Page 3 of Junk Magic

“What?”

I glanced up to find him looking over my shoulder, where a swivel of my head showed me two lanky teens lounging in the doorway to the dining room, trying not to grin.

They weren’t trying very hard.

“Accalia de Croissets, meet Jace and Jayden.”

“Brothers?” I guessed.

“Twins,” the slightly taller one said. “Fraternal.”

Ah. That would explain why, although they favored, they weren’t identical. One was milk chocolate, the other dark. One had a buzz cut and the other was growing a very respectable ‘fro. One had on baggy jeans that must have been enchanted, because no way were they staying up otherwise, while the other was wearing a track suit worthy of a Russian mobster.

Yet they really were similar. In fact, other than for the piercing in track suit’s nose, I’d have been hard pressed to tell them apart by facial features alone. Especially since they both smelled of wolf.

But not of clan.

Normally, having two vargulfs—the outcasts of the Were community—in your house would be cause for alarm, assuming you lasted that long. They tended to be desperate, dangerous types with murky pasts, the kind with a lot of power but few restrictions on how they used it, because they literally had nothing left to lose.

But when your boyfriend is one, too, you get a different perspective. Not that it was so clear cut in his case. Because Cyrus was something I wasn’t sure the Were world had ever seen before: an outcast by choice.

It had started when his older brother, Sebastian, the leader of the powerful and wealthy Arnou clan, had decided that he wanted to be bardric. Humans would translate the term as “king”, but that was pretty far off the mark. “First among equals” would be a better version, although it actually meant “war chief”, because the only time the clans had ever agreed to submit to one man’s rule was when they were threatened with disaster.

And even then, it was touch and go.

Weres didn’t play well with others, and resented being bossed around by a wolf outside of their own clan. Like, really resented. Like tear-your-head-off-and-feed-on-your-entrails resented. Yet the war had demanded sacrifices from everyone, and theirs had involved choosing a leader.

It had gone about the way you’d expect.

After weeks of yelling, fighting—sometimes literally—and utter stalemate, Sebastian had come up with an idea. The other clan leaders viewed him as more of a diplomat than a warrior, because he occasionally liked to talk before the head ripping started. In the human world, that would be an asset; in the Were, not so much.

Not that most Weres were quite that temperamental, but any sign of weakness in a leader was anathema. Your Alpha was your life. He could lead you to success or utter destruction, so you damned well wanted him to be the baddest son of a bitch out there.

Which was why, despite the power and prestige of Arnou, Sebastian had been having trouble sealing the deal. But he’d had to seal it, because the next mostly likely candidate was Whirlwind of Rand, the wolf name of the leader of the second most powerful clan. And Rand hated the current human-Were alliance.

If Whirlwind became bardric, the Corps would be fighting this war alone, unless you counted the vampires. And nobody counted the damned vampires. They dealt with high level politics and otherworld invasions, which was all well and good and absolutely needed, but what about the little guy on the street? Who protected them?

And they needed protection. The other side knew that the best way to keep the Corps busy was to run us ragged preventing terrorist attacks, and for a while, they’d done a pretty good job. But that was before the Were council started providing support.

Unlike vamps, who tended to stay in their own little enclaves, Weres were a part of their communities. They ran businesses, employed locals, bought homes, and went to farmer’s markets. Yes, their kids usually went to special schools, both to teach them clan norms and to keep youthful hormones in check, especially around the full moon. But other than that, and for a few festivals and meetings of the clan throughout the year, their lives weren’t markedly different from the guy down the street.

Except that the guy down the street couldn’t throw you through a building if you pissed him off.

But the clans kept that kind of thing pretty much in check, and their involvement in the community had been a lifesaver for the Corps. Turns out, super senses were really good for picking up danger signs. Weres could smell magic, and even differentiate between light and dark varieties. Having the clans on board had cut the Corps’ workload by an order of magnitude, helping us hunt down dark mage enclaves, protect vulnerable human communities, even stop an attack on HQ.

That last had been an accident. A Were had been in line at headquarters, waiting to get a shaman’s license renewed, when he smelled the stench of blood magic. It was emanating off a new arrival so thickly that it had almost knocked him down.

Our enemies had known that getting a bomb past the Corps’ fearsome wards would be impossible, so they’d found some old drunk, stuffed him to the gills with life magic, the kind that wards couldn’t detect because all magical humans have it, and sent him in.

The magic in his veins was bound to a spell powerful enough to have taken out half the facility and killed who knew how many mages. And it would have, except that the Were jumped him half a second before his body exploded. The vicious attack caused the tainted blood to spirt out everywhere, the magic to disperse, and the Were to be tackled by no fewer than eight war mages for his trouble.

They’d eventually sorted things out, and he’d received an apology and a reward from the Corps. But it showed that, despite every possible precaution, if somebody wants to get to you, they can get to you. Unless, of course, you have paid Were guards stationed all over your lobby, as we now did.

One of them, Hernando, made the world’s best tamales. They’d caused the cafeteria’s revenues to take a nose dive ever since he started showing up with a cart that he parked outside the front door, ‘cause why not double dip? I’d gained at least five pounds, and felt a lot safer, ever since.

But that could all go away if an anti-Corps leader like Whirlwind got into power. Which was why Sebastian and Cyrus had rigged up a plan. Sebastian needed a show of strength to impress the clan leaders, but nothing penny ante would do. So, Cyrus had challenged his brother for leadership of Arnou and then thrown the fight, ensuring that Sebastian looked bad ass enough to win the vote.

As a result, the Weres stayed in the war, a lot of people stayed alive, and Cyrus was made an outcast for life. Or until the war ended and he and Sebastian could admit what had happened and bring him back into the fold. That would entail its own special set of problems, but they were minor compared to a world without family, something that to wolves was literally a fate worse than death.

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