“It would have been so easy to just be nice to them,” Iz said.
Logan looked back at her over his shoulder. One of the fluffalo—a mint-green one a little smaller than the others—had meandered over to her and was leaning heavily against her legs. Nathaniel sniffed at it with avid interest.
Iz went on, “If Sebastian had just takenhalfthe energy and effort he wasted on being a creepy asshole and used it to treat histreasurewith a little affection, the tamer ones would love him.” She petted the fluffalo’s cloud of soft, pale green fur, and it made a pleasant, oddly musical lowing sound that was sort of like a cow crossed with a harmonica.
She was right. But Sebastian would never have listened to that kind of tip. He didn’t want to believe he had any responsibility to care for the creatures he was labeling asthings, and he sure as hell didn’t care about whether or not they wanted to be kept. He grabbed up everything that struck his fancy—tame or wild, human or animal—and then he closed it all up in a jealously guarded box.
Logan didn’t want to dwell on what being in that box had done to him. He swallowed down the knot in his throat and said, with forced cheerfulness, “They already seem to love you, I can tell that much.”
“And you,” she said quickly. She pushed herself off the wall and came over to get the key from him. “Here, I’ll do the snakes. They’re practically cousins.”
She opened up their cage, and the air-snakes flew out into the wider cavern like a spray of wild, rainbow-colored confetti. Like Nathaniel, they had absolutely no ambivalence about being freed from captivity. Good for them.
Most of them vanished immediately, finding their own way out through the tunnels and hopefully not tipping Sebastian off in the process, but one of them—a metallic blue—settled on Iz’s arm and curled around her wrist like a bracelet.
Logan stared at it. “Is it. Uh. Is it supposed to do that?”
Iz looked as shocked as he felt. “I have no idea.”
She ran one finger down the creature’s spine, and it practically sighed with contentment, wrapping itself in place a little more snugly.
“Hello,” she said to it. “Are you my new pet?”
It poked its slender pink tongue out of its mouth and replied with an agreeable hiss.
Nathaniel declined to sniff it. He pranced back to Logan instead, giving him a look that clearly amounted to,Can we go now?
“Are you good with handling that air-snake?” Logan asked Iz.
“I don’t know what I could do if I wasn’t,” she said, sounding amused. “But yes. Are you ready?”
He had to be, so he was. “Yeah.”
Iz gave the mint-green fluffalo one last fond pat and fell in at Logan’s side, standing so close that Logan could feel the warmth of her.
He remembered how he had first smelled the clean grapefruit-and-soap scent of her when Sebastian had dragged her into the tunnels. His human nose, which was so much weaker, needed this kind of closeness to pick up on it. But the delicate scent was still there, like her human body had been held in reserve this whole time.
It was weird, which changes translated between forms and which didn’t. He’d never had such a stark example of it before.
The animals clustered around them, and as Logan took a single step forward, they all moved with him in unison.
“Wow,” Iz said. There was a small smile on her face. “Are hellhounds like sheepdogs?”
Pack, his hellhound affirmed.
“Sort of,” Logan said. “Not for everything. But when there’s a bond ....”
Iz nodded.
Mate, his hellhound added.
Not relevant right now, Logan said, shoving it away.
It gave him a judgmental stare, embers flaring brightly, but it settled down. It occurred to Logan that, like Iz, it was worn out. Boosting her dragonfire had taken more out of it—out of him—than he’d realized.
Neither of them was working at optimum capacity, but they had to do their best for each other and for the small menagerie they’d accidentally acquired. Somehow, despite everything, they had to find their way out of a labyrinthine tunnel system while avoiding the diabolical asshole who’d trapped them in it.
If all else failed, he would throw himself between Sebastian and Iz. That had to give her a chance to get out of here, and the animals would know to follow her.