Dog Days Of Jaysome

“Magician.” I walk into our hotel suite. “Jay isn’t in his room and he didn’t answer his phone.”

“I know,” The wandering magician says calmly.

“Then where?”

“Last I knew, he was being a wolf?”

“A spirit animal for @madworlddiary. Because Jay.”

“There are consequences for acts of jaysome.” He sighs. “He’s in the pound.”

“And you’re not getting Jay out?”

“He has to start learning, Charlie.”

“That might not be the best place to teach Jay.”

“And any place is?”

“Shit.”

*

I enter the pound before it is open for the day, stilling alarms with a faint trace of magic.

Jay isn’t in a cage. There isn’t a cage that can hold a Jay, even if he’s being a JayWolf. He has used bindings and opened every lock, changed back into his human form and is just talking to animals. There is nothing Jay can’t talk to, sometimes because it simply never occurs to him that he couldn’t. And most reply, not wanting to disappoint him.

“Honcho.” He doesn’t look back at me. There is slightly less enthusiasm than when he normally says my name as he turns to me, all eleven, from far Outside the universe and looking both baffled and hurt. “You did a binding so I couldn’t leave this place last night.”

“Kiddo. You got captured.”

“I was having an adventure!”

“Yes. And sometimes they lead to different sorts of adventures.”

“But but all these animals don’t have families and finding some for all of them is pretty hard and –.” He hiccups. “Why?”

For a moment, I think he understands: why I’ve been forcing him to understand the consquences of his actions and power, why he’s been having to fix up his own oopses and accidents.

“Why what?” I ask, and it takes everything I have for my voice to be even. Some day I will hurt him more than I ever want to hurt anyone; I don’t want it to be today.

Jay scratches his head. “Why lock them up when they’re just having adventures too?”

“Sometimes adventures can’t overlap with the adventures others have, Jay. And sometimes people are just very confusled and trying to help the best they can.”

“I try and help a lot!”

“Yes. Yes, you do. And you being safe in the pound overnight was a trying to help you. We can’t take them with us.”

“But we have a really big hotel room,” he protests.

“Yes. And are leaving for another town today. But I asked the fae, and they’ll work some glamours and do what they can.”

No one wants to disappoint Jay. No one wants to be the one to break that hopeful, helping innocence even if the power behind it is beyond anything they understand.

He beams, following me outside and I pretend I don’t notice the bags of treats that appear in every cage.