by Harry Nix
At that thought he stopped again. He saw the little blonde witch glance at him in the rearview mirror and then give him a wink before her gaze returned to the road.
She’s not my wife, not my mate he thought.
Not yet some wolfish part of him replied.
“Let’s get home and cleaned up before we go back to the Grease Trap. Alex, we’ll need to get you some more clothes because that Hawaiian shirt sucks on you,” Juno said.
The windshield has almost finished healing itself, the small open circle in the glass whistling air as it shrank and finally closed up.
Alex’s stomach grumbled so loud everyone in the car heard it.
“Someone’s hungry,” Nia said and poked him.
“Hey, stop it before I eat the two of you,” Alex said, fending her off.
“Fine by me,” Juno said.
12
For the first time since he’d become a werewolf Alex was wearing clothes that fit, weren’t Hawaiian patterned or stolen or fashioned from a unicorn sheet.
Nia and Juno had done a good job measuring him by sight and buying jeans, boxers, t-shirts, socks and shoes.
They’d gone back to Juno’s for all of what felt like five seconds to clean up before Juno bustled everyone back to Boris, who was back to his old self. Lacking any clothes that fit him, Alex was wearing a sheet toga again. They’d driven to the nearest mall and despite his misgivings, Alex had stayed in the car while the girls shopped for him. He’d offered his card to them but Nia declined, explaining that they didn’t know if the mages were tracking his bank account or not. It was then that Alex removed the battery and sim card from his phone, feeling like he was a paranoid tinfoil hat character in a spy movie.
Thankfully they were in and out in fifteen minutes – although it was a twitchy fifteen minutes for Alex slouched down in Boris’ back seat expecting mages or floating wooden balls or who knows what else.
Now they were sitting in the Grease Trap waiting for the masses of food they’d ordered to arrive. No one had batted an eye when they’d walked in – although only a short time ago he and Nia had been in hybrid form directly outside.
Nia and Juno were deep in a conversation about what they should do next and Alex was half listening while he examined the crushed wooden ball he’d recovered. With everything in pieces it was hard to know how it all went together originally. The circuit board had wires hanging off it, one of which was still connected to a quartz crystal. The bird feather was loose, sitting inside the orb. There was no battery or power source that Alex could see so he wasn’t quite sure how the circuit board functioned or what it was for.
I need Puzo he thought and then wondered if that was an immensely stupid idea. Puzo had studied electrical engineering before dumping it for computer programming back in college. He still loved to tinker and make things, including wiring up his own homebrew electronics. If anyone could figure out what the circuit board was for, it would be him.
But would it be Puzo’s death sentence? Who knows how dedicated or vicious these mages were? If you couldn’t kill someone straight out what would do next if you were batshit insane? Alex could see a clear line there – hold family or friends hostage and force the intended victim to come rescue them. He didn’t want to put his two friends in danger... although it could be argued they already were, given they knew him.
Alex stuffed the ball back in his bag and let that go, his mind drifting to the game the three of them were making. It was a sort of post-apocalyptic village game. You started off as a stranger who’d appeared from nowhere with no memory in a ruined and toxic village in some distant future. Over time the player rebuilt the village, cleaning up radioactive and nanite infested land, helping the villagers, growing weird new crops, and sometimes fighting robots in the junk heap outside. It was a peaceful serene game of rebuilding and relationships... and it was now gone, surely.
Alex’s mood darkened and he found himself almost growling again. Him, Howey and Puzo had put their all into their game (which didn’t have a title yet), abandoning jobs and living on noodles so they could take their shot. Now his entire life had been turned upside down. A normal life was impossible when a damn weredog could come after you at any moment.
For all that magic and spells and an entire supernatural world was a fantasy, there was a part of Alex that wanted to rewind time. Or better yet, just change everything so he wasn’t a werewolf and he could go on living, oblivious, on the other side of the Great Barrier.
