Page 22 of Witchwolf

What the heck?

I shook off the confusion, making up my mind to ask her what she’d been talking about next time I saw her, but for now, I had work to do. Lots and lots of work. Which, it turned out, was a good thing, because whomever they had gotten to translate the contracts had done a poor job of it. They weren’t outright wrong that I saw, but a lot of the subtleties of the language had been lost in the translation.

Also, I’d never in my life seen anything like them.

Instant delivery systems? What was that?

In part, this was an issue because I still had no idea what the hell Crescent did. The contracts implied that they were sort of like that company named for a river in South America that everyone used. But I’d never even heard of them and couldn’t find a website. If they were so diversified, how was that possible? Because the contracts had sections involving every aspect of a business like that. Acquisitions, warehousing and storage, sales, taxes and tariffs of all kinds in various countries, shipping... and the shipping was the weirdest. They named companies I’d never heard of doing deliveries. What the heck was UFD? I even tried to Google it, but found nothing useful.

Still, the work took all my concentration, and I was madly scribbling notes on my tenth sheet of paper when motion in the corner of my eye caught my attention. The door hadn’t opened. How had...

I blinked in shock, staring at... at the stapler on my desk.

Okay, no, at the stapler that should be on my desk, but which was instead hovering three inches above my desk.

I snatched it out of the air, opening it up, looking it over, trying to find whatever mechanism had allowed that to happen, but there was nothing. It was just a stapler. I was still staring at it when on the desk, the pen I’d dropped slowly lifted into the air.

I dropped the stapler and shoved the pen onto the desk.

There was no way. That wasn’t...

It was just a pen. It was my pen, one I’d brought with me, because I was picky about pens. It wasn’t able to hover on its own.

Wildly, I looked around for a fan, or maybe an air vent, that could explain this.Coulda fan or an air vent explain it? Almost certainly not, especially since I couldn’t feel any movement in the air around me.

As I sat there holding my pen against the desk, the damned stapler started to hover again. And then the papers. Not like they were being blown upward, but more like they were being lifted on strings. No blowing. No bending. Just lifting.

What in the actual fuck?

I wasn’t breathing, couldn’t drag air into my lungs.

What was happening?

A voice sounded right outside the door—Jax’s voice, talking to someone about... about quitting time. I looked down at my watch, which did indeed say it was a minute to five. As the doorknob of my office started to turn, I grabbed the stapler out of the air, and then shoved at the papers wildly with both hands, trying to force them back onto the desk.

And then Jax walked in.

10

Jax

Iopened 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.

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