by Harry Nix
“You can't just go on adding were to things and then expecting it to be a creature. There are werewolves but that’s it. No werefish, werebananas, werelions, were… um… houses, whatever,” April said.
She was eating a junk food snack that had Chinese writing all over the box. It was some kind of cheesy ring. She’d slipped one over each of her fingers and now was eating them one by one.
“Okay, do it,” Alex said bringing up his analyze spell. Nia slipped on the ring and Alex quickly opened up the uncompressed code. It would take too long to copy it all over so he just scrolled to the section with the numbers and digits. As he suspected some of the numbers were different. He copied them across and then took the ring back.
With the two screens open side-by-side he could see a similar number in both. Maybe it meant werewolf?
“Your turn,” he said, giving the ring to Juno.
“Oh my, it's just so sudden, I didn't think I'd be getting a ring, especially not a generic steel one with a really dodgy engraving on it,” she said, slipping the ring on to her left hand and then holding it out to Nia and April, who played along, oohing and aahing.
“I love how there’s no diamond. It’s really great for a man to be frugal like that,” April said with a smirk.
Alex ignored them and cast analyze again.
He soon copied the code section and then gave the ring to April. She crunched one of the cheese rings off her finger before slipping the ring on and Alex repeated the process.
Once he was done, he put the ring back on and started examining the four chunks of code side by side.
“You want to explain that White Fang?” Juno asked, opening a bottle of cola and taking a large gulp.
“There are numbers in the spells. I know some of them refer to body part locations. There are these other ones and I think it's information about the person the spell is working on. I can already see some numbers that are the same, at least at the start. Maybe one means female possibly? And there’s one similar between you and April that Nia doesn’t have.”
Alex kept flicking between the bits of code. Although we couldn't read some of it he still felt there were hints of what it might mean. The number similar between Juno and April was in his code too – maybe it meant magic user?
The problem was once again that his sample size was too small. Alex wondered if, when they got to Nia's father's pack, he’d be able to ask various werewolves to put on the protection ring so he could examine the numbers.
Alex customarily had Know Thyself running every time he opened up his spell screen. He closed the four windows of code for later study and habitually flicked to his stats page.
Immediately a new resistance jumped out at him:
Silver +++
Alex reached out and grabbed Juno's hand. Although he couldn't share what he saw directly she could get a sense of what he was looking at.
“Resistance to silver,” he said.
Juno frowned and then rolled her eyes.
“Of course it is. Of course you get hit by silver and immediately get resistant to silver.”
“Are you serious?” April asked. She came over and grabbed Alex's hand. Although Alex had felt her magic before, it had been her casting spells to aid him. This was something far more intimate and although she was only holding his hand it felt like a far deeper connection was being made. He wasn't quite sure what April was seeing – perhaps sheet music or maybe she heard chimes and other sounds but she frowned, just like Juno, before suddenly grinning.
“This is ridiculous. You’ve actually started to grow resistant to silver.”
“I take it this isn't normal for a werewolf,” Alex said.
“No werewolf, and I mean no werewolf is resistant to silver. It’s always deadly,” Nia said. She’d crossed her arms and was looking worried.
“I guess I’m just different, that's all,” he said, fearing it sounded as feeble as he thought it did.
“You might want to keep these things to yourself. Having magic is one thing but being resistant to silver? Some other werewolves aren’t going to like that one bit,” Nia said.
Juno and April must've realized something was going on because they let go of Alex's hands. He took a drink of cola before moving over to sit next to Nia, wrapping his arm around. He nuzzled against her ear.
“I'm sorry you got splashed,” he whispered.
Although, Nia had repeated many times she was completely fine with what had happened, this time she nodded and then sniffed before a tear rolled down her face. She quickly wiped it away. Alex wasn't quite sure what to say so he just hugged her. A moment later Nia got up to rummage in the bag for some chocolate and it seemed temporarily that all was well.
“Is it much further to your dad’s?” Juno asked.
“At least another three hours,” Nia said. She tore open the chocolate, broke some off and tossed the packet to April. Alex decided he’d use the next three hours to get more magic study in but he needed a bit more information first.
“Juno, do you have any spells that appear in your left-hand?” he asked.
“Like this?” Juno said, summoning a shimmering blue ball into her left hand. Alex had barely seen the code on the screen it was so fast. He could feel the cold radiating from where he was sitting.
“Yes, show off, that's what I mean. Can you bring up the spell so I can look at it?”
“Sure. I call this the ice ball. Like, I’ll ice your balls with it.”
She canceled the spell and came to sit beside him, holding his hand. As usual the spell was far too large to copy so he started scrolling through it, looking for strings of digits. He soon found a promising section and copied it over, listening with half an ear as the three girls talked.
Finally he was done, so he gave Juno a kiss and then brought up all the other spell parts he'd copied. He immediately spotted some numbers that matched with the flame finger spell. Maybe they referred to the hand itself before going down to a more specific location, such as the finger.
