The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  They sat in the muddy sand just past the edge of the Pool of Dark Reflections, their least favorite place in the Other. However, Bailey had to admit the black lake had been instrumental in the progress of both of them so far.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she shot back, giving Roland a disapproving glare. “Fenris understands mortals way better than the other gods do, it seems like. He might cut you some slack for saying that shit, knowing how tired and stressed out we both are. But I wouldn’t try it to his face.”

  The wizard flexed his hands. “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing.”

  Bailey tried not to shudder. “Don’t mention dreams right now. We’ve had enough of the bad kind, thanks to this place.”

  Not only had they seen Aida Nassirian, one of Roland’s “admirers” and the right-hand woman of Shannon DiGrezza, dragged into the pool to her death by the realm’s mist-demons, but the mysterious power of the waters had induced highly unpleasant visions in both of them. It seemed to force people to confront their worst fears.

  Fortunately, the task Marcus had set for them didn’t involve succumbing to any more waking nightmares. The opposite, in fact. He’d told them to gently channel magic toward themselves through the pool, then try to resist the onset of the visions.

  It was some kind of defense against psionic attacks, Bailey suspected. The Venatori had tried to overwhelm them previously with waves of terror and despair, so it made sense to know how to protect themselves.

  “Well,” Roland commented, “we probably ought to get back to it. I’ll be the first to confess that this nonsense isn’t easy. Essentially, he’s having us deliberately induce an altered state of consciousness, which makes it harder to cast spells, then use rational magic to push back or something like that. Shit.”

  Bailey shrugged. “It’s for a good reason. The more we know how to do, the harder it will be for the witches to kill us. Or in your case, enslave you and use you as a sperm donor.”

  Roland stretched his legs. “It’s nice to have a woman to talk to about these things. Every time I mention that particular situation to another man, they produce the same old jokes about how much they’d like to be ‘threatened’ with the ‘doom’ I’m trying to get the fuck away from. Doesn’t it occur to them that being reduced to a vending machine would get old pretty fast?”

  The girl shook her head. “Men!”

  They languished without speaking for a bit, neither wanting to provoke the dreaded pool again but having no idea of what else they might do if they rebelled against Marcus’ instructions.

  It had occurred to both of them, though. Bailey was almost ashamed of her feelings, but she couldn’t deny them, either. She was frustrated by the slow, tedious, tortuous path of her training. The seemingly endless strain and repetition, and the lack of clear answers as to why they did what they did.

  Marcus’ method of instruction was like making them fight their way through fog with blindfolds and earplugs in the hope that it would develop their tactile reflexes, not caring what it did to the quality of their hand-eye or ear-eye coordination. Or their planning and strategic skills.

  Just as they were about to get up, something out in the pool began to bubble.

  “What the hell?” Roland pointed at it. “That looks bad. What do you say we get the fuck out of here?”

  Bailey stared. The black liquid, too dark and viscous to be water, was rising fountain-like around a mass—no, a figure—emerging from the depths of the lake.

  The werewitch and the wizard jumped to their feet, spines going cold. They knew they ought to just run, but they were weirdly fascinated. Some part of them wanted to know what was boiling its way out.

  “Shit!” Bailey exclaimed. “The goddamn pool is spawning another vision, and this time we didn’t notice it was happening. We’re not that tired yet, are we? How long have we been in here?”

  Roland swallowed and took a couple of steps back, dragging on the girl’s arm to encourage her to do the same.

  “We’re not that tired,” he answered her, “and this isn’t a vision. It’s real. Something is coming out of the water, and it’s guaranteed not to be anything good.”

  That was just what she was afraid of.

  All at once, the thing stood up. The water out there looked deep, yet what emerged was a humanoid shape that towered far enough above the surface that it only appeared to come up to its knees. It looked like a giant plant or a fungus or a mass of algae the same obsidian color as the water, rotten, dripping, and hideous. It had long wet black hair and limbs composed of vines and tendrils wound tightly around decaying chunks of flesh and bone.

  Roland made a strangled hissing sound. “Oh, my fucking god!”

