by Harry Nix
“C’mon, c’mon,” Alex said, holding the back of Jacob’s head.
Despite the pain in his own body, and the sounds around him, Alex felt an odd calmness come over him. This wasn’t just Jacob... but a doorway.
Letting the pain-charged healing spell run, Alex reached into cold darkness, feeling a thick rope. At the end of it was something tremendously heavy and strong. Letting out a breath, Alex gently pulled on it.
For an instant he saw Jacob’s surprised face coming out of the black and then reality reasserted itself. The young werewolf coughed, and Alex let his healing spell fall away just as the last of the pain mana was exhausted.
“Did we get them?” Jacob asked, blinking, and taking deep breaths.
“Not yet,” Alex growled.
He left Jacob there to recover, casting Shield again and leaping back to Nia. The soldiers were still in position, just outside the tree line, taking shots of opportunity.
Alex glanced over to Juno and April who were still working on the werewolf who’d taken the headshot. Her skull was back in place, but she was still unconscious.
“Something is wrong with those soldiers. They have the advantage and yet they’re just standing there,” Nia said.
“Why advance when they can just kill us from there?”
“The weredogs were just a distraction for the soldiers. Maybe they’re one, too,” Nia said. She’d realized what Alex had.
“Alex, what do we do?” a werewolf yelled out from somewhere.
“The weredogs are coming back,” another yelled.
Alex risked a glance. Most of the weredogs had been dismembered to the point of no return but three of them had only lost legs and suffered minor injuries. They’d already partially regrown their missing limbs and were attempting to stand. It wouldn’t be long before they attacked again.
Although he wanted to leap across the field to the soldiers, Alex knew he’d be blasted multiple times before he even reached them. It was mid-afternoon but it wouldn’t be dark until late as the season slowly moved into Summer. They couldn’t wait for night.
“Wait for now. Juno, can you fling a spell at them? Something small.”
Juno nodded back at him. With April still feeding her mana, she summoned a small fireball in her hand, not much larger than a marble. Then she stepped out into the open and flung it. The six soldiers immediately opened fire, but her shield blocked the bullets. The marble of fire transcribed a perfect arc through the sky before bursting on the chest of one of the soldiers.
He didn’t even move, despite the flames that took hold on his shirt.
“I don’t think they’re alive,” Nia murmured after peeking out again. The flames burned under the soldier’s face before finally dying out. He stood there impassively the entire time.
“So, there are necromancers somewhere, too?” Alex said.
“You hear that?” Nia asked.
Alex caught the sound—a low buzzing from the direction of the soldiers. It didn’t take long for the source of the sound to reveal itself. Drones, at least ten of them, rising above the trees, each with a small box attached.
“Everyone under cover!” Alex yelled.
It was easier said than done. Some of the werewolves could go into cabins but others were on the wrong side of a featureless flat wall.
Alex stayed where he was, watching the drones fly high up into the air above them. Then there was a crack as the boxes detonated, flinging silvery dust outward. The drones lost power immediately, dropping straight down.
Werewolves hunched against buildings as pieces of silver rained down. It wasn’t just silver dust, which was taking its time to drift down but also curls of silver, as though they’d been scraped off a bar with a vegetable peeler.
Alex ducked inside the cabin with Nia as the rain fell upon them. Screams rose up from werewolves trapped with nowhere to go.
Thankfully, April and Juno were still within range of everyone. They immediately began casting purify, pushing silver out of any wounds. Alex risked a jump between buildings to help too.
It was then the three weredogs attacked Nia. She screamed in pain and this time the rage swept over Alex before he had time to blink.
2
“They made me I’m sorry, they made me, sorry,” Stephen gasped.
Alex found himself looking into a familiar face—Stephen, the young necromancer they’d captured and then let go.
Alex was looming over him, a clawed hand stabbing into Stephen’s stomach. The necromancer was pale and gasping like a fish hauled out of the water. Alex spat something out of his mouth and then cringed when he saw it was human flesh and clothing.
“I’m sorry,” Stephen said again.
Alex knew pulling his claws out would likely kill Stephen, almost instantly. He took a moment to look around. They were in the forest somewhere. Dead mages lay everywhere. Most of them were about the same age as Stephen or even younger. One of the dead was almost certainly a teenager. There were drone controllers scattered about the place.
Alex checked his mana and saw he was almost empty on all of them. He’d clearly been injured in the gap and his body was using what he was generating just to keep him alive. He had no store of pain to perform a miracle this time.
He began actively drawing on the magic around them, but it was being taken as fast as he produced it. Hoping he wasn’t making a huge mistake, he began pulling the magic through his injuries. He had plenty to choose from—his right ear was missing entirely, he had long gashes down both arms and on his torso and there were bullets, at least six of them in his legs. They weren’t silver though, which Alex found strange. Then he spotted a handgun in the grass. The junior necromancers had been armed but with crappy weapons.
