Winner Takes All (Were Witch Book 9)

by Renée Jaggér

  She kicked aside a goblin, decapitated an elf, disemboweled a troll, and skewered a draugar. The carnage was horrific, but the enemy refused to surrender. Soon all but a handful of them were dead. The Asgardians took the remainder prisoner and shuffled them aside.

  Bailey caught her breath and checked on her side’s casualties. A few Asgardians, one agent, and one witch had died in the battle. Several others were injured. No one she knew well had fallen, but it pained her to think they’d be unable to win this fight without losses.

  She looked at the bridge.

  Half as many monsters were stationed along its shining translucent length as had guarded the arch, but they were crammed into a far smaller area. The girl also saw snipers waiting on the walls of the palace. Even with shields, they’d be heading into a potentially deadly bottleneck.

  She had an idea.

  Bailey pulled Mjölnir off her back. “Lightning!” she cried, and bolts fell from the clear sky to illuminate the hammer’s head. With a battle roar, she flung the weapon straight up the bridge.

  It spun along Bifröst’s length, sending out lightning bolts at random in every direction as it moved. The first lines of the enemy were dead before they could grasp what was happening. The rest, seeing the fate of their comrades, turned and ran.

  But the hammer was faster than most of them. Smoking corpses fell in waves before the magical weapon’s advance. It destroyed three-quarters of the host before the final quarter plunged through the palace gates to relative safety.

  Bailey summoned Mjölnir back to her hand before it could enter the palace since she didn’t want it to destroy the place. Then she motioned for her troops to charge.

  They did, moving at a jog up the seemingly insubstantial causeway. Mortals in particular looked uneasy, doubting that a bridge made of light could support them, but it held firm beneath their tramping feet.

  Halfway across, the snipers began firing. They seemed to be dark elves shooting arrows that had been enchanted with various spells, giving them greater damage potential and some ability to penetrate arcane shields.

  The witches devoted their magic to renewing barriers that faltered under the barrage. Meanwhile, Bailey and the Asgardian bowmen shot down half the arrows with careful blasts of their own. Finally, they picked off the snipers, and Bailey destroyed them with homing fireballs while they tried to flee or seek better positioning.

  At last, they reached the palace gates, finding them shut and barred. Bailey didn’t like the thought of destroying such beautiful architecture, but their circumstances were too dire to worry about that, and she could always help Asgard rebuild. She powered up her sword with an intense charge of arcanoplasm and split the gates with a strong vertical swing.

  As the combined Earthling-Asgardian force hustled into the front palace courtyard, they saw that the battle had only just begun.

  At the head of a host of monsters supported by four demigods in hooded coats not unlike the one Fenris always wore was a familiar figure: an athletic, dark-skinned young man, smirking at the new arrivals. In his hands, he carried a steel mace much like the one he’d used to engage the werewitch in friendly fights at the training grounds.

  “Hi, Bailey!” Carl greeted her as his allied archers and bombardiers readied their weapons. “You should not have listened to stupid, unimaginative gods like Tyr and Thor and Thoth. And especially Balder, whom I personally shot with that accursed arrow, in case you hadn’t figured that part out yet. They are the real problems in our universe. They’re holding everyone back.”

  The girl glared at him across the shining marble steppingstones and closely cropped emerald grass. “Fuck you, Carl. I knew you were a traitor already, but thanks for admitting it for everyone else to hear.”

  Rather than wait for him to react, she fired a massive plasma beam at his face.

  Carl launched himself upward at blinding speed, and the blast vaporized a dozen or more elves, goblins, and draugar behind him. Then the next phase of the battle was on.

  Fenris’ forces began using hit-and-run tactics, harrying the sides of the formation with their weaker units while especially large stone giants and elite elven mage-archers pressed them with suppressive fire. The other four demigods unleashed a flurry of spells, but Roland alone was a match for any of them and was able to neutralize most of their attacks.

