Chapter Seventeen

Less than two days later, Will was at the Crossroads Diner, the cold winter weather keeping all but the most determined of students out and away for the night, but it was good, because it had let Will spend the time healing up from his duel at the gathering. He hadn't had any damage to his human form, but he felt like the damage to his werewolf form being repaired exhausted him a little bit more than he'd thought that it might, even if it was all happening in some other world he didn't directly see. He'd felt like he was dragging, like he had to work twice as hard to move half as much, and he'd been told to expect that, as he was recovering from the injuries he'd sustained, which had been nothing to sneeze at.

Explaining the imperceptible injuries to all his partners had taken a bit, and they had been less concerned about the duel than they were about Trish being added to Will's pack, although Will had told them all it certainly wasn't a guarantee, even if Trish had made it sound like a near certainty. It was going to be a complicated few months, that much Will was certain of.

While he'd told them all about it as a group, he'd spent most of his free time over the last few days answering questions, at least as best as he could, because both Dina and Lacey had been asking them non-stop, although thankfully Freya had been doing her best to help answer many of the questions about the bigger world that they'd all now found themselves in. April had already had a brief touch with the mythos world when vampires and werewolves had come into the Diner earlier, and as such, the girls had fought to establish an order of who was hanging around with Will in the Diner and when, simply so that there was always at least one or two of them there with him.

Freya, the only one of them who didn't have a full-time job, had agreed to become one of the Diner's regular employees to help out, meaning some days there, such as this one, there could be up to two members of his Pack hanging around the Diner. Freya was working the counter, Will was manning the kitchen, and Lacey had been hanging around, chatting with both of them when they weren't really doing much, which had been much of the Sunday afternoon, and even now heading into evening, it looked like the day was mostly going to be a wash, the income of the Diner for the day having been kept afloat by the collection of Door Dash, Uber Eats and Grubhub orders that been placed and picked up, a testament to Will's cooking and menu design that the college had turned his place into one of the most popular places for carry out orders in just a few months.

"You're telling me, if I wanted to, I could just start being a mage tomorrow?" Lacey asked Freya, the tall blonde behind the counter and the redhead seated in the customer area.

"I mean, yes, theoretically, you could," Freya said, leaning against the countertop, "but it's not a thing that's easy for most people to pick up, even for those who start young. Wizardry is typically a family trait, so ninety percent of the casters in the world come from existing lineages. Long running bloodlines of mages spanning over thousands of years. But sure, there's a chance you could have a latent skill that would let you learn and master magic, but you're also getting an incredibly late start, if you were to start today. Beyond that, you would need to find someone to teach you, and magic teachers are notoriously finicky about who they will and won't teach. Most magicians start young and are enrolled in boarding schools where they're given both a traditional education and a magical one at the same time, although I don't know where the closest one of those is. Besides, you're too old for it."

"Gee thanks," Lacey grumbled.

"If you want, you could take the aptitude test, see if you're in that small percentage of people who have a latent skill at that kind of thing," Freya said, adjusting the salt and pepper shakers for what had to be the fifth or sixth time that hour. "I could make a couple of calls, or, hell, you could get Will to ask his new best friend, Silversmith."

"He's not my best friend," Will said, stepping out from the kitchen with a bagged-up order for pickup that he'd just finished putting together. Technically, Freya should've put it into a bag, but it was so slow, Will had been thankful for something to keep him distracted so he'd just done it himself. "But I do know a guy I could call that I met at the party, guy named Tommy who seemed to be a rising up and comer in the magicians' world. He was friendly enough, gave me a business card. Said he was always happy doing favors for friends and told me to call him a friend. You want me to make a call?"

Lacey scowled, looking down at her homework that she'd barely been working on over the last couple of hours. "You probably think it's silly of me, don't you, Will?"

"Lacey, at this point, I have survived a werewolf duel, turned a former monster hunter into a girlfriend and watched a half-dragon fight a half-faerie wizard as a part of their own personal job security, so I don't think I have a whole lot of room to say what is and isn't silly, do you?"

