by Renée Jaggér
She approached Roland after they were both awake. “Wanna go out for breakfast?”
“Sure,” he agreed. “I think I’m putting on a few pounds, though. You people certainly know how to eat hearty. I might have to start politely refusing second helpings from now on.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, ‘you people?’”
He smiled and smoothed his hair. “The Nordin family, a group of people—Weres, whatever—who are noticeably large and therefore require greater caloric intake than the norm. Large as in tall and strong, of course.”
“Damn right,” she shot back. She put her head into his stomach and lifted him onto her shoulders, where he sputtered and cursed for a moment before she tossed him onto the sofa.
He blinked, then smoothed his hair again. “Well, it’s good to know that you can carry me if I’m ever knocked out. Then again, I weigh a lot less than a fridge.”
It was about ten-thirty when they arrived at the diner. They’d be transitioning into lunch soon, but breakfast was popular enough that they usually had the supplies reserved and a section of the grill reserved for eggs until quarter past eleven or so.
The waitress on hand was the newer gal, Cheryl. Tomi usually worked lunch and dinner. She seated them at a small table near the center of the floor. Bailey thought about requesting a booth, but it was pretty busy, so she didn’t bother.
Soon their orders were in, and with surprising speed given the number of diners on hand, they had beautiful, butter-glistening omelets sitting in front of them in addition to their steaming cups of coffee.
They had tucked about halfway into their meals when four young men approached them, all Weres. Bailey knew most of them.
The one out front made eye contact. “Hey,” he offered in a low voice. “Nova. We want to talk to you.”
Bailey set down her fork. “I don’t get called that very much. Last time, I think it was by Dan Oberlin right before I kicked the shit out of him. Aren’t you guys his friends?” Her tone was flat and even, neither rude nor polite.
Roland, for his part, sipped coffee but watched the quartet all the same.
“Yeah,” the leader responded. “Well, we were.” He was rangy and strong, if not overly heavy. Two of the other guys were taller and wider, and the fourth was short and stout. “I’m Will Waldsbach. Me and him were friends in high school, but I didn’t talk to him much after that. I didn’t know what he was doing.”
One of the big guys stepped up. “I’m Dan’s cousin, Leo Seigneur. I didn’t know either. Not ‘til after him and his boys were arrested.”
Bailey tried not to make it too obvious that they’d bewildered her. Roland too had furrowed his brow and seemed to be searching the folds of his brain for an answer.
“I see,” she said. “So, what do you want to talk about?”
The Weres exchanged glances. “We wanted to apologize,” Will rumbled, “for all the crap Dan’s gang did. We didn’t have no part in it. Especially not the kidnappings, and we never harassed you either, did we? We heard about everything you’ve done, though. And about,” he swallowed, “who’s teaching you now. How you’re gonna be the shaman.”
Bailey couldn’t pretend to be nonchalant any longer. Her jaw dropped and her eyes widened.
“So,” Will went on, “what I’m trying to say is, I want us to be on good terms. Everyone knows you’re a hell of a fighter. And aside from some of the bullshit rumors, everyone knows you’re trying to do well by all the packs in the valley. Saving our girls, kicking the asses of the guys who took them, and driving off those witches. If…Fenris wants you to be our shaman, then we don’t got a problem with that. You’re someone we could follow. We got your back.”
The other three nodded their agreement.
Bailey took a deep breath and raised her coffee mug for a quick sip to give herself a second to think. “Thanks,” she said after a pause. “I guess I wasn’t expecting that, but it’s good to hear. Too many Weres lately have been acting crazy. You guys eating? Pull up a table if you want.”
Roland gave them a curt smile and flourished his hand for them to do as Bailey had suggested. He wasn’t as enthusiastic as the girl was since he didn’t know the four, just as he still didn’t understand lycanthrope society. But it was obvious they had nothing to fear from Will or his friends.
