Winner Takes All (Were Witch Book 9)

by Renée Jaggér

  A heavy mist condensed over the burning valley, thickening to water, which extinguished the flames and added clouds of steam to the smoke. As the pair descended to re-engage, the moisture formed into lances of pressurized water that shot at them.

  Carl dodged two. “Crap. It’s always something, isn’t it?”

  “Be silent,” Fenris snapped. He raised his hand and summoned a powerful and concentrated mass of gravitational force in the center of the valley. Trees uprooted themselves and joined chunks of earth and stone to gather around the miniature black hole.

  Coyote’s cover vanished. Fenris spotted the dog-like god running for a narrow ravine between two hills and instructed his apprentice to harry their nemesis with a shower of projectiles. Carl happily complied.

  As they chased Coyote up the ravine, Fenris canceled the gravity spell so that the clumped-up amalgamation of matter at the center of the valley collapsed into a giant ball of dirt, rock, and wood that shook the ground. Coyote stumbled. One of Carl’s arcane blasts had wounded him in the hip, and he couldn’t keep his balance during the minor earthquake.

  Then the wolf-father surrounded him with shield-matter, encased the shields in sheets of rock pulled from the hillsides, and finally created a powerful spear of flaming plasma and diamond, which he hurled through the center of the makeshift prison.

  The coffin of rock fell away and Coyote came into sight, resting on one knee, a smoking hole in his chest. “Ah,” he panted, looking up with a face contorted in agony, “I was not clever enough after all. But now, Fenris, let us see if you can keep your victory.”

  The strained gasps faded, and the canid deity’s face relaxed into a curious expression of peace. He smiled sadly. The color drained away from him, and his body grew hard and brittle, crumbling into a mass of gray ashes and crisp brown leaves that wafted away on the wind. Sparks and streamers of deep coppery red and spruce green rose and fizzled alongside what little remained of his material form.

  Fenris slowly balled his big hands into fists. “It is done. Only one of them remains. Then the entire council will have fallen.”

  Carl wiped his brow. “Hah! I can’t believe we pulled it off. The old mutt put up a tougher fight than we figured. What comes next should be more interesting still, though.”

  His master turned toward a shadowed corner of a cliff, where he conjured another portal. “Correct.”

  As the two left Coyote’s realm behind them forever, neither saw the slender black-haired figure that watched them from behind a mirrored illusion on a nearby hilltop.

  “All right,” Bailey began, putting her hands on her hips and shaking a strand of brown hair out of her face, “it’s time to go on the offensive. We’ve knocked down two armies so far, and we can take on another. Those rock giants seem to be the biggest threat for the time being. Our aim is to remove that threat.”

  The people assembled before her on the back lawn weren’t much of an army, though.

  The South Cliff pack had assembled its bravos under Will Waldsbach. Half of them looked reluctant to get involved in another battle after losing their friend Scott to the dark elves. There was also a smattering of wolves from other packs in the area, as well as Russell Nordin. Fourteen men in all.

  Of the survivors at the academy, most had gone home or to the hospital, but three had volunteered to join her on the next expedition. They wanted payback and to make a difference, and to ensure that what had happened to them at the training grounds would not happen to others again. Among them was Rami, the guy who’d spoken to Bailey both times she’d come to the rescue.

  Agents Townsend, Velasquez, and Park were still there, and they’d called for backup, acquiring an extra seven agents armed, like them, with the so-called “big guns” that had performed so well on the training grounds.

  Roland had returned with Dante and Charlene as well as a dozen other witches, many of them familiar faces from the fights they’d all been through before.

  They weren’t very many, but Bailey had something planned that would substantially balance the odds.

  Will raised his hand. “I’m guessing these things are, you know, giant and made of rock? What will Weres be able to do against them? We’ll fight no matter what, but I’m not sure how much good we’ll be against things like that. All we have is physical strength.”

