Werewolf Mage Box Set 1

by Harry Nix

  “I need some more mana. Can you get Juno and Nia?” he said as calmly as possible.

  April paused, unwilling to leave his side but then bolted out the room calling for them.

  Alex kept scrolling, opening up a new window ready to copy. But he’d reached his limit, his homebrew fireball spell taking up space. He cleared it away without a second thought.

  Juno came racing into the room with Nia and April behind her, a look of panic on her face but then stopped short when she saw Alex was sitting there unharmed.

  “What magic handkerchiefs out of the butt stuff are you getting into now?” she demanded.

  “I can see the code of the Great Barrier. I can read the spell,” Alex said.

  That shut Juno up. She stood there with her mouth half hanging open, a shocked expression on her face.

  Alex's mana was almost gone now.

  “Need any mana you can give me,” he said.

  Immediately, April touched his arm and started pouring mana into him as fast as she could. She grabbed Juno by the arm, snapping her out of her shock.

  “Feel what he's doing!” April said.

  Juno put her hand on him and poured mana through it. Nia touched both April and Juno, so they could draw on her too.

  Alex found the code suddenly turned to long strings of numbers and digits. One even looked familiar, maybe it was the code he thought meant werewolf? There was no time to check now. He started copying as fast as he could while trying to draw on the magic around them to keep the spell open.

  It wasn’t long before Juno and April dropped their hands away, their magic exhausted.

  All of Alex’s mana was gone now, the green consumed and then the tiny sliver of death. The blue dropped to empty. The pain was extraordinary, a roaring agony and wounds opened up and down his arms. Alex was still drawing on the magic around him and saw the pain magic bar flickering. He was feeding on his own pain and it hurt badly but there was a sweet seduction to it, just like he’d experienced at the Corvus outpost. He could see why they cut themselves and used the pain to cast powerful magic.

  “Alex, stop!” April yelled.

  But he couldn’t. He kept flicking through the code, trying to copy parts of it to study later. The pain was growing and wounds opened on his face. Juno and Nia were yelling but it was a distant roar.

  He flicked to a new page and there, jammed in amongst the code was an image. He copied it and it came straight across.

  Then he let the spell go, the relief overwhelming.

  Alex came back to himself to find the three girls still yelling at him.

  “I’m okay,” he whispered through cracked lips. He didn’t even have enough power to cast Know Thyself right now. He just kept drawing on the magic, letting it heal his body.

  “Do you want to explain why you did this to yourself? What could possibly be worth it?” April said.

  She was furious, maybe even more than Juno and Nia.

  He tried to concentrate on what she was saying but he couldn’t look away from the image he’d copied.

  On it was a giant ball of light, like the sun, rays coming down to touch the backs of countless werewolves. Some of them had their arms up and their heads back, as though they were howling in joy. Others were hunched over in pain.

  Alex wasn’t sure what exactly the image was showing.

  Was this magic pouring down upon the werewolves? Or was it being taken from them?

  Epilogue

  Another abandoned building in the Baxter industrial district. This one hadn’t been used for a long time; the piles of materials had mostly been washed away so the golems that formed were muddy and poorly defined.

  “Prince,” the vampire said and then looked down at his body. The spell was doing its best to model a patterned waistcoat but with limited materials it was mostly a mess.

  “Great, I wear this amazing suit and look at this! Can’t we sometimes meet in nice locations? Or at least get some colored sands dumped in here?”

  “Eric,” a golem said, stepping out of the shadows.

  “Henry,” said another.

  Henry and Eric stood there staring at Prince, radiating disapproval.

  He waved them away. “Yes, what is it? Implementation of the plan not quite sticking to your ideal?”

  “The frog was a bit much, don’t you think?” Eric said.

  “Almost burning them to death in a sealed cabin was a bit much, don’t you think?” Prince said back. He then turned to Henry.

  “It was a nice move with the water balloons though. Very well done.”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “Well, it worked out nicely anyway.”

  Eric started pacing, bits of his golem falling off and rejoining as he moved. If they wanted to use this meeting place again they’d have to arrange for some clay at least to be dropped here.

  “Jasper is dead and Alex has the territory now. His pack is growing quickly. We need to keep the pressure up, or he might just decide to stay wild and live out there. Ideas?”

  “Attack his father-in-law’s pack. Familial tie, dead werewolves. Now that Alex is out in the open there is a case for destabilizing the packs again, yes?” Henry said. He waved and a muddy chair formed behind him but then broke to pieces, the spell unable to hold the materials together. He sighed and remained standing.

  Eric turned to Prince who was standing with his arms crossed.

  “Tell us,” he said.

  “I don’t know if you’re ready for this level of idea.”

  The vampire was still annoyed about being chastised over Bailey. The others had seen this plenty of times before though so they just waited him out.

  “Fine. As much as we vampires love the sociopolitical pressure cooker stuff and indirect forces, time is of the essence. If Alex is still considering retiring to the countryside and living a peaceful life we must disabuse him of that notion immediately. We need direct action.”

  Eric rolled his eyes at Henry at Prince paced. The vampire always loved the dramatic and setting up shocking statements in particular.

