Stand On It

by Jan Stryvant

  "Now, all of you! Strip down to your underwear! This includes any rings or other jewelry, magical or otherwise."

  "What about my wedding ring!" one of them, a woman, called out.

  "All non-magical items will be boxed up and mailed back to the compound, or the address in your wallet. Now, strip!"

  Chad watched as all five of them quickly complied, when they were finished the woman again spoke up.

  "We have wounded still in the cab!"

  "Then I suggest when you get back to your compound that you send someone back here to tend to them. As long as they lie still and don't do anything, we'll leave them alone. Now, start walking!"

  As Chad watched, they all started to walk along the road, with their hands in the air. None of them looked happy, and almost all of them had blood on their faces or their hands.

  A team ran out as the mages started walking and opened up the back of the third trailer; Chad could hear the whining from where he was observing everything as another team opened the back of the second trailer and experienced much the same thing.

  A third crew carefully checked out the cab of the first tractor, issuing some warnings to someone in the back, then carefully drove it far enough forward for a team to open the back of that one.

  "How's it looking in the back of those trailers?" Chad called on his radio.

  "Everyone is cooperating," Roy, the captain in charge of the liberation teams told Chad over the radio. "There were a few who weren't keen on it, but they got smacked down pretty quick by the rest of them."

  "Okay, get rid of their silver pellets, gather up everything that they can carry, and then let's get out of here. I want to be gone in five minutes!"

  "You got it, Boss!"

  Ten minutes later, Chad had everyone mounted up in their vehicles and on the way back to the assembly point they'd picked for tonight.

  "How many did we get?" Chad asked Baron.

  "One hundred and twenty-three."

  "How many were there? Do we know?"

  "Almost five hundred, with thirty-three mages supporting them."

  "Damn! That's almost four hundred unaccounted for!"

  Baron shrugged, "They left a lot behind at Sean's place. From what one of Roy's men picked up, they were getting slaughtered up there, and a lot of them were captured. But that's not the best part," Baron grinned.

  "There's a best part?" Chad sighed.

  "There were only eight wounded mages in the cabs of those trucks, and two of them probably won't ever practice magic again, they were missing limbs. So that means thirteen mages, out of thirty-three came back."

  Chad shook his head, "That's not a good thing, Baron."

  "What? What's wrong with dead mages?"

  "What's wrong is that they're probably going to seek revenge."

  "Hey, but they attacked us!"

  "Do you really think that matters to them? Baron, most of them don't even think that we're anything more than dogs." Chad shook his head, "I need to go talk to Sean and find out how bad things are up at his place. But I guess that can wait until we've divvied up our new pack members."

  Max looked at Chad in surprise, "New pack members?" She asked.

  "We're keeping these; I don't think Sean'll mind, especially not after having to clean up whatever mess he's got up there now. We'll take most of them up to the place I picked out to build that new compound in the hills. We'll get them situated up there until they've gotten settled into their new lives. Then they can go live with whichever one of our packs wanted them. This'll give everyone time to fit in."

  "You're sure Sean won't be mad?" Baron asked.

  "Hey, I told him I'd get even with him for making me deal with the Sacramento crowd. He'll he happy he got off so lightly," Chad smiled.

  "Hands up!" Ryan ordered curtly as he and a dozen others came up on a group of werewolves that were hunkered down in a drainage ditch.

  "We won't let you kill him!" One of the wolves in the ditch growled.

  "Kill who?" Ryan asked as his men surrounded the ones in the ditch slowly.

  "Master Mike, our kennel master."

  Ryan shrugged, "Fine with me, as long as he doesn't trigger your pellets we could care less. But you're all coming with me, after we get rid of you pellets of course."

  "No we're not!" he growled.

  Ryan lowered his rifle and glared down at the werewolf, "Oh hell yes, you are. Once everything settles down, if you want to work for the Vesti's, though why anyone would is beyond me, you can. But you're not a slave anymore, and they sure as hell aren't going to be treating you like one!"

