Werewolf Mage 3

by Harry Nix

Or in this case, husband and wife and wife and other wife.

  Looking at the timeline of it all, Alex knew Nia and Juno easily fitted into the same group as April: incredibly hot mates... who he didn’t know very well.

  Now that he was back in human form, under hot water enjoying the delights of technology, he was mentally far away from the wolf that had been stalking the boar. It had no concerns about the short time his mates had been with him. They were his mates, end of story.

  As he thought of them, blood flow went south, and Alex looked down in disbelief.

  “Seriously? Juno and Nia and still that’s not enough?”

  Then he remembered what April had looked like in her wet t-shirt.

  Alex upped the cold and managed to get his mind off the super-hot pink-haired nymph.

  After he dried himself and dressed, Alex checked his eyes in the mirror again. They were still glittering silver. It was hard to tell if it was more. It definitely wasn’t less, however. As an experiment, Alex touched his finger to his eye and felt a hiss as the silver particles burned. He pulled his finger away and shook his hand at the pain.

  The pain that hurt... but felt good too.

  “Nope, not doing that,” he told himself in the mirror.

  The lure to draw on pain was strong and worst of all, when he was injured, he did it unconsciously. It took a direct effort of will not to draw magic through the pain.

  Alex looked at his blistered finger and one of his darker ideas came to mind. Juno had been hyperbolic when she’d said it but perhaps there was an idea there: cut off some body parts, gulp silver and when they grow back, they’ll be immune, like his eyes and eyelids apparently were.

  There was an even darker idea lurking behind that one—use a knife, or a vegetable peeler to take off the top layer of skin and then try to heal after being doused in silver.

  Of course, he’d never be able to go to bed with Nia again...

  The memory of the Corvus mages suddenly came to mind and Alex forcefully shook himself out of his thoughts. When he and Juno had attacked their outpost, a few had caught fire. The sweet release of pain had washed over Alex and the mages like a warm honey tide. The mages had been so intoxicated by it that it had cost them their lives when Alex attacked them.

  But he’d been affected too, for a short while.

  He’d been warned that using magics would alter him. Those who dealt with the dead soon only cared for the dead was cute as a warning, but it didn’t quite get down to the reality of it. Since he’d used pain, he was starting to enjoy pain, to want pain. He wasn’t quite on the slippery slope yet, but he could feel it waiting for him.

  Alex went to leave the bathroom but found a certain body part was hard again and had quite a lot to say about April.

  “C’mon dude, sure we need some sex magic but this is—”

  The thought hit like a freight train.

  The magics you use alter you. Those who use fire want to burn things.

  He’d been using sex magic, repeatedly. He’d been using it to edit rings and make magic easier. He’d been drawing on it and recharging himself by jumping his three mates.

  Now he was walking around with sex on the brain, an insatiable appetite.

  Damn, did this mean he’d have to cut back on sex with his mates?

  Alex got out of the bathroom before he could delve too deeply into this new very unwelcome idea. He’d have to talk to Juno about it and see what she thought was happening.

  He found her on guard outside Stephen’s room. Bish’s funeral was soon and so Juno took off immediately to get changed, after giving him the key to the mage cuffs. Alex stood outside the door, debating whether to go in or not. He hadn’t seen Stephen since healing him yesterday. By all accounts the young mage was well and truly cowered. Being held prisoner in a village of werewolves who wanted to murder you would do that.

  Alex wasn’t sure what he might do if he saw Stephen. When he thought of the silver dust...

  He growled under his breath and then closed his eyes. Stay calm. Yup, there it was. Although Stephen was a disposable foot soldier (which was clearly proven by the fact he and the rest of them were abandoned by more powerful mages), he’d still flown a drone. He’d been part of an attack that had killed Bish and maybe Gem too.

  Alex’s mind strayed to Jacob. If he ordered it, the werewolf would attack a mage outpost or compound. What was the difference there? Power and authority and those in control always sent the young off to fight and die in their pointless wars for treasure. Who was responsible? The young soldier who was bound to obey orders or those who gave the orders?