  Carl was nowhere to be seen. Bailey tried to control her anger and hurt. She recalled the good times she and the scion had shared at the academy, and the knowledge that it had been a facade made her burn with vengefulness.

  But she had other things to deal with.

  One of the other hooded demigods attacked her with a miniature hurricane of acid and a flechette storm of random chunks of sharp stone and metal. The girl summoned a form-fitting shield around her and bulled straight through the attack, renewing the shield matter as needed and boosting its deflective properties until the demigod was struck with some of his own debris.

  He tried to flee, but Bailey threw her sword like a javelin, impaling him, then summoned it back to her hand to engage a squad of dark alfar swordsmen.

  Meanwhile, Roland was grateful to have Shannon contributing to the battle since she’d always been a fairly talented witch. Her distinctive fuchsia bolts of lightning still made him uncomfortable on a primal level, though.

  Dante and Charlene worked as a couple, with him handling defense and her offense, gradually breaking up sub-formations of the enemy or destroying stone giants who tried to hurl magically-augmented boulders at them.

  Will and Alfred led their packs in wolf form into the alleys and stairwells of the palace’s surrounding outbuildings, hunting down and killing the monsters who tried to hit-and-run the main force. Though fast and stealthy, the elves and goblins were ultimately no match for the predatory instincts of wolves.

  Townsend fired his plasma gun from the rear of the group toward flankers, and Velasquez and Park commanded their squads closer to the front. They caught the remaining demigods in crossfires of burning plasma, which proved too much even for semi-divine beings.

  Sigfred maintained his men’s formation as they slowly advanced, their shields battering aside attackers and their arrows and lances making short work of them thereafter.

  But the enemy still outnumbered them, and it wasn’t over yet.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bailey swung her sword again and again in the delirium of combat. As bodies fell around her, she caught sight of the enemy commander at the same moment that a stray chunk of rock giant smote her to the ground.

  Carl pointed his index finger at the tight formation of Asgardian soldiers, pantomiming the firing of a handgun, and a white-hot explosion like the detonation of a plasma grenade bloomed amidst them. Dead, burning troops fell in all directions, and their smoking weapons and armor clattered to the ground.

  Bailey hurled herself back to her feet, her brain seething with rage. “You son of a bitch!” she howled, tossing Thor’s hammer at him.

  The scion’s eyes widened as he took note of the deadly projectile, and he jumped upward and back, shielding himself from the hammer’s profusion of lightning bolts, though the weapon sought him out despite his efforts to weave away from it.

  Finally he encased it in a sphere of water that shorted out its electrical functions, then froze the water and used a gravity wave to blast it into a side alley.

  By then, Bailey was on top of him. She kicked him in the stomach before he could react to her.

  He grunted loudly and flew back ten feet. She moved in on him with her sword poised, though he recovered quicker than she’d have preferred. He lashed at her with his mace, halting the momentum of her charge. The bludgeon knocked aside her sword, though its blade half-melted the mace, rendering it useless for further attacks.

  He tackled her, forcing her back against a wall and raising his fist to smash her face in. She was faster, ducking under the blow and jabbing him hard in the kidneys, then kicking him in the back of the knee. He stumbled
away, narrowly dodging a swipe of her sword.

  Carl picked up a fallen spear by one of the dead Asgardians and swung it at the girl like a quarterstaff. She fought defensively against his first couple swipes, then realized he was slower and weaker than she. He had not powered himself up as she had. He’d been too busy accompanying Fenris on his errands to betray and murder the gods.

  “You,” he asserted, “have no idea what’s in store for you. There’s a lot more going on than simply fighting me.”

  Bailey caught the spear’s shaft in her left hand and split it in two with her sword. Then she brought the pommel of her weapon hard into his face, cracking his jaw and cheekbone and knocking him over.

  She told him, “Yeah, and you’ve never been dead, so you have no idea what’s in store for you, either.”

  She was about to finish the scion off when she saw a mixture of blue and golden light taking shape behind him. She hesitated.

