Page 4 of Kin of the Wolf (Magnetic Magic #3)

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“Are you certain you don’t want to return to your abode and retrieve the sword?” Duncan asked.

We were at a red light, and he was, fortunately, fully clothed now. He’d replaced his usual black leather jacket with an expensive-looking sweater, a testament to the damp chill of a Seattle winter. With his hand on the steering wheel, he watched as I slid two dollars for gas onto the stack of bills on his dashboard, the fisherman bobblehead still holding them down.

“You think I’ll need it to feed ducks?” I asked.

“For adventure and fulfillment.”

“At the duck pond.”

“Just last night, your cousins appeared to watch you. In your wolf form, especially with the assistance of a fine and devoted male of some stature, you could have defeated them, but what if they’d come when you were a human? You don’t carry a firearm loaded with silver bullets, so you may have struggled to deal with them.”

“I appreciate the sword, Duncan.” I smiled at him to let him know I really did. Further, I hoped he wasn’t disappointed that I wasn’t toting it all over town on my various errands. “But I don’t think it’s legal to carry one around openly. They’re dangerous weapons. Besides, I don’t know anything about sword fighting.”

“It is an art with instructors that exist, even in this technology-subsumed era. Perhaps some lessons would be in order. I’ve noticed local karate dojos with katanas mounted on the walls. A single-edge blade would be different from the dual blade of the longsword, but any experience with swords should be helpful for you.”

“I’ll think about it, okay?” Given how crazy my life had been lately, I could barely keep up with my work. Taking on a new hobby sounded stressful. He wasn’t wrong, however, about my inability to defend myself in human form.

“Certainly.”

We turned left at the convenience store and entered a designated wetlands area with the pond sprawling on either side of the road. Duncan turned into a small parking lot near the boardwalk. After stopping, he bounced into the back of his van to collect whatever gear we would need for this endeavor. When I met him outside, he hefted one of his huge cylindrical magnets and the coil of rope attached to it.

“We’ll start with this. Maybe we can find enough valuables to trade for eggs and bacon.” Duncan tilted his chin toward the convenience store.

Someone was ambling out with a paper bag that probably held a bottle of alcohol. The shopper slumped against a bus-stop sign, looking like he wouldn’t wait to get home to start drinking.

There was duct tape covering a crack on a front window of the store that hadn’t been there the last time I’d visited. The signs that the neighborhood was growing seedier distressed me.

“I suspect the store owner prefers currency to rusty bike locks and cutlery,” I said.

“Americans are fussy, aren’t they? ”

“We pride ourselves on it.”

Duncan led the way along the boardwalk toward the dock jutting out into the water. Ducks paddled toward us.

“They’re either starving or not as able to detect our magical and predatory natures as the cats on the premises of your complex,” Duncan observed.

“I don’t think ducks are as smart as cats.” I didn’t point out that it was possible that they couldn’t sense our magic. It wasn’t as if most people could. Though animals—including birds—did tend to be more perceptive.

“Approaching werewolves isn’t wise. Though we prefer stimulating prey to hunt, their plumpness could make them targets on a cold hungry night.”

“I thought you filled up on bacon and eggs.”

“Oh, I did. I was thinking of your lurking cousins.”

“I’m sure they came all the way to Shoreline to hunt ducks at the pond, yes.”

Duncan gave me a wry look, then, before we reached the dock, tossed his magnet into the water. None of the ducks were close enough to be in danger, but they didn’t like the noisy splash and squawked and paddled away at top speed. Several took to the air.

“ Now they’ll think twice about approaching werewolves.” Duncan nodded, as if he’d done them a great favor.

“‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Maya Angelou?”

“I think so.”

Using the rope, he started pulling the magnet along the bottom of the pond. “She also said, ‘Love is like a virus; it can happen to anybody at any time.’”

He only glanced my way instead of giving me a long look laden with significance. That was a relief. We hadn’t even slept together yet. I wasn’t ready to contemplate deep feelings for my transient treasure-hunting werewolf.

“Did you read a lot of poetry when you were growing up in that lab?”

Though Duncan had shared his past with me, we hadn’t discussed how he felt about the reappearance of the man he’d believed long dead or what he thought it meant. That was something I was curious about and more interested in discussing with him than love. I particularly wondered if Abrams and Radomir would continue to be a threat. They were collecting wolf artifacts, and I’d taken back two of the most powerful ones that they’d acquired.