  He couldn’t forgive Stephen... but he could understand why what happened wasn’t his fault.

  Alex went inside the room before he could twist his mind into further knots. Someone had found clothes for Stephen to wear and now he was in jeans and a t-shirt, his hands mage-cuffed in front of him, sitting on the side of the bed. He looked like he’d never done a push-up in his life. Between his thin arms, small frame, and reddened eyes, he looked like he was fourteen.

  He glanced up at Alex but then looked at the ground.

  Alex took the chair from the nearby desk and sat down.

  “How old are you?” he asked. Visions of the dead swam in his mind. Some of... the heads... had looked incredibly young.

  “Eighteen.”

  “What about those other mages we found you with?”

  “Eighteen, nineteen. Xavo doesn’t send anyone younger than eighteen out.”

  Was there a relief there? If so, was it justified? Some sort of magical line set at eighteen that made it okay to murder teenagers? Alex wasn’t so sure. He knew that if he had come across them, not his wild bestial side, he wouldn’t have killed them unless there was no choice.

  “I want you to tell me what happened yesterday. Start from getting the order until I caught you. Name names.”

  Stephen frowned but kept his gaze on the floor.

  “I already told your wives. Artemis must have given the order. He’s the head of our enclave. It came down the line to Tyril, one of the senior mages. We got told we’d be flying ten drones full of silver and all we had to do was get them into position and detonate. We didn’t know there were soldiers or weredogs. They keep all the information separate. We got set up but as soon as we hit the button, the van we came in abandoned us. We were trying to figure out what to do when... you came.”

  Tears trickled down his face and dripped off his nose. Stephen used his cuffed hands to wipe them away.

  Alex’s pack had found tire tracks but at Juno’s insistence they hadn’t followed them. She was wary it was just another trick, a way to lure werewolves away and murder them. There had apparently been a lot of disagreement but as one of the Alpha’s mates she had some power. Plus, the fireball she conjured and waved around helped.

  “How do you feel about silvering our home? Knowing that it burns us. We have six children who live here and now we have to worry that someday in the future they’ll step on a tiny speck and get horribly injured.”

  Stephen seemed to shrink into himself. He screwed up his face and sniffed through a blocked nose.

  “I’m sorry. You don’t know what it’s like. We swear ourselves to the enclave. I grew up in it. Apart from our rumspringa, most of us don’t go outside it. We’re taught to obey.”

  Alex gave a double blink.

  “Sorry, did you say rumspringa? Like the Amish?”

  For the first time, Stephen looked up at him. “Yeah, well you know not all mages that grow up in an enclave are suited to that type of magic. Some always go, join Ignis or Corvus or whatever.”

  That feeling of not knowing anything about anything was back again. Of course, what Stephen was saying made sense. If you grew up in a necromancer enclave but your affinity was for pain magic, then how would you discover that?

  “Who is Ignis?”

  “Fire mages. You ever see their spells they’ll be wavering, you know like heat lines over the road?”


  Alex was suddenly regretting not talking to Stephen earlier. The kid was a font of knowledge.

  “I see it as a screen above their head. Is that what you mean?”

  “Yeah. I can only see it sometimes but I’m still learning.”

  “I saw a mage in Baxter, driving slowly in a car casting some spell over and over. His screen was wavering. So, he was a fire mage? Any idea what he was doing?”

  Stephen shrugged and Alex saw the teenager was relaxing. Alex decided right then and there that there would be no more good cop bad cop stuff going on. Juno and April were angry, still furious really, that Alex had had his hand torn off by the resurrected old lady but scaring the hell out of this kid wasn’t the right thing to do.

  “Ignis are like the vampires—getting their fingers into businesses all the time. Running protection rackets, that kind of thing, for money. Maybe some kind of protection spell? There are other enclaves or rogue mages who are always fighting for territory. It’s like mafia gangs sometimes.”

