by Renée Jaggér
Roland tried to extinguish the fire by summoning a torrential rain across an acre or two of the affected land, but while he did this, the Venatori hit them with a combined blast of force.
The two rolled back down the hill. Closer to town.
Roland got hold of a protruding root. “Bailey. Don’t hold anything back. They’re not going to, and we can’t either. We need to overwhelm them if we want to live through this.”
He slashed his hand through the air and broke open the shield around them, exposing them but also letting oxygen in.
She was torn, but only for a moment. She sucked in air and then unleashed everything she had.
“That’s it,” Spall barked. “That is just fucking it. I know our function is containment only, but I have had it with those bitches, and those other bitches, and the were-traffickers, and every other fuckhead who keeps forcing us to watch this bullshit town and keep it from being destroyed.”
Agent Townsend was trying to keep his cool, but he had to admit that his partner had pretty much spoken for both of them. He did think Spall’s vacation couldn’t come too soon. Tahiti, maybe?
Their car was parked at a scenic overlook on a nearby mountain peak. From here, they could see the entirety of the Hearth Valley, including the desolate patch of woods near Greenhearth where a fire had started and multicolored auras strained against one another for supremacy.
“Don’t do anything hasty,” he chided, “but yeah, the goddamn apocalypse is breaking out down there in broad daylight. Call for backup. We might even have to move in to suppress this.”
Today Townsend was the one behind the wheel, with Spall in the passenger’s seat manning their mobile console.
“Oh,” Spall shot back, “we’re moving in, all right. Those people are going to pay for this. I mean, just look at this shit!”
He flourished his hand out the side window toward the bizarre fireworks display. The light show was accompanied by all manner of crashes and booms. Everyone in town must have been aware of it by now, and some people in nearby communities were probably wondering what the hell was happening.
Despite his bold words, Spall went back to his device to contact reinforcements. They had allies who could be relied upon to provide the sort of paramilitary support this situation required. Allies who mostly understood what was going on—and even if they didn’t, they’d signed confidentiality waivers and could be memory-wiped later to be safe.
Townsend wondered how the hell they’d handle this if they did have to intervene. It was beyond anything either of them had dealt with in their long and storied careers.
Spall threw up his hands. “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he hissed. “We’re being jammed!”
“Jammed?” Townsend sputtered. “By technology, or…”
“Magic,” snapped Spall. “Would’ve detected it if it was anything natural. The Venatori know we’re here and are trying to keep us out of it. That’s the only explanation.”
Townsend’s mind raced. If that were the case, a phone call wouldn’t work either. They might have to retreat and call for help from another town. Or even from Greenhearth, though that would risk exposure.
He said as much, but his partner cut him off in the middle of his comment.
“No!” Spall raged. “This is it. I’m ending this crap right here and now!”
He meant it. Before Townsend could stop him, he grabbed the arcanoplasm accelerator from its place behind the passenger’s seat and bolted out the side door of the car, running down the mountainside toward the site of the battle.
“Spall!” Townsend shouted. ‘Spall! You imbecile! What are you doing? You’re going to get yourself killed!”
It was no use. The agent kept running, moving fast for a man in middle age, and soon vanishing between the trees.
Townsend punched the dashboard hard enough to rattle the bones in his hand. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “This is the last thing we need right now.”
His partner had at least left the mobile device. Townsend propped it up on his center console and zoomed it out. It still displayed the sorcerous battle, but also the surrounding woods, so he would see when Spall arrived at the fray.
Then the agent started his car’s engine and drove back down the winding road that would take him to Greenhearth. He had no choice now but to find a working phone within the village.
For all his driving skill, the road was so treacherous that he had to go far slower than he wanted, at the risk of plummeting off the side of the goddamn mountain. That would do nothing to improve the situation. He was about two-thirds of the way to the town when the miniaturized figure of Spall appeared at the edge of the device’s screen.
Spall fired the accelerator the instant he came into view. It was an alien-looking weapon about the length of a man’s forearm, a cylinder of bright chrome with red tubes running down it. Most of them hooked into its magazine or fuel tank, a small canister filled with arcanoplasm—the pure, distilled essence of magic. It was among the Agency’s most powerful and closely guarded secrets.
A beam of whitish-magenta light like some death ray in an old sci-fi flick burst from the weapon and struck the Venatori witch at the far left of the quartet. She screamed only briefly as her body changed to a black silhouette within an ovoid mass of white flame, and then she winked out of existence, leaving behind only a tiny wisp of ash.
Spall did not bother trying to place his shots carefully, but simply kept the trigger depressed and moved the beam on to the next witch. By now, the sorceresses had noticed his presence and begun to try to resist or deflect the attack.
They were too late for the second woman, though. The half-baked shield they summoned only slowed the beam. It struck her at perhaps a quarter of its full force and speed, granting her a slower, more painful death than her partner. She howled as pink and white flames consumed her, then her blackened skeleton toppled to the ground.
By then the shield was complete, and the magenta beam refracted off its surface in a hundred directions, starting more small fires throughout the woods.
