Page 21 of Falling

“I am,” Seth said. “One of my many skills.”

The corner of my mouth twitched. Yeah, I could see why Mark had fallen for him.

“How quickly could you make up the world’s most basic flyer?”

Seth raised an eyebrow, and then extracted his laptop from the tote bag as well like something out of Mary Poppins.

“What else have you got in there?” I asked.

“Aspirin, Band-Aids, protein bar, hair ties⁠—”

“You don’t have enough hair to tie,” I pointed out.

“No, but other people do,” Seth said. “Planner, pen, scrap paper, a cool rock Iggy gave me, my tarot reading for the week⁠—”

“Okay I wasn’t… seriously asking you to list all your worldly possessions,” I said, lips twitching. I loved Seth with my whole heart. I couldn’t imagine anyone feeling otherwise. “But you sound like me. Aspirin, Band-Aids, and snacks.”

“If Miles gave you a cool rock, you’d keep that too.”

“I—”

I wanted to argue, but Seth knew me too well. If Miles gave me a cool rock, I would have kept it. I would have put it in pride of place somewhere. “Well, it’d be rude not to,” I allowed.

Seth smirked. “So what am I putting on this flyer? Sounds like you have a plan.”

“I do.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting to find in the library, but Miles being chased around the children’s section by a band of preschoolers with aluminum foil swords hadn’t been on my list of possibilities.

Not until I’d seen it with my own eyes, at least.

I hesitated a second, wondering if it was a game. Then, I saw the look on Miles’s face and my heart sank. There was real fear in his eyes—it was obvious he wasn’t having any fun and couldn’t work out how to make it stop.

He’d said he wasn’t used to this. I hadn’t really understood what that meant for him until now.

Without thinking about it, I strode over and inserted myself between Miles and the kids, pushing him behind me and holding an arm out to stop them. Even with my attention on the kids, I could feel him close behind me, using me as a shield.

Damningly, I didn’t hate that at all. I was glad Seth hadn’t been here to see this, or I would never have heard the end of it.

The four preschoolers stopped dead. Maddy, the ringleader—who was a good kid, mostly, but had a personality the size of Texas—looked me up and down, then dropped the sword.

A heartbeat later I was being hugged around the knees by three of them. Noah, the shy one, hung back until I waved him over.

When I twisted around to glance at Miles, he was staring with his mouth open.

I broke into a grin, happy I’d managed to rescue him and thrilled to be surrounded by kids. Even if they had just been terrorizing my friend.

“You know if you slay the librarian, they’ll close the library again,” I said to Maddy, who looked up at me with her most innocent face.

“He’s a dragon!” she insisted, wide eyed.

I snorted at the thought, imagining Miles curled up on a pile of books, guarding them from all comers.

It… probably wasn’t the least accurate thought I’d ever had.

“He is,” I agreed, since there was no point arguing with a four-year-old. “But you know what? He’s a good dragon.”

Maddy looked at me suspiciously.