Werewolves Of Detroit, a motorcity fanfic

Length: 24,000 words

Characters/Pairings: Ensemble cast, gen!

Warnings: Superhuman prejudice/speciesism, mentions of nonconsensual surgery, vampires drinking blood, etc.

Note: This fic is also on AO3 under the same title-over there it has illustrations for every section. UoU Just something to note. It's a real shame doesn't let you upload in-line images, but hey, we work with what we've got. Here's some supernaturalcity for you.

It's three weeks before Chuck's "elective" surgeries when Mike goes on the run.

That's not why Chuck goes with him—what else is he going to do, abandon the person he trusts most in the world when Mike comes to him and says he wanted me to kill innocent people Chuck I've gotta go they're looking for me—

He has to go with Mike. Would have gone, regardless. But it doesn't hurt that he knows there's an operating table in Kane Co. tower with his name—with his citizen ID number, actually, if he knows Kane Co.—on it.

Apparently Chuck's supposed to be grateful for that. Because it's awful to be what he is, he should be disgusted by his eyes that see better in the dark and fingers that are a little bit webbed and a bit too long and bent at the knuckles like the fingers of his wings.

But as much as Chuck dislikes about himself, he doesn't want them to change him like that. Deluxe surgeons don't even know what they're doing with deviants. Nonhumans. Whatever. The cybernetics in his eye are great, but with only one eye enhanced his vision blurs sickeningly and mismatches, one eye brighter and clearer and wrong. Nobody bothered to think "hey, maybe we should either implant both or not do either, or he's going to get some pretty bad headaches!" Nobody thought "the power source for that slingshot is going to need extra power, maybe he'll need a bigger plasma ration to maintain it!"

Besides, Mike wouldn't need the surgeries, not with his cadet exemptions, not if he was careful. And then it would be him, a werewolf Commander in the prime of his life, and the scarred, crippled vampire he hangs out with and that's…that's not gonna fly. (Haha. Surgically-altered vampire joke! Ha.)

So when Mike runs, Chuck runs with him. Mike runs on two legs even though he's slower that way, risking getting caught; he keeps a hold on Chuck's hand and runs with him, ducking behind walls as bot patrols and ultra-elites run by. They follow the smell of dirt and concrete away from Deluxe's blindingly white streets until finally it's cool and quiet and the last traces of fake sunlight have faded away.

Motorcity is…different.

It's darker, for one thing. They stand in the mouth of a giant, ruined pipe together, looking out over the city, at the beams of dim light filtering down from Deluxe. There's a swarm of what looks like birds swooping around a cluster of buildings to the west, and when Mike grabs his arm and points at them and his implant enhances what his eye can pick out in the dark, Chuck sees human shapes in among the flapping wings. Feathered wings and…bat wings.

Chuck stares, then shoves his hair out of his eyes and stares some more—there's no pain, when he opens his eyes, no accompanying throb of migraine. Blots of neon light still make his head spin a little bit, but it's not like the overwhelming, blinding brightness of Deluxe. Beside him Mike is sniffing the air, ears flicking, eyes wide. "Whoa," he says, and glances over at Chuck, grinning a grin with way more pointy teeth in it than a normal human's smile. "Haha—whoa!"

"Mike—" You're looking kinda wolfy, he almost says, and then doesn't say because…because who gives a shit, down here? Who's going to report Mike for indecent public conduct just because his ears are too pointed or his fangs are too visible?

Mike apparently knows what he was going to say though, because he rolls his eyes fondly and shakes his head. "Aw, lighten up, Chuckles." He flexes his shoulders experimentally—his eyes are lightening from their usual soft brown toward bright tawny-gold. "Let loose a little bit! Lemme see your teeth."

Knowing they're safe is one thing—convincing his body he can relax is another. Wer have a reputation as being boisterous and messy and…not very Deluxian…but safe enough if you keep them under control. But getting outed as a bloodsucker is way worse. After all, a wolf can hunt anything. But a vampire…

"Hey."

Chuck blinks—his mouth is pressed so tightly shut his jaw aches, hiding his fangs. Mike is looking at him, obviously concerned—he's closed back up again with it, eyes going brown again, almost human-looking except for the point to his ears and the weird otherness around his eyes.

"…buddy," says Mike. "Seriously. We're good. Look, there's more people like you, there's more people like us! We're everywhere down here! Come on."

Chuck stares at him for a second, breathing, calming down the hot, tight buzz of fear at the back of his mind. Then he closes his eyes and lets himself relax.

Letting go is like a full-body sigh. He's not bimorphic like Mike is—he'd be a hell of a bat, as big as he is, he'd give himself nightmares—but you don't stay un-corrected in Deluxe for very long if you don't figure out how to hide at least the most obvious signs of your deformity. If he focuses hard enough, head down, ears pinned back and half-hidden by his hair, the fangs retract enough to hide behind his lips and his fingers straighten, his nails settle back flat and harmless. It hurts, everything hurts by the end of the day, but it's that or get reported. Maybe even have his operations early.

The image of somebody manhandling his unconscious body onto an operating table, twisting his head to one side to sink a scalpel into the membrane of one ear, makes him shudder all over. But that's not going to happen now and Mike is still in front of him, watching him. Chuck opens his mouth and lets out a long, long breath, then smiles back at Mike with all his pointed teeth.

"There you go!" Mike looks gleeful. His fingers are square and rough and clawed now, he's practically bouncing up and down with energy. If he gets any more excited, Chuck wouldn't be surprised to see a wagging tail. "Yeah! Haha—I don't think I've ever seen you do that, man! How does it feel?"

It feels…good, actually. "Not bad?" It's not just the fangs and the ears either, he can feel it moving through him, like his whole body is realizing he's finally ready to let it be what it is. Muscles he didn't even know were tense are relaxing, aching with relief as they go. "My whole body's one big cramp."

"Can you fly?"

Chuck snorts before he can catch himself, and then sputters as he realizes Mike isn't laughing. "—wh—seriously?" In Deluxe, flying—manifesting his wings at all, actually—would be a direct ticket to the operating room. He never used his wings, but the thought of waking up without them is still sickening.

"Vampires can fly," says Mike. "Everybody knows that. We just saw some!"

Chuck glances back at the patch of sky where he saw the swooping, winged figures.

"…you think right now's the best time to learn how to fly?"

Mike blinks, and then sighs. "Okay," he says, defeated. "Sure, dude. Man, if I could fly you'd never get me down."

"I believe it." And he'd be great at it, too. That's how it is with Mike, he'd know as soon as he let his wings out how to use them. "Come on. Let's go find something to eat."

"Yeah!" Mike falls in next to him as they come out of the wrecked access tunnel and onto the roof of the building it's collapsed onto. "I can smell food! I don't know what it is but it smells really good. You smell that?"

"Uh…" Chuck takes a deep breath—he doesn't smell any food. Just stone and dirt and maybe mold, and over top of it all he can smell Mike, warm and kind of sweaty and smelling like wolf. It's a nice smell. Familiar. "…mm."

"Smells good, right?"

"…yeah," says Chuck distantly, and feels his teeth press at his lip, sharper and longer as he takes another deep breath.

"Dude?"

Chuck shakes himself awake—he's standing there staring out over the city, breathing through his mouth, fangs fully extended. He's hungry and he doesn't smell any food except…

"…oh my god," says Chuck.

"I think I see a sign for 'pizza'," says Mike helpfully. "I've heard that's good, we should—"

"Mike," says Chuck, tight and high-pitched with barely-controlled panic. "We gotta go back."

Mike blinks, startled. "—what?"

"I'm—I'm a—there's no plasma packs down here and—and I didn't eat today, I'm starving and I—" He's babbling, but Mike seems to understand what he's saying.

"There's plenty of you guys down here, though," he says, like this is a reasonable response. "They've gotta be eating something."

The video training on vampires is burned into Chuck's memory in lines of fire—he makes a hysterical kind of vaguely laugh-like noise as the mental image of his own face flashes into his mind, eyes wide and dark and mindless, fangs fully bared, splattered with blood from nose to chest. He's almost hyperventilating and every breath he takes in just brings a fresh wave of the smell of warm blood back to his mouth and nose and makes it worse.

Mike sighs and reaches out to put a hand on his shoulder and Chuck takes another deep breath before he can stop himself, filling his mouth and nose with the smell of…food. He's always had plenty to eat, the throat cubes tasted like chemicals and death and the plasma was barely better but he was never hungry like this. He never let himself get…hungry.

"We gotta go back," he says again.

"Dude, they'll cut you open!"

"I'll starve, Mikey!"

"No you won't!"

"I can't—I can't, Mike I can't I'm not gonna go nuts like the ones in the videos Mike I don't wanna hurt anybody—"

"You won't!" Mike says again, and then he reaches down to his own arm, grits his teeth and rakes his claws across his skin.

Chuck yelps, shocked, and then freezes dead as the smell of blood reaches him—Mike growls softly at the pain and then looks up at him with the same burning intensity he had in his eyes when he decided to leave Deluxe. "Here," he says, and holds out his arm. The cut isn't deep, just a shallow slice above the crook of his elbow, but it's leaking blood slowly. It's already welling over, deep scarlet against Mike's dark skin. "Here. Dude, take it. Come on, seriously, you're okay."

Chuck stares, and comes to the unwelcome realization that his mouth is watering. With every breath the smell seems more intense, rich and metallic and alive, organic like the fake plasma never was. The realization of how badly he wants more is scary enough all on its own, frightening and gut-level-intense. Chuck shakes his head, staring at the trickle of red on Mike's arm.

"I'm gonna be bleeding anyway," Mike coaxes, and he takes a step closer and it smells so good… "Come on, what could even go wrong?"

"You could—bleed out and die," says Chuck, because even when every joint in his body feels like a solid ache of hunger and his fangs are so long they make him slur, he'll never be one to turn down a chance for a worst-case scenario. He can't stop staring at the gash in Mike's arm; Mike's blood is dripping onto the dirt, wasted. It's precious and important and it's just being wasted and that's what finally drives him down onto his knees and that's why he reaches out and grabs Mike's arm, shaking. For a second he struggles with himself—blood-borne diseases, the rational part of his brain mutters, blood you'd be drinking blood, what kind of monster is this going to make you and maybe scarier than either of those thoughts, the image of Mike slumping down, pale and clammy, eyes falling shut as Chuck drinks and drinks and drinks…

And then Mike's hand comes to rest gently on top of his head and pulls him in.

"…okay?"

"Mm?" Chuck sits up, licks his lips clean and hastily presses a thumb over the bleeding cut on Mike's wrist. "What?"

"I said, you look like you're fallin' asleep down there," says Dutch. "You okay?"

In the videos in Deluxe, they always said that as soon as a bloodsucker, a vampire got a taste of blood, it would lose all sense of rationality, would stop thinking and drink until it was satisfied or its prey had no more blood to give. Chuck had sat in the back of the classroom during the videos, ears pinned back and jaw aching, watched a woman with flared ears like his and pointed teeth pull her mouth away from another woman's throat with blood all down her chin, and felt shame and fear dig cold iron claws into his core.

Chuck yawns, blinking away the strange, hyperlucid clarity of feeding, and smiles vaguely. "…Mike's tired," he says.

"Am not," says Mike, injured, and then, "…okay, maybe a little," when Chuck snorts at him. "It was a good day! Got a lot done."

"Your washout adrenaline's m….mmmmmaking me…" Chuck yawns cavernously and drops his temple against Mike's arm, blinking slowly. Mike laughs and messes up his hair. "Nnnnmmh stoppit." It's not just the taste of sleepy satisfaction in Mike's blood—he can feel the warmth, the places the blood pumps close to Mike's skin, hear his heartbeat, smell that strange, warm, strong something that reminds him of being a little boy, curled up around a shaggy-furred puppy with too-big paws. It's wolf and it's Mike and it's warm and it's so good.

"So go to bed," says Julie, and lays down an ace of spades. Dutch groans and pushes the trick her way. "Do you know how many times I've wanted to just put you all to sleep and make you finally get eight hours? I know a sleeping spell. I could do it."

"I was gonna get work done," says Chuck, without much force. He's always on top of his game after he's filled up on blood—moving faster, thinking faster, steadier and less quick to panic. He's battered his way through a lot of knots in his coding that way, running hot on the fiery burn of magic in Julie's blood.

"Well you're not gonna at this rate." Dutch throws down another card. "Go to bed, guys."

"No, come on," says Mike, but without much force. "I got more stuff to do before I go to sleep."

The rest of the Burners soundly boo him. Chuck laughs and pushes himself upright, reaching out to grab Mike's hand and pull him upright. "Let's go, Mikey," he says, and Mike slings an arm around his shoulders as they wander slowly upstairs.

Mike doesn't like his new podmate, the first time they meet each other. Chuck is weird, and his eyes and ears are weird and his teeth are weird, and he smells weird and Mike wants to go home.

…and he's six, which is maybe why the first time they meet each other he says all of this right to Chuck's face.

And he's expecting (kinda wants) Chuck to go "yeah well you're dumb and you stink," and then Mike can wrestle with him and chew on his paws like he used to do with his mom when she was…

…like he used to do. But Chuck doesn't do that, he crumples up and his lip trembles and his big weird dark eyes get all wet and his big ears go all pinned-down and sad, and Mike feels bad but also angry. Mom wouldn't have wanted him to say any of that, but mom is dead. So who cares?! Who even cares. Not Mike.

He only manages to be a jerk to Chuck for about a day and a half before a bunch of bigger boys with round, small ears and round, flat teeth corner Mike's new roommate up against the wall of the building and cut their fingers and wave the blood around in his face to make him whimper, and Mike is mad at everything in his own six-year-old way but this new kid is all he's got for a pack.

Mike bites a kid right on the arm, not hard enough to break skin but hard enough to make him run away crying. The other boys run after him, and Mike pulls his new podmate inside and changes, curls up with him all soft and fluffy with paws too big for his body, and licks the tears off Chuck's face until he sniffles and laughs and pets Mike's ears.

After that they sleep together, skinny vampire curled up around fluffy wolf puppy, for years. Not every night, after a while, but often enough. When Chuck turns fourteen and gets a message, you have been registered for the Deviant Correction Procedure, you may contact the Kane Co. department of Surgical Assignation to check your approximated surgical year and month, he buries his face in Mike's neck and shakes and shakes and cries for a long, long time. The night before Mike leaves for his new pod in the barracks, he curls up around Chuck and nuzzles into his hair, into his neck, and for once Chuck doesn't grumble about how cold his nose is or shriek or push him away, just lets him hold on and memorize what it smells like to be home.

But before all that, at the beginning, Mike holds onto him and turns back enough to make words, not ever quite letting go. "I'm not gonna let anybody hurt you," he says. "If anybody tries to hurt you, I'm gonna bite 'em. Okay?"