  The creature was looking at them with wide dark eyes that were somehow familiar. It opened its mouth and out poured a torrent of bile and seaweed-like sludge before it found its voice.

  Though the thing now stood in the open air, the sound that emerged from its pond-scum-lined throat resembled something shouted underwater, combined with a bizarre sibilance that reminded Bailey of the wind rushing through a field of grass.

  “You!” it jeered. “You did this. You two did this to me! It’s all your fault. Look at me! Look at me!”

  Bailey snapped her eyes toward Roland, trying to gauge his reaction. He had shut his eyelids and was quaking in place like a kid having a nightmare.

  “Roland,” she urged, shaking him by the shoulder. “Is it…”

  “Yes,” he stated, his voice low and ragged. “It’s fucking Aida.”

  Staring at the abomination, Bailey was forced to accept the truth. The young woman who’d been dragged into the accursed lake not long ago hadn’t died but had somehow mutated into one of the Other’s myriad demons.

  Horribly, her tall and ample-bosomed figure and well-chiseled facial features were still vaguely recognizable, despite how much of her body had been consumed or replaced by alien plant life. Enough of her former beauty remained for them to be nauseated by how badly it had been ruined.

  “I,” the Aida-thing went on with a sloshy groan, “am now part of this place. I thought I died, but I didn’t. I stayed alive, even as I was turned into fertilizer for the things that grow at the bottom of this lake. Now I belong to it, and the Other belongs to me. I am a manifestation of the cursed bog, the endless swamps here that hunger for mortal flesh and blood and souls. And I can’t think of anyone who deserves that fate more than you. Come, join me!”

  Bailey blinked, suddenly spurred to action. “Hell, no. Roland, let’s ditch her.”

  “Good idea,” he agreed. They turned and sprinted up the slope, fighting the steep terrain and the pull of gravity to get out of sight of the awful pond.

  Aida’s voice gurgled after them. “No! Come back! You will fucking pay! I can’t even die! I’m in hell!”

  In front of them, the weeds and mosses and roots rose up like a mass of charmed snakes emerging from an Indian fakir’s basket, slithering over to block their path, then moving in for the kill.

  Bailey raised a hand and sucked the heat out of the mass of plant matter, paralyzing it with cold and causing some of the vines to break off. Then she spun, the heat she’d stolen forming a fireball in front of her hand, and threw it straight at Aida.

  “You tried to kill me with one of these,” Bailey reminded her. “Now we’ll see about the whole ‘not dying’ thing.”

  The mass of flames struck the swamp creature square in the chest. Half the fire was extinguished at once by the dampness of Aida’s body and the residual bubbling vapors of the lake, but the other half seemed to engulf her. She screamed, but only for a couple of seconds. Then the blaze winked out, and only steam rose where it had burned.

  Bailey stared. “Fucking hell!”

  Part of Aida’s new body had been destroyed by the blast, but almost sentient black water was rising to cover the damage. The botanical tendrils and blobs of pond moss were regenerating at an unnaturally fast rate.

  “So,” Roland observe
d, his face skewed with that half-crazed look he got when he could barely believe what he was seeing, “she’s a kudzu plant now, basically. Let’s try some weed-killer.”

  He swept his arms toward the mutated witch and a cloud of toxic vapor condensed into a sheet of yellowish rain that poured down on their foe, raising puffs of smoke where it struck.

  “So, yeah, Aida,” Roland called. “I know a thing or two about the chemical composition of herbicides. Unlike other people, I paid attention in science class instead of texting my friends about whose makeup looked like shit that day.”

  Aida shrieked, the noise unnervingly inhuman, and she half-melted, half-withered, sinking partway back into the boggy pool. Again the black liquid came to her rescue, neutralizing the attack and re-growing her ravaged body.

  Then, her still-mostly-human eyes flashing with hate, Aida struck back.

  Vines sprouted from the earth around Bailey’s and Roland’s ankles, lashing them into place, while a foaming column of black liquid rose from the lake and splashed uphill toward them.