Townsend almost put his fist through the windshield. “Dammit, Spall! What the fuck are you thinking?”
The remaining witches had been forced to divide their attention, the one closer to Spall having shifted her efforts toward him while the other one kept up the battle against Bailey and Roland. With the element of surprise gone, one Venatori was too much for a human agent, even one with an arcanoplasm accelerator.
Spall took cover behind trees as the witch threw spirals of kinetic force laced with what looked like radioactive fire at him. Most of the trees he tried to hide behind disintegrated into burning chunks. He took potshots with his weapon, but the beams just bounced off the witches’ shield.
“No,” Townsend breathed. He pressed down on the gas, even as his car threatened to swing off the edge of the mountain road. “Goddammit, no.”
Finally, the sorceress caught one of the arcanoplasm beams. “See how you like it,” she taunted in a thick Swedish accent. Then she threw it back.
Spall had tried to duck and roll, but his foe was good at leading her target. The magenta beam struck him in the center of the back. He let out a sharp, gasping groan, then his body vaporized. Flecks of ash wafted in the air.
Townsend stopped the car. There was no place to pull over; he simply blocked the lane, unable to drive or do much of anything else for the moment.
After a moment, he regained control of himself, although his hands were still trembling and he was seeing red.
All of them, he thought. Just like Spall said. The Venatori, the DiGrezza gang, the were-traffickers, and even Roland and Bailey. She and the swishy wizard weren’t to blame, but if they’d never gotten involved, things would be different.
Thanks to them, his partner of fourteen years—and his best friend—was dead. There wasn’t even enough left of him to bury. The ashes were already scattered.
“They’ll pay,” Townsend snarled. He was mainly talking about the Venatori,
although his crude emotions wanted everyone to pay right now. “One way or another. They’re going down.”
Chapter Fourteen
Bailey had lost track of time. The fight had gone on long enough that she was having trouble remembering anything else that had happened before it started.
“Eat this!” she bellowed and hurled a crude but intimidating mass of fire and lava at the nearer of the two witches.
The Venatori caught it and tossed it back, adding burning tree trunks to the mass of death. They had all been pushed past the point of coherent strategy and could only trade blow for blow, desperately trying to neutralize one another through brute force.
Bailey seized the fireball again and whipped it around, throwing it like a curveball back at the sorceress.
“Hey!” Roland called. “Get rid of that thing before it—”
The witch had thrown it back again, but she detonated it halfway, shielding herself at the same time. The concussive force of the explosion created a shockwave that knocked Bailey and Roland off their feet.
The other witch, who’d been having an invisible duel of psych magic with Roland, moved in for the kill.
“No!” Bailey cried, swiping her arm and creating a thick wall of ice in front of them. A bolt of lightning struck it from the other side, shattering it, but the solid water absorbed the electricity before it could impact its intended targets.
Roland gasped. “This is getting us nowhere. I think that agent guy killed the two smarter ones, so now we’re in a slugfest with the workhorses. We need to either figure out a clever way of beating them or get the hell out of here.”
In the moment of respite they’d earned, Bailey glanced around. She could see a cluster of people watching them by the drugstore.
It was only early afternoon, and the Venatori had driven them to an exposed area, away from the sheltered spot Marcus had chosen for practice. The entire battle was occurring in plain view of the general public.
There was no time to consider the public relations stuff, though, because a storm of spinning magical blades was raining down on them, leaving hazy colored streaks behind them as they clove through tree branches on their way to their targets.
Bailey deflected about half of them with a crude kinetic spell, while Roland gathered up the other half, quickly melting them with an infusion of heat. He formed them into a metal wall that he sent slowly toward the witches.
While the Venatori were busy with that, the pair climbed into a denser part of the forest higher on the mountain.
“We have the high ground,” Roland gloated. “Wasn’t that in a movie or something?”
“Don’t remind me,” Bailey shuddered, thinking of Kevin.
Then a huge bolt of lightning struck the mountain—not the point where they stood, but up near the peak. Dirt, snow, and rock exploded, and an avalanche streamed toward them.
“Oh, fuck!” Roland exclaimed. “Hold my hand.”
Bailey, alarmed not only at the prospect of imminent death, but also that the invaders were causing so much damage to her local environment, took the wizard’s hand, hoping he had something in mind.
A cold, tingling feeling like the sensation of stepping through a portal suffused her, and all at once, they were standing in the clearing near Marcus’s shack again.
“Hah!” Roland chuckled. “I was pretty sure that would work. It helps if I know where we’re going.”
The Venatori were at least a quarter-mile away, but before Roland and Bailey could decide whether to flee, the two witches vanished. They reappeared about twenty feet in front of them.
Bailey clenched her jaw. “Like you said, we can’t keep this shit up.”
As blasts of magic again strove against each other, she reflected on a sobering truth. What they faced here was only a fraction of the Venatori’s might.
Townsend cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said, loudly but not obnoxiously so, addressing the crowd.
