Werewolf Mage 5

by Harry Nix

  Time stretched on, Alex casting purify and healing flame as the werewolves got themselves together, enacting procedures for cleaning silver, like grabbing gloves and cleaning products.

  They scraped all of the silver out of the main part of the building, and every time a werewolf was healed, they were sent inside after washing their feet off, careful to remove any speck of silver on them. It took over an hour to get everyone clean and healed, and soon there was only Alex and Julius outside. Julius stood with his jaw clenched, flecks of silver bubbling out of his skin at Alex’s touch. As soon as the silver was out of his body, Alex cast healing flame, seeing as he did so that he’d almost entirely exhausted his magic. When he went to put it on Julius’s arm to heal his wounds, the alpha pushed him away.

  “Tell me how you commanded me,” Julius demanded. He almost had to shout over the thundering rain.

  “I… I just wanted everyone inside,” Alex said.

  “Don’t lie to me. I wasn’t always an alpha. I grew up in a pack too and followed commands and I felt what you did,” he said. They stood there for a moment in the pouring rain, the area lit up only by the lights on the front of the main house.

  Alex took a step towards Julius and was surprised when the alpha took a step back as though he was afraid of Alex. Then he seemed to catch himself, frowning before finally stepping closer and holding out his hand. Alex placed the healing flame against it, feeling it jolt through Julius’s body, helping stitch up his wounds.

  “I don’t know how it happened. It just started happening and…” Alex trailed off. He felt like he was admitting some horrible guilty secret. Something he’d done to people; something wrong.

  “Now it’s getting stronger,” Julius said, finishing the thought for him. Alex nodded. Once the worst of Julius’s wounds were healed, he pulled his hand away and Alex canceled the spell. Although the rain was thundering down upon them, they could hear the planes were gone, perhaps driven away by the storm.

  “There must be an airstrip somewhere they are coming from,” Julius said.

  Although he wasn’t saying it openly, Alex could tell that Julius was trying to repair what had just happened between them.

  “I think it could be a good idea to find them and destroy them,” Alex said. Julius clapped him on the shoulder and then waved him inside. Alex walked in, seeing most of the pack gathered. He saw all of them look up first to Julius and then to him.

  Although Alex had let go of the strand, he could feel it waiting there, and for a moment knew that if he spoke and issued a command, the pack would obey because he was the alpha and not Julius. He was sure that Julius felt it too, maybe even some of the werewolves.

  Alex quickly put his head down and got out of the way, rushing over to his mates who had at least found some clothes now. Juno and April were close to exhausted, still working on casting healing spells every now and then but struggling to regain their lost mana. Nia touched him on the arm before briefly embracing him and pulling him down to sit next to Juno and April. Alex did so gladly, feeling the attention of the pack dissipating and turning back to Julius, their alpha, as he walked among them checking on injuries and reconnecting with his pack.

  “Some more mages need to die,” Nia said to Alex. Alex just nodded, afraid that if he spoke, it might come out of his mouth like a command and then everything really would fall to pieces.

  10

  “What about that spell your grandmother has? That abrasion one that she pinned me to the wall with?” Alex asked. Juno ran her hands through her hair and sighed.

  “I don’t have that one. The old witch refuses to give it to me without exchanging a favor. But I do know it’s only localized. So yeah, if there was silver falling from the sky, you could use it to push a small area of it away, but not enough to protect a whole village,” Juno said.

  Alex turned to April, who was sitting across from him. “What about your rain spell? The droplets hit the silver, pull it down. Can we direct the water somehow then, use vines to dig channels, at least make it flow away from the village?”

  April screwed up her nose as she looked around. About half of Julius’s pack were dressed in biohazard gear, scraping up dirt and bagging it, trying to get rid of all the silver. Her rain spell from the previous night had been incredibly effective in washing away the silver from the werewolves, but it also churned up the ground, mixing the silver into it, meaning the werewolves had to dig down further to get to clean earth.

  “I guess you could use plants to make some channels. I can sometimes direct a vine to grow the way I want, but honestly it’s no faster than getting a shovel. Once the water’s falling, it’s just rain. You could push at it with telekinesis or blow it maybe, but you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of raindrops,” she said. Alex let out a frustrated sigh as his gaze returned to the spell screen in front of him.

  It was midmorning now, and the mood of Julius’s pack was grim. Alex had enchanted a bunch of healing flame rings and distributed them, but still Juno and April were going about the place having to cast purify any time a werewolf stepped on a speck of silver and it began to burrow its way into their body. The children were staying locked up in the main house, which was being treated like a quarantine area, the werewolves having to wash themselves completely before going in.

  The rainstorm had only been a temporary solution. Now the sun was out, the tiny particles of silver stuck to houses were coming free and blowing about the place.

  Alex hadn’t talked to Julius since last night, but Nia had, and so far the prognosis wasn’t good. Once a certain amount of silver had been dumped on werewolf land, it was impossible to continue living there. It could take months or even years to clear all the silver out. Alex was methodically going through all his spells, every bit of code he could find, trying to think of a way a spell could remove the silver. So far he had the idea of using telekinesis, which, if he focused, could pick up a single grain of silver and shoot it any direction he wanted, but it was too specific. He needed every speck of silver, not just one.

