Magic Rises

this thing apart, I’d need a large wrench to do it. And possibly a hammer to hit the wrench when it wouldn’t move.
    Curran lined up the hinges with the top of the smoker. They didn’t look right.
    “I think these hinges are backward.”
    He shook his head. “It will fit.”
    He forced the bolts through the hinge holes, tightened the screws, and tried to attach the top to the bottom. I watched him turn it around about six times. He threaded the bolts in, attached them, and stared at the mutilated smoker. The lid was upside down and backward.
    Curran glared at it in disgust. “To hell with it.”
    “What’s bugging you?”
    He leaned against the wall. “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Europe?”
    “No.”
    I came over to stand next to him.
    “When I was twenty-two years old, Mike Wilson, the alpha of Ice Fury, came to me with an invitation to the Iberian Summit.”
    Mike Wilson ran a pack in Alaska. It was the only pack in the United States that rivaled ours in size.
    “Wilson’s wife was European, Belgian, I think, and they used to cross the Atlantic every couple of years to visit her family. She’s his ex-wife now. They had a falling out, so she took their daughter and went home to her parents.”
    Considering that home was across the Atlantic Ocean, she must’ve really wanted away from Wilson. “Mike didn’t fight for his kid?”
    “No. But ten years ago they were still together. They stopped in Atlanta on their way to the summit, and Wilson invited me to come with them to Spain. He made it sound like a deal for panacea was on the table, so I went.”
    “How did it go?”
    “I expected it to go badly. Turns out I was overly optimistic.” Curran crossed his arms on his chest, making his biceps bulge. “Things in Europe are different. The population density is higher, the magic traditions are wider spread, and many structures are old enough to stand through the magic waves. The shapeshifters are more numerous, and they started hammering out packs and claiming territory early on. There were nine different packs at the summit, nine sets of alphas, all of them strong, all of them ready to rip my throat out at any minute, and none of them honest. It was all big smiles to my face and claws at my back the moment I turned around.”
    “Sounds fun. Did you kill anyone?”
    “No. But I really wanted to. A werejackal from one of the packs approached me to make a deal to sell panacea, and the next day we found his corpse outside with a rock the size of a car tire where his head used to be.”
    “Fun.”
    “Yeah. I brought ten people with me, some of the best fighters in the Pack. I thought all of them were solid and loyal. I went home with four. Two died in ‘unfortunate accidents,’ three were lured away by better money, and one got married. The Pack was still young. Losing every single one of them hurt, and there wasn’t anything I could’ve done about it. It took months for the power vacuum to sort itself out.”
    Old frustration laced his voice. He must’ve spent weeks thinking it over, dissecting every moment looking for what he could’ve done differently. I wished I could reach through time and space and punch some people.
    “We came in outnumbered and outgunned, and went home empty-handed. I said never again.”
    I waited. There had to be more.
    “One of the alphas I met was Jarek Kral. Tough, vicious sonovabitch. He owns a chunk of the Eastern Carpathian Mountains and has been steadily expanding. The man is obsessed with his legacy. He thinks he’s some sort of a king. Most of his children died, either from going loup or from being his children. Only one daughter survived to adulthood, and he tried to give her to me.”
    “He what?”
    Curran faced me. “When I got back to our ship, there was a seventeen-year-old girl named Desandra waiting for me with a note. The plan was that I would marry her, and he’d pay me each year, as long as I agreed to send one of my sons his way. Jarek preferred two, as an insurance against one of them dying, but would settle for one.”
    Charming. Fifteen minutes in a room with Curran would tell anyone with half a brain that he couldn’t be bought and he would never sell his children.
    “You didn’t take him up on his generous offer, I take it?”
    Curran shook his head. “I didn’t even talk to her. We sent her back where she came from. Jarek married her off to another pack, the Volkodavi from Ukraine.”
    Wolf Killers, huh.