“I read everything I could get my hands on, which was a substantial amount, since Lord Abrams had a library of impressive breadth. That was the part of his castle I most regretted causing to burn. I couldn’t regret escaping, but I wished I could have managed it without damaging the home. I even stuck around longer than I should have to try to keep the fire from destroying the library. In hindsight, that’s probably what kept me from noticing that Abrams also escaped.” Duncan looked at me with an apologetic expression. “There was a charred body. All these decades, I believed it had been his, but it might have been the remains of a servant.”

“What do you think brought Abrams to Seattle?” I waved north, silently acknowledging that the lavender farm and potion factory outside of Arlington weren’t exactly Seattle . “Would he have been following you?”

“I don’t think so. In thirty years, he hasn’t reappeared in my life, even though I wouldn’t have been hard to track down, especially since I’ve started doing that YouTube channel.”

“You think that’s made you famous, huh?” I couldn’t imagine the seventy-five- or eighty-year-old Lord Abrams surfing social media sites for videos on magnet fishing .

“In certain circles, certainly.” Duncan lifted his chin as he reeled in his magnet. “A producer for a small television studio in Slovenia once approached me about hosting a show.”

“All good films are known to come out of Slovenia.”

Duncan squinted at me. “Are you mocking me, my lady?”

“I would never.” I pointed at the magnet. It was even grimier than other times I’d seen him withdraw it, and I suspected my guess about what really covered the bottom of the pond was correct. “That’s gross.”

Duncan pulled a set of car keys, attached by the metal ring, off the grimy cylinder. He laid them on the railing. “In case someone comes looking for them.”

That would be doubtful. They’d probably been down there for years.

Duncan reached for a larger attached item, what looked like a pocketknife, though the gunk coating it made it hard to tell. Before pulling it off, he paused, an odd expression crossing his face. He looked toward the cloudy sky.

“Everything okay?” I asked when he held the pose for several seconds without stirring. “Besides that you should be wearing gloves to touch that magnet?”

“Yes, but…”

Something plucked at my senses, the barest whisper of magic. I looked around for threats, but little had changed. A motorcycle roared on the street passing the convenience store, and someone honked in the distance, but the pond was quiet. Several ducks had settled back into the water at the far end, plucking at bugs floating on the surface.

“It’s as if he knows we were talking about them,” Duncan muttered so quietly I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.

“What?”

He shook his head, plucked off the pocketknife, then tossed the magnet back into the water. “Nothing. ”

I raised frank eyebrows.

He looked over at me with consideration. “I suppose since I seek to earn your trust I can’t withhold truths from you.”

“That’s right.” I smiled encouragingly, then held up a finger and delved into a pocket. I withdrew a bar of chocolate, broke off a piece, and held it up so he could see it.

“Are you offering that to solicit the behavior you want from me?”

“It’s a bribe to encourage truth-telling, yes.”

Duncan wiped his hand off and accepted it. “Soon, I’ll be trained so well that the mere rustling of a chocolate wrapper will make me salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs.”

“I’ll make sure to restock my supply so I’ve suitable rewards for good behavior.”

Duncan slid the chocolate into his mouth and gazed thoughtfully toward the cloudy sky again. “For a minute, I felt something… Something magical.”

“I got a hint of that too.”

“Did you? Hm. Was it calling to you? Almost like the moon’s magic? Beckoning you to come?”

“No, I just sensed that magic was in the area.”

“I think… the magic was summoned elsewhere but beamed in this direction.” Duncan waved at the dock, but then, after hesitating, rested his hand on his chest.

“At you?”

“If you didn’t feel the call…” He raised his eyebrows, almost hopeful.

I shook my head.

He slumped against the railing, letting his rope droop in his hand, and touched the scar on his forehead. “It felt like the power of the device Abrams has.”

I stirred uneasily, barely able to keep from taking a step back from him. “The device that turned you against me? ”

He’d been scary as the bipedfuris, especially when he’d sprung at me. I rubbed my shoulder at the memory of him knocking me flying. Even though I’d been in my wolf form, and sturdier than I was as a human, I’d hit the pavers in that courtyard hard. Multiple times.

