“And Tiggy.” Because that was also true.
“And your mom,” Gary said. “And your dad. And Morgan. And the King.”
“Okay, them too.” I was not my own man at all.
Ryan smiled. It was not the nice one I’d seen earlier. “Good. I’ll ask the King about it, then.”
Motherfucker. “You fight dirty, Foxheart,” I grumbled.
“Hey, if I have to go through with it, then so do you,” he said, which brought significantly more questions than I wanted to deal with. Like did they ever ditch the chaperone? Did they run away and fuck in the forest? Was Ryan a virgin? A sweet, sweet virgin with a big, fat—
Nope. Nope, nope, nope. So not even going there.
“Not for much longer,” I said lightly. “Pretty soon, it’s married life for you.” That was easier to think about.
“Hey, Ryan?” Gary asked. “If you’re so concerned with Sam’s… virtue and importance to the Kingdom, why don’t you volunteer to be the chaperone? As Knight Commander of the King’s Guard, no one is more qualified than you to ensure the safety of his butthole.”
I muttered two dark syllables as the green fluttered around the edges of my vision. I snapped my fingers and Gary’s mouth was bound with shining twine. He glared at me while Tiggy laughed at him. Gary was a unicorn, so his magic would counteract my own in a few short minutes, but it shut him up for now. It was time to end this, and Ryan would laugh and I would laugh (while slowly withering on the inside), and then I’d go back inside and find some way to move to a different continent.
And then Ryan said, “That’s a good idea. I’ll tell the King immediately.” He turned tightly on his heel and started walking toward the ballroom.
Because. What? “Hey!”
“Don’t worry,” he called over his shoulder. “It’ll be a great first date. You’ll see.”
And then he was gone.
“What in the fuck just happened?” I breathed.
Gary’s magic finally negated my own and the twine fell away and disappeared. “I fell in love with Ryan, you got jealous, then I fell out of love with him because he seemed needy, you tied me up, I got half a chubby because it reminded me of Octavio, and now you have a date with Ryan. Oops. I mean Todd. Gosh, I’m beat. What a long night. Tiggy, take me to bed or lose me forever. Bye, Sam! Bye! Good night! Bye!”
And my night ended with me standing alone among my mother’s flowers saying “Wait, what?” as I looked up at the stars and wished for impossible things.
CHAPTER 6
Ducks, Blueberries, and
Accidental Almost Hand Jobs
TWO DAYS after the Weirdest Night in History (and yes, it even beat the night forty years ago when the wizard Carlton the Dark Moth somehow managed to replicate himself sixty-seven times and then proceeded to have a self-orgy out in the town square of Meridian City), four invitations for dates came to the castle.
I ignored them at first. I was busy in the labs, trying to catch up on writing my own Grimoire before Morgan chewed my ass. I was at least two chapters behind, and getting trapped in a cave by Lartin certainly hadn’t helped.
A wizard’s Grimoire is his legacy to the world of magic. Or at least that’s what Morgan had told me time and time again. At first, I didn’t see why we couldn’t just share his, but he had just smiled at me, handed me his book, pointed out a relatively minor spell to turn an apple into an orange, and told me to knock myself out.
Which is exactly what I did.
When I woke up four days later with my eyebrows singed off, Morgan had told me that a Grimoire’s spells were meant to be tailored to the individual wizard who wrote them. Morgan’s Grimoire was in tune with Morgan and his magic. Since he was my mentor, his magic was intertwined with my own, which is why I only lost my eyebrows and not a hand or a foot.
Magic isn’t just the wave of a hand or the utterance of a word. Morgan best explained it in that a wizard is like a conductor to a symphony. It’s the specific timing, the cadence, the movements that allow the magic to occur. Without a conductor, the beat could be lost and dissolve into a blaring cacophony.
Without a knowledgeable wizard or a guiding hand, the magic could be fatal to the caster.
Morgan had shelf after shelf of Grimoires of the wizards that had come before him in the Verania line that would one day go to me. I tried not to think about that part. It felt like way too much responsibility.
So I experimented in ancient tongues. I conducted the magic, listening to it sing. There were colors here. So many colors that it was easy to get lost in them. To be overwhelmed by them. Morgan had said once that he’d gotten so far into the colors that the edges of reality had started to bleed together, like the world was melting around him. He’d made a mistake and almost didn’t make it back out. He never clarified what he’d seen in those moments. What he’d heard. He’d recounted the story to me as a warning of the addictiveness of magic. It was so easy to go too far.
Morgan never let me. He kept my boundaries contained and controlled. Every now and then I’d wonder how I could ever know how far my magic could go if it was always boxed in, but I never pushed. Morgan knew more than I did. I trusted him to know what was best for me.