  “Over here,” a werewolf called out.

  “I’ll go,” Juno sighed. She stood up and followed the werewolf over to where one of the workers was grimacing. Her plastic suit had been damaged and silver had gotten inside.

  “What if you could use parts of the Find Food spell, but focus it on silver and then combine it with telekinesis. Like search it out and then fling it?” Alex asked April. She had her own spell screen open, looking through the musical representation of the spells. But it wasn’t like working with Stephen. Although April had made her own spells in the past and modified some, she simply didn’t see things in a way that was useful to Alex. To her, spells were multilayered compositional pieces, and pulling out sections dramatically changed how they sounded and their results.

  Once again, Alex wished he hadn’t let the necromancer go. He had no idea if the kid was still alive or whether he’d left his enclave in the end. April patted him on the back of the hand and then stood up to head in the direction of another werewolf who had been injured on cleanup duty.

  Alex was sitting at the tables that last night had been the source of merriment and food. There were still a few bowls scattered about the place, and a few of them even had pieces of meat that had been left out all night and thoroughly rained on. Alex’s gaze landed on a piece of it, glinting in the midmorning sun as though someone had thrown a handful of glitter on it.

  “If Find Food can find any speck of food, it can be altered to find a speck of anything else. That means I have a searching algorithm that seeks throughout the environment until it finds what I’m looking for and goes towards it. Once it finds it, I should be able to chain a new spell to it,” Alex said, thinking aloud.

  He brought up the telekinesis spell. It was one of the largest he had, and huge portions of it were dedicated to understanding the intent of the user. Although he wasn’t entirely sure, it seemed that only a small part was the actual force itself. Alex cast it on the b
owl further down the table, willing it to come slowly closer to him. The spell compiled and then the bowl smoothly slid across the table before stopping. Alex then changed his focus to the piece of glittery meat and cast it again, willing it to rise an inch above the bowl, which it did. Holding it in place, he cast telekinesis one more time, focusing on a speck of silver stuck to the meat. He managed to pull it off the meat, floating it another inch up into the air, before he canceled both spells, the meat dropping back into the bowl and the silver with it.

  Alex sat for a while, churning over ideas in his mind, an open window sitting before him with a cursor blinking in it. This was how he used to work when he programmed, too. He would sometimes sit and stare for up to an hour, formulating ideas, before starting to write. It was as though if he could get close to the structure he wanted, it made everything after that flow, and although it might not be perfect, he at least had something to work from.

  It seemed to Alex, as he went through the Find Food spell and the telekinesis spell, that the sections to do with understanding the will of the caster were gigantic and bloated and unnecessary.

  In Alex’s experiments with coding, he’d seen strange strings of numbers, which appeared to directly correlate to parts of the body when he cracked some of the spells down to their basic components. This was why healing flame appeared on the same finger each time. It was also why Juno could summon a fireball to one hand and a ball of ice to the other.

  Alex focused on the piece of sparkly meat again and then on the silver, casting telekinesis, lifting a small speck of it off the meat and bringing it over to sit before him on the table. Casting analyze on the silver revealed its weight, temperature, and what it was. It was basic information and didn’t go any deeper than that. But as Alex had learned, increasing the power of the analyze spells sometimes revealed surprising information, like uncovering that the Great Barrier spell was active on him at all times.

  Feeling an idea trembling in the corner of his mind, Alex brought up the analyze spell and then another, mentally pressing them together, doubling the spell over. Despite the fact he was tired from healing various werewolves and casting purify, he had enough magic to quickly reach analyze 50x.

  He sat there for a moment, staring at it, wondering if that was enough, before deciding what the hell, why not go the whole way? He began compiling analyze spells in another window, duplicating them over and on top of themselves, until he finally had two analyze 50x spells. He then lifted his hands in the air, needing the physical motion to help with this part, and began forcing the two spells together. The resistance was immense, but nowhere near as bad as when he’d done it the first time with Know Thyself. All of his training and practice was paying off. Instead of feeling like he was trying to push two mountains together, it was more like going for the personal best in the bench press, knowing that you might be able to make it but it would hurt.

  Alex drew on every drop of magic he had until suddenly the two spells collapsed into each other, and he had analyze 100x. He immediately focused on the speck of silver and cast it. The window opened up, filled with page after page of statistical information. There were lines he recognized—temperature, weight, purity—but then there were others he wasn’t sure of. Some even seemed like coordinates. Even as Alex looked at it, the page reshaped itself, bits and pieces moving around—to fit his expectations, he assumed. A number floated to the top. It was over four thousand digits in length, and Alex instinctively knew that this was the number of what silver was. Although the number was quite long, it wasn’t the same as code, where it took up pages upon pages. It still took up quite a lot of space, but Alex was able to copy it and drop it into his empty windows. He had to act fast, as the analyze spell was draining magic by the second. He even saw Juno looking over at him, frowning, perhaps sensing what he was doing, prepared to run over if she needed to. Alex copied the entire number and then finally let the spell go with a sigh of relief.