Alex willed himself to stop healing. He was partially successful—the mana drain slowed but didn’t stop entirely. It was enough though for his pain bar to begin to fill. The moment he judged he had enough for his homebrew healing spell, he cast it. The clawed hand he had inside Stephen was where the healing flame appeared.
The young necromancer let out a cry of pain as Alex carefully withdrew his finger, sealing the wound as he went. Then he removed the others one by one, healing up the holes.
The surface wounds were quickly sealed but Alex kept feeding the dark flame, running it over Stephen’s body. He had no idea if it would provide deep healing, the way Juno’s spell did. He carefully moved to Stephen’s side and used a claw to shred his clothes off him. Instead of robes, Stephen was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. The t-shirt had a laughing earth joyfully spinning around a grinning moon. It made him look painfully young.
Alex forced himself to look over at the other dead bodies. Nine in total, plus Stephen made ten, one for each drone. All disposable foot soldiers.
He shook his head, feeling the fury rising again. Why send six possibly undead soldiers with guns and silver bullets and then back them up with kids barely out of high school? There surely must have been other more powerful necromancers involved to reanimate the dead.
Alex let out a grunt as a wound opened up on his arm. He’d exhausted all his mana and the black flame on his finger stuttered as the pain went dry.
“Are you injured anywhere else?” Alex asked, letting go of the spell. The immediate relief was bliss, and Alex wasn’t sure he’d be able to cast his healing spell again even if he wanted to. He was more injured than he’d first realized.
“Something hurts inside,” Stephen said. He had some color back to his face but he still wasn’t breathing well.
Alex tried willing the healing to slow again so he could help Stephen, but nothing happened. He cast his gaze around, trying desperately to think of a solution. Wherever he was, he was alone and who knew how long before his pack arrived, or even if they would. Trees surrounded him but as he and April had discovered, his ability to draw on nature was restricted to taking her to bed. She could sit in the forest like a wild earth child and pull magic through the nature around her, but Alex thus far had f
ound it impossible.
His gaze came to rest on a headless body, and he felt unease gather in his stomach.
There was plenty of dead around here and he had a mana bar just waiting for it.
Stephen’s eyes rolled back in his head as he coughed, pink foam on his lips. Alex pushed his worries aside and staggered to the nearest dead body. Since he’d pulled death though a recently killed chicken, he hadn’t tried it again. He’d used up the tiny sliver of it casting his ridiculously powerful Know Thyself 100x, which had revealed far more than Alex had intended to find.
Alex put his hand on the body, again forcing himself to look at it. It had been a man, barely a man, slender and Alex couldn’t help but feel an ache in his heart. He’d murdered this boy. If he’d come out of his wild state earlier, he wouldn’t have killed any of them, unless it was necessary.
He pushed all this down, putting it with the fury and began drawing magic through the dead body.
It came easily, like a faucet had been turned on and Alex realized it was because there were so many dead in the same place. They’d punctured holes through to the magic, like a water balloon stabbed with a pin multiple times. He filled three-quarters of his death mana in under ten seconds before the flow slowed and then stopped. He felt there was more there, but it was outside his reach, exceeding his skill to pull on it.
Staggering back to Stephen he saw he was down to quick gasps, surely moments from death.
Hoping his healing spell was more than surface touch, he cast it, drawing on death to fuel it.
The flame that shot out of his fingertip was a good foot long and deep red but focused, like a welding torch. The coldness was deeper than before and painful, but Alex ignored it. He thrust his finger against Stephen’s stomach. The flame flared out for a moment before piercing through his skin, opening a keyhole wound.
It only lasted ten seconds or so, the flame eating up the mana and then extinguishing. As it died and retracted from the wound, it sealed it up, leaving only a scar.
Alex found himself swaying on his knees beside Stephen, his head muzzy. He realized he’d been staring at one of the bodies that was missing a leg. Odd thoughts of pulling more death mana through it had been echoing in his mind.
“Alex!” Nia called out in the distance.
He turned his head, blinking slowly as though waking from a deep sleep. Nia was with some of his pack members. Juno was riding on the back of a werewolf.
Soon they were at his side, Juno pressing her hands against him to cast heal. He mumbled something about casting the spell on Stephen first but then his words stopped working. For a moment he was on the grass beside Stephen. The necromancer was still alive. Then the cool darkness washed over him and Alex happily allowed himself to sink into it.
3
Alex sat in the cold conference room alone, another ring in his hands, staring into the middle distance, ignoring it, the pile of jewelry in front of him and the results of his ruined attempts to enchant experiments to the side. He was in human form, the chill of the room biting into him, but he didn’t shift to hybrid, where he’d be covered in fur and warm. He wasn’t sure if he was punishing himself.
It was the day after the attack and things were, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked.
Utterly, utterly fucked.
It turned out the drones were carrying three forms of silver in their boxes. There were curls of it, scraped off a silver bar. They were a problem but large enough to easily spot and pick up by any werewolf with gloves. There was silver glitter, tiny flecks that thanks to their size had fallen pretty much straight down from the drones exploding. As a result, there were ten six-to-twelve-foot diameter circles of the village that glittered. The only way to remove it was to scrape up any dirt with shovels and bag it for disposal and to wipe down surfaces carefully.
