by Harry Nix
Incredibly, he still had his spell screen open. He guessed the wild version of him hadn’t bothered to close it, or didn’t know how.
His list of injuries was long, including serious damage from silver. He was soaking wet for some reason, as though he’d fallen into a lake.
He went to cast shield but made the wrong movement, casting flame shield instead. In the close quarters, the nearest mage’s robes immediately caught fire. Alex turned his back on him and began slashing at the mage on his other side.
“Kill him!” shouted the mage from the front.
The mage was wearing a protection ring, the spell within flashing up on a small screen with each attack. Although the mage was physically unharmed thanks to the spell, in the small space he couldn’t get away from Alex nor reach for a weapon himself.
Alex kept slashing until the ring the mage was wearing was exhausted, and then drove his claws directly into the mage’s chest. For a moment he actually felt his heart beating before he ripped it out, leaving a gaping hole.
Behind him the mage on fire was screaming, trying to get his robes off but couldn’t get the space to do so, not with a giant werewolf in the way.
“Kill him, kill him!” The driver shouted again. He had a wand in his hand but hadn't fired it yet, perhaps wary of friendly fire.
Alex saw that the pain mana had now restored itself to half full somehow, perhaps when he was wild. He already had flame shield running but he cast it again, charging it with pain. The shield became white hot and the mage beside him died, screaming as his flesh caught fire.
Alex reached into the front seat and grabbed the mage’s neck, his white-hot claws searing off his head.
The car immediately lost control, spinning and then flipping. All Alex saw was a flash of road and sky before the car smashed down, landing upright somehow, before bursting into flames.
Acting on instinct and roaring in pain, Alex leaped out of the hole in the roof with much force as he could muster, shooting up into the sky like a fiery comet, his fur on fire. The Great Barrier pulled again, delivering a dose of pain but then Alex must've shot out of sight of onlookers, coming down between two buildings. He smashed into a fire escape and then crashed to the ground, landing half in a puddle, which put out some of the fire. He rolled over in it, extinguishing the rest.
Alex opened his eyes but everything was blurred. He could still read his spell screen though. It was crystal clear and floating over a blurry background. It showed he was suffering from partial blindness and eye injury from the colloidal silver, and now fire. He had silver still in his body and it was burning.
With the car on fire behind him, Alex knew he couldn't stay here.
He couldn’t change back to human form though – his injuries were extensive and perhaps fatal in that form.
His wolf was howling to get back to the girls. Sure, they could handle themselves but Nia’s scream was still echoing in his ears. She’d clearly been hit with silver too.
Alex pulled himself out of the puddle and squinting upwards at the building, took careful aim and leaped. For the first time he got it perfectly right, landing gracefully.
He knew there was nothing he could do while he could still barely see. So, ignoring the urge to go running across the rooftops back to the mall, he sat down, knowing he was out of sight from prying eyes because the Great Barrier was leaving him alone.
Despite the advancements in his spellcasting ability, Juno's healing spell was still outside of his grasp. He’d studied the healing ring code over and again however. Thinking this might be the last stupid thing he ever did, he opened a new screen and tried to hack together a healing spell.
As he wrote, the burning silver in his body got worse. His injury list was expanding by the minute – broken blood vessels, burns, blood loss, nerve damage, tendon damage.
Alex tried to ignore it, certain there was nothing he could do. Then he glanced at purify in his list of spells and cursed himself. Would it treat silver like a toxin? Despite his mana draining away trying to heal his body Alex cast purify upon himself. Immediately a new pain arose in his body as the silver reversed course, heading back up the channels it had burned through his skin. But it was slow and causing damage on the way out.
Gritting his teeth, Alex cast purify again, doubling the spell and then charged it with pain.
There was a moment of sheer agony as all the silver within him burst out, splattering the surrounding area. That was closely followed by a wave of relief as the holes in his arms and legs and torso closed up, his healing speed greatly accelerating now the silver was gone.
With that done, Alex returned to his hacked together healing spell. He didn't know how to target the eyes but he knew how to lock a spell to his fingertip.
He dropped in the code from flame finger for location and typed lines, working in a mad rush. The execute button suddenly lit up.
Alex hit it, hoping his head wasn’t about to explode and felt a comforting chill appear at the end of his fingertip. Through his blurry vision he saw a small blue flame resting there, but it wasn’t hot.
He tested it against a cut on his leg and the wound healed up. Somehow he must have taken the code for fire from flame finger as well, so now he apparently had a healing flame.
Alex brought up his finger and touched it against his eyelid. Immediately, his blue mana jolted down as the spell got to work. The sheer relief through his eyeball and eyelid was pure bliss.
Within a moment, his eye was healed. Alex touched the other one. His blue mana was almost gone now – it was powering the healing spell and also trying to heal his body. Alex still had plenty of pain mana but wasn’t sure about using it for a healing spell. He remembered Juno saying something about spells having different effects depending on what they were charged with.
After a moment he pulled his finger away and then canceled the spell before he ran out of mana entirely.
