Werewolf Mage Box Set 1

by Harry Nix

“Eww, that’s gross,” Juno protested.

  “Girls were just throwing their virginities at him left, right and center,” Ruby added, making a motion like someone throwing a frisbee and then catching it out of the air.

  “That's too much information,” Juno said, her voice rising in pitch.

  “What do you mean? You know,” Ruby said.

  “I have no idea what you're talking about. In fact, I'm still a virgin,” Juno said.

  Nia, April, and Ruby all snorted simultaneously. Juno turned on Nia.

  “Oh, I see. Like a certain werewolf didn't ‘stay back late for band practice’ that one time.”

  Now it was time for the grin to disappear from Nia's face.

  “I have no idea what you're talking about. Like you, I am also a virgin,” Nia said, trying to keep a straight face.

  Alex was grinning now, seeing his two mates get embarrassed by Ruby.

  “The two of you lost your virginity to the same kid?” he asked.

  “It wasn't so much lost, as thrown at great speed,” Ruby said, opening the bottle of gin and sniffing at it.

  “You know there are plenty of super dodgy old folk’s homes around the place. Lots of them are under investigation,” Juno threatened.

  Ruby just ignored her and turned back to Nia. “So Nia, how did Tony Mazzazoli look anyway?”

  “Yes, Nia, how did he look?” Alex added.

  “Oh, it was… horrible. He’s obviously really let himself go, and I think he's had some kind of accident. Maybe something involving chemicals. Um, and he only had one eye as well and he’s obviously not doing well financially. He didn't even have a proper eyepatch, it was just like a wad of toilet paper, taped to his head. He's losing his hair too. He was definitely one hundred percent not slim and trim and fantastically fit with the body to die for with that beautiful, dark Italian hair and those blue eyes and just the right amount of stubble, which was a shame really,” Nia said.

  Alex was having too much fun to stop. He turned to April next.

  “So, you and Tony Mazzazoli too?” he asked.

  April swatted him with a bunch of celery.

  “No, actually. I'll have you know it was a delightful boy named Hugo Harris. He had beautiful brown curls, and blue eyes,” she said.

  “He was a little nerd,” Nia said.

  “Super-nerd but he was pretty adorable. He was like a little Cabbage Patch Doll brought to life,” Juno added.

  “Isn’t he a lawyer or something now?” Ruby asked.

  “Environmental lawyer, saving the wetlands and all that. Or so I've heard. It’s not like I've stalked him online or anything to see what he's doing. It’s not like he’s out there every day to try to save the environment, like a hero,” April said.

  “Mine was a werewolf named Ben,” Ruby began before Juno threw up her hands.

  “Nope, I don't wanna hear this story. I don’t wanna hear about Ben ever again,” she said.

  Ruby continued, unperturbed. “He was a wild thing, and I'd gone marching out into the wilderness until he found me. He caught me naked, bathing in a stream.”

  “La, la, la, la, la,” Juno said, her finger stuck in her ears.

  “You should have seen the bite marks I ended up with, and he had some too,” Ruby said, pulling one of Juno's fingers out of her ears.

  “La, la, I can't hear this. I don't know what you're saying, my grandmother is still a virgin, obviously,” Juno said out loud.

  “Then of course one night he introduced me to his friend,” Ruby added.

  “Nope, I'm going to get the kid now,” Juno said, rushing out of the kitchen. All four of them were laughing, which is how Stephen found them when Juno brought him in from the garage. He was still looking skinny and small, and also fairly scared. Maybe it was the four of them laughing, the domestic nature of the scene, or who knows, the bottles of gin sitting on the bench, but Alex thought he saw the kid relax.

  “Death boy! What's your name?” Ruby called out as Juno pushed him further into the kitchen.

  “Um… Stephen.”

  “Juno, unlock Stephen,” Ruby instructed. Juno took the mage cuffs off him, and the kid stood there, rubbing his wrists. He was looking a bit scruffy, perhaps from spending such a long time stuffed in the trunk, but otherwise looked okay.

