Page 10

10

Jax

I opened the door to a maelstrom.

A whole stack of papers flew into the air with a rustle like a shuffled card deck. A stapler shot up and hit the ceiling before clattering back onto Dakota’s desk.

Then a pen shot through the air and stuck in the drywall by the door like a dart.

Dakota had jumped out of his desk chair and was standing there, bent over it, hands pinning down his keyboard and the box of tissues. He was staring at me with wide, terrified eyes.

Fair enough. He could’ve taken out somebody’s eye with that pen trick.

But there was no reason for us to lose our heads. He didn’t mean it, or he wouldn’t have looked so horrified. I shut the door behind me so nobody else would see him lose control. It wasn’t like every wolf’s first shift went easy. Why should mages be any different?

“You okay?”

All right, I was man enough to admit that I was keeping more distance than I strictly needed to, but Dakota looked like he was about to come apart, and mages were?—

Well, the whole reason they had such disdain for us was that we were governed by natural magic, not in charge of it ourselves. I couldn’t imagine a mage who’d lost control would be particularly happy about it.

“Am I okay ?” Dakota’s voice was high and choked.

Clearly, I’d asked the wrong thing.

“I mean... I’m sorry. I don’t really know how this usually goes. Can you call your guardian?” Maybe this had been too early to talk about dinner. I didn’t know if it took a couple hours or a couple weeks for a mage to come into their power after their Awakening, but it clearly wasn’t going as smoothly as one might hope.

“My what?”

“Isn’t that what you all call the, I don’t know”—I circled my hand in the air—“the person who helps you learn to manage your magic?”

“My magic ?”

“I mean”—I glanced significantly at the pen in the wall—“yes?”

With a hard thump, his elbows hit his desk as he bent in half over it.

“What the fuck is happening?” Dakota pushed his fingers through his thick, dark hair. The heels of his palms pressed against his eyes, and he groaned like he was in physical pain. That wasn’t a thing, right? Surely his own magic couldn’t hurt him.

Plus or minus getting impaled by the sharp nib of an ink pin.

Okay, I didn’t actually know if his magic could hurt him, burn through him as easily as it burned through his enemies. But surely not so soon after his Awakening.

“I assume you mean that in some kind of... of non-literal way?” I wasn’t really sure how to ask what I thought I was asking because—because that was ridiculous, right? He was overwhelmed because he didn’t have as much control as he expected, not because he didn’t know what was going on.

He blinked his enormous dark eyes at me, looking almost desperate. The stapler started to lift off the desk again, and he snatched it and shoved it back down. “No, I do not. I definitely do not mean it in a non-literal way. What the fuck is going on? Is this some kind of new technology? Levitating office supplies? Is that what Crescent makes? I can’t find our website, you know. Like it doesn’t even exist. But it can’t be levitating office supplies, because that’s my pen.” He motioned toward the pen in the wall with his stapler. He turned back to me, panting, panicked, and almost ready to bolt.

Fuck.

He had no idea.

“Well, going out tonight seems like not the best plan,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, trying to sound like I knew exactly what I was doing, but really trying to figure out what the fuck came next.

He didn’t know .

How the fuck could he not know?

Mages were notoriously power hungry. They didn’t just abandon one of their own when they could instead use them to grow their own influence.

It didn’t happen. No way had Dakota wandered into Howl, with all its protections, accidentally .

Except—if he had latent magic of his own, the wards wouldn’t keep him out.

I had Awakened a mage who didn’t even know what he was giving up when we?—

Oh fuck.

“What if we order in?” I suggested, fighting hard to keep the gut-churning panic out of my voice.

Dakota looked up at me like I’d gone crazy, his brows forming little “u”s of concern.

“For dinner,” I clarified.

He still looked pale, but he’d feel better after eating. Everybody felt better after eating.

“Okay,” he said, still looking rather ill.

I opened a delivery app on my phone and handed it to him. “Pick whatever you want.”

For a whole minute, he just stared at the screen. His thumb flicked across the glass, but he didn’t pick anything.

“I could really go for a burger,” I suggested. Which had absolutely nothing to do with me wanting to eat a whole motherfucking cow so I could stop thinking about how badly I’d fucked up.

“Burger,” Dakota echoed. “Burger sounds good.”

He put his in the cart, handed it back to me, and I got the biggest, most double-down deluxe monstrosity I could find before putting the order in and leading him over to the couch against the wall. I turned around one of the chairs in front of the desk and sat there.

Dakota gave me a haunted stare.

For a few long, deep breaths, I couldn’t speak.

I didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to be his entry point to the supernatural world, but I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t leave him in the dark when I’d been the one dragging him into all of this. “What do you think I am?”

“A... guy?” Dakota grimaced. “CEO of Crescent? What are you talking about?”

“I’m a werewolf.”

Dakota snorted. It sounded a little wet. His eyes were suspiciously red. “Shut up.”

I held his eye, leaning forward, elbows on my knees. “I’m a werewolf.”

In my head, the wolf that was always prowling rushed forward as I pulled back the cover on him. My teeth sharpened. My eyes flashed red and held.

“Fuck!” Dakota scrambled back on the couch, pulling his feet off the floor.

That was more like the reaction I’d expected from a mage, but when the wolf shrank back from his fear, slipping beneath the human mask I wore most of the time, Dakota’s brow furrowed. He sank back into the couch. His feet returned to the floor, and he leaned in to get a better look at me.

“Werewolves—that’s a thing. A real thing.” Tentatively, he reached out and touched my face. Maybe he was searching for the sharper features of a predator, but his fingers were still gentle. They lingered against my cheek, and it felt a little less like the world was ending.

I smiled. “Werewolves are definitely real.”