“Oh damn,” Juno swore and looked out the window as heavy raindrops suddenly began to pelt down.
Alex broke out of his dark thoughts (his mood remaining however) and saw Nia rub Juno’s back
“It’s me. The storm. Just another great bonus of being a Chaos Witch!” Juno said.
She smiled at the end but Alex could see she wasn’t happy, not at all. He reached out and touched her hand, connecting to the magic around them. Immediately, goosebumps crawled up his arm.
Juno’s magic was cold and he could sense it stretching up from her into the sky. It felt like she was chilling the whole area.
“You’re not doing that on purpose?” Alex asked as people outside ran for cover.
Juno shook her head.
He didn’t get a chance to ask more questions – the food arrived and they all dug in. The sudden storm outside pelted the Grease Trap. Almost everyone inside started taking their time with their meals – it had been a warm day up until now and no one was dressed for the cold change.
Alex and Nia had ordered Pablo’s Heart Attack Special and Alex had added on practically every side on the menu. What would have felt a ridiculous amount of food a few days ago now looked barely enough as Alex ate his way through it.
Soon they were eating enormous slices of cherry pie and drinking bottomless cups of coffee. The weather outside finally cleared up and Alex saw Juno visibly relax.
“So what’s your deal then? Alex Lowe, game developer, now werewolf mage. You got the secret to immortality or saw the President getting the old North Korean Handshake?” Juno said, making some lewd hand movements.
“I don’t know... I was a normal guy, I guess. Then weredog, bite, werewolf and all these people trying to murder me. I’m not special.”
“You sure? There’s no such thing as a werewolf mage, not until now. You sure you didn’t see the President getting the old Romanian Shopping Cart? Anything to explain why these mages are hell-bent on killing you?”
“What the hell is a Romanian Shopping Cart?” Nia asked.
“You know, it’s like an Egyptian Book Report except the monkey is sober and the stopwatch is optional.”
“I didn’t see the President getting a, uh, French... Speed Racer, I swear.”
“Good one,” Juno said.
“This is all just... crazy. Life changing. Life destroying, I don’t know.”
Alex thought back to the alleyway and shifting. What happened next was still a black nothing. It felt like a cut now, a bottomless chasm separating his old life from this one.
Nia was watching him with her exquisite green eyes. With the clearing storm, a sunbeam had lit up her hair like fire. She is unfathomly beautiful Alex thought... but surely the cost of such a girl shouldn’t have been the destruction of his entire world.
“Well, there must be something about you they don’t like because no one would ever send that kind of force after a nobody. My first instinct is that the mages can’t take the competition from a werewolf mage. But then there is the matter of how exactly you stayed hidden for nearly twenty-five years, and how you didn’t go completely mad from not shifting too,” Juno said. She sliced off a piece of pie with her fork and popped it in her mouth.
“I didn’t shift because I didn’t know I was a werewolf, right?”
Nia shook her head.
“Most werewolves, the sane ones at least, do the blood nip thing to their children that I did to you. There are some packs who think a werewolf should only shift spontaneously. Mos
t kids do that by the time they’re three, five at the latest. But there are some werewolves who just can’t seem to do it the first time without some help. If they haven’t shifted by their teenage years then it gets bad. They get sick first, like the world’s worst flu and then they start having mental problems. Then they either die, or go crazy and then die, if someone doesn’t force them to shift.”
Everything Nia was saying was familiar to Alex. In the three weeks leading up to his birthday he’d felt like he’d been fighting a virus that just wouldn’t go away. A lifelong sleepwalker and sleeptalker, his parasomnias had escalated radically in the last month.
“So... there was a spell on me maybe? It hid me, stopped my magic and also kept me from going crazy from not shifting. But then it was wearing off, right around my birthday and so I was getting sick, ready to go mad. But then you made me shift. You saved my life?”
“You say I saved your life, I just call it a Tuesday,” Nia said with a shrug.