  “Stephen, this house is warded, so you can move around it and even go into the yard. But if you attempt to leave it will crisp you to ash, understand?” Ruby said. Though she was still smiling, there was a cold steel undercurrent in her voice. Alex wasn't entirely sure she was telling the truth. He hadn't heard that the wards worked that way but he guessed the kid didn't know that.

  “Absolutely, yes, yes,” Stephen said.

  “It's about three, so I think it's time for a drink,” Ruby said.

  Alex glanced at Stephen and nodded his head too. Hopefully, this plan would work and if not, well, at least they'd had some gin and tonic and cheesecake.

  10

  Around nine, Alex found himself incredibly drunk out in the backyard with Stephen who, despite his size, was holding up fairly well, considering the ridiculous amount of drinking they'd been doing.

  Over the course of the afternoon Ruby had taken over bartending duties, making increasingly stronger gin and tonics. Alex was surprised how well the kid was doing. He knew at his age if he had drunk as much he would have passed out, thrown up, or both. It turned out the girls had bought steaks, which Juno and Ruby had drunkenly cooked up about six and served with some premade salads and then followed with cheesecake. Stephen, despite his initial nervousness, had relaxed and was eating, drinking, and sometimes laughing with all of them.

  Sometimes, in rare moments, sober thoughts would appear for Alex, like how strange it felt to be Stephen's captor and yet to be friendly with him. Was this what Stockholm syndrome was?

  Alex had had other semi-unwelcome sober thoughts arrive in the midst of their drunkenness, like worrying about his pack. What would they do if there was another attack? Nia had told him that she’d called and spoken to Lydia and Esme and some others via the satellite phone, but then, after Alex couldn’t let it go, she smacked him in the back of the head, telling him they were werewolves and they’d be okay. Alex wasn't quite so sure. Maybe it was something about being the Alpha, being in charge of it all, of having responsibility. He felt that split in him, the desire to return to the wilderness but then also wanting to stay in Baxter.

  The first time he’d returned from the wilderness, Baxter hadn't smelt so good. Exhaust fumes and plastic pollution. This time it wasn't so bad. There were many things the city had, first and foremost steaks, bottles of gin, and cheesecake, that the wilderness simply didn't have. Not for the first time Alex wondered whether it was possible to move the entire pack from the wilderness to the city. He had no idea how you would do such a thing. At least out there, they had a territory they could hold if they could continue to defend it. What other option was there? Bring a pack of werewolves and try to keep them at Juno's? Have them sleep in the garage?

  Alex tried to focus back on the here and now. Stephen was rambling about something, sitting on the grass with half a glass of gin and tonic in his hand. Although there was light pollution from Baxter, there were still plenty of stars above and in Alex's inebriated state there were two or three of each as his vision blurred.

  “You gotta stop thinking of it as a one or a zero, on or off. Life and death is a continuum. Your whole body is full of cells that are living and dying all the time inside you like this giant frothy… stew… in the shape of a man. Stuff is constantly dying inside you to make way for the new life, and then one day you slowly slide further down the gradient until all the bits of your physical body are dead but then, there are still other bits that remain sometimes,” Stephen said.

  “Sounds about right,” Alex said. From inside he could hear karaoke, Ruby and April doing a duet. Every now and then, he heard the chime of April casting a spell. He wasn't quite sure what exactly she was casting.


  “So you really didn't know you’re a werewolf?” Stephen said. He took a gulp of his drink then made a face before putting it down on the grass where it immediately tipped over. The kid didn't seem to notice or care. Perhaps he was finally reaching his limit.

  “Nah. Just living my life, making a post-apocalyptic farming game and then suddenly find out I’m a werewolf. Apparently, there was some spell on me for all those years,” Alex said. He couldn't remember saying anything to Stephen about himself, but then again, there were already patches of missing memory. The drinks Ruby had been brewing up were incredibly strong.

  “Must've been some crazy powerful spell that lasted twenty-five years. Do know who cast it?”

  “Nope.”

  They sat outside in silence for a while, Alex watching the stars drift and multiply before snapping back into place. The karaoke inside was now hitting the 1980s and not the good part of the 1980s either. Ruby and the three girls were singing their hearts out.

