Page 7 of Junk Magic

He broke off suddenly and bolted, vanishing into the darkness so fast that it almost looked like he’d disappeared. Cyrus frowned harder and got up. “I’ll be back,” he told me, and I nodded.

There was silence around the campfire for a moment after he left, except for the soft crackle of the flames and the even softer hiss of the wind. And then Jace spoke up. “Don’t mind Colin,” he told me. “He had a bad experience.”

“A bad experience?”

I regretted the words almost as soon as I’d said them, because one thing you never asked a vargulf was how he got that way. But my attention had been on Cyrus and the boy, and my mouth had been on automatic. That was rarely a good thing.

But Jace only shrugged. “Colin’s parents were part of a group who split away trying to form their own family, after a disagreement with their clan leaders. But they were attacked a few weeks later by some of their old clan, who didn’t want to look weak by letting them go.”

“Attacked?” There was surprise in my voice, because that sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen. Yes, clans had a lot of autonomy over their members, but there were rules. A rather large number of them, in fact, as to how acts of vengeance could be carried out.

And sneak attacks weren’t among them.

“Didn’t they report it?” I asked. “The council—”

“Wasn’t in session. There was no bardric then, so it would have had to be called to give a ruling. And who was gonna call it? The parents were all dead.”

“And the kids?” I asked, wondering if I wanted to know.

“Dragged back to the clan,” Jace shrugged. “But not all of them were let back in. The elders made them fight, and only the strongest were restored, while the rest were killed or driven off.”

It was said so matter-of-factly that, for a moment, I wasn’t sure what I’d heard. “They were made to fight?”

He nodded. “Any who were old enough to Change. I think they kept all the littler ones.”

“But . . . people can Change as young as nine or ten, some even sooner—”

“And those mostly didn’t make it. Colin was one of the few who got away, limping off into the desert after an early round. He’d been given a bad leg wound in the first fight and knew he wouldn’t last through a second. But that’s also why nobody went after him right away; they thought he wouldn’t get far, and they’d round him up once the contest was over. But he got a ride with a norm into town, then ran into Jayden—”

“Wolf eyes in the dark,” Jayden said, without looking up from his overloaded plate. “I almost had a heart attack. Thought the clan had come for me for sure.”

“He took him back to our camp,” Jace added. “We’re staying in an abandoned building off Mesquite, so we had plenty of room. He fit in okay.”

“’Cept he’s angry all the time,” Jayden added. “You know he is.”

“We’re all angry.”

“I’m not. Not anymore.” He glanced at Cyrus’s trailer, and then back at his plate again. “I’m going places.”

Jace laughed, and ruffled his brother’s ‘fro. “Yeah, you’re going places, all right.”

“Not the hair, man. How many times I hafta tell you?”

The brothers’ interaction cut the tension, and in a few minutes, the lighthearted banter was back. Not that everything was forgotten, far from it, but these guys had learned the hard way that you take your fun when you can get it. And they were.

By the time Cyrus came back alone, it almost felt like nothing had ever happened. “Where is he?” I asked, as somebody handed me another beer.

“He’s fine. Wanted some time alone.”

Yeah, so did I, but not for the same reason as before. I wanted that boy’s clan name. Nobody else around the fire seemed to realize that they’d just reported multiple homicides to a war mage, along with a few dozen more minor crimes, if child abuse counts as minor. I didn’t intend to point it out since learning that they had a cop in their midst might not go down well, but I damned well intended to act on it.

But I could get the particulars from Cyrus later. If I knew him, he’d already reported everything to his brother. That was partly why Sebastian had agreed to this craziness: Cyrus wanted to use his status as vargulf to get information on badly behaving clans. It had been a long time since there had been a bardric, and things had gotten sloppy. Sebastian was trying to change that, but he needed information on the inner workings of the clans to do it.

And who better to give it to him than their victims?

I told my inner war mage to relax, lay back, and enjoy the night. I rested my head on Cyrus’s leg and looked up at the stars. The fire was throwing ash and burning embers skyward, black and red and yellow. The guys were kicking back beers that they were too young to buy, but that with their metabolisms would never catch up enough to make them drunk. And then somebody pulled out a harmonica.

It crystallized into one of those times that you remember for years. When things, for one brief moment, are so perfect that they don’t seem real. The chill of the desert air, the warmth of the fire, the hard muscle of Cyrus’s leg under my head, shifting a little because he felt it, too.

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