"So, if I wanted to be tested for magical proficiency?"

"I can make a phone call, sure," Will said. "I make no promises about whether you've got magic in your blood or not, but Tommy can probably come out and give you the once over and tell you if it's worth trying to find you a teacher. He'd be glad to do me the favor."

"He wouldn't teach me himself?"

"He's based out of somewhere on the West Coast, so I can't imagine him wanting to commute to Colorado a few times a week."

"He's a magician," Lacey grumbled. "He can handle getting himself here and back without that much effort. I'm sure a damn teleportation spell must be one of the very first things they learn how to do, so if there's even a chance that I could learn magic, he'd better be on it."

"Magicians strike me as wildly flighty people, but we'll see what he says," Will said. "I'll call and leave a message on his voicemail, but he'll get back to me soon enough, I imagine."

But before Will could make a call, customers arrived.

When the door opened, Will wasn't sure what to expect would walk through the door, but whatever it was that might have settled in his mind, it was a million miles away from what did. The first figure was tall and lean, dressed in a dark green suit, with straight black hair, pulled back tight into a neat ponytail, bound up with a large clasp with an ivory curio on top of it, his skin a deep shade of walnut, his build gaunt and ominous looking. The fabric of his attire had a dull glaze to it, and the man's eyes were covered by a large pair of Oakley wraparound sunglasses. The general look and attire made Will think it was a dragon, but not one of the ones he'd seen at the gathering. There was a similar vibe from this individual to those he'd met before. There was most definitely an aura of radiating power coming off him that even Will could pick up.

By contrast, the other man was relatively short, although Will supposed he could just be average sized, and Will was being distracted by the comparison to the man's companion. Or to Freya for that matter. The shorter man had skin the color of desert sand, and his black hair streaked with flames of grey and white was thinning on top, but the massive length of it was also pulled back into a long heavy braid that ran down well past the man's waist. He was dressed in a dark tan suit of corduroy with an open white shirt beneath it, and his wrists were covered in bracelets and bangles, a handful of necklaces dangling from his neck, a long bit of gnarled wood in one hand as a walking stick. His eyes were brown, a big bushy black beard jutting down to his sternum. He had an incredibly striking face, and nearly every inch of exposed flesh from the neck down was covered in tattoos with dozens of colors and hundreds of styles.

Most astonishingly, he was wearing sandals.

In a snowstorm.

And yet, his feet looked perfectly dry.

If the dragon gave off whiffs of power, this man positively reeked of it.

"Don't worry, my boy," the shorter man said, a vaguely European accent of some kind inflecting his voice, a playful ancient smile resting on his face, giving Will a cheeky wink. There was something so unbothered about the man that Will felt slightly humbled, like a child looking upon a revered grandfather. "I won't let get things out of hand. You have my word."

As the two moved to settle into a booth over in the corner, Freya brought over a couple of laminated menus, and both Will and Lacey were trying to watch on without staring, a trick much more challenging than it might have seemed. "You two know what you want, or should I leave you for a couple of minutes with the menu?"

"Can your chef manage a Denver Omelet?" the dragon asked dismissively.

"Don't be an ass, Chekire," the other patron said, smacking the dragon on his hand with the back of his spoon. "Of course he can. If that's what you want, order your damn Denver Omelet."

"Denver Omelet. Hashbrowns. Coffee, black. And if you offer me ketchup, I shall completely neglect to leave a tip." Freya quietly scribbled everything down on her order pad, double underlining 'NO KETCHUP.'

"Ah!" the shorter man said, tapping the menu with great delight. "Someone who knows how to properly make a club sandwich! Brilliant. I will have one of those, with no tomato. Potato salad. And Coca-Cola for the drink, and I'll ask you to keep it refilled as best as you can, love. I'm operating on only about three hours of sleep and the more caffeine assists I can get, the better."

"I hear you, sir, and I'll make sure when you're halfway through the first one, I'll have a refill headed to you," Freya said with a smile as she scribbled the man's order on her pad.