“Yes, this is what a real hero looks like. Form an orderly queue people for autographs. We’re selling strands of hair for fifty bucks a pop,” Juno said, deadpan, and then pulled a strand from Nia’s head.
“Ouch! Hey, I was using that!”
“Oh goddess I’m sorry, I wasn’t actually trying to pull that out!” Juno said, covering her mouth with her hands.
“I’ll pull you out,” Nia grumbled and took a piece of Juno’s pie as compensation.
“Is this your natural hair color?” Juno asked, holding the hair up into the light.
“I think you’re very aware that the curtains match the drapes,” Nia said, taking more of Juno’s pie.
Juno went red and looked at the table.
Alex found their banter comforting and it help push away the dark mood that seemed to be squatting on his shoulders. It also made their next move clear.
“I want to go to my apartment to collect my laptop,” he said.
Nia sucked in air between her teeth. “I mean, sure, I guess but there are probably mages watching it. No way those three we just fought happened to stumble over us.”
“I know but... look, I might be in a whole new life now that I didn’t pick but that doesn’t mean my old life just vanishes. At the very least I owe it to my friends to hand over all my work so they have a chance of finishing the game. Plus, I have a really awesome stick blender I want.”
Nia smiled at him. “Oh, well that’s completely different then. An awesome stick blender that probably cost, what, fifteen bucks? Why didn’t you mention it earlier? I’m definitely down for risking our lives for that.”
“It was six bucks actually, secondhand from a market, but I’m glad you see how important it is,” Alex said.
Juno had seemingly recovered from her embarrassment and was eating what remained of her cherry pie after Nia had taken large chunks from it.
“It’s not a terrible idea. So far it’s four mages dead, plus all those weredogs and we still have no clue who they are or what they want. Maybe a visit to the apartment to lure them out so we can capture one is a good move.”
Alex hadn’t even considered that but Juno was right. Unless they could talk to one of the mages after them how else would they discover who’d sent them?
“A dead mage is a good mage,” Nia said, finishing off her pie and waving over the waitress for more (this one a caramel chocolate). She got a piece for Alex too, Juno waving off more food.
“But it could work. The two of us stake it out, you go up, get your laptop and this gold-plated jewel encrusted talking stick blender with built-in AI and we see who or what comes out of the woodwork.”
“We just have to hope they send mages as incompetent as the three that just burned themselves to nothing by screwing up their spell,” Juno said.
Alex suddenly realized Juno had no idea he’d interfered with their spell by flinging his Shield spell into it.
“Yeah... that was me actually. You know how I wrote wow on your screen? I did the same with them, except I threw the entire shield spell right into the middle of what that mage was casting.”
Juno took an awkward swallow, splurted coffee on to the table and then ended up coughing with Nia pounding her on the back. She finally recovered, using a napkin to wipe it up as well as soak up the coffee dripping from her nose.
“That was you?” she croaked. “Oh goddess I have coffee in my nose but that was you with the wow? I thought Owen Wilson had cracked his head and astral traveled for a second. I saw that word appear in my magic and I knew it wasn’t mine! How did you do that?”
“You’re telling me that’s not normal? I just thought it and it appeared. With the mages I shouted at them. I was trying for nonsense to screw up the spell but somehow threw the Shield spell right at them.”
Juno sat back and took a sip of water the concerned waitress had brought over. “It’s definitely not normal. Not not not not not not not a million times not normal. Like, you can disrupt a mage or witch with the usual fireball to the face or icicles to the hoohah but overwriting their spell? Nope, no way. Even under mental domination, the thrall still casts the spell and the dominator can’t just change it.”
“Is this a good time to tell you I could see their spells as well? I could see their screens above their head. I even managed to copy part of that last spell. But I didn’t get much of it.”
Juno pinched the bridge of her nose.
“You’re killing me here White Fang.”
“But can’t you see spells too? What did you say? It was high level, like vanish the Statue of Liberty magic or something?”