  “What kind of direct action?” Eric finally said.

  “It’s simple. We need to kill one of his wives.”

  Werewolf Mage 3

  Werewolf Mage Copyright 2019 Harry Nix. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.

  Harry Nix

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  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogs in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

  1

  The orange hit Alex in the face at high speed and he went down hard, first slipping off the beam before hitting the one below it and finally landing in the mud pit.

  Most of the werewolves in the pack cringed but a few let out cheers.

  “Gasp,” April yelled.

  Alex felt his lungs shut down as her spell hit. Not that it mattered much—he could barely breathe as it was after that fall off the obstacle course. It was good he was in his hybrid form—human Alex would have snapped his spine.

  He pulled himself out of the mud, quelling the rising panic inside him at the lack of air and focused on pushing back against the spell.

  Know Thyself was up and running and in his resistances, he had Gasp +++. Alex wasn’t quite sure how the spell was measuring things but in real terms it meant if he forced it, he could manage to move his chest and get in a bit of air.

  Alex blinked the mud out of his eyes and attempted to heave a breath. April gritt
ed her teeth, her cheeks turning red from the effort. Gasp wasn’t a one-and-done spell—once cast it required a steady flow of mana to maintain it more than a few seconds.

  Gathered behind April were six children, ranging from two to five years old. One of them, Ruby, was holding her hands over her mouth, looking shocked. The others were absorbed in their game.

  Alex knew April could only hold the spell for a short time, but that wasn’t the point here. He wanted to resist the spell repeatedly and minimize its effect on him. He attempted to heave another breath and got nowhere.

  “C’mon wolfie, you can do better than that!” Juno called out. Alex glanced at her, and she winked back before passing a ripe orange to Jacob. The teenager had an arm on him and scary accuracy.

  “Vertigo,” she then called out, waving a hand in his direction.

  The wave of sickness nearly dropped him back into the mud. Alex had studied the spell countless times now and best he could understand was it screwed with the inner ear somehow, inducing stomach-churning sickness and loss of balance. He managed to keep his feet—at least until Jacob hurled the orange.

  Alex thrust out a palm, the physical movement to trigger Shield, barely getting it up in time for the orange to explode against it. But he lost his balance and went face-first into the soupy mud.

  For a moment, everything was dark and quiet, under the mud. The whole lack-of-air thing was starting to become an issue, Alex feeling tingling in his limbs as his oxygen levels dropped. He couldn’t hear his assorted pack members yelling and aside from his various wounds, it was kind of peaceful down there.

  Just as Alex was preparing to stand up and try for a breath of air one more time, April’s spell vanished, as did Juno’s.

  “Ha!” he roared, leaping out of the mud, covered head to foot. “The mud monster is coming to get you!” he called out to the children.

  “Alex, weredogs are coming!” Nia yelled.

  Alex looked away from the children to where Nia was pointing. Three of his pack were sprinting in wolf form towards them, followed by no less than twenty weredogs of various sizes.

  “Hide the children! Everyone else with me!” Alex roared.

  In the past week, his pack had grown from twenty to thirty-six. There were now six children who’d come with their parents, which left twenty-eight werewolves, a witch, and a half-nymph, half earth elemental to face off against the attacking weredogs.

  Make that twenty-six werewolves Alex thought as he saw Esme and Lydia herding the children away to the nearest cabin to hide them.

  Alex was fast but Jacob wasn’t weighed down by sticky mud and ended up in front of him, leading the pack. The young werewolf launched himself at the largest weredog, narrowly avoiding its teeth and slashing sharp claws across its eyes and down the side of its body. It put him in a bad position though, another weredog clamping down on Jacob’s leg.

  Alex saw Jacob’s shield ring flare as it took the bite and he silently cursed himself for not buying more of them. But he was hitting a severe financial barrier. Just feeding the pack was taking up a lot of money. Alex had done the sums—they needed at least five more profitable trips to Baxter to throw off enough cash to get every werewolf a shield ring. As it was, only eight of the entire pack had them.

  Landing beside Jacob, Alex kicked the weredog that had him by the leg, crushing in its face. Although it couldn’t pierce Jacob’s thigh with the ring still active, it could manage to hold him in place. It was a significant flaw in the rings that Alex had also been studying. They’d stop a bullet but not a cup of water, or a water balloon filled with colloidal silver. There was some level of velocity or pressure that needed to be hit before they’d activate, at least with the rings he’d studied. A slow bite could slip right past them.

  Jacob got free and attacked the biggest weredog again, which was snapping about, blinded.

  Over the sounds of screaming and barks, Alex heard chimes, April casting spells. A weredog to his right suddenly found itself bound by vines crawling up its legs, tightening as they did. Alex dispatched the weredog with the broken face, tearing its head off and flinging it away before plunging his claws into the trapped weredog.

  “C’mon doggie,” Juno yelled out, flicking a fire whip. She had a wild look on her face—one Alex had seen before at the Corvus outpost where she’d been gleefully ripping mages in half, surging with Chaos Magic. She was using the whips to devastating effect, tearing off limbs.