"…'kay," Chuck says, and smiles a wet, fangy little smile.

"You're my pack now," says Mike. "I'm gonna keep you safe."

Mike is 11 when he joins the junior cadets. He thinks it's a club, a game—there are so many kids here who smell like him, who have eyes that are blue or green or yellow like him. There are people watching them the whole time, Elites in blank masks. They give the kids games, challenges, puzzles. Mike is great at those.

The other boys smell like him, but they're not like him. They change, like he does, even though Mike is head and shoulders taller than all of them when he turns, black and brown and still not big enough for his clumsy paws. They all smell and hear things far off, like he does, even though Mike can smell farther and hear sharper than any of the others. But the other boys can't hold their breath like Mike can, staying underwater until the Elites think he's in trouble and pull him out. When the Elites bring in a siren, take off his gag and have him sing to them, the other boys with eyes like Mike's do what the siren says. But Mike's dad left him something in his blood and he can cover his ears and fight it off. He doesn't have to follow orders.

Mike smells weird, the other boys tell him. Wolf, but not wolf. Some of them think he's half siren, dragon, elemental—Mike tells them he doesn't know, his dad left and never said what he was, and they laugh at him. Glad that they've got something he doesn't have. It's not funny—it's never been funny, his mom cried after his dad left—but Mike laughs along with them. It doesn't help anything.

Mike is 14 when he joins the cadets, two years ahead of everybody else. There's wer here too, but they don't want him for pack any more than the others did. He's too weird, they say when he smiles and tries to get them to wrestle, bouncing on his toes and asking everybody he can find for sparring matches. He's too full of himself, they say, when he wins every match against boys inches taller than him. The biggest boy in the barracks smells different too, but it must be okay-different because nobody tries to steal his stuff or turns him down when he wants to play-fight, and nobody tells him to stop elbowing Mike when they pass each other in the hallways or grabbing his food in the mess hall. He's different, but for some reason they all like him, and they don't like Mike.

"Don't ask me, dude," Chuck says, when Mike goes home on leave. He looks stressed these days-he loves counting, sorting, putting things in order, so Mike thought he would really like R&D. But he doesn't seem to be sleeping well, and it kinda seems like he gets skinnier every time Mike sees him. "I'm a vampire, we're not really…known for being social." He takes a draw of his plasma pack, wrinkles his nose and puts it down half-drunk. "…ugh."

"You're social with me."

"Yeah, well." Chuck grins at him, all crooked and tired. "You're my pack, right?" And then his smile falls a little bit. "…maybe that's the problem. You, just…showing up, smelling like bat."

"I like smelling like you," says Mike.

"Yeah, but you should…you should be making friends with…other…you should have a real pack, right? Dude, we should really sleep in separate…" He must see Mike's face, because he sighs and lets that trail off. "…I just want you to be happy, Mikey," he says instead.

Mike's leave ends the next day, and the biggest boy, the strange-smelling one, tries to fight him as soon as he walks in the door. He's got four wer with him—two black wolves, one grey, one sandy-blonde—and when he stalks toward Mike, drops to all fours and turns as well, Mike knows why he smelled strange. Wer, but not wolf. Some big cat, all dappled golden-black hide and heavy paws.

It takes five Elites to tear the fight apart, and Mike's the only one who doesn't have to be carried away on a stretcher. Years later, at seventeen, he can still feel scar tissue stretch on his back and shoulders when he changes clothes; a bite on his shoulder and deep claw-marks across his spine. But after the fight he transforms to two legs, pushes himself up and walks away, and after that nobody tries to pick a fight with him again.

A day after that, Abraham Kane promotes him to the pre-elite barracks, on a fast track to promotion. Mike looks out at his squad, and smells the animal in some of them, and thinks alpha.

It doesn't feel as good as he thought it would.

"I see you left my elites just in time," Kane sneers. "If you'd gone feral like this in my tower I would have had you shot like the dog you are, Chilton."

Mike lets out a vicious, rolling snarl—his voice comes out hoarse and ragged with rage, but the words are clear and carrying. "Yeah, because that's what Kane Co. does with things that scare you, right? Nobody should have to pretend to be something they're not just to live! Nobody should have to let you cut them open to fit in!"

Kane's eyes narrow. "You think I'm frightened of you? You and your deviants and monsters, scrabbling around in the trash down there? You and I both know it's only a matter of time before humankind wipes you out. If you're lucky, I'll be merciful enough not to make you watch."

As one, the other Burners wince. Mike snaps his fangs, eyes wide and gold—guard protect he can't have them keep them safe—

"Mike," Julie hisses urgently over the comm. "He's trying to provoke you, he's trying to get to the wolf—you have to be smart about this! The Deluxians are scared, if they see you as a monster—"

Mike growls one last time, and then closes his eyes and straightens his shoulders. His ears flatten a little, his fangs shrink. On the screen, Kane's eyes narrow again.

"You don't want to destroy us," says Mike, and he's keeping the snarl out of his voice but his eyes are bright gold. "—why don't you tell your people up there the truth, huh? You want us under your control. You don't care if your barracks are full of wer if you can put a collar on all of them. You're totally cool with vampires as long as they're locked up in some tiny room somewhere crunching numbers for you and starving."

Kane just laughs. "I'm willing to treat subhumans like subhumans," he says. "You have your uses."

Julie joins the Burners on the same day she finally figures out her illusion spell.

Elements for spell-casting are rare up in Deluxe, but she's been picking things up for years. She finds one of the last flowers in Deluxe, growing in a crack in an ancient building site that fell too close to a gap in the dome, petals fluttering in the cool breeze from Motorcity. That's when she's fourteen. That day, she sees her dad looking at a photo of a cadet with big, pointy teeth and a huge, wide smile, talking to somebody on one of his screens.

"—five other boys," he says. "Those little animals may be half-feral at that age, but they respect that kind of strength. They'll follow his orders."

"Sir, he's…several years ahead of the projected—"

"That's my last word on the subject," her dad says, and he sounds angry. Julie was going to show him the flower, but there's something about that tone in his voice that makes her stop. She backs out, slips the flower in her jacket, and runs back to her pod.

Old, banned articles on Motorcity's network tell Julie it's a white rose, and show her how to preserve it. She dries the flower, and locks it away.

She saves her tears, the first night she sees her dad's Elites round up citizens for being out a minute after curfew. One of the women tries to stop an Elite from yelling at her son, and he pulls out his gun and clubs her across the face with the butt of it. Julie's pod is flying low—she can see one of the soldiers talking to her dad on a screen. Can see her dad glance over at the woman, bleeding on the ground, holding her head, and then look back at the soldier and nod.

Julie's hands move almost without her consent, emptying out a vial that was meant to hold makeup, cleaning it with a spell she learned before she even knew what magic was. She cries through the night, seals the vial tight, and locks it away.

She takes seven drops of Claire's blood, the day she goes down to Motorcity for the first time. Her dad is locked in his office, thundering at people through his screens—she's never seen him so sad and angry. Julie packs up everything she might need, throws on a backpack, and hugs Claire for a long, long time.

She takes the rose, so old and fragile it almost crumbles when she picks it up. She takes her betrayed tears, and the blood of her loyal best friend, and whispers to them until they mix together and flare brightly with power. She weaves herself new bodies out of that light.

She runs.

There are full moons, somewhere outside of Motorcity's distant metal dome and Deluxe's regulated, moonless nights.

Mike's never seen one, but he can feel them. Those are the nights where it's actually painful to stay two-legged, the kind of pain he can't just ignore or shrug off. It was an awful surprise, the first time a full moon came around after the Kane Co. suppressors wore off. Mike had tried to stay human-shaped, freaked out by the force of the sudden need to change, even more freaked out with every increasingly-painful pang of need that went through him. Jacob had found him a couple of hours after moonrise, half-transformed and fighting every inch of the way, curled up whimpering on the ground in the garage. Mike doesn't care about pain normally, but that had him dry-heaving, eyes watering so hard it was like tears. He never tried that again.

It's not just the transformations at night, though. It's a full moon. It's...there. It's just there, he can feel it waxing, even when the sun is still up. It makes him...different. People say stuff like "...Mikey, you're sniffing me again" and "Mike stop licking dishes, you're getting food on your face" and "Hey Tiny, go get the ball!" because Texas, at least, seems to think full-moon Mike is hilarious.

He can totally function, as long as the sun is up-heck, even if the moon came up during a mission he might be able to drive Mutt as a wolf! He's always kinda wanted to try, but when he brings it up Chuck goes all pale and starts saying things like "are you nuts?!" and "crazy-freakin'-dangerous!" and flailing his hands around while he talks in that way that means no no no I'm totally serious no! So Mike hasn't tried that yet.

Anyway. He can totally be focused and think fast and think with his brain instead of his instincts during full moons. He just doesn't like to. It feels way better to hang around with his (pack) friends, enjoy how much he likes them, low-key resist the urge to lick their faces. Take long runs for no reason, shifting smoothly from two legs to four when he reaches a fence he needs to scale or a wide gap he needs to jump. To go hunting for other wer and meet them and introduce himself, or find mutant alley-animals and fight them. Although actually the fourth or fifth time he did that a mutant sewer-rat tore its claws across his muzzle and Chuck almost passed out when Mike came limping back into the hideout with blood all over his face and deep claw-marks across his nose and mouth. They healed up really nice, barely a scar, but he's not allowed to go rat-hunting any more.

His second full moon is a couple of weeks after Dutch joins. They're all still bumping around, getting comfortable with each other, making their own spaces. They've barely talked about what each of them is, and that might be why when Mike goes tense all over and suddenly hunches down over Mutt's engine block, Dutch goes "-whoa! Are you gonna hurl, man?"

Mike answers that question by dropping onto the floor and turning into a wolf the size of a small bear, and Dutch immediately jumps so hard he hovers off the ground in shock and throws an oil can in Mike's face. And that's how Mike ends up spending his second full moon in Motorcity sitting in a big metal tub while Chuck scrubs motor oil out of his fur and grumbles at him.

"Welcome to the Skylark Motel," says the man with the "1" on his suit, and holds out a hand. "Rayon. Nice to meet you."

"Mike Chilton," says Mike, and shakes hands. "These are—"

"Your Burners, I know." Rayon smiles and settles back into one of the chairs around the room, as elegant and unhurried as a king in his castle. "Heard you kids make some pretty quality custom parts. I'm willing to pay in raw materials if you've got skills to match the rumors."

"Dutch and Chuck can crank out anything you guys are looking for," says Mike, with utter certainty, and smiles his wide, pointy-toothed smile. "And we always deliver on time."

"Well then, we might have some business to discuss," says Rayon. He leans back in his chair, looking slowly from Burner to Burner, and then adds, "...I can offer you a drink too, by the way. Just good manners."

"We're not old enough to drink," says Mike. "Thanks."

"I wasn't talking to you," says Rayon, and looks straight past Mike to where Chuck stands at his shoulder. "And that's not the kind of drink I meant."

There's a split second of silence, and then Chuck seems to realize what he means-he straightens up abruptly, pulling in tight. "Oh," he says, high-pitched with shock, and laughs nervously. "Oh, haha, no, thanks. I'm, uh...I'm fine."

There's a moment of very tense silence. Then Rayon shakes his head and laughs a little, not unkindly. "…Deluxe kids," he says, and leans forward a little in his chair to look at the Burners over the top of his glasses. "…Look. You seem like good business. From what I've heard, you deliver on your deals and you deliver quality. But you go out there and try to do business with gangs like this, you're gonna get ripped in half."

"Business like what?" Julie didn't flinch at the words ripped in half, but there's a hard, focused look in her eyes. "What was wrong with that?"

Rayon rubs the bridge of his nose for a second, like their ignorance gives him a headache. But his voice is still even when he answers. "…you brought him with you," he says, and gestures at Chuck. "You bring a vampire, you expect whoever you're dealing with to offer them a drink. Just good manners. And when they offer you take them up on it or it looks like you're givin' them a real cold shoulder."

"Yeah, but," starts Mike, and rubs the back of his neck uncomfortably. "Chuck doesn't like—he only feeds off me. Us."

Rayon raises his eyebrows. "Might wanna avoid advertising that," he says, sounding vaguely amused. "I'm not gonna spread it around, because I like you guys, but that's some pretty personal stuff. All I'm sayin' is, it doesn't have to be a big deal. Make a cut, take a drink, you're done."

"Just…anybody?" This from Chuck, who has been silent up to this point—Mike, who had been opening his mouth to keep arguing, glances back at him and shuts up. "Can't you…isn't that…I dunno. Dangerous or something?"

Rayon smiles, reaches down and runs a finger over one of his cufflinks. There's a spark of magic in the air as the illusion dispels, and instead of the short, flat human teeth he had before, there are long, needle-sharp fangs in his smile. He doesn't keep them retracted—why bother, when there's an illusion between you and the outside world—but apart from the length they're the mirror image of Chuck's.

"I won't say there's not people you don't want to drink from," he says, and touches the cufflink again. His ears shorten and flatten, human again. His fangs vanish. "…never hurt me, though. Think we should have a talk some time, if you're gonna be running around with the gangs down here. There's a lot to learn, and you're gonna get yourselves in trouble if you don't know how to show respect." He raises an eyebrow. "…and the Skylarks can't afford to go making business with troublemakers."

"That would be great," Chuck says, with heartfelt relief. "We've got no idea what we're doing."

"I can tell," says Rayon, but he sounds amused. "Mike's been showing his fangs ever since you got here. Nobody's lookin' to challenge you, kid. Or your pack. You'd do better to keep those out of the way until you really need 'em."

Mike blinks and then guiltily unclenches his jaw, hiding his fangs again. Rayon quirks up the corner of his mouth.

"…It'll be easier on you if you get over drinking from other people early. It's not gonna hurt you—unless it's some kind of mutant. Don't go putting rat blood in your mouth."

Chuck shudders. Rayon smiles briefly and leans forward to pour himself a glass of ice water, then stops as something occurs to him. "—or dragon."

"Huh?"

"There are only a couple of things you shouldn't take a drink from, and dragons are one of them." Rayon's mouth twists for just a second. His expression is cold and hard to read behind the glasses. "...they should know better than to ask and you should know better than tryin' it. That's strong stuff."

"What do you mean, 'strong stuff'?" Julie has the look in her eyes of somebody mentally taking notes. Rayon sighs.

"There's mostly rumors about it," he says, and takes a drink. It would be impossible to notice if you weren't looking for it—he holds the glass just a little bit wrong, making sure not to hit invisible fangs against the rim. "But it's not somethin' you want to mess with. If you're not strong enough to handle it, it'll burn through you and leave nothin' but ash."