  Carl stood up, oblivious to the illumination at his back. “What,” he grated, though the damage to his bloodied face made speaking difficult, “you want this to be a fair fight, is that it? You could have killed me.”

  “No,” Bailey retorted, looking at him coldly. “I figured I’d let someone else do the deed.”

  Carl spun at the same instant that Balder’s rapier pierced his lower right side and came out of his upper left chest. He spat blood as he looked the god of beauty in the face.

  Balder’s eyes burned with subtle yet intense anger. “You should not have betrayed us, Carl,” he intoned in his soft, pleasant voice. “I treated you as well and fairly as any valued apprentice. Not so with Fenris, who is not as smart as he likes to think. In truth, he was the one who was fooled. You killed none of us. We live on.”

  With a fast, sharp motion, the deity twisted the blade, then pulled it free while throwing Carl to the ground. The scion’s face showed total shock as he stiffened and lay still.

  Balder frowned, looking at the corpse. “I am the god of innocence,” he observed. “I…perhaps should not have done that, but he shot me with a cursed arrow while hiding. Among other things.”

  Bailey shrugged. “I’d call it fair, then. Come on, though. It will be good for troop morale to see you up and around.”

  Fenris stood before the throne of Odin, supervising the ritual. They’d begun the ceremonial magic that would open the way to the next stage of reality, leaving the old world behind in ruins.

  Six of his half-god trainees had volunteered to be chained up and used as conduits. They writhed on the ground under the stresses of the dark and potent arcane energies being employed.

  “Fear not,” he assured them. “When the ordeal is over, you will share in the power that is made available by the cracking asunder of Asgard.”

  For the moment, though, their role was to function as grounding agents. The forces of darkness the wolf-father was required to channel created surges of excess and harmful magic that could have consumed and killed him. His chained disciples absorbed enough of it to allow Fenris to continue his incantation.

  He raised his arms, speaking words so old that the gods didn’t know from where or when they’d originated. Visions flashed before his eyes, a primordial string of universes being born and then dying. One door closed. Another opened.

  Still the perilous energies swirled and grew in intensity. The throne room was charged with them. The act of diverting the penumbra surges failed to kill his acolytes since they were all part-divine beings, but they would be weak and depleted of magic for quite some time.

  But they ought not be necessary. There were only two things left to do.

  A pair of disciples, the only ones left in the chamber who weren’t acting as conduits, approached Fenris as he reached the ritual’s climax. As per his instructions, they lowered him to his knees, wrapped him in chains near the center of the floor atop the central sigil of the occult pattern he’d drawn earlier and beside the crude sacrificial altar, and put a gag over his mouth.

  Thus, at the moment the buildup of dark energies reached its peak, ready to be released with the final offering, he took on the role of the hapless prisoner.

  His acolytes faded back to stand against the walls and wait. Fenris stared at the chamber’s doorway, which was still open, thanks to Tyr’s intrusion. The trap was ready to be sprung.

  The girl would come, he knew. He’d trained her himself. In a way, he was proud of her.

  Bailey paused around the corner, leaning against the corridor’s wall in the brief lull and examining the handful of allies she’d brought with her into the keep.

  Roland was there, of course. So was Russell, always the most ferocious fighter among her brothers. Agent Park, who was probably the best man with a gun amongst the feds. A squad of eight Asgardian troops allocated by Sigfred, and of all people, Shannon DiGrezza, who still pretended to look annoyed at “having” to be here, but who had thus far proven her desire to make amends.

  “Okay,” Bailey whispered, as the sounds of battle raged outside, “he’s going to be in the throne room. From what Loki said, that’s where the ritual to end the world has to be conducted. It’s down this hall and around another corner. There might be more resistance...”

  Shannon made a sharp “uh” sound in her throat. “Great. Why am I here, anyway?”

  Roland covered his mouth to stifle a bark of laughter. “You alone can answer that question, I believe.”

  “Shut up, Roland,” she snapped.

