by Renée Jaggér
“Fair enough,” said Dante, suppressing his goofy smile.
Roland leaned back in his seat and his eyes went distant. “You know—and maybe you’ve heard about this—not long ago, I had three witches after me because they wanted to use me as a breeding stud. Don’t ask me their names since I’d rather not divulge that information. Suffice to say that they were all hot as fuck.”
The younger wizard stared at him. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.” Roland sighed. “Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it? But you’d be amazed how quickly a woman’s attractiveness stops mattering much when she’s off her rocker and thinks you should be her goddamn slave. Three of them makes it that much worse. And it’s not as though they gave a shit about me. They just wanted to climb the social ladder by having my children, since I was supposed to be this great magical prodigy and blah blah blah.”
His head drooped toward his chest with the bitter memories.
“Oh, gosh,” Dante shot back, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “Three hot girlfriends at once. Not that.”
Roland waved a hand. “Clearly you weren’t paying any attention to what I said. Get yourself a sufficiently crazy girlfriend, and you’ll find out. Not crazy as in ‘different and interesting’—that’s more like Bailey—but crazy as in ‘should be institutionalized for the good of civilization.’ Ugh, I don’t want to talk about them.”
“Well,” Dante pointed out, “you’re the one who raised the subject, but okay. Anyhow, I’m thinking we need to start by putting out a few anonymous messages on the boards, hiding our IP addresses as well as our magical signatures, to get a feel for who might be interested in helping us.”
Before the black-clad wizard could go into more detail, a man in a suit and dark glasses strode into the bar. Roland recognized him immediately; it was the Agent who’d visited them at Gunney’s shop and informed them of Townsend’s situation.
Velasquez stood to the side of Dante. Looking down at the boy, his face was grim and humorless even by the standards of federal operatives.
“Please vacate the premises until I’m done talking to this individual,” he stated.
Dante, despite his shy demeanor, flashed angry eyes at the intruder. The booze must have emboldened him. “The fuck? Who are you?”
Roland was about to suggest that Dante obey the man’s reasonable suggestion when Velasquez produced as if by magic a tiny chrome pistol whose faintly glowing barrel was aimed straight at the wizard’s face.
“This place,” Velasquez mused, waving a hand around him. “Nice decor. Such high-quality windows. They look like they’ve just been washed. It would be a shame to splatter liquefied organic matter all over them. It would be difficult to clean off. You know what I mean?”
Roland nodded to his new friend. Dante swallowed, stood up, and trudged outside for the time being.
Velasquez sat down in his place. He waved the bartender away, and for her part, she seemed to recognize who he was—or who he worked for—and gave them a wide berth.
“Bad news,” the agent intoned, getting straight to the point as his predecessor used to do. “Bailey’s in danger. The Venatori are concentrating a huge force in the Northwest, and they’re going to come after her personally while launching simultaneous strikes against vulnerable packs of Weres so she can’t group everyone together and will come out with fewer living allies if she survives. We need to apprise her of the situation immediately.”
Roland’s nostrils flared. “Well, obviously.”
* * *
Bailey’s breath caught in her throat, partially in fear, but also in excitement. “There they are,” she whispered.
Will and the other twenty wolves with her acknowledged her with slight nods. Most of them had already seen the witches, and the ones who hadn’t were quickly brought up to speed. Crouching amidst the grass, bushes, and trees of their sacred ground, the lycanthropes were quieter and better-camouflaged than their intrusive opponents.
Of the approximately two dozen Venatori who’d penetrated into the Other, half were moving toward Bailey’s forces. The other half were circling around the perimeter of the holy forest. The twelve they saw currently were further divided into two subgroups of six. Each half-dozen marched in a loose yet disciplined formation, and the two groups were only about a hundred feet apart.
Still, Bailey thought, they should have kept their people together. One hundred feet is enough for us to get a wedge in and then divide and conquer their asses like we did to those legendary alpha spirits in the temple. We’ll just have to hope they don’t catch on and their friends don’t suddenly show up.
