Bad Attitude (WereWitch Book 1)

by Renée Jaggér

  The amount of wind-up and force Roland had put into the punch, though, left him wide open, and one of Redhead’s wild, grasping strikes took him behind the ear.

  “Ow, fuck!” the wizard exclaimed, instinctively jumping forward a few steps before spinning to face his opponent.

  By now, the man had mostly gotten his vision back, and he was prepared for a follow-up blow. But as he stepped forward, his foot sank into a hole in the ground that hadn’t been there before.

  “Whuh?” he drawled as he wobbled, his momentum ruined.

  Roland was already on top of him, kneeing him in the gut and hitting him in the side of the face with the flat of his forearm. He went down, yelping as his ankle twisted in the hole, and when he landed, he used one hand to cradle his foot and the other to cover his face in an unconscious gesture for mercy.

  The wizard left him be for the moment and checked on Bailey.

  The girl had returned to Gangly. He was about to spring back up at her, but she drove her foot hard into his ass, bruising the hell out of his gluteal muscles and knocking him back to the ground.

  Dan Oberlin was back on his feet, however.

  “That’s it!” he roared. “It doesn’t matter what you do, I’m gonna beat the shit out of you!” Foamy spittle flew from his lips.

  Before Roland could intervene, Bailey tackled him again, clawing at his face. Her nails put red lines down his cheek as the back of his hand connected with her face, hitting her almost exactly where the good old boy in the bar had sucker-punched her earlier. They both ignored the blows, so deep were they in battle-fury.

  Then Dan swung a powerful fist toward Bailey’s forehead, but she was quicker, ducking under it and smashing her fist into his groin. He pivoted, randomly punching and kicking as she ducked for cover. Then it hit him.

  “Ohhhh, fffuuck,” he groaned, his eyes bulging as the adrenaline melted away and the pain caught up with him. Clutching himself between the legs, he collapsed to his knees.

  “There,” Bailey panted, rubbing away the blood he’d drawn from her cheek. “Just like I said. Now you definitely don’t have the balls to mate with me.”

  With that, the scrap was over and done. Oberlin’s henchmen were already stumbling away, not even looking at their adversaries. They made a beeline for the brown Chevy Blazer they’d come in, which was parked in front of the farmhouse.

  Only Chins took the time to hook his arms under Dan’s armpits, dragging his leader until the other man could properly stand—which might be awhile.

  Soon, they were gone. Bailey and Roland watched them leave. For three or four minutes they both stood there, only a foot or so apart, leaning together on the old barn’s wall and catching their breath. They’d won, and that was always a good feeling.

  But they were both tired, and they’d both taken some good hits. They knew that kicking the South Cliffs’ asses this time would not be the end.

  “Shit,” Bailey wheezed, “that was probably the best fight I’ve had in…I dunno, two months, at least.”

  “Wow!” Roland exclaimed, wiping the sweat from his brow and flicking it into the dirt. “Two whole months? I don’t think I’ve ever been in a clusterfuck like that before. I’ve had a few fights, yeah, but that was a brawl. Goddamn.”

  Bailey looked at him over her shoulder. “Well, for supposedly not having much experience, you handled yourself well. Hell, I think I got it worse than you did, and I do this crap all the time. Who taught you to fight with a belt like that? That was some real kung-fu shit.”

  He smiled in his calm, subtly confident way as his lungs returned to normal functionality. “Oh, that was nothing, really. I might have used a few minor tricks to, uh, tip the scales in my favor. That reminds me, those guys are really clumsy. They need to watch where they’re stepping and keep an eye on their balance. Everyone says footwork is one of the most important things in a fight.”

  Bailey shook her head slowly, wondering if what Roland had just said was an admission of using magic. She couldn’t be sure. She’d been kind of busy with her own half of the fight, after all, but from what she’d seen, there were things that didn’t quite add up.

  And she was almost certain that a couple of the nearby patches of ground had been higher or lower or flatter than they were at the moment.

