craftiness of it all. The king and his mate painted an enticing picture of love, romance, and happiness—three things everyone was searching for. Combined with the website, it was like they were saying, If you’re a mage, you could have this same love and happiness, too.
So very tempting.
But was it all too good to be true?
Ravi looked around uneasily as he walked through Sonthofen. It used to be, before he came rather spectacularly out of the dragon closet, that he could pop into town for milk and a video game and think nothing of it. But he was too famous for that now.
Everyone was staring and whispering.
And that one over there had a camera pointed at him. While he’d been captured on camera only in his dragon form, it was clear everyone in town remembered he was frequently seen shadowing Alric. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. If Alric had come out as a dragon and Cameron was a mage, then clearly Ravi had to be either a dragon or a mage.
Alric and Cameron had also been careful not to state that they were all living in Burkhard Castle in Sonthofen, Germany. But again, someone had talked to the press. Or maybe someone remembered that the fire dragons had lived in Burkhard five hundred years ago and guessed they might still be there.
Their days of being forgotten were clearly over.
Ravi sighed gustily. Never did he regret an impulse decision so much as “rescuing” that plane.
Sometimes, he really did feel like it was for the best. They were steadily getting interest from possible mages. The website was busy with people taking Cassie’s “Are You A Mage?” quiz like it was the hottest new quiz on Buzzfeed. It ranked up there with “Which Disney Princess Are You?” and “The Food You Pick Will Predict Your Perfect Pet.”
Ravi was sure that for a lot of people it was a mix of a game and a dream, but in the end it meant they were collecting vital information. It was all getting shoved into databases and compared against what they knew about existing mage clans. Just the thought of all that information and computer keys clacking made his head ache.
Word was spreading at the speed of light. Or social media, same difference. All the different apps were filled with pictures of dragons. Ravi’s own shiny blue dragon was everywhere, but he was also seeing blurry clips of red dragons from the battle with the Jaeggi, when they’d fought to get Cameron back. There were a few interesting ones of Warin from the rescue of Tori in Finland, as well. And others were so shadowy and grainy, Ravi couldn’t tell if they were of dragons or the Loch Ness monster.
The end result was that the world was interested in dragons again. Search engines boasted that searches for mages, dragons, clans, and the Dragon War were up like a million percent. All the news agencies had a host of histories, pundits, political talking heads, and more on every night, talking about what the potential implications were going to be for the world.
Ravi wanted to point out that nothing was really going to change. It wasn’t like they’d suddenly appeared from nothingness. They’d always been around. For now, it seemed like most of the world was excited. Ravi hoped it stayed that way, but it really didn’t matter so long as they found mages.
Sighing again deeply—because this situation was so dire, it required two sighs—he headed into the game store and took a look around. It wasn’t crowded at this hour, but the two employees kept staring at him with wide eyes. Ravi had the worst impulse to go over there and say, “Boo!” The stares rattled him enough that he couldn’t enjoy his shopping, and he finally gave up, heading back out of the store.
Let’s just get the milk he was supposed to buy. Yeah. That seemed a better decision all around. Ten jugs of the stuff. Fifty-plus people burned through milk fast. He needed to work on convincing Alric that they needed their own cows so someone wasn’t constantly running to the store for milk.
But that might mean he would be stuck milking cows. Or cleaning up after the cows. Ravi’s nose wrinkled.
He’d taken all of five steps when an excited uptick in voices caught his ear. After so many years as Alric’s bodyguard, Ravi had developed good instincts for trouble. People who sounded excited normally led to problems, so