The ruse was working, though. Having initially drawn her aura-clones back to her after catching the sorceresses’ attention, Bailey had dispatched them to move through the Other, their strong magical signature easily trackable by the eager invaders. The Venatori were clearly following the duplicates while ignoring the magical auras of Bailey and those of her alphas. In their lust to kill their main target, they apparently hadn’t considered that the Weres might have duped them.
Granted, it helped that Bailey and Fenris had collaborated on a spell to muffle the arcane signature of her and her people. In the Other, everything was subtly charged with magic anyway. Thus, after the spell was cast, the members of the wolf pack were barely distinguishable from the supernaturally augmented trees and rocks.
The witches were almost upon them.
Concentrating hard, employing all the tricks she’d learned to break through the Other’s magic-inhibiting barriers, Bailey sent out a psionic message to her troops: Now.
Rather than all attack at once, the only thing that happened was that two wolves burst out of the foliage and ran across a small glade slightly ahead of and to the right of where the Venatori were walking.
The half-dozen who were closer to the galloping Weres shouted something in French and moved off in pursuit of their quarry. The other group hesitated.
And the rest of the wolves pounced.
The Venatori had allowed themselves to be divided by enough space for their attackers to cut them off from one another. Ten lycanthropes tackled each cluster of six, while Bailey sprang up and summoned thick, blinding-hot bolts of lightning to descend toward both groups. Half of them panicked and tried to run out of the way of both the lightning and the advancing Weres, and the rest were caught in the hopeless struggle of defending against magic versus defending against claw and fang.
Hairy forms piled into witches, and bodies rolled and tumbled. Snarls, screams, howls, and curses filled the air of the forest, which had been placid less than a minute before.
Bailey started with the half-dozen closer to her position. Her Weres had killed two of them, and only one had the elbow room to mount a magical counteroffensive. She flung out her hands to attack.
The werewitch struck her with a combination of shield and concussive energy at the very moment she cast her spell. The woman was knocked back while a storm of plasma blades got stuck in the arcane field, which Bailey forced back onto her, both crushing her to the ground and burning and stabbing her with her own fumbled spell.
As the witch died, her companions toppled under the wolves’ onslaught. Some of the Weres were already bounding toward the other group of six, which was trying in vain to flee deeper into the woods.
Cruel exultation that frightened her rose in Bailey’s chest. The witches were pushing deeper into her people’s sacred land, and the wolves were on the verge of overtaking them. She ran after them to make sure she didn’t lose any of her troops.
And ideally, to make sure the Venatori lost all of theirs.
She reached the edge of the new melee in time to mitigate the magical blasts the sorceresses sent toward her men. Two wolves went down yelping, dazed and injured but not yet dead. The others closed in from all directions, covered in part by the whirlwind of fire and ice Bailey conjured to disorient the witches and keep them pinned and on the defensive.
Soon enough, twelve motionless b
odies lay strewn throughout the forest. The wounded on her side would live.
Bailey sent out another psionic call and drew the Weres back to her.
“We’ve cut their numbers in half,” she announced as they assembled. Most were still in beast form, but a couple had shifted back. The two who’d taken blows were recovering off to the side, hidden amidst tall grass and wide trees. “Now there’s only the other dozen to contend with. We’ve got two men down, but we can do it. Those of you who were with me in the temple, it’ll be the same as when we took on the alpha spirits and the werebears. And I’ll cover you with magic. Let’s go!”
High on the adrenaline rush of victory and enthusiasm, the nineteen lycanthropes who could still fight assumed the form most natural to the woods and ran on all fours toward their adversaries. Bailey shifted too, assuming the new, smaller form she’d mastered to give herself more maneuverability.
Using magic in wolf form was a tad harder, but not much. When they caught the initial sights, sounds, and scents that led them toward the other twelve of the Venatori task force, Bailey had trouble imagining they’d fail. The ghosts of their honored dead were watching over them here, and the holy forest would be the grave of those who’d violated it by their intrusion.