  Not wanting to lose the confidence of the moment, he opened up a copy of the Find Food spell and began slicing parts out of it. Anything that looked to be about user intention he deleted, and then finally he took the number and pasted it in. The execute button, which had grayed out at various points as he cut and chopped, lit up, and Alex sat there for a moment staring at it, wondering exactly how bad it would be if he cast it and something went wrong.

  Deciding he was willing to risk it, he hit the execute button and cast it. The spell quickly compiled, and a small ball of light appeared in Alex’s palm. It dropped downwards, not towards the piece of silver on the table, but onto Alex’s sleeve where it stuck. Through his connection to the spell, Alex could feel it was seeking something and then had found it. He canceled it and lifted up his sleeve to find the tiniest speck of silver lodged there in the weave of his clothes. It had worked. The spell had found the nearest speck of silver to him.

  Alex opened up the telekinesis spell and got to work, deleting a good 80% of it with swipes of his fingers in the air. All he wanted was the section that dealt with force. Finally, he’d cut it down. He dropped it into the spell screen along with his new finding silver spell. It took a good twenty minutes of messing with it and moving lines about until the execute button lit up by itself. Alex read through the code over and over again. In principle, it was there: find the nearest piece of silver, apply force to it. Alex stood up from the table and then looked around, searching for his mates. Juno was sitting over with some workers and when she was finished casting purify, he waved her over.

  “I’ve written a new spell to find silver and then push it away, and it might kill me, so I need you here,” he told her.

  “April!” Juno called out. April came at a worried jog, closely followed by Nia. Alex explained what he’d done and then shared the spell with Juno and April. Juno said she saw the picture of a hammer pounding a silver nail into the ground. April described it as a very forceful song, something that grabbed and wouldn’t let go.

  The three girls made some space around Alex as he brought the spell up and then cast it. It took a giant gulp of his natural mana, almost bringing him down to zero. Immediately, the ball of light appeared in his hand and dropped to the ground, heading for what Alex presumed was the nearest piece of silver. When it hit the earth, however, it split, much like a fireball thrown at something hard, breaking into pieces. Each of the smaller pieces shot outwards, splitting into pieces again, and within a moment, Alex was surrounded by a spider web that had spread ten feet around him. He was connected to the spell, but as it split, he lost the ability to be able to track each individual piece.

  Suddenly there were two hundred tiny dots of light surrounding him, and then they lurched all at once. Alex barely got his hands up in front of his eyes before two hundred pieces of silver ripped themselves out of the earth and shot towards him like bullets.

  Nia dived out of the way, crashing against the side of the nearby building. Thankfully, most of the pieces were small, no larger than grains, but a few of the larger curls hit him like fragments of bullet, piercing through his skin easily. Alex roared and shifted to hybrid form, attempting to defend himself as a sudden hiss went up from his body.

  His spell screen suddenly filled with injuries, multiple wounds, bleeding, silver poisoning. The silver had hit him everywhere, and it was only by quickly getting his hands up that he’d managed to protect his face.

  Alex dropped to his knees with the enormous roar of pain, and immediately cast purify. He heard a chime of music and a tug of magic as Juno and April did the same. Every tiny hole in his body that was now leaking blood birthed a tiny speck of silver that trickled down him and out of his body. Alex soon found himself on the ground, kneeling, surrounded by a puddle of silvery blood, some of the specks of silver still stuck to his fur. He let go of the purify spell and cast healing flame, pressing it against his leg, twitching every time the zap moved to a new location, rapidly healing up the puncture wounds in his skin. He finally managed to stand up and step out of the rin
g of blood with all the pieces of silver collected in it.

  “So you made yourself a silver magnet,” Juno said. Although Alex was still stinging from the wounds, he was starting to grin.

  “This is a success. Get me behind some armor and cast that spell, maybe charge it up, and I might be able to grab all the silver, pull it to one spot. Or maybe I’ll be able to stick that spell onto something, like one of those ward cylinders,” he said.

  “Or maybe every piece of silver hits you at once, and you get turned into a cloud of mist and pureed werewolf,” April said.

  “Oh, I’m fine over here by the way, thanks everyone,” Nia groused from behind the house. She was covered in mud but seemed otherwise unharmed.

  Alex quickly went over to her, and after brushing the last of the silver off his fur, gave her a hug until she stopped being grumpy.

  Although April and Juno were dubious, Alex spent the next hour searching around the village, trying to work out what he could use for armor if he had to stand inside it. Thick clothing might work, layers of it perhaps, but he didn’t want to risk getting shot to pieces, especially if larger chunks of silver had been dropped. Eventually, he found some wooden doors that were piled up with other building materials that had been intended to build another kit-style cabin.

  Julius was nowhere to be seen, so Alex decided to give himself permission to take them. Grabbing a hammer and some nails, he quickly put together a rough square frame, nailing the four doors to it, so he could open one and step inside and close it. The top and bottom were still open, but Alex figured that’d be okay. It was unlikely the silver would come pouring in from the sky. By now, some of the other werewolves in the village had grown curious about what he was doing, and he’d gathered a crowd. He’d also managed to charge up his natural mana, again, and had drawn some nature mana as well.