Weird Magic (Lia de Croissets #2)

Chapter One

I’d never seen a bunch of apex predators look so nervous.

“It’s fine,” I told the nearest, who was getting help with his bow tie from another predator, only this one looked like it.

The first was named Jace, a young Were with milk chocolate skin, a buzz cut, and a strong preference for baggy jeans and tank tops, except for today, when he’d donned a tux.

It had been tailored to fit him, yet somehow didn’t.

Or maybe it was his nervousness that was communicating itself through the clothes.

Anyway, he looked rumpled but sweet.

The tie tier was named Ulmer, who was not now and likely never had been sweet, having probably come out of the womb snarling.

He hadn’t bothered with a tux because even the best tailor in the world would have run screaming at the very idea. Ulmer looked like a cross between a disaster and a nightmare, and that was in human form—or as close to it as he ever got. Which wasn’t all that close.

Tonight, though, he had made some effort, with a long flowing caftan of the type Weres used when they thought they might have to Change suddenly.

That could have been taken as an insult by the assembled throng, who were among the glitterati of the Were world, and might even have raised questions of a challenge in some minds had it been anyone else. But no one would take offense at Ulmer.

Not because he wasn’t offensive, deliberately so, and on a regular basis, but because he was a force of nature and everyone knew it. Did it make sense to rail at a hurricane? At an earthquake? An avalanche?

It was equally a waste of time with Ulmer, not to mention dangerous. As a Were, he was a shaggy, scarred, monster of a creature that put the fear of God, or at least of Ulmer, in even the most hardened of fighters. In human guise… well, not much changed.

He had wolf eyes in a human face, with long, shaggy gray hair that would have looked better on a lion, a matching beard, and a body that appeared to defy the laws of physics, because how could mere bones support that much muscle?

They had to be made out of solid steel, I thought, as I watched his surprisingly deft fingers form a halfway respectable bow tie.

It was a little lopsided, but not too bad, and anyway, it matched the rest of the suit.

I took over brushing down Jace’s coat and tried to pull it into some kind of shape.

“I don’t think I can do this,” he whispered to me, while Ulmer went on to inspect the other young men in the small room, like a drill sergeant checking out a new batch of recruits.

He was barking orders because tonight was important and they were representing two clans—their new one and the sponsoring one of Arnou, to which he belonged. Ulmer on a tear was scary, but for once, nobody looked worried. They were too busy worrying about something else.

“It’ll be over quick,” I told Jace, while straightening his lapels. “And you’ve met Sebastian before, right?”

He nodded but didn’t speak.

“He’s a lot like Cyrus,” I said, talking about my fiancé and the boy’s clan leader.

Sebastian, the current bardric, the title for the leader of the Were world, was Cyrus’s brother, and the two even looked a lot alike.

I hoped that fact would settle Jace’s nerves when he got into the audience hall, but I doubted it.

It was a tough transition, from street kid and vargulf, the latter a term for the outcasts in Were society, to a founding member of an entirely new clan in barely a month.

Of course, it was a tiny clan, composed mainly of former vargulfs, and didn’t even have a name yet, but it was a clan nonetheless.

And new clans were traditionally presented to the current bardric at the yearly meeting of clan leaders.

It was as intimidating as all hell, but it was also non-negotiable.

Weres were all about tradition, and we couldn’t be a clan until we got through it.

And this was the last chance, as it was the final day of a very contentious meeting that had dragged on far longer than normal as people wrangled with the changes the current war was bringing to our world.

And even more with the progressive policies Sebastian was trying to enact.

Since we were a result of one of those policies, we had to brave this out.

“It’ll be fine,” Jen said. She was not a Were, being one of the students I was teaching as part of my job in the War Mage Corps, the police branch of the world’s leading magical organization, the Silver Circle.

She and my other students were not being presented, even though the boys of our clan had had no trouble adopting them.

That might have been because my latest crop of students had more in common with vargulfs than with mages.

Their special, unwanted abilities made them persona non grata in the magical world, and the two groups of outcasts had quickly bonded.

“Right!” Sophie, another of my students, grinned encouragingly. “We’re gonna be right there with you, all the way!”

Jace brightened, which made it a bitch for me to rain on his parade. “They have to stay here,” I told him. “I’m sorry, but it’s protocol.”