The first group of the remaining witches appeared on a ridge up ahead, their forms silhouetted against a curtain of leaves that glowed silver under the shining moon.
The wolves howled as one and attacked.
Chapter Seven
Roland didn’t have a lot of confidence in his cell phone being able to reach Bailey under the current circumstances, but it was worth a shot.
“Come on,” he breathed, speed-dialing her and waiting for the ringtone to resolve itself. Or not.
He stood in an alley not far from the bar and grill where he and Dante had been eating and drinking. The other wizard was lounging a couple of yards away, and so was Agent Velasquez. Shadows and garbage cans hid them from the main street.
The ringtone died before it had even started, followed by the automated message. “We’re sorry, but the person you have dialed is not answering. Please—”
Cursing and gritting his teeth, he pressed End. “Not like I expected that would work.” He waved a hand toward his companions. “Hold on, and I’ll see if I can get hold of her the esoteric way.”
He relaxed and let his eyes drift out of focus, his mind expanding, consciousness rising and flying from him, expanding over the whole city and then seeking a path out of the world altogether. If indeed she was still in the Other, he should be able to track her magical signature within it and then mind-meld with her. It might not be possible to do so thoroughly enough to exchange coherent messages, but if nothing else, she’d realize he was trying to speak to her.
If it worked.
He recalled the techniques he’d used to open portals into the alternate dimension and modified them on the fly to admit astrally-projected consciousness rather than physical bodies. Part of his mind felt the familiar cold, dizzy sensation, followed by the damp and gloomy chill of the arcane realm.
Mere steps away from him, Velasquez looked at Dante. “You know what he’s doing? Is this shit legitimately going to work, or are we wasting precious minutes?”
The kid shrugged. “I think he’s trying to contact her via a psychic link. He’s a more powerful wizard than I am, so I haven’t been able to attempt anything like that before.”
Velasquez grunted. There was only so much time to spare on failed attempts. They needed a foolproof method.
Roland’s consciousness expanded throughout the Other, seeking familiar things. He detected the location of the dreaded Pool of Dark Reflections, as well as the sacred temple of the Weres within their enchanted forest. For an instant, he thought he found Bailey, but something was wrong.
Pulses of magical personality were running and ricocheting around, and nearly all of them seemed to be her.
His physical lips, back on Earth, mouthed the word, “How?”
He could not identify differences among or between them. It was as though she’d cloned herself, or multiple beings were disguised as her. And there were other things in the wolves’ forest too, getting in the way. Shifting tides of magic and fury, expulsions of power, currents of emotion and thought. The entire area was becoming a chaotic mishmash of forces.
“No, dammit,” he gasped and felt his grip on the Other slipping away from him. Fast enough to give him vertigo, his astral mind fell out of the arcane realm and rocketed back into his body. He experienced its return much like the sensation of crashing into the ground after a fall—shocking and painful.
Dante advanced toward him. “Shit. Are you okay, man?”
“Uh,” he moaned, “yeah, just a sec. I’m fine. Or,” he shook his head and fought down a wave of nausea, “I will be fine in a minute.” He sucked in air and steadied himself.
Velasquez stepped up. “We don’t have time to spare. If you can’t contact her by magic, then you need to take us there in person. You can do that, can’t you? We have to warn her, no matter what.”
Roland blinked and dismissed the last of the disorientation. “I can, but we could end up in the wrong place. The Other isn’t like Earth or any other planet in the universe as we know it. Both time and space are distorted, so it’s tough to judge things like distance, area, or relative position. Even if I can get us to the place she seems to be, we might fall right into the middle of a gigantic clusterfuck. There was something going on in there. I’m worried the Venatori might have already found her.”
The agent’s fists trembled. “Shit! Is there anything you can do? I would have thought you’d be the man to go to, but it’s starting to look like I should have asked my superiors instead and relied on Agency resources.”