  There wasn’t much time until the funeral. Stephen was going to be left unguarded, which was something Alex was uneasy about. There was no worry about Stephen himself escaping—he was mage-cuffed and any attempt to use magic would burn one wrist and freeze the other. Even if he made it out of the main house there were miles of territory to cross and his captors were supreme trackers.

  No, the worry was that a werewolf would come up here during the funeral and murder the kid. It would be the perfect time for it.

  Everyone would be attending the funeral, but Alex was still uneasy. Was he meant to do a damn headcount and as soon as the funeral was over, he had to run back to guard Stephen again? He idly wondered if there was an attic he could stash him in. Find some secure room to lock him away.

  “What do Xavo do for money?”

  Stephen gave him a look that for a moment was much like Jacob. Sort of a “dude, are you serious right now?” that only a teenager could pull off.

  “Mortuaries. Funeral homes. Cemeteries. Corpse transport services. Anything involving the dead. I think they own a few hamburger franchise locations too.”

  “Hamburgers? Wait, that doesn’t mean—”

  There was that look again.

  “No, gross. They’re not feeding dead bodies to people in... in hamburger patties! They’re just, you know, diversifying their income stream or whatever.”

  “So, they run funeral homes so they can get access to dead bodies. I guess so they can raise them and also draw death?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Doesn’t the ability to draw death magic fade quickly though? I did it on a chicken that had just died but when I tried it on a different dead body, there was nothing there.”

  Stephen’s eyes widened.

  “You’re a necromancer?”

  For a moment Alex wondered if he should keep his secrets to himself. His pack knew he was a mage but maybe not the full extent of his powers. He’d told Bailey about himself, which may have resulted in the old frog’s death, which presumably meant others knew a little about him.

  The question was: would revealing he was gaining mastery of various forms of magic make things worse?

  Although it was hard to see how they could be worse. Dead soldiers with silver bullets, drones dusting their home, his apartment being blown up, psycho pain mages, the blood golem...

  Alex decided to talk, and he also realized with surprise that he’d decided he was going to let Stephen go. He’d escort the kid back to Baxter and set him free with another message and a plan.

  “Yeah, I know one necro spell right now for resurrecting small animals. I can draw on death. That’s what I did to save your life. Fill up my death mana and charged the healing spell with it.”

  Stephen pulled his cuffed hands against his stomach, perhaps remembering Alex’s attack.

  “Who taught you that? You’re a werewolf so you’re definitely not in an enclave. Was it some rogue necromancer?”

  Alex decided to keep Henry’s name out of it for now. Although Alex and his mates had been attacked at their meeting, and there was a non-zero chance it was a false flag to get him to trust Henry, he was still leaning on the side that Henry wasn’t his enemy. As Henry had said—there was an argument in whispers ongoing in his enclave. Alex wanted to press on that sore spot until the whole thing cracked open. Maybe then they’d leave them the hell alone... and if not, at least he could get some more names, climb that ladder, leaving it bloody behind him.

  “You could say that. How many spells do you know?”

  Even Juno and April were cagey around this question. Apparently, it was just. not. done. A breach of etiquette to ask such a thing. Alex didn’t care though. He wanted spells, even if it meant just reading more of them.

  “I have some,” Stephen said.

  “Can you resurrect a dead body?”

  “It’s not resurrection. It’s reanimation and no, I’m not quite there yet. I’ve only been able to reanimate a child.”

  Alex got a sudden vision of Xavo diverting bodies intended for burial, faking cremations, all so they could have access to the dead for their purposes. To hear Stephen speak so... casually about it was a shock. He supposed the kid had been raised to be a necromancer though. He’d probably seen dead bodies from childhood.

  “Can you show me that spell?” Alex asked.

  “We’re not meant to do that.”

  Alex had already decided he’d let Stephen go, and there was to be no more good cop bad cop threats, but he wanted those spells. Any one of them might have new lines that could help him advance his spell writing.

