Villain, 69

“So your role in Solomon’s work was to eat babies?”

When his work produced unfortunate offspring, yes.

As one of the unfortunate offspring Solomon had produced, Sam wondered what could be so bad that it needed to be eaten by this demon, whose power felt like getting a face massage from Todd’s asshole and whose voice sounded like someone had poured a glass of anger into Sam’s brain. Solomon’s notes said it was named Timmy.

“Fine,” Sam said. “I’ll call on you if I need your services. I haven’t continued most of Solomon’s work, so we’ll find a new task for you.”

Oh, but I’m so delightfully good at my old one, Timmy complained.

Prince, 69

“You naked.”

“So? You’re short.”

Donny scowled. “I’s is big.”

“No, you’re not,” said the dragon who’d attacked—or in fact not attacked—the castle. He was dark-haired, a bit funny looking, had green horns, wings and a tail, was butt naked even in the frigid cold, and had a huge dick. Donny seemed impressed. By the horns and wings, mostly. “You’re a baby.”

Knighthood, 69

“Thanks for doing this.”

Prince Franz had asked to meet Louis. Or rather, he’d asked for his baby brother to meet Louis, which honestly Edwin thought was kind of cute, even though it was delaying his getting on Louis to go to Techen’s Stand and set up the portal there. It was the sort of thing he’d have done for a baby brother.

“I didn’t do anything, sir. He goes where he wants.” The littler prince was currently over there babbling at Louis in Kyn, which Louis apparently knew but Edwin didn’t, so he had no idea what they were saying. The prince was sitting on Louis’s shoulder pulling on his horns, though, and Louis was letting him.

Prince Franz kept speaking, which was annoying, because Edwin was trying to watch his adorable boyfriend do something way cuter than he had any right to even attempt. “Yeah,” he was saying, “but he wanted to come here because you asked him to, didn’t he?”

Slavery, 69

“So if you play this card…” Simon frowned down at the stuff in front of him. “Maybe if you play this card it lets you change someone else’s stone to your own?”

“If you make that a rule,” Marcus warned, leaning against the wall, “it’s going to be the rule Daniel uses to ruin all our lives, all the time.”

Simon giggled a little. “Maybe, but I’m sure we can stop him doing that. We shouldn’t have too many of them. Maybe only two.”

Simon had decided that since Daniel was terrible at cards and since everyone else was terrible at stones—he’d put it more nicely than that—he’d make up a different kind of game that had cards and stones in it, which seemed to Daniel like it just meant that everyone would be bad at it except Simon. He’d been at it for a few hours now, trying to figure out what the rules would be.

Game Changer

Juniper threw up. He coughed as he awoke, half-choking on the vomit, managing to sit up as he retched into his hand, and down his front. “Egh.”

I warned you.

“You didn’t warn me that you were going to hit me with a vertigo hammer,” Juniper complains, making a face at the mess and wiping his hand on a clean part of his shirt. “Fuck, I feel like I was trampled by a tornado. What did you do to me?”

Took you somewhere.

Team, 69

Cal was starting to hate churches.

“There’s nobody in there,” Mick said, finishing up his magic. “Not that that means much, really. I guess Klaus will probably teleport in.”

“Most likely wearing someone else’s body,” Sully added with a heavy sigh. “I still think you should have let me tell Cameron and Raphael.”

Cal nodded, just looking at the mural over the church. Saint Lyra, stopping storms, and Saint Stephen, stopping nightmares. He had never gotten around to asking Bartholomew why they were up there together. Also, he really didn’t want to talk to Bartholomew, but he hadn’t been able to think of anywhere else to do this in the moment. “I want to talk to him first. Just because Rawen wants him dead doesn’t mean that killing him is a good call.”

“Really,” Travis agreed. “Doing what Rawen wants is probably all around a bad call.”

“Probably, but not killing him just because Rawen wants him dead is probably also shortsighted,” Wes said.

Joey was sulking a little, which might have been because Cal had made him wear clothes again. “You guys are making this too complicated. If he’s evil, we should kill him.”

Stowaway, 69

“That,” declared Pax, in his most declarative tone, holding up his finger to make the firm, finger shaped point at the end of this declaration, “is the worst idea I’ve ever heard, which is saying something because once a wasp suggested that I swap her one of my eyeballs in exchange for the ability to sting people with my backside. So needless to say, we won’t be doing that.”

If I could step in here, Nate stepped in, invalidating his request.

You can’t, Pax told him immediately. Because you don’t have legs, you’re always wrong and you’re going to say it’s a good idea, which will further cement that it’s a bad idea.

Actually, I was going to say I think it’s a terrible idea and you shouldn’t get near it with any part of your body or soul.

Pax blinked, touching Nate with his hand. That was unexpected. Unbelievable, even.

Especially, Nate continued, Your dick. You shouldn’t get anywhere near it with your dick at all.

Witch, 69

“Are you ready?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“Yes. It’s going to be okay.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Because I can reassure you if I want,” James said, pinching Ron’s arm. He looked over to his family. “Are you all ready?”

Chosen One, 69

“True conjuring is very difficult,” Yancy lectured. He’d been lecturing for a while. Isaac had a headache and his skin was crawling all over. He’d woken up like that, annoyed that it had taken him so long to realize he was getting sick.

Yancy continued. “When you see a mage conjuring an item from somewhere, rarely are they crafting an object out of nothing, which requires the use of Shadow—and I’m told by our researchers that Dark helps a great deal as well—and requires a good knowledge of how said object is crafted and from what. What one normally sees with conjuring is actually a very small teleportation spell that can be used to summon an existing object to the mage’s location, like so.” He manipulated Light for them, and his spectacles fell into his hand. “These were in my study on my desk, but because I knew where they were, I was able to teleport them here without too much difficulty. This is a spell you will all find very useful for those days when you arrive at class and realize you’ve forgotten your notebooks. The principle behind it is very simple…”

Yancy droned on about the principle, and Isaac tried very hard to pay attention, he did. He’d read about this a few weeks ago because he did all his reading in advance, and he’d read about it again last night to refresh himself. It didn’t seem that hard, though he hadn’t been able to make it work when he’d tried, the Pillars hurting his fingers when he touched them. Jacob had made him go to bed, and Peter was making him stay behind after his healing class to talk to Twila.

He didn’t understand why he was so tired suddenly. He’d been staying up a bit late to get work done, but not that late. He wasn’t working as much as he’d been during exams and he’d been fine then. But the Pillars were buzzing so much whenever he tried to use them that even being in the room with Yancy using them was putting his teeth on edge. Peter was making him talk to Twila because Isaac himself had been buzzing last night. Even Spencer had been able to feel it. Even Jacob had been able to feel it.

Dragon, 69

“I was thinking,” Gavin said, as they walked through Pelican Bay. He’d wanted to get out of the manor for a while, so they were out on a walk.

“Oh, good,” Owen teased, holding his hand. “That always ends well.”

“You’re damn right it does,” Gavin told him, giving Owen the side-eye. “I was thinking that when we get home, we should talk about Darby.”

Owen looked over at him, then around. Darby had come with them but had bounded off somewhere into the city not long ago. He wasn’t straying far, Owen kept catching glimpses of him. “What did he do?”

Gavin snorted. “A lot of things. But I meant we should talk about all the jokes about us being his parents.”

“Oh, right,” Owen smiled. “Those are getting a bit old.”

“I mean that we should talk about adopting him, Owen.”