ha,” Tiggy said. “Yuck.”
“We’re still over the Dark Woods,” Ryan said. “We probably won’t reach Meridian City until sometime this afternoon.”
“I’m fast as shit,” Kevin said proudly.
“You okay to keep going?” I asked him. “You’ve been going all night.”
He turned his head back toward us, a wide, lecherous grin on his face. “Obviously you know nothing about the virility of dragons. You don’t need to worry about me, pretty. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gone all night. And it won’t be the last.”
“I set myself up for that one,” I admitted. “I have no one to blame but myself. Sorry. Sorry, everyone. I made Kevin gross again. My bad.”
“It’s not like it’s that hard,” Gary said. “He’s gross all the time.”
“You literally have no room to talk,” I said. “Do I need to remind you that you incorporated my name into your sexual perversions? Not to mention that none of us will ever be able to eat muffins again, much less ever step inside a bakery. Do you understand what you’ve done? You’ve ruined pastries. And my name.”
“Whatever,” Gary said. “I am a free and single independent unicorn who don’t need no mens. I’ve sown my oats, settled down in a semimonogamous relationship, got my heart shattered into a billion pieces, put said heart back together, and now will unsow the aforementioned oats so that I may find new ways to sow them all over again.”
“And that’s what I’m paying you alimony and child support for?” Kevin said, sounding horribly affronted. “So you can sow some young new thing? For shame, Gary. For. Shame. And let’s not even begin to discuss how it was you that broke my heart. And the heart of our son.”
“Nope,” I said. “Still not even involved. Also, you don’t pay alimony or child support because I am not your child.”
“It’s okay, champ,” Kevin said, glancing back at me distractedly. “I promise I’ll try and make it to your sportsball game next weekend, assuming I don’t get called into the office. We’re working on a big project, though, so I might have to take a rain check. Your stepdaddy is a very important dragon with many responsibilities.”
“You know,” Ryan said, “with everything that’s gone down—evil wizards, villains, sand mermaids, bad-touching grandmas, jerks named Ruv who never put on clothes like they’re supposed to—I think the fact that Kevin and Gary getting together somehow made them think they’re your parents is still the one thing that baffles me the most.”
“It’s not that baffling,” I assured him. “It’s because Kevin and Gary are the stupidest magical creatures alive. It’s as simple as that.”
“Gary,” Kevin said, “your son is acting up again.”
“Oh really?” Gary snapped. “So he’s my son when he’s being a little asshole, but he’s your son whenever he does something right. Which, admittedly, isn’t very often, but you get my point.”
“If I’d left him in the woods when I first met him, I might not be here right in this moment,” I pondered aloud.
“No,” Tiggy said, and I could hear the frown in his voice. “No, Sam. You found us. We go home with you. We stay with you. Forever. And ever. And ever.”
“Gaaaahhh,” I said. “I can’t even with you. I’m going to give you such a hug when we land, you don’t even know.”
Tiggy was perfectly okay with that.
So Kevin and Gary continued to bicker, and Tiggy started humming to himself. Ryan leaned forward, lips near my ear.
“Bad dream?” he asked quietly.
I shrugged, unsure of how to answer. After all, how do you tell the love of your life that your grandmother and a dragon made of stars had predicted his death? And that was the crux of it, too, because the death could be soon, or the death could be years down the road, but the fact remained that one day, Ryan would die, either at the hands of Myrin or in the cold grasp of age. And either way, he would leave me behind. I was a wizard. My magic wouldn’t allow me to age like a normal person.
Granted, it might not even matter if Myrin got what he wanted, whatever that was. I highly doubted that any of us would be alive for long after that.
“I guess,” I said. “It’s just… everything, you know?”
“I know. The last few weeks have been—”
“Ridiculous?”
“I was going to say trying, but yes, ridiculous works too. But then, most of the stuff that seems to happen to us is ridiculous.”
And that… well. That worried me. More than it should have, given all that was going on. Ever since Ryan and I had met (actually met—not the days where he was Nox and I was a little shit in the slums, not the days when he came to the castle and I pined creepily after him from afar, but the days before Justin was kidnapped by the very dragon upon whose back we now sat), it had been one thing after another. Adventures and villains and plots that made absolutely no sense but still happened anyway—we’d never really had a break. From anything.
And then the icing on the cake was the fact that I was the star of an ancient prophecy involving dragons and an evil wizard who apparently wanted nothing more than to monologue about killing my face.
With all this on our shoulders, I felt like shit for having dragged Ryan into this mess. If he’d never met me, he’d probably be married to the Prince by now, living the life of a knight commander in charge of the Castle Guard like he wanted to, instead of retaining the title but spending more time on the road than in the castle. He’d said once that I inspired him back in the days of the slums to make something of himself, but who’s to say there couldn’t have been another genesis to inspire him? He was meant to do what he did—I believed that with all my heart—and it didn’t have to be me that had motivated it.
The problem with thinking such thoughts was that more and more, Ryan was getting a better sense of my moods, whether I said anything about them or not. It seemed to be a byproduct of being a cornerstone. He helped me to control my magic, allowing me to build upon it, to make it stronger. And in turn, it was like there was an almost extrasensory link between us.
Either that or I still couldn’t keep everything I was feeling off my face. I was really shit about that too.
So when he broke through my self-pitying thoughts by saying, “You’re being stupid, aren’t you,” I wasn’t surprised. By now Ryan Foxheart was fluent in Sam of Wilds, which I loved. Mostly.
“I’m not being stupid,” I said. “You’re being stupid.”
“Yeah, because that was the mature response to go with.”
“You’re a mature response to go with—”
“Sam.”