Page 65 of Junk Magic

“Listen, about Kimmie,” she began.

“It’s okay.”

“Is it? I kind of got the idea that maybe this,” she gestured around vaguely, I guessed at the piles of charcoal from the earlier incident, “was more than you bargained for.”

“No, it’s fairly standard.”

“Standard?” Her voice acquired an edge. “What about it is standard?”

I closed my eyes. I was hot, hungry and feeling really odd. I’d had hell of a day, and I had a funeral to go to tonight for another kid I hadn’t managed to save. I just wanted to finish my beer in peace.

But that obviously wasn’t happening until I cleared some things up.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” I said. “You’re worried that I’m getting freaked out. That I plan to tell Hargroves that he saddled me with a group of powerful, but highly unstable kids who’ve been through a lifetime of trauma and might go off at any moment—”

She bristled. “That’s not what we are! That’s not what any—”

“That’s exactly what you are. Some of you, maybe all of you, but it’s not the point. And don’t interrupt.”

She blinked at me.

“But I’m not going to do that, okay? And, yeah, considering that my last class set the gym on fire and the one before that tried to kill me, this doesn’t feel all that different. Magic is chaos, but you’ll learn to leash yours.”

It was an indication of how upset she was underneath the calm exterior that she didn’t even ask about the attempted murder.

“And if we don’t?” she said instead, her hands gripping the beer bottle almost hard enough to snap it. “We can do a little more than set something on fire.”

“I hope so. The other side certainly can. And you’ll have to hold your own against them soon enough, right alongside the rest of us.”

She blinked some more, as if she’d expected me to lie. But she rallied quickly, because this kid didn’t have a spine problem. “Or die trying?” she challenged.

“Or die trying. That is, if you decide to stay.”

“We don’t have a choice!”

“You do. It’s just not one you like. But there are worse things—”

“There’s nothing worse than going back! Nothing!” she got up abruptly, as if intending to walk away, then sat back down just as fast. And abruptly leaned in, invading my space in a way that would have disturbed a human.

Fortunately, Weres have a different standard and I recognized the pain on her face. This wasn’t an attack. I doubted she even realized what she was doing.

“You don’t know what it’s like there,” she told me. “No, they don’t kill us. They don’t even hurt us. But it’s . . . it’s a living death. You can’t use your magic, even when it builds up inside you like a volcano about to go off. You have to swallow it, repress it, try your best to eliminate it no matter how much it hurts, or risk being put in the danger group. The group that doesn’t go anywhere, not even on those carefully guarded “field trips” they take the rest of us on. So they can say we have a normal life.

“Normal!” she laughed, and it was bitter. She sat back and gestured around, more wildly than before. “This is normal! Did you know, Caleb didn’t lock the back of the van this morning? We could have jumped out if we wanted. Or later, he asked Dimas to go with him to get the damned pots. They went alone, just the two of them. Dimas could have overpowered him at any time; Caleb turned his back on him for at least five minutes, searching for cookware under the sink!”

“Is he really unaware that they sell frying pans separately?” I asked, trying to lighten the atmosphere, and it was the wrong move.

Because she was suddenly back in my face, and this time, her eyes were solid gold. It was like looking at a tiger, a deceptively sweet tiger with freckles over her nose and cheeks still slightly chubby from baby fat. But who could nonetheless rip your throat out.

I would have flinched—anyone would—if I hadn’t grown up with creatures who could transform in an instant and do the same thing, to the point of touching my nose as they menaced me. Those last few years in Lobizon had seen a lot of that, and I’d gotten very good at staring into the eyes of a predator. But it took everything I had to sit tight, to look back unflinchingly, to appear like we were having a normal conversation.

And not to ask why Sophie was so sure that Dimas could kill a senior war mage with impunity.

Then she sat back again, and it was almost as big of a transformation as the Change. Her eyes were suddenly back to blue, and her face was tragic as she looked out onto the mundane scene in my back yard. It was literally just a barbeque, and a pretty shit one so far. But her gaze was filled with wonder.

“We never had anything like this,” she whispered. “No one watches us here. No one threatens us. Most of the people aren’t even wearing weapons.”

Most of the people are weapons, I didn’t say, because I’d already screwed up once. I just let her talk. It seemed to be helping.

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