Origin (Scales 'n' Spells 1)

It was settled. Warin was the nicest guy ever. “Well, I hope you guys realize it’s not just me and my sister? I’ve got cousins, too.”

Warin’s face lit up. “Do you?”

“Three, to be precise. I’m not sure how we’ll get them over here, or if they’re magical—could be they aren’t. Who knows? But there’s more than just us.”

A weight dropped next to him on the bench, and Cameron turned his head to realize a woman he didn’t know had abruptly joined them.

“What’s this I hear about a sister and cousins?” she asked.

Warin waved a hand between them. “Cameron, this is Sasha. Sasha, Cameron. He just told me that he has a twin sister and three cousins.”

Sasha looked like a bodybuilder who could walk right into the Olympics and take the gold. Any gold. All the gold. She was beautiful, her blonde hair thick and luxurious, draped over one shoulder, eyes a stunning blue in an oval-shaped face. She also looked quite capable of snapping Cameron in half.

Right now, though, she looked as giddy as any child in a candy store. “That’s amazingly good news! I hope all of them can come.”

“My sister and grandmother hope to come, at least.” And Cassie would take one look at Sasha and climb her like a tree. Cameron decided to call it right now.

“They’ll be more than welcome. I’ll volunteer to guard them from the airport, bring them here.” Sasha nodded, already decided. “Maybe they’ll be here in time for game night. That would be an easy way to introduce your family to the clan.”

“That’s a good idea,” Warin approved heartily. To Cameron, he explained, “We do game night every two weeks. Sometimes we play hide and seek in the castle. Sometimes it’s board games. Ravi introduced PlayStations to us, so we’ve taken up LAN parties, too.”

“Alric plays DnD with his own group every Thursday,” Sasha threw in. “We have one other campaign going, I think. I don’t play myself, but isn’t Menno the DM?”

Cameron’s jaw dropped. “Get out. Your king plays DnD?”

Head canted, Sasha regarded him for a moment. “Is that how he strikes you? As serious? He can be, I suppose. He’s under a great deal of strain. But he does know how to have fun, too.”

“We haven’t seen him really smile much the past several decades,” Warin pointed out with a sigh. “He takes on too much responsibility, sometimes. He blames himself for not finding mages before this. As if he failed us by not doing so. I suppose right now, he does give off that impression.”

And then some. Cameron had seen him smile, though. And laugh. He’d been great fun on the two times they’d been out together. But then, that sort of made sense, in context. Of course Alric would be in lighter spirits. Cameron’s arrival had given him hope. Up until now, he’d likely felt he was in a dark tunnel and even the light at the end was just an oncoming train. Everyone dealt better with a bad situation when they at least had hope to cling to.

“It’s not that he struck me as this too-serious guy,” Cameron sought to explain to them. “He was fun while hanging out with me. I guess I didn’t expect a dragon to play Dungeons and Dragons.”

“Oh.” Sasha snorted, lifting her cup to her mouth for a sip. “Yeah, the irony of that still amuses me. Ravi was the one to bring the first edition book home, so many years ago. Took a while for it to catch on—the rules are rather intense—but people had fun playing it. I’m not sure how Alric got pulled in.”

“Ravi,” Warin stated confidently.

“What am I being blamed for?”

Cameron tilted his head back to see the dragon standing right behind him. “Corrupting Alric with DnD.”

“Ohhh. Yeah, that was me.” Ravi plopped down in the seat next to Cameron’s, a slice of cake in his hand. “I accept blame for that. Cam, Lisette wanted me to assure you, he’s good now.”

For a second, that didn’t connect. Then Cameron spotted Alric across the room and saw him turn to speak to someone. He displayed no sign of the pain from before, his movements far less stiff and more fluid. Oh good, so she had taken Alric aside at some point and done something to help him. A spell or a potion, who knew? Cameron made a mental note to ask later, as he was curious on the how-to. It was a relief, frankly. Cameron had hated seeing Alric be in pain and yet smile as if nothing was wrong.

“Did he overdo it again?” Warin asked in dismay.

“Yeah, I think this was more a leftover of saving Cam from the kidnappers,” Ravi confided. “We’d mostly gotten the kinks worked out after that fight, but it wasn’t something to be fixed in a day.”