  “It’s okay,” Bailey replied, “I thought about that. You guys will mostly be the auxiliary. If they get too close, attack their legs and then their heads when they fall. Or stick to distracting them, moving fast, hit and run, trying to get them to break their formation—that sort of thing.”

  The wolves agreed, and the werewitch informed them that she had a surprise. An entire regiment of the Army of Asgard had been placed under her command, and she’d be summoning them presently.

  Roland gawked at her. “What? I wasn’t aware they had an army.”

  Dante added, “That’s awesome. Do they have, like, projectile weapons?”

  Bailey frowned. The soldiers she’d fought with before had relied on their phalanx formation and melee tactics. “Not sure, but I’m about to contact them. I’ll ask if they have, I dunno, bows or something.”

  Velasquez stepped forward and announced, “Our weapons will make short work of those things on an individual basis, so it’ll be mostly a matter of keeping them from swarming us.”

  Bailey allowed the agents, Will, Dante, and Roland to coordinate their specific strategies while she sat down, away from the group, and reached out with her consciousness toward Asgard and Sigfred, who had taken charge of their temporary occupation of the frost trolls’ home realm.

  His mind opened before hers, and by extension, the rest of the troops’ as well. The werewitch spoke to them.

  I need you, and soon. We are going on the offensive against the rock giants. Leave men in the trolls’ world if you have to, but anyone you can spare should meet me there as soon as you notice my energy signature arriving. If you have any long-range weapons, bring them.

  Sigfred’s mental voice replied, We are ready. The trolls have been quiet, and there are other Asgardian troops who can reinforce the platoon I will leave there if need be. We knew this was coming.

  Bailey was relieved; she hadn’t been certain they’d be able to come on such short notice. Thank you, sounds great. See you soon.

  Her next task was to figure out where the hell the rock giants dwelled and open a portal there.

  It took ten or twelve minutes of intense concentration. First she recalled the creature she’d fought at the training grounds, the stony behemoth towering over the dark elves and rabid goblins she’d destroyed with a localized sonic boom. She remembered the entity’s arcane signature, its smell and frequency.

  Then she mentally scanned the known universe for a domain with a concentration of similar signatures. The realms of the dark alfar and the frost giants had been located in a sort of ring that extended out from the base of Asgard, and she hypothesized that the stone giants’ homeworld would be somewhere in that vicinity.

  She was right. Soon, the location of the domain she sought took shape in her mind, and throughout it were patterns of energy much like that of the creature who’d breached the academy’s wall.

  “Okay,” she murmured, then extended her hands to summon a portal that would take them there. The girl had only the vaguest idea of where to start but figured that an area with an especially high concentration of giants made sense. Their king or champion would likely be well-guarded.

  A broad purple gateway opened in the air before her. Satisfied and hoping she hadn’t screwed up an overlooked detail, she beckoned to her friends to follow her through.

  “Be ready,” she told them. Then she walked into the gleaming amethyst mass and through the astral void between worlds.

  They emerged into a landscape that was almost shockingly pleasant. It was about halfway between grassland and forest, a rolling plain of emerald grass with lone trees dispersed here and there and occasional thickets at lower p
oints where water would have gathered. There were also masses of boulders piled here and there. The sky was a clear turquoise.

  About half a mile before them was a broad, gentle rise in the land, not quite a hill, where the trees were larger but less numerous and the rocks more densely strewn. It appeared that the ruins of a stone structure were perched at the top.

  Bailey blinked. Did we come to the right place? This looks like something out of one of those nineteenth-century Romantic paintings or some shit.

  “Okay,” Roland said, beside her, “so where are all the giants?”

  A faint tremor went through the earth. Nothing serious, but just enough to cause most of the group to steady themselves so as not to stumble. When Bailey looked again at the nearest pile of boulders, it seemed...different.

  “Aw, hell,” she muttered. “They’re probably hiding amidst these things and waiting for us to stupidly blunder into them. Well, we’re waiting for the Asgardians. So there.”

  To her consternation, she didn’t see them. Not yet, anyway.

