Winner Takes All (Were Witch Book 9)

by Renée Jaggér

  The throb of intensely concentrated divine energy within the realm was not difficult to locate. Mere seconds after it revealed itself, Fenris heard the sounds of his target, besides.

  Feet stumbled in the irregular motions of a man losing his sense and coordination. Branches and leaves rustled, and Balder, not yet visible to the eye, spoke his challenge.

  “Fenris!” the voice cried. It would once have been a clear, fair voice like the note of a well-honed trumpet, but now it was strained with anguish, emotion, and exhaustion. “Come forth! Face me, you bastard! This realm falls under your dominion. Show yourself!”

  The tall man grinned within his hood, his teeth more like a wolf’s than a human’s. He sensed Carl’s satisfaction as well. Balder was badly frazzled, his self-control poor, his emotions raging. It would not be difficult to complete the task of removing him from the pantheon permanently.

  The pair moved silently toward the growing noise, and the voice shouted again.

  “I know, Fenris!” Heavy breathing, a soft whimper of pain. “I know your plans, you miserable traitor! You turned my students against me. You plotted the whole attack on the training grounds. And I know that you are behind all the unrest lately. You’re trying to bring about Ragnarök! Face me, damn you, and answer the charges!”

  Fenris and Carl advanced a little farther, allowing themselves to make enough sound to be heard, and the former let his energy signature radiate strongly enough for another deity to sense.

  They waited at the edge of a glade until Balder stumbled into it. Carl hung back, hiding behind a tree, while Fenris made no effort to conceal himself. Balder’s eyes were wild, his golden hair flying about his shoulders in tangled locks, and dried ichor stained his shoulder and arm.

  The god of werewolves took a single slow, heavy step forward.

  “Yes,” he rumbled, “I am responsible for all of that. I am guilty of every charge you’ve laid before me. Everything you’ve mentioned happened because I did it. All of it. No one else will know, of course, but I want you to know in these, your final minutes of existence. You were among the few gods who could pose a legitimate threat to me. But look at you now—wounded, weakened, growing desperate as you succumb to delirium. A shadow of your former self. I will kill you, Balder. You have no chance to save yourself at this point. I’ve already blocked off any route of escape you might take.”

  He watched the strained, beautiful face of the injured god grow pale, the eyes bulging in horror as the truth of the wolf-father’s words sank in.

  “With you dead, that leaves but two who could challenge me. Thor is one, but in truth, his chances are less than yours. I haven’t much fear of him. He will be dead soon, and whatever husk of him remains will join you in the abyss. That leaves only Tyr, and by the time the Lord of Justice realizes what is occurring, it will be too late. Goodbye, Balder.”

  The lord of beauty and innocence produced his sword, the shining rapier blade coming up too slowly to intercept the hulking, towering monstrosity that suddenly bore down on him. A bellowing howl shook the leaves of the trees and the huge furry paw of the dark shape lashed out, its knuckles striking Balder’s torso and smashing him into a tree.

  Balder shouted in pain and rage, summoning not only the reserves of strength he still possessed but drawing power and vitality from the earth around him. Though it was one of Fenris’ domains, the raw stuff of its existence was a kind of life-giving ether that any being of sufficient magical talent could use.

  The two gods met each other next on equal footing. Fenris, his wolf form many times the mass of the human-sized Balder, was poised to smash the other into the ground, where his fanged and slavering jaws could complete the task.

  But the blond god’s strength was far greater than his dimensions would suggest. With his left hand, he stayed the next blow from Fenris’ paw, while his right hand lashed out with the sword and drew blood from the dark-furred breast of the giant wolf.

  Fenris growled thunderously and clenched his jaws on the blade, flinging it from his foe’s grasp and nearly snapping the bones of Balder’s arm.

  The deity of innocence did not give up. His battle cry had taken on a strangled, desperate note, and tears streamed down his face as he tried to pummel the wolf-beast with his bare hands. Fenris drove him back against the same tree where he’d been flung seconds earlier and brought his head down to bite him in half.

