Page 12 of Sugar & Dragon Act I: Temptation

They watched each other for a moment.

“Do I have to convince you to let me in, or can I just enter?” Hera eventually asked.

“You have to convince me.” The cat moved his fluffy tail right and left. “But you can’t use the same excuse as last time.”

He was so cute that Hera was tempted to approach him and give him a stroke. What stopped her was her common sense. The morpheuses of the imp class might not have had a lot of power, but the consequences of their affinity for games were sky-high. Literally and figuratively.

“Dago invited me here,” she said.

Instead of getting out of her way, the phantom licked his paw.

Ah yes. That was too logical.

“I want to see the castle.”

“Why?”

“To find out where the living roomreallyis.”

The cat set his paw on the ground and gave her a look full of innocence and sweetness. “Why do you need that knowledge?”

“I want to know if it’s dirty or clean.”

“Why?”

“Because my mother says that men living alone in a clean house are suspicious.”

A strange sound came from the cat’s throat—a giggle, for lack of a better term.

“My mother says that if I stay with humans for too long, I will become one of them,” Pandorian said. “Mothers are so funny, aren’t they?”

“Very.” Hera nodded politely.

The imp stood briskly. “Come, I’ll show you the library. It’sreallyclean.”

Hera was about to ask about the living room but bit her tongue. Dago probably wouldn’t mind if she waited in the living room, but he certainly wouldn’t insist on showing her a room full of expensive magical books. Magi were usually undemonstrative when it came to their libraries. There might not be another opportunity to take a look at the Midais’s collection.

Just like last time, Pandorian led her through a door of pretentious size and up the stairs that spiraled along the smooth walls, spectacularly decorated by windows with unearthly views behind them. However, instead of continuing up to the third floor, which she now knew was entirely occupied by a darkly tasteful bathroom, he passed through a portal marking a corridor that led to the rooms on the second floor. There were three black doors on the right side of the corridor and one on the left. Each had its own columned portal, but unlike the entrance, which had a floor number engraved at the top, here there were no clues as to the purpose of the rooms behind them.

The winged cat stopped in the middle of the corridor and turned toward her. “The library is on the left,” he informed her, gesturing at the door with his little paw.

Hera glanced at it and then at the opposite one. Not hiding her suspicion, she asked, “What’s on the right?”

“I can’t tell you.” The kitten adorably cocked his head. “I can’t go in there.”

Hera hesitated, but eventually concluded that if there were no bookshelves behind the door to the left, she would simply withdraw.

She reached for the gilded doorknob…

VIII Hera

And the doorknob turned into a tightly packed knob of sugar.

Apparently it wasn’t only gilded. Oops.

Hera looked at the imp sheepishly, but he only giggled.

“Dago will go crazy when he sees it,” he said joyfully.

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