  "I don't care, I said we're not...." the werewolf stopped talking as a smaller one, a female, came up and put her hand on his muzzle.

  "Mike will die without us."

  "And I should care, why?" Ryan asked.

  "He always treated us well, better in fact than any of the others ever did. He's wounded pretty bad, so we had to stop, to stabilize his wounds, and well," she smiled slightly, "we really weren't sure we wanted to go back, but," She shrugged, "after all he's done for us we couldn't leave him to die."

  "Can he be moved now?" Ryan asked.

  "Yes, but we have to go slowly, he's hurt pretty badly."

  "Fine, we'll take him to the compound back on the hill, I'm sure they can help him."

  "We can't go back there!" the first wolf said.

  "Why not?" Ryan asked.

  "We just fought with them!"

  "And you lost. Fight's over. You're with us now. So pick him up, and let's see if we can't get him some better help before he dies."

  The first wolf grumbled a bit, but the others carefully picked up the mage on the ground and started to carry him back towards the compound.

  "Jeff, run ahead and warn them that we're coming," Ryan told one of his men, then he turned back to the female who was walking next to him now.

  "I'm Ryan, you're?"

  "Shia," she said with a smile.

  "Are you the one in charge of this group?"

  Shia nodded, "I am now. We lost our leader early on in the fight."

  Ryan nodded, "Tell everyone to shift back to human form when we get closer, and to drop any weapons they're carrying now."

  "You heard him," Shia told everyone, and Ryan watched as they all complied. He detailed two of his men to pick up all of the gear and follow after they'd gotten it.

  "Are you really immune to silver?" Shia asked him.

  "No, but we all have something that keeps any silver from harming us."

  "We'd heard rumors of it, but none of us thought it was true. Until tonight that is."

  Ryan nodded, and then motioned towards the mage they were carrying. He really was in a bad way; the man was covered in bandages, very bloody bandages.

  "So, what makes him worth saving? Most of the mages I've met from the different councils around here haven't been worth the time of day, much less this kind of dedication."

  "He always watched out for us, always protected us from the other mages when they'd get upset. He'd even do what he could to help those on other teams if they got in trouble, which, because he was one of the two kennel masters, he was able to do fairly often."

  "Oh?"

  Shia nodded, "Jerigg over there," she nodded to the wolf who'd challenged him when they'd first gotten there, "got into a lot of trouble with one of the other mages, they wanted to kill him, but Mike got him assigned to our group instead."

  Ryan looked up at Jerigg, who was glaring at him.

  "Is that true?" Ryan asked him.

  "Yes, it's true," Jerigg grumbled.

  "Well, in that case I'll make sure we do whatever we can to save him."

  "And then what will you do with him?"

  Ryan shrugged, "Probably send him home."

  "You won't keep him prisoner?" Shia asked.

  Ryan shook his head, "What's the point? Our leader, Sean, doesn't want a war with the mages, nobody does really, he just wants us to be free to make our own choices."
r />   "As long as we go with you," Shia pointed out.

  "If the Vesti's let you come and go as you pleased, and didn't put those murder pellets in you and didn't just kill you whenever the hell they felt like it, we wouldn't even be here tonight," Ryan growled back at her. "Eruditio and Sapientia don't force their lycans to work for them; in fact, they pay them, just like regular people. That's why you don't see us quarreling with them.

  "We're not animals, and we're not slaves. We're people."

  "We're werewolves."

  "So? That doesn't make us less than human. It just makes us different. Yeah, we like to live in packs and have an alpha. But if your alpha is a dick, you can always go find another pack."

  "Is it true that your leader is a lion?" Shia asked after a moment.

  Ryan nodded, "Yes."

  "What's he like?"

  Ryan shrugged, "He's nice enough, as long as you don't piss him off."

  "What happens if you piss him off?" Shia asked, curious.

  "You quickly discover that the legends about lions are true," Ryan said, remembering what had happened to Michael, who for a month hadn't been able to turn back into a wolf, and who now lived in an old gold mine up in the mountains, living a very austere life.

