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Garrett nods. “Yeah, that sounds more like Alistair. So you were friends after that?”
“Yes. It’s kind of impossible to not be friends with Alistair if he wants you to.” I don’t go into any detail about everything Alistair’s done for me. I barely know these people, and even though they’ve been so nice to me, they don’t need to know my deepest, darkest secrets.
CHAPTERSIX
Micah
I guessI should be glad Alistair didn’t want to be friends with me. I don’t think I could handle his kind of friendship—Garrett’s more my kind of hellhound. But there’s something about the way Cam’s face changes when he talks about being friends with Alistair that makes me wonder if there’s more to the story. Maybe they hooked up for a while? I’m sure if they’d been in an actual relationship, Garrett would have heard about it. Hell, the way Alistair shares things, he probably would have told us when he first mentioned Cam.
Whatever. I might be interested in Cam, but even if we do hook up, that doesn’t give me any rights to his past, and I wouldn’t want them anyway. We’re grown adults, not jealous adolescents.
“Did you have a good trip?” Garrett asks, changing the subject. “I hope the teleport sickness wasn’t too bad.” He makes a sympathetic face. It still hits him every time, even though he’s used to being teleported now. At least it’s not too severe.
“Oh, I didn’t get sick,” Cam says blithely and bites into the toastie he just dunked in his soup. Garrett’s eyes flash to me.
“He didn’t,” I confirm. At first I’d thought he may have been playing it off, and of course I couldn’t tell in those initial dark minutes in the cave, but I paid close attention when I brought him to the house. He’s either a helluva actor, or he really doesn’t get teleport sick at all.
“That’s great.” Zac sounds surprised, and he grins at Cam. “It’s going to make teleporting back and forth from the cave so much easier.”
Garrett nods. “I’m jealous,” he confesses. “I still get queasy every time. Not bad enough to throw up, but it’s not fun.”
“Wow, really?” Cam’s eyes widen. “I had no idea. It didn’t feel like anything to me. I mean, when it was dark in the cave, that was a bit disorienting, but I didn’t feel sick.”
Asher raises a brow at me. “You’ve been to the cave already?”
“He was excited to see the door.” That’s kind of understating it.
“I was going to die if I didn’t see it today,” he confirms in a matter-of-fact tone that makes me wonder if he would, indeed, have died. Even though I know he wouldn’t have. “And I’m so glad Micah took me. It’s stupendous!”
Garrett’s grinning widely. “Isn’t it? I never could have imagined something like it.”
“But I was surprised by the amount of rust,” Cam continues. “Micah said it’s been fifty years since anyone’s been there, but there’s not enough rust for that.”
“That’s not what I said,” I correct before either of my cousins can make a smart-ass comment. “I said the village has been here for fifty years and we didn’t know the cave existed.”
“But someone else must have known and been looking after it,” he insists stubbornly.
“Wait,” Zac interjects. “Alistair didn’t tell you the background?”
Cam shrugs. “He might have. I was looking at the pictures.”
Asher turns slowly to look at me, and I shrug too. The horror on my cousin’s face is kind of fun.
“That’s okay,” Garrett’s saying. “That means I get to tell you, and it’s a fun story.” He repeats what I told Cam earlier about Isaac wandering off and us searching for him. “And then he didn’t want to leave because he hadn’t had a chance to look at the ‘treasure,’” he continues. “And in the middle of telling him there is no treasure, we actually looked around and saw the wall and all the crates with the components in them.”
“Wow,” Cam breathes. “That must have been incredible.”
“Itwas. We had to go home, though, and come back the next day with equipment because Zac’s a party pooper.”
“Hey! While you slept in, I was running around getting all the stuff we needed,” Zac protests. Garrett ignores him.
“Then we had to call the government—or in this case, Alistair and these guys’ cousin, Gideon. They brought their experts, and it turns out the whole thing is actually the door to a dragon hoard that’s been there for thousands of years.”
Cam’s jaw drops. “But… but there’s not enough rust for that!”
Garrett nods slowly. “Right? The dragon who created it used some really good preservation spells. We had two dragons here looking at them saying how good they were.”
“Wowwww,” Cam breathes, and I choke down the impulse to lean over and kiss his cheek. “This is… this is…” He shakes his head. “This is so much better than I thought it was, and I already thought it was going to be the best part of my life, ever.”