The Duke's wings are way too heavy to use for flying—there are golden caps on the end of every spindly finger of them, they glitter all over with gold and rubies. But then again, they don't need to be flight-worthy to be intimidating. Mike glares up at him and doesn't back down. Chuck folds his own wings tight and huddles into Mike's shadow, ears pinned flat, squeezing so hard Mike's arm aches.

"Not such a big, scary bloodsucker off the race-track," says the Duke, and spreads his wings lazily, grinning past Mike, trying to get a glimpse of Chuck's face. "…are you?" His eyes glow through the red of his glasses, like burning coals. At least there's one upside to those dumb glasses—if he's got something like that covering his eyes, he can't do any of his weird hypnotic dragon tricks. "Come out come out wherever you—"

"I thought you said you weren't going to race," says Mike.

"I thought we said that your little baby bat could beat any of my drivers," says the Duke languidly. "Whatsamatter? Did I scare him off?"

"Chuck beat you one time and he's gonna do it again!" Texas contributes fiercely. Chuck glances over at him, briefly too surprised to be scared—Texas has spent plenty of time making it clear he thinks Chuck is a hilariously wimpy nerd and vampires are weird and gross. But apparently whatever problems Texas has with Chuck pale in the light of this new outside threat, because Texas is doing his very best to stare the Duke down, ostensibly in Chuck's defense.

"Did you want something?" Mike shifts his weight, snapping the Duke's attention back to him before Texas can spend too long looking the Duke in the eyes and get himself hypnotized. "Or are you just here to make noise?"

"I just came to say hello to my…'competition'," says the Duke delicately, and then raises his voice. "—and you can say you ain't scared as much as you want, but don't think I can't hear you chirping away back there, blondie! If you wanna back out now, I might be inclined to be generous. I'd even let your loudmouth friend keep his buxom, bumpered beauty."

"He's not backing out," says Mike firmly, before Chuck can answer that or Texas can cut in again at the mention of Stronghorn. "He's gonna win this thing. How about you go get ready to drive if you're gonna, and stop trying to get in his head."

"Trying?" The Duke snorts, a showy flash of fire. "Mr. Chilton, I don't have to try to wind up your high-strung little baby bat. Ain't my fault I've learned how to press the right buttons."

"Stop calling him that," says Mike, and then whips around as the Duke spins past him and abruptly crowds in on Chuck's space instead, breathing boiling-hot air that flutters his bangs. "Hey, whoa!"

"You look like you could use a boost before the big race," the Duke says, and smiles a smile full of perfect, white, knife-edged teeth. His claws dig sharply at the side of Chuck's neck for a split-second, brief but utterly intentional. Mike strides over, teeth bared, as Chuck tenses and shudders and instinctively tips his head back, waiting for the bite his body thinks is coming. "I'm a fair man. Dragon blood does you good."

"Not cool!" Mike shoves his way between them, ears pinned back, eyes flaring protective gold. "You know how dangerous that is!"

"Oh, fine, if you don't want a boost." The Duke falls back, hands raised in mock-surrender and leans back against one of his cars, tilting his head back. He makes it look casual, but the gesture bares his neck and his belly in blatant pacification and Mike stops growling almost immediately, brows furrowed, suddenly mollified and obviously confused why. "Just making the offer. Ain't anybody told you that's the way to be polite around here?"

"Not…not if you're a dragon," says Mike, and there's still an edge of growl to his voice but his eyes are brown again and his teeth have shortened. He pulls himself together a second later, back on the defensive. "Look, are we talkin' or are we racin'?"

"…mm." The Duke flashes that perfect, saw-toothed smile again. "I'll see you at the starting line."

"Nice to hear from you again," says Mike, and settles down at the table in the luxurious mood-lighting of the Skylark Motel. "Can I offer you a drink?"

"Nice," says Rayon, approvingly. "Classy." He nips Mike's wrists—takes a cursory draw and sits back. "Mind if I return the favor?"

"Oh, uh…" Chuck sits up straight, startled like he always seems to be. "S-sure. Yeah. Thanks."

Chuck takes longer to feed than Rayon did, unwilling to bite down without numbing the skin first—Rayon waits indulgently, and then pulls his sleeves back into order as Chuck sits back, running his tongue over his teeth.

"We'll make a Motorcity gang out of you yet," he says, and smiles. "Okay. I'm gonna give you a bad deal. Show me some fangs, Mike. Lay down the law."

It only takes Julie a couple of days in Motorcity to figure out Pockets.

Regular old pockets she's known about for a long time—they're not common, they compromise the sleek Kane Co. aesthetic, but some people have them. (Almost exclusively the boys, to Claire and Julie's disgust.) In Motorcity, everybody's got pockets. Pockets full of tools or papers or ancient rubber bands or anything! Anything you might need. But Julie picks up more mediums for magic on her first day in Motorcity than she did in the last year living in Deluxe, and she can't just fill up her pockets and carry everything back up to Deluxe with her.

So she makes herself Pockets.

The spell is Jacob's. The ingredients are all things she's never heard of, but he gives them to her out of his garden, out of dresser-drawers and under the bed and the back seat of his enormous car. "Beautiful part is, it's just a little one," he tells her, "—so you can cast it one time…" he wiggles his fingers in the air. "…poof. Last you a good five years before you gotta hunt the ingredients down again. Y'know, if you can remember the words."

Julie's sixteen, and five years is an eternity. Jacob shows her which pieces to put together, shows her the words, shows her how to make a ring out of her fingers and make a bubble in space like a soap-bubble on one of Jacob's kitchen sinks. Pinch it off, and press the rim to the inside of a pocket.

Julie fits a summer squash the size of her forearm into a pocket that was barely big enough to fit one of her hands into. After that, she never goes back to Deluxe empty-handed. She makes herself a little wallet that fits in her Kane Co. jacket pocket, and fits an entire room's-worth of inventory into it. She casts a spell of silence around her room. She fills vials with tears and blood, she collects feathers and bones and metal and rotting wood. Things she'd never find in Deluxe. Things that used to be alive.

She wakes up the first morning after she goes down to Motorcity with Nine Lives kneading her chest, all silky black-red fur with big, bright yellow eyes. Julie is used to the small, soft cats some Deluxians can put in permits to own—Nine Lives is nothing like that. She's big and bony and lanky, with hard paw-pads and long claws. She's rangy and her fur is shaggy and thick for cold weather Deluxe pod-cats never feel.

She's part of Julie, and she's a Motorcity alley cat.

Julie goes back down the next day.

No matter how many complaints any of the others might have about the limitations of their powers and bloodlines, everybody just tacitly agrees that Dutch has the most weird, inexplicable issues.

"I gotta paint," he says, jittering, and welds one final piece onto Whiptail, perfectly neat. "I'm gonna blow if I don't." Because putting things in order is his passion, putting pieces into a perfectly-functioning whole, but there's something in fae blood that wants things that are old and chaotic and wild. He paints bigger projects, after a long day of working on the cars, huge metal canvases full of ambitious neon. Full of arresting, half-hidden images that jump out of the tangled colors when you turn your head to look away.

He also sleeps on the roof, and pure iron makes him break out in a painful, itchy rash.

"What are you gonna do if you gotta wear armor some time, Dutch," Texas asks him once, deadly serious, as Dutch winces and rubs lotion onto his hands. Almost all of their parts are polymers or alloys, but Dutch went digging around in the pile of scrap parts in the garage and accidentally put his hand right on some ancient piece of straight, unadulterated iron. His palm and the pads of his fingers are angry, swollen red.

"That's not gonna happen," says Dutch. He squints at his palm in the dim light, and then sighs and lifts his other hand to produce a handful of floating, golden points of light, illuminating his burned palm. "Why would that even be an option, dude? Gimme the bandages."

"What if you do, though." Texas pokes at one of Dutch's wings and then pulls his hand back as Dutch glares at him. "What? Fine, here's your stupid bandages."

So there's the iron burns, and the sleeping on the roof, and the way he hates things that go in straight lines. And the way plants try to grow toward him and the ones with tendrils wind around his hands when he's close. And how he can't turn down a puzzle or a game, and how he's (according to Texas at least) really weird about people borrowing his stuff.

"Because you don't bring it back!" Dutch insists, when the topic is broached, "You never bring my stuff back! It's my stuff!"

"Texas can get you new stuff," Texas points out.

"That's not—ugh!"

"How do you even know if something goes missing?" Chuck doesn't like Dutch's half of the garage, it makes him twitchy. There have been way too many times, when they work in the same place, where half their time is spent absently organizing all the tools, and then rearranging them into careful chaos. Mike has watched Chuck and Dutch wordlessly reorganize the entire work bench four or five times each in a single afternoon, like neither of them even realizes they're doing it.

"I know where my stuff is," Dutch says firmly. "I know when it's missing."

They put a tape line down the middle of the garage, and Texas is banned from touching anything on either side of it.

When Julie's angry, the air hums like static electricity, like the moment before a lightning-strike (Jacob says, anyway. It's been a while since anybody in Motorcity saw real lightning). She clenches her fists to keep from writing signs she doesn't know in the air, presses her lips tight together to keep in words that could do something she doesn't know how to fix. Without those outlets, the magic hums off her skin and changes things—she turned part of her bed into wood one time, left scorched footprints burned into the floor of her bedroom another. Nine Lives could be halfway across the city from her, but she'll suddenly be there, hissing at Julie's feet or balanced on her shoulders. Two pairs of golden, slit-pupilled eyes glaring at whatever or whoever dared to antagonize her.

Texas swears Julie's eyes glow when she gets angry. The others do their best never to find out.

When Chuck joined the LARPing group, he knew there were going to be other…deviants, other people who weren't all the way human, but somehow some part of him still expected somebody to point out his fangs and his strange, bent, too-long fingers. Push him out of the group or yell or call him a bat or a bloodsucker.

But nobody mentions it. Thurman is the first person to talk to him there. He notices Chuck staring around, wide-eyed and confused and amazed, and goes "dude, hey, are you new?" Takes him around, introduces him to some people, and shows him where he can sit and watch the first time, get a feel for what they're doing.

There's a lot of nonhumans in Motorcity. Deluxe's policies on "deviant" citizens has driven the majority of Detroit's supernatural population underground. But apparently most of that supernatural population doesn't see the point of dressing up and pretending to be something out of a fantasy, because there aren't a lot of pointed ears or pointed teeth or scales or wings or—anything, in the group. Mostly a couple of rowdy werewolves, and one guy with slit pupils and shimmery skin who kinda hisses when he talks, and Chuck thinks maybe a fae or two. But most of the people around him look…normal. Human.

The second person who talks to him is Ruby. She comes running up, eyes wide and bright and fading from their natural black to a wolfish yellow-green, and sniffs the air around him just like Mike does.

"You must be a vampire," she says, and then before Chuck can flinch, "—hail and well met! No vampire has entered the kingdom in many weekends! Not as long as I've been here! I'm Ruby."

"Uh…w-well met," says Chuck, and Thurman comes jogging up too, out of breath from keeping up with Ruby, and grins at him. "That looked really fun."

"Yeah!" says Thurman.

"If you think losing is 'fun'!" Ruby huffs, losing some of her noble bearing. The change in the way she carries herself makes her seem about six inches shorter, although not any less scary. "We're on such a losing streak. They creamed us out there!"

"You're a vampire?" Thurman says.

"We shouldn't have let them close in around us like that!"

It was a classic pincer technique and it wasn't even that well executed. Chuck saw it coming a mile off. He doesn't mention that. "Um," he says instead. "Y-yeah." Is that a problem, he doesn't say. Should I go?

"Cool," says Thurman, and sticks out a hand. "Welcome to Raymanthia."

"If that guy from Bardonia kills me one more time, my jaws shall rend his flesh!" Ruby thrusts a fist into the air. "I shall chew his marrow from his bones—"

"Come on, Ruby," Thurman mumbles. "You're gonna freak him out."

"My…my best friend is a werewolf too," says Chuck, a little bit weakly. "It's cool."

"See?!" Ruby punches Thurman in the arm. "I told you I smelled a new wolf. I mean, it's not him, but he smells like wolf. You should bring your friend some time! How am I supposed to make a noble pack of direwolves if all the other werewolves are Bardonian?!"

"Do you wanna come…meet everybody?" Thurman gestures back, a little self-consciously, at the rest of the group. Most of the people have filtered away, but there's a little group still gathered around chatting. "We can get you a weapon, maybe, uh…you could come meet the Oracle!"

"Totally," says Chuck. "Yeah, sure!"

The first thing that takes him by surprise that day is how awesome somebody can look brandishing a weapon made out of scavenged kitchen utensils and tape. The second thing is how people react to finding out he's a vampire.

"—whoa, and you're gonna be on our team?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you fly?" And then,"—can we see your wings?"

"I don't…like heights." He's serious, but that still gets a laugh. "And, I mean…sure? Yeah, just gimme some space."

It takes him a second to even remember how to bring his wings out, and when they do unfold into existence they almost hit a guy in the face, but everybody looks impressed and it's actually really nice to stretch them out.

"Do you bite people?"

Chuck's whole body seizes up. Everybody around him murmurs, curious, crowding in, and a painful throb of tension goes up his back and out through his wings, cramping in the suddenly-tight muscle.

"I heard it feels really cool," says one of the girls, and everybody is nodding, and not like it's a joke. Chuck stares around, poleaxed, feeling the burning hum of anxiety crawl up the back of his throat. "Do you, like…bite people sometimes? Would you, I mean?"

Hey bloodsucker, you thirsty? Wanna drink? My mom says you're gonna get put down, they're gonna cut off your wings and shoot you—

"I, uh," says Chuck, and his wings wrap in tight around him, protective as he huddles in on himself. "I. I'm not a..uh…"

"Are you okay?"

"Oh, no," says Chuck, and steps back, away from the center of the group. The eyes just follow him, though, wide and curious. His voice is coming out all wrong, cracked and high and breathless. "Fine, I'm fine, I'm okay. I'm good."

"Was that not okay to ask?" the girl is following him, looking worried. Chuck can hear/smell/feel her heart pounding. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you, did—"

"He's from Deluxe," says Ruby, and people go ohhh and shake their heads. Then she's crowding up into Chuck's space, sniffing the air, all wide intense eyes and twitching ears. "You can totally bite people down here, you don't have to be scared," she tells him, startlingly blunt. "People want to try it to see what it feels like, that's all."

"You're just the only vampire who's ever joined the group," the girl chips in—she looks worried, ashamed of herself. "And a lot of the other ones who're around are really scary, but you seemed nice—sorry. I'm really sorry."

