Flameborn. Corinna Rogers

unbuckled and in the back. His hands tighten on the steering wheel, and he breathes out heavily through his nose, staring straight ahead without seeing much as Shane settles himself into the passenger’s seat.

      “Well, that was—“

      “Not now.”

      The drive home is silent, save for the occasional clicking of a turn signal and the revving of the motor. Drake pulls up in front of an apartment building that’s reasonably shabby for the money (a sign in the window says “Magic and Pet’s Allowed!”), but doesn’t unbuckle his seatbelt.

      Shane raises an eyebrow at him. “You’re not even coming in? What, just because I grabbed him?”

      “You know this is what I’m doing with my life.” Drake rubs at the back of his neck, short hairs bristling under his hand. “I’ll be home in a few hours. Got a class to teach.”

      There’s something tense and unhappy in Shane’s body language as he slides out of the truck. He looks for all the world like he wants to say something, but Drake drives off before he can turn around.

      Through the entire drive to the karate studio, Drake feels three things: the dull ache of heat in his lungs, the tingling print of Father Aaron’s palm on his head, and the taste of Shane lingering on his lips.

      ~

       Chapter Two

      ~

      Smashing something isn’t nearly as much fun when Shane knows he’s the one who’ll have to pay for it in the long run—or worse, that Drake will have to take late-night classes to pay for it, and that drastically cuts into the time he usually considers “fun.” He’d like to put his fist through a wall, annoyed at himself, annoyed at priests who don’t seem nearly as free from worldly desires as Shane is pretty sure they’re supposed to, annoyed at creatures that don’t play by the rules when it comes to dying when they’re supposed to.

      Being a destructive asshole was a lot more fun when he didn’t give a shit about the consequences.

      Underneath the anger, there’s a sulking resentment that it’s Friday night and literally no one he knows will want to go out. They’d been that couple for a while in their twenties, the ones who rarely went out except with each other, but he had friends. He had people to call up and go clubbing with. Now, with his new “freedom” from the Ice King and ten years down the drain, everyone he knew is either far too involved in their children and work, or have died from a slew of the unnatural causes that normal people like to pretend don’t exist.

      The ringing of the phone jars him out of his anger, but the sullen, prickling feeling stays. He knows without picking up the phone that it isn’t Drake, and grabs the ancient thing off the wall mount. “Yeah?”

      “This is a recording. Do not attempt to answer. Your utility bill for this month is past due. Please pay the amount of… One. Hundred. Seventy. Seven. Dollars. And. Fifteen. Cents. By the shut-off date, or your service will be discont—“

      He slams the phone down on the stilted voice, then stalks over to the empty coffee can above the fridge, pulling down the change bucket and poking at it with one long finger. The leftovers from Father Aaron’s last “payment” glare dully back at him, dirty coins in a lump that fills up half the coffee can and probably isn’t anywhere close to being a hundred and seventy-seven bucks.

      It wouldn’t be the first time they’d gone a month or two without light and heat, and his magic does tend to make that kind of thing a lot more bearable. It’s a strain, though, and depletes the power he has available for vaguely important things like fighting bad guys.

      And there’s rent, and food, and the phone service, and gas for the car…

      Shane braces himself, decides that it could be worse, and rifles through the mail to get to a publication he usually throws in the trash, sitting down with a red pen to circle carefully coded jobs that make him feel vaguely greasy to take.

      The “MHW,” or Magic Help Wanted section of the weekly periodical is never exactly full of winners, but actually flipping through and looking for work makes Shane sort of want to punch himself in the face. The first twenty in a row are all about love potions, something that he’s pretty sure doesn’t actually exist even if the collective public has decided that if there are Mages now, there have to be love potions. He skims the Want Ads, finally landing on a few that aren’t about love potions or strange sexual fetishes, and are varying degrees of suspicious.

       MHW

       STOLEN and LOST MERCHANDISE FIND IT and U GET A CUT

       MHW

       Emotions, NO LP!!!

       MHW

       Snakes?!

       MHW

       I Have Ants, If U Cn Do it Cheaper Than Xterminator! Contact PHILB.

       MHW

       Find a Man 4 Me NO LP

       MHW

       How Many Cats Can U Groom At ONCE???

       MHW

       You have the JUICE I have the IDEAS

       MHW

       Make the angry ghost in my apt go away cash reward $$$

      With all the gravity of a man scraping mold off his last piece of bread before begrudgingly eating it, Shane calls one of the numbers. He’s never gotten rid of ants before, but the creepy little assholes can’t be much worse than Inferna, and will probably be less likely to retaliate.

      Public transportation in Sunrise City is less than adequate at the best of times. When it’s unseasonably hot and half of the city’s bus lines are shut down due to the “mysterious fires” of the past several days, using it is pretty much hell on earth, or as close to it as Shane ever wants to get. Counting nickels into the bus conductor’s box earns him a few dirty looks from fellow passengers, though he’s never sure if it might be because of the tight pants, or possibly his hair that changes color every so often when he isn’t paying too much attention to it.

      He arrives at the address he’d jotted down and a man answers the door in a pair of boxers, apparently unconcerned by the fact that it’s just going on four in the afternoon. “You the wizard?”

      “Sure. You the guy with ants?”

      The guy scratches his belly, then nods. “In the kitchen.”

      One step inside reminds Shane just how much he likes his apartment. It’s clean, if a little shabby, and full of nothing but books and their few major appliances, courtesy of all his own belongings being frozen in blasted-apart ice somewhere. More importantly, it smells good, unlike the apartment he currently stands in. He also feels uncomfortably tall, shoving his hands into his pockets and unconsciously hunching, as if worried he’ll smack his head on a door frame when he’s just over six feet himself. Maybe everything just feels slouched in the apartment, he reasons.

      It doesn’t take long to spot the ants, mostly because there are probably thousands, maybe millions, of them swarming over every conceivable surface of the kitchen. “Wow. You weren’t kidding, Philb.”

      “What’d you call me?”

      Shane hands over the newspaper bit. “Philb?”

      “They messed it up. It’s Phil B. Exterminator wanted seven hundred to do the whole place.”

      “Maybe he wanted you to pay per ant,” Shane suggests, fighting the urge to start scratching