Melissa and Chelsea were waiting for me under the big tree in Melissa’s yard, the one I’d used to use to get from my second story room to hers, back when the house next door had been mine. (Whoever owned it now had changed the gardens. I didn’t like it.)

Melissa threw her arms around me, knocking me off-balance into Chelsea. “Kayden!”

“Hello,” I told the cloud of curly hair pressed against my face.

“So are you a badarse mage now?” Chelsea asked. “Ready to rain your magical terror down upon the world?”

“Um. I can make some basic potions.”

“Can you make potions that catch fire and rain your magical terror down upon the world?”

“You mean molotov cocktails? Are you asking if I learned to make molotov cocktails at school?”

“No, I’m asking if you learned to make magical molotov cocktails at school.”

“No.”

“Lame.”

“My teacher magically melted a metal statue in her bare hands once.”

“… Less lame.”

“How is school, though?” Melissa asked. “Nobody’s giving you trouble?”

“Trouble? Uh, no.”

“He’s a big boy, Liss, he doesn’t need us to protect him,” Chelsea said, clapping me on the back. Then she shot me a worried look. “You would tell us if they were though, right?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said, rolling my eyes. “What about you? Surely I should be worried that foul villains beseiged my fair maidens the moment I, their glorious and charismatic knight, was no longer around to protect them.”

About thirty seconds later, the girls recovered enough from their laughter for Chelsea to gasp, “Sure, Kayden.”

I crossed my arms. “You’re lucky I’m difficult to offend.”

“You’re literally incapable of fighting,” Melissa pointed out. “Because of the curse.”

“Not incapable. Sensibly refrained because of the curse. Which is no longer an issue; we can now be pretty sure violence won’t wake it up. So.”

“So you can protect us by raining your magical terror down upon our enemies?” Chelsea asked.

“What is it with you and magical terror?”

“What is the point of magic, if not to reign terror?”

“Heal the sick? Make cheap electricity? Discover the secrets of the universe?”

“Haven’t seen many mages doing that around here.”

“Okay, but to be fair, they’re not raining magical terror down upon anything, either.”

“… Fair.”

“Can you fight?” Melissa asked, apparently not willing to let this go.

“I have been in two fights,” I said, as dignified as I could.

“Did you win them?”

“I… did not lose them.”

“A teacher broke it up, then?”

“No! My, um, my boyfriend broke up the first one.” I rubbed my hand, remembering how much it had hurt to punch di Fiore.

“And the other?”

“A, ah, a giant magical lake monster broke it up.”

“I’m sorry, a giant magical lake monster?!”

“It’s not that exciting,” I mumbled.

“Not that exciting? When did this happen?”

“Um. A while ago? Maybe eight months?”

“Before you went back? You got attacked by a giant magical lake monster and you went back?”

‘Well, I’d already been attacked by the giant magical lake monster on my first day of school so it wasn’t all that big a deal’ seemed like the wrong thing to say, so I just shrugged.

“Of course he went back!” Chelsea said. “It’s a giant magical lake monster! Who wouldn’t go back for that? Did you find out anything cool about it?”

“I found out,” I said, “that if you try to swim in its lake, it will attack you.”

“… Handy to know.”

“Better than not knowing.”

“… Fair.”

“So how’s life with you guys? Getting into massive amounts of trouble without me?”

“Melissa won’t play the tracker game with me,” Chelsea complained. “Make her play it.”

“I have better things to do than crawl up drainpipes in the rain looking for tracking devices,” Melissa protested.

“Oh, right. Don’t want to interrupt your fanfiction schedule.”

“You are illiterate, Chelsea. Illiterate.”

Chelsea grinned playfully. “Maybe dragons are just boring?”

Melissa put one hand over her heart and closed her eyes. “You have wounded me! I will not allow this offense to stand! Lord Kayden, veteran of two entire fights, I demand that you defend my honour!”

“I don’t know if I’m really much of a lord,” I protested. “I think I’m more of a jester type.”