"Let's get you a weapon," says Ruby, and everybody gets out of their way as she pulls Chuck out of the group and off toward a pile of scrap on the edge of the battlefield. "Don't worry about them. Humans are weird! You don't have to bite anybody. We've got a bunch of lances, do you want a lance?

Lord Vanquisher, the Vampire King, rises to power a few short weeks after that first fateful day. His beloved court shelters in the shade of his mighty wings for many weekends, and he takes no blood from his loyal subjects for fear that pain and weakness befall them.

"…I would if you guys wanted to," he tells his "inner circle", after the Official Best Adventure Ever with the robots and the monster and the lance and the Smiling Dragon.

Everybody's kind of shell-shocked. Not least because the Smiling Dragon is driving—they need to get back to the battlefield fast, after all—and he just looked over and went "You should've told me you were hungry, dude. Here." And pulled off his jacket.

Chuck never bites people but he just kind of sighed and rolled his eyes and leaned over to take a long, slow drink from the crook of Mike's elbow. Everybody stared the whole time and Mike—scary, confident, competent Mike—leaned back in his seat and went mmm, sleepy and pleased.

Then Chuck sat up, wiped his mouth and saw everybody staring at him, and now everything is awkward.

"I mean, I know you guys pretty well now, so…if you wanted," Chuck soldiers on, not looking at anybody. He looks better, in a weird kind of hard-to-describe way. Better than he ever has when he comes LARPing; his skin is flushed and his hands don't tremble and his fangs are drawn back so he doesn't slur at all. "I know there's some people in the group who…who want me to bite them. Which, y'know, that's kinda weird, but you guys—"

"What, you don't eat with anybody while you're out?" Mike glances away from the road for a second, frowning. "Dude! You gotta stop starving yourself, man."

"I can't fill up on werewolf blood and then go play against a bunch of humans," Chuck points out. "It's not fair."

"So drink from some humans, bro."

"I thought vampires bit people on the neck," says Sam, popping his head over the back of the seat. "My uncle's a vampire and my mom calls him a neck-biter all the time."

"Shut up, Sam," says Phillip.

"Anybody would be glad to let you," Ruby puts in. "I don't take a handicap! Fighting at less than your full potential is dishonorable."

"I don't want 'anybody'," says Chuck. "I drink from—friends, people I know. I like the others, but I don't…we're not…" he stammers, hands waving helplessly.

"Fang friends," says the Oracle.

"What? Ew, no."

"Bite buddies."

"Where—what? Dude."

"You get a lot of crap for being a vampire in Deluxe," Mike says firmly, defensive. "If he only wants to drink with people he knows, that's cool. But…dude." That to Chuck, softer and quieter. "…you know they're not gonna be gross about it. You know those guys. You can't just live off of wer and fae and witch forever, seems like it might be kinda…not great for you."

"I eat plenty," Chuck says. "Seriously. Stop worrying. I can totally get human blood if I need it."

"So. What's up with you?"

Chuck, who's been clinging to Mutt's seat and hyperventilating in the face of almost-certain death for way too long today to be cordial, doesn't look up from his screen. He's hungry—he can feel it mundane in the pit of his stomach and stronger, aching in his jaw where his fangs retract—and he doesn't have time for more of Texas's heavy-handed "jokes" about bats and bloodsuckers. It wouldn't suck as much if he even seemed to realize Chuck wasn't laughing.

"You know what's up. I'm hungry, nobody's around. Do you want something, dude?"

"Mike's here."

"Mike had Jacob's onion-chai loaf."

"So?"

Dammit. "So, I'm allergic. Vampires are allergic to—it doesn't matter, I can't drink with Mike right now or I'll be miserable all day, and the others aren't around."

"Yeah, well," says Texas, "—not like you bite the other guys anyway."

"What?" Chuck half-turns, frowning. "Yeah I do."

"Nuh-uh. I never saw you bite Jessie."

"Julie can't have cuts and stuff on her arms where people can see them," says Chuck, and clicks his fangs in annoyance as his fingers twitch on his keyboard, accidentally replacing a whole line of code with a misplaced "w". "And she's from Deluxe, she was…pretty scared of what I'd do, for a while." It was really brave of her to offer at all, honestly—Mike had gotten a nasty gash in his side and it was healing but he'd lost enough blood to make him kind of weak and woozy. Chuck was shaking and hazy with hunger but stubbornly refusing to take blood from Mike when he was already anemic. Julie had thought it over, looked at the options, evaluated everything she'd learned since she came to Motorcity, and had gritted her teeth and made the offer. Her pounding heartbeat made it easier to find a pulse, but the fear in her blood soured the taste.

Her blood tastes way better when she's not scared. It makes his skin burn and tingle like he's covered in static electricity.

"Anyway," he says, because it's that or keep thinking about how good it feels to be filled up with blood, feeling the skittering burn of secondhand magic running over his skin, "—Julie's up in Deluxe, she can't get down here."

"Yeah, and you don't bite Dutch."

"Dutch doesn't like blood. And he's out driving." His hands move on autopilot as he talks, remembering the sweet-dusty tang of fae on Dutch's blood. He tastes like color, like chaos and life—he must have been out of place in Deluxe, but honestly he doesn't fit much better down here. He belongs somewhere from the old world, somewhere bright and full of color and growth. A forest, or a city, or a city full of forests, if there was ever something like that. There might not be a place left in the world for people like Dutch. Kinda sucks to think about too hard.

"You're—"

"Look, just because you don't see me drink with people, that doesn't mean I don't do it. Okay? Mike just…offers a lot." And he doesn't care if anybody sees. It's not as bad as he thought when he came down, feeding in front of people, but he's getting the impression it's kind of…embarrassing. Like the couples that hang around making out in public. Not that Mike cares, apparently.

Texas subsides a little, then goes "—well, okay, but—" and Chuck tunes out a little bit. Texas's heart is beating pretty hard, Chuck can hear/feel/smell it, can tell where it's warmest and closest to the skin. He forces himself to focus on typing, one key at a time. This is fine. This is totally fine, he can code on a normal empty stomach and he can code the same way when he's low on blood. Even if it is kind of like everybody who comes in the room is carrying around a delicious four-course meal with them.

"—would mean Texas was bein' rude, kinda, okay, and you're part of the team and junk. So—"

What is he even talking about right now? Texas doesn't usually get nervous about anything, it's one of the things Chuck kind of envies about him, but his heartbeat is going hard and he's talking himself in circles. Chuck blinks, a little bit blearily, and tries to force himself to listen.

"—'cause you looked kinda hungry. And nobody's around, y'know, so—"

Pieces of the situation finally click together. Chuck finally turns in his seat and looks up at Texas head-on, flicking his bangs out of the way to see better. "…are you…offering me blood?"

Texas cuts off in mid-word and then crosses his arms over his chest and looks away. "…maybe. It's not like that's weird, you drink it and stuff."

Holy shit, this is new. "Yeah, okay, but…I dunno, I was pretty sure you hated me."

Texas looks, if not appalled, then definitely upset. "Nuh-uh! We're Burners! We're a team!"

"You literally said 'man, I hate bloodsuckers'." says Chuck. "Like, two hours ago. About a vampire. To my face."

"Yeah, I mean—yeah, but…" Texas waves a hand vaguely at him. "You're okay."

Chuck frowns at him. Texas has the good grace to look slightly ashamed of himself.

"Still not cool, dude."

Texas opens his mouth and then closes it again, frowning. He looks like he's actually thinking that over, which is new—Chuck sighs and turns back to his project, rubbing one temple through his hair. Maybe Jacob—no, Jacob would be even worse than Mike right now, he's been messing around with growing his own spices again, onions and leeks and garlic and chives. Just walking into his garden makes Chuck's sinuses stuffy and his throat feel tight—asking for a meal from him now is a phenomenally dumb idea. Allergy city.

"Uh…"

It's Texas again. Chuck swivels back around in his seat and, in a fit of sudden pique, lets his fangs extend just enough to be noticeable. "Yeah?"

"Sorry."

Chuck opens his mouth to answer and then stops, staring, as his brain catches up to his ears.

"…what?"

"I said 'sorry', okay?" Texas crosses his arms even tighter and stares at the ceiling as he says the words, kind of like a little kid being forced to apologize by a parent, but apologizing is definitely what he's doing. "Texas doesn't act like a jerk to his buddies, that ain't the Texas way."

"Did Mike tell you to say this?" Chuck asks suspiciously. Texas snorts.

"Uh, no?"

He says it like Chuck should have known that was a dumb idea, so that's probably the truth and Mike isn't involved. Well crap. This might actually be Texas genuinely apologizing. Chuck pulls his fangs back with an effort and manages to get them well enough under control he can talk clearly again.

"…well…okay. Thanks, I guess."

"So." Texas uncrosses his arms, swings them a couple times and then crosses them again uncomfortably like he doesn't know what to do with his hands. "So. You wanna eat?"

Well, if Texas is somehow miraculously okay with vampires now, there's no reason to turn him down. Especially when Texas is standing right there, smelling like blood and filling the air with the feeling of his heartbeat. He's like Mike—he's in good shape and his heart is a strong, slow pound. Chuck's mouth is watering.

"…okay," he says finally, "Okay, fine, sure. Uh…where?"

Texas shrugs. "I dunno, wherever?" He drops down in the other chair, tugs down his zipper and shucks off his jacket—he smells like exertion, heat and sweat, and it should be unappetizing but it just smells like life, blood, FOOD. "It's not like Texas can't handle pain, okay, but how much is it gonna hurt?"

"It's…not gonna hurt?" the words come out a little bit slurred, his fangs are all the way out and one of them almost snags his lip. "Mike says it just feels kinda warm." Where, where, where? Upper arm, elbow, wrist, neck? No, not the neck, it feels right but it's too much, too dangerous. Definitely not for a first time. Elbow, the same place he feeds on Mike? Yeah, that's safe. No tendons or nerves he'll have to work around. Chuck reaches out, too eager to be hesitant, braces Texas's arm with one hand and presses his fingertips to the skin, feeling for the pulse. Texas immediately tenses up, but doesn't pull away.

"…so? Whatcha waiting for?" He says it with bravado, but there's a hint of a tremor to the words. Chuck licks his lips…and hesitates.

"I just don't know…what I'm getting into?" At this point it doesn't really matter—whatever Texas is, he's definitely not a dragon or any of the other dangerous types. If he was an elemental or something he wouldn't have kept it under wraps this long. "I don't know if I've had your kind of blood before."

"What kinda blood?" His fingers find the vein—Texas hunches up in the chair, eyes squeezed shut.

"Y'know, I've had Mike's, so I've had werewolf…fae, and witch blood, and other vampires, and…"

"What, human?"

Chuck blinks, taken aback.

"You're human?"

Texas untenses as a bite fails to come, cracks open one eye and then the other. "Yeah? So?"

"I thought you were just…I dunno, like Rayon, you were covering it up for some reason."

"Hey." Texas looks offended. "Texas don't cover up his Texasness. 'Kay?"

"But—you're always competing with Mike. You're pureblood human? Nothing else?"

Texas's eyes narrow the way they always do when somebody compares him to Mike. "Yeah, so?"

"So…so Mike's a werewolf, dude. You're a normal human and you're competing with a werewolf, that's nuts!"

Texas looks surprised, and then very, very pleased. "Chyeah, well Mike's lucky he can compete with me."

Human. Up in Deluxe they always said that humans were vampires' natural prey—normal, helpless, innocent humans. Sweet, defenseless Deluxian citizens. But…up in Deluxe they said a lot of things.

"Never had human blood before," Chuck says, and leans in. "I'm gonna lick your arm, don't punch me."

There's so much about being a vampire nobody ever bothered to mention—none of the classes up in Deluxe mentioned the topical anesthetic that started secreting when the fangs came out. In all the talks about how dirty and gory a vampire's feeding was, nobody mentioned the quickest way to get a cut clean and closed was to let a vampire take a drink out of it and let the coagulants and antiseptics in their saliva fix it for you. Every time Chuck starts to feed on somebody he wonders, just a little bit, what other stuff he doesn't know about his own body. What nobody ever bothered to teach him.

Texas tensed back up again when Chuck started numbing his arm—he slowly untenses as the pain keeps on not coming, and Chuck has already taken three or four long, slow pulls of blood when he says "…are you gonna do it or what?"

Chuck glances up at him and pointedly licks his bloody teeth. "…told you it wasn'gonna hurt," he says, slurred around his fangs, and ducks his head down to catch another pulse of blood from the cut. "…mm."

"Oh." Texas sounds pleasantly surprised. His heartbeat, which picked back up again when he saw the blood, starts to settle. "…huh! Kinda creepy, not totally cool with that yet, but yeah! Can you taste the awesome?"

He can definitely taste…something. Chuck takes another draw. "It's like…" metaphors are failing him when he needs them most. Chuck waves a hand vaguely in the air and then finishes, "…water."

"You sayin' I got weak blood?"

"No, I'm saying…" he takes another drink, careful with his fangs. "…It's just…I dunno. Mike's is pretty heavy, and Julie's tastes…uh…kinda…kinda like what those old sparklers we found looked like when we lit them. And Dutch's kinda burns on the way down, but yours is different."

"Good different?" Texas sounds pleased by this concept. "So you do taste Texas's awesome!"

"Yeah, totally." It's not flavorless, and not dull or flat, just… simple. Clean and warm and filling.

"Well...cool," says Texas, and settles back, giving Chuck this weird kind of look like he's seeing him for the first time. "Cool."

"Mister Chilton!" The Duke of Detroit straightens up from his position lounging across the hood of his limo and grins with very sharp, very white teeth. As he leans forward his skin flickers with an almost invisible sheen of red-gold scales. "Where are your Burners?"

They're within five minutes' drive, and the Duke has to know that Mike knows that the Duke knows that. After he tried to offer Chuck a drink before the race, Mike has been a lot more careful about letting his friends near the mansion.

"Busy," says Mike. "What do you want this time?"

"Ha! Do me the favor of not lyin' to my face!" The Duke flicks a wing—the golden scales sparkle and shimmer. "You know what this is about. I want you to keep your pawsoff my hoard!"

"Hoard?" Mike snorts. "What hoard? We don't need gold, if somebody's been taking yours then you're looking in the wrong p—"

"You think gold is the only thing I keep in my hoard?" The Duke laughs derisively. "Hwell. Lemme put this a way that little dog brain of yours can figure out. I want you outta my junkyards."

"You can't just claim every single yard in Motorcity as your 'hoard'," says Mike, nettled, "—we had a deal, and we need the parts!"

"Then you can do business," says the Duke, "Just like everybody else."

"So what, you're backin' out because you can't handle losing a bet?!"

