by Harry Nix
“They really don't like me, do they?” Stephen said as soon as they were in the basement.
“Well you did fly a drone full of silver, and that reanimated old dead lady, my neighbor, tore my hand off,” Alex said. He held out the hand in question and flexed it. There was still the occasional glint of metal in the skin.
It had been slowly fading. Alex hoped the same would happen to his eyes, but thus far there had been no change there.
“How long did that take to regrow?” Stephen asked.
“Most of a night and day. Spent the whole day with the skin splitting and cracking and then re-healing over and over. It was the most agonizing thing I’ve ever experienced.”
“Is that what happened to your eyes?”
“They didn’t get torn out, but yes, I got injured and then when they healed, they incorporated silver somehow. Look at how weird this is,” Alex said and then touched the tip of his finger to his eye. There was a hiss before he pulled his finger away and showed Stephen the burn mark.
“That's so weird. It’s like your eyes have total resistance to the silver, or maybe they’re just ignoring the silver.”
“I can't work it out either. I was wondering if I cut some of my skin off, splash it with silver and heal up, whether I'd suddenly be resistant to silver there, but then I wouldn’t be able to touch Nia again.”
At the mention of his mate, Stephen went silent, much the same way Jacob did.
“Let’s enchant some rings,” Alex said, changing the topic.
Working together, they spent the next two hours enchanting shield rings and soon had a pile of thirty-five of them. Alex used up the sex magic, the natural mana and the kid appeared to use up every drop of magic he had.
Eventually they stopped to rest.
“Hey, I wanna show you something,” Alex said, another idea crossing his mind.
When he'd accessed the Great Barrier spell, Alex had copied pages of numbers. The kid was visual, so maybe he could make some sense of them.
Alex brought up his spell screen, touched Stephen on the shoulder and then brought up some of the copied numbers, allowing Stephen to access the numbers. A soon as he did, the kid broke into a smile.
“Ah, this is easy. The first one is a mermaid, the second one is a nereid, the third one is a harpy, the fourth is a werewolf. This is a long list of supernaturals.”
“Are they doing anything?”
“Not really. There’s a protective circle around them… like if you're in the circle you can't be touched. But also I can see strings they have attached to the hands, feet and head. You know, like a puppet? So at the same time you can't be touched but maybe something is controlling a bit?”
It had been bubbling away in the back of Alex’s mind that as the Great Barrier was a spell that worked on normals and supernaturals in different ways, there must be categories in it somewhere. For an old spell it seemed incredibly complex and as anyone who has ever worked in programming knows, the more complexity, the more holes.
A list of supernaturals within the spell could mean he’d found what the spell checked to determine how the spell worked—a sort of ‘if normal = hide supernatural’ to put it in crude terms.
Could it be that easy? The Great Barrier was cast hundreds to thousands of years ago, according to Juno. It worked incredibly well but just like old programs, maybe it was dumb in a lot of ways.
Maybe Alex could fool it.
“I'm going to try something. See what you think,” Alex said. He opened up the ring he had in his hands, strengthened it, added the draining mana spell, and then dropped the code Stephen had said was werewolf into the window.
He quickly wrote a small bit of code around it, that he thought essentially meant go in a loop, a sort of ‘start program-if this is true, go back to the start’. The execute button on the spell lit up but Alex didn't hit it, waiting for Stephen to check the spell.
“It’s pretty much what I said. This one’s a werewolf in a circle with the strings on them,” Stephen said. Alex compiled the spells and put the ring under the mixing bowl just in case.
“What's the point of doing that, though?” Stephen said.
“I think if a normal wears this ring, the Great Barrier will think they’re a werewolf and maybe they’ll be able to see supernaturals.”
“Nothing gets past the Great Barrier. I once saw a witch fireball a mage in a crowded street and every supernatural in the area came running to kill her. The second it was over, all the normals just walked on by like it was nothing.”
“Spells have holes in them. I think the Great Barrier can be screwed with.”
Alex removed the ring from under the mixing bowl and slipped it on. He couldn't feel any change, which was what he was hoping. He cast Flame Finger and extinguished it. Everything seemed to be normal. Then he gave the ring to Stephen. Alex immediately cast Analyze and saw in the code the werewolf number was remaining stable.
Hopefully that meant that magically the ring was saying that Stephen was a werewolf.
“Can you still cast things?” Alex asked.
Stephen cast Flame Finger and then extinguished it.
“Do you have some normals you want to see all the supernatural crap that goes on around them?” The kid passed the ring back to Alex.
Alex had been thinking more on the line of how to stop werewolves being murdered and the Great Barrier hiding it. But maybe a ring like this could be useful. Make two of them and he could give one to Puzo and Howey, tell them the truth.
At the thought of it, Alex felt a chill cross over him. Someone had murdered Bailey. If he pulled Howey and Puzo into things they could end up dead.
“Maybe the normals knowing there’s a bloodthirsty parallel world would be best long-term.”
Although Alex could have spent more time enchanting his mind was staying to April and Nia who were leaving tomorrow for some undetermined amount of time.