  Bailey turned to her small force of volunteers. “They should be here any minute. Be patient until they arrive.”

  Unless, she added to herself, it gets to be so long that we have to assume it all went wrong and go looking for them. But that prospect is a ways away yet.

  Fortunately, they didn’t have much longer to wait. Bailey sensed a disturbance in the air nearby and then saw a broad purple gateway open there. The gold-armored warriors of the Norse gods streamed out in tight formation soon after.

  Charlene and one of Will’s friends exclaimed, “Wow.”

  They were an impressive sight. In addition to the spears, swords, and shields they’d had last time, around half of the Asgardians also carried what looked like golden recurve bows, which were curiously lacking in strings.

  Bailey walked up to meet them, and Sigfred greeted her. “Lady Bailey, good to see you. As requested, I have assembled the majority of the troops who fought by your side earlier. We’ve also brought bows that fire arcane projectiles for as long as the archers can maintain their magical strength.”

  “Excellent.” The werewitch grinned. Despite the looming danger, she was looking forward to seeing how the weapons performed. “There was a tremor a few minutes ago, so I think we’re going to be in combat pretty soon. Form up.”

  She quickly filled the divine soldiers in on the tactics and abilities of her other allies, and they arranged their forces so that an Asgardian shield wall was the vanguard, with their archers as well as the agents near the front to fire on the enemy. Witches would be kept in the middle for support magic, and the Weres, along with other Asgardian melee troops, brought up the rear.

  Another small quake rattled the ground, but this time, it didn’t stop after a couple of heartbeats. It continued and increased. Cresting the top of a low hill, they saw a long line of boulders moving toward them that were mounted atop other, larger boulders—the heads and shoulders of a legion of giants.

  Bailey raised her right arm, and her sword blazed with light in her hand. “Get ready!”

  The rock creatures crested the ridge—hundreds of them, moving slowly and deliberately in a block formation. The ones out in front held jagged pieces of stone, which they hurled at the interlopers.

  Before Bailey could try to destroy the hurled missiles or Roland could shield them from their impact, the Asgardian archers aimed their stringless bows and fired a torrent of golden bolts of light that struck the boulders and blew them into masses of hot dust.

  “Nice,” the werewitch commented. Then, louder, “Shields up! Move together, but advance!”

  The witches created a dome-like barrier over and around them and moved it alongside the group, who marched forth to meet the enemy. Bowmen and gun-toting agents fired around the edges of the shield, the golden arrows and white plasma fireballs streaking through the clear air to strike the first two or three ranks of the giants head-on. Dozens of the creatures burst into half-molten gravel.

  The rest still marched forward inexorably, shaking the ground with their steps. If not stopped, they would crush Bailey’s small task force and move on to batter down the walls of Asgard.

  Bailey made a decision.

  “You guys,” she shouted, “keep doing what you’re doing. I’m going ahead to soften them up!”

  Roland flashed her a concerned look, and she hastily grabbed him and kissed his cheek. Then she launched over the shieldmen out front, charging her sword with everything she could think of, and plunged into the middle of the army of giants.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The first wave had fallen. Bailey’s berserk charge had softened up the stone creatures, disrupting their initial formation, and she’d nuked the middle portion of their lines. The ones out front were picked off by the overwhelming firepower of the Agency’s plasma cannons, the magical bows of the Asgardians, and whatever the witches could come up with.

  The Weres were antsy; they’d sat out the battle thus far but knew that they might still be called upon to fight the huge and powerful golems at close range. The giants were slow and unimaginative, but their enormous physical power was obvious.

  They also seemed to enjoy combat. No hesitation was evident in them despite the masses of their numbers who fell. They were like automatons whose sole emotion was joy in smashing things.

  And more of them were coming. For each wave the interlopers destroyed, two more trudged over the horizon from multiple directions.

  As projectiles flew, with the agents’ plasma guns doing the most damage, Bailey looked again at the distant hill she’d noticed when they’d first arrived. Something about the place suggested a headquarters to her, and she thought she could detect a concentration of magic there.

