The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  The girl motioned for them to explore around the far side of the keep. The agents nodded and followed her, their rifles held ready.

  They’d barely gone seven steps when the ground rumbled with the unmistakable sound of approaching feet and bodies, charging them. Oddly, though, they seemed to be moving from the forest toward a solid section of the castle wall.

  Bailey jumped fifteen feet into the air to have a look.

  “Shit!” she exclaimed, noting the diverse mass of unfriendly creatures streaming toward them. A faint purplish glow suggested they were using magic, but there was no time to see what. The werewitch allowed herself to fall back to the earth, deciding it was better to stand with her human comrades than to dive-bomb the enemy alone.

  Something struck the stone in front of them. It rattled, and dust fell to the ground. Townsend breathed in deeply through his nose and cocked his gun.

  All at once the wall collapsed, the stones falling apart in a miniature landslide and the mortar spraying as dust. In streamed a jumbled crowd of too many types of monsters for Bailey to identify them all at first glance, though she did notice an ogre and a handful of dark alfar.

  One of the elves was obviously a sorcerer since he held up his hand and maintained a purplish translucent shield a yard or so ahead of the front lines.

  Bailey had been about to simply hit them with a river of fire, but the shield gave her pause. She could probably blast through it with sheer force. However, it made her wonder if the creatures had enough intelligence amongst them to enact a diversionary ploy, like a sound-masked rear ambush while she and the agents were distracted by the wall breach.

  Her second’s hesitation allowed the beasts to stream in. Most charged straight in behind the shield, but half a dozen sprinted to each side, looping around to flank the mortals.

  Bailey gestured to the auxiliary forces. “Deal with them! I’ll take the center.”

  She advanced sidelong but at speed, making a narrower target of herself as she hefted her sword. She looked to the left.

  Agents Townsend and Velasquez aimed their imposing weapons and fired balls of superheated plasma, white and violet-tinged. Each bloomed quickly to the size of a volleyball and the projectiles struck the small flanking group head-on, exploding into a dome of fire that vaporized five of the six creatures at once and drove the last one reeling back, burned and on the cusp of death.

  Nice, the girl acceded. I ought to see if they can spare a couple of those things for the sheriff’s office in Greenhearth just in case.

  Then she crashed into the main force.

  Her sword cleaved straight down, splitting the arcane shield asunder, and she was past it as it fell away, beheading the elf mage who’d conjured it with another fast stroke of her blade.

  Two goblins tried to attack her legs, and she killed them both with a broad lateral swing. Then she unleashed a kinetic blast that drove half the monsters back to the bottleneck of the fallen wall while causing the rest to stumble forward and to the sides, right into the agents’ line of fire.

  Bailey leaped a good thirty feet off the ground, scanning the area for signs of any other attacks. There were none that she could see or sense, meaning they ought to be in the clear once they vanquished the current band.

  As she floated downward, she channeled lightning through her sword, moving it like a hose across the disoriented mass of foes and destroying most of them before they could regain their composure. By the time she landed, only a single badly-damaged rock giant, two alfar, and two goblins remained. The agents had incinerated the rest.

  The girl’s sword made short work of the smaller combatants. The rock creature, bigger and certainly stronger than the others, might have posed a problem in a one-on-one confrontation, but Bailey was too eager to find the survivors among the trainees to bother with a duel. She detonated a small sonic boom in the center of the golem’s chest, shattering it to pieces that were quickly lost amidst the rubble of the wall.

  Things went quiet. Surveying the area around her, Bailey saw the agents powering down their guns, looking with grim satisfaction at the smoking sludge and white-hot particles scattered across the ground—the only remaining traces of the monsters they’d blasted.

  Townsend looked up. “Like I said, we thought it would be prudent to come with proper weaponry.”

  “Very proper,” Velasquez added.

  Park scowled. “The military doesn’t have this stuff yet. Might come in handy, but then again, that creates openings for China to steal it and reverse-engineer it, so maybe it’s better kept as one of the Agency’s little secrets.”

  Bailey muttered, “I wouldn’t call it little, exactly. Come on, we need to look for any students who might have survived.”

  They continued around the back of the keep and soon came to a small stone outbuilding that had another hastily-erected and crude barricade over the door.

  Bailey approached and knocked against a wall with the butt of her sword, calling, “Hey, it’s Bailey. Anyone in there? It’s safe out here. I’ve got backup, too.”

  Footsteps moved, and the door opened inward behind the barrier of debris. “Come inside,” said a voice. “Sorry about all this.”

  “No problem. Step back, please.” She waved for them to remove themselves to safety while she split the barricade with her sword and shoved the pieces off to the sides. Then she strolled into the structure, Velasquez and Park following her while Townsend stood guard outside.

  Within were eleven people, ten of them unfamiliar. Bailey recognized one as the uninjured young man who’d spoken to her before.

  “It’s you,” he greeted her. “We weren’t sure if you were coming back. Someone who said he was sent by Loki came a day ago, maybe? He took the most badly wounded away right as other people filtered in from the woods.”

  She nodded and waited for the inevitable bad news, thinking of the students of Balder’s who’d turned on him during their forestry exercises.