His vision was restored, although there was still a niggling pain around his eyelids, where he’d been burned. It would have to do for now.
Alex carefully pulled himself to his feet and looked around for a landmark. He soon spotted a familiar building he knew and realized he was only a few blocks away from the mall.
He checked through his list of injuries. Now the silver was gone the worst of them had been healed somewhat. He hadn't suffered any deep injuries to his organs, although some of the silver had burned channels into this body.
Alex briefly checked the burning car from the rooftop. The flames had subsided somewhat and people on the street were keeping far away from it, clearly wary it might explode. He headed away from them, setting off across the rooftops towards the mall.
Sometimes when he jumped between buildings he felt the Great Barrier pull on him as people in the street glimpsed some giant creature.
By the time he was close to the mall, Alex judged his injuries weren’t going to be fatal in human form. He took a deep breath and shifted back. His clothing appeared again, thanks to the shifter charm. They were saturated with water. Alex suddenly remembered the fountain at the end of the food court and Henry trying to cover him. Had he thrown Alex into it to wash the silver off?
Alex shoved the questions aside and carefully made his way down the fire escape to the ground. He could faintly hear sirens, police and ambulance and it sounded like the fire brigade too.
He was walking across the road to the mall when suddenly Boris squealed to a stop in front of him and April pulled the door open.
“Get in!” she yelled, holding out a hand. Alex saw Juno was driving and Nia was in the back seat. She was saturated too, with patches of fur missing and bleeding lightly, but appeared largely unharmed. An incredible wave of relief swept over him as he realized the three girls were safe. He took April's hand, allowing her to pull him into the back of the car, half crashing into her. April pressed up against him, an intimate moment as she pushed him past her and into the middle.
Alex touched Nia on the only clear patch
of undamaged fur he could see.
“Colloidal silver, too?”
“Juno got it out with purify,” Nia said.
“We’re going to kill every single one of those necromancers, except this time no one's gonna bring them back from the dead,” Juno swore as she punched the gas and they took off.
“I don't think that was them. Pretty sure Henry tried to protect me,” Alex said.
“I saw that too. He covered you with his coat and then tossed you in the fountain, even as you were trying to fight him,” April said.
“Yeah, unless it was a false flag attack in which case he set it up and is trying to appear as the hero, trying to play us,” Juno said.
Alex reached over to the front seat and squeezed Juno's shoulder. The little witch was practically stiff as a board, her muscles tensed up. She slightly relaxed at his touch and let out a sigh.
“Or maybe it was some other mages, I guess,” Juno said.
Alex sat back and now they were mostly out of sight of others, shifted into werewolf form, slouching down so the Great Barrier didn't pull too much.
He held Nia's hand as he healed. After a moment he felt April slip her hand into his. He heard light chimes and smelt green leaves and wildflowers as she sent a spell through him and Nia. It wasn’t quite a healing spell but took away a lot of pain.
“Well, at least you got to eat some dodgy food court food before that all went to hell,” Juno said.
“Mongolian beef was pretty good,” Alex said, leaning back and closing his eyes, letting his magic heal him.
15
“I do so like to ride you, Mr. Wolf,” Juno whispered in his ear, her breath tickling against his fur. She squeezed her legs against his back as she did and even rocked her hips back and forth a little.
Alex, who was in his wolf form, gigantic and covered in black fur, let out a huffing noise.
“Stop teasing the poor boy,” April said from where she rode on Nia’s back. It was two days since the mall, enough time for everyone to heal up and for Juno to get some cash together from selling the rings.
Alex had spent most the day healing but also frequently checking up on Nia who had suffered two fairly serious injuries in short order, the first being the little old lady caving half her face in and now being splashed with silver.
Nia reassured him that she was fine, but Alex wasn't so sure. He kept kissing her, finding her in the house, feeling uncomfortable if she was away from him. On some level there was the feeling of failure, that he’d allowed her to get injured.
After the mall attack, they’d decided there was no more time for delay – they needed allies and fast. They'd chewed over Henry's words multiple times, puzzling over why was he was suggesting an attack on his own enclave. Alex figured it was because Henry would come out on top once his internal rivals were wiped out, although he wasn't too sure of that assumption. Just from the meal yesterday, Henry didn't seem like some power crazy mage seeking to turn a werewolf against his enemies for personal gain.
“But he likes it,” Juno said and scratched her fingers through Alex's thick fur.
They’d driven out of Baxter, heading south, going down bumpy roads until they’d come to an impromptu makeshift car park with a few old cars sitting there. Nia explained it was werewolf territory from there on out and the cars were most likely owned by werewolves, used to take them to civilization when they needed.
They’d locked up Boris, gathered their things (both Juno and April were wearing backpacks) and had now been walking for three hours through the forest, up and down hills and dodging around a large swampy marsh area.
Alex had found much of the walk peaceful and in fact he been able to bring up his spellcasting screen as they were trotting well-worn paths. Nia called them slipways, paths between werewolf territories that were somewhat neutral, although it still wasn’t advisable to entirely let their guard down.