The quartet had just dragged up a table when the front doors around a corner from the dining area burst open and in tramped a group of people. A large group, from the sound of it. Moving fast and stomping hard.
Roland craned his neck. “The hell is that?” Subtle twists of his fingers suggested he was preparing a spell—something subtle and tactical, nothing like the flashy destructive magic he’d used in the Other.
Bailey frowned. “We’re about to find out.”
A crowd of young men, along with a couple of women, marched around the corner and into the dining area. There were at least twenty of them, maybe twenty-five. Most were large, muscular, rough-looking sorts. Bailey figured most of them for werewolves, although a few could be human allies. She’d never seen any of them before.
They muscled their way in, streaming between the booths and tables, making other diners scooch their chairs in to avoid them. Then they spread out to form a squared-off U-shape around the double table where Bailey, Roland, and their four new friends sat.
The werewitch watched them. She said and did nothing, only waited for them to introduce themselves.
Out in front was their presumed leader. It was difficult to judge his age; he might have been twenty-five or forty. He was of average height, but fit and muscular, with a shaved head, a well-groomed black chin beard, and tattoos on his bare arms, which he'd crossed over his chest. His eyes were cold and steady.
“You’re Bailey Nordin,” he stated.
Bailey slightly inclined her head. “Yep, that’s me. Who are you, and what brings you to Greenhearth? Don’t think I’ve—”
“Cut the crap,” he interrupted her. “We know what you’ve been doing lately. So does the entire rest of wolfdom all through Oregon and Washington. To answer your question, my name is Nick Jezak, apprentice shaman of the Shashka Pack—one of the ones you haven’t wiped out yet.”
A visible tremor of deadly rage went through the whole gang as if they were a single animal prepared to pounce.
The entire diner had gone dead silent. No noise interfered with Bailey’s thoughts or the rush of intertwining emotions.
That’s him, she concluded. This is the fucker who’s been inciting those other packs against me. But what the hell does he mean by wiped out? Is someone out there killing Weres?
There was no time to try to come up with answers to her mental questions, though. Nick was continuing his spiel.
“This woman,” he announced, his voice filling the whole building as he pointed at her face, “is a threat to every lycanthrope—man, woman, and child—in the region, and she’ll be a threat to the whole goddamn world unless she’s stopped. She’s not fit to be a shaman. We have confirmed evidence that her power, probably combined with jealousy and resentment, has driven her crazy. The result is two entire packs in Washington dead. I’m talking mass murder, genocide. Check the Internet or listen to the radio if you don’t believe me.”
Gasps went around the diner. The normal humans of Greenhearth were aware that lycanthropes lived among them, and silence on the subject was a long tradition. News like that was more shocking to them than if they’d had no idea about such things.
Bailey gawked. Things were on the verge of going completely out of control.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” she urged. “I haven’t killed any Weres. I’ve been here the whole…time.”
As the words left her mouth, she realized she had inadvertently lied. She and Roland had been in the Other. For all anyone else here knew, they might as well have been in China.
Or in Washington.
Nick shook his head and narrowed his eyes. “No. We’re ending you right
now.”
Patrons screamed, knocking over chairs as they rose from their seats and made for the doors. Bailey’s four new friends closed protectively around her and Roland, and half of the wolves of Shashka shifted form to attack.
Chapter Nine
People became wolves, and the formerly peaceful diner became a melee. The quartet of South Cliffs hadn’t been kidding when they’d pledged Bailey their allegiance since all of them changed into their beast forms and hovered around the girl and the wizard.
The civilians scattered, shouting for someone to call 911 as the Weres from Nick’s group pounced on their targets. The others, still in human form, advanced more slowly from all sides.
Bailey had already sprung up, her chair falling and sliding behind her, where it got tangled in the legs of one of the Shashkas. He tripped and knocked his face into a booth seat.
Roland was up too. “For fuck’s sake! We can’t even eat a nice greasy brunch without this shit happening anymore!” At a flick of his hand, one of the bounding wolves mysteriously tripped on a table and sprawled into the opposite wall, missing Bailey’s head by at least five feet.