“But I got all dressed up!” Jen said, while Sophie’s eyes narrowed.

“Screw protocol,” she said. “You told us we’re part of the family—”

“And you are, but—”

“But what? We’re part of it as long as you don’t have to show us off? As long as we don’t make you look bad?”

I sighed. Sophie was the leader of the little group of magical throwbacks I had been called upon to make into soldiers, and if she wasn’t happy, none of them would be.

And she wasn’t happy. The Barbie-esque makeup she currently had on, complete with a fan of pink rhinestones by either eye, didn’t hide that.

“It isn’t up to me,” I told her. “The Clan Council has a lot of rules—”

“Stupid rules!”

“—and one of them is that only clan can walk.” I didn’t point out that our new clan was already contravening a millennium of tradition just by existing, and pushing it any farther wouldn’t be a great idea.

Because Sophie didn’t care about that. She cared about her own little group being seen as equals after a lifetime of being hidden away in the special schools the Corps had for people whose magic wasn’t on the approved list.

She had spent a lifetime being the Other, being Wrong, being Weird and Shameful and whatever other words had been applied to her—I was sort of grateful I didn’t know them all—and now she was touchy.

Very.

And this was just all I needed.

“Only clan and its auxiliaries can walk,” I began, only to be cut off almost immediately.

“Fine. Then we’ll be auxiliaries.”

For someone with her long red hair in a curly updo tonight, and her hi-lo gown a giant mass of pink ruffles, she should have resembled a very well-heeled can-can dancer. Yet she nonetheless managed to look intimidating. Almost as much as a wolf.

I felt my lips quirk. I was proud of her and couldn’t deny it. This place should have intimidated the hell out of her, but nothing intimidated Sophie. Or if it did, I didn’t want to meet it.

And, technically, she was right, although…

“That’s not just a word,” I explained. “Clan auxiliaries are… they’re important. Not wolves, as they haven’t been bitten, but bound by oaths of loyalty and service to the clan nonetheless. Like junior members.”

“Okay, give me the oaths.” It was immediate.

“Yeah, only we haven’t even figured out what they are yet!” I said, getting a bit exasperated. “We don’t have a clan structure, a symbol, even a name, much less written oaths—”

“Then make them up.” That was Jen. She was a vision in pale yellow silk, wearing a sleek, body-hugging gown with strategic cut-outs at the waist outlined in diamond-like bling.

It was a get-up worthy of a vampire, which she was not, and complemented her blond bob and the blue eyes that could burn green whenever her necromancy was active.

“Guys, it’s okay,” Jace said, always the peacemaker. “I’ll be fine.”

“We know you will, ‘cause we’ll be there with you,” Sophie said staunchly.

“We’ll call you… honorary auxiliaries… for the moment,” I told them, because I didn’t have time to argue.

And because all the other clans that had paraded around for weeks had had long trains of followers, showing off their strength to everyone and dressed to the nines, so why shouldn’t we?

“Do all of you want to walk?” I asked, looking past the ringleaders to where my three other students were hugging the wall to stay out of the way.

Kimmie, the cute black girl with the Cleopatra braids and the yellow, black, and leopard-print Versace number that had had Jen eyeing her enviously earlier, only nodded, not being the in-your-face type.

Aki, a Japanese-American with blue-tipped hair and a tux with a blue sheen, and Dimas, the youngest of our tribe at barely fifteen, looked at me blankly.

They had both been tugging on their finery in different ways, looking like they couldn’t wait to get home to shorts and t-shirts, and now seemed surprised by the question.

“You weren’t planning for us to walk?” Aki asked. “Then why the suits?”

“You’re invited to the party afterward,” I assured him. “Whether you walk or not is up to you.”

“Of course we’ll walk,” Dimas said, like I was being boring, while trying to get his short dark hair to lie flat. It grew in clumps, all of which seemed to want to go in different directions, in what was normally termed a cowlick. Only in his case, it looked like a whole herd had been at him.

“Okay, but you stay to the back and do not pass in front of any of the clan members. It would be interpreted as an insult, possibly even as you challenging them—”

“Everything’s a challenge to Weres,” Aki complained. “I don’t know how you’re not all dead already.”

“—or as a sign that our clan is badly organized and doesn’t know what it’s doing, which is what they expect.”

Sophie, who’d had her mouth open to say something, abruptly shut it.