  “Whatever,” she said. “The important thing is, Dan ain’t getting his precious piece of ass, at least not from me. But therein lies the problem.”

  Roland narrowed his eyes in concern. “You think he’ll try again? With ten or fifteen guys instead of five? And possibly toting a couple of shotguns?”

  “Maybe,” she replied darkly, her voice lower and harder. “I don’t think he’d go so far as to try to kill us or risk accidentally killing us trying to make me do the deed at gunpoint. My family is well-known and well-respected around here, and you can’t get away with that level of serious shit in a little town like this. Everyone would know exactly what happened and who’s responsible.”

  The wizard rubbed his chin as he considered her words. “I think you’re right, but feuds like this don’t end just because one side triumphs in a single fight. What do you think they will do?”

  Bailey stood up and cast her eyes toward the wooded horizon, looking southwest toward Greenhearth proper. “Whatever they can,” she surmised. “They might just keep trying the same shit, ambushing us and trying to beat us up until I get tired of it and give in. That’ll never happen, though.”

  Roland let out a sardonic chuckle. He was getting to know her quite well.

  “Or,” Bailey continued, “they’ll try to make our lives a living hell through other means. Nobody with any sense likes the South Cliffs, but they’ve still got friends—alliances with other packs from nearby places in the mountains, things like that—and Oberlin Senior has money and connections.”

  “Right.” The wizard rubbed his side where he’d been kicked. “And since there were no witnesses, they might be able to get away with slandering us and spreading rumors. I don’t know if anyone would believe that six men, known to be asshole troublemakers, were the innocent victims of one girl and one guy, but you never know. Besides, the sheriff doesn’t want me here, so it’ll look bad if word gets out that I was involved in an…altercation.”

  Bailey clenched her teeth, and for a brief moment, she was almost as angry at the South Cliff pack now as she’d been just before the brawl had started. The whole community refused to leave her alone, and Dan Oberlin was the spearpoint of the whole damn thing: Operation Get Bailey Nordin to Open Her Legs.

  Now Roland, who didn’t have anything to do with it originally, might get in trouble, in addition to all the ways the Oberlins could make things even worse.

  “Fuck,” she growled. “I can’t even call the sheriff or my brothers, because then the shit would really hit the fan. The sheriff wouldn’t believe we didn’t start it somehow, and my brothers would kill Dan. We can’t keep this up, Roland. We can’t just sit around and wait for Dan and the other pricks to try whatever they have in mind next. Whether it’s more brute force shit, or whether they decide to act like a bunch of high school girls and just spread gossip, it’s going to screw us over one way or another, and sooner rather than later.”

  “I agree.” His tone was dismal but not despairing. There was still energy and determination in him. She liked that. “Whatever they do, it will make a lot of noise, as well. And my three not-so-lovely ladies are still hovering around, so I’m almost positive they’ll hear that noise and move in for the kill.”

  Neither of them spoke for a minute, and for the last few seconds, they turned and looked into each other’s eyes.

  Bailey broke the silence. “We need to get the hell out and fast,” she concluded. “Out of this entire valley and away from anyone who knows me, just like you wanted to get away from anyone you knew in Seattle.”

  The wizard smirked in a darkly humorous way. “You’re full of good ideas today, I have to admit. Any notion about where we should go?” />
  “Hell,” she responded, suddenly feeling stupid, “I’ve never been outside this stretch of the mountains. You’d know better than I would where we oughta go. At least you’ve been between Seattle and here. That’s a lot more of the world than I’ve seen.”

  Nodding, his eyes grew distant, and he thought for a few seconds. “Portland,” he said finally. “Come on, let’s go to your truck. I can direct you there. Just make sure your brothers take good care of my car in the meantime.”

  They both started walking, quick and purposeful, at the same time.

  “My brothers,” Bailey retorted, “taught me everything I know about vehicular maintenance. Well, Jacob did, mostly. And Gunney taught me some, too. Whatever. Point being, your car’s in the best hands in Greenhearth. It’ll be fine unless Dan Oberlin is even dumber than I thought and tries to blow up our pole barn with a big-ass jug of flaming moonshine or something. Good thing it’s not in town anymore.”

