Precious squeaked and nibbled on his ear.
“Lucky,” Fen said wistfully. “I’d love to have a tiny dragon. She even brought you a present.”
“A useful one, too. Though I wish she’d brought me a cell phone.”
“Could she?” A wild hope gleamed in Fen’s dark eyes. “How smart is she? She knew to bring you a compass when you were lost…”
He had to shake his head. “I think that’s a coincidence. It’s pretty and shiny. I tried to get her to drop off a message, and you saw how well that went.”
She picked up the message from where it had fallen after she’d bounced it off his head. “What’s Protection, Inc: Defenders?”
“A bodyguard agency. They’re the guys I helped rescue from the lab that had the magical animals. I help them with technical stuff sometimes. One of them has that infernal nuisance of a bugbear.”
“Are they shifters?”
He nodded. “But they weren’t born shifters like me. The lab experimented on them and made them into shifters. It really messed them up, too. The scientists were trying to give them powers apart being able to turn into animals, and they had some nasty side effects. But one of the bodyguards has the power of finding things. Information. People. I figured if the message got to him, he could probably find us.”
She looked at the plastic strip with new interest. “I get kidnap, swamp, and pawpaw. But what’s wizard?”
Carter had been dreading this part. He hesitated, and she pounced. “You don’t want to tell me. What is it, a code word for your viral marketing scheme?”
“There is no viral marketing scheme.”
“What then? A code word for ‘a civilian learned about shifters, be ready to wipe her memory?’”
“No! What sort of monst—horrible person do you think I am?” As an afterthought, he added, “Anyway, no one can wipe anyone’s memory. That’s not a thing.”
“Then—”
He held up his hand, stopping the apparently limitless flow of her ideas about terrible things he might do under the code name of “wizard.”
“I didn’t want to tell you because out of all the things you’re not going to believe, it’s the hardest to believe. But since you’re obviously going to keep on guessing that it means something awful about me, I’ll tell you what it does mean. It’s not a code word. It actually does mean wizard. That’s who’s really after us—well, after me. The note about hunters and the most dangerous game is just some weird mind-game they’re playing with me.”
He braced himself for her to scream “LIAAAAAR!!!”
An incredulous grin cracked her face. “Wizards? Like Harry Potter?”
“More like Voldemort.”
She leaned forward, resting her chin on her fists, for all the world like she was watching the opening credits in a long-awaited movie. “Go on.”
Carter searched her expression for disbelief or mockery or anger, but found none. “You believe in wizards?”
She made a face. “Not until now. Don’t you go telling the magazines Fenella Kim sleeps with a window open because she expects a letter from an owl!”
“I would never,” he assured her. “I knew that wasn’t what you meant.”
“Well, I did when I was eight,” she admitted. “But what I meant is that I believeyou,Carter. I don’t know why I do, given how much you’ve lied to me, but everything that’s happened is so weird that wizards make as much sense as anything. Also, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern with your lies.”
Alarmed, he asked, “What’s that?”
“I probably shouldn’t tell you,” she muttered. “It’ll be teaching you to lie better.”
“I swear…” he began.
“Don’t bother. If you’re telling your secrets, I may as well tell you something I’ve been keeping from you.” Her grin was surprisingly warm. “Your lies try to make things sound more plausible than they are. ‘Crashed on a desert island’ isn’tlikely, but it’s a lot more believable than ‘kidnapped and experimented on.’ Helium balloons and rare lizards are more plausible than dragonettes. ‘Wizards’ are even less likely than ‘man-hunting lunatics.’ Given that, I think your wizards are the unlikely, implausible, unbelievable truth.”
It was unlikely, implausible, and unbelievable, but Fen believed him. In the flickering light of their swamp cookfire, her openness to whatever weird story he was about to tell was written all over her face.