"That'll be lovely," the man said, grinning with some of the most impossibly whitest teeth Will had ever seen. "Cheers."

Freya brought the sheet of paper back to Will, even though he'd already started in the order, as soon as he could hear it being placed, due to how quiet the diner was at the time. And as much as he was invested in making the best possible food he could, he was also fixated on the conversation going at that table through the window from the kitchen into the dinner proper. The two were obviously using it as a safe Sanctuary and the tension between the two of them was thicker than molasses.

"You know why I've brought you here, don't you, Chekire?" the non-dragon said, his voice calm and even, perhaps a hint of chastisement layered in the polite words. "This is about the workshop you decided to open in the mountains southwest of Madrid. You know. In my backyard. If you were doing minor works, I wouldn't mind, or even big spellworks that were relatively self-contained would've been fine... but Chekire... Chekire, Chekire, Chekire... why the hells are you messing about with portal magics?"

"I've got needs I can't sate here on our worlds, old chap. I'm attempting to open doorways to several of the lost realms, so I didn't want to be anywhere near a major populated area," Chekire sighed. "I wasn't aware your main spell laboratory was north of Cordoba these days, otherwise I would have reached out to you before I set up shop. I realize we are a little past the point of apologies, but I still offer one nonetheless."

Freya tried not to interrupt them to bring them their drinks, setting down a cup of coffee, then a Hoddle, so he could refill it any time he wanted, as well as the other man's Coke.

"An apology is a good start," the other man said. "But I'm going to require more than that, obviously."

"Obviously." The dragon sighed, raising a hand. "Go on. Suggest an opening line of retribution."

"I'm thinking I get first pick of the plunder brought back from the lost realms each time you make an excursion," the man said before taking a big sip from his Coke.

The dragon visibly bristled. "Out of the question. I'm going into the lost realms with very specific things I'm on the hunt for, and the idea of just giving you the best items, the one I went into literal hells and back, because I happened to open my lab too close to yours? Utter nonsense. I'm willing to concede first pick after I've put five items on a 'reserved' list that you can't take things from."

"Three things, and you let me use the gate once a month for my own expeditions."

"Once a season and I think I can agree to that."

"Along with an assurance that you're not ever opening a portal to Loeninshire."

"Gods no, what do you take me for, a madman?"

"You're opening portals to the lost realms, Chekire," the human bristled in amusement. "It's not exactly a status symbol among the wise and sane."

Despite the fact that Will wanted to keep watching and listening, he needed to turn his attention to the food for the final bit that required his focus - the plating. The club sandwich he could've done in his sleep, but the omelet had taken slightly more attention. Still, he'd been enraptured by the second conversation where his Diner had been used as a Sanctuary, and he wondered how often this sort of thing was going to be a regular occurrence.

Will plated the two orders, no tomatoes on the sandwich and no ketchup anywhere near either plate, and dinged his little bell, as Freya came over and picked them up. She also filled up another glass with Coke for the man, loading it onto her tray, carrying everything over to the table, laying the items out one at a time.

"Thank you, miss," the dragon said.

"And a second Coke before I'm done with my first," the human said. "Well done."

"Anything else I can get you two?"

"What kinds of pie do you have?"

"Lemon chiffon, French vanilla, chocolate, French silk, mud pie, key lime and the chef's own pina colada pie."

"Oh, that sounds delicious," the man said. "I'll have a piece of that."

"None for me," the dragon said.

"One piece of pina colada pie, coming right up."

"And the bill, please," the dragon said. "I'm paying for both of us. It's the least I can do with all this mess, especially considering how reasonable you've been about all of this. I was expecting this to be in danger of coming to blows, and one of us, probably me, paying a much higher price than either of us would be comfortable."

"Nonsense, Chekire, we're not savages, and it isn't as though you intentionally opened your lab close to mine," the man replied, waving his long fingers through the air dismissively. "I imagine you chose your lab's location much as I did mine - away from any large population centers, and yet still near a few major ley lines."

"True, but you have to admit, your reputation paints you as... mercurial, at best."