“Let's finish up for the day,” Alex said. He gathered the shield rings and went upstairs, Stephen trailing behind him. Nia, April, Juno and Ruby were in the kitchen, sitting around the table drinking coffee and gossiping.
“Check it out, thirty-five shield rings,” Alex said, dumping them in the middle of the table. He sat down on the empty chair between Juno and Nia, touching both of his mates on their backs. Stephen stood at the kitchen counter, leaning against it, as though he was unsure if he had permission to sit.
“Avocados out of the butt again,” Ruby said, lifting up some of the rings and letting them drop back into the pile. Juno facepalmed but then leaned over to Alex.
“Speaking of butt stuff,” she whispered, her breath tickling his ear.
Alex felt his temperature suddenly jolt up.
“Well, we need to get an early start tomorrow, so it's time for bed,” he said. His three mates quickly made their own excuses and followed him down to the bedroom.
“So, silence spell?” Alex said to Juno.
“Why? Do you think someone is going to be making a lot of noise?” Juno said with a smirk. Then she cast the spell.
As Alex sat down on the bed, his three mates began undressing.
14
The kid was gone come morning.
He'd taken ten of the shield rings with him, plus Alex's newly minted healing flame, fire finger, and the other ring that changed the “code” of the person wearing it. Nia and Juno were all for hunting him down but Alex managed to hold them back.
“I think you're trusting him too much. He did actually fly a drone over our home and detonate it,” Nia said.
“He was ordered to fly a drone,” Alex said.
“Maybe you need to stand next to Bish's grave and say that a few more times,” Nia said. She walked off to the bedroom, slamming the door as she went.
Juno watched her go.
“I get what you were doing but… things just aren't the same in the supernatural world. There is no law, no law enforcement. There's just power and what you can do with it. These so-called t
reaties that allow werewolves, witches, mages and vampires a seat at the table have always been garbage, constantly broken,” she said.
April came into the kitchen holding a slip of paper which she gave to Alex. On it was an address in town.
“I found this in his room. I think he left it for us,” April said.
Alex immediately took it to the lounge where his laptop was sitting, slowly gathering dust. He sat down and turned it on. It was just another memory of all the things that he had lost. He used to live on the thing, staring at computer screens every single day, making the game with Howey and Puzo and now, with everything that had gone on, he hadn’t looked at it in what felt like a lifetime.
Soon it was up and running. Alex looked up the address. It was one of the streets on the blurry edge between the industrial zone and residential in the street where there was still a factory or two, but then houses between them. The address was a gated factory with houses on both sides. Alex switched to street imagery, but there were no businesses listed at the address, nor any clues as to what was actually there. The last known business at that location had been a place that had made wooden boards for coffins. Alex thought that fitted into the Xavo pattern, except of course the business had closed down twenty years ago.
Alex sat back, thinking about why Stephen had handed over that address. Presumably, it was a Xavo outpost. Did he expect Alex to attack? To go in there with sharpened claws and teeth, and his pack of werewolves, and tear every mage in the building apart?
Alex suddenly remembered the dead teenagers out in the forest, the scattered drone controllers. They'd been left abandoned by their masters. Although Henry, a necromancer himself, had said the only way to stop the mages was if he made it painful, bloodily so, to continue, Alex was losing his taste for murder. What if we got to the outpost and it was just full of teenagers? What then? Weren’t they entitled to defend if he arrived to attack?
Alex spent some time turning over these questions, the finer details of them starting to drive him mad. If it was wrong to kill an eighteen-year-old who had been directed to murder, then why not a nineteen-year-old? And then why not a twenty-year-old or twenty-one-year-old? Was there some magical line where suddenly the thirty-year-old mage could be executed without a qualm, but it was wrong to do the same to the eighteen-year-old? The division within him felt at extreme tension. The werewolf was all about the pack, territory, destroying enemies. Alex could feel the lure of it. There had been kind of a mad joy when he and Juno had attacked Corvus and although he didn't know if they had backed off yet, thus far he hadn't seen a pain mage darken his doorstep.
Alex had talked with Howey about winning hearts and minds, how to succeed in asymmetrical warfare against powerful opponents, and the truth of it was that sometimes it required blood and death and gruesome outcomes. There came a point where you had to kill the ones who wanted to kill you because they wouldn’t stop otherwise.
Alex chewed over all this as he slipped into a kind of computer hypnosis, going through his old patterns of checking his email. His email account was clogged up with hundreds of emails and plenty of spam, promising him hot single moms in his area and treatments for erectile disfunction. Alex was deleting them en masse when he came to an update sent out by Howey and Puzo about the game. It contained some new art from the game, descriptions of a new area, and also a small animated image of one of the enemies, a kind of murderbot.
Alex’s soothing rhythm of deleting emails broke. Seeing the update from his friends, he felt a spike of pain so sharp he wondered for a moment if he was about to have a heart attack. The loss was immense. They'd had conversations about the new area and the murderbot but then Alex had left and his friends had continued on without him. Usually when these update emails went out, Alex had read them over and over. He’d seen the art a thousand times by then. This was the first time he has on the outside, rather than being on the inside.