Alex quickly made a duplicate of flame finger in an empty window. He opened up the code and also the section he’d copied from Juno’s spell. He cut bits out of flame finger to do with location (he guessed) and pasted in the section from ice ball
Execute lit up so it pressed it.
The flame appeared in the palm of his left hand.
“What exactly are you screwing with?” Juno said.
“I'm figuring out the exact coordinates of different body parts,” Alex said. He held the flame and waited. It felt the same as it did when it was on the tip of his finger. He felt enough heat to know it was working but wasn’t burned.
After a minute of nothing exploding, Alex canceled the spell.
“I think if I can work out enough of these locations, I’ll be able to make really specific spells.”
He stood up to stretch and immediately toppled over, planting face first in the dirt. Juno leaned over to him. “Do ya mean like that one?” she asked.
Alex rolled over and saw his shoelaces were tied together again, the little witch somehow managing to cast the spell without him even seeing it.
Rather than waste time kicking off his shoes and socks, Alex shifted on the ground into his hybrid form, the shifter charm taking his clothes. He leaped to his feet, towering over the girls. Juno tried to run but he hauled her up over his shoulder and smacked her on the butt a few times before putting her back down again.
“Watch yourself,” he said, pointing a clawed finger at her.
It was then that he saw April and Nia had been watching this. Both of them had flushed cheeks and quickly looked away, stumbling a bit before they resumed their conversation.
Juno for her part seemed chastened.
“Yes, Sir,” she said under her breath so only he could hear it.
Alex's mind suddenly filled with memories of him, Nia and Juno in bed. He quickly started thinking about icebergs, cold water and anything else to get his mind off it. He shifted back to human so h
is clothes appeared so at least had a chance of hiding what was on his mind, causing Juno to snicker.
The three of them finished their lunch, Alex finding his mind obsessed with the digits and letters he found in the spells.
“What if I cast analyze on you?” he finally asked Juno.
“Well, I have a lot of secrets, so you might not find out much. But if you power it up too much that could really hurt me,” she said
“That’s sort of what I did to that mage we tied up in the barn. It wasn't quite analyze but a similar method. You saw what happened to him,” April said.
The mage in question, a mercenary who’d given up his bosses, was now fertilizer for April’s tomatoes.
They finished up, packed their bags and then Nia and Alex shifted back to their wolf forms. They set off again, Alex reading through the magic spells as he walked.
After about two hours, Alex began to get the feeling that they were being watched. He closed all the screens and concentrated on the forest around them. April and Juno were both quiet and so all he could hear was the sound of their footsteps, heartbeats and their breath. There was something different about the quality of the sound in the forest, Alex realized, and then it came to him: the other small creatures were quiet. The birds and insects and other things had fallen silent and it wasn’t because of them.
Nia slowed a little until Alex was by her side and then touched her head to his.
“We're being shadowed,” she said, lisping a little. She didn't seem overly concerned but Alex stayed on alert.
There was mostly that strange silence around them as they padded through the forest. He heard the crack of a stick at one point to indicate there might be someone there, but he didn't see any werewolves.
They continued walking before Nia suddenly stopped and howled at the top of her lungs. After a moment she was answered with a chorus of howls. The wind suddenly shifted and Alex caught a different scent: smoke from fires and also cooking oil and food.
All around them wolves emerged from the trees but they kept their distance.
Alex tensed up but kept moving, now taking the lead. They were close to where the pack lived.
Soon they emerged from the forest into a large clearing that backed on to the edge of a mountain ridge. There was a cave into the hillside that had wolves lounging in the opening, sunning themselves and a few sleeping. There were also a few small cabins and three larger homes, the roofs covered in solar panels.
Nia had explained that these homes would be here but to Alex it was still strange seeing them. They looked out of place in the landscape, as though they'd been hastily erected, made from kits.
The grass gave way to dirt, no doubt trodden out of existence by the werewolves around them. Alex estimated he could see fifty at a minimum, a mixture of men and women. The ones lazing around were in wolf form but the rest were either in human or hybrid form. There were also children running about. He watched a boy and girl both no older than five years old chasing each other, shifting from human form to wolf and then back again as they played, sometimes laughing and sometimes barking.
As they came closer to the camp, Alex went over what Nia had told him yesterday. There was always a traditional challenge when a werewolf approached the pack. The Alpha would draw a line in the dirt and the visiting wolf had to walk forward and stand on it. No matter what happened they could not move until invited to cross the line by the Alpha werewolf or sent away.
To do anything else was to risk death.
There was a hubbub of voices across the camp before someone called out for silence. A werewolf in hybrid form emerged from the main building. His fur was red like Nia’s, but far darker, tending to black on parts of his body. He stood as tall as Alex did in his hybrid form, easily eight feet and was layered over in muscle.
Alex had only seen Nia in hybrid form and himself in a mirror and he suddenly understood why he was such a terrifying sight. This was Julius Whitewood, Nia's father, and Alpha of the Whitewood pack.
He walked over to where Alex and the girls stood and used a long claw on his hind leg to scratch a line in the dust. He was glaring at Alex like he wanted to tear him to pieces. Nia had assured him that this would be part of the ceremony but Alex wasn't quite so sure.