  “So, can you let me go?” Stephen said. He picked up his empty glass, finding a trickle in it and tipped it into his mouth.

  “Yeah, I just wanted you to get to know me, trust me, see me as a person you know?” Alex said.

  “They tell us that werewolves are more like animals. That’s when they tell us anything at all.”

  Alex had gathered some information from Stephen in shouted conversations over the music and things the kid had let slip. Alex wasn't quite sure how much of it he was going to remember. The overall impression he got was growing up in the Xavo enclave wasn't good, but that Stephen didn't know what else he could do. Both his parents had been Xavo and both were now deceased, killed by other mages. The enclave was his home, his family, and his parents all wrapped up in one.

  “Can’t you just leave that enclave? Go become like an accountant or something?” Alex said.

  “I can leave but it’s a one-way trip. They do teach us things. Not many mages end up going back into the normal world.”

  Alex was about to ask Stephen something about that, but then because he was drunk, his mind suddenly slipped across to his homemade flame sword spell.

  “Hey, I want to share this spell I wrote because I can't work out how to fix it,” Alex said.

  They were close enough on the grass that Alex could reach out his hand and touch Stephen on the shoulder.

  “Go for it, I want to see it,” Stephen said. He had his eyes half-closed and was rocking his head around, the alcohol obviously still working on him.

  Alex brought up his so-called flame sword spell. It was hard to sense whether Stephen was accessing it. The alcohol was dulling all his sensations but obviously the kid was.

  “Okay, so I got like this guy and he’s standing by a photocopier, and there's a campfire on top of it, and he's going crazy copying the campfire and then throwing the paper on the ground, and then copying it, and putting another one next to it until he’s just got this huge line and then all the campfires are bursting into flames off the paper, so he’s got like twenty campfires in a row. There is also this other guy holding the dude, like he’s grabbing his shirt and pulling him back so he can't go any further,” Stephen said.

  “That's exactly the nonsense happening!” Alex said and without intending to, cast the spell. Thankfully, the flames appeared on his other hand, not the one he was using to touch Stephen on the shoulder. It stretched out a long line for a second, hitting the lemon tree, before Alex pulled his hand back and pointed it straight up into the sky, the flames making a whooshing noise in the darkness.

  “Yeah, that sucks, that’s not right at all,” Stephen said. Alex quickly canceled the spell before the girls inside could see what he was doing.

  “I was trying to make a way to throw the flame. Like appear and then throw it, but all I managed to do last time was make the flame appear inside the house. I burnt the curtains and nearly burned the house down,” Alex said.

  “Bring it up again. I can fix it,” Stephen said. Alex brought it up again after a few false starts. He could feel Stephen doing something. When his spell screen appeared above his head he had the entire spell there, but with chunks of it rewritten.

  “Okay so now there’s the same dude, but he's making a fire, and I got rid of the other one holding it, and then he’s like dressed as a baseball guy and then he makes the fire and then he throws it wherever he is looking. Plus, I put like a temperature gauge thing on the fire so can make it hotter if you want,” Stephen said.

  Alex was struggling to read through the code, and he had no idea how Stephen's changes translated to code anyway. He'd already deleted his original homebrew healing spell, replacing it with the upgraded one so he had enough space to copy the improved spell back. It took more than a few times thanks to the alcohol, but eventually he got it all.

  Without worrying about whether he was about to kill himself, or whether Stephen had set a trap for him, he executed the spell and a ball of fire appeared in the palm of his hand. Without really intending to, Alex fed some more mana into it. It grew to size to the size of an orange, then, laughing like a fool, he threw it, thinking it would just hit the back fence and harmlessly burst apart. The fireball roared across the back yard and hit the back fence, immediately setting it alight. There was a vine hanging over the fence, parts of which were dry, which immediately caught fire.

  “Oh shit oh shit oh shit!” Stephen said.

