Page 118 of Junk Magic

“Why?” I couldn’t keep the horror completely out of my voice, and he frowned.

“You know that, too. We’re at war. I wanted to help, and my specialty was well designed for it. I could have given us so many advantages, so many new abilities harvested from ancient strains—”

“Like these?” I rasped. I couldn’t see much from where I was, but I didn’t need to. The leftovers of Jenkin’s “experiments” were burned into my mind.

“And more,” he agreed. “We have schools full of people who have somehow managed to hold onto talents that we’ve tried to breed out of us, but which could be damned useful now. I requested the right to do some experiments with them, to see if their power could be enhanced, possibly even brought back to full strength—”

“You wanted to experiment—on children?”

It popped out before I could stop it, and it was a mistake. He bristled. “Do you know how many mages we’re losing in the field every day?” he hissed, leaning in. “We need more men, they say it all the time, but my point was, we need better men. Enhanced ones. Ones with skills the opposition doesn’t have or know how to handle—”

“We have them—”

“You mean those “students” of yours?” he rolled his eyes and sat back. “Yes, and I’m sure we can trust them, after the life they’ve led.”

“So, you want to make it worse by experimenting on them?”

“I want to make it better, for them and for all of us! Do you think the other side isn’t trying the same thing? That they don’t have people working just as feverishly as I have been? This is an arms race, mage, and we were going to be left behind!

“But the Corps said no; that bastard Hargroves even threatened to demote me if I so much as dared to bring it up again. But when we lose this war, when these so-called gods we’re fighting come back and scorch our world to cinders, do you think your precious students will be better off? They will die, right alongside the rest of us!

“But they don’t have to. Those kids are repositories of skills that could save us all, but I wasn’t allowed to touch them—”

“But you’ve been experimenting anyway,” I said, interrupting the diatribe. “How?”

He smirked. “Because I realized that there was another great untapped repository for ancient abilities, one that nobody else seemed to have thought of. The clans.”

“What?”

He nodded proudly, mistaking my shock for admiration. “Yes, I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. But think about it—Weres don’t trust the Circle, so most of their problem children never show up in our facilities. They get vargulfed instead—” his head tilted. “Is that a word?”

I just stared at him.

“Well, no matter.” He waved it away. “In any case, I realized that I could use the cast offs from your people to mine the old strains. To suss out talents and abilities that were lost to time, except in rare individuals—”

“Weres don’t do magic,” I said harshly, my head spinning.

“Yes, but many Weres have intermarried with members of the magical community through the centuries, haven’t they? Especially in the lower ranked clans, where a mage in the family might be useful for protection or advancement. And as a result, they carry all sorts of interesting abilities, only the Were strain overrides them, represses them. They don’t know they have them!”

“So, when the Corps said no to using the students, you started abducting street kids instead, people no one would miss,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even.

He didn’t bother to deny it. “What choice did I have? I was trying to save the world, mage, and I’ve done it.”

He took a small vial out of his pocket and held it up to the light. It was a pale green, and cast a sickly pallor over his face, but he regarded it with wonder. “See this? Such a little thing, but it’s going to win us the war.”

“And that is?”

He blinked at me behind his glasses. “Well, you ought to know. It’s been circulating in your veins for the last two days.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

The vial was clear glass, allowing me to see that the contents had little bits of what looked like herbs in it, suspended in a syrupy liquid. It looked innocuous, just another potion in a world filled with them, like a salve or balm. But if that was what I’d been given at the grow farm, it definitely wasn’t.

“It’s distilled from fey wine,” Jenkins said, turning the vial this way and that, to catch the light. “Like punch, only better. Punch wasn’t designed to bring out latent abilities; that was just a byproduct. So, it was hit or miss, not to mention that it often made people too high to think straight. That wouldn’t work for soldiers—”

“And this will?” I croaked.

“You’ve seen the result; you tell me.”

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