“Mhm. I hope whoever made the book didn’t kill the dragonling.”
“If they did, I’m sure they paid for their crime. Hurting a dragon, well, everyone should know better than to do that.”
Reverently, he caressed the cover—then a tail ejected from the end of the spine with a swloop that startled me and almost made me drop the book. I held it away from my chest while the tail unrolled to a length as long as my arm. Its scales were a deep, vibrant crimson, shiny in the lumoonlight, like blood—the original color of the book’s cover, I imagined. It ended in a wicked barb like the point of an arrow.
Baz and I gaped at it, then at each other.
“Wow,” I said.
Eyes wide, he nodded. “We really need to figure out how to read this book.”
“We do.” Ever so gently, I petted the tail. It flicked to one side, then whipped to the other, and settled—like a cat’s tail. No, like a dragon’s.
We stared for an entire minute before Baz said, “So how’d the book get us here? I didn’t even see you crack it open.”
“The book didn’t do this.”
“Then what did?”
“When I pulled the book from the shelf, there was a little button hidden behind it. I pressed it.”
“You pressed a secret button in a castle that constantly wants to murder and eat people, not knowing what was going to happen?”
“It was shiny, like a crystal.”
“It was shiny.”
I nodded.
“And when it opened up a giant, black hole in the floor, you jumped through without knowing where it would take you?”
“Pretty much. Seemed like a better option.”
“A better option than … being attached to me?”
I raised my arm with the rope and pointed at my collar. “I’m your prisoner, as you’re so fond of reminding me. Prisoners are meant to try to escape. It’s practically all that prisoners do.” When they weren’t being fucked into blissful oblivion by their captors’ monster-big dicks, anyhow.
“Let me confirm I’m understanding this right. You were willing to jump into a hole that looked bottomless, inside the most dangerous structure in all of existence, with no idea what was going to happen to you—to get away from me?”
“You locked me in a dungeon without blood, my power, a blanket, or even a single lumoon to dispel the darkness, for days on end.”
He glanced at the lumoons that were inexplicably linked to my person and movements, and that I hadn’t created, but said nothing. I didn’t know why I had them now either.
“I had to take my chances,” I said. “I didn’t think you would follow me through the hole, or portal, or whatever it is.”
He wagged the arm connected to the rope. “Of course I was going to.”
“You put it on me. Figured you would get it off, spare yourself my awful company.”
“Nope. The Rillis rope binds us together, no matter what.”
No comment about how I wasn’t awful company, how he’d certainly enjoyed the scorch out of some of the time he’d shared with me.
“So then how’s the rope supposed to ever come off if you can’t get it off?”
“None of your business.”
“Right. Not for your ‘prisoner’ to know.”