  “Okay,” she told her men and women during a lull in the fighting, “you guys advance. Keep doing what you’re doing, and hold the bastards off. I’m going to cut toward that place over there. I think their king, or at least a commander, is based there.”

  Sigfred, Roland, and Will agreed.

  Three dozen giants advanced toward them in a wedge formation, and the archers and agents concentrated their fire on its center to split it in two. The remainder of the monsters picked up speed and closed ranks.

  Bailey detached herself from the main force in time to see the giants slam into a hasty arcane shield a foot in front of the physical shields of the Asgardian troops, then their gold and steel lances lunged out, doing minimal but nonzero damage to the hulking stone forms. It was enough to slow and wound them until the casters and gunmen could pick them off.

  Satisfied that her people could fend for themselves, Bailey dashed off, cutting through half a dozen giants who tried to block her way.

  As she hurtled toward the semi-fortified embankment with its ruins and heaps of boulders and massive old-growth trees, her blazing sword cleaved through stone legs and hands and abdomens. Some of the giants died or fell apart. Others merely stumbled, wounded, and the werewitch trusted her allies to finish them off.

  The ranks of the giants thinned here. Most of them had been deployed in the titanic horde that marched against her friends and Asgard. She jumped from ridge to ridge, boulder to boulder, or sprinted up the winding path that led up the low hill as necessary.

  She knew the king would be guarded. She came to a low, half-crumbled stone wall at the top of the grassy mesa and easily hopped over it, her booted feet landing in a courtyard whose floor was of different colors of quartz and gypsum.

  At the center of the space was a strange throne carved into the trunk of one of the biggest trees she’d ever seen. A huge stone giant sat there, though she could see little of him.

  He was encircled by his elite guard, six golems who were larger than most of the others and who wore helmets, greaves, and breastplates of metal and crystal. In their blocky hands, they hefted crudely forged metal lances or club-swords of chiseled minerals.

  It occurred to Bailey that she did not know the stone giant king’s
name, but her challenge ought to be obvious enough.

  “You!” she shouted. “Face me! If I win, your army agrees to stand down!” She raised her sword, allowing it to glow purplish-white as she charged it with arcanoplasm. Its blade could cut through almost anything like a serrated knife through soft bread.

  A low rumbling, grinding sound rose from the throne area, and it took Bailey a second to realize it was the king’s voice. “Upstart fool,” he quaked. “She has spirit, but kill her all the same.”

  The guards advanced.

  Bailey darted forward, low to the ground, ducking under the first one’s mighty but relatively slow sword-swipe. Her blade licked to both the right and the left, severing both his legs. He toppled to the ground, shaking the hill.

  Three more surrounded her, two stabbing at her with lances while the third swung his sword in an overhead arc. These creatures were the slowest and least-skilled of the monstrous races, but their strength was incredible. Bailey had little doubt she could avoid their blows, but if she failed, Roland would have to gather what was left of her in a jar.

  She dodged the first three strikes, then conjured an expanding dome of shield matter and sonic vibrations that pushed the giants outward and back, throwing them off-balance.

  The girl swung her sword three times. With each stroke, the blade sent a razor-edged sheet of concentrated plasma through the air, cutting the giants asunder, their bodies splitting into halves.

  The last two elite guards assailed her. She jumped over the first one’s sword and perched on his shoulder, severing his head with a quick strike, only to catch the second’s lance in the center of her body.

  Bailey saved her life at the last instant with a kinetic cushion that crushed the tip of the lance but also blew her backward. She flipped head over heels and landed hard at the base of an ancient tree. She gritted her teeth as leaves wafted down. Then she was back on her feet, not seriously injured.

  The final guard charged her with his lance, his impassive stone face oddly livid with a primitive mixture of bestial joy and rage. He feinted, then stabbed as she dodged, his speed and dexterity noticeably a cut above that of his peers.