  Balder rolled aside and, springing to his feet with agonized effort, found himself face to face with his supposed apprentice.

  “Carl,” he gasped, “help me. Fenris is a traitor. We must—”

  “Oh,” the scion remarked as the lycanthropic monstrosity loomed across from him, “I’m well aware of that, Balder.” He smiled.

  Carl’s foot plunged forward, striking Balder in the chest and driving him back into the grasping claws of the were-god. The look of horror and emotional pain on the blond god’s face had to be genuine, the scion realized. Whatever else he might have figured out, he’d been in the dark about Carl’s deception.

  Balder tried to spin and stab upward into the massive wolf, but Fenris’ jaws came down on his neck, chest, and shoulder, biting deeply, while his claws held the man’s arms at bay. Balder screamed, and Fenris flung him aside to crumple against a mass of mossy roots.

  The golden deity’s form became insubstantial, ghostly, like a cold mist dissipating in the morning sun. The runoff of his divine powers filled the air with a horizontal rain shower of yellow sparks, and what little remained of his body vanished in a flash of light, blue-white tinged with gold. The rushing, tinkling sounds made by his escaping energy subsided. Then nothing remained of him.

  Carl burst out laughing, pumping a fist in the air. “Ha-ha! You did it, old man, you actually did it. Well, we did it, to some extent.”

  Fenris drew himself up slowly, shifting back into the form of a tall, hooded man, his breaths long and deep. “Correct. Although you should not forget your place as my subordinate, Carl, your efforts were instrumental in all of this. And we are one step closer to Ragnarök. Rejoice! But not for long. We have preparations to make for the next step.”

  “Oh,” the scion remarked, “I am rejoicing.” He kept looking at the empty space where Balder, whose apprentice he had pretended to be, had once been. “But, yeah. Let’s move on. Plenty more to do.”

  Loki watched. He did not move or speak or breathe or do anything; he only observed the scene playing out in the hunters’ forest before him. His son, Fenris, had completed his “killing” of Balder.

  Or rather, his destruction of Balder’s illusion. Powered by the combined magic of two gods, it was the most convincing level of deception in the universe.

  He was hiding behind another illusion, a highly convincing one made from the astral fabric of the realm. Loki had doubled-up the exact view of the woods in this direction and pasted it over reality on a vertical plane in front of where he stood. It served much the same function as a matte painting in a couple of old human movies he’d seen, where a distant landscape was represented by propping the painting up at the edge of the set.

  Fenris had not suspected his presence, just as he hadn’t suspected that Balder, in his supposedly final seconds of life, was not truly Balder.

  “Alas,” the god of mischief sighed, the sound of his voice muffled through magic, “I was expecting something to confound my efforts. That would have made this more of a challenge. And more interesting.”

  He looked down at his hand, where a tiny light glowed, and with a thought, extinguished it. The point of illumination was the signature of a spell he’d cast to record all that had transpired, creating a perfect holographic representation of the scene that had played out in the clearing.

  Everyone would see it. Everyone would hear all that Fenris had arrogantly confessed to, thinking there were no witnesses.

  Loki sent the vision to the other gods. It would register in their minds like a vivid memory, implanted there for them to recall at will, and it could
still be conjured like a film scene for any mortals who might need to see it, such as Bailey and her friends.

  The black-haired deity laughed softly. He still thought of Bailey as a mortal, though she sat on the council of the gods.

  Fenris and his treacherous disciple watched the illusion dissipate into nothingness. Since the wolf-lord had defeated the god of innocence with such ease, he did not bother trying to absorb what little remained of his victim’s power.

  “You know,” Loki murmured to no one but himself, “I would have thought that my son would have been...cleverer. He’s dumber than I’d expected. Deceit is not his strong point, despite being my child. Oh, his lies have advanced things further than we might have expected, but his plan unravels so easily the instant someone is on to him. Given how heinous his aspirations have become, I suppose it’s good that he’s this sloppy and foolish, but...” He sighed. “I cannot help but wish for him to have made a better showing. We’ll see how he fares when the facades fall and it all goes to brute force. He’s rather better at that.”

