CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Deus Ex Drag Queen

There was something about Manifest Destiny that encouraged even Alec, who didn’t like to follow anyone, to follow her. Biff supposed it was charisma. Or age. Or beauty. Or the deadly combination of all three. Of course, Alec kicked up a fuss and griped about it. Alpha wolves didn’t take to being ordered around by foxes, no matter how many tails.

Thus it was that, in a remarkably short space of time, half a pack of werewolves was suited up and riding into Friday traffic. Only half, because Alec refused to let Marvin come into unknown danger, Judd had to get to work, and Colin had some sort of frat party to attend.

“Young people need to get down with their bad selves,” said Alec, looking at their youngest pack member with approval.

Colin rolled his eyes at his Alpha. “What are you, eighty?”

Kevin came to Sausalito – since Alec was going into danger, one of the enforcers must accompany him. Tank came out of curiosity. And Lovejoy already would do pretty much anything Manifest Destiny wanted.

Biff wished he were anywhere but headed back to Max. The timing was crap. It was too soon for Max to have accepted anything – that’s assuming he ever would. Throwing a bossy kitsune drag queen at him wasn’t going to improve matters.

Frankly, Biff wasn’t ready either for the inevitable confrontation. He was still feeling odd and floaty, a sensation he couldn’t shake since their farewell lovemaking earlier. He supposed it was likely a mix of pheromones and shock.

During the half-hour ride through the city, back over the bridge, and down the cliff edge, Biff’s brain hummed with This is wrong, this is wrong, thisiswrong, thisiswrongthisiswrong!

But it still happened.

If Max was surprised to find Biff on his doorstep a mere hour and a half after he left it, he didn’t show it. He barely flinched at the addition of pack and beautiful Asian woman. Biff guessed that Max was also still floating. His blue eyes were glazed and red-rimmed.

This is us ending. What is it they say? Not with a bang but with a whimper. Well, we did both. Banging and whimpering. Overachievers.

Biff turned away from Max to meet his brother’s sympathetic gaze. “This is not a good idea, Alpha.” Help me.

Mana weaved through the werewolves and shoved Biff out of the way (okay, he moved aside) to glare at Max.

“We must talk.”

Max looked at Biff, eyebrow quirked.

Biff said, “Maximillian Barker, this is Manifest Destiny. She wants to tell us something important.”

“Come again?”

Mana looked down her nose at him. “Only if you ask nicely.”

Max clocked her then. Perhaps there was too much catty gay boy in the tone. Biff could see realization register on his lover’s face. And then be dismissed as unimportant.

Mana didn’t like that: being known or being ignored.

Max said to Biff, “I already got a pissed-off judge I don’t know what to do with, and you bring me a tetchy drag queen?”

“Drag queen might know what to do with the judge.” Biff kept his tone light.

“Welcome to San Fran-fucking-cisco.” Max pushed the door wide, inviting them all in.

His place smelled strongly of sex, but the pack was too cowed and confused to embarrass Biff with a running commentary on his prowess.

Between them, Alec, Tank, Lovejoy, and Kevin took up the whole apartment. In an effort to be somewhat accommodating, Tank crammed himself into the tiny kitchenette and started making tea. Something to cope with the tension, Biff supposed.

“Are all werewolves freaky about tea?” Max wondered.

“Biff started it.” Kev went to sit on the bed, wrinkled his nose at it, and then leaned against the bedside table instead.

Mana sat on the tiny couch, pulling Biff to sit next to her, and stared pointedly at the chair opposite until Max sat there.

Lovejoy, who had no shame, sat on the couch arm, and Alec, looking highly uncomfortable, stayed at the door, stiff and unsure, his helmet still half on the top of his head, like some weird version of a guard at Buckingham Palace.

* * *

Max tried not to look at Bryan, but his gaze kept getting dragged back to him. His werewolf looked odd – spacey and withdrawn. He doesn’t want to be here any more than I want him here. This is against his will. Alec is making him. Or she is. What kind of power does she have?

Alec spoke from the doorway. “Manifest Destiny here is our hostess. Or has been, in absentia. And she’s a kitsune.” The Alpha werewolf’s eyes, so much like Bryan’s, kept turning to his brother in worry and confusion. As though Bryan could somehow explain everything.

“An Old One. Nine tails.” Bryan added information without looking at Max. His voice, always soft and growly, was almost nonexistent. Yet Max felt it shiver over his skin, the pain in that low whisper spiking through him as if on trace lines.

Alec continued, “She wanted to see you and Biff immediately because… Actually, I’ve no idea why.”

The redheaded enforcer added, “None of us know what’s going on.”

Manifest Destiny gave a long sigh.

Max didn’t like her. Too old. Too cocky. Too precise. Her beauty was weaponized.