  “I see my spells like code. At first it was gibberish, numbers and symbols and characters from other languages. Then it changed to English and became readable. That’s how I edited a shield ring from three charges to thirty. I also wrote my own healing spell. Do you want to see it?”

  Alex pulled his chair over closer to Stephen without waiting for an answer and held out his hand.

  “It doesn’t work if I’m wearing these. They’ll hurt me,” Stephen said.

  Alex pulled out the key.

  “I unlock you and you attack me... it’s not going to go well so you won’t do that, right?”

  Stephen quickly nodded.

  Trusting his gut, Alex set him free, dropping the mage-cuffs on the bed. Then he touched the back of Stephen’s hand and opened up his homebrew Healing Flame spell.

  So far, Alex had only connected magically to Juno, April, and Henry. Henry was a necromancer and his spell screen had been dark with red veins through it. A sort of cold eternity mixed with pulsing life.

  Stephen’s was more like life with just a hint of death. It was golden, to start with, shimmering with a warm glow. Through it were tiny lines of black that spoke of death. Alex wasn’t sure if it was because Stephen was still young and inexperienced or just not that great of a necromancer.

  “I see computer code... what do you see?” Alex asked.

  He could feel Stephen’s attention on the spell. It was like knowing where someone else was looking.

  “Comic book pages. They move for me. Like I can see a doctor in white and then he bursts into flames before starting to operate. There are two other characters in the background just standing around doing nothing.”

  “Like who?”

  “A woman with a map. She has all the directions, but the doctor isn’t talking to her.”

  Alex’s head started to spin. Had he in his hasty writing of the spell not connected the parts correctly? Juno’s spell managed to find its way to any injury in this body.

  “Who else?”

  “There’s a man using a scoop to lift materials out of various bags. Bits of metal, I think. That’s all.”

  “Can you... cut the women with the map out, just her, and move her to a separate page?”

  Stephen bit his lip and moved his free hand in the air. Alex could feel him working on the spell. Soon, the code appeared on the spell screen above Stephen’s head
. Alex immediately copied it.

  He was running out of space—the image he’d captured from the Great Barrier spell, plus all the numbers and everything else was taking up most of his spare pages. He’d even had to delete his nascent fireball spell that he’d been working on to make room. Still, there was a little space and he dropped the code into it.

  Now that he read through it, he got hints of what it might do. A sort of finding, a measurement or test of injury. If injury wasn’t found it moved to the next location and tested again.

  But how to connect it properly?

  “Tell me what you see,” Alex said. He opened the spell, duplicated it, leaving him with no space left, and then started moving pieces of it around.

  “The map women just dropped her map,” Stephen said.

  “Now she has it back again. She’s yelling at the doctor, but he can’t hear her.”

  Alex kept moving code, trying to join the “map” bit with the “doctor” bit.

  “The map woman is now dressed in running gear, like an athlete. The doctor is listening to her.”

  Alex stopped changing the code around. Had he done it? The execute button was lit up, so at least the spell could be cast. He just needed a way to test it.

  If he were a heartless werewolf, he’d slice Stephen on the leg and then touch his shoulder to see if the healing spell would make the trip. Instead of doing that he stood up and shifted to his hybrid state.

  Stephen immediately jumped back on the bed.

  “Oh, sorry,” Alex said.

  He cut his leg with his claw, ignoring the lure of the pain, and then cast the new and improved spell. The flame lit on his finger and then he pressed it against his arm.

  The zap that went through him was like he’d touched a live wire. It sprinted from his arm to his leg and closed the wound. Alex must have still had some metal in him because he now had a line of gray holding his flesh together.

  “That’s a healing spell? But it’s tiny. I don’t know any healing spells because they’re still too large for me to copy.”

  Alex put his giant claw on Stephen’s shoulder.

  “Copy it from me,” he said.

  He wasn’t quite sure why he was offering his spell to Stephen. Perhaps to push a quid pro quo. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was thinking of what Howey had said about winning hearts and minds. What better way to start than by turning an enemy into a friend?