“—and then I let out a great gout of fire, and I know I looked majestic as fuck, because how can one not look majestic when they can breathe fire? Oh, that’s right. They can’t. Wait. They can’t not. Okay, is that a double negative? I feel like I’m not making the point I want to make.”
“How did they tear a hole in his wing?” Justin asked, watching the Meridian City Guards start to poke through the bodies that were still intact. In the distance, I could see townsfolk beginning to exit through the front gates and head toward us.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t know everything.”
“No one believes you know everything,” Justin said. “In fact, most people believe you don’t know much at all.”
“Thanks for understanding,” I said, feeling relieved.
He rolled his eyes at me.
“Well?” I asked, looking up at Kevin. “How’d it happen?”
“Hmm?” he said. “Oh, this old thing?” He stretched out his wing again, wincing as he did so. The hole looked rough. “Don’t rightly know. One moment I was winning, and the next, I was still winning but was wounded in the heat of battle. Granted, it didn’t do much to slow me down because I still kicked ass, but it certainly hurts. I suppose that maybe if I was given a reward of shinies, I’d feel much better about it.”
“I’m sure you would,” I said, eyeing the approaching crowd, an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. “And I’ll get right on that, I really will, but I have a question. Why are people coming out here to look at the dead bodies? And a follow-up question. Why are they bringing their children?”
They all looked toward the people coming to stand along the edges of the field of battle. There were men and women, hookers and drug dealers. Many of them looked as if they hadn’t bathed in a long time. Some wore the smallest stitches of clothing that I was sure would probably be considered extraordinarily indecent in any place other than Meridian City. A few looked as if they were strung out on some kind of drug.
But most of them were staring at me with such derision that I looked over my shoulder, sure that I would see the most evil of men standing behind me. Because that was the only thing that made sense for those expressions.
Of course, there was no one behind me.
I looked back toward the crowd.
“Me?” I asked, pointing at myself.
The crowd nodded.
“Huh,” I said. “That’s… unexpected. I didn’t do anything.”
“You’re standing on the blood of your enemies,” someone called out.
I looked down. Sure enough, I was standing in a large pool of blood. “That’s unfortunate.”
“He’s so bloodthirsty,” another voice said. “He probably wants to bathe in it.”
“Well I never,” I said, putting my hand to my throat.
“They were just people,” someone else said. “And he murdered them.”
“What the hell,” Justin said. “They were Dark wizards. They would have attacked Meridian City!”
“The Prince is defending me,” I whispered to Ryan excitedly. “Are you hearing this?”
“Should I be worried about this you and Justin thing?” Ryan asked with a frown. “Because I think I might need to be worried about it.”
“Babe,” I said. “Of course not. You know you’re my one and only. But I can’t help it if he falls in love with me. It’s not my fault I’m so irresistible.”
Ryan crowded in close to me while he glared at Justin. “You can’t have him.”
“I feel like you’ve gotten stupider since our wedding day,” Justin said. “Given the company you keep, I’m not surprised.”
“Hey!”
“Sam’s thirst for blood knows no bounds!” a woman cried out. “Soon he’ll come for us and feast upon our flesh!”
The crowd gasped and took a step back, eyeing me in fear.
“Sam don’t eat flesh,” Tiggy said.
“Thank you, Tiggy.”
“Except for chicken.”
“Okay, Tiggy.”
“And cows.”
“That might be enough, Tiggy.”
“And—”
“Not helping, Tiggy.”
“Hear me, good people of Meridian City,” Justin said, sounding more regal than I’d ever heard him before. “Sam of Wilds might be… a lot to take in. I get that. Trust me. I really get that. In fact, I might get that more than any of you. In fact, I can almost guarantee that I get that more than you all do. You think you’ve got it bad? I have to see him almost every day.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And he doesn’t mean that the way it sounds, either.”
“But he came here with the sole purpose of making sure that you and your city are protected from the Dark wizards,” Justin continued. “You had a betrayer in your midst, a villain who acted with the sole purpose of attempting to bring darkness to Verania.”
The crowd gasped yet again. The fact that they did it in unison was really quite impressive. I wondered if they got together regularly and practiced it for moments such as this. “Who?” a man cried. “Who has betrayed us?”
“Someone you would not expect,” I said, taking a step forward to stand beside my Prince. Unfortunately, I accidentally stepped onto a recently deceased Dark wizard and crunched what sounded like a large bone. The crowd looked a little queasy at the sharp crack that echoed across the field. Justin’s face was in his hand as I tried to avoid more bones. I laughed weakly. “Oops. That was an accident.” I took another step forward, only to step on someone’s dead face and break their nose and cheeks. I stumbled a little bit on that one. “Ha ha, that… good gods, how many of them are there?”
It took another awkward minute or two before I was standing next to Justin. Thankfully, I’d only managed to step on (and in) three more Darks before I made it to his side. “Made it,” I announced.
No one seemed happy for me.
I coughed. “Anyway. It was Feng.”
I don’t know what I expected. Shock, maybe. Or possibly outrage that he could have fooled them as he had the rest of us.
What I didn’t expect was the immediate anger directed toward my person.
“Feng? Is he serious?”
“Feng was a good man!”
“He wouldn’t betray us!”
“Feng helped save my family from the streets.”
“Sam of Wilds is full of it! Feng would never work with the Darks.”
“Maybe it was Sam that betrayed us!”
“Yeah! We were fine until Sam of Wilds came here!”
“Just look at him! He’s basking on top of the dead bodies of those poor, defenseless wizards who probably wanted nothing more than to be friends with all of us!”
“Are they being for real right now?” I whispered to Justin. “Because if they are, I severely underestimated my self-worth, and I’ll be honest: that’s a really terrible feeling.”
Justin was tense next to me, warily eyeing the crowd. Tiggy began to growl behind me, and then came the unmistakable sound of Ryan drawing his sword, as if he thought the mob before us planned on attacking. And maybe they were. There was anger on their faces, and fear, and I promised myself that one day, I would have my revenge against Lady Tina DeSilva, because this was obviously her fault. Somehow she’d poisoned people against me, and I would see her pooping in a bucket in the dungeons for the rest of her life. I figured the King owed me a solid.