The Duke is up off his feet and in the air before the words have finished echoing, spreading vast, golden wings as he lands, blocking out the light. Mike stands his ground, eyes narrowed as the Duke leans in close to his face and grins. The breath that hisses out between his fangs smells like hot metal and burns like a blast-furnace. "Your bat didn't win that race," he says.

"One rule," Mike parrots back at him, and lets his hair bristle and his fangs show, matching snarl for snarl. "He drove the last race, he beat you, we get whatever we want from your…hoard."

In the end, nobody is happy. The Duke won't stop trying to put loopholes and caveats on the "anything from my junkyards" rule-Mike won't back down on the deal Chuck worked so hard to win, and by the time he gets out of the Duke's mansion he's more than a little bristly from sheer annoyance, feeling angry wolf prickle under his skin.

He needs to burn it off, and there are too many people with guns and scowls hanging around near the mansion, so instead of calling for a pickup Mike just bounces on the balls of his feet and takes off running.

He turns wolf to run back to where the others are parked. It's not a long run and he doesn't really need the extra speed, but it's a relief to change and it feels good to stretch out and really run. Even if the air around the Duke's mansion does constantly smell overwhelmingly like burning metal and woodsmoke. When Mike comes loping back into sight, the other Burners are sitting around on the hoods of their cars—all of them sit up a little straighter when they see him transformed, but he slows down as he gets close and wags his tail at them and everybody relaxes a bit.

"Don't freak us out like that, dude," says Chuck, but he does deign to reach down and scritch behind Mike's ears when Mike comes trotting up and drops down in the circle of cars, out of breath but pleased with himself. "Jeez, I swear you get bigger every time you change. What are you, half bear?"

Mike would pretend to bite him for that, but Chuck is absently scratching at the scruff of his neck now and it feels great, so he lets that one slide.

"We got nothin' on the radar," Dutch says from his car. He's reclined on Whiptail's windshield, playing glamour back and forth between his fingers, making spots of dappled color skate idly over his skin. "We were just talkin' about whether we wanna go back to Jacob's place or go for a drive."

"Let me guess what you wanna do," Chuck says to Mike, with the put-upon fondness of the guy who's probably going to spend the next couple hours screaming at his best friend for being an idiot. Mike grins up at him. Chuck rolls his eyes and flicks Mike's nose to make him sneeze. "—yeah, I thought so. Would it kill you to prove me wrong once in a while?"

"That's still three for home, two for drive," Julie points out sleepily. "I almost just want to hang out here, but—"

Mike hunches his shoulders and growls quietly.

"Yeah, exactly. Not the friendliest place to spend time." Julie glances over at the mounds of junk that mark the edge of the Duke's territory. "Feels like somebody's watching us."

After the mess with the Kane Co. Safe-T Suits and the bot factory, they throw Julie a party.

Nobody really says that's what it is, it's just kind of…there. Texas uses her actual name the whole time. Dutch is sketching a picture of Julie on a napkin, lit up in fire, with explosions whipping the inky red-black of her hair around her head.

"Close one today," Mike says, and puts a hand hesitantly on her shoulder. "…you okay?"

Julie thinks about the moment where she thought she was going to tell him. About the second where she thought she was going to look up and see her dad watching her, furious and disbelieving.

"…yeah," she says, and smiles. "It was a good day. I'm fine!"

Mike sniffs once, frowning. His eyes are too sharp, fixed on her.

"You know you can tell me anything, right?"

Julie twitches her fingers in her pocket, stirs her magic and dulls her smell, fading it away under the smell of cheese and oven-smoke and the other Burners crowded around. Hides whatever he's smelling behind a thick, heavy veil.

"I know," she says, and smiles.

Because Mike can tell when she's lying, and Julie can't allow anybody to have that. Can't let somebody know that much about her. Julie casts the spell, that night in her room, changes ingredients and recasts it. And the next time she goes down to Motorcity, Mike leans in and breathes her in and frowns, eyes all wide and confused.

"…Jules…?" he says, and breathes again, trying to find her smell, lost and confused and strangely hurt. "What…?"

"Just working on a deodorant spell," says Julie, and forces herself to smile, and knows he can't smell her lying. "Guess it turned out pretty strong."

"But I like how you smell," he says, kind of plaintive. "I can see you but I totally can't smell you, it's like you're—I dunno, a ghost. Like you're not here."

"There are wer upstairs too, Mike," Julie says, and it's not nice to remind about the other werewolves under Kane's thumb, but she can't afford to have him asking questions about this. "I can't smell like Motorcity in the middle of Kane Co. tower."

Mike's face falls. "Oh," he says, quieter, a little bit hurt. "Yeah, I—I mean, I get that." He shifts his weight a little, uncomfortable. "…can you…turn it off when you're down here?"

Julie relents. "Maybe most of the way," she says. "But I have to be careful, Mike. You know that."

"I know," says Mike, and pats her shoulder with a big, square hand, awkward and fond and a little bit too rough. "I know, Jules."

Julie doesn't find out Claire's not human until a couple of weeks after Julie joins the Burners; the first time she brings Claire down to meet them.

When they grew up together, Julie would feel the magic in the air. Literally, a weird little prickle on her skin, nothing she could get a hold on or identify but definitely magic. But that was back when all the girls their age were trading little black-market charms to make themselves prettier, to put on the illusion of makeup that they could take off as soon as their parents came in. She just assumed that was the illusion. Makeup or longer eyelashes, the color in Claire's hair maybe.

She brings Claire down to Motorcity, jittery and excited in her new Burner clothes, drags Claire into the hideout by one hand and says "Guys, this is Claire!" Mike sticks out a hand and then pauses and sniffs the air, leaning in, brows furrowed. Chuck, who's been holed up with Rayon for hours every couple of weeks, having super-secret meetings that basically seem to be etiquette lessons, takes one look at Claire's nervous smile and then steps away from her, chin rising and fangs extending in unspoken welcome.

Claire's smile instantly falls away. She steps back and behind Julie's shoulder, watching Chuck warily—he colors and drops his chin again self-consciously, hiding his fangs behind his lips.

"Julie," Claire says, an almost-inaudible little squeak, "You didn't tell me one of them was—"

"Jules," says Mike, grinning. "You didn't tell me your friend was a vampire."

Claire is so insulted, she insists on a ride home immediately. Julie apologizes to the others, bewildered, and then climbs back into the driver's seat of Nine Lives to find Claire sitting with her arms crossed and her lips pursed, obviously not in the mood to talk. Julie opens her mouth to say something, and then stops and sighs, and pulls out her keys.

They drive in silence for a long time. Nine Lives is spiraling up a ramp toward a distant access tunnel by the time Claire unwinds enough to say "—I can't believe them."

Julie keeps her eyes on the road. "It's not an insult down here," she offers. "Mike must've just…smelled some bat on you. That's all. His nose gets him into trouble sometimes."

Claire isn't listening. "You're not supposed to say anything!" She reaches up self-consciously and brushes her fingertips over one ear. "Ugh, how could they—tell? Ugh, what if all the deviants can tell, eww—"

Stop calling them that, says part of Julie, fierce and hurt. "Can tell what?" says the rest of her.

"You know what!" Claire leans forward, staring eagerly up ahead as Nine Lives cruises toward the growing square of white Deluxian light. "Oh thank god."

"Claire…"

"Can we just go home? Ugh, everything is so dirty and dark and weird down there—"

"Claire."

"What?!"

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Claire stares at her for a long second, and Julie looks at her big, dark eyes and wonders how she could possibly have missed this.

"You never had fangs," she says, but her brain is already putting things together. The hint of magic she used to feel in the air, the little illusions, the way Claire never wanted to eat with her. "…You were wearing an illusion."

Claire looks away, and Deluxian surgeons are good but if Julie looks close enough she can see it now. The strange, almost uncomfortable way Claire moves her hands, how her fingers don't really seem to bend right; bones shortened, joints straightened and forced into line. Claire's teeth are absolutely uniform, perfectly white, flat and straight and just slightly wrong. Claire's ears are just a little bit small, a little bit pink on top like there's a seam of faint scarring there.

"Claire, why didn't you tell me?"

Claire groans, frustrated. "I'm only half!" she says, like she needs to defend herself. "My no-good dad was totally a bloodsucker, okay? Before he died doing—I don't know, something illegal or something probably?"

Julie has seen the records of the first riots when Deluxe started to go up over Detroit. She doesn't say anything.

"But then I was besties with you!" Claire says, "And you were great! So yeah, no, like, I was not gonna go around with my stupid pointy ears and my stupid ugly teeth in front of you? And your dad found out and said I could have my operations early, which was like, the nicest thing he's ever done. Everybody wants their operations early, I was super lucky, and nobody was supposed to know!"

"Everybody?" Julie has met more than one vampire in Motorcity. She hasn't mentioned the Deluxe "normalization procedures" to all of them, but the ones she has mentioned it too haven't exactly sounded envious.

"Yeah!" says Claire defiantly, chin raised. "Everybody! Because, newsflash! We're freaks. Who wants to be a freak?!"

"You're not a freak, Claire!"

"No," says Claire. "I'm not. Not anymore. Look, just—keep them away from me, okay? I'm not like them. I'm not a monster."

Chuck has blood at the corner of his mouth.

That's the first thing Mike sees when he half-runs up to the treacherous platform Chuck is lying on; Chuck is laid out on his back, limp and motionless, lanky limbs thrown out loose, with blood on his mouth. Mike thinks back immediately to the way Chuck's been showing his fangs for the past couple of hours. To the way he hissed through his teeth when that guy in the bar started getting handsy, all needle-sharp fangs and fury. Feral.

And then he sees the glint of red on Chuck's arm.

He's reaching out, trying to see, unwilling to believe it, when Chuck's wings snap out wide, materializing out of nowhere and knocking him back onto his butt. Chuck sits up slowly, sniffs the air and growls.

He smells like fearless challenge; he's baring his fangs, head down, and some part of Mike wants to snarl right back. It's written deep down in his genes, he's a werewolf and there's a threat in front of him and he's bristling all over. Instead, he forces himself to settle. Makes his teeth blunt, makes his eyes darken.

"Buddy," he says, as calmly as he can, and when Chuck looks up at him this time Mike catches a glimpse of glowing red through his bangs. "Why are you using that thing?"

Chuck's hand immediately flies to his arm. "Why shouldn't I?" And then, before Mike can even start on all the really good reasons why he shouldn't, "—Kane thinks he can tame us, he made this thing to keep us down but it's so good, Mike. I could fly up to Kane Co. tower like this; I could take him down myself!"

"You're not thinking straight," Mike says, and edges closer, trying to get an eye on the booster through Chuck's fingers, looking for an opening. "You gotta—"

He starts to move for the glint of red through Chuck's fingers and Chuck lashes out with another one of those vicious snarls. Mike jumps back just barely fast enough to keep long claws from raking his chest.

"I'm not—taking it off," Chuck says, slurred, and smiles with all his fangs. "You can't make me! I'm not scared of you Mike, I'm not scared of anybody!"

"Have you—did you bite somebody?!"

Chuck licks his lips—dabs at the corner of his mouth and stares at the blood on his fingers. "…somebody punched me," he says, sounding vaguely surprised. "Jerk. I decked him though. He was just human."

That's not as bad as Mike was afraid it might be, but it's still just…wrong. "What are you talking about, just human? Dude—"

Chuck laughs, and for just a second his face is utterly foreign, feral. His eyes are pure red, his fangs are fully extended and needle-sharp. Red light from the KMG glows through his wings, throwing Mike into vivid shadow. "I'm not scared of what I am anymore," he says, and for the first time as he steps forward, all fangs and claws and glowing red eyes, Mike sees the feral vampire from the Deluxe videos. Just for a split second, he sees the monster.

ROTH doesn't make any sense.

Not by the old rules of magic, not by the new rules of combinant polymer-robotics and AI. Part plant, part machine, mechanical but not made of cold steel. Artificial but alive, feeling, thinking. Dutch likes to stop sometimes and put his hands on ROTH's shell and feel the hot burr of life and magic against his fingertips, mixing with the soft, warm thrum of robotic motors and gears. Sometimes they go flying together, ROTH motoring along on finely-tuned repulsor hovertech, spinning around Dutch and the irridescent, blurred shimmer of his wings. Around Dutch, the weird, half-plant, half-polymer arms seem to grow more vividly, brighter and stronger.

ROTH also really likes Tennie.

"He's got so much power circulating!" Tennie says, when they meet each other, and reaches out to shake ROTH's "hand". She's so excited, so interested, there are sparks crawling in her hair and eyelashes, glittering off her big, dark eyes. Dutch thinks (privately, to himself, where Texas can't somehow find out and make fun of him for it) that all the fae glamour in the world couldn't make something that beautiful. In the blue-white light of the Cablers' Settlement, she looks unearthly. "It's like magic, but electric! Wow!"

ROTH beeps and whirrs and bobs up and down happily in the air. His eye glows brighter when he's touching Tennie, flashing and flickering. For a second Dutch was afraid Tennie would sap him accidentally-whatever power source ROTH runs on now, who knows if an Elemental could absorb it-but it kind of looks like there's more risk of the opposite. ROTH is whirring, all systems at 110%.

"Just...be careful you don't jolt him by accident," Dutch says, and Tennie snorts and takes her hand away.

"Elementals don't jolt stuff by accident," she says, and grins at him. It makes her nose crinkle up. Dutch's wings flutter involuntarily. "...sometimes we do it to mess with people, though. Don't tell anybody."

"Wow," says Dutch, and ROTH pats his hair and chirps his agreement.

Julie is huddled in her car, mumbling—she's put so many wards up around herself her comm can barely reach her, but they're falling apart as fast as she can make them as her concentration wavers. The inside of Nine Lives must be a mess by now, she's throwing off so much magic in random surges, trying to protect herself from imaginary enemies. Texas is still gibbering to himself, a constant stream of terrified nonsense.

Mike is still looking back at the cars towed behind him, distracted by the scent of his (pack) friends' fear, when one of those weird seedpods smashes through the window. He has just enough time to think oh crap and then that smells awful, and then the world starts to blur around him and he knows he's going under.

"Mutt, follow homing device," he manages, and then the car's controls are vanishing under his hands and they're changing in front of his eyes, flickering from hands to wolf paws to a weird, contorted mixture of the two, bristling with cybernetic enhancements.

"Mutt," whisper the voices swimming around him, and Mike wavers and slumps forward over his steering wheel, panting as his vision doubles and smears like melting wax. "Run back to run back run run run back to your owner get back on your leash loyal dog needs a master loyal soldier needs a general—" The whispers echo and bounce around him, distant and then so close in his ear his skin prickles. It's just the Terras, it's something they did, it's not real—

"No," he gets out, strangled through a growl. "Not."