  "The legends say that they're our gods," Shia replied.

  "Yeah," Ryan nodded, "they do."

  Claudia's

  "How bad is it?" Claudia asked as she strode into the doctor's operating room, and it really was an operating room. Brian Peters had gone to med school, on her dime no less, and had been heavily trained in the magical healing arts as well. He was one of the few non-lycans on the property, Claudia having taken him in as a child after his parents died in a very suspicious 'accident' during some particularly nasty infighting in one of the lesser councils.

  "Well, he's not dead," Brian said looking at her.

  "But? I heard a very big 'but' in that sentence." Claudia asked coming over and looking at Sean as he lay on the hospital bed where they'd put him. Claudia had never seen him in his hybrid form, and damn he was big, a lot bigger than she would have expected. He'd look a lot more impressive however, if most of his fur wasn't burned off and his mane wasn't mostly gone. Or if his body wasn't riddled with small bullet holes and if there wasn't a hole burned into his chest at the top of his sternum, in the exact shape of one of those tags, that went in farther than she cared to look. She could see the blacked and charred bone of his sternum from where she was standing easily enough.

  "But he isn't alive either."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Claudia's head whipped around to look at Brian.

  Brian shook his head, "I don't know. Normally I don't think those wounds would kill a lycan of that size and strength, but Jody told me he was doing some sort of major magic and there was a backlash or something. So best I can figure it, all of his magic is gone, his insides might be cooked, and he should be dead."

  "But he's not dead," Claudia pointed out, "you told me that."

  "Yes, but he's not alive either. He's not breathing, his heart's not beating."

  "Doesn't that mean he's dead?" Claudia asked, confused.

  "Normally, yes, it would. But his soul is still there, his sense of life, also his body is still warm to the touch, or it would be if you could touch it."

  "Wait, what?"

  "You can't touch him. Go ahead and try it. I had to use one of those infrared thermometers just to take his temperature."

  Walking over to Sean's body, Claudia put her hand on him. It tingled, she could almost feel him, but it seemed that her finger tips were now numb because you couldn't quite feel what your fingers were pressing against. Pulling her hand away, she looked at Brian.

  "Do you think he did this to himself?"

  Brian shrugged, "Who else could have? It's almost like some form of suspended animation. I cast a couple of healing spells on him, but I can't tell if they had any effect. I'm afraid to try and do anything more invasive, well not just yet anyways."

  "We can't just leave him like this!" Claudia said.

  "I don't know what we can do," Brian said throwing his hands up in exasperation. "This is beyond anything I've seen before. That field around his body, that needs to go before I can even hope to treat him. But the moment that goes away, I don't know if I can do anything to save him, because I think he's in a pretty bad way."

  "So can't you get more people to help you?"

  "For the magical healing, possibly, but then, only if he's still alive. What if he's too far gone to save? What if he's dead? And that's assuming that I can even get past whatever the hell he's done to himself!"

  Brian shook his head and sighed, "I have no idea what I'm getting into here, and I have no idea who to go ask about it. I don't dare talk to any of the magic users out there, or they'll spread it around that he's dead, and right now, I don't think that's a good idea."

  Claudia shook her head, "No, if they find out he's dead they'll all unite and strike against us. As far as they know, he's the one behind all of this, the one driving everything. If he's gone, they'll think it's over and they can go back to business as usual."

  Claudia looked around the room, "In fact, if they find out he's here and he's wounded, they'll attack us. I need to get control over this, before anyone...."

  Just then the door flew open and Roxy came running flying in, sliding to a stop next to Sean's body.

  "How is he!" Roxy demanded without looking up from Sean's body, she had her hands on him.

  "Who are you?" Brian demanded back.

  "His wife, now answer the question!" Roxy growled.

  "He's badly hurt, but he put himself into some kind of stasis."

  "What does that mean?" Roxy said turning to look at Brian with fierce look in her eyes.