“And so is magic.” He still sounded like he didn’t entirely believe it, but he couldn’t think I was playing a joke on him. Honestly, I wasn’t that clever.

In fact, what I most wanted to do was call Jillian and tell her I’d fucked up and needed her to fix it. She’d sort everything out, make up for my fuckery.

She was the smart one.

The only thing that kept me from dragging her in to help was staring into Dakota’s eyes and knowing that, well, at least I was familiar. Kind of. “Yeah. It’s real.”

And he had it. Magic. Enough to turn his writing instruments into lethal weapons.

I’d been a fucking fool to assume he’d been at Howl of his own free will, knowing fully what he was about.

I sighed, my shoulders sinking deep. “I... I really thought you knew. Regular humans can’t get into Howl, can’t find its website, let alone get in the door, so I figured, if you were there, you knew what you were doing.”

He blinked. “How the hell would I know about werewolves and magic?”

I shrugged, the feeling heavy, like I was a garbage can absolutely full to the brim of trash. “Most mages do. I’ve never heard of a magic family letting go of one of their own. They like to keep a firm grasp of whatever power is born to their line. But you said you’re...”

“Adopted?”

“Yeah. Your parents aren’t?—”

“Magic?” Dakota laughed. “No. They are definitely not magic.”

Dakota was impossible. Not his demeanor—no, that seemed sad and lost—just that he was a mage who’d wandered into Howl without even realizing what he’d done, that he’d been hired by our company without realizing we weren’t human, that he was there in his office instead of tucked away in some faux French chateau hidden behind a hundred different wards with a dozen other mages who’d all, invariably, look down their noses at him for—for me. For letting a “beast” be there for his Awakening. All that was impossible.

Yet there we were, trapped in agonized silence, when my phone buzzed to let me know our burgers had arrived.

I pulled it out of my pocket and waved it in the air. “I’ll go grab our food. Sit tight.”

I took the elevator, and it still wasn’t fast enough for my liking, but in just a couple minutes, I was back with a paper bag stuffed with burgers and fries, a tray of sodas in the other hand.

I pressed the bag into his hands before sitting beside him on the couch. One leg, I bent so I could twist all the way around to face him. He was only picking at fries, too nervous to dive in, but I’d never been hungrier in my life. I went for the container with my burger and balanced it in my lap.

“Give me tonight,” I said, setting it down on my thighs.

“What for?” Finally, he looked at me.

He didn’t glare. He should’ve been glaring.

I’d have been angry, in his shoes.

“I’ll... figure this out,” I promised. “I can’t help you control magic. Mine doesn’t work like that, and I don’t know shit all about spells or anything, but I know more than nothing. Newly Awakened mages will usually have a guardian, often an older member of their family, to help them. I’ll make some calls, see if anyone can help.”

Dakota sucked in his cheeks and stared at his lap. “You don’t have to do that.”

I flinched, looking down. “It’s not a have to thing.” That burger was calling me when I flipped back the cardboard lid. It was wrapped in paper, translucent with grease, and right then, I wanted nothing more than to shove the whole thing in my mouth. Glutting myself on a chargrilled patty would be less devastating than what I had to say next.

“You wouldn’t be in this position if not for me,” I admitted with a sigh. “I let my ego get the better of me last night. I thought—I don’t know. I thought you knew what you were doing. Maybe you were feeling rebellious, or your family had set their sights on someone old and unappealing for your Awakening.”

“My what?”

Despite the mess I’d made, I smiled at the dissatisfied wrinkle on his nose. “When a mage loses their virginity, it awakens their magic. So, it’s your Awakening.”

“Ew?”

I shrugged. “Mages aren’t always as clever as they think.”

“You can say that again.” Dakota was back to turning over an especially soggy fry in his fingers.

“Listen”—I scooted closer and bumped his knee with mine—“if I’d realized you were in the dark, I wouldn’t have—well, I’d have done a lot of things differently. You should’ve been well informed about your Awakening before it happened, been able to make clear decisions about it and who you wanted there.”

Dakota huffed. “I wanted you.”

In that moment, glaring at me, he was petulant and perfect. I wanted to believe him, but it wasn’t that simple and he couldn’t let me off the hook so easily.

“And I want you, Dakota. But what I’m trying to say is—I’ve never been with a mage, much less Awakened one of you. I was flattered and got ahead of myself, but just because I’m not the best prepared to help you now doesn’t mean I’ll leave you to navigate it on your own. We’ll figure it out.”

He let out a heavy sigh. “Okay.”

Good. At least he’d let me try and make amends for being so fucking dense when it mattered. Of course a mage hadn’t knowingly picked me for his Awakening, and worrying about how I’d pressed advantages I didn’t even realize I’d had was going to keep me up late into the night.

Once I finished my burger, Dakota folded his bag without ever taking his out. “I’m not actually hungry right now. I’ll, uh, take this home.”

“How about I have Charles drive you?”

He arched a brow. “Why?”

“To avoid any magical mishaps on public transportation.”

“And what if I have a magical mishap and flip your car?”

“Well, I’d appreciate it if you tried not to flip my car, but if you do, it’s okay. Charles is pretty hardy. He’s a fae. They’re difficult to pin down.” In fact, I was pretty sure that, in the event of an accident, we’d find Charles mysteriously safe, standing on the sidewalk nearby, not a scratch on him. Fae were strange, and their rules didn’t work within the strict confines of what most of us considered reality.

“Fuck me,” Dakota breathed. “A fae? He looks...”

“Human? Most of us do.”

Dakota sighed, sinking into the couch and throwing his head back. He looked young like that—young and overwhelmed—but when I held my hand out to help him up, he took it.

“Just don’t kill my driver.”

Dakota’s face screwed up like he was caught between laughing and being ill. “I’ll do my best.”