Haru pulled the cell phone Vitor had given him for communication with Ruben from his pocket and handed it over to Adrian. “Send him a message. Tell him I’ve been in contact with my people. The Caspagir shard will arrive shortly. Ask for a meeting.”
“Yeah, okay,” Adrian mumbled, already typing on the phone.
“If it’s anything like last time, his butler will show us to his study. Ruben won’t realize that we’ve brought our friends until it is too late.”
Adrian lifted his eyes from the phone to stare at Haru and then Shey. “Uh-huh. This is the part where he panics, refuses to tell us anything, and tries to kill us.”
“Yes, but he won’t because we have a dragon, storm magic, and luck magic,” Tyche chimed in. “We’ll torture him. Get the information we want. And afterward, we’ll kill him.”
“I’ll burn the building,” Haru added.
“Afteryou get the shard from the Isle of Stone. We are not leaving that behind,” Adrian stated.
Haru nodded. “Yes, of course. It shouldn’t be hard to locate. Even if I must tear the building apart.” That was the other part he was looking forward to besides the killing of Ruben Deinum. He wanted that monument to Ruben’s wealth and power destroyed, reduced to rubble and ash.
“There. We have a plan,” Shey announced.
“We’ve got something,” Adrian grumbled. He tapped on the phone a few more times before setting it on the table facedown, as if he couldn’t stand to look at it. “The message has been sent. If our cover hasn’t been blown, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted to see you today.”
Tyche jumped to his feet and rushed to Haru’s side. “Help me find the right attire for this. He dismissed me as nothing while in that prison. I want to wear something that screams fierce bad-ass, so he regrets ever capturing me.”
“And you don’t think him discovering you’re a god is terrifying enough?” Shey inquired.
“I haven’t decided if I’m going to reveal that yet. I have a feeling that learning you’re Caspagir royalty is going to be enough to make him shit his pants. Finding out I’m a god is kind of unnecessary.”
Shey smirked as he reached out. He caught a strand of red hair between two fingers and rubbed it. “You are anything but unnecessary.” His smirk turned into a grin. “But finding out you’re a god could give him a heart attack.”
“Which would keep us from learning anything at all.” Tyche sighed.
“Do not worry, Little God,” Haru purred, his mood improving by leaps and bounds. “I can make you fierce andfrightening. We will make Ruben ruin his pants, and then we kill him.”
Yes, this is a much better plan than simply waiting…
CHAPTER 30
Tyche
Apowerful hand slowly cut through Tyche’s field of vision, and the tips of the fingers landed on his endlessly bouncing knee, applying the smallest amount of pressure. It was enough for Tyche’s entire body to still. His eyes snapped up to Shey’s gently smiling face.
“It’ll be okay. I’ll watch your back,” the prince reassured him.
Tyche’s throat tightened, and he forced a crooked grin onto his lips. “Yeah, but are you going to be able to stop me from clawing his eyes out or making him explode with bad luck?”
Shey drew his hand to his own lap. “I could probably handle the former, but not the latter. You’ll have to exert a little self-control.”
“We’ll see.” He wasn’t making any promises.
But his sudden case of nerves didn’t have anything to do with facing Ruben. It was the fact that he was taking any kind of confrontational action at all, and that he had companions to support him. He was part of a team. A strange team, with a prince infused with the power of the God of Storms, a dragon, and a royal guard who had this interesting thread of magic from the God of Hope. Sure, he was a god, but he was a rather uselessgod and didn’t have any kind of fight training like this trio. Of all of them, he was the most likely to have his head lopped off.
Of course, if he were being honest, the past week had been too strange for words. He’d been living in this posh hotel penthouse with Haru, Adrian, and Shey, eating the most delicious food and wearing amazing clothes. Mostly, he lounged about, read books, and had the oddest conversations with the dragon. Haru had the perspective of a long-lived being—unlike the humans—but he’d lived a sheltered life on the Isle of Stone. He’d missed out on so many things that were happening in other kingdoms. While Tyche had been happy to fill him in on thousands of years of random history for Ilon, New Rosanthe, and more, Haru told him about life on the Isle of Stone and the various dragon clans.
However, his favorite time was at night, after they all turned in. Shey had offered to share a room with Tyche, despite there being three bedrooms. Adrian and Haru shared, though Tyche didn’t miss that occasionally he found one of them sleeping on the sofa in the morning. Very confusing. The third room was reserved for Vitor, who was absent more often than not.
At night, with all the lights turned out and darkness soaking into the room, Tyche and Shey would whisper silly things to each other like they had when they were locked in their cells. They never talked about anything serious or important as they drifted off to sleep in that giant king-sized bed with an ocean of space between them. Yet, there was a strange comfort in hearing that familiar voice reach out to him, reassuring him as it had so many times before.
He glanced over at Shey, viewing the man beside him in the car from the corner of his eye, and he looked perfectly at ease. Of course, he thought little of running off to confront bad guys and save the populace.
“Answers first, people,” Adrian called out from the driver’s seat as he maneuvered the black car through midday traffic to Ruben Deinum’s house. “Answers andthenkilling. We can’t get answers from a dead man. Unless you’ve got some tricks you haven’t told us about yet, Ty?”
