“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.”