Page 12 of Junk Magic

The rotating creature suddenly changed, morphing into dozens of others. Some of which were barely recognizable—a hulking vampire that had to be eight feet tall, with fangs as long as my index fingers; a humanoid fey with glowing yellow eyes, levitating off the ground and throwing energy bolts from his fingertips; a woman with towering white wings—and others that were not even sort of familiar. And some that made my head ache to look at them.

“They come from a time when magic was less tame than it is today,” Jenkins twittered on happily, maybe because he hadn’t had to fight one, “and more plentiful. And when the creatures it spawned were far more dangerous, as a result. Think of them as the saber-toothed tiger version of a kitty cat—same genus, very different result.”

“And we’re the kitty,” I guessed.

“Exactly so.” He looked pleased.

I was less so. “You’re telling me I fought a saber-toothed Were?”

“Well, the equivalent, yes. Weres used to be far more fearsome than they are now,” he added with a straight face, as if a Were child would have had any problem ripping his balls off. “As were other magical creatures, for that matter.

“Then what happened?”

He shrugged. “What happened to the saber-toothed tiger? Evolution, changing conditions—did you know, the Earth used to have much more oxygen in the atmosphere than it does today? Scientists speculate that it might account for why everything grew so large in the past—”

“Jenkins,” Hargroves began heavily.

“—Gigantopithecus, for example, was an ape who stood ten feet tall, like a real-life King Kong. There were dragonflies that had wingspans larger than modern day seagulls. And the megalodon shark was sixty feet long! You could have walked, with someone sitting on your shoulders, through its giant maw with room to spare. Not to mention—”

“Fascinating, but—”

“—sloths!” he said, his eyes glowing with enthusiasm. “They were as big as elephants once—”

“Jenkins!” Hargroves snapped.

“Yes?” The small man blinked at him.

“Get to the point.”

“I was,” he sniffed, looking offended, and pushed up his glasses. “The point is, if oxygen levels could affect everything from plants to animals, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that fluctuating magic levels can affect us. It was a different era; the world is not static—”

“Then what was that thing doing here?” I interrupted. “We aren’t in the stone age!”

“We’re not talking about the stone age. That is quite a recent era, evolutionarily speaking—”

He cut off because I grabbed him by the front of his lab coat. “I don’t care what era it was! I’m talking about now, tonight. Why are there monsters walking around—”

“Oh, not monsters,” Jenkins said, frowning, and not the least bit intimidated. “And not walking around, at least not usually. We have them contained.”

“Contained? Contained where?”

He blinked at me. “Why, just down the corridor, for one.”

“What?”

Hargroves sighed. “He means your new students,” he said dryly.

* * *

The room I ended up in a few minutes later was spacious, having been converted from an old holding cell. There had been some concessions made to the fact that its current occupants weren’t actually criminals, mainly a screen in front of the toilet for some privacy and a few T.V.s. None of which were currently on because it was the middle of the night.

Things were not particularly quiet, however. The six people meant to be in the bunk beds arrayed around the walls were mostly still up, despite the fact that it was almost two A.M. But I guess when you’re stuck in a hole in the earth, however clean and sterile of one, day and night cease to have much meaning.

Two of the guys were playing cards, one girl was brushing another one’s hair, and a third girl was on her phone. I doubted she could get bars down here—the Corps’ wards were hell on reception—but maybe she was playing a game. The last guy was in bed, with his back to the door and the covers pulled over his head, probably because the light was still on.

He didn’t move when I came in, but everyone else did, all conversation stopping abruptly as it had when I’d been here with Hargroves yesterday. He was absent this time, since I doubted that they’d tell me anything otherwise. Of course, that was likely going to be the outcome anyway, because teacher or no, I was the enemy.

I was one of the people who had kept them locked up all their lives.

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