  Roland snickered. “That would be something to see. Almost worth the loss of the car just for the novelty factor.”

  Bailey sighed. “Yeah, yeah. Not sure we’d agree about losing the barn.”

  They reached the Tundra, noting gratefully that the South Cliffs had been too eager for direct confrontation (and too eager to escape, a few minutes later) to bother sabotaging the truck. They leaped into their respective sides.

  Bailey had the keys in the ignition almost before Roland could even pull down his seat belt. “Think we better hurry,” she suggested. “The South Cliffs won’t be back anytime today, but the cops are another story, not to mention your suitors. Word will get out fast.”

  Roland fastened his belt and glanced at her. “No long scenic route, then?”

  “Nope,” Bailey almost snapped. “Just gunning it out of Dodge as fast as, uh, reasonably possible.”

  Roland grinned. “That sounds pretty fast.”

  The girl shifted into drive, wheeled the truck around in a nearly complete circle, and shot mud out from under the tires as she barreled straight down the dirt road that would lead them back the way they’d originally come, through the forest.

  She almost felt guilty, leaving the barn wide open with its doors wrecked, but under the circumstances, there wasn’t much else they could do. They didn’t have time.

  As the truck bumped and rocked its way along the tortuous dirt road, Bailey reflected on their hasty decision and decided it was a pretty good one after all.

  “Portland might be ideal,” she opined. “It’s the biggest city I know anything about. I hear things; we get a fair number of people from there passing through on their way to more interesting places, and some of them stop over for a bit. Also, it’s far enough away to put some distance between us and the numerous assholes who seem to have collected in Greenhearth.”

  “Right,” said Roland. “And it’s not too far from home, for you anyway, in case we need to rush back. Obviously it will have more amenities than an abandoned farm—no offense intended—so we can lie low while things cool off with your wannabe boyfriend. Meanwhile, if we’re lucky, we’ll confuse my wannabe girlfriends. They’ll probably expect me to keep heading east or south. Portland is doubling back, a classic evasive maneuver.”

  Bailey smiled, but then she squinted, thinking things over in more detail. “How big is Portland, anyway? I mean, it’s smaller than Seattle, right? Yeah, I know, all this shit’s on the Internet, but I never bothered to look it up. Didn’t have a reason to.”

  Roland braced himself against the dashboard as they hit a nasty rut while going around a curve. “Portland’s smaller than Seattle, but still pretty big. Large enough for us to get lost in. In a good way, I mean; like, to lose our pursuers. They’d have to look hard.”

  “Okay,” Bailey acceded, “good. Could you, like, give me a frame of reference? Again, I’ve never driven around an actual city.”

  He nodded. “What I said earlier about the sprawl between Seattle and Tacoma and so forth pretty much applies to the Portland area too. As I understand it, that’s every major city in America, really. Anyway, how many people are in Greenhearth?”

  “Uh,” she answered him, “depends on how you define ‘Greenhearth’ since the town proper has about seven hundred people, I think, but it goes up to around a thousand when you include all the rustics who live outside the town limits but are still, y’know, part of the community. The post office serves all of them, after all.”

  Roland nodded. “Right. Population of seven hundred, urban, and about a thousand in the metro area. If memory serves me correctly,” he took a deep breath, “Portland has at least six hundred and fifty thousand people in the city proper, and when you figure in the greater metropolitan area, it rises to about, uh, two and a half million.”

  Bailey knew there were places where millions of people lived shoulder-to-shoulder with one another, but until now, such facts had been mere abstractions.

  “So,” he continued, “that would mean Greater Portland is approximately two thousand, five hundred times larger than Greater Greenhearth. Does that put it in perspective?”

  Bailey stared straight ahead, silently, at the road as they came off the winding woods path and back onto the road that led downhill toward town.

  She cleared her throat. “Well, shit.”

