Page 11 of Junk Magic

And then the hills were echoing, but not with words. Unearthly, desolate, ghostly howls erupted in the night, floated over the sand and seemed to merge with the stars. Not just from the throats of the still transformed, but from all of them.

A strange, hybrid pack mourning the loss of not one, but two of their own.

Chapter Four

“Yeah. That’s it,” I said, shoving limp hair out of my eyes.

It was cold this deep in the belly of HQ, where the hot air blowing through the main doors from above never reached. And all I was wearing was the nightie and my now tattered and useless coat. But the monster rotating slowly in front of me was still making me sweat.

Hargroves didn’t look any happier, probably because he’d been rousted out of bed—again. If I were him, I’d consider investing in a cot for his office, considering how often that sort of thing happened. But, as always, he was perfectly pulled together, with the purple spotted hanky in his coat pocket jewel bright against the smart gray linen, and the waves of silver-gray hair perfectly combed.

I’d never seen him disheveled, and probably never would. He was old school Corps, brought out of retirement to help with the war, as so many had been. And like most of them, he thought us newbies were slipshod, careless, and less than adequately trained.

I’d often wondered how that last one worked, exactly, since it was their generation who had trained us, but I’d been just smart enough not to ask. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up now. Hargroves’ usual mood was set on grim, but tonight he was as sour as I’d ever seen him.

With cause, I thought, looking back at the monster.

It wasn’t the one from the desert, although it was hard to tell. The height was the same, the horribly hunched back was the same, as were the elongated arms, which made him literally a knuckle dragger unless he raised those terrible claws for some reason, like slashing out your heart. Mine still hurt where that had almost been done to me, so I found it a little hard to meet the blank stare under that horrible maw.

But I did it anyway.

Old school types weren’t the only ones with steel in their spines.

“You’re sure?” Hargroves pressed.

“It was memorable.”

That won me a glance, probably for the tone more than the words. But he didn’t say anything, at least to me. “Jenkins!”

A small man came forward, and by small, I mean maybe four feet tall. He probably had fey blood somewhere in his background, although I wasn’t sure as I didn’t know him. I’d thought I knew all of the dungeon masters, as the mad scientist types who worked down here were called, but I guessed not.

He was sort of cute, with dimples, thinning, light brown hair and glasses that he shouldn’t have needed because there were spells for vision problems. And wards, like the little horned owl tat that my dad had given me when I joined the Corps, along with the coat. At least I still had the owl, I thought, grimacing.

But spells could sometimes fight other spells, and tats took part of your magic. So those glasses told me a lot. Namely that he was more concerned about doing his job than about his appearance. Or about how long he droned on for, I thought, when he started talking.

But unlike Hargroves’ lectures, this was one I wanted to hear.

“Are you familiar with cryptozoology, mage?” he asked me. And then went on without a pause for a reply. “It’s what norms call the study of legendary creatures whose existence has never been proven: Bigfoot, the Chupacabra, the Lock Ness monster—or the giant bird creature people keep sighting in the desert around Vegas. Big as an Apache helicopter, by all accounts, with a forty-foot wingspan—”

“Cryptids,” Hargroves said, cutting to the chase, which won him an annoyed glance from our lecturer.

“Yes, that’s the term given them by overly imaginative humans. In fact, most of the supposed sightings are creative mental embroidery by people who have been, shall we say, hitting the bottle a bit too fiercely of late? And who stumbled into the woods and were startled by a bear or what have you—”

“Or a fey,” I pointed out, and was talked right over.

“—or, in a very few cases, by a fey or demonic creature temporarily escaped into this world, something that happened more frequently in the past than today, of course—”

“We know all that,” Hargroves said impatiently.

He didn’t get the verbal steamroller treatment as I had, but he did receive another look, which I could have told Jenkins was a waste of time. That sort of thing slid off Hargroves like water off a duck’s back. I’m not sure he even noticed, considering that it was the same expression he wore most of the time.

“You’re saying that I fought a myth?” I said, jumping into the brief pause. “Because my ribs think otherwise.”

“Not a myth,” Jenkins said, pushing up his glasses. “A Relic.”

I frowned. “What?”

He nodded. “Long before humans came up with their so-called cryptids, the magical community had its own strange sightings. Only ours were real.”

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