  Although the weredogs were vicious and overgrown balls of muscle, they weren’t smart or organized. The werewolves were furious but somewhat methodical. April would tie a weredog down and werewolves would disable it before moving to the next one.

  Weredogs had a regenerative ability, being they were ordinary dogs infused with werewolf blood and transformed by spell. But it wasn’t fast enough to regrow a torn-off leg with any speed.

  Juno ripped off limbs and then werewolves finished the job.

  Half the twenty weredogs were either dead or crippled in under a minute.

  Alex killed another weredog that had latched on to his arm, sinking its teeth in deep after Shield had canceled. He pulled it off him, gritting his teeth against the pain. Although it hurt badly, there was a sweet edge to it, the lure of the pain itself. Alex saw his pain mana bar filling as he almost unconsciously drew magic through the pain. He had to force himself to stop, a conscious act which felt like the equivalent of refusing a drink of cold water on a hot and dry day.

  He found himself behind his fighting pack, in a clear area. They were down to five weredogs left and one of them was already tied down with a vine. He could see a lot of blood and some injuries but overall, their sheer numbers and coordination was working well.

  A weredog went down as Dana, Pearl and Yvonne, three teenage werewolves, jumped on its back and rode it to the ground.

  Jacob turned to Alex, his fur wet with weredog blood and grinned at him, showing his sharp white teeth.

  “Yeah!” he yelled.

  Then his jaw disintegrated, tearing off his face, shards of smashed white teeth bursting up into the air.

  Alex heard the crack of the bullet a moment later. He turned to see six men emerge from the trees. They were dressed in camouflage and appeared to be professional soldiers. They were firing methodically into the werewolf pack.

  Alex saw and understood in an instant: the weredogs were just a distraction, something to wear them down, to exhaust any protection rings or spells.

  A bullet tore through Alex’s ear, practically ripping it off. He didn’t need his spell screen to tell him it was silver—the hissing burn and searing pain did that. He quickly cast Shield again.

  What had looked to be a swift victory was suddenly a rout—two werewolves went down with clean headshots. Three of the weredogs were still attacking and a few of the disabled ones were doing their best to haul themselves close enough to bite. Someone was dragging Jacob away, the young werewolf holding his face, blood pouring out from his shattered jaw.

  The rage, ever-lurking, quickened, rising like a flood. Alex let it, the fury feeling good, like the pain.

  But then—

  Then Nia kissed him.

  She tasted like blood but also her.

  “Don’t go wild, not now,” she said and pressed her hand to his chest, over his heart.

  Alex nearly threw her off him, such was the power of the fury but somehow managed to get a hold of the wild thing inside him.

  “Back into cover!” he roared.

  The werewolves scattered, dragging their injured with them, and fighting off the last of the weredogs. Alex and Nia took April and Juno with them, running for the nearest cabin. Alex felt something pierce his shield spell and searing pain lit up in his shoulder.

  It only took a moment for the werewolves to get into cover, but the six soldiers had exacted a cost. Many of the werewolves without shield rings had been hit. Some were frantically clawing at themselves, trying to get the silver out. Others were helping them, doing rudime
ntary battlefield surgery that mostly consisted of slicing the hole wider and pulling the bullet out.

  April, Juno, and Alex immediately started casting Purify on the nearest werewolves. The spell hit and helped push any silver out of their bodies.

  But there was a range there. Alex hadn’t bothered establishing it, but they could only reach the nearest werewolves.

  “I’m running closer,” he said to his mates and cast Shield without waiting for an answer. April and Juno did the same.

  They left Nia behind and bolted between the cabins. Bullets flared off the spells, but none got through.

  One of the werewolves who went down to a headshot was still alive, her forehead caved in slightly. Juno put her hands on her and cast her heal spell. April lent her mana while Alex kept casting Purify on any werewolf he could.

  He looked around for Jacob but couldn’t see him. But he could see the trail of blood. With the weredogs dead or disabled, the only risk was the soldiers. Alex checked his mana—it was running low. He’d been hitting training hard this week and experimenting with the different mana he could use to fuel his spells. As a result, he only had pain mana and what was left of the blue bar he’d now labeled “natural mana”.

  Alex cast Purify on himself and the searing in his shoulder abruptly abated as the silver bullet dropped out on to the ground. He used the last of his natural mana to cast Shield again and leaped in the direction of the blood trail. He overestimated his jump and landed well past the cabin he was aiming for. His shield flared twice as he turned around to find Jacob propped up against the back wall, staring at the sky.

  “No!” Alex roared, diving down beside him. The young werewolf had no heartbeat, but he was still warm.

  Alex didn’t waste any time—he immediately cast his homebrew healing spell and charged it with the only mana he had left, pain.

  Usually the flame that appeared on his finger was small and blue. This flame came out black and cold, like an eternal winter night. Alex touched it to Jacob’s missing jaw and ruined throat. There was a lurch in the magic around them so sharp that Alex winced. The spell regrew Jacob’s jaw and throat in under a second, the black flame playing over his face.