"Bad dog," the voices snicker, and white Deluxe towers swim in front of his eyes, for just a second his mouth and nose are full of the clean, white, chemical smell of Deluxe. He can feel his teeth lengthening, feel his body trying to transform to answer the threat-but logical thought is even harder when he's transformed. He can't breathe, it must be the collar around his throat he can't breathe—

For somebody who's lived in Motorcity his entire life, with an enormous mixed family of just about every species imaginable, Texas is really bad with non-humans.

Granted, even down here there are more humans than not, even though the gangs are almost exclusively non-humans gathered together for safety in numbers. But the people Texas knows, the ones who've been calling greetings to him on the street since before Mike joined the cadets or Julie caught the first greedy gleam in her dad's eyes, they're almost all human.

Or maybe, the Burners determine eventually, they're not and he just doesn't care. Texas knows what's up with him—he's human, and nobody else's species is really a huge concern. As long as nobody is getting hypnotized or bitten or hexed in front of him, who cares? Apparently there was a lot of family drama about a vampire, but he's gotten a lot better about that since it finally got through his skull that Chuck was a vampire and Chuck was his buddy and therefore he was buddies with a vampire, so not all vampires were bad, maybe.

Then again, it took him weeks to figure out his team wasn't a bunch of humans in the first place. So maybe they should have expected it to take him a while.

"…He knows he's talking to an elemental, right?" Mike says, as they watch Texas chatter to a bent old man with a suit coat and a data-cube full of digital files in a bag over his shoulder. "Can't he smell it?"

The rest of the Burners shrug and watch, fascinated. The old man isn't speaking English, but in any language there's no mistaking the gesture he makes—you used to be this small! Look how much you grew! Texas preens.

"I don't think he does," says Dutch. "He doesn't have a problem with elementals, right?"

"He likes Tennie," Julie says. "But I don't know if he noticed."

"She literally gets covered in lightning when she's mad," says Chuck.

The old man reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of brightly-colored candies. Texas perks up and accepts them gleefully, shoving them into his jumpsuit pockets.

"…doesn't mean he noticed," says Dutch.

"—'kay, paalam na po!" Texas comes bouncing back over, grinning. There are already two pieces of hard candy in his mouth. "Let's go."

"Hey, big guy," Mike starts. Texas grunts inquiringly and sticks another piece of candy in his mouth. "…never mind."

"Aweshome," says Texas around his candy. "Pizza time!"

Two days later, after the Robo Roundup, Texas dumps every single piece of equipment in Chuck and Dutch's workbenches into a barrel of motor oil, "cause I figured they were probably thirsty, y'know?" Chuck makes a gutted kind of noise and goes scrambling forward to dredge up the remains of a delicate mess of circuitry that used to be an almost-finished project. Dutch growls curses under his breath and pulls wrenches and engine parts out of the sludge.

"Hey, I give you drinks when you're thirsty," says Texas, when Chuck holds the project up at him despairingly. "You sayin' robots don't get thirsty?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying!" Chuck wails, and Texas bristles, and the argument lasts for almost half an hour before Julie and Jacob gather up ingredients for a scouring spell and painstakingly clean the entire workbench.

"Texas ain't cleaning up this mess," says Texas. Dutch stares at him for a second, blank-faced, and then howls with rage and sprints off to flatten himself on Stronghorn's windshield, smearing his oily hands and shirt all over Texas's windows. Texas yelps and runs after him. Mike bursts out laughing and goes bounding off to join in the fun. Chuck sighs, put-upon and long-suffering, and asks Julie to put a barrier spell around his stuff. Julie pats him on the back and walks away.

…because the thing about Texas is that he really should be at a disadvantage, surrounded by vampires and werewolves and fae and wix. He should be hopelessly outmatched, easily the weakest Burner. But he's not. He likes proving it, too. He may not have the fantastic reflexes Mike has, or be as fast and quick-thinking as Chuck, he can't cast spells like Julie or build spectacular marvels like Dutch, but he's strong. That, he has confidence in.

At first, they're all a little bit protective of Teas. He's a tough dude, they figure when they first meet each other. He's good at what he does, they get that, but he's…human. He's solid, but he's not supernaturally tough or anything.

And then, two months after the Burners are officially formed, Texas challenges Mike to an arm-wrestling contest.

Mike accepts, bemused but willing, sort of half-laughing because really Tex, come on, you know I'm a—and then grunts and throws his weight into it as Texas comes within inches of flattening him. They struggle for four straight minutes before Texas lets out a roar of effort and Mike's knuckles hit the countertop.

Nobody tries to say "—hey, maybe you should hang back, Tex" after that. He's human, but he's one of them. Mike bounces up to him when he's in a wrestling mood, shoves his shoulders to get him to playfight like he's one of the pack. He shows up in Dutch's paintings, he even eventually gets over his problems with vampires enough to occasionally offer Chuck a drink. Julie accepts his gifts of random junk he finds around the city, and actually uses a surprising amount of it in her spells. "It's magical because he gave it to me," she explains, when she pulls out a half-ruined baby doll for a spell and the rest of the team gives her dubious looks. "Gifts are powerful."

"So Texas can do magic," says Texas.

Nobody tells him he can't.

"What's it like?"

Mike, who's sprawled out across the couch, makes a sort of questioning noise.

"Being a werewolf," Julie clarifies, and twists her sweaty hair up into a knot, grimacing as she peels away the strands that are glued to her neck. "I mean…we know none of us are like the school videos—" No kidding, Dutch mumbles, and rolls over onto his stomach to let the iridescent shimmer of his wings flutter in the breeze from the fan. "—but I don't think I ever really asked what it is like."

"Mmm." Mike yawns a yawn full of pointy teeth and drops his head back over the arm of the couch. "Uh…I can turn into a wolf?"

"Booo," says Texas.

"Well, I can!" Mike half-laughs, short and tired in the heat. "…it's always there, like…how you always know you could move part of your body if you wanted to. I can smell stuff, like, probably everything out to the blast doors. My ears are really good, high-pitched noises hurt pretty bad…what do you wanna know, dude?"

"Is it true we're your pack?"

That from Chuck, flat on the floor with a wet rag over his eyes. He's still wearing a shirt, but in this heat even he has replaced his long sleeves with a battered tanktop he stole from Mike. His back and shoulders are flushed and red. He lifts up the rag and grins as Mike rolls over and stares at him.

"We totally are," Julie says, half-laughing. "You're super-protective, the videos got that part right."

"You're my friends, of course I wanna protect you!"

"Mikey, you literally growl at people who get in our faces," Chuck points out. "You growled at a dragon for me. Plus after fights you start hanging on everybody and, uh…you've licked my face more than once, dude. It's a thing down here. We're officially your pack."

Mike huffs, disgruntled, but his brown cheeks are a little bit pink. "—yeah, okay. Sure, guys."

"So Mike's the alpha." Texas sounds kind of muffled—he's facedown a few feet from Mike's couch. "Texas gets the other one. The next one down."

"Wolves don't actually do those," Chuck says lethargically. "That's what happens when you get a bunch of strangers and shove 'em all in the same place, alphas aren't really a thing."

Texas snorts into the floor and rolls his head to one side to squint at Chuck through one eye. "You're just sayin' that 'cause you're the omegon."

"There's no omega," Mike says firmly.

"Yeah, and I wouldn't be one if there was," Chuck says, high-pitched and defensive. Texas snorts, but apparently decides it's too hot to argue. "Which there's not. Wer in the barracks, maybe, but not in their packs."

"So were you totally alpha in the barracks though."

"Texas," says Julie, long-suffering. "Let it go."

"…you can't be alpha when there's somebody holding your leash," says Mike.

There are a few seconds of silence after that—the words are uncharacteristically harsh, bitter with hatred the way Mike only ever is about his time as a Kane Co. cadet. Chuck reaches up clumsily from his place by the couch and pats at Mike's shoulder.

"What's it like to be wix?"

Julie shrugs. Chuck grimaces at her, glancing over to Mike and back again—Mike is frowning at the ceiling, obviously lost in thought. There's a muscle working in his jaw.

"…It…took me a long time to figure out there was something weird going on," Julie says, and Mike blinks and then looks over, distracted. "I just kept doing things I couldn't explain. There aren't a lot of mediums for magic up in Deluxe though, so until I came down to Motorcity—"

"—and found your familiar and accidentally put the evil eye on Jacob and put Mike to sleep for two days, yeah." Chuck picks up his wet rag with a limp hand and turns it over, pressing the cool side to his eyes instead. "I totally remember. Pretty hard to forget."

"Magic is really frustrating," Julie says, a touch defensively. "Sometimes I just…need to pick stuff up and keep it, I know it's magical and I can use it, but I don't know what for. If somebody wrote down all the ingredients and the words you can do them on purpose, but if there's a spell you're supposed to use, you don't get to know what the parts of the spell make until you have all of them. And you don't know how long you'll be able to use the spell you cast until it starts to crap out on you when you need it."

"At least you don't have to do the whole song and dance every single time," Dutch points out. "What if you had to stop in the middle of fights to get out the…" he waves a hand. "…tears and blood and…whatever you said you use for your illusions."

"The illusion spell lasts sixty-seven days," Julie says. "No matter how often I activate it, every sixty-seven days I need to refresh the spell. I know that one." The idea of her illusions cutting out when she most needs them gives her nightmares sometimes. They've saved her life more times than she can count.

"There's gotta be a way to measure," says Chuck. "..should try to program something. Magic tester." He doesn't make any attempt to move, though.

"Boring," says Texas. "What's up with the cat."

"She's a cat," says Julie.

"Yeah, what's up with her?" Dutch glances around. "…where is she?"

"Nine's upstairs," says Mike, wrinkling up his nose. "Smells like cat up there."

"That's because she's been sleeping on your beds when you're not around," says Julie. "She's here. I asked her not to sleep on me because it's so hot."

"She's…here?" Chuck shifts uncomfortably. He's almost okay around Julie's familiar by now, but he still gets jumpy when he knows she's nearby. "Where?"

"She's invisible."

"What?" Mike sniffs again, turning his head, searching. "Why'd you turn your cat invisible?"

"She did it herself." Julie holds out a hand—Chuck jumps and yelps as invisible, clawed feet pad over his stomach and Julie's fingers trace her familiar's head fondly. "She knows what she's doing."

"Cats can do magic?"

"Cats," says Julie with dignity, "—can do whatever they want."

"Okay, but—" Chuck reaches down and cautiously pushes at the invisible cat standing on him—Nine Lives meows accusingly, but lets herself be pushed off. "So, it works on computers too though, right? Like, can you enchant your way past Kane's firewalls?"

"Computers don't like magic." Julie traces a sigil in the air—illusions flicker around her and suddenly there are three or four sweaty, tired Julies lying around the room. "…helps with his security systems though. I mean, at least the illusion spell is easy, once you know how to do it, it's just learning new magic that's the problem! Kane's worked so hard to get rid of the magic up there, all I can find is fragments of old spells."

"Ahh, you'll handle it, Lisa." Texas shoves Dutch with a foot. "Your turn."

Dutch groans and pushes his foot away, but does at least deign to roll over. "…I'm allergic to iron? Grew these when I turned seven." He flutters his wings—iridescent, insectile, like dragonfly wings. "Jacob's plants grow better when I talk to them. And…I got glamour, but not as good as my brother Dar."

"Mmhm," says Julie, and rolls over, turning the pillow under her over to lie on the cool side. "How does that feel? Is it like casting an illusion?"

"You just…" Dutch raises his hands, and his eyes unfocus a little bit like he's looking at something far away that only he can see. "…kinda…picture how everything would be, if it was all better and brighter. And you just…push that picture out."

For just a second, the air around his hands seems to thicken and shine, and everything shifts and takes on that weird, shimmering light. Everything is indescribably more vivid somehow. Then Dutch lets out a breath sharply like he's dropping something heavy and the light vanishes.

"Don't usually do a whole room though," he says, and slumps back. "…fae don't do a bunch, nothin' big. Just little stuff."

"You fly," Mike points out. "Wish I could fly, that would be awesome."

"Like a hummingbird," Julie puts in, unexpectedly. "I didn't know fae could fly any direction."

"Oh, yeah." Dutch flutters his wings a little self-consciously. "Pretty cool. Good for painting the big stuff, y'know."

"And you make lights," Texas adds. "Little fairy-lights."

"…and I make lights," Dutch repeats, and cups a palm full of little, glinting light like fireflies. "Somebody else go. I'm done."

Mike waves a hand at Chuck. "Your turn, dude."

"Oh, y'know, I just…drink blood." Chuck shrugs, obviously embarrassed, and pushes his hair out of his face—there are sweaty strands sticking to the bridge of his nose. "Ugh. And I like it dark and cool and this is awful."

"Oh come on, bud." Mike stretches out. "None of us like this, that's not a vamp thing. Besides, you got wings, you can lose some of the heat like that."

"There's no room in here for my wings."

"It's not like you're flying with 'em! Just do what Dutch is doing."

"It helps," says Dutch, who's face-down again with his wings fluttering in the fan.

"Just go hang in your cave, bat-boy," Texas contributes. Nobody laughs, but he laughs at himself anyway. Chuck groans.

"I don't hang upside-down to sleep, Texas."

"I totally saw you do it!"

"I tried it out once!"

"Uugh." Julie waves a hand like she wants to swat everybody involved, but reaching is too much work. "It's too hot to argue, guys, stop it."

"Yeah, okay, sure." Chuck pointedly turns away from Texas. "Uh…I can kinda…feel your heartbeats right now, a little bit, just if I'm trying to."

"I thought you said you didn't hear any better than a normal person," Texas says, scandalized. "Texas thought you couldn't hear—"

"I don't hear them!" Chuck flaps his hands in the air over him, describing invisible shapes in the air. "I feel it and smell it and hear it and…and kinda none of those things, too. Uh…I heal really fast, but everything leaves scars? Which…I guess is a territory…marking…thing—not that I have one or anything, y'know, but if I had the scars I guess that would mean I had a…vampire family? Pack? Clan?"

"Colony," says Dutch, and "—you've got us," says Mike at the same time, a little defensively.

"Pack mom," Julie mumbles. Mike's ears flick self-consciously, but he doesn't argue the point.

"What's it feel like when you get hungry?" That comes, unexpectedly, from where Texas is lying. Everybody is silent for a second, surprised. Then Dutch breaks the silence.

"…yeah, man. How does that work? In the videos and stuff, they made it sound…real bad."

"It's not like the videos!" Chuck starts to sit up, frowning, and then apparently runs out of energy halfway up. He slumps back down again with a groan. "It just feels…kinda like just being hungry, but it's everywhere. Like, everything feels hungry. And it's really hard to ignore."

