Page 120 of Junk Magic

“And you had them killed at Wolf’s Head because?” I asked, trying to make sense of all this.

He frowned. “What?”

“Wolf’s Head! The clan meeting place, out in the desert.”

“Oh, is that what that thing was?” He thought about it. “Yes, I suppose it does look rather wolfy. I’d never heard of it before I got your call.”

“Never—are you saying you didn’t order them to be killed there?”

He blinked at me. “Why would I do that? I just wanted them dead, and told the alpha to arrange it. I didn’t care where—”

“Then you aren’t working with Whirlwind? You aren’t trying to kill Sebastian?”

“What are you going on about?”

“Your . . . the dark mages you sent—”

“Dark mages?” He looked at me as if I was the crazy one. “Why would I be working with them? I told you; I’m trying to save us from them! Haven’t you been listening?”

I just stared at him some more, trying to figure out where I went wrong. But I hadn’t misread the situation. Those mages had been laser focused on Sebastian.

But if our Dr. Frankenstein hadn’t sent them, who had?

“And now I’ve found a way to do that,” Jenkins said, pushing bothersome Were politics aside. “You are the last piece in the puzzle, the one I’ve been searching for.”

“Me? I can’t even Change.”

“Well, no, which puzzled me—until I did a blood test on you while you were out. I understand now why you didn’t want to allow that. Neuri,” he mused. “I must say, you played it off well. I really believed you just wanted to follow in your father’s footsteps.”

He pushed up his glasses, and waited, as if expecting a comment. But hearing the hateful word on someone else’s lips had done more to freeze me in place than any spell. I didn’t say anything.

“Anyway, I arrived at that place—Wolf Head—just in time to see what you did,” he said. “You roared at them and they . . . fell out. Just fell out. Stunned, back in human form, and greatly chastened. Some of them couldn’t even move! It’s exactly the kind of control I’ve been looking for. It turned out to be fortuitous in the extreme that my incompetent associates didn’t kill you.”

He beamed at me.

“But . . . I don’t know how I did that—”

“Of course, you do—I just told you. A latent ability brought out by the potion you consumed. It seems that Neuri can’t block everything. Or maybe the magnitude of the dose opened up a crack in its protection and something slipped through.” He reached over to pat my shoulder and his glasses fell down. “Don’t worry. We’ll figured it out,” he assured me distractedly, reaching to push them back up. “And then we’ll—”

I cursed him into oblivion.

Jenkins collapsed on top of me, a literal dead weight, while I gasped at the ceiling like a fish. I’d used what magic my body had produced while I was out for the spell, but it hadn’t been enough, not even close. But I’d forced it, anyway, taking some of the magic I needed to live.

And now, I wasn’t sure that I’d left myself enough for any of this to matter.

I hurt, but it was worse than that, way worse. It felt like opening a vein, like bleeding out, like I’d cracked a bone and fed the damned spell my marrow, and I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t. I could feel my heart stuttering in my chest and my veins shriveling up, and would have curled into a tortured ball but the restraints wouldn’t let me. Breathe through it, I told myself savagely, biting back the screams that battered against my teeth.

Fucking breathe!

And, after a moment, I did. In little gulps, like someone who has been underwater for too long, doesn’t remember what to do with oxygen. But the Corps teaches techniques in pain control, and slowly, the breaths got longer and deeper, and my starved brain cells started to be able to think again.

Everything still hurt, and probably would for days, as this sort of thing was extremely ill-advised. But it was better than the alternative. Only the alternative was still a good possibility if I didn’t figure a way out of here!

And that wasn’t looking likely when I was strapped down and exhausted. I couldn’t even manage to throw Jenkins’ body off me, leaving me stuck under his weight until Igor decided to come back and check on the boss. Which probably wouldn’t be long because there were cameras all over this place.

But try as I might, I couldn’t dislodge him. Or free myself, no matter how much I struggled. Which I continued to do until worn completely out, to the point that my muscles refused to obey commands and my heart started doing that stuttering thing again.

I lay there as the room swirled around me, panting and desperate and staring at Jenkin’s balding head. It was getting familiar with my stomach, with what felt like drool leaking out onto the thin material of the hospital gown. Like his hand, which had landed near my breast, but couldn’t be said to be groping me because he was dead.

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