Alex abruptly stood up and closed the laptop. If he kept thinking about all that he had lost soon he would start listening to the wolf and he wasn't quite sure if he was ready to go down that path just yet.
Alex wandered back to the kitchen where April and Juno were making breakfast. Ruby was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, and even in human form, Alex could smell the whiskey she’d tipped into it.
“You know there are two werewolves I really think you'd like to meet,” Alex said to her.
“Are they handsome with big muscles and big—”
“Grandma!” Juno said, cutting Ruby off.
“Their names are Esme and Lydia and they are awesome,” Alex said.
“It might be a good idea to get them to come here or send for Jacob or maybe one of the other werewolves. You should be able to make more shield rings by the time they arrive. Then they can equip the whole pack in case there’s another attack,” April said.
Alex hadn't really worked out the logistics of what they were going to do next. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was imagining leaving Baxter, returning to the village, and bringing all the rings with them but now he realized this was a good solution as well. The pack would be defended somewhat, and perhaps he could spend the rest of the time making rings for sale, build up a bit of cash to help buy food and other things they needed.
The question of what they needed, of course, was a big one. Although food and the other essentials were required, Alex was thinking more along military lines. Cameras set up in the wood, sensors spread throughout his territory, a bank of television monitors in the main house. Maybe a bunch of semi-automatic rifles and if it really came to it, landmines just like Julius had.
Of course, such things cost money. Money he definitely didn't have. There was also a slight concern as to what the rest of the pack would think of such things. From what he’d gathered, even werewolves living in the most civilized way possible still wanted to hold their territory by power and numbers. Even the Greenacre pack with Jasper as their leader hadn't set up cameras throughout the forest.
Alex pushed the questions away for now. Thanks to Stephen he at least had a way to make money and he’d work on that first before the next hurdle.
“I’m going to check on Nia,” he said, heading out the kitchen. She was in their bedroom in bed, under the covers, and had even covered her head with a pillow. Alex lay down beside the lump on the bed and put his arm over her, listening to the sound of her breathing. He could tell that she wasn't asleep.
“Do you know you're the only one that I've gone wild for?” Alex said.
“Well, good for me,” Nia said somewhat muffled under the pillow.
“I don't know if it's just because you're a werewolf and so am I or because you were first. I haven’t brought it up because I didn’t want there to be any jealousy, but it was something I definitely noticed.”
Nia made some noncommittal noise from under the pillow.
Alex knew she was upset but he’d had girlfriends before, and this wasn't his first rodeo. When in doubt, just keep talking.
“The kid’s left an address behind. Looks like a factory with houses on both sides over on the edge of the industrial district. If this is a Xavo outpost, we’re going to have to decide what to do,” he said.
“Is murdering them all still on the list? Or are we just going to go for gently, gently, send them cupcakes and ask nicely?” Nia said.
Alex abruptly decided to mix things up. He had forgotten one of the key things he should have remembered… physical touch. He poked the lump in the side and then grabbed Nia, hopping on top of her.
“Yes, that's right, we can make cupcakes, such a good idea darling, it’s so clever,” he said, starting to tickle her.
“No, get off, stop it,” Nia said but laughed in the middle of it.
“I'm so sad that Nia passed away in her sleep from being sad. Or maybe it was being suffocated with the pillow,” Alex said, suddenly pressing down on the pillow that she had over her head. He and Nia wrestled for a minute, him teasing her until she was
finally laughing. In the end she managed to throw the pillow off and Alex let himself be pinned.
“You're a real pain in my perfectly formed and well-shaped butt, you know that?” Nia said, holding his wrists down. In the struggle she’d shifted to hybrid form. Alex was still in his human form. As a result, she was actually bigger than he was, and arguably stronger.
“Speaking of butt stuff,” Alex murmured in memory what Juno had said last night.
“Is that all you've got on your mind these days?” Nia said, leaning forward to nip at his neck. The bite stung and Alex shifted involuntarily, the bed creaking under the weight of two werewolves. He immediately flipped Nia over onto her back, his arms on either side of her, trapping her in a warm prison.
“How can you blame me when you go sauntering around the house in…” Alex looked at what Nia was wearing—a pair of grey tracksuit pants that may have once held shape but no longer did and a T-shirt that had been so many times through the wash that It was hard to know what color it had been originally. “Such fine, sexy clothing as you have on right now.”
Nia punched him in the chest.
“Hey, shut up. We had to leave everything behind and this is all I could find right now. We're going to take some of the shield rings little deathboy didn’t steal and buy some clothes today.”
Alex dipped his head and kissed Nia, quieting her protesting. Although he could smell the scent of food from the kitchen and knew that anyone could come bursting in at any moment, it was true what Nia had said. For some reason he just couldn't get his mates out of his mind recently. He was starting to feel like a teenager again, every moment distracted. Especially now when she was lying on her back with Alex between her legs, her beautiful red hair slightly mussed.
“You can take the rings to sell. I’ll make some more. Also, why are you wearing so many clothes?”