Frowning at the implied insult, Roland was about to snap at the man, but then a thought occurred to him.
“Actually, uh, yeah,” he commented, “I just thought of something. It’s—how should I put this—atypical, but I think it’ll work.”
“It had better,” Velasquez warned.
Dante caught the other wizard’s eye. “What do you have in mind? I might be able to help.”
Roland shook his head. “Not with this. Well, maybe you can do auxiliary channeling. What I’m going to attempt is to summon Fenris. It might be our only chance.”
The younger man’s eyes widened in surprise. Velasquez betrayed no such alarm, but the way he tensed up suggested he appreciated the seriousness of such a notion.
“Fenris is their god, the patron of Weres. I’m on good terms with him, yes, but this could still bite me in the ass since you don’t typically go around calling upon deities, and especially not ones that aren’t your own. Bailey summoned Freya not long ago, and that was a massive risk. The gods tend to find stuff like that insulting. They’re strange entities.”
Velasquez shook his head slowly. “Gods. Never seen one, though from what Townsend told me, they’re real enough. Do it, then. We don’t have any other options.”
Roland nodded, raised his arms, and closed his eyes. He motioned with one hand for Dante to stand beside him, and the younger man started channeling arcane essence toward the other’s position, feeding it to him for use in his endeavor.
Velasquez took three steps back. He’d easily surmised that it would be wise to stay out of the way.
Roland’s voice rose like a wind. “O Fenris, wolf-father,” he intoned, “wise and mighty lord of the forests that sprawl beneath the ever-shining moon. Hear me and heed my call. I, Roland, am one beloved to your favored daughter, Bailey. I have need of your knowledge. Move and appear. Manifest, for my cause is in line with yours. We seek to help and protect Bailey, and through her, the lycanthropic people. Fenris! Come forth!”
The god answered the call. Velasquez recoiled, struggling to maintain his composure. Dante blinked and stood frozen. Roland was only mildly surprised.
A beam of moonlight had descended from the clear daytime sky overhead, and whe
re it struck the ground, silvery mist erupted in a swirling cloud. A black silhouette appeared within it, taking on the form and features of the large, hooded man whom Roland had once known as Marcus.
“Roland,” the figure stated. “Why have you summoned me? I was watching over Bailey. She’s drawn some of the Venatori into our sacred grounds within the Other to destroy them.”
Velasquez took three steps forward, his steely confidence regained. “Hey, haven’t I seen this guy before? You look familiar.”
The deity cast a brief glance toward the agent. “Perhaps you have seen me. Perhaps it was someone else. I can take different forms, after all.” Then he looked back at the wizard.
Roland inhaled deeply. “Well, it sounds like Bailey’s in trouble, but she’s about to be in a bunch more. The Venatori are storming the beaches. Velasquez, do you wanna fill him in?”
The agent quickly summarized everything he’d previously told the wizard. Fenris’ face, always solemn, grew graver still with the information.
Before responding, the deity looked at the younger of the two casters. “Who is this man? Do you trust him?”
Both Velasquez and Roland turned their eyes to Dante. Roland spoke up first.
“Yeah, so far. He wants to help us, and in fact was just talking to me about a recruitment drive to get more of the local witches on our side. I’d say we can use all the help we can get.”
Velasquez chimed in with, “Agreed.”
Fenris nodded. “Yes. And with the Venatori stepping up their attacks on the scale you speak of, our timetable is accelerated. We must intercept them directly and cannot afford to play games. The tactics we used last time will no longer suffice.”
Dante listened, his face intent and his mind working to process all the new information.
As Fenris continued, his listeners grimaced. “Prior to and during the Order’s last attempt, we were able to hop all around the continent, using the Other as a transit point from which to open portals and speedily rush to the aid of multiple communities. It worked because the Venatori’s numbers were only sufficient to launch sneak attacks on small pockets of isolated rural Weres.