“A bard,” Chelsea said decisively. “He’s a bard.”

“What the fuck is a bard?”

The conversation moved on made our way into town. There wasn’t much I could say about myself that didn’t merit at least an hour of background explanation, so I mostly listened to the pair talk about the lives of people I used to know well enough but hadn’t even thought about for the past year. After about an hour of aimless wandering, we stopped at the ice cream place, and Chelsea pointed her plastic sundae spoon at me and announced, “While you’re here, you should come onto our youtube channel.”

“Um,” I said. “No.”

“It’ll be great! We still get occasional questions about you, you know? From people looking at our old stuff. I bet people would be interested.”

“The entire world saw me make enough of an idiot of myself at the trial, right? They don’t need a repeat performance.”

“You don’t have to, but it’d be fine,” Melissa said. “Everyone was really on your side over that whole curse thing. You’d been so responsible with it for years and then some bigots decided to lie about you attacking their son for a quick cash grab; it really drew a lot of attention to the anti-curse victim bias in law enforcement and media.”

“Okay but that’s not what… that’s not how it… can we not talk about this? I want to forget that whole trial happened, to be honest.” Not that it was easy. Random townspeople kept catching sight of me and doing double takes.

“We can talk about something else,” Melissa said quietly, “but only if you promise to react normally and not turn around and look.”

“Sure,” I said, grabbing Chelsea’s arm when she immediately made to turn around and look.”

“I’m pretty sure that guy in the pink shirt is following us.”

We were careful not to react to this. We kept walking, making small talk, and a couple of shops down I stopped to look in a window and caught sight of the man in the reflection. I didn’t recognise him, but that didn’t mean much; he could be a local that neither I nor Melissa happened to know. Our town wasn’t that small. I didn’t see a mage mark, but that also meant nothing; it was hard to distinguish that kind of thing in a window reflection anyway, and he could very well have one under his clothes somewhere. He could be a local, coincidentally in the same places we were. He could be a mage, wanting… what? To kidnap me? Unlikely. He could be some random out-of-town reporter who’d found out I was going to be around for two weeks and wanted to catch whatever residual interest there might still be in me. Hard to say.

I warned Chelsea what I was going to do with a few taps to her arm, and old code of ours, and a couple of blocks later stopped talking mid-sentence to duck into an alley at a dead run.

The butcher had a back door leading into the alley that he never bothered to lock. I slipped inside and dodged around him unseen easily – I’d perfected this technique when Chelsea had hid our tracker under the meat mincer that one time. I exited out the front door on a completely different street, cut across the road and through a private garden, and jumped up onto Miss Simpson’s decorative stone wall that would take me high enough for a jump onto her roof.

I barely made the jump and landed on the old tin with far more noise than I’d expected. I’d grown since I’d last done this, and I was starting to realise that I was kind of out of shape. Not completely out of shape, but jumping across rooftops wasn’t something I could do casually any more. Ugh, maybe I should join a pit comp team, if only to stay fit. Or at least do more rock climbing. Lift weights with Magistus. Something.

I lay flat on the roof and waited. The man who’d been following us could certainly canvass an area; it was only twelve minutes later that he strode briskly past, scanning for me. He was smart enough to check the roofs and trees (you’d be amazed at how many people just don’t think to look up), but I’d hidden on this very rooftop from cops often enough to know how to conceal myself.

So. He had been following us; specifically, he’d been following me. And he wasn’t a reporter or anything, or he would’ve just left and come back the next day. And he probably wasn’t here to kidnap me or anything either – me running off had to have clued him in to the fact he’d been noticed, and at that point a kidnapper would withdraw and come back later, right? Not take the risk of trying to follow their target through their hometown.

And there, on the back of his neck. Peeking out over his collar. The bright white lines of a mage mark.

Alright then.