Seeing the wizard do that, Bailey remembered they were in public on Earth. In the damn Elk on a busy day. They couldn’t afford to toss around hyper-destructive magic. This fight would come down to the subtler sorts, abetted by fangs, fists, and muscle.
One of the Shashka men, a guy in his early twenties who had to be at least six foot four, took a swing at her, but for all his strength, he was clumsy, and the girl easily ducked his crude roundhouse. Her knee shot into his groin at the same time her fists pummeled his stomach, then she’d slipped her foot behind his ankle while piling her weight against him. He stumbled and fell, by which point she was bounding back up into the fray.
Another man had been momentarily caught between a failed strike at one of Bailey’s South Cliff wolves and a second strike at Bailey. His hesitation was all she needed to sock him in the jaw and drop-kick him into a booth seat.
Then a shifted wolf pounced on her. She blocked its claws and whipped her head back from its drooling mouth, pushing it upward. One of her allies, also in beast form, grabbed the wolf by the scruff and hoisted him off, then the two animals became a rolling tangle of furry limbs.
In the second it took Bailey to get her bearings, two more Shashkas in human form charged. She thrust out her hands and created a weak wave of concussive force, just enough to stagger them. One dropped to his knees.
The other was less affected, so Bailey elbowed him in the face. His nose crunched and he blundered backward, holding his hands to his face to the stave off the blood flowing from it.
Someone else hit her from the side, and for a few moments, all was pandemonium. She lashed out with her hands and knees and feet, never staying in the same place for more than a split second, pounding on anything within arm’s reach.
She caught fractured glimpses of people swinging chairs and breaking them over each other’s heads, wolves gnashing their deadly jaws at each other, and injured men crawling free of the brawl.
And Roland, dancing atop the half-walls that divided the booths and kicking Weres in their faces.
The wizard knew he couldn’t risk burning the diner down, and it occurred to him that he’d lately grown overly reliant on magic of the pyrotechnic sort. Their training in the Other and their arcane battles against the Venatori had left him out of practice at using sorcery to augment himself as an empty-handed fighter.
But his skills and knowledge came back to him quickly enough. He manipulated gravity to his benefit, deftly using the furniture and layout of the dining area to stay out of reach of the humanoid Shashkas and leap away from the lunges of the ones in wolf form.
He levitated hard plastic drinking glasses into his hands, then threw them, enhancing their velocity and guiding their accuracy through magic. They shot into the Weres’ faces or testicles, or struck them in the backs of their knees to make them stumble.
He directed wolves and men to trip into vacant tables and spill silverware, only to find forks and knives embedded in their limbs, perfectly stuck in just such parts of their anatomy as to hobble them in a fight without crippling them or making them bleed to dangerous levels.
And when all else failed, he simply jumped into the open air and guided his fists like heat-seeking missiles into snouts, kidneys, or solar plexuses. Then he was airborne again. If an average person was watching, they’d think him a highly-skilled martial artist or perhaps a gymnast.
Will and Leo and the other two former friends of Dan Oberlin did their part, proving their bravery mere minutes after they’d sworn friendship to Bailey and Roland. Rallying around the werewitch and the wizard, they flattened most of the Shashkas who assaulted them and held a defensive position in the far front corner of the dining hall.
But they were still outnumbered five to one.
The six of them might have had a fighting chance against the twenty intruders if it weren’t for Nick. Though supposedly only an apprentice shaman, he quickly demonstrated that his magic was nothing to be trifled with.
Thus far, he’d been tossing streams of invisible force into the melee, subtly wearing down the South Cliffs with a level of precision and control beyond Bailey’s skills, or even Roland’s. Now, with his targets out of reach but his allies by far the more numerous, even though a few had been hurt badly enough to be taken out of the fight, it was time to try something different.
