“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“How are we going to get this dragon on our side?” Ryan asked. “Are we just going to walk up to it and say, ‘Hey, dragon. Come be on Team Sam. It’s great.’”
“Yes,” I whispered reverently. “I knew Team Sam would be a thing.”
“We’re going to need to sell it better than that,” Gary said, rolling his eyes. “Give him some incentive.”
“Oh?” Kevin said. “And just what kind of incentive can you give? Is that how it’s going to be? Move on from one dragon to the next? For shame. For shame.”
“Well,” Gary said. “Once you go dragon, all the rest is laggin’.”
“Hey!” Kevin said, sufficiently outraged. “That’s my saying! You can’t weaponize it and use it to stab me in the heart!”
“They’re so in love,” Tiggy said to me. “Tiggy knows.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I told Ryan. “You gotta trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
He frowned. “I trust you, Sam. But you never know what you’re doing.”
Which. Okay. That was pretty much true. I tended to be more of a by-the-seat-of-my-trousers kind of planner. I figured that since I was still alive after all these years, I must be doing something right.
As we approached the dome, I could see it was bigger than I’d thought. There were large square sections cut out of it, openings that looked as if they had once held windows or a covering of some kind. The stone was cracked along the dome, and some pieces had collapsed, but it still stood and looked solid. Or at least I hoped it was, because I had a bad feeling that we were going to be heading inside.
“It was an aviary,” Ruv said, coming to stand next to me as I stopped to look up. I had to blink against the sun shining along the curve of the dome.
“Those would have been some damn big birds,” I said.
“The world is a mysterious place, Sam,” Ruv said. “Before today, you never knew sand mermaids existed
.”
“And I was totally okay with that.”
His grin was rather unsettling. “Just because you ignore it doesn’t mean it will go away.” He continued on toward the dome.
“Fucking gypsies,” I muttered.
As we got closer, the whispering in my head got louder. It wasn’t forming words anymore, only sound, like a low hum. It itched and rankled, but the hook only pulled harder. Ryan walked closely at my side, his hand brushing against mine. It grounded me, kept my head mostly clear.
“They’re getting brighter,” he said as we walked into the shadow of the dome. “Your eyes.”
“It doesn’t feel like I’m seeing anything differently,” I said, though it felt like a lie. “They red?”
“Very.”
“That’s probably not a good sign.”
“Probably.”
The front of the dome had a large archway where I was sure had once been an entrance akin to the Great Doors into the throne room in Castle Lockes. But those doors were long gone, either corroded or destroyed at some point in the past. Now it was just a cavernous opening, and it was eerily reminiscent of the mouths on the sand mermaids, sans teeth. That wasn’t the image I wanted to have while walking into it.
But it wasn’t completely dark inside. In fact, it was rather beautiful, with shafts of sunlight crisscrossing through the openings in the dome, illuminating large swaths of ground. And while it was magnificent, it wasn’t what caught my attention.
No, what caught my attention was the life inside the dome.
For even though it was surrounded by a harsh and unforgiving environment, and even though it should have died a very long time ago, the interior of the dome was teeming with plant life. It was startling, seeing the bursts of colorful flora that bloomed within the dome. There were trees that looked almost as old as anything I’d ever seen in the Dark Woods. There were flowers of orange and violet and blue and ocher, much larger than the blossoms that grew in my mother’s garden. I heard the loud chirp of birds, their calls and songs echoing in the dome.
It was, in a word, extraordinary.