  “Dammit,” Bailey growled, weakening the vines with a wave of heat and then tearing them apart. Roland did likewise, and the two of them dove in opposite directions to avoid the crashing wave of enchanted liquid.

  It reached for them with dark dripping tentacles, then flowed back downhill, compelled somehow to return to the pool. Aida gave a strangled cry of frustrated rage.

  Roland caught Bailey’s eye. “This isn’t working. We need to get her away from the pool so she can’t regenerate.”

  “Yeah,” the girl replied, “or kill her outright by using more firepower.”

  They scrambled the rest of the way up the slope and climbed over the ridge onto the hillock.

  “Or both,” Roland suggested. “That way, we can kill her, make sure she doesn’t regenerate, and keep blasting the ashes until they’re reduced to subatomic particles.”

  Behind them, they could hear the sloshing sound of something moving through the pond in the direction they’d fled.

  “Yeah,” quipped Bailey, “let’s go with Option Number Three.”

  The pair scrambled over the weedy expanse of the hilltop, reasoning that if nothing else, they could probably outdistance their adversary with ease. The wet, shuffling noises were moving no faster than a brisk trot. Aida had probably lost the ability to run.

  “No!” her distorted voice screamed again. “You won’t get away! You deserve this!”

  Roland tripped. “Shit!” he gasped, pitching forward, his arms flailing before they extended to brace himself and save his face from crashing into the ground.

  Bailey saw with mounting revulsion that grasping weeds had encircled the wizard’s feet and ankles and shins. She jumped into the air, but her left foot, lower than the right, succumbed to the grip of a similar mass of vines. She stumbled and half-rolled on her side in the writhing foliage.

  Regaining her bearings as the sentient plants flowed up her legs, she saw that Roland was using careful blasts of intense cold to destroy the tentacle-like weeds and free himself. She quickly fashioned a crude, glowing blade of arcane plasma and used it to slash the tendrils holding her.

  The two sprang to their feet at the same time and bolted.

  Ahead of them, a black tree bent over, its branches reaching toward their faces.

  Roland had paused to look behind them, and Bailey left him to the task while she summoned lightning to strike the suddenly-hostile tree. Thunder split the air and the dark wood fell asunder, halfway reduced to charcoal.

  The wizard groaned. “I don’t think we can outrun her. She has too much control over the landscape. At least we got her away from the pond.”

  The werewitch turned back. “Fight it out, then.”

  As a wet, mossy head crested the ridge, arm-thick vines and roots sprang from the earth around them, rapidly forming a net, then a dome closing in on them from all directions. Huge spines like lances grew inward, aiming toward their flesh.

  “So,” Bailey asked, “fire or ice? I’m fine with either.”

  Roland contemplated the question for a second or two before answering, “Fire. It kills things, guaranteed, whereas some creatures are merely sent into suspended animation or hibernation by being frozen.”

  Bailey shrugged. “Okay.”

  In unison, they turned and stood back to back, facing toward the encroaching dome of deadly plants. They extended their arms, channeled or generated heat, and unleashed hell.

  Wide swathes of the vines burst into flames. Bailey focused on generating more heat, causing the fire to change color from yellow to green to blue and reducing most of the thorn wall in front of her to a pile of bleached white ash.

  Roland, meanwhile, strategically hurled exploding fireballs at the parts of the lattice that directly threatened him, blasting the giant spikes before detonating the wall’s foundation. It tottered, and he gave it a telekinetic push so that it fell over and away from him, burnt to cinders.

  With the constricting dome obliterated, Aida was revealed to be about two hundred feet away, still shambling slowly toward them. Writhing vines and shuddering waves of moss expanded from her, and she leaked black fluid onto the ground.

  Bailey still had control of her wall of fire. She moved it around, finishing off the last of the thorny lattice, then pushed it toward the swamp witch, raising the flames higher to block the deadly spores that now shot at them from the mouths of carnivorous plants. Aida had animated more hybrid creatures from the hill, but she was clearly faltering.