The final form was silver dust. Alex had seen the clouds of it hanging in the air before he’d gone wild and apparently it had taken its time to drift down, spreading out into a diffuse cloud as it went.
It was close to impossible to remove completely.
Alex had awoken on the way back after Juno had cast her healing spell on him. He’d returned to the village to the sight of werewolves in breathing masks and eye protection with bright yellow gloves up to their elbows carefully wiping down buildings and scraping off the top layer of dirt.
April was on hand casting Purify over and over as werewolves encountered silver dust, the fine particles easy to breathe in. Although Alex was still healing, he took over, giving April the chance to return to the worst of the injured.
Alex had made the mistake of stepping on to contaminated soil with his bare feet and had been instantly burned. His leap away had stirred up silver dust, which he’d then breathed in. Purify had pulled the silver from his body but not before a few moments of sheer agony as the tiny particles burned his throat and lungs.
The necromancers had salted, or silvered, the earth.
Although Alex felt like he’d gone past rage into some deep calm on the far side, he involuntarily growled.
His pack were enraged and even here, far away from most of them he could feel the pull of the pack on his blood and body. They wanted bloody vengeance and he couldn’t think of many good reasons they shouldn’t have it.
According to Nia, the worst thing anyone could do was to break the truce of the Call, a sort of werewolf gathering. The punishment for such a break was the death of the entire offending pack, down to the last child, wiped from history.
The second worst thing was to silver the earth.
Apparently, it could take months to remove the silver dust and in some cases, it made land uninhabitable by werewolves entirely. Packs without access to any form of Purify, either from a ring or friendly witch would simply abandon the polluted area.
That was shortly before they went on a violent rampage against those who attacked them.
One of the werewolves shot in the head had died, despite their best efforts to keep her alive. Her name had been Bish. Alex had learned she was single with no partner or children and some small shameful part had been relieved it had been her and not one of the parents of the six children now in his pack.
The second werewolf shot, Gem, was still alive but unconscious. Despite Juno and April’s best efforts, she hadn’t awoken and apparently healing spells were no use—all wounds that could be found had been healed. Whatever had happened to her brain would require time now to recover.
Despite the death and the likelihood that Gem would never awake, it was almost as if the pack was far more enraged about the silver.
This led to the next aspect of utterly fucked: they now had a prisoner, Stephen.
The young necromancer had survived thanks to Alex’s healing spell and then further treatment by Juno.
It had been lucky Juno had come after Alex because she was the only one who’d stopped the werewolves ripping Stephen to pieces. From what he’d heard, she’d even had to shout Nia down and, in the end, had summoned a fireball in her hand to back the pack down.
Stephen was now mage-cuffed in one of the upper rooms of the main building and currently only Juno and April were allowed to guard him. Nia had confessed it wasn’t safe for her to guard Stephen and it wasn’t likely any other pack member would be either. All she wanted to do was murder him.
Even Esme and Lydia had made some dark comments to Alex about the mage involving the words “flaying”, “maiming” and musings on the most agonizing castration method.
With gentle probing, Alex had learned a lesson many rulers had lost their heads for: the power of a ruler is delegated by the people and continues only with their consent, as quoted by Nia who had thrown what sounded like Latin at him again: Vindiciae contra Tyrannos.
There was a dichotomy there: he was Alpha and although his pack would argue with him and seek to sway his decisions, in the end, his word was law... right up until it wasn’t.
Nia hadn’t gone into it but there were some Alphas who’d
woken up to find themselves alone and abandoned, king over nothing.
Alex had taken all this in and despite what his pack wanted (and what a significant part of him wanted), he was keeping Stephen alive for now. Alex was determined to extract every spell the kid had and every bit of knowledge he carried about his enclave, death magic and anything else supernatural.
There was a risk keeping Stephen alive and with the pack, but Alex knew it was the right move because there was the third strand of utterly fucked to deal with: he’d reached the limits of spell-writing he could achieve on his own.
Yes, he’d written a healing spell that, thus far, seemed to work, although long-term effects still remained to be seen. And he’d written a useless flame sword spell that projected not so much a sword but more a stick of fire from his finger.
But he was stuck. Juno and April had allowed him access to their spells, and he’d read over them countless times but there was virtually no point in reading a book written in a foreign language if you didn’t even have the basic syntax down.
Almost all of their spells were too large for him to copy across entirely, which meant he still had limited offensive spells. Flame Shield and hugging mages had worked a few times now, but it required he be up close and personal. He wanted to throw a fireball, grow vines from the dirt, hurl a lightning bolt.
Juno had described how witches learned magic—from their families first and then their coven, which often contained family members. As children they were taught the basic spells Alex had and then were required to practice them for years to improve their skills. Along the way they were taught more complex spells, other witches extracting favors in return for teaching them.
April’s education had been more formal but along the same lines: repeat the basic spells until your skill levels improved and then learn more complex spells suited to your nature.