Everyone looked at the drag queen hopefully. Except Max, who pretty much dreaded whatever it was she was about to say.

I don’t want it voiced. Speaking it makes it real.

“Did you know you’d mated the Beta here?”

That was not, exactly, what he expected. “Is this a shotgun wedding?”

Bryan winced.

“Oh, I get it,” said Manifest Destiny. “You’re a jerk.”

“Sweetheart, you thought you were the only queen bitch in the Bay Area?” Max was having none of that. He didn’t care how old she was, no one out-sassed him in his own home.

She rolled her eyes. “We got us a little problem, Sparky. Your boy here stinks of you, in a good way. There’s only one time a shifter smells good bathed in a mage’s quintessence. I know, ’cause I’ve sniffed it before. Not often, but I have.”

Max winced and said it before she could. He wasn’t going to let her have the advantage. “When he’s a familiar.” My big mouth.

The werewolves all gasped.

Bryan hung his head, as if somehow he were at fault.

God no, baby, it’s me! It’s all my doing. Or my family’s. I’m so sorry. How many more lives will they destroy? Don’t you see that’s why I can’t do this? The very idea of the damage my heritage could do…through me.

“Give the boy a prize.” Manifest Destiny sounded smug.

“What?” Alec was not pleased. He whipped the helmet off his head and looked like he wanted to throw it at Max. “You made my Beta – my brother – your pet?”

Bryan leapt instantly to Max’s defense. “It’s not like that, you moron.”

Max wished he wouldn’t. He deserved the condemnation.

Alec went fierce. “Oh, no? What’s it like, then, Bryan? Why don’t you explain, to your pack, because I sure don’t have any idea what’s going on. Isn’t he a sumage?”

“No.” That was the drag queen again. Her voice was calm. “He’s a Magistar.”

Max visibly flinched. “No. I’m not.”

“Oh, yes, you are.”

“Magistars require familiars to function.”

“Exactly, and Bryan here—”

“No.” Max interrupted her. “I don’t have to accept it. And I can do that by not accepting him. We stay apart, then nothing works, and nothing happens.”

Alec was vibrating with anger. “You’re rejecting my brother? Again?”

Bryan’s big, open face was carefully blank. “Alpha. Stop. I thought you were offended by the idea that I’m his familiar. Now you want it?”

Max ached for him.

“Actually, I thought he was your boyfriend.” The Alpha turned to glare at Max. “We talked about this. I warned you.” He was almost growling and his canines were showing.

Max felt that frisson of fear that comes out of the monkey brain. Predator. Run. Like the idiot he was, Max shook his head and ignored the teeth. Instead, he tried to make them all understand – but mostly Bryan. “I can’t. We can’t. It’s not possible.”

Manifest Destiny jumped back in. “Why not?”

Max, unsurprising, felt himself go on the defensive. “Like sleeping with your familiar is normal for a Magistar?”

“Actually, it is. How many Magistars do you know?”

“None.”

“So. Familiars are always shifters, carefully guarded secret.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Max knew his tone was desperate, broken. “I can’t be that thing.” I can’t have my relationship colored by my father’s avarice. By my family’s sins. The deaths of all those people haunting me as we fuck. I can’t do that to him and I won’t do it to me.

The drag queen cocked her head. “This is about something more than the relationship. Which I assure you is perfectly natural. Well, supernatural. In fact, in my experience, most Magistar pairings also display same-sex tendencies. Not that there are enough of them for a legitimate sample size.” She tapped her full lips with one perfectly manicured fingernail. “No, you actually don’t want the power. You’d rather be what? A sumage? It’s not exactly a glorious life.”

“I like my life, thank you very much,” Max found himself lying. Well, I liked it when Bryan was in it, for a little while. When he was just my boyfriend. When I wasn’t using him to tame quintessence. Using him. Like a tool. Like. Oh god— His face prickled in horror.

“Did I damage him? When we were casting together? I guess that’s what we were doing. Casting. When I used him as a familiar, did it shorten his lifespan? I know shifters are supposed to live long. Sumages don’t.” Max found himself looking at Bryan. “Oh god, baby, does it hurt? Did I hurt you?” A strange parroting of Bryan’s own text messages from a long time ago. When I rejected him the first time.

Bryan looked like he wanted to cry. He cleared his throat, voice still husky. “I’m fine.”

Manifest Destiny looked back and forth between them. “Familiars aren’t damaged that way. Not that we know of. The first Magistar pairings showed up – when? The 1920s? Those that haven’t died by design are still alive. It’s possible it actually works the other way around. After all, sumages tend to die young. Could be Bryan here loans you some of his extended lifespan. That’s assuming post-Saturation-born werewolves are still long-lived. This is a brave new world. Who knows what any of you young ones are in for? It’s only been a hundred years.”