The man smiled and offered a slight shrug, as if to say the reputation was neither true nor untrue, just an approach which allowed that both could be either. "Appearances must be maintained, and I can't let people push me around too much, otherwise everyone will think that my age has finally caught up to me, something I mostly cannot allow people to think. And besides, when people of our power levels clash, the spillover always interferes with the lives of so many mortals that I feel bad for them, with all the second-hand carnage we leave in our wakes. So, for centuries now, I have tried my best to avoid open conflict and preserve my reputation, such as it is."

Freya tried to make as little noise as possible, sliding the pie in front of the man and the bill in front of the dragon before backing away quietly.

"That's fine. With the terms agreed upon, we can agree upon this to both parties' satisfaction?" the dragon asked, extending his hand across the table, welcoming the return shake he immediately got.

"Agreed. Let the feud between us be quashed and the terms offered accepted, I, Merlin, here do swear."

"I, Chekire, do here swear," the dragon echoed when their hands lifted and dropped. The dragon reached into his pocket and pulled out a small leather wallet. He withdrew three crisp hundred-dollar bills and laid them down on top of the check. "You can keep the change as a fee for the Sanctuary services, miss, and for your lovely service. Merlin, I leave you... to your pie."

The dragon rose from his seat, setting his napkin on the table next to his plate, and then walked out of the diner into the cold winter night, swallowed up by the storm almost immediately, lost in the sheets of white, leaving no trace that he had ever been there, beyond, of course, the hard cash resting on the table.

"Come out, Sanctuary Keeper," Merlin said in between bites of his pie. "I would like to lay eyes upon you, take the measure of you for myself, rather than relying on the whispers floating upon the air between the gossipy spirits and sprites. The tale of your victory in the duel made quite the stir, even if it was little more than dusting off some scrapling pup."

Will stepped out of the kitchen, taking off his apron with a chuckle. "Considering he'd been training in the ways of the werewolves his entire life and I've known about even being a werewolf less than a school year? I think you can give me a little more credit than that, don't you? Forgive my saying so, but you don't look at all what I imagined you'd look like."

"Yes, well, it was the form I was wearing when I met Geoffrey of Monmouth so many hundreds of years ago, and I couldn't have known his stories were going to be so damned popular," Merlin said before pointing at what was left of the slice of the pie in front of him with his fork. "This truly is quite delicious. Are you starting from a rum cake recipe or an upside-down recipe?"

"Neither," Will said, leaning against the bar counter, looking over at Merlin, folds his hands together. "My mom's recipe. She made it herself. One of the few things she was amazing at making, so she used to make it for me every year for my birthday."

"You remind me of her," Merlin said, nodding quietly. Will's eyes widened and the mage picked up on it. "And yes, to answer your next question, I knew her, briefly. I know your father more so, but I still wouldn't call him a friend, or even an ally, really. Your father's always kept his own counsel, and while we have often found ourselves on the same side of several conflicts, no, I do not know how to contact him, nor do I know where he is at this particular moment in time. Last I had heard, he was running in eastern Europe, attempting to try and unite the rather wild and disparate tribes over there, something that had been far more challenging than he'd anticipated when he started it almost twenty years ago."

"That certainly sounds like him, running away from his family to go play hero," Will said in annoyance. "You'd think maybe he'd want to keep an eye on his only son?"

"You're not his only son, Will," Merlin said to him. "You're his only child from your mother, but you have at least a dozen half brothers and sisters running around on other continents."

"That's both thrilling and terrifying to think about," Will said, rolling his eyes. "Dad can't keep it in his pants, huh?"

"He's an alpha wolf, Will. That means several mates. That's just part of your wolf nature. You have multiple partners yourself, don't you?"

"Now how would you know that?"

The old mage grinned, his teeth impeccable. "I'm one of the most powerful spellcasters on the planet, my boy. Maybe one of the greatest mages ever, if I don't say so myself. You don't think I have eyes and ears in every pack, coven, clique and snarl across the globe? Spells can influence a great many things in this world, but none half as much as a well-placed bit of knowledge can. I got to where I am not just through magic, but wisdom as well. But in this case, it's mostly just an educated guess, especially since you have two of them here, and if that isn't the start of a pack, I don't know what is."

