by Baen Books
I repeated the elements to myself six times, and on the seventh, released the magic. It settled over us like that dust. As it did, my father looked my way. So did the were.
“A warding,” I said, pitching my voice so both of them could hear.
Dad nodded, and I saw some of the tension drain out of the wolf’s stance.
The lights from the Jeeps shone in our eyes, silhouetting the men in them. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought each vehicle might have carried three people. I hoped the warding would hold.
I raised the stone, catching the glare with it, reflecting it back on the men arrayed before us, and shifting it so that it shone on each face.
“Hey!” one of them said, raising a hand to shield his eyes. “Stop that.”
“I will when you switch off your lights.”
They were white, dressed in camo. Most had beards, or at least three-day scruff, and almost all of them were what I might charitably describe as burly. All right, they were fat.
These weren’t drug runners, and chances were they weren’t professional poachers, either. They were a bunch of guys out hunting on federal land, in violation of at least a few BLM regulations. They had probably started by spotlighting deer and then got it in their heads to go after something bigger, more exciting. And to make the situation even better, I thought I could make out coolers in the back of all three Jeeps. Filled with cheap American beer, no doubt. Not only were they hunting at night, driving their Jeeps through the wilderness at excessive speeds, with loaded rifles in their hands, they were probably halfway to shit-faced.
But while they might not have been criminal masterminds, they were well-armed and there were nine of them. Several of them appeared to be eyeing the wolf.
It was hard to tell for certain, though, because those damn lights were still shining in our eyes. And so I kept the reflection from my stone on the face of the guy who’d told me to stop. I was stupid that way.
He had been holding his rifle with the barrel pointed up at the stars, but now he lowered it, leveling it at my chest. He didn’t raise the weapon to take aim, but his approximation was close enough, and he had his finger on the trigger.
“I told you to get that thing out of my eyes.”
I wanted to tell him that, in fact, the stone wasn’t in his eyes. Just the light it was reflecting. But I didn’t think he’d appreciate being corrected, and I wasn’t sure that cracking wise with what appeared to be a Mossberg Patriot bolt-action rifle aimed at my heart was such a great idea. Instead I went with uncompromising defiance.
“And I told you to shut off the goddamned lights.”
As I said, I’m not always the sharpest pencil in the box.
“I have a better idea,” said the driver of the second Jeep. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, get that thing out of Dave’s eyes, and get the hell out of our way so that we can shoot that wolf we’ve been tracking.”
I cast a quick look at my dad, only to find that he was already watching me. He gave a small shake of his head, which could have meant, “hell no, we’re not giving up the wolf,” or “don’t be an idiot; there are nine of them and they’re all armed.”
I was betting on the former.
“Yeah,” I said, sporting a little frown. “I don’t think I’m going to do any of those things. But thanks for the suggestion.” The driver opened his mouth to say more, but I didn’t let him. “Killing wolves is illegal in Arizona. Spotlight hunting deer is illegal in Arizona; you didn’t use a spotlight when you killed that buck, did you?” A couple of the men exchanged glances. “It’s also illegal to hunt without a license. I assume you all have licenses.”
“What are you? A cop?”
I wasn’t about to tell him that I was a disgraced cop who’d had to leave the force due to “undisclosed psychological problems”—in other words, the phasings. But I hoped the implication would be enough to end our standoff.
“Well, actually . . .”
“Oh, shit,” another of the men said, “he is a cop.”
Dave, the guy with the rifle aimed at me, shook his head. “He’s lyin’. He’s no cop.”
I gazed back at him, not bothering to confirm or deny.
“The bitch is ours,” he said, pointing at the wolf with his free hand. “We’ve been tracking her for more than an hour. Give her up, and we’ll be on our way. You’ll have no trouble.”
“And if we don’t?”
He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t think you’re that dumb. You don’t want anything to happen to the old man.”
“He means me, right?” my dad said.
It was all I could do not to laugh out loud. “Yeah, I’m afraid so.”
“I had a feeling.”
I didn’t put much stock in my ability to scry the future, but none of the outcomes I could envision for this encounter were very good. Right now, only Dave had been bold enough to threaten us with a weapon, but that could change at any time, and if it did, we were in trouble. So I cast. Again, it might not have been the best idea, but there was no way I would allow them to hurt the wolf. I didn’t care whether or not she was a were. She didn’t deserve to be gunned down by these idiots.
Three elements to my spell this time—as simple as a spell could be. Dave’s hands, his rifle, my hands.
One moment he still held the weapon leveled at me; the next it had vanished from his grip and reappeared in mine.
“What the fuck!”
I glanced down at the rifle. It was light, well balanced. “Nice,” I said. I tossed it to my dad without looking, heard him catch it.
“Thanks,” he said.
I cast a second time, taking a rifle out of the hands of another guy in the third Jeep. This one was a Howa Hogue, and I didn’t like it quite as much. Of course, that was beside the point.
“How the hell did you do that?” asked the driver who’d earlier told me to shut up.
I replied with a cold smile. “How the hell do you think?” And for good measure, I cast again. One of the lights on his windshield rack, a rock on the ground at my feet, and the distance in between. The rock flew as if thrown by Sandy Koufax and shattered the light with a spray of glass and sparks.
