Page 20 of Wanted: Rogues and Bards

There was a digestive pause. “How the hell did you know?”

“You think with your stomach, so it’s always a food word, and we had pumpernickel bread last night. Now open the fucking door!”

He heard some grumbling and the unlocking of the door, then Malfas allowed it to swing open. Fenric stepped right in and then paused, looking around the room with growing dismay.

In the four hours he’d been gone, the long dining room table had been destroyed—literally cracked right down the middle—the chairs were now kindling unless someone was willing to use an arsenal of mending spells, and there were black marks across the floor in a sunburst pattern, with matching black sooty marks on the walls.

Maxie stood in the middle of the chaos, his face heavily smudged with soot and the whites of his eyes vivid against the mess. His curls had been blown back and looked frozen, as if he were still caught in a powerful wind.

An open grimoire lay in Maxie’s hands.

Which pretty much explained everything.

Malfas waved Hapi in, as happy as a trash panda with a whole array of trash cans to dig through. “Hapi, come, come.”

“Why? Why do I need to be here?” There was a tinge of annoyance to his voice, but Fenric didn’t miss the curious thread of excitement as well.

“To watch! To see, see!”

“Your kinks are showing again,” Fenric muttered, already exhausted and he hadn’t even learned what the fuck had been happening while they were gone.

Malfas stuck his tongue out. “Excuse you, we were doing a very important experiment, and I want Hapi’s take on this⁠—”

“It didn’t occur to you to do the very important experiment outside so you didn’t have to use several days’ worth of mending spells to undo this mess?”

Malfas stared at him, realization blooming over his face. “Ah. Oops.”

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” Hapi said, then sighed. “Puppy, you are not hurt, correct?”

“What?” Maxie held up a hand to stave off his concern. “Oh, no. No, I am unharmed. The damage is all my doing, in fact. I do apologize. Um, so Mal suggested that perhaps my magic was not limited to cooking. Since we decided to not make food while you were out of the house, we thought this might be an opportunity to try one of the other forms of magic. Malfas generously loaned me this grimoire and had me read off spells at random to see if anything else sparked. Um. Well, none of the spells have worked as intended.”

“Hence the damage?” Hapi tapped a finger to his chin before he maneuvered around a destroyed chair and gestured for the grimoire. “What all have you tried?”

Interesting how nothing else worked, though. Was Maxie’s magic confined to cooking? Fenric hadn’t considered his magical limitations. This would give Maxie a very narrow magical skill set, but in the right hands, with the right timing, his specialty could be incredibly lethal. Fenric could think of two or three jobs offhand that would have gone a lot smoother if Maxie had been with them.

Seeing the club propped up in the corner, safely out of the way, Fenric grumbled to it, “Seriously, Ezlan, can’t you talk common sense into your follower?”

Malfas sniffed, chin at a haughty angle. “Show some respect to my god’s most ardent follower. Or my god will eat you.”

“Is he gentle?”

Maxie overheard that and busted up laughing.

Fenric shot him a wink, which made the kid laugh even harder.

This was another pro for adopting Maxie into the fold. The kid’s sense of humor aligned pretty well with their own. A point in their favor, considering their humor was a mix of raunchy, deadpan, and dry. Over the past week, Maxie had come out of his shell. The little sneak still wasn’t sharing anything about his past, which was understandable, but he was relaxing and making more comments. He laughed more and teased his new housemates.

Hapi even smiled at the byplay, although he was focused on flipping through the grimoire. Finally, he stopped and stared at Maxie thoughtfully for a full second. “I believe, after seeing the results of your cooking experiments with Malfas, these spells all backfired because you are an alchemist-type magic user.”

“Oh!” Maxie lit up, eyes bright and shining. “Is that what I am? But I don’t know exactly what that is? Is it different from Malfas? Does that mean I can make potions and such?”

“I believe so. At first, we thought you might be a sorcerer. They have an innate magic ability, usually passed down through the bloodline. It was always possible you maybe had a sorcerer somewhere in your family history you didn’t know about. However, their magic, when it first manifests, tends to appear in odd and unexpected ways. It’s almost never focused on a single medium and on a single result, so after many experiments, we were forced to chuck that idea out the window.”

“We also knew you couldn’t be a wizard,” Malfas chimed in. “All their magic is taught, and through the experiments, we couldn’t see any evidence that what you were doing was learned from another.”

“Also, there are warlocks, which are a type of magic user who derives the bulk, if not all, of their powers from a source, like a demon or a god. In the case of Malfas, his powers come from his club⁠—”

“They come from Ezlan, the constellation who has chosen to possess my club and has graciously offered me a bit of his power so I can help do his bidding,” Malfas cut in sharply.