  The trickster-god secured the playable illusion-scene within himself as he watched Fenris and Carl depart through a portal. Satisfied that they were gone, Loki turned and conjured one of his own, leading back to Greenhearth.

  “And now,” he murmured, “the girl will have no choice but to believe. I pity her.” Shaking his head, he went through.

  Loki stepped out of the gateway and into the backyard of the Nordins, striding past the familiar pole barn and toward the rear door. He moved silently, so no one poked their head out a window to engage him as he crossed the lawn. When he knocked on the door, Jacob, the eldest of Bailey’s three younger brothers, answered.

  “Oh, hi,” the young man said. “We were relaxing after lunch and the funeral service for the guys who died in the elf world. The rest of them are off paying their respects to the families. You need to talk to Bailey?”

  He managed a small frown of sympathy. “Indeed I do. Rather important, though not to the point of absolute urgency.”

  Jacob admitted the mischief-god, and they found Bailey on the couch in the living room, her arm around Roland as the couple and the other two brothers watched TV.

  The girl waved. “Hello. Bad news, I’m guessing? I was trying to relax after all the shit we went through earlier. We had to bury one of Will’s friends, plus the others. Though of course, I expected you back sooner rather than later.”

  Loki sat down next to Roland, pressing against him. The wizard made a sour face.

  “Yes,” the deity replied, “I’m afraid so. Well, mostly bad, but good in the sense that we have absolute, indisputable proof of what we’d suspected, and can therefore act without hesitation.”

  The girl’s face fell, and there was a twinge of pain in the expression. She’d been holding out hope, he suspected, that Fenris was not truly her enemy after all.

  But what was going on was far bigger and more important than the emotional security of one young goddess. He could not spare her the truth. As she watched, he extended his hand, summoning the point of light he’d held while recording the battle between Fenris and Balder. With a snap of his fingers, he replayed the entire scene.

  Bailey watched with mounting sick horror. She had good control of herself, but it was obvious that it was taking a great deal of effort. In particular, she seemed hurt and disturbed by the cold, flat tone Fenris used when admitting his role in the recent chaos and to his intentions to bring about the end of the world, regardless of who he had to sacrifice.

  The other thing that clearly bothered her was the revelation that Carl was working with Fenris and had been in on his plans the whole time. Loki recalled that Bailey and the scion had become friends during their time together at the training grounds.

  The girl’s mouth fell open. “My God,” she gasped. “Loki, I know this is a stupid question, but...are you sure this is real? This is exactly what they said and did?”

  He let the wry amusement drain out of his face; sometimes, it was better to be serious. “Quite sure,” he declared. “I had to be there to observe them in order to record it, and this was what I saw and heard. I don’t deceive people when it comes to truly important matters.”

  After a short pause, he added, “Balder is fine, however. We successfully pulled off the ploy to trick Fenris into thinking he’d murdered him.”

  Dead, absolute silence held sway in the room for about ten seconds. Then Bailey abruptly jumped up and stormed out to the backyard.

  Jacob commented, “Let her go. She needs a minute alone. You can talk again when she’s ready.”

  Loki folded his hand, canceling the illusion in the same motion. “So be it. I take it she’s accepted what she’s seen.”

  Frowning, Roland remarked, “I think she accepted it a while ago, but in the back of her mind, she didn’t want it to be true and was holding out a tiny speck of hope. I suppose it’s better for her to be one hundred percent certain today than still be inwardly confused at the very end. There was no avoiding it forever.”

  Kurt’s mouth hung open, and he stared at something far away, or at something within his own head. “Fenris,” he stammered, “is…is…he’s our god. He’s the Father of Weres. How could he do this to us? To everyone? I didn’t believe it at first, either.”

  Russell flexed his huge hands and his eyes burned. “There aren’t any words for this,” he growled.

  Jacob only sat holding his downturned face in his hand and sighed. “No one could’ve anticipated this crap. It doesn’t make sense. We’ll have to tell all the other Weres that there’s no denying or pretending anymore.”