There were a good dozen townspeople gathered in a parking lot beside a drugstore partway up the northern slope, where they stood gawking at the forest fire and the sporadic eruptions of light and sound.
It took a second, but they all turned around. Then Townsend whipped out a small tube that sprayed the group with a fine gaseous powder. They inhaled it, as people always did, and stood blinking stupidly at him.
“Shit,” he said, forcing himself to look jovial, “who would have thought a major Hollywood production would be filming stuff like this way out in the damn Hearth Valley? Ha-ha. Great, though. Too bad they didn’t warn the town in advance. Still, it’s putting you on the map. Hell, I came all the way out here just to see it! Ha-ha. Great.”
He left as the half-confused citizens talked amongst themselves, trying to determine if anyone had heard about the movie being shot in the surrounding mountains.
Grumbling to himself, he shuffled into the town, seeking any other groups who might have seen too much and trying not even to think about Spall. He had work to do. There would be time for grief later.
He’d accomplished a lot. He’d placed a call to HQ from the gas station, speaking, of course, in code, and his gut had clenched when the person at the other end fell silent for a moment at the implications of what he’d just said. But the Agency would, in theory, deal with the problem.
They couldn’t promise when backup would arrive, though.
In the meantime, Townsend had made sure their drone was still recording footage of the magical brawl. The jamming meant it couldn’t be beamed back to HQ, but at least it was stored on the device.
He’d also been mentally composing a long list of notes—things that would be necessary to report later. Details about the witches in particular. If Townsend had his way, and if the Agency hadn’t decayed into uselessness, the full might of one of the USA’s most powerful and secret branches of government was about to declare war on the Venatori.
Townsend intended to see to it that the bitches were swept out of the country and never allowed to return. He wished they’d been barred from entry to begin with, but HQ had felt that doing so would raise too many questions with the normie bureaucrats.
He continued his vigil and memory-wiped another small crowd that had seen the battle. In other towns, the entire population might need to be reprogrammed, but he didn’t think that was necessary here. The people of Greenhearth already knew about werewolves, after all. Simply ensuring that no one had gotten too good a look at what caused the fire on the slope ought to suffice.
The car was strategically parked on a slight incline at the south end of town, where there was a fairly good view of the north slope but he wouldn’t be too conspicuous. Townsend, the bulk of his work done for now, returned to it and sat behind the wheel, breathing in and out.
He checked the mobile device’s screen. By now, the Venatori were retreating, and Bailey and Roland were huddling by a half-burnt tree. He directed the drone to follow the witches. After a couple minutes of running, they came to a stop on a cliff far from town.
But in sight of where Townsend was parked.
Murderous rage suffused his entire being. He stepped out of the car, hands shaking, and opened the trunk. From it, he took out a sniper rifle fitted with a high-quality scope, and loaded it with four armor-piercing rounds.
Then he stood beside his car, not caring if anyone saw him, and took aim.
Through the scope, he quickly located the two Venatori henchwomen. They looked tired and scared and angry. He could relieve them of their stresses very easily. Two quick pulls of the trigger and their heads would become part of the scenery.
“No,” he told himself. “They haven’t moved against me yet, and the rest of them will if I blow these two away. Stop. Think. There’s still more I need to do.”
He lowered the rifle, took a few more deep breaths, and unloaded it before locking it back in the trunk. Then he climbed back into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
“We have all kinds of new info,” he said aloud, c
oaching himself through the crisis. “We know what we’re dealing with now. Even the desk jockeys at HQ can understand what just happened here, and very soon, we’re going to fuck them up. They won’t get away with this. All I have to do is not blow it.”
He nodded, gritting his teeth with determination, and pulled out into the road.
Lavonne watched the battle continue to rage through her high-powered binoculars. She could have just as easily displayed the scene on the air before her like an arcane TV set, but binoculars were far less suspicious. Half the town was watching the bizarre spectacle anyway.
She handed the contraption to Savina. In Lavonne’s view, the two of them were the most important to keep alive, for now. Hence, she’d sent the other four.
“I must say,” she began, “I was not expecting the American authorities to intervene. It is too bad about Ella and Vittoria, but they should have paid better attention. At least we now know these people are stupid enough to resist us.”
“Yes,” Savina agreed. “Next time, we will bring a larger force. I already contacted the other unit that was approaching from the southeast.”
Lavonne nodded. “Good. We may well need them, even if Alice and Mari survive.”
For a few more moments, they watched the fight. It was unnecessary to state the obvious—Bailey was far more dangerous than they’d anticipated. Lavonne had learned much by fighting the girl and her erstwhile bestial allies.
Now, watching her fight from a safe distance, she took still more notes, jotting things down in a pocketbook as needed, trading the binoculars back and forth with her aide. Savina asked moderately intelligent questions, and Lavonne gave curt answers.
“Let us leave now,” the leader proclaimed. The battle would be over soon. Most likely, the werewolf girl and her boyfriend would triumph, though without killing Alice and Mari. They seemed hesitant to take life.
