How to Lose Your Dragon (The Immortality Curse Book 1) by Peter Glenn (beach read TXT) 📕

look, I’ll admit, but it made me feel a little better in the moment.

Rick muttered something else under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, but he got out of the car and started to fill the tank anyway.

Phew. Crisis averted. For now, at least. Hopefully, we wouldn’t need anything else between now and when we reached our destination. And then? Well, then I’d figure it out. I wasn’t sure what to do then, either, but maybe my Canadian friend would help out.

While Rick was busy working the gas pump, I dug into one of the eclairs. It was just as magical as I’d always imagined it would be. The filling was thick, and the chocolate icing wasn’t too sweet, so it balanced the whole dish out instead of making it cloying.

A moment later, Rick got back in the car and shot me another dirty look.

“No icing on the interior,” I said in a mocking tone before he could have a chance to say it himself. “I remember.” I stuck my finger in my mouth to suck off a little custard that had gotten on it and held it up to him and smiled. “See?”

He grumbled again, but we got going.

“Are you sure you don’t want one?” I offered. “They’re amazing.”

“No thanks,” Rick said. “Let’s just get you to Canada to find that ‘dragon’ of yours.”

There was that heavy emphasis on “dragon” again. No matter. He didn’t have to believe in it, he just had to get me there. And fast. The fate of the world depended on it.

In hindsight, I wondered if I should have told him that part earlier. But he probably wouldn’t have believed that, either, so it was a wash.

“Two hours to Canada,” Rick said, eyeing his GPS.

I nodded, then sat back and closed my eyes. This whole thing would be over soon enough.

Around eight hours later, Rick pumped the brakes hard and roused me from a little nap.

“Hey!” he jabbed me with a finger. “We’re almost at the border. Just waiting to get through.”

“Already?”

I heard Rick groan again.

Under normal circumstances, it should have taken about two hours to get to the Canadian border from Seattle. But both of us had forgotten about Thursday traffic. It was always extra backed up on Thursdays. Plus, there’d been a major pileup that had closed the road down to one lane near Mount Vernon, and we’d stopped for another fill up and a bite to eat in Bellingham, much to Rick’s chagrin. Another thing he’d had to pay for.

Practically the whole trip had been stop and go traffic. Probably a nightmare for poor old Rick. He didn’t look like the type that enjoyed being stuck in traffic, and since he was driving, he hadn’t had the luxury of taking a nap.

Now it was a little past nine o’clock, and we were just about to pull up to the border crossing. Fortunately, border crossings were easy these days. Gone were any sort of massive walls or menacing structures, replaced with tiny stalls and open fields. The whole thing looked more like a loose collection of toll booths than anything.

Some Canadians worried about foot traffic across the border, but it was mostly nonexistent and not really looked for anymore. US and Canada relations had improved considerably over the past couple of years, and border crossing was all but a formality. Quickly scan your documents with an automated document scanner, and you were on your way.

“Whatever,” Rick scowled at me, shaking his head again. He sure was a grumpy dude. “Just get your passport ready so we can get this over with nice and easy.”

“Sure thing, Rick.”

Passport. I patted my pockets and rummaged around for a moment as a chill ran down my spine. Passport. Where had I last seen that thing, again?

Unlike a driver’s license, which was hard to come by, I did have a Chinese passport. Not on me, unfortunately, but I had one all the same. In my previous haste to save Rick from certain doom last night, I hadn’t thought to bring it with me. In my mind’s eye, I could still see it sitting in its little shoebox of important papers on the top shelf of my closet, well out of reach of me now.

“Umm… huh.” I flashed Rick a goofy grin. “Yeah. Passport. Huh.”

Rick’s eyes flashed over in my direction for a moment, and I heard him sigh again. “Let me guess. You left it at home.”

I shrank against my seat. “In fairness, I was trying to save your life at the time.”

Rick shook his head and groaned. “I can’t believe you, Damian. Now we need to go all the way back to Seattle, wasting most of a day, and for what?”

He started to turn the steering wheel and head for a nearby exit.

“Wait!” I urged him, putting my hand on one of his.

“Take your hand off me, please,” Rick said through gritted teeth.

I complied. “Just please wait,” I begged. “We can’t go back.”

Rick rolled his eyes again, but he stopped moving. “And why not, exactly?”

Because the world is going to be destroyed in two days if we don’t save my friend who you don’t even believe really exists, of course, and going back now would waste a whole day that we don’t have.

Yeah, that wasn’t going to sell it. I needed something else.

“Because… because it’s not safe back there,” I said.

“Not safe?” His eyes looked extremely untrusting, but he stopped trying to turn the car around. “Go on.”

“Remember that guy that attacked you? If his friends could get to your workplace, they could get to my apartment, too. They could be waiting there right now for us to show up. It’s not safe.”

“You killed that guy, remember?”

I pulled on my face. “Come on, Rick. You know he wasn’t acting alone. There’s bound to be others. Think about it. Who released the dobhar-chus after us if they were all dead?”

Rick’s expression looked grave, and I could see a small war playing out behind his