Page 60 of Junk Magic

“It is! I just never realized before. How much you gave up to be with me. How much you lost—”

“I lost nothing.” I suddenly found myself backed into the wall, a furious Were in my face. He still hadn’t Changed, that iron control holding, but it was by a thread. I could feel his power circling me, a staticky cloud of it, but I wasn’t afraid.

Like my wolf, I reveled in it, drew it closer, wrapped it around me like a cloak and saw his eyes flare, neon bright for a second. He loved my courage, had told me that once, although this wasn’t that. I didn’t need courage with him. I was safer like this, with him standing as a bulwark between me and the world than I ever could be anywhere else.

I loved it here, but I didn’t deserve it.

And, for once, we had to face that.

But Cyrus beat me to the punch. “Your mother chose to be with your father,” he said harshly. “A human war mage who never accepted the bite; never Changed. Do you think she felt that she lost out? Do you think she resented him?”

“No, but—”

“Then am I so much weaker than she was? So much less willing to sacrifice—”

“You shouldn’t have to sacrifice! That’s the point—”

“Is it?” His head tilted. “But she did, didn’t she? A high-ranking member of one of the chief clans, yet her position was destroyed by her marriage, and her status in the clan eroded. She could have gotten it all back by repudiating him, by saying she’d made a mistake, by turning her back . . . yet she didn’t. I wonder why that was?”

I had a sudden flash of the two of them, with mom sitting on dad’s lap like they were newlyweds although they’d been married close to two decades at that point. They’d been pouring over an app they’d found that added dog ears and a snout to any photo. And scrolling through their phones’ memories, putting the new “accessories” on everything and giggling like children.

“She loved him,” I whispered, because she had. And he’d loved her, to the day she died. Hell, to this day. He’d never dated again, although it had been years.

I wasn’t sure he ever would.

“Strange how that works,” Cyrus said, as if that changed anything. But our situations weren’t the same and he knew it.

Dad hadn’t Changed because it would have cost him his career, there being rules about deliberately taking on a transformation and thereby splitting your loyalties. Not to mention that the Were strain can often override anything else, potentially costing him his magic. And because it wouldn’t have helped.

Mother was a noble of the great house of Lobizon, one of the twelve clans who had first founded the ruling council. She was expected to make an illustrious marriage, maybe even to birth a new clan leader, not to lower herself to couple with a nobody. Even had father accepted the bite, her status would have been in the gutter anyway, as a newly turned Were from none of the old bloodlines wasn’t viewed as much better than a human.

They hadn’t seen the point.

But Cyrus and I weren’t facing that choice. I couldn’t take the bite and join him, not at any price; the truth of that throbbed on my thigh even now. And there was another consideration as well.

“It’s not just about what you’ll miss,” I said. “It’s about what you risk. Had things gone differently today, had something happened and you went berserk at HQ—”

“Then there would be a lot of dead war mages on the ground.”

The flat assurance in his tone frightened me as nothing else had.

I felt my nails dig into his arms. “No, there wouldn’t be! You don’t understand the power of the Corps, Cyrus—”

“Or you the power of Arnou. You grew up in Lobizon, but you were never treated as part of it. You think more like a war mage—even when you shouldn’t.”

“And you more like a wolf!” I wanted to shake him, to make him understand. The Corpsmen might look puny to Weres, some of whom when transformed were three times their size. But they weren’t. And the thought of what might have happened today sent a shard of pure ice down my spine. I gripped his arms harder, made him hear me. “Sebastian is a diplomat; he’s not going to risk the alliance for me, nor should he! And you’re only one man—”

“He’s not, though,” someone said, and I looked up to find Noah standing there, backed up by several more Weres from the camping trip whose names I couldn't recall. “He has us now. And so do you.”

Damn! I’d forgotten that I was currently surrounded by creatures with way better hearing than average. And that I needed to watch my mouth.

But it was too late now, and the three of them must have heard enough, because they were looking pretty worked up.

“You saved us the other night,” one of the other Weres added, a guy with skin so dark that it blended into the dim light of the hallway. He’d solved the problem of quick growing Were hair with dreads wrapped at intervals with different colored thread, which reached past his shoulder blades. “You put your life on the line, yet you think we wouldn’t come after you? That we wouldn’t tear that place up?”

“We ought to do it anyway,” the third Were said. He was a tall redhead named Jason, with a prominent Adam’s apple, a skinny, lanky build, and hair in a Carrot Top-like snarl. He should have looked more than a little goofy, but his voice was halfway to wolf speak and there was nothing funny about it.

“After what happened to Jace,” Noah agreed. “I mean, what more can they do to us?”

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