Page 2 of Myths and Shifts

Half the room looked very confused and the other half were vibrating with excitement. Even the clowns looked ready to explode in a shower of glitter as the door started to open.

“Surprise!” The excitement finally burst out of them and the sound was thunderous.

The men at the door were clearly mates and obviously faking their surprise, but everyone else seemed to believe it, so I decided to keep my thoughts to myself.

“Oh wow.” The human gave wide eyes and looked around the room like he’d never imagined anything like it. “This is…”

Horrifying.

I was starting to understand why they’d gotten married in secret.

“Congratulations!” Another random round of excitement rushed through the room, and I was pretty sure I heard several people saying, “Happy birthday,” and that one old woman who seemed to think we were at a baby shower called out, “It’s a boy,” which made the two men try not to laugh.

I had no intention of going up to rush the men who’d just gotten back from their wedding adventure, but the rest of the town didn’t have any reservations about mobbing them. The two men took that in stride, but the dragon was shaking his head and I could see him talking to his mate. “We’ve got clowns.”

Wren must’ve seen it too because he giggled as they were swept out of our view. “There’s a story with the clowns. I can’t wait to hear it.”

Bouncing off with barely a wave, he wiggled his way into the mass of people even though he couldn’t have known any of them.

Wait.

Had he just asked someone about their son’s mate?

How many of these people had he gotten to know?

We’d only been in town three days.

“Someone is going to get hurt.” The quietly mumbled words coming from behind me came with a sigh I completely understood. “Oh, don’t do that. You’re going to… That’s going to…”

“At least the tall clown in the corner hasn’t dropped the balls on anyone else?” Looking over my shoulder, I had to fight a smile at the way the small man went wide-eyed. “Oh, you missed that part? The tall one with the sparkly hat was showing off and they went flying. They’re surprisingly heavy.”

At least, based on the thud they’d made and how quickly one of the mages had hurried to heal what looked like a concussion.

It was good to see they could do practical magic and not just fuck with shit, but I’d mostly just seen thefuck with shitvariety.

“I think he might actually be using painted Skee-Balls from that arcade game where you roll the ball down the bowling alley-looking lane.” The sound they’d made as a couple of them hit the floor had echoed through the room and had brought back memories from my childhood.

But how any human in the entire state didn’t understand the town was filled with dragons and mages was something I’d never know.

They should’ve outed us all years ago.

“Is everyone okay?” The way he immediately started searching the edges of the crowd instead of watching the newlyweds get the third degree made me think he wasn’t a local either.

“Yes. From what I could tell, they were healed fairly quickly, by one of the visiting council members possibly. The more I think about it, the more I realize that he was too functional to be local.” There was no way the man next to me was human—there was just an extra spark in him that most of the people who were indigenous to the planet didn’t seem to have.

Looking relieved but not happy, the man nodded. “Thank you for filling me in. I was supposed to be with the medical team here but I got delayed by a slight problem.”

He looked fine, so it was definitely alocals are a menacekind of issue.

“I hope whatever the locals did in this case didn’t involve serious injuries or the news.” My dry response got a flicker of a grin from him as he tried to keep up the professional appearance.

“Well, mostly, but they do need to work on putting together an immediate response team that can handle…let’s call them interesting problems.” Looking around, the medical team visitor frowned and his voice dropped slightly. “They don’t even have a mage on their EMT crew. It’s just two dragons and a human who’s playing dumb.”

That didn’t surprise me at all.

Half the town was highly proficient at playing dumb.

“They don’t have a PR team or a lawyer on retainer either.” How every human in a hundred miles didn’t know about them was amazing…some kind of miracle actually. “The human over at the police station takes care of all of that. He’s mated to a local but he’s known about them less than a year. Months, I think.”

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