  Russell glared at her to silence her, and Bailey waved a hand in Roland’s face to encourage him to do likewise. Park smirked but didn’t comment.

  They’d had to separate from the rest of their allies due to an unexpected wrinkle in the plan. After overcoming Fenris’ forces in the palace courtyard, a portal had opened in the sky above a high tower and more monsters had streamed in, firing down at them. Others had charged down to harass the Earthling-Asgardian task force.

  Balder had told Bailey to go on ahead with a small, hand-picked group while he assumed command of the rest and kept the monstrous host busy.

  The werewitch had chosen her team, breached the doors of the keep, and moved in for what she knew would be the last thing they had to do.

  Mere seconds after they moved out with Bailey out in front, a force of about a dozen foes appeared around the corner. “Get them!” the girl barked, trusting Roland to shield her as she summoned waves of fire and ice within the hall’s narrow confines.

  The new opposition consisted of more treacherous demigod-trainees as well as a smattering of hybrid monsters unlike anything Bailey had seen before. One took the form of a bronze-furred wolf and charged them, barking and drooling madly.

  The demigods blocked Bailey’s magical attacks as the wolf advanced. It bowled past her with surprising speed and made for Roland.

  The wizard had been focused on defending against a swirl of plasma spears, and his eyes bulged as the beast pounced at him. Then a fuchsia blast of energy knocked it into the wall.

  Roland sighed in relief. “Thanks,” he told Shannon, who looked away, then he conjured a sword-like protrusion of silver. The wolf-creature pounced at him again, but this time he fell back and skewered it through the throat, killing it and hurling it aside.

  One of the hybrid monsters, a cross between a frost troll and a lizard, bounded ahead and tangled with Russell, but the towering young Were slammed its head into the ceiling and then ripped its guts out.

  Park laid down a barrage of plasma fireballs that blew through the trainees’ arcane shield and melted one of them into a mass of atoms. The others panicked as Bailey sprang into their midst, but it was short-lived since they all died within five seconds.

  One of the half-gods tried to flee into the throne room, its entryway oddly doorless. Bailey threw her sword and it hit him in the back, launching him ahead and pinning him against the far wall, where he hung lifeless.

  Her friends moved up behind her, but as she stepped over the threshold into the chamber, an opaqu
e blackish-purple barrier slammed shut behind her, blocking them off.

  Shit, Bailey thought.

  She had to trust that they’d be okay. Her business lay ahead.

  Fenris knelt in the middle of the floor, chained and gagged, an unexpectedly pitiful sight. Eight humanoid figures in hooded robes hovered around the periphery of the room, but they made no move to speak or act, and Bailey let them be for now. The room pulsed and throbbed with a vague, dim light and a subsonic buzzing that the girl recognized as an incredible well of divine power.

  She crept to the side of the wolf-father, her erstwhile mentor, forgetting that she no longer had her sword, and looked at him.

  What the hell? This has to be a trick, but Loki and Balder never mentioned anything about it.

  “Fenris,” she said, “are you...okay?”

  The wolf-god groaned and raised his head. His dark eyes gleamed faintly within his hood. Bailey reached out and removed the gag from his mouth.

  “Bailey,” he began, “free me from these shackles. The worst of what I feared has come to pass.”

  Grimacing, she broke the chains with her bare hands, and he slowly rose to his feet, moving as though he were weak and exhausted from long imprisonment.

  She asked him, “What happened?”

  He shook his head, the motion slow and regretful. “The other gods have betrayed me, and all of us.” He flexed his hands. “They feel we’ve grown too unruly and are insufficiently grateful to them for their wise leadership.”

  The bitterness was thick in his tone. “They’ve secretly stirred up all this trouble, intending to sacrifice me according to the ancient prophecy of Ragnarök and bring about the end of the world. Their long lives have driven them mad, and they’d rather end it all than deal with the imperfections of their followers. I tried to raise a few who might fight against them, but they cruelly destroyed them with their mercenary army of traitors and monsters.”