“Now turn off those lights before I break every goddamned one of them.”
Again the men glanced at each other. After a few seconds, they shut off the windshield lights, though their headlights stayed on. That was fine with me. Now that the scrying stone was no longer reflecting that glare, I put it in my pocket.
“Much better,” I said. “Now you’re all going to back up, turn your Jeeps around, and drive away from here. Without the wolf.”
“We’re still seven to your two,” Dave said.
I resisted the urge to compliment him on his math skills. “Yes, you are. But do you really want this to come down to a fire fight?”
He stared back at me in a way that made me wonder if he did. For several seconds no one said a word.
Just when I thought he might relent, he grabbed a rifle from the guy sitting beside him, aimed, and squeezed off a shot at the were. I shouted a warning, which was lost in the deafening report of the rifle. The wolf flinched, but the bullet never touched her. It ricocheted off my warding with an incongruously soft flash of blue-green magic, and struck the grill of Dave’s Jeep. He’d been lucky. If he’d aimed any higher the shot would have rebounded on him.
The report continued to echo off the hills around us, repeating and fading for several seconds.
“What the hell, Dave?” one of the others said.
Dave could do little more than gape. I think he wanted to get out and check the front grill, but was afraid to come that close to me.
“You’re not going to kill this wolf,” I said. “Not tonight anyway. Now get out of here.”
“Are you, like, a witch, or something?” another man asked.
As before, I decided it would be rude to laugh. “Not a witch, no. I’m a weremyste.”
“Hey, I’ve heard of them,” came a voice
from the third Jeep.
The guy sitting in front of this genius twisted around. “Well, then I guess you get a fucking gold star, don’t you?”
“Come on, Dave,” said the driver. “Let’s get going. We can find other game.”
Dave regarded me, clearly less sure of himself than he had been a short time before. “What about our weapons?”
“I don’t want this rifle, and my dad doesn’t want yours. We just want you away from here.”
To prove my point, I used another transporting spell to return the Howa Hogue I was holding to the guy from whom I’d taken it. I swear, he nearly wet himself when the weapon reappeared in his hands.
Still I could tell Dave wasn’t yet ready to give in. I’d seen guys like him when I was on the force: so full of themselves, so convinced that they were the toughest hombres on two legs that they never, ever backed down from fights, even when they were destined to lose. Most of them wound up doing time, or getting themselves killed.
“Dave?”
“Yeah, whatever,” Dave said at last, breaking eye contact and dismissing the entire confrontation with a disdainful gesture. I had the distinct impression he was trying to convince everyone there he didn’t care one way or another about the wolf or my dad or me. I guess he figured we all had bad memories. He shoved the weapon he’d taken into the hands of the guy next to him. “Give me back my rifle already.”
My father opened the breech on the Mossberg and removed the free round and the magazine. And casting his own transporting spell he sent the weapon back to Dave. An instant later he cast again, and the bullet and magazine fell into the hunter’s lap.
Dave examined the weapon, perhaps checking it for damage or magical alteration. Then he met my gaze again. I pulled out my Glock. I didn’t aim it; I held it casually at my side. But I made certain he could see it.
His expression soured, tipped over into that bored look once more. “Let’s get going.” The way he said it, one might have thought this had been his intention all along.
The Jeeps backed into three-point turns and pulled away, raising enough dust to make me squint in the darkness, and to leave my teeth feeling gritty. We stood without moving, without speaking, marking their retreat. When the glow from their lights had dulled, and the revving of the engines had subsided to a whisper, my father stepped to the were and knelt.
He scratched her head, allowed her to lick his cheek.
“You’re a beauty, aren’t you?” he said.
I joined them. “You should stay here tonight,” I told the wolf, hoping she could understand me. “I don’t know how far the protection from my warding can stretch, but you should be safe if you stick close to us.”
She stared back at me, eyes luminous with candle glow and starlight.
“I can leave out a pair of a jeans and a T-shirt so that you’ll have something to wear in the morning if you change back.” I smiled. “I’m sorry, but this is my only pair of shoes.”
She answered with a high bark and licked my hand.
“I wonder why she took this form so long before the full moon,” my father said. “I wonder if somehow she can change at will.”
“Can weres do that?”
He shrugged, shook his head. “I don’t know. Yesterday I would have said no, but it makes about as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.”
I gazed after the Jeeps. I couldn’t hear them anymore, and full darkness had fallen over the desert once again. Except for the weapon I still held in my hand, there was nothing at all to indicate the hunters had been here.
I retrieved my book from the table. “Well, I’m going to turn in.”
“Okay,” my father said, still scratching the wolf’s ears. “I think I’ll sit out for a while.”
“You all right?”
“Fine,” he said. “But I’m awake, and I want to keep an eye out for a while, in case those guys double back and try to hurt her.”
I handed him the Glock. “Wake me if you need to.”
I walked to the truck, put the book on the front seat, and pulled out those spare clothes. The wolf watched me as I placed them on the table and crossed to the tent.
