The dragon said, “You can understand me now?”
And I said, “So, this is awkward.”
“Why haven’t you been talking this whole time!” Justin shouted.
“I have been,” the dragon snapped. “You just couldn’t understand me!”
“I understand you just fine now! What did you do differently?”
“I didn’t do anything! I brought the wizard here to translate!”
“Oh, isn’t that just perfect! I’ve been sitting here for weeks with you just growling at me, when we could actually have been having conversations this entire time!”
“I wasn’t growling,” the dragon growled. “I was actually talking to you, but you don’t speak dragon so you didn’t understand me!”
“Wait,” Justin said. “Are we speaking dragon or Veranian?”
“I… have no idea,” the dragon said.
They turned to look at me. So I said, “Heeeeyyy, buddy. You look alive. That’s just super,” all the while thinking guiltily of how Ryan’s breath felt upon my cheek. I was an awful person and where the hell did I get off thinking about someone else’s man? And maybe, just maybe, Justin had turned over a new leaf whil
e being held captive by the dragon. Maybe he’d found in himself his heart and was able to see that the world was a wonderful and mysterious place and there was no reason to go around being a gigantic dick all the time.
Justin rolled his eyes. “Did you break him? He sounds broken. Well, more than usual.”
Nope. Still a gigantic dick.
“I found him tied up to a pole not far from here.” The dragon puffed out its chest. “Apparently there’s a cult that made a religion because of me and they were sacrificing people to me because of it.”
“I wasn’t tied to the pole,” I said. “By the time you’d gotten there, I’d already freed myself.”
“Oh yeah,” the dragon. “That’s right. And then you tripped off the altar and landed facedown on the ground.”
Justin snorted.
I glared at both of them. “I’m not a fan of either of you.”
“Feeling is mutual,” they both said at the same time.
“Great,” I muttered. “Now there are two of them.”
“Why are you here, Sam?” Justin asked.
“Um. I told you. To rescue you? I thought that much was obvious.”
He laughed. “And this is your idea of a rescue? Seriously?”
“Hey! I was fine until the cult!” And the Darks and fire geckos and fairies and drag queens, but he didn’t need to know any of that.
“The cult,” the dragon whispered. “The cult that’s for me.”
Oh gods. He and Gary could never meet.
“I’m actually a little insulted,” Justin sniffed. “My father sent just you to rescue me? I thought at the very least I’d warrant the knights.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me!”
“Well, that’s certainly not true, Sam,” Justin said. “I don’t know why you try and convince yourself otherwise.”