So he was a mage, apparently without the ability to magically detect me, keeping an eye on me for… someone. Someone who wanted to be appraised of my movements, for unknown reasons. Who had I pissed off enough for this? Plenty of people, probably. Who had I pissed off enough who was rich enough to afford this?

Plenty of people, probably.

The Fiore seemed the most likely person to have hired this guy. I didn’t know anything I could use to hurt him, or have any intention of plotting against him, but he was paranoid and he’d approached me to try to get information several times before. If he thought that Miratova was assembling a group of politically elite teens or whatever then the whole ‘human familiar’ thing probably had him extra worried.

Or my follower might be Acanthos, for similar reasons. Max rarely talked about his family, but it was hard to miss how important political reputation was to them. The narrative we were going with to stop copycats from getting themselves killed was that Max Acanthos had safely created a human familiar (which was true) with the heavy implication that this had involved some genius new process (which wasn’t) and that we, or at least Max, knew what to expect and what was going on (which definitely wasn’t). Even I could see what a big political boost something like this was to Max, and to his family. So it wasn’t out of the question that they might take an interest. (Although if they wanted to know anything about me, they could just have Max ask me and save themselves the trouble. What did they expect? That I’d lie?)

Which I supposed made the third most likely person or group to employ someone to follow me… absolutely every other mage family that might have any interest in the Acanthos family. Or in familiarity. Or in magical science in general.

Or the guy might be employed by no one, and himself be a mage scientist.

So I had no idea who was following me. Excellent work, Kayden. Brilliant deduction. Time to try my usual approach instead, then.

When he gave up on trying to find me, the guy would probably tail Melissa and Chelsea again, hoping I’d meet back up with them. But they’d be heading home by now, so unless he wanted to lurk outside one of their houses like a creep he’d next try to find me at…

I went back to the motel, keeping as out of sight as I could, and found him sitting casually outside one of the rooms, pretending to read a book. I dropped out of a tree right in front of him, gratified to see him jump a little.

“Hi.”

He looked relieved to see me, but not particularly surprised. He gave a little nod. “Mr James.”

“And you are?”

“Henry.”

“Right. Why are you following me, Henry?”

He pulled up his right sleeve and showed me a tattoo on his inner wrist, done in the same bright white ink as a mage mark. An outline of a sword inside a diamond. I had a vague memory of sword imagery being somehow important, but other than that, it meant nothing to me.

“Yeah, that doesn’t answer my question.”

“A lot of people have problems with the Refujeyo,” he explained. “If they wanted to cause trouble, you’re of potential interest. The higher-ups thought it best to make sure there wasn’t any trouble.”

Refujeyo… Max had explained the organisation of Refujeyo to me once, labelling the three divisions with a book, scales, and a sword. Education, law, security. This man worked for Sekura Refujeyo.

“You’re here to stop upstart mad scientists or political rivals from kidnapping me?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“And the chances of that happening are…?”

He shrugged. “Low, in my opinion. But high-level risk assessment isn’t my department. The chances are, of course, lower if you don’t run off and hide and prevent me from doing my job.”

“If I can evade you, I can evade threats, right?”

“If I were a threat to you, Mr James, I would have shot to kill the moment you started running.” He spoke without any malice, simply stating a fact.

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Skimmed my eyes over him, trying to see where he might be hiding a gun and coming up with nothing, then realising that didn’t actually matter then I had no idea what his spell did.

“Yeah, well,” I said, “if anyone wanted to kidnap me, shooting – ”

“There would be no point in abducting you without also abducting Miss Kylie,” Henry said. “She would be the more important, and therefore the first, target. And she is fine, meaning that anybody coming for you right now has another goal in mind.”

“And, and the chances of that are…?”

“Very low, as I said. But let’s try to keep them as low as possible, hmm?”

“R-right.”

“Good day, Mr James.”

I would’ve liked to come up with some kind of witty parting word, but my mind was blank. So I took the dismissal for what it was and headed for my room.

Apparently I was in enough danger to need a bodyguard.

Fantastic.