Page 28 of The Fantastic Fluke

“Huh?” It took me a moment to comprehend the question. “Fluke? It’s, like, something good that happens by accident.” I looked at him and stressed, “Accident. See?”

He sighed, turned, and walked through the glass door. I opened it and followed, holding it for foxy behind me.

When we found the registration office, it was like a nightmare I sometimes had.

It was full of children.

Their parents were with them, as well as a whole menagerie worth of exotic familiars, but that was when I really got it. The woman on the phone had thought I was a little kid, not because of my voice, but because only little kids came newly into familiars. I was two decades late to be registering a familiar.

I’d known it, but somehow, my mind hadn’t connected that knowledge to what we’d find at the office.

It was too late to rethink, and even if it hadn’t been, what else was I going to do? Leave him unregistered and either have him taken away or pay a massive fine?

I went to the counter, where a perky woman with purple hair wearing a cherry-print dress smiled brightly at me. “How can we help you today?”

I leaned on the counter and lowered my voice. I didn’t want to come off as some creepy dude offering her unsolicited dick pics, but I also didn’t want everyone in the room to know I was some sad, stunted thirty-year-old registering a familiar for myself. “I, uh, have to register an exotic familiar.” I motioned to foxy, who, in an impressive display of agility and control, popped up onto his back legs, putting his front ones on the counter and giving the lady his best innocent melting chocolate eyes.

It worked on her as well as it always worked on me. “Aww, well aren’t you just the sweetest?” She asked him, leaning forward and holding her hand out for him to sniff. She didn’t look around for a kid, just pulled out a clipboard with her free hand and gave it to me, then grabbed a pen and set it on the counter. All without moving her gaze, or her hand away from where foxy was sniffing it. “What’s his name?”

I blinked.

What the hell was with people, all asking the same thing? Except, well, it was probably part of her job to know.

“Fluke,” I told her, and on the other side of foxy, Gideon put his face in his hands. For some reason, his deep sigh firmed my resolve. “His name is Fluke.”

Unlike Gideon, she grinned. “That’s adorable! Welcome to the registration office, Fluke the fox.” She surreptitiously reached under her desk and pulled out what looked like a Milk Bone, handing it to him where he was still braced on the counter. He scarfed it down so fast part of me thought I might have imagined the whole exchange, then spent a moment licking her hand. To me, she said, “It won’t take too long, just fill out the paperwork and bring it back up to me, and they’ll call you back in a few minutes to finalize everything.”

We found an open seat and foxy—Fluke—sat down in front of me, right on my feet. The children looked at him with hungry eyes, despite each having a familiar of their own. They had mice and starlings and one boy had a small owl, but my guy was magnetic. Who wouldn’t want to pet him?

I did pet him absently as I started filling out the papers. They were mostly what one might expect: name, address, payment type. For the first time in a long time, I cringed at having to admit to being a class two social mage. Not because I was still ashamed of it, but because a class two finding a familiar was very strange. Hopefully they wouldn’t notice. Or at least wouldn’t care.

I returned the paperwork to the nice woman at the desk and went back to my seat, and f—Fluke just sat right there, like a fox statue.

An exhausted woman whose daughter, not more than seven or eight, was cradling a toad against her chest, leaned over to me and whispered, “He’s very well behaved. Did you get him from some kind of breeder?”

“Nope. Just the old-fashioned way,” I told her. Was that a real thing? Familiar breeders? That didn’t seem right. Familiars were supposed to be a function of a mage’s magic attracting a creature who resonated with their abilities. Rich people weren’t just supposed to be able to buy them.

The woman’s daughter, wearing a frilly pink dress, came over and shoved her toad under Fluke’s nose. “His name is Jackie,” she informed him. My heart jumped, and for a second I was afraid my fox was about to make a meal of some kid’s brand new familiar, but he just sniffed it, then gave the kid’s hand a lick. She grinned in return. “He’s glad to meet you.”

I suspected he was more glad to not be breakfast, but I kept my mouth shut.

People were called away one by one, replaced as more came in, until a woman came out of an office and called my name.

All she did was check my ID, go through the form and confirm that everything I’d written was right, and then put it in a computer. She didn’t even hesitate when she asked me to confirm I was a class two social mage. Just asked and then typed.

When she finished, she pulled a piece of paper from a printer so old I half expected it to be dot matrix. “This is your temporary license. You should keep it on your person. Since he’s a canid, you’ll get the real one with a collar tag, so he can wear it and have the freedom to go where you need him to, with or without supervision.”

It had never occurred to me that as a familiar, he’d have the independence to do things like run errands. I knew it was a thing that happened; there was a mage from the university who sent his lynx to pick up his book orders once in a while. She’d show up with a bag, order list, and cash tucked into a little harness she wore, and let me handle the rest. Once, she even pointed out that I had the wrong edition of a book before I sent it along. She’d patiently kept nudging it back in my direction, tapping on the cover, till I’d realized what she was trying to tell me.

Remembering the incident with foxy and Dad’s ashes, I figured that wasn’t going to happen any time in my near future.

Then I bit my lip and sighed inwardly. No matter how much I’d started thinking of him that way, wanting it to be so, I didn’t have a familiar. Fluke was biding his time with me until a real, powerful mage came along. Maybe the one Gideon was supposed to be training, since that was also not me. Or maybe he was just a hyperintelligent fox, which still wouldn’t be as smart as a familiar. No regular fox would ever be able to choose the right edition of a book.

“Congratulations, Mr. McKinley,” she told me as she led me out of her office. “Fluke seems like an excellent familiar. I’m sure you’ll have many happy years together.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

And that was that. We all left the registration office, and foxy was a whole new fox. Fluke the familiar, all registered and legal-like. He seemed to understand that something had changed. Maybe it was my imagination, but there seemed to be an extra spring in his step, his head held a little higher, like he knew he had the right to be where he was, when before he’d been taking up someone else’s space.

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