  "It means I don't know what to do. I can't break the field and I don't even know if I should. Right now it's all that's keeping him from dying. I've never seen anything like it."

  Roxy whipped out her cell phone and pressed the button for Daelyn, hopefully she had her phone back on now. Roxy had tried to call her on the drive up here, but you didn't go into combat with your cell phone on.

  "What, Rox?"

  "Where are you?"

  "We're pulling back to the assembly area. What the hell's going on? I haven't been able to reach Sean, Chad said he talked to Maitland, you guys were attacked?"

  "Sean's down, it's bad. I'm at Claudia's, their doc here doesn't know what the hell he's dealing with. We need your grandmother, the one who healed me."

  "Oh shit," Daelyn swore, "Grandmother Robin, that's who it was."

  "Yeah, her! I think we need her."

  "I'll call her and get her up, but it's a long drive from her place to Claudia's."

  "I'll have one of the helicopters meet you at the assembly area, bye."

  "Take care of him! Bye"

  Roxy turned to Claudia, "I need you to send that helicopter to pick up Dae, then go get her Grandmother. The dwarves know about lions."

  "Now just a minute," Claudia bristled, "who the hell do you think you are!"

  If Claudia had blinked, she would have missed it, Roxy moved that fast. Roxy dashed across the room, grabbed her shirt by the collar with her right hand and hauled her up off the floor and looked into Claudia's eyes with a glare that made it pretty damn clear that the rumors of just what Roxy had done to those kidnappers all those years ago weren't lies.

  "Sean's your King, and I'm his Queen, and that makes me the boss of you! Understand?" Roxy snarled. "Now you will do as I say or I swear by all that's holy that I will tear you to pieces here and now and take over your packs myself! Do I make myself clear!"

  "I'll send them," Claudia growled back. "But you and I are going to have words at some point, young lady."

  Roxy opened her hand and dropped Claudia, who landed on her feet.

  "Trust me when I say that you don't want to do that, ever," Roxy growled. "Now, both of you, outside, I need to make some phone calls."

  C
laudia walked out of the room, still growling softly, with a rather shocked looking Brian behind her.

  "I had no idea cheetahs could be so scary!" Brian said, once they were out of earshot.

  "You haven't met her dad, have you?" Claudia grumbled as she went off to where she'd left the pilot.

  "No, why?"

  "He's worse."

  Bittersweet Faith

  Daelyn was fretting the entire trip. The helicopter had shown up fairly quickly after she'd gotten to the assembly area with the rest of the dwarves and the twenty odd lycans that they'd been able to liberate from the Vestibulum. All of them were either domestic servants or sex toys, or to put it more bluntly, they had all at one point been sex toys, but the older ones now just cleaned house.

  Daelyn could only shake her head at the hypocrisy of people who would on the one hand tell you that lycans were no better than animals, but on the other would think nothing of having sex with lycans, whether the lycans were agreeable or not.

  "What did Roxy say was wrong?" Samis asked her.

  "She didn't. Just that it was bad and we needed Grandmother Robin," Daelyn sighed.

  "It's bad," Paul, the helicopter pilot said over the intercom.

  "What?"

  "They loaded him in to the back and I flew him to Claudia's. He had a hole in his chest and was unconscious. They said something about a spell backlash or something. I didn't quite get it, but his clothing was burned, as was most of his fur."

  Daelyn heard the pilot gulp then.

  "It wasn't pretty."

  "But he's not dead, right?" Samis asked.

  "No, but your friend Roxy has descended on Claudia's place, and from the way Claudia's nose is out of joint, I think she's taken over."

  "She's not my friend," Daelyn growled.

  "Huh?"

  "She's my sister."

  "Oh! Ummm, right," the pilot said.

  "How bad were things back at the compound?" Samis asked, changing the subject.

  "From what I saw when I got there, and heard on the flight out, it was pretty bad, but they got it under control and won, eventually. We lost our other helicopter; I think we also lost a couple of our folks when it crashed."