"So, you're like the Merlin? The one from the stories about King Arthur and the sword in the stone and Camelot and all that shit?" Lacey asked, cocking her head to one side.

"That's me."

"We were talking before you came in here about latent magical ability, and whether or not I have any," the redhead confidently said, as if Merlin's status didn't intimidate her at all. "Will was going to reach out to a mage he met at the event, but since you're here, could you test me and see if I have any latent magical abilities I should know about?"

"There's usually a price to be paid for this sort of thing," Merlin said, but his eyes twinkled, as if the very concept amused him, as well as the brash confidence of Lacey. "That said, you are a civilian and asking for a very light thing indeed. I suppose I could grant you this as part of my tip to the Sanctuary's tithe, if it is something you are certain you would want."

"Why wouldn't I want it?" Lacey asked, narrowing her eyes at him.

"Because without the answer, you will always have the joy of the mystery, the chance spent wondering 'what if...?' instead of knowing the answer," Merlin said. "Some people go seeking for answers, only to spend the rest of their lives wishing they hadn't."

"That won't be me," Lacey said. "Either way, I'll know, and I will take satisfaction in the knowing, even if I don't ever do anything with it."

"Alright then," Merlin said as he slid out of the booth, grabbing his walking stick as he made his way across the diner, over to stand next to Lacey. It was surprising - the man looked less old up close, the wrinkles not quite as deep as they had seemed before, and there was an intense, deep power radiating from the man's body and behind his eyes, which Will could now see were a deep shade of frightening gold. The closer a person stood to him, the harder it was to ignore what a force of nature the man was.

He took one of Lacey's arms by the wrist and laid her left hand flat down on top of the counter, placing his right on top of hers, as a golden glow started to leak out from the bottom of his hand onto the top of hers, bathing it with a contained light that seemed like it was diffusing into her skin.

The redhead gasped a little bit, but didn't pull her hand back, as she glanced over at Will, then at Merlin, then back at her hand. It didn't look like she was harmed and Will couldn't be sure what the old wizard was doing to Lacey's hand. A moment or so later, the glow turned into a light cyan shade before fading and disappearing entirely.

When he lifted his hand, a strange and curious smile crossed his face. "What a fascinating result," Merlin said. "Not at all what one might expect, although I suppose in looking at you with more open eyes, it would have been a distinct possibility."

"What is? What would?" Lacey asked, desperation in her voice.

"So, I'm afraid there's both bad news and good news in your past and your future, Lily," Merlin said to her as he pulled his wrist back and let his hand fall to his side. "The bad news won't come as any shock to you, I think."

"I can't say that it does," Lacey sighed, her hand curling up into a tiny fist. "While I've always felt like something was... off... with me, I never thought I was going to be a wizard or a warlock or that kind of thing."

Will felt like he was getting angry, even though he didn't really have any real reasons for it. It wasn't like his anger would benefit her any, or even improve her situation any, so he did his best to start to relax and let go of that tension and anger, pushing it to the back of his mind. It surprised him that it took as much energy to do that as it did, so he suspected it was some kind of sympathetic frustration he'd shared with Lacey, but he couldn't place his finger on why the results triggered something in him. But then he realized - it was because the old mage wasn't being entirely truthful. So Will stuffed it down and waited for the man to explain further.

Merlin took a few steps back, a wry smile on his face. "I did, however, say there was good news, didn't I? Yes. Yes I did. And I wouldn't be a very fine man if I didn't adhere to the terms of the deal I'd struck only moments before. So I imagine this will provide you some comfort by contrast. The reason you will never be able to learn human magic... is because you aren't entirely human. You are, in fact, one-eighth fae, which means if you want to learn magics, you will need to learn them from a fellow fae and not a human, as the two schools of magic are quite radically different."

"I'm... I'm what now?"