Juno nodded. “Yeah, I can see spells sometimes. If the chaos is up, all the time. If it’s down, it’s harder. But I’m a damn good witch, despite my disability. You’re like... the janitor raised in a desert country who never saw a pool in his life stumbles while picking up trash during the Olympics, fall in and smashes the world record while still holding his mop and garbage stick in one hand.”
“Garbage stick?” Nia asked.
“You know, that spike you use to pick up trash.”
“Garbage claw?”
“Maybe. But listen – that’s an ability that I don’t even think the most powerful Chaos Witches even have. They can dominate someone utterly, control their mind so completely they’ll kill their own children with a smile and bake their bones. We’re talking mega-bad witches here, powerful enough to dust you with a blink of their eye, or make you think daytime TV is interesting. They can’t even do it. This has to be why they want to kill you.”
They sat there in silence for a moment (the waitress coming by again with more coffee and to check on Juno). The sun outside was well and truly shining so she was possibly subtly urging them to pay and get out.
“Pretend you’re going to cast a spell, I want to see something,” Alex said.
“Maybe we should save the magic experiments for home? Plus I think we need to do another Cleanse with all the blood we left behind,” Nia said.
Juno waved her hand. “I already took care of it while we were cleaning up,” she said.
Alex was impressed. “But how? Last time you drained all those rings and wand and us, and still got knocked out.”
“Tada, Chaos Witch. I was having a strong moment. Now do your worst Remus.”
Alex saw Juno’s screen appear above her head. It was blank with just a blinking cursor, which looked new. It seemed adaptations were still underway, changing what he perceived. Juno crossed her arms, pushing up some impressive cleavage. He saw the edge of a bright red lacy bra.
I can see your bra he thought and then the words appeared on Juno’s screen.
The little blonde witched started, her eyes widening in shock. But then she grinned.
“This is ridiculous. We have to see if you can teach me.”
Alex thought he saw something flicker on her screen for a moment but then dismissed it. It had looked like a glitch on a computer screen.
“Sure, if I’m able to. Can we go to my apartment
now? I can hear a hypersonic stick blender calling my name.”
“I’ll pay,” Nia said, pulling out some cash she must have withdrawn while they were at the mall.
Alex went to stand up from their booth before he tripped and landed face first on the floor. Even with his new werewolf enhanced body it still knocked the wind out of him.
He rolled over and sat up, seeing his shoelaces were tied together.
Juno ducked down with her hands on her knees, giving him a view of that epic cleavage and red bra he’d seen before.
“You didn’t see that spell, did ya Lobo?” Then she walked out, laughing.
“Laugh it up, fuzzball,” Alex called out as he untied his shoelaces. He got to his feet and met Nia returning from the counter.
“You gonna let her get away with that?” Nia asked and poked him in the side.
“Once I get my laptop back, and my stick blender then no, she’s definitely not getting away with that,” Alex said.
The wolf side of him wasn’t unhappy about crashing face first to the floor. It liked to chase its prey... and Juno was looking more like a meal with every passing minute.
Nia saw the same look on his face as when he’d first met Juno.
“Let’s rescue this talking blender and whatever before we take her down,” Nia said. Then she wrapped her arms around him and gave him a passionate kiss, right there in the middle of the Grease Trap.
When they broke apart, Alex saw a wildness in her eyes. Nia was looking forward to chasing the witch too.
13
“I've eaten at that Chinese restaurant and use that laundromat many times but I swear I have never ever seen that super dodgy pawnshop,” Alex said, looking across the road.
“Give your thanks to the Great Barrier!” Juno said with a flourish of her hand.
Alex kept blinking his eyes and looking again, as though the appearance of Bailey's pawnshop would suddenly make sense. In his memory there was an extremely cheap Chinese restaurant directly next to a laundromat. Any time the sole washing machine in his apartment block went out, he’d use the laundromat and then go next door to eat some cheap but delicious Chinese food while he waited. There was just no way there was an entire shop wedged between them.
