Page 16 of Junk Magic

“Thanks for making coffee,” I told him, with a kiss. “Hello, Sebastian.”

“Lia.” He didn’t get up; it wasn’t the Were way. But he did the usual hand on heart gesture of a clan member greeting another. I did it back and sat down, and Cyrus slid me over a mug of coffee, fixed just the way I liked it, which was hot as hell and black as sin.

I practically inhaled it.

“We were waiting for you,” Sebastian said. “I hoped they wouldn’t keep you all night. I had to slip away from my bodyguards, and I can’t stay long.”

“Any word?” Cyrus asked, more abruptly. Because he doesn’t have any more tact than I do.

I didn’t take offense, since I’d gotten the easy job tonight. I didn’t even want to imagine what it had been like trying to comfort kids—because that’s what many of them still were, whatever they thought—who had just seen what they had. I just took out the same vial I’d shown to Sophie.

“Yeah,” I said, and put it on the table.

Cyrus picked it up and sniffed it. Normally, I’d have told him not to bother, because I doubted there was much left after the labs finished with it. But it hadn’t been washed out, either, and a Were’s nose doesn’t need much.

“Punch?” Cyrus asked, looking up.

I nodded.

“I assume we’re not talking about the Hawaiian variety?” Sebastian said, taking it from his brother. And rearing back after a single whiff, as if his nose might be the better of the two. Or maybe he just wasn’t as familiar with Vegas street drugs.

“The fey variety,” I said. “It’s a derivative of fey wine, a potent narcotic smuggled over the divide from Faerie and then cut way the hell down. The original stuff is said to be able to knock a vamp on his ass.”

I hesitated, because this was going to start a shitstorm, but there was nothing for it. “It’s what Grayshadow was taking.”

Sebastian had no response, other than for a slight tightening of his hand around the white porcelain of his mug, but Cyrus was a different story. “That son of a bitch!”

It was true. Grayshadow had indeed been a son of a bitch. He’d also been Sebastian’s right-hand man, who had betrayed him.

Like many Weres, Grayshadow hadn’t liked the alliance with the humans. But that had been less important to him that the opportunity it afforded, one that only a truly twisted mind could have come up with. He’d helped to formulate the plan that had made Sebastian bardric and Cyrus an outcast, and had then kidnapped Cyrus.

The idea was that Sebastian would be forced to go after his brother himself, since sending the clan to help a vargulf would be impossible without admitting what he’d done. And as soon as he made himself vulnerable, Grayshadow intended to kill him and blame the death on his estranged brother. As Sebastian’s second, that would have immediately left Grayshadow as clan leader, and possibly bardric as well.

It was a good plan, and it might have worked, only I’d found Cyrus before Sebastian had, and caught Grayshadow in the act. He had therefore issued challenge, as it was the only way left to get the position he wanted and avoid punishment. He’d assumed that he would win any fight between him and Sebastian, although not because he was stronger.

But because he was planning to cheat.

He’d been taking punch—a lot of it. Enough to bring out latent magical abilities that, while untrained, were still formidable. Abilities that Sebastian didn’t have.

Unfortunately for Grayshadow, I traced him to the arena, and my skills are not untrained. The traitorous second died shortly thereafter, and the problem was solved. But plenty of punch was still out there, and now it looked like somebody was tinkering with the recipe.

“Punch gets you high,” Cyrus snarled. “Maybe brings out a few latent abilities—”

“More than a few,” I said. “That’s why the Corps has a whole division assigned to stop it—or we did. They were mostly pulled off to help with the war, and the stuff has been flooding the streets ever since—”

“Damn it, Lia! It doesn’t do what we saw tonight!”

For a moment, I was taken aback, because that wasn’t a tone I was used to hearing from him. Then it dawned on me that the boys weren’t the only ones who had been traumatized. Stress and pain were written on Cyrus’s face as well as exhaustion, and the eyes were haunted in a way that they hadn’t been earlier.

I took his hand under the table, and a little of the strain smoothed out. Weres liked touch even more than humans, craved it even, especially after a traumatic event. I suddenly felt it as well, a need for some skin-on-skin contact, preferably full body and in bed. Not sex, not anymore; as tired as I was, I’d probably fall asleep halfway through. I just wanted to hold him.

But we had company so I did the next best thing and answered his question.

“No, it doesn’t,” I agreed. “This wasn’t the usual drug. Someone’s refined it, upped the potency, and also played with the formula—”

“Played how?” That was Sebastian.

“It’s hard to say, because we just got the sample. And because all fey wine is different, so punch varies greatly, too. It’s like chili; everybody has their own recipe, and exactly what goes into it depends on the region it came from, what was blooming the time of year that it was made, the maker,” I fluttered my free hand. “A lot of things.”

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