"Why would you ignore bein' hungry?" Texas snorts. "This is why you're a toothpick. Ka-chaw."

Julie starts a file on her drive, eventually; there's too much to remember for her to just keep it in her head. Things she picks up from watching, things she hears around Motorcity, things her boys discover about themselves in this weird new underground world. She watches Jacob grab Mike by the scruff of the neck to calm him down when he's getting rowdy, watches Dutch flutter his wings when he's got something he's not saying, sees the subtle changes when Chuck talks to other vampires, the way they show their fangs or hide them, spread their wings or tuck them neatly away or get rid of them entirely, like an unspoken language.

Texas is pure human, but his family is huge and has married in people of basically every species imaginable; some things he's utterly clueless about, but sometimes he comes out with something Julie never would have picked up on her own. Usually, it's in the form of little sayings and repeated phrases, which he throws out like they're common sense and which none of the other Burners have ever heard before. "Sadder than Mer in Michigan" and "pat a back, save a neck" and "never get in a staring contest with a dragon" and "iron, acorn, holly, ash" and "never let 'em bite on the first date".

Julie writes them all down, and after some pushing Texas even explains most of them. The list grows. Merfolk need filtered water to keep their gills clean. Vampire submission instinct, back of the neck. Dragon hypnotism/challenging reflex. Fae trap-making (?) (?). Vampire clan bonding.

Sometimes, there aren't sayings. Sometimes, she just has to ask.

Things like, "…Why do you sniff people when you meet them?"

Mike stares at her. "I don't."

"You do."

"Y'do, Mikey," Chuck contributes, from somewhere across the room.

"You see somebody for the first time in a while," Julie ticks steps off on her fingers. "…you say hi, you hug them or shake hands or wave or whatever, and then you lean in a little bit and take a big breath."

"That's not sniffing," Mike says, a little defensively. "I'm just checkin' up, y'know. On how they're doing."

"At least he's not sniffing anybody's butt," says Chuck. Dutch snorts. Texas sticks out a hand for a high-five.

Werewolf greeting—smells, Julie writes down, and closes the screen in favor of making butt jokes.

She doesn't tell the guys about the list for a long time. Partially because she knows somebody's going to jump straight to "you've been watching us?!" and partially because the only major things she hasn't confirmed yet are…conversation-stoppers.

"Instincts?" Mike asks, and wrinkles up his nose, scrolling down the list. "What does 'werewolf chin calm-down' mean?"

"Don't worry about it," says Julie, and reaches out as Mike starts to open his mouth to pat him lightly under the chin once or twice. Mike blinks at her, startled, and his eyes go darker brown, pupils dilating.

"…okay," he says, a little bit poleaxed.

"How did you do that?" Chuck looks awed. Mike glances at him and shakes himself awake a little bit. "Did you, like…find his off-switch, or what?"

"Dude," says Mike.

"Just something to defuse tension a little bit," says Julie, and darts out a hand. Chuck tenses up all over when her hand squeezes the nape of his neck; his head drops back to bare his throat, his ears flutter, his fangs abruptly retract. He bounces back faster than Mike and a second later he's jumping and pulling himself away from her hand, squinting at Julie suspiciously through his bangs.

"What was that?" he reaches up and rubs the back of his neck. "What did you do?"

"Instinct," says Julie, a little bit smugly. "I'm just trying to keep track of the things you guys do that aren't…human, and figure out what they mean."

"What y'mean how like I picked skinny up the other day and he screamed like a lady and hid in his room for like an hour?" Texas snorts. "…that was awesome."

"You can't just pin my wings like that!" Chuck interjects shrilly, "It's seriously not cool—"

"Did he hurt you?" Mike is frowning, protective.

"He—it—" Chuck's cheeks are rapidly going red. "Just don't, okay?! I thought you got this, Mikey, you hate people grabbing you from behind!"

"Uh." Mike blinks as everybody turns to look at him instead. "Yeah, well. It's weird. I don't know you like that, y'know?"

"No," says Dutch. "What?"

"It's just…" Mike gestures abstractedly. Chuck nods, apparently grateful to have somebody who agrees with him.

"Right?"

Julie privately adds the heading "Things that make the boys blush when they talk about it." Number one: getting grabbed from behind, apparently. It's not Julie's favorite thing either, she likes to know when somebody is about to touch her, but Mike and Chuck are both avoiding everybody's eyes and looking sheepish, so she has the sneaking suspicion that not liking it isn't exactly the problem here.

Can't have the list incomplete, Julie thinks to herself, guilty and embarrassed and fascinated, and dives in.

It's a little while after the weird, awful nano-zombie plague when somebody comes up to Mike and asks if he can join his pack.

Mike blinks at him and then grins and goes "Oh, you wanna be a Burner? Uh…well, I mean, it's not an easy job. But we manage, huh guys?" And the others are already glancing at each other, uncomfortable, knowing what's coming, but Mike has never been good at spotting stuff like this. It just doesn't occur to him.

The guy looks around at all of them, sitting there in their booth with their pizza, and goes "…this is your pack?"

"Yeah?" Mike's still smiling, like he doesn't even get it. "This is it!"

The guy sniffs again. "They're not like us."

"Nobody's like me," says Mike.

"You can't make a pack out of just anybody," says the guy, and wrinkles up his nose at Chuck and Dutch. He doesn't even bother to look at Texas or Julie. Mike's smile falls.

"This isn't just anybody," he says. "They're my Burners."

"Yeah," says the guy, "—but they're not a pack."

"Hey, you wanna fight?" Texas half-stands. The guy glances at him, almost startled, like it's the first time he's thought to notice him. "Texas will totally kick your fluffy butt!"

"Sit down," says the werewolf, dismissive, and turns back to Mike. "Look. If—"

"No," says Mike, mild and even but very firm, "—you were rude to my friend, and I think you need to apologize, dude."

"What?"

"Apologize," says Mike again. "And then I'm gonna need you to back off and let me eat with my pack."

The Terras don't attack head-on like Kane does. They track down the Burners in a restaurant, sitting at the tables outside and laughing. They surround them on rooftops and creep into the restaurant's kitchen.

Mike goes down first; he throws back his drink and then goes "Oh, this doesn't—" and then clutches at his stomach as the silver hits, retching and choking. Terra wix wind spells together like knots, a minefield of illusions and curses, twisting Julie up in her own magic. Spores burst on the ground around the table; ugly, mutant allium and vines with iron wire merged into them bear Dutch to the ground, yelling in pain as his skin burns and his strength drains away; Chuck drops to the ground, sneezing and then coughing and then just wheezing, clutching at his throat and struggling for air.

Six Terra-Dwellers are advancing with iron and silver weapons when Texas comes charging through the silver and the spores and the iron and the spell-traps, gunchucks swinging, and kicks their leader right in the face.

He's outnumbered, but either they thought he would be too worried about his friends to fight or they sorely underestimated human beings. Texas mows down mutant plants left and right, flipping and yelling and punching. Somebody throws a weighted net over him—the strands gleam silver and iron, devastating and inescapable for a werewolf or a vampire or a fae. Texas aims his gunchucks at the sky and shoots until the net is a bunch of smoking cinders, bursts through the tatters and karate-chops a Terra right in the throat.

"GO RUN HOME AND TELL KAIA," he whoops after the Terras as they run, "TEXAS AIN'T GOT NO WEAKNESSES! HOYAHH! YEAH!"

Texas and ROTH stomp on plants and incinerate them until Dutch is free, groaning and burned. Dutch puts his hands on Julie's temples, feeling out the chaos they've wrapped her in, turning it to his own hand and untangling her. Texas drags Chuck bodily away from the miasma of choking spores and pats his back while he coughs, eyes puffy and running, making terrible choking, wheezing noises. Mike has already thrown up twice and now he's on his feet, staggering and looking very, very dizzy but determined to join the fight. Texas helps him over to Chuck, settles Dutch and Julie down next to them, and stations himself standing over them, firmly on guard.

"I don't need to fly."

Everybody groans or rolls their eyes. Chuck folds his arms stubbornly. "I don't," he repeats. "I'm never gonna be able to fly faster than Mike can drive anyway, it's—not efficient. It's just not worth it."

"You don't fly to get places," Dutch says, and flicks his wings a couple of times, hovering off the ground for a second. "You fly because it feels right, man."

"Well, I don't want to," says Chuck.

"How do you know if you'll like it or not, if you've never tried?" Mike has always been fascinated by people who can fly, and more than a little bit envious—listening to Chuck steadfastly refuse to even try makes him grimace like he's in pain. "Come on, buddy…you gotta at least try it out."

"This shirt isn't made for—"

"I brought you one that is," Julie cuts him off and holds out the shirt. Chuck looks from it to her to the rest of the group, to Mike's big, sad wolf-puppy eyes. And then, finally, he growls and snatches the shirt out of her hands.

"I hate all of you," he says, without much force. "I gotta change."

"We'll all turn around," Julie assures him, and she and Mike move seamlessly to grab Texas's elbows and pilot him gently but unstoppably around until he's facing away, ignoring his muffled grumbles. "Okay, go."

Chuck mutters rebelliously to himself the entire time he changes into the new shirt. The clothing stores down here know how to tailor to their customers; the slits in the back of the shirt are barely visible when he pulls it on, just the occasional brief flash of pale skin. He stretches long and slow, rolling his neck and groaning as his back pops, and spreads his wings to their fullest extent.

"…okay," he says, resigned, and folds them. "I hate all of you."

"We heard you the first time, dude," says Mike fondly. "You look good!"

"It's exactly the same as my other shirt," says Chuck, but he looks kind of pleased anyway. "it's just got holes in it."

"How do you make sure the holes are exactly where the wings are going to come out?" There are no vampire-tailored clothes in Deluxe—Julie is peering curiously at the holes, pupils constricting to wide, curious slits. "You can't see where they're going to be before you bring them out."

"Path of least resistance." Chuck flaps once or twice, spreading them wide, and then pulls them in and tucks them against his back. Even folded, they're long enough to poke out over his head and almost brush the ground but his feet. Mike whistles appreciatively. "I don't know how they…know or whatever. They just do that."

"Yeah but they wouldn't fit, would they?" Mike holds out his hands, squinting and trying to eyeball length. "…the holes in your shirt are like ten, twelve inches, and they're…jeez, were they always this big?"

"Well I don't usually try to bring them out." Chuck flutters them a little bit, self-conscious. Texas reaches out to poke one leathery web—Julie smacks his hand. "And it's not like they show up full-size and then fit through."

"Really?" Julie looks up, distracted from Texas-wrangling. "What do they do, then?"

Chuck stares at her for a second, and then frowns, confused. "…uh…"

"Can you put them back and then bring them out again?" Dutch edges around so he can see the place the wings grow from. "I'll try to get a look this time."

"Try to do it slowly," says Julie.

"Yeah, slow as you can."

Chuck squeezes his eyes shut this time, obviously focusing, but if it makes any difference to the speed his wings appear it's not a visible one. It's still almost too fast to follow; the wings aren't there, and then they are, unfolding into existence. They don't appear tiny and then get bigger, and they don't fade in from intangibility—they just kind of happen, in an eye-stinging kind of way, flicking out of nowhere to their full spread.

"Dude, that is messed up," says Texas, fascinated, and pokes at the place the wings attach seamlessly to Chuck's back. Chuck jumps and squeaks. "What if I grab one when you try to put it away?"

Chuck yelps and pulls his wings away, tucking them in close to his body. "—that's how you rip my wings open! Dude, seriously please don't ever do that! Okay?!"

"You could break the wing," Julie contributes, and pulls up her enormous file of notes, scrolling down to the section on vampires. "Or just tear it open. I mean…that's just assuming you can hold on when they start to vanish, they pull really hard, but—"

"Texas totally could," says Texas proudly, and then stops, frowning. "…but uh. Wouldn't. Y'know. That'd be lame."

"Sure," says Chuck, still pale. "That's one word for it."

"Are we gonna talk all day?" Mike is practically bouncing in place, grinning a wide, fangy grin. "—or are we gonna fly?!"

Chuck wilts a little bit. "Mikey…" he glances over at the others and then leans in, raising one wing, hiding them behind the web to whisper. Whatever he says makes Mike laugh.

"Oh, come on, dude. Of course you can."

More whispering.

"You're not gonna."

Slightly fiercer whispering.

"That's not what I said, Chuckles, come on."

Chuck groans and flicks his wing away again, rubbing his face with both hands. Mike claps him on the shoulder bracingly, and everybody troupes up to the roof.

For the first few minutes, watching Chuck try to fly is kind of like watching Texas trying to breathe underwater. He only starts flying in the first place because Texas gets tired of his mumbling about air velocity and wind resistance and shoves him off the side of the hideout. He flails and flaps and spirals away like a drunk moth, trailing high-pitched, terrified noises as he goes.

Dutch laughs and takes off after him, hovering around him as he struggles to get upright and gaining height. Compared to the hummingbird-blur of Dutch's wings, Chuck's look unwieldy, almost clumsy. But once he gets the hang of it and stops getting in his own way, four or five strong wing-beats takes him speeding upwards, faster than Dutch can fly.

Mike lets out an exhilarated whoop and races out into the empty garage, staring up at the distant shapes circling overhead.

"…I might be able to enchant you up some wings," Julie points out quietly. "I've never seen a spell for it, but that doesn't mean it can't be done."

For a second Mike's face lights up with fascinated glee at the idea. Then he catches himself and laughs it off. "Aw, no," he says mildly. "You've got enough stuff to worry about! It looks fun though, huh?"

"Eh," says Texas.

"You should try gliding!" Julie calls up. Far overhead Chuck kind of lurches around, apparently trying to follow her suggestion—he lists badly to one side, almost falling out of the air. A panicked yelp filters down and he goes back to flying in wobbly circles. "Just spread your wings and angle down! Just—ugh, Texas?"

Texas cups his hands around his mouth. "SPREAD 'EM AND POINT DOWN!" he bawls up at the two dim shapes above them. "LEAN! FORWARD! AND THEN DO SOMETHIN' COOL ALREADY!"

"I seriously don't know what I did," says Julie, and squints at the ancient pages of one of Jacob's paper books, trying to read the scribbled hand-writing. "I can't read any of this! I told you you were ticking me off, you know magic is harder to control when I'm mad-"

"?ydaerla ti xif tsuj uoy nac ,enif yakO" says Texas grumpily, and swats at Chuck as he eases in closer, grinning, aiming a filming screen at Texas's face. "?asseT ,kceh eht tahW .siht otni ton OS si saxeT !ti tiuQ"

"I have no idea what you just said," says Chuck, squeaky with repressed laughter, "this is great."