Alex had spent a lot of time studying the necromancer spell. Juno had been particularly concerned about it. What if it was a trap? Or worse, what if it worked and pulled Alex down that path? He'd offered to share it with her but Juno had waved him away. She wanted nothing to do with the death magic. She hadn’t outright asked him to delete it but Alex felt like she wanted him too. She urged him repeatedly to be incredibly careful using it and to seriously consider whether he wanted to draw on death for power.
Despite her worry about minor necromancy, his hastily hacked together healing spell that he’d titled healing flame seemed to cause far more concern. “Unintended consequences” was the phrase of the day, often repeated by Juno and April.
Juno had accepted a copy of it and then gone out to the back yard to test it. She’d cast the spell, summoning the blue flame and using it to heal a split in a lemon hanging from the tree. It sealed the split using far less mana than Juno's healing spell did. For that matter, it was far smaller too. Alex still couldn't copy the entirety of Juno's healing spell across and yet he’d managed to hack together one that barely took up a page, using bits and pieces of cut and pasted code and making educated guesses.
Both Juno and April had examined him and especially his eyes a few times. Juno worried that although he’d healed he may have done some damage to himself that wasn't yet known. Alex had cast Know Thyself on himself a few times and as far as he could see he was perfectly healthy. It really appeared he’d written a compressed healing spell that operated at a touch.
“You do like it, don’t you Mr. Wolf?” Juno asked and squeezed him with her legs.
Alex was very aware of the little witch sitting on his back and the fact that there was only a thin fabric of panties between her and him.
“Yes,” he said, struggling to get the word out. He and Nia could talk in their wolf forms, but the shape of their mouth and throat made it difficult. Most the time they huffed and made other noises instead.
Alex looked across at April who’d been taking sideways glances at him all morning. He realized that she'd never seen him as a full wolf before. It was either that or she was still checking up on him.
According to the three of them, Henry had thrown him in the fountain to get the silver off him. Alex hadn't shifted when he’d gone wild, which he found interesting. This had probably saved Henry from serious injury as Alex had been trying to fight him even as he was being dunked.
Alex had run up the stairs to the upper level, chasing their attackers. April had followed him, Juno staying behind to help Nia.
The last she’d seen of Alex was him shifting and leaping from the multi-story car park, down on to the escaping mages’ car.
The fact that Alex had gone wild again was of great concern to the girls, especially Nia, who’d warned him that sometimes werewolves didn’t come back from that mindless state.
Alex was taking note of what she said but also privately wasn't too upset about it. After all, the wild werewolf version of himself seemed to be a professional killer of the highest caliber. It had taken down a car of three mages, ripping the roof off and Alex had returned in time to finish the job.
They walked for a little longer in silence, Alex enjoying the feel of the dirt under his paws, the sunlight dappling through the forest and the sounds of small animals and insects around them.
He could see that April was relaxing and feeling better now they were away from the city and all the concrete and pollution. He could feel it himself. The air was clean.
It wasn't long before they stopped for a break, finding a small clearing which obviously was used for such things given that at some point someone had cut some logs and placed them around it to make seating.
Juno got off Alex's back and scratched behind his ear before he shifted back to his human form and stood up. He had a moment of vertigo as his perspective changed and the shape of his body did too. There was always a slight hangover between wolf and man where things felt wrong and it was strange to be standing up. April and Nia broke out the food. It was all high calorie – bagels stuffed with cream cheese, bags of
chips and chocolates.
Since yesterday after hacking together his healing spell, Alex had been pondering the strange numbers that he’d found in every spell he’d read. Within sections of gibberish were long strings of numbers and symbols.
He'd taken the numbers from the flame finger spell which summoned a flame to the pointer of his right hand and used it in his healing spell, which had placed it in the exact same position.
Alex had been putting together a hypothesis of magic that every spot of the body had a set of coordinates for it. As he ate, he looked at the protection ring he wore and suddenly wondered whether the code within revealed anything about the wearer.
He cast Analyze on it and then on the gibberish code to open it up, seeing the pull on his mana was still decreasing. Flicking a finger in the air, he scrolled through the code on the ring until he came to the numbers and letters he thought certain referred to the person wearing the ring, or at least their body.
Alex opened up a new window and just copied that section across.
“Hey, Nia, put this ring on. I want to look at something for a minute,” he said, slipping the ring off and handing it to Nia.
“You gonna turn me into a wereturkey or something with this?” she asked, her mouth full of bagel.
“Are there such things as wereturkeys?” Alex asked.
“Nope, just werewolves,” she said.
“There were rumors once of a werefish but I don't really think they were true,” Juno added.
Although there were just joking around, Alex was curious about whether there were other were- creatures. They hadn't quite gone to the point of opening the Internet and bring up a page of mythological creatures so he could find out which were true or not, but they still had conversations on and off.
He learned that while harpies were real they were on the verge of extinction and in fact were not women with hideous screeching voices and long wings but looked more like angels. But they too suffered the same problem the giants had suffered from: they couldn't crossbreed or hybridize and without enough males there were no more harpy children.