  The only other “customer” in the sheriff’s office was some drunken derelict who’d wandered into town from one of the other, nearby communities. He slumped in a chair out front, barely conscious, the cops not even having bothered to restrain him while they processed his paperwork.

  The woman ignored him, trying not to look at his shabby clothes or breathe the foul-smelling air near his body any more than she had to.

  Meanwhile, the fat sheriff and his stupid-looking deputy were trying their best to ignore her, as well as her friends. Since they had not been helpful, that was fine with her.

  She looked down into her hand, and her eyes suddenly bulged in surprise. Then she flipped her unnaturally red hair away from her face to see better. Her head snapped up, drawing the attention of the other two girls.

  “Let’s go,” she said sharply. They hustled to her side and the three strode out the front door, not bothering to speak to the cops.

  Sheriff Browne turned his head and watched them go. “You ladies get back to Seattle nice and safe now,” he called after them.

  None of the three paid his comment the slightest heed.

  Once they’d gotten off the dirt road that led to the farm and brushed the edge of civilization again, Bailey and Roland changed their plans. Rather than drive through the middle of town, they took a minor detour through the residential side streets around Greenhearth’s northwest corner.

  Roland repositioned himself in the seat. “At least it’s a smoother ride now,” he commented. “And it’s not like the town is big enough that going around its perimeter is a major delay. Hell, even I can tell we’re almost to the highway, and I’ve never been here before.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bailey riposted. “Stuff it. You and your ‘metropolitan areas’ that take two hours to drive across. If we were going the other direction, we’d probably make it to Idaho in the same amount of time.”

  They were now on a road that led straight south at the very edge of town, a cliff topped with pine trees to their right and a slope leading into Bailey’s neighborhood to their left. There were only a couple of houses on the street, and in another quarter mile or so, they’d intersect the highway.

  Greenhearth would be safely behind them in minutes.

  “Hmm,” Roland quipped, “not sure about that. The part of Oregon where nobody lives looks pretty big to me, on a map at least. I guess it depends on how many awful mountain roads we’d have to— Oh, crap!”

  Bailey instantly saw what had interrupted him—a car had pulled out in front of them across the road, seemingly from nowhere off to the left, and she slammed on the brakes while spinning the wheel to the right.

  “What the hell? Fucking drunks!” she curse
d as the truck bumbled into the gravel and mud of the shoulder, just under the cliff.

  The vehicle that had cut them off stayed where it was—parked perpendicularly across the road, almost completely blocking it. In the brief excitement, Bailey hadn’t registered the make, but now she could see that it was a silver Jaguar.

  Roland wiped a hand over his face. “Let me handle this,” he murmured. With the air of an arachnophobic dad preparing to kill a spider for his daughter, he unbuckled himself and stepped out.

  “Like hell,” Bailey muttered and got out as well.

  Chapter Eight

  Three women piled out of the car and formed a rank in front of it. The afternoon’s light was waning and half the clouds had returned, but Bailey could make them out clearly nonetheless—in part because they stood out like a sore thumb against a bleached white background.

  The one in the middle, whom Bailey immediately pegged as the leader, was about the same height she was, thin bordering on downright skinny, and slightly orangish-looking, with hair that draped over most of the right side of her face dyed a strange purplish-red color. She had her hands on her hips, and long nails the same hue as her hair stood out against her short silver dress.

  To her right was a darker-complected woman with black hair in a high ponytail. She was about an inch taller, with large breasts and full lips. She wore a tight black top and knee-length black skirt with heels and had a tiny black crossbody handbag.

  To the left was a shorter, curvy blonde with a pixie cut and heavy blue eyeshadow. She was wearing a white sports bra under a sapphire-colored windbreaker jacket, along with equally blue yoga pants and blindingly white sneakers.

  Bailey guessed the blonde was about twenty-three and the other two more like twenty-seven or -eight, although it was difficult to be certain since they were all wearing a ton of makeup. And perfume. They looked like high-roller party girls on their way to a nightclub, about as congruous with the people of Greenhearth as an elephant in Alaska.