"It's not in here." Julie frowns and looks from the book to the collection of odds and ends she used for the curse. "None of this would've happened if you would just stop calling me that stupid nickname, y'know. Okay, but it might be...close to this one? It's got the rat skull, even if it's a mutant one, and a...what's this plant?"

"Is it that thing witches are always using in stories and stuff?" Mike pokes at the slightly shriveled greens dubiously, sniffs and then wrinkles his nose. "...uh...nightshade?"

"It's a leek, you yahoo." Jacob swats him on the back of the head. "—go wash your hands."

"Man, I wish I could magically make Texas shut up," says Dutch dreamily.

".sttub ruoy LLA kcik annog m'I" Texas grumbles.

"He's not shut up though," says Julie, frustrated. "He's just as loud as he always is!"

"Yeah, but hilarious," says Chuck, and then yelps and dodges back as Texas growls and swipes at him. "Hey!"

"!nam elttil ,uoy thgif ll'I"

"Okay," says Julie, and digs in her pockets, pulling out odds and ends. "Okay, let's try this. Hold really still."

Texas holds obediently still, glaring sulkily at everybody as Julie lays out mysterious objects, sometimes pausing and reordering things, sometimes closing her eyes and reaching out blindly, sometimes stopping to rub a piece of dried plant between her palms or break a piece of wood or metal casually between her fingers. Finally, she seems satisfied by the items laid out in front of her; she sits back, raises her hands and closes her eyes for a second, breathing in deep. Nine Lives jumps up behind her on the booth, winds around her shoulders and stares down at the objects on the table, and when Julie opens her eyes they're the same shade of pure, slit-pupilled gold as her familiar's.

"-it is to be as I command," she starts, and says something that makes everybody's ears pop, syllables that slip through the air and seem to twist weirdly between her mouth and everybody else's ears. The plants on the table in front of her flutter into the air and then burn into thin, spiralling pillars of ash. A bird's skull flips over and clatters against the tabletop, beak snapping. Texas jumps and grabs his throat.

There's stunned silence for a second after that. Julie lowers her hands again, eyes fading back to darkness, pupils widening from their cat-like slits, and looks at Texas expectantly.

"...well?"

Texas clears his throat, frowning.

"Say something," Mike prompts. "Y'know, anything."

,,˙˙˙pᴉp ᴉʇ ʍoɹʞ¿,,

"...dammit," says Julie, softly but with feeling, and pulls the book over again. "...okay fine. Let's take this from the top."

The first time after the race Mike lets the other Burners come with him during negotiations with the Duke, Chuck offers the Duke's Number 2 a drink.

It's polite, and pretty impressively brave as far as Mike's concerned, since the lady is honestly much scarier than her boss is most of the time. Mike keeps an eye on them as he talks to the Duke, and sees her take one business-like drink and then offer one arm without comment. Chuck glances up at her, and then edges cautiously forward and bends down over her arm.

"I said do we have a deal, Mr. Chilton."

"I'm listening," says Mike, even though he totally wasn't for the last couple of seconds. "You're going to have to offer us more than that if you want a part big enough to go in that thing." He didn't actually hear the last price the Duke quoted at him, but the guy's limousine-tank has parts half the size of one of the Burners' cars. Even with the Duke providing the materials, the labor involved is still going to take probably the better part of a week. Whatever he was offering, it was probably not enough.

The Duke is just starting to scowl, eyebrows drawing thunderously down, when Chuck straightens up from Number 2's arm and frowns.

"Uh," he says, "that doesn't taste like—"

There's no warning; one second he's upright and the next he's crumpling over, shuddering all over, curling in on himself.

"Chuck!" Mike rushes over to him, dropping to his knees, shaking one skinny shoulder. "Dude, you okay? What's up?"

Chuck just stares blankly ahead, eyes blank and face slack, breathing fast and shallow. His face is going abruptly red; his pupils visibly constrict as Mike shakes his shoulder. Number 2 lifts her bleeding wrist to her mouth—when she takes it away again the wound hisses and seals shut in a plume of white-gold dragonfire smoke.

"You." Dutch is incandescently furious. The air around him is seething with glamour, but it isn't brightening or beautifying anything. His face is suddenly inhuman, eyes too bright and fingers too long and wings buzzing. "You're a dragon too!"

"There's only one dragon 'round here," says the Duke, and puts a casual arm around his second-in-command's shoulders, spreading his wings around them. "…and there's only one vamp who gets to drink off him. A-get back!"

"You drink dragon blood?!" Number 2 cocks an eyebrow at Mike and doesn't answer, but the look on her face is answer enough. "You knew!" Mike's teeth are growing sharper, longer by the second. "There's dragon blood mixed in with yours, you knew it would hurt him!"

"My dear boy," the Duke says, and smiles an utterly insincere smile full of white, pointed teeth. "We never offered him her blood. He made the offer himself, and she accepted in good faith."

"I'm gonna—" Dutch is practically lifting off the ground, face feral and fierce like only an angry fae's can be.

"Oh, settle down." The Duke talks over him, waving his cane. "He's not gonna die. Take him home, ice him down, he'll be fine."

Chuck is not fine. He lies still in Mutt's passenger seat as Mike speeds back towards the hideout; by the time they get there Mike has turned the air on full blast to cold, but he can still feel the heat radiating toward him from the place Chuck is sitting. His skin is flushed scarlet, so hot it almost burns to touch. His eyes wander, and sweat trickles down his cheeks and the bridge of his nose like tears.

They catch Jacob up as soon as they get home. When he hears the words 'dragon blood' Jacob immediately pulls out his book and sits down to dig through it, searching for any spell that might help. He sends Mike and Julie to dig out seven or eight ancient ice packs from the freezer, Dutch to get him more books, Texas to fill up the biggest pitcher in the kitchen with ice water. And Chuck just lies there and shakes and sweats and burns.

The ice packs seem to help just a little bit; Chuck whimpers when the cold touches his skin, and the rime melts off of the ice packs where they're touching him in tiny plumes of steam. But it takes less than five minutes for the ice to turn into water. Julie holds out both hands, focusing, and the heat rises out of the icepacks in a haze and dissipates. They crackle and snap, freshly frozen.

Chuck only gets worse over the next hour. He drifts in and out of consciousness, he tries to run from monstrous hallucinations, he drinks the ice water they give him and breathes out steam and hot air that shivers like the heat-haze over blacktop. His fever spikes three times to temperatures that burn the hands of anybody touching him, and on the third spike he starts jerking and trembling all over, eyes rolled back and bloodshot.

It's Dutch's idea to rip Jacob's mini-freezer off the wall, and Jacob and Julie's magic grows it large enough to manhandle Chuck's lanky, trembling body inside and prop the door just barely open. Julie shows Jacob the freezing spell, and they trade off freezing the icepacks, bringing the air temperature down.

They keep him in the freezer for most of the night, until one last burst of heat that hits so sharply it turns all the frost in the freezer into a cloud of hot steam. And then the heat fades, and the door swings open, and Chuck sits up in his soaked shirt and stares around and goes "—hey guys. Did Texas knock me out with a water balloon again?"

The first thing Mike does is hug him. The second thing he does is ban everybody from going anywhere near the Duke, ever.

"Oh come on," says Chuck, "What are you talking about, dude, I feel awesome!" And then, as everybody catches him up, talking over top of each other, "—seriously?"

"—and you coulda died," Jacob says. "I'm with Mike on this one."

"You're not any safer, though," says Dutch. "Seriously, man, you should have backup."

"Okay," says Mike. "But Chuck's not allowed to go near him again."

Chuck bounces off the walls for an entire week. He doesn't get much less anxious, but now it comes with nervous-cat speed and an unexpected boost in strength that makes him accidentally swat Texas off his feet the first time Texas starts play-punching him. Chuck mentions at one point that he's kind of enjoying himself, and he doesn't remember the bad part anyway, so maybe he should try that…again…some…

He stops as soon as he sees the look on Mike's face, and hastily reassures everybody it was a joke. If diluted dragon blood was as bad as they all told him, of course he wouldn't actually go drink with the Duke. Mike sniffs the air and frowns tightly, and Chuck only manages to smile at him for a second before he coughs awkwardly and looks away again.

Eventually, the strength and speed fade, and Chuck's hands get cold again. Mike eventually relents on his No-Duke Policy, but Chuck still avoids the mansion whenever he can.

Until G-Day.

Mike's cuffs are silver.

That's not the first thing Julie notices, but it is the worst; Mike's eye is black, his lip is split, his shoulders are hunched miserably down and his wrists are burned because his cuffs are freaking silver. Behind Julie, feeds from her dad's bots show the wreckage of East Side. The burning buildings. Mike slumps in on himself, eyes squeezed tight shut like he's trying to block them out; he doesn't even seem to hear her come in.

"Mike," says Julie softly.

Mike lurches upright—for a second his eyes flash yellow and his fangs snap, and then there's an angry hiss as the silver burns fresh, livid marks on his skin. Mike makes a pained, choked noise and falls back; his eyes go brown, his fangs retract.

"…Jules," he says, ragged. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm here to get you out," says Julie, but she doesn't move. Mike's face is a patchwork of bruises. Did her dad do this?

"You can't do magic on these," Mike says, and twitches his hands in their gleaming cuffs. The motion makes him wince. "Silver."

"I know." Julie reaches into her pockets, working more on instinct than knowledge; she twists her hand and pulls out a scrap of metal stained gold with Dutch's paint, a thread from Texas's fraying boxing gloves, a strand of Chuck's hair, a sprig of withered leaves from Jacob's garden. Mike makes a startled noise when she reaches out to press her hands to his burned wrists, and then slumps forward and rests his chin against her temple, leaning his cheek into her hair and taking fast, panting little breaths like an animal in pain.

Most spells have words. Julie closes her eyes, feeling more than seeing as the pieces she's laid out around her rise into the air and burn away. She's waiting for some kind of ancient spell to come to mind, some old, powerful words, but instead she just leans into the hoarse, pained sound of his breathing and whispers "Shhhh…"

She feels the magic shift, feels something change, but when she opens her eyes and leans away everything is exactly how it was. Mike has his eyes closed—maybe she put him to sleep?

Then he opens his eyes and smiles at her. "…wow," he says, and his whole body relaxes, untenses. "Thanks, Jules."

"I don't…I don't know what I did."

"Helped," says Mike simply, and jerks his head up toward one burned wrist. "…doesn't hurt any more."

Julie can't afford to cry, she can not afford to cry, but she feels her lip tremble for a second. Her throat knots up and her eyes burn.

"…there's gotta be more I can do," she says, and he smiles at her and leans forward to press his face into her hair again.

"You did plenty," he says. "Look after them for me, okay?"

Mike wouldn't hurt her.

Julie knows it, Mike knows it—even her dad knows it, and he stares Mike down across a thousand-foot gap full of nothing but air and says as much. You're not going to hurt her. You and I both know you like to pretend you're more than an animal, Chilton.

Julie can't see Mike's face but she knows. She knows it's true. Her dad is going to call his bluff, and Mike is going back into that tiny awful cell with the burning silver cuffs, where Red can hurt him until her dad gets tired of having him alive. She can't let that happen. Julie stares straight ahead and hears Mike growl softly in his chest as her dad advances on them. She can hear the fear in that sound, she knows he's bruised and scared and furious and in pain, she knows what she has to do.

Julie jerks, pretending to struggle in terror, and slams her elbow back into Mike's cracked ribs. Mike lets out a sharp, strangled snarl of pain; Julie struggles against his hold and arches her head back and feels Mike snap at her on pure instinct, feels his teeth drag across the skin of her throat with a sharp, burning sting.

Hot blood trickles down her neck, and over the sudden, terrified ringing in Julie's ears she hears her dad yell "No!"

She feels Mike remember himself, jerk back, and then realize what she did. Feels him pull himself together, panting, and then force himself to lean back in. Feels his breath trembling against her throat as he bares his teeth and snarls.

"Don't hurt her," Kane says, and holds out his hands. "Please don't hurt her."

Mike can smell Julie hurting. He can taste her blood, and that's the worst thing, the worst thing, knowing what her blood tastes like. He can smell her fear and her pain, and knows she's scared of him. She trusts him, but she can't help it. She's scared of the animal. She can feel the wolf against her back, the fangs on her throat.

But Kane is finally taking this seriously, and Mike can't afford to blow Julie's cover. He growls and snarls. He digs his claws in as gently as he dares. He lets his eyes go gold and reflect the sunset. He bargains with an empty hand. He lets her go.

He watches Julie realize it's a trap a second before he does, and then she's gone, gone gone, vanishing into the sunset, and Kane is coming at him and there's no more time to think.

"You traitorous dog," Kane snaps, and hits him with a punch that feels like a sledgehammer, knocks him back off his feet. Change, his body screams at him, the adrenaline sings in his veins. Change. If he wants the animal let him have it, if he wants fangs instead of fists—Mike shakes it off and dives forward, tries to land a kick and feels the world spin sickeningly as Kane catches his leg and swings him bodily around, throws him across the warm metal. Mike skids, comes up on his feet and feels his jaw pop as his fangs grow. Feels his nails turning into claws. "I should have had you put down as soon as I saw you!"

Change, change CHANGE—

"I gave you everything—"change, you have to you can't win like this— "—I would have made you my heir!" No more room gotta get past him go on four legs, tear him open— "And you threw it away!" He pulls Mike up by the throat, and some part of him wants to claw and writhe and try to get away, but there's nothing but empty space under him.

Mike opens his eyes, and lets them turn brown. Lets his fangs and his claws shrink away, and meets Kane's eyes.

"You were like a son to me!" Kane snarls, and Mike can smell him hurting, and that's the worst thing. "You filthy monster."

"I was never gonna be what you wanted me to be," Mike grits out, and feels wind rush up past him from the city far, far below.

"No," says Kane. "You never were." And he lets go.

When Mike is fourteen, he's promoted to cadet.

Mister Kane tells Mike himself. He's huge to Mike—fourteen years old with the might and power of Kane Co. looming over him. He bends down a little bit to talk to Mike, and he smells like interest and he smells friendly and scary and he looks strong and Mike is amazed. Mike wants to please him more than he wants anything else in the world.

"Cadet Chilton, sir!" says Mike, and salutes. "You're Mister Kane! Hi!" So eager to please he can't stand still, grinning so wide his cheeks hurt, excited and young and ready to protect his city. His people, his family.

"Hello, Cadet Chilton," says Mister Kane, and instead of saluting back he reaches out and puts a hand on Mike's head, warm and heavy and soft. "Do you know the Oath of Deluxe?"

He does, he knows it by heart, and he stands up even straighter, fourteen and ready to serve. "I solemnly swear loyalty to Deluxe," he says, and Mister Kane smiles at him.

Mike is going to help so many people. Mike is going to change the world.