“Only?”

“Darling, I’m pushing six hundred. You are all mere mayflies to me.”

Max tried to distract her. “Six hundred years? Learn anything?”

“Eyeliner technology has come a long way.”

Max let himself wobble forth a smile. There was no point in explaining his denial. A creature that old would be divorced from human emotion. Her moral compass focused on otherworldly concerns. She would see life in constantly shifting shades of gray, all ethics and mathematics. And, apparently, makeup. Her perception was that Max had been granted power and should use it.

“Magistar power is not a new kind of eyeliner.”

“Certainly not – that would be far more exciting.”

Max tried to frame it so she would understand. “I cannot face what it would make me into.”

“You seem like a decent sort. A bit high-strung and emotional. But nothing that won’t improve with age.”

“You don’t know my family.”

Manifest Destiny laughed at that. “They’re probably Surges. They usually are. And assholes. What does that matter here? Are you like them?”

“Fuck, no.”

“There you have it.”

Max went silent. She would never understand.

Bryan tried to explain. Defending the very man in the process of rejecting him. “He’s afraid he’ll become them. Become his father.”

Max shuddered. Spare me his sympathy. I’d rather he hated me.

Manifest Destiny frowned. “Power doesn’t corrupt, you know. You have to start out rotten.”

“Exactly.”

She understood at last. “You don’t trust yourself.”

Max nodded. Afraid his misery was evident.

She puffed out her cheeks, then stood. “Well, that is a problem. Come with me. I require a demonstration.”

Max wanted to protest. He didn’t need to show them what he could do. Plus, he couldn’t bear to touch Bryan again, not when there were no caresses to follow.

Manifest Destiny anticipated his objection. “I must understand the scope of your abilities to know the solution. We might as well deal with that other problem someone mentioned at the same time. An enchanted judge?”

Max sighed. Manifest Destiny indeed.

* * *

Biff wasn’t sure what made Max acquiesce. He couldn’t possibly smell Mana’s power, nor did he have shifter nature to recognize her Alpha persuasion. So, he must have picked up on something else. A directness of gaze and firmness of step that suggested a lifetime spent conquering. Mana would always come out on top, even against Judge Rassolnik or DURPS. Even against Max.

So, they made their way out to the enchantment. His pack at their back. His friends were looking less confused and more upset. Biff wasn’t sure if that was general overprotection, or the idea that they now, all unwittingly, shared their Beta with a mage.

The kitsune looked the enchantment over. Biff could see she was trying not to be impressed. “This is very prettily done.”

The judge was standing in the doorway, sweating slightly. Biff hoped it wasn’t radiation poisoning.

Rassolnik glared at Mana. “Who’s this bitch?”

“Vixen, please, darling. I know I’m hanging out with a pack of wolves, but really.”

The judge grimaced. “Kitsune? What good is a kitsune? The world is lousy with kitsune these days.”

Everyone ignored Rassolnik and looked at the kitsune in question.

“So,” said Max, “how do we take down the enchantment?”

“Hold on, let me make a call.”

Out came Mana’s burner phone again. “Ayesha? Yes. So, we’ve got a house enchantment, set by a full coven, one dead, beautifully balanced. I’ve a pairing with me, too.” A pause. “Yes? I’ll ask.” She looked at Biff. “Can you two pass through it together?”

Biff nodded.

“They can.” A pause while the woman on the other end of the line chatted away. “Are you sure? That doesn’t sound pleasant.”

Mana looked up again, this time at Max. “She says you should just stand within the enchantment and bleed it off. She says you need to peel it back like layers of an onion, each civic mage’s contribution, one at a time. It may feel funny, she says.”

“Who’s she?” wondered Max.

Mana waved the phone. “Oh, you know, just a Magistar.”

Judge Rassolnik heard that and gasped.

Max gave a little sigh. “We could just go in, pull Rassolnik out, and leave the enchantment as is.”

Mana said, the plea awkward when voiced by an Alpha, “I’d really like to see if you can take it down. If you don’t mind. Ayesha would like to know, too.”

“And if we can’t?”

“She’ll have to get here all that much sooner. You’ll need a lot more work to make you safe.” She looked at Max intently. “Apart or together. Whatever you decide. You still need to be in control. It’s your choice, of course, but…”

Max nodded.

Biff said, trying to put strength into his voice, “It feels weird and tingly to be inside the enchantment. Is there something we can do to avoid that?”

Mana looked at him like he was something smeared on her boot. “Ayesha, the wolf is whining.”

Bryan glared. He’d never discussed with Max whether his trace lines flared under enchantment, but he thought they might, and he wanted to keep him from hurting.

“She says it’s like getting your sea legs, floating quintessence. You’ll adapt or learn to ignore it or barf.”