  Roland willed a bolt of lightning to fall upon the witch from the sky, paralyzing her and kicking up a great cloud of steam. Then, as Bailey lowered her mass of fire and kept it advancing toward their foe, the wizard tossed a few more exploding fireballs her way.

  Aida screamed as she was engulfed in a blaze of heat and smoke and plasma. The few plants she still had control of wilted, even the ones outside the reach of the flames. Her bodily form was breaking down; she was dying.

  “Damn you!” her inhuman voice wailed. “I’ll be back. The bog will remember!”

  The wizard extended both hands in front of him like a character in a fighting game. “Remember this,” he said. A raging, almost nuclear fireball, blue-white with intense heat, appeared between his palms, and he cast it at what remained of the witch’s chest.

  The blast sent a tremor through the ground and gave off so much heat that Bailey and Roland staggered back from it, shielding their faces. When the worst was over, they saw only a pitiful heap of ashes in the center of a blackened circle of ground.

  Bailey glanced at the wizard while both caught their breath. He looked as tired as she felt.

  “Wanna take a break?” she suggested.

  * * *

  Time had again passed, but not too much. There was still no sign of Marcus, and Roland was having none of it.

  “Fuck this shit,” he snapped all of a sudden and stood up from the cozy position they’d settled into. “I am completely sick by this goddamn point of waiting for a god to come rescue me from this place. I’m a good wizard. No, a fantastic wizard. I’m opening a portal, and we’re going home.”

  Bailey blinked, then smiled. “Yeah, I’ll second that. This is getting old. I could use some damn dinner, even if our stomachs don’t work the same way here.”

  She hoisted herself to her feet. “And if anyone can figure out how to get back through the veil between worlds or whatever it is, it’s you.”

  He beamed with pride. “But of course. I’ve been watching how our divine friend does it and taking mental notes. He showed me a thing or two as well. I was able to widen that portal the Venatori were using during the battle on the hillside. Granted, opening the doorway seems to be the hard part. Different mindset and skillset from what I’m used to with tricks or combat.”

  “Tell me,” Bailey asked. “I’m curious.”

  He explained, acknowledging her pointers and questions as he went, that it seemed to be a matter of feeling the ar
cane makeup of the realm in which they found themselves, then visualizing their destination before finally parting the fabric of reality at that very point. It made sense to her in a general way, although she knew it would prove easier said than done.

  Roland inhaled and flexed his hands. “Okay, then. Let’s see how this goes.”

  For several minutes he meditated, concentrated, and hummed faintly under his breath. Then he extended his hands slowly and deliberately before clapping them together and parting them to each side.

  The air tore open, disclosing a shimmering mass of purplish liquid. The portal was thin and faint, more of a weak gash between worlds than a proper gateway.

  The wizard’s brow furrowed, and a bead of sweat rolled down his cheek as he tried to seize the door and force it open wider. For a second, it seemed he’d succeeded—the purple mass broadened near its middle. But then the top and bottom sections collapsed in on themselves, and the whole thing folded inward and faded.

  “Shit!” Roland exclaimed. “I lost it. It requires you to focus on multiple things at once in a way I’m not used to. I got close enough, though, that I can probably do it in a couple more tries.”

  Bailey scratched her chin. “I’ll try. Wouldn’t hurt to have two people on the job, after all.”

  The wizard shrugged. “Sure, why not? Go for it.”

  The werewitch drew a breath, closed her eyes, and did what Roland had described: feeling the nature of the Other and pulling up images of the point in Greenhearth she wanted to return to. She visualized the patch of forest near Marcus’ hut in the foothills just outside town.

  She reached out and tore through.

  A portal appeared, larger than Roland’s but jagged and unstable. The purple liquid surface resembled a lake during a windstorm. For a moment, she almost lost control of it, but then, remembering all she’d learned, she stabilized the edges and flattened the surface. The result was less a neat doorway than the mouth of a cave or tunnel, but it held.

  Roland coughed. “Well, then.”

  Bailey could hardly believe it. She grinned, then she turned to the wizard, gently elbowing him in the ribs.