  “I stayed behind to greet them. It turned out it was about half students of Balder’s who had disappeared days ago and half other students who’d come back to check on things. And then...”

  The boy’s face was drawn with pain and fear, and it was a few seconds before he could speak again. “The ones who’d been with Balder turned on us. They killed two people, then ran away, alerting those things that we were still here and defenseless. I don’t know why they did that. Who are they working for? What made them betray everyone?”

  Bailey wanted to blurt the answer, but she couldn’t risk it. The fewer people who were in on the counter-conspiracy against Fenris, the better.

  Instead, she nodded and said, “Yeah, Balder said something about that when I found him. He isn’t aware of what the hell’s going on yet either. We’re going to find out, though, I promise you that. But for now, let’s get you out of here and back to safety.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Fenris stepped out of the portal and advanced, allowing Carl to emerge behind him before closing the gateway. He nodded at his apprentice, then turned to survey the scene before him.

  Under a blue sky filled with white clouds spread an autumnal forest of tall, thin pines interspersed with oaks and maples whose leaves had turned from green to a profusion of bright reds, yellows, and oranges. The trees rose on the slopes of low, broken mountains and hills, and gulches and ravines crisscrossed them, filled with rushing and burbling whitewater streams. Dead brown leaves crunched underfoot, giving off a musty yet pleasant scent that rose and fell on the cool, gentle breeze.

  The wolf-father tilted his face upward, sniffing the air and expanding his consciousness throughout the realm to seek the energy signature of his target. He found it soon enough and gestured toward a high promontory overlooking a densely wooded vale.

  Carl smiled and followed his master. The two scaled the slope toward the cliff, their view blocked by the trees and bushes. Fenris conjured a light wind to disperse the carpet of fallen leaves so they could approach in silenc
e.

  The pair emerged between two pines into an open space before the angular, moss-carpeted promontory. A figure sat with its back turned to them in front of a dead fire. A single thin wisp of smoke rose from amidst the ashes and blackened logs.

  The seated humanoid wore a vest and short trousers of tanned leather and had furry doglike ears along with slender, half-canine limbs to match. A slight movement of his head indicated that he was aware he had guests.

  Coyote began, “Hello, Fenris, and your young friend Carl. I’m unsurprised to see you at such an unusual time. When I’m so...vulnerable.” He chuckled as though at a private joke.

  The wolf-god took one heavy step forward. “Coyote. We have business to discuss.”

  The trickster god unfolded his legs and stood up, not bothering to turn around. “Ah, of course. That’s your curious idiom for intending to kill me and assuming I wasn’t aware. Not only did I smell you all the way from the base of this hill, but I’ve also noticed a distinct stench of treachery on you for, oh, quite some time.”

  Carl shot Fenris a narrow-eyed look of concern, but his master waved it off.

  “So,” Fenris intoned, “you were aware it would come to this, and you’ve accepted that there is no escape. You might as well turn and face me.”

  Coyote did, his dog-like features preserving a trace of his usual good humor, though his eyes looked deep and tired and ancient. Next to Fenris, he was relatively small and thin.

  “Better?” the trickster queried.

  The wolf-father moved two paces closer. “Yes. I can see how old you’ve grown. Immortal or not, time has taken its toll, and we have come to the end of your journey. Being a lord of tricks and boondoggles will not save you this time since you can’t simply magic your way out of your predicament. You face a battle in which your victory is impossible.”

  Carl moved to the side, blocking a section of the slope that the other deity might have been able to escape down if he’d dashed past Fenris fast enough. “Impossible,” he repeated. “I like the sound of that.”

  Coyote only smiled. “Yes, it’s true that I’m old, but I might, perhaps, have a few more tricks to play.”

  Before Fenris or Carl could act, the canid god jumped a yard to the right at the same instant that he conjured a dozen illusions of himself, the thirteen figures moving with such haphazard speed that it was impossible to immediately determine which was the real one.

  The ground beneath the feet of the were-father and the scion turned to liquid, trapping them up to their ankles as the clones struck them in the torso and face with fierce blows of fists coated with magical kinetic force.

  “Damn you!” Fenris growled, sending out a semicircular wave of electricity that engulfed, froze, and destroyed most of the illusions. Carl, meanwhile, shielded himself from further attacks as he struggled to pull free of the melted ground.

  Coyote leaped into the air, avoiding the arc of lightning, and tossed a cascade of icy water and freezing gas downward so as to further trap and immobilize his foes.

  Fenris, rather than react directly, detonated an explosion within the cliff. The entire shelf of rock collapsed in a shower of rubble, the wolf-god and the scion falling downward ahead of the frigid torrent. Carl raised a shield above their heads for further protection while Fenris floated aside, aiming to land on a nearby crag.

  Coyote flew down and around in a loop. Fenris guessed the trajectory of his movements and struck him with a sudden small but powerful meteor that made the trickster deity burst into flames while also knocking him out of his gentle flight and sending him careening down into the forested valley.

  Fenris and Carl landed on the small peak in time to see their enemy vanish amidst the trees below. The scion struck the area with multiple lightning bolts, igniting the dead leaves and pine needles as well as the wood of the trunks.

  “There,” Carl grated. “That ought to teach him to ruin my boots.”

  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 bal
ance 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.