“Charming,” said Max. At Biff’s confused look, he said, “It makes me feel queasy.”

Mana looked between the two of them. “Well? Go on, boys. Ayesha will stay on the line, just in case.”

“Her advice is invaluable, I’m sure,” quipped Max.

Biff went to him. Skin prickling. Wanting so badly to be close.

Max swallowed and then held out his hand. “Last time?”

Biff said nothing. Then there would be nothing to unsay. Quickly, he stripped and shifted, then he moved to nudge against his mate’s leg. Max wound his hand into the fur on the top of Bryan’s head.

Together, they walked into the enchantment, stopping on the bare patch of earth just in front of the judge.

* * *

Max tried to relax into the tingling. He tried to let it wash over and inside him. He wasn’t quite sure what to do, so he put his faith in the wolf at his side.

He let his senses open, as they did before he Placed some other mage’s cast. This was, after all, someone else’s cast originally, just anchored and set by many.

He began to feel swirls of quintessence around him, activated as energy. They beat against the enchantment, resisting it. They wanted to be static again. They wanted to be free.

Somehow, he felt Bryan there too, a firm, solid presence within the eddies of power. The wolf was pushing them away, making a hole in which they both stood.

“Babe,” said Max, falling into the pet name without intent, “stop pushing it off us. Let me take a better look.”

The wolf whined in disagreement and pawed at the bare earth.

“I’ll be fine.”

He chuffed and then sighed. He stopped resisting.

Max figured that Bryan was using his own shifter abilities, like a savage healing reversed outward, augmented by Max’s own aptitude for quintessence. That’s likely how he built the shield against Rassolnik’s earlier attack, too. It’s instinct. He uses instinct. But Max had training. Long-forgotten, decades-old, civic training to be a Surge, but still training. His father’s voice in his head. Fists beating it into him by rote.

Quintessence is there. It’s all around you, all the time. It’s air and light and sound and scent, but only the possibility of those things. You have to tell it what it should be. You must be firm with it, son.

Without Bryan pushing it away, the enchantment rested on them both, inside and against. So far as it was concerned, they became part of the landscape.

Max ignored the tingling of activated energy and looked at it through his seventh sense. He saw it in his head like a tent of amorphous light, particle and energy at the same time. He examined it. To him it appeared iridescent with threads of five colors mixed across it, like oil on a puddle. The dominant one was gray and it reached down, coiling about the judge in the doorway. That was the Surge cast. Then there were webs of blue and green, which netted the spell down, keeping it from drifting away. Those would be the Sluices. Lastly, there were tiny pinpoints of yellow and orange, which sparked all about the ground, tracing over the barren earth, the Siphon power-couplers. They tied the spell not to Place but to time, an infinite loop of supply in a very small dose, keeping the enchantment alive.

It would be easiest, Max felt, to break those pinpoints. Then the enchantment would simply stop working, although it might take a while to fade away. Or he could cut the threads of Sluice and let it drift up into the air like a large soap bubble. Or he could bleed it dry of the bulk of its power, like the Placer he once had been.

It was no onion to peel layer by layer. He need not dismantle each part – any one component was a weak link.

He chose the Surge because it was the root of his father, to be dug up and destroyed, like a rotten tree stump. Because it was connected to the judge, and Max needed Rassolnik to see its destruction.

Max reached forward with his free arm, understanding for the first time why Surges insisted on making movements with their hands. He’d always thought it affected, like Italians talking. But it helped him concentrate when he motioned with his fingers.

When Max the Sumage Placed a spell, he let it hit him and then shifted it, from matter to energy, from energy to matter. He forced quintessence from one state to another. The enchantment was energy, so he thought to Place it into matter, a bucket of slime to land on Rassolnik’s head. Not that he’d ever had that level of control over the outcome.

But it wasn’t necessary.

This time, Bryan was there. This solid, comforting understanding presence. His familiar. In that moment, Max realized how it worked.

He could pull the energy through his wolf, using him like a conduit. Bryan’s savage abilities, his innate shifter nature, would smooth it, converting it back to static quintessence. It would be like purifying water through limestone.

“Are you ready?” he asked his familiar. “I don’t know if it will hurt.”

The wolf snorted. He might as well have said, “I’m a werewolf. I’m used to pain.”

Max reach out and grabbed with his seventh sense, tugging at the swirling gray that only he could see. The wolf tensed under Max’s hand, ears twitching.

A crack reverberated through the headlands and down the cliffs through the streets of Sausalito to the ocean shore. It was a vast shattering noise, like the biggest cracker in all the world splitting asunder. The earth shook, enough to be thought an earthquake in the papers the next morning, but not so much as to make any native Californian flinch.

The enchantment was gone.

Bryan shifted form and collapsed.