  Loki agreed, then he wandered through the house toward the rear door before following Bailey to the backyard. She stood at the edge of her family’s property, back to him, looking into the mountains and the sky.

  He came to within five feet and waited. “I’m sorry, Bailey.”

  “Yeah,” she responded, her voice low and soft. “Me too.”

  The god of mischief ran two fingers through his black hair. “He is my son, as well as your people’s father, but he’s too far gone for us to do anything but stop him. You may take the remainder of the day and the night to rest.”

  She turned around, and her eyes were red and shiny. Her fists trembled with anger, though her face was mournful. “Then what?”

  “In the morning, we depart for Asgard.”

  Chapter Nine

  Bailey awoke at 8:22 and decided it was good enough. She’d slept for over seven hours, yet it was still early enough for her to make the necessary preparations for her coming excursion.

  As she walked downstairs, sniffing the air for any signs of fresh coffee, she saw at once that preparations must not have been part of the plan. Loki was sitting in a chair in the living room, waiting for her.

  “Good morning,” he opened. “I hope you rested well. I heard you snoring loudly, which usually seems to mean that it was a good sleep, yes?”

  “Uhh,” she muttered, her brain not yet operating at full capacity, “yeah, usually. Something like that. Did anyone make coffee?”

  Russell poked his massive head out through the dining room doorway. “Yeah,” he replied. “It’s strong.”

  Bailey nodded and accepted a cup gratefully. She felt as though she’d been drinking heavily last night, though all she’d had was one beer.

  It’s got to be the aftereffects of absorbing the dark elven king’s power, she surmised. But it was different in the past. Then again, I was siphoning it from gods. Gormyr was a supernatural creature, but not a frickin’ deity. That must be it.

  She sat down in the living room to sip her brother’s borderline-dangerous brew, blinking and stretching her limbs one by one.

  Loki spoke up. “How do you feel? The sooner we visit Asgard, the better.”

  She grunted. “Eh. Okay, I guess, but I’m gonna need time for coffee, hopefully breakfast, and a shower. So, like, an hour?”

  “Hmm.” The god of mischief stroked h
is smooth chin. “Aim for forty-five minutes.”

  Fifty minutes later, the werewitch was ready to go. She’d dressed in nice slacks and a blouse. Somehow, she felt like she should be presentable while visiting the homeworld of the Norse gods.

  Roland wandered in. He’d slept out in the pole barn to create fewer disturbances while his fiancée rested and recovered from the recent battle. He pursed his lips appreciatively at the sight of her.

  “Nice! Are you going for a job interview at the bank or something?”

  Her head whipped toward him. “No, dork. Like we said yesterday, I’m going to Asgard. Maybe I’m overdressed since I was still wearing the usual blue jeans when we went before the council, but I dunno, this seems different.”

  Loki came up. “It doesn’t matter much, but there’s no downside to looking good, is there? Anyway, come. I can’t say how long we’ll be gone, but one of us will try to send word to your family and friends if it’s terribly long.”

  Jacob had wandered in. He and Roland gave solemn nods and hugged the girl goodbye.

  “Don’t worry,” she told them. “Nothing’s killed me yet, and I don’t intend to break that streak.”

  She and the lord of mischief strode out the back door to open a portal behind the pole barn by the pine-forested slopes.

  Before they went through, Loki held up a finger in a schoolmarm-like gesture of admonishment.

  “Do not let your guard down,” he warned Bailey. “Under normal conditions, Asgard is not dangerous to anyone who has business there. As a goddess, you do. However, things lately have not been normal conditions. The attacks on the realm’s boundaries have everyone on edge, and of course, we are not yet certain if Fenris might have turned anyone to his cause, or who his agents might be if so.”

  The girl grimaced and nodded. “Got it. Makes sense.”

  “Another thing,” Loki added. “The people of Asgard respect strength. It is a domain where tremendous power, divine, arcane, or physical, is the norm, so don’t hide your power. Don’t be ashamed of your status as a rising deity. Flaunt it. Not in an obnoxious or conceited way, but with calm confidence and quiet grace. Such a bearing will serve you well there, and in other places, too, if need be.”