He'd met fathers more than once with different girlfriends. The feeling that they wanted to kill you was all too common.
Juno got off Alex's back and he shifted to his hybrid form just as Nia did the same. Gathered behind Julius were some women who’d shifted to their hybrid forms too. One of the girls looked very much like Nia and Alex supposed it was a sister or half-sister.
Alex walked forward and then stomped on the line, letting part of his foot go over it, a deliberate provocation that was part of the ritual. The moment he did, some of the gathered male werewolves rushed at him, roaring. Alex tensed but held his ground.
They roared at him and ran but then sprinted past before turning back.
Julius then came walking over. Although they were the same size Alex knew “dad strength” was a real thing. It felt like Julius would have no problem snapping him in half. Julius growled at Alex and then sniffed the air before letting out a loud howl that was echoed by the rest of the pack. When he was done he then held out a clawed hand to Alex who took it and was immediately pulled over the line towards Julius.
“Welcome,” Julius said in a gruff voice.
“Nice to meet you,” Alex said recycling the line he'd used on countless fathers since he was a teenager. Suddenly it was like Carnivale – the girls behind Julius squealed and came rushing forward to hug, Nia, Juno and April. They were all suddenly talking a mile a minute and Alex could hardly keep up with what any of them were saying. Julius clapped him on the shoulder.
“We’re having a celebration later but first to business while they catch up,” he said. He walked off, heading back to the large house. After a glance at Nia, Alex followed. She explained this might happen – when her father had business on his mind it had to be dealt with immediately.
Alex followed Julius through the camp, passing small cabins on the dirt path. It wasn't like being in the city. Everything here seemed a rundown, apart from the cabin's which looked newly constructed.
There was dust and dirt everywhere and some of the children were grimy. Alex had no idea how a werewolf pack lived so he wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. The overall impression he got was that life was hard.
There wasn't civilization out here. You couldn’t head down to the supermarket to buy a box of ice creams if you wanted or see a doctor.
Julius opened the door to the main house and then shifted back to human form. To Alex’s surprise he was completely naked, which must've been usual for him because it was an open basket of clothes sitting inside the door. Julius started pulling on pants and a shirt. In his human form he looked to be in his late forties, solidly built with red hair that grew darker around the nape of his neck. Alex shifted, his clothes reappearing with him.
“Shifter charms are a little out of our budget right now so we make do with the baskets,” Julius said.
That feeling of being in someone's parent's house intensified. Alex almost wanted to take his shoes off. He followed Julius into a large room that had a wooden table in the middle covered with papers. The walls were covered too. On the back wall there were maps of Baxter and the surrounding territories.
“Werewolf territories. The one on the left is forty years ago. The one of the right is last year. What’s different?” Julius asked.
Alex walked over and immediately saw the differences. In the map from forty years ago the area surrounding Baxter was covered in a multitude of packs. Whomever had made the map had done their best to sketch out territories and written names of packs within them. To the north of the map there was a gigantic territory with Arkovis written across it. On the map from last year the Arkovis territory was down to a fifth of that size and Alex saw there were business names written in the old held territory. He looked
for Lowe but didn’t see it.
“Arkovis had a lot of territory and now these companies have it all.”
“It's always the same. Starts with werewolves holding and ends with vampires or mages owning. Always,” Julius said, coming over to stand beside Alex.
“I’ll make you a coffee,” he said, touching Alex on the shoulder before heading over to the side of the room where there was a small bench with cups and coffee-making equipment.
As Julius prepared and stirred, Alex examined various other papers pinned up on the walls. There were endless property sale documents, stretching back over a century. Someone had attempted to color-coded them at one point. Alex saw a V written on some of the pages and M on others which he supposed was vampires or mages. All up, it looked like Julius had spent quite a long time tracking precisely how it was that vampires and mages had been screwing over werewolves for decades.
Alex remembered what Bailey had said to him the first time they'd met, about the bitey ones and magic ones screwing over the furry ones since time immemorial.
Julius returned and handed Alex a cup of coffee, which tasted damn good.
“So is it true what my daughter says about you? You can do magic?” Julius asked without preamble.
“I can,” Alex said, transferring his coffee cup from one hand to the other and summoning a flame to the tip of his finger before extinguishing it.
“I'm just wearing a protection ring. That’s all me,” he said.
“Do you think you could teach another werewolf?” Julius asked. Although Julius was calm and happy Alex sensed a hint of desperation and hope in his voice.
“I don't know. Werewolves don't have magic they can use do they?”
“Much to our dismay and to our tragedy,” Julius said, drinking some of his coffee. He waved Alex over to another large sheet of paper stapled to the wall. On it was lists of enclaves, houses, covens, and packs. There were four headings: Mages, Vampires, Witches, Werewolves.
“The witches are sympathetic to our cause. After all, they do mate with us quite often. There are four seats at the table, but in reality there are only three. Then you look at the power the mages and vampires have from sticking together and realize there are two that are in control,” Julius said.