Duncan noticed my gesture and winced.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly.

“It’s not going to… I mean, he can’t make you attack me from afar, can he?”

“I don’t think so. It feels more like he—or whoever is holding the device—is trying to call me back to the north. Back to their home base.”

I frowned. “Wouldn’t it be Abrams holding the device? He’s the one who tuned it to you or whatever, right?”

“It’s more than that. He used it in my youth. It’s linked to this.” Duncan touched his scar again.

I’d once thought it looked like it might have come from a burning cigarette pressed to his skin, but it probably hadn’t been something so mundane…

“I’m not sure how that device works exactly, but it’s hard for me to resist its power. Its control over me.” His voice lowered. “In my youth, Abrams used it to compel me to change into the bipedfuris and spread the bite… wanting me to make an army of werewolves for him to command. Luckily for the world, werewolves aren’t easily controlled. The ones who changed didn’t want to come to him and obey, and I… sometimes I could fight his commands.”

Even though he’d alluded to this when he’d told me his story, the admission that he’d actually turned people into werewolves, presumably against their will, disturbed me. My mother lamented the weakening of our kind and the loss of that magic, but I suspected most of the rest of the world would prefer it if werewolves permanently lost the ability to infect humans with lycanthropy, if we ceased to exist altogether.

“It may or may not be Abrams using the device,” Duncan continued, looking toward the surface of the pond instead of at me. Lost in memory? “He has a replacement, so he doesn’t need me. I heard them talking about that when they thought me unconscious. Since I betrayed Abrams before—that was his word for it—he doesn’t trust that I wouldn’t do so again. He thought they should kill me to ensure I wasn’t a threat to their plans. Unfortunately, they didn’t discuss exactly what those plans were while I could hear.”

I picked at slivers of wood on the railing. “What replacement? I can see not trusting someone who burned your library down?—”

He gave me such an aggrieved look that I believed that had distressed him more than anything else about the situation.

“—but you’re pretty valuable,” I finished. “Even irreplaceable. Unlike eggs and bacon. Which, I’ll mention, you haven’t wandered up to purchase yet.” Normally, I would buy my own breakfast foods, but he had devoured most of that pound of bacon and eight or ten of the eggs. What a metabolism.

“I fully intend to make you whole.” He bowed to me, then tossed the magnet into the pond again. “I was hoping we might find something that could pay for those goods, but I do have cash, should that prove necessary.”

“Even if you find a throne made from gold, I’m pretty sure you’d still need dollars to buy eggs.”

“Such a strange country.”

Noticing he hadn’t answered my question, I asked, “What replacement does your Lord Abrams have?”

Duncan was good at avoiding answering questions. Though, this time, I’d been the one to divert him. Not that a bacon-and-eggs discussion would have distracted him if he’d truly been dying to answer .

“The boy.”

I blinked, remembering the eight-year-old with floppy brown hair, a young werewolf who’d slipped away during the battle. What he’d been doing there in the first place, I’d never known. He’d almost gotten away with my mother’s medallion, but I’d traded chocolate to him to get it back. My stashes occasionally did more than satisfy my own addiction.

“You think he kidnapped the boy from a pack and is raising him to do his bidding? Or to… Well, if he’s from a modern pack, he wouldn’t be able to turn people into werewolves with his bite, right?”

Duncan was walking slowly, pulling his magnet along the other side of the dock, and he gazed at me, his eyes heavy with significance.

“ Did Abrams kidnap him?” I thought of Duncan’s background. “Or do you mean… Abrams isn’t carrying around frozen bits of the dead werewolf from the glacier, is he?” It occurred to me that the dead werewolf from the glacier had essentially been Duncan. Not a father or a brother or a relative but him . They would have been raised differently— much differently—so their personalities and experiences would have made them different people, but… what an odd thing to imagine. Like an identical twin, I supposed.

“He didn’t discuss it with me—I didn’t get much more from that evening than you did—but the boy looks much like I did at that age. I suspect Abrams has, for all these years, kept the genetic material from the preserved werewolf. Likely by magical means rather than freezing, but… it would amount to the same.”

“So, you’re saying that boy was… is…”

Duncan paused in pulling the magnet to rest a hand on his chest. “Exactly the same as me.”