  “Get the garden hose,” Alex said. He tried to stand up and immediately fell over on his face before getting to his knees. Despite the fact the kid was obviously drunk off his ass too, he managed to get the garden hose, turned it on, and quickly doused the fire.

  Alex managed to get up eventually and checked to see if there were any embers that would burst into flames again. Even in the dark, he could see the huge burn mark on the fence from where he had hit it with the fireball. He looked towards the house where the sounds of karaoke were still echoing.

  “Okay, we don't know what happened; it was nothing to do with us,” Alex said.

  “Yes, absolutely. I think we should go inside,” Stephen said.

  Stephen put the hose back and then the two of them rushed inside, in their haste leaving their glasses out on the lawn. They got into the lounge to find Ruby, Nia, Juno, and April still had the karaoke music blaring and were now playing drunken strip poker, sitting on the floor around the coffee table. Nia and Juno were both topless. April was fully dressed, and Ruby was down to a bra.

  “We’re playing strip poker and this slut is cheating,” Juno said, pointing a drunken finger at her grandmother.

  “Don’t fire the kitchen if you can’t handle the fire in the kitchen,” Ruby said, struggling to focus on Juno before gulping down more of her drink.

  Alex saw Stephen's eyes go wide, much the same way Jacob’s had when he'd seen Alex's mates topless. Alex wouldn’t have minded strip poker with his mates, but with Ruby… not so much.

  “We're going to the kitchen!” he declared and grabbed Stephen by the arm and hustled him out of there, the two of them laughing as they went. They ended up at the kitchen table where the final quarter of the cheesecake sat, the two of them picking at it.

  You know what, this is way more fun than being in that stupid enclave,” Stephen said.

  Then, without fanfare, the young mage slumped back in his chair and slipped under the table, snoring before he hit the ground.

  Alex looked at the cheesecake. “These young kids can't hold their liquor,” he said to it.

  11

  Alex woke up, his head pounding, when the three girls clattered into the bedroom.

  “Time to get up,” Juno trilled and flicked his ear.

  Alex tried to open his eyes but found one of them was glued shut. This probably was a good thing too because Nia opened the blinds, filling the room with light that even through his closed eyelids was like being stabbed in the brain by red-hot pokers.

  “Can you let me give the poor boy his potion first,” April said from beside him.<
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  Alex didn't remember coming to bed, although he had woken up at one point in the middle of the night when someone had smacked him in the face while sleeping.

  Juno, April, Nia and he had all shared the same bed, which now that he was awake, he supposed was because Stephen had possibly taken a room, and he guessed that Ruby must have one too. Not that this was on his mind this morning. He was lying face down on the bed and his stomach was churning, his head still spinning, and he was pretty sure he was still drunk.

  April knelt beside him. She was wearing a short white miniskirt and looked like she was about to go off to a tennis lesson and on any other day he would have loved to drag her into bed, except for today when he felt like he was about to die. She was holding a small glass bottle and inside it was a green liquid with small glints of gold through it.

  “Is that the stuff you gave us out in the wilderness that tasted really horrible?” Alex said, trying to get his eyelid unstuck.

  “It was like if someone took the smell of a dead whale and somehow made into a drink. That's what it tasted like,” Juno said.

  “Hey, that was only because I had to use what I could find out there in the wilderness. As you well know, this one tastes delicious,” April said. She waved the bottle near Alex and he caught the scent of lemon and hints of vanilla. Willing to drink anything to get rid of the horrible feeling, he swallowed it down. It tasted strongly of lemon with a slightly bitter undernote to it, but also vanilla, almost a little like the lemon cheesecake they'd eaten last night. The effect on him was immediate. His churning stomach calmed, the pounding in his head went away, and the cobwebs cleared.

  Within a moment, he sat up after rubbing his eyes, getting a proper look at Nia, Juno, and April. He wasn't sure if they were coordinating but all three were wearing short white skirts. Looking at the three pairs of beautiful legs, the blood flow immediately went south, and he started to reach for April, but she jumped out of his way.

  “No, no, no, you need to head off for a shower while we open the windows and change the sheets because last night four people who had drunk way too much gin all slept in this room,” April said.