I feared I might have trouble sleeping—after a confrontation like the one we’d had with the hunters, it wouldn’t have been unusual for me to stay up half the night. But I was asleep almost as soon as I stretched out on my sleeping pad. I barely even woke when my father came in some time later.
I was awake with first light. I crawled out of the tent, doing my best not to wake my dad.
Dawn silvered the cacti and brush, and a few bright stars still shone in the brightening sky. Low in the east, the first hint of gold tinged the horizon.
The wolf was gone. So were the clothes I’d left out. Fresh footprints in the dirt—human, delicate—led away from our campground, winding past the prickly pear and chollas and up the small rise, where they vanished amid the rocks and saguaros. I considered following them to the top of the ridge; perhaps I could catch a glimpse of the were in her human form. But if she had wanted that, she would have waited to leave until we woke.
Instead I stayed where I was, brewed some coffee, listened as the cactus wrens and black-throated sparrows practiced their morning duets. And I waited for my father to wake.
The Teacher
by Robert Conroy and J.R. Dunn
The Party Kreisleiter droned on, trying to instill courage into a group of old men and young boys. He was talking about dying for the Reich. Wolfgang Kohl doubted that the man had been within twenty miles of combat.
“To us,” he shouted, “falls the honor of defeating, no, destroying the Red Army and its murderous, thieving, raping hordes. We will save the Reich and earn the undying gratitude of our beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler!”
“Sieg Heil,” someone shouted, and Wolfgang forced himself to echo the words. He wanted no one to suspect that his loyalty to the Reich and the Führer were anything but total. Any hint of defeatism would mean death, by firing squad or being hanged by a wire from a hook, without the formality of a trial. There was no time for such niceties. The Russians were too close. When conditions were right—as they were this very moment—the rumbling of artillery could be clearly heard. It could be assumed to be Red Army guns. The German Army was short of everything, including shells.
He wiped the sweat from his brow. At age fifty-five, he was just too damned old to be running around trying to save the Reich from itself. But the choice had been made for him. He was now a captain in the Volkssturm whether he wanted the dubious honor or not.
The Volkssturm—“People’s Storm,”—was symbolic of the desperation that had taken hold of what was left of Nazi Germany. Boys scarcely in their teens and old men on the far edge of retirement, called on to the fight the Red Army, one of the greatest forces of pure destruction ever fielded. Once an ardent supporter of Hitler and his vision of the world, Wolfgang no longer had any confidence in anything that emanated from Berlin.
He glanced over his shoulder at his good friend and fellow veteran of the Great War, Willi Grossman. Willi rolled his eyes. The Nazi was a pompous pain in the ass. Not only was Germany short of guns and ammunition, it was also short of good speakers.
Wolfgang had been appointed commander of this forlorn group because he had been an NCO in the previous war. He was in charge of this band of a score or so and his job was to lead it to either destruction or slavery. The distant rumble of artillery told him he didn’t have much time to make up his mind.
The official wound it up with a final “Heil Hitler” and plopped down into his seat. The car roared off in a cloud of dust, preceded by a motorcycle soldier who kept looking upwards at the blue sky and the clouds that would have been lovely any other time. Today, they could be hiding Jabos, Jagdbombers—enemy fighter-bombers that prowled the German sky unopposed, shooting up everything that moved.
“That man was a bloody fool,” said Willi. Instead of a rifle, Willi had a Panzerfaust, a single-shot anti-tank weapon.
It was effective only at close range, which meant that the shooter either had to be very quick and lucky or suicidal, and Willi was neither. As commander, Wolfgang had been given an old Mauser rifle and a Luger that might have been new in World War I. He thought the ammunition he’d been given came from the Franco-Prussian War.
Wolfgang was about to comment when two planes shrieked overhead at nearly treetop level. Everyone scattered or hit the ground. Seconds later, they heard explosions and the sound of machine-gun fire. Then silence.
Wolfgang picked himself up. A column of black smoke arose from the road where the official had gone. “I’ll go check,” Willi said. “By the way, it looks like some of your troops have gone home to their mothers.”
Wolfgang swore. Eight of his young charges had indeed run away from the terrifying American warplanes. But could he blame them? Not at all. He just hoped they made it home safely and didn’t fall into the clutches of the SS.
While waiting for Willi to return, he led the rest off the road and told them to keep a sharp eye out for Yank planes.
When Willi finally did return, his face was gray. “Not much left besides a few torn-up bodies. The only thing I got was a decent camera and a wristwatch and a few hundred Reichsmarks that will make good toilet paper in a few days.”
“Throw away the camera and the watch, Willi. If the SS catches you with them, they’ll assume you stole them and they’ll hang you for it. If we get to the Americans, they’ll just confiscate it, which is another word for stealing. Keep the money, though.”
Willi lowered his head. “I’m not going to the Amis.”
“No?” Wolfgang had been afraid of this. Willi’s disapproval of Wolfgang’s plans had been clear from the first.
“No. The SS . . . they’re all over the place. The Amis. Who knows what they’ll be like. And . . .” He looked Wolfgang in the eye. “I’ve just got a bad feeling about it.”
