He looked at it for a moment, then back up at me. “Is this what you’ve been working on in your room?”
“Yes.”
“And in it are your secrets?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
“I will ask you one last time, Sam of Wilds. Are you sure?”
My answer was pressing the corner of the Grimoire into the side of his face. It slid until it squished against his nose.
He frowned at me.
“C’mon,” I muttered, poking him with it again. “Take it. Take it.”
“You always were a child,” he grumbled at me, snapping it out of my hand.
I shrugged, trying to quell my nerves. “You wouldn’t expect me to behave any other way.”
“I suppose I wouldn’t.”
I sat in the chair opposite him, fighting the urge to flee the room and quite possibly the castle itself.
He watched me, momentarily ignoring the Grimoire in his lap. Then, “I am sorry.”
And that… well. That had never happened before. I didn’t think I’d ever heard Randall apologize for anything before. “Okay?” I said, seriously freaked the fuck out. I thought it possible the world was about to end.
He rolled his eyes, clearly picking up on what was going through my head. “About tricking you with the mirage.”
“Oh,” I said. “Um. Okay. Dude, I’ll be honest. That was a fucking shitty thing to do.”
“I wanted—”
“I know what you wanted,” I said. “But still, not cool.”
“Not cool,” he agreed. “Definitely not cool.”
I winced. “Maybe don’t talk like that. You’re old. You shouldn’t speak the language of youth, especially since it’s been literally centuries since you were my age.”
“I am old,” he said irritably. “But I do believe that gives me the right to do whatever the hell I want.”
“Great,” I said with a sigh. “I’m having so much fun already. I regret nothing about this morning so far.”
“Where should I begin?” he asked, caressing the cover of my Grimoire.
“Oh,” I said, suddenly nervous again. “Um. Here. Let me, uh—” And I leaned forward, flipping the Grimoire open on his lap, riffling through the pages, reading them upside down until I found the one I wanted. My hands were shaking, and I had to force myself to calm down when I sat back in my seat.
“There,” I said quietly. “There’s where you start.”
“All right. I will ask for absolute silence. I find that words upon a page tend to speak more than anything from a mouth. No need to clarify unless I ask. Understood?”
I nodded.
He waited a beat before lowering his eyes, beginning to read.