“He can too! He’s a frickin’ eros!”
“Oh.” I deflate a little. “Fuck. I forgot about that.”
“We need to do a spell. Like right now, Pell!”
“All right, all right. We can do that. Can’t you just…” I shrug. “You know. Whip up a little poem?”
“A poem? No! That’s for doors, not hiding things. We need”—she points to my horns—“that.”
“And a dragon scale,” I add.
“Yeah. Good thing we have plenty of those.”
“Do we though?”
“What do you mean? I have a whole box filled with portal keys.”
“Yeah. That’s what I mean. Portal keys, Pie. They’ve already been used.”
“So? Can’t they be repurposed?”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
“Well, that’s dumb.”
“Hey.” I put up my hands in surrender. “I don’t make the rules. And as far as I’m concerned, they’re all stupid.”
“Agreed.” She huffs. “Well, we need to find Tomas, then. He needs to get us a real freaking dragon scale.”
I don’t contradict her, but I don’t think there are any more real freaking dragon scales. I know I said he could pull some fire out of his ass, and I’m pretty sure he’s got a puff or two hidden in there. But fire and scales are two different things.
“What are you doing?”
I look at Pie. “What do you mean?”
She twirls a hand in the air. “You’re having a whole internal conversation with yourself. What are you saying?” I open my mouth to deny it, but she points her finger at me. “Don’t lie.”
God, she really is cute. “All right.” I sigh. “Do you want the bad news? Or the bad news?”
“Bad news, please.”
“I don’t think Tomas can get another scale. He cleaned the dungeon out and he took every single scale to the apothecary. Those small ones were shed.”
“So? What’s the difference?”
“A scale that falls out because it’s no longer useful is… well, mostly no longer useful. It’s obviously enough to do a portal spell, but there’s no way it can do a banishing. I really don’t think we have any real dragon scales left.”
Pie sighs. “Then what do we do?”
“Well, we do have an entire apothecary filled with those apothecary monsters. Why don’t we just get them to do it?”
“We can do that?”
I shrug. “Why not?”
“Rules?”
“I’ve read that rule book thousands of times. Nothing in there about not using other magical creatures to banish each other.”