Nick clasped his right hand over his left fist and held it in front of his chest, and a tremor went through his body as his powerful shoulders shrugged forward and his head angled down. A faint aura, colored like tarnished silver, began to emanate from him, then the same shine appeared around the wolves of his pack.
As the shaman began to chant, the Shashkas renewed their attack with almost double the speed, power, and ferocity they’d displayed thus far.
“This is bad,” Roland exclaimed, pointing out what was fairly obvious to them all as he tried to hold two Weres back with a transparent magical shield. “He’s buffing them somehow. It’s pure were-shaman stuff, whatever it is, so it’s not magic I’m familiar with.”
The song Nick had begun to sing was loud and heavy and guttural, like a battle hymn Vikings or Cossacks or Scythian horsemen might have intoned centuries prior. In time with the primitive yet mesmerizing notes of the chant, glowing runes appeared in the air before him, rotating in a circle.
And his warriors went berserk.
Bailey was suddenly charged by two Shashkas who came out of nowhere with incredible swiftness, and all she could do was block their attacks with her arms, augmented with subtle protective magic. Her friends had problems of their own as the enemy Weres pounced, so she strove against them alone.
Leo took a nasty paw-strike to the chest, bruising and perhaps cracking a rib or two and drawing blood from a pair of lacerations. Grunting and sputtering, he backed to the rear of the fight. He was still able to prevent the Shashkas from flanking the rest of them, but he was in no condition to help with the main struggle.
The rest of them were wearing down under the ferocious onslaught as well. Unless help or a miracle arrived, there was no way for the six from Greenhearth to win this fight as it now stood.
Bailey pushed back against her pair of snarling attackers, bowling one over and getting the other tangled up amidst his fellows since too many of them were trying to strike at once to manage a disciplined frontal assault.
Roland grunted as he fended off another attacker. “I’m going to have to use magic that might get us in trouble,” he gasped. “Not much choice at the moment.”
Bailey’s anger surged through her in waves of heat and cold. Her teeth ground together, and her fists wanted to knock down stone pillars or put holes through trees.
“That’s it,” she snarled. “Enough is fucking enough!”
Agent Townsend stood at the center of the open floor on the highest story of the Agency’s Western Regional Headquarters.
It was an unmarked office building, tall but not a skyscraper, in glossy black. It stood just outside of Reno, Nevada, a location deemed appropriate for overseeing all three West Coast states plus the next four to the east, as well as the western portion of Montana.
Besides, Nevada was the traditional state in which to place facilities of the less-publicized portions of the US government.
Townsend’s hands were clasped behind his back, and he stood ramrod-straight, his shoulders thrown back and his tie perfectly aligned with the edges of his jacket. His dark glasses covered his eyes and his mouth did not move, but a shining pearl of sweat was slowly working its way down the side of his head. Two glaring floodlights were aimed directly at him.
Just beyond the lights, at a desk on an elevated platform, were the silhouettes of two dark figures. The bosses.
“Agent Townsend,” the left-hand one began in a high, rapid voice, “the data you’ve collated is convincing as well as alarming. But before we can authorize any kind of large-scale action, we needed to hear your verbal statement in person.”
The right-hand one added, “Standard operating procedure.” His voice was slow, deep, and monotonously deliberate. “We must hear you out. Make your case, sir. Do not bother repeating the basics. We’ve read your report.”
The agent inhaled deeply through his nose, then opened his mouth.
“Sirs,” he began, “we have a situation on our hands that threatens to upend everything we’ve striven for continuously these last few decades. Not years, decades. If we were to examine all possible outcomes and place them on a scale of best-case to worst-case scenarios, the halfway point would still be well into territory that we would describe as catastrophic.”
The bosses were silent for a moment, then Left asked, “Are you sure that this is an objective assessment, Townsend?”
“You’re not allowing your feelings for the late Agent Spall to get in the way?” Right added.
Townsend was too well-disciplined to react in a blatant way, but he allowed his face to settle into a deeper grimace.
