A Destiny of Dragons (Tales From Verania 2)

I was going to murder them.

“—and then she said— You’re not going to believe this, kitten. You want to know what that bitch said to me?”

“What she say?” Tiggy asked.

“She said, Bitch, you ain’t gonna get my man. And then I said, Bitch, I ain’t even goin’ after your man, but if I was, I’m sure I could totally get him because, girl, you nasty. And then she said, I ain’t nasty, you’re nasty.”

“She a nasty girl,” Tiggy agreed.

“Right? But get this. While she was saying I was nasty, I noticed that her roots were showing, so I said, Girl, your hair looks like a tragedy up in here, and she said, Oh, I know, it’s so embarrassing. My stylist died from a combination of gangrene and getting caught in a stampede of manticores. So I said, Listen. Just. Listen. You go down to Ming Win and she’ll take care of you. She’ll do your hair and your nails, and you tell her that Gary sent you because then she’ll give me a five percent discount on my next visit because money doesn’t grow on trees, if you know what I mean. So she was all like, Really, that’s sounds awesome, thank you so much. And I said, Of course, that’s why I’m here, and if you ever call me nasty again, I will fucking cut you. And now we have tea once a month.”

“I like tea,” Tiggy said. “And pencils. And rocks and cats. And friendship stories.”

“Of course you do, dear heart,” Gary said. “You are precious, and I love you so. Now, on the forty-second time I got called a bitch, I deserved it, seeing as how I had been with her man. But did I know that he was married? Of course I did. But only because he needed unicorn jizz in order to free himself from the entrapment spell she’d put him under. And who was I to say no to that? He had hair on the back of his knuckles. You know how I feel about that.”

“You feel good about that,” Tiggy said.

“Exactly. So of course I called her a bitch back and—”

It’d been going on.

For two hours.

In very, very loud voices.

My everything was twitching.

“Bathe in your blood,” I hissed under my breath. “Just bathe, motherfuckers.”

I could outlast them.

I could.

I would.

Two minutes and sixteen seconds later, I threw open the door, ready to choke the life out of two of my closest friends.

Who immediately broke off when they saw me.

“Oh good,” Gary said. “It worked.”

“What worked?” I snapped at him, trying to resist the urge to reach out and squeeze.

“I knew there was only so much of my bitch stories you could take before you came out,” he said, tossing his mane prettily. “Those amateurs before me don’t know how to get under your skin as quickly as I do.”

“I came out here to murder you,” I admitted, because it was the right thing to do.

“Oh, tiny human,” Tiggy said, patting me on the head with a big hand. “You try. You just try.”

I knocked his hand away, but not before Gary was crowding me against the wall, his snout pressed against my face, eyes inches from my own.

“Sam,” he said, breathing rather heavily. He didn’t blink.

It was terrifying. “What?”

“How are you?”

“I’ve… been better?”