Page 52 of Junk Magic

“—or maybe better. And in the meantime, we have somewhere to cook!” He yelled the latter over his shoulder, having jogged off to tend to the nearest smoking trench.

There were two of them, each about six feet long, carved slap into the middle of my xeriscape. There was a new mountain of dirt, from the trenches I assumed, toward the back of the lot, and coals burning merrily at the bottoms of the pits. There were also grates piled haphazardly on top, which worried me.

I did not own any grates.

And now neither did anyone else in the neighborhood, I assumed, because said grates looked like they’d been sourced from all over. There were a handful of different shapes that belonged on barbeques, several that appeared to have been ripped off of firepits, and one that resembled the gate of a decorative iron fence that a neighbor had recently put up. I glanced around apprehensively.

The last thing I needed was a posse coming to retrieve their stolen stuff. But all I saw was dust, waves of heat coming off the blacktop, and a lone, whirlybird lawn sprinkler wobbling its way around and around Mrs. Kovacs’s flower bed. She was gonna get a ticket for that; it wasn’t anywhere near seven P.M.

Maybe I could trade her misdemeanors, I thought, eyeing her missing gate as Sophie emerged from the back door of the house.

She’d changed from the khakis and blue eyelet top she’d been wearing earlier into a more climate appropriate set of white shorts and a knitted green and white tank. Her red hair was up in a messy bun and her fair skin was flushed. The latter might have been because of the heat, or the fact that she was carrying a gigantic pot.

It was my biggest one, the kind used for stews and mass quantities of soup, and looked like it weighed a ton. But she made it to the grill, putting it down with a thump before anyone could help. Chris and Jen, who had been spreading out charcoal in the other trench, wandered over to see what was going on. Aki likewise showed up to peer into the pot, and looked disappointed that it contained only water.

“Cyrus said we gotta boil the ribs before they hit the barbeque,” Sophie panted at me. “Or they’ll take forever to cook.”

“They’ll take forever to boil, too, if that’s all you got,” a man said.

I didn’t remember his name, but he was one of the guys who’d been with us in the desert the other day. He had the typical overgrown Were haircut, in his case a shock of blue-black that was falling into his eyes, and half covering the jagged scar on one olive-colored cheek. It takes a lot to mark a Were so deep that his natural healing abilities couldn’t compensate, but that wound must have laid his face open to the bone.

An expensive healer might have been able to smooth it out some, but I didn’t think that was in this guy’s budget. He was wearing a wife beater and a pair of old jeans, the kind that were clean enough but discolored at the knees and hem as if he hadn’t always had a way to wash them. The lack of ready access to a shower might explain the cloud of cheap cologne that wreathed him like a halo, and caused my new, overeager senses to almost gag.

That was weird for a Were, especially one who smelled clean enough underneath it, but I guessed old habits die hard. He was also older than the rest, maybe mid-twenties, and raw bone thin. But he sounded like he knew something about food.

“Used to work in a kitchen,” he added, accepting my scrutiny without comment, and I nodded.

“No problem,” Caleb told Sophie. “We can bring out some more.”

“We’re going to need a lot,” she said doubtfully. “And this is the only big one I could find. Where do you keep the rest?”

“The rest?” I asked, because she was looking at me.

“Of your pots.”

“Why would I need multiple stew pots?”

“You mean this is the only one you have?” Caleb asked, sounding surprised for some reason.

“Who has more than one stew pot?”

“I do—”

“You never even cook.”

“No, but they come in those sets from the store, right?” I looked at him blankly. “You know, the kind with five or six different sized pots and matching lids?”

“Okay? But what does that have to do with—”

“But I only use the frying pans, to cook a couple eggs in the morning or a grilled cheese once in a while, and eventually, they get scratched. Then I have to buy another set, and the big ones just accumulate—”

“Another set . . . of what?” I asked, confused.

“Of pots.”

“You buy another set of pots every time your frying pan gets scratched?”

“Of course.”

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