The Troll Solution (Were Witch Book 8)

by Renée Jaggér

  “Sure,” she replied at once. “But where to? And what wheels we taking?”

  The mechanic smiled. “Up the mountains to the east, I’m thinking, up to that scenic overlook. You know the one. As for the wheels, well, I was saving it for a surprise. Check this out, girl.” He stood up and beckoned for her to follow him out back.

  She bit her tongue to keep from asking, but mumbled to herself, “This oughta be good.”

  Gunney had a way of acquiring new and interesting vehicles seemingly out of nowhere. Then again, it could also be one of the obscure projects he’d been gradually working on for years. There was so much shit in his scrapyard out back that despite the many years she’d known him, she didn’t have a firm mental inventory of it all.

  There was nothing in the gravel lot immediately behind the shop. They headed instead to the fenced-off yard. As it grew closer, Bailey could see a particular car at the center of a clear patch of ground. It was an antique, and bright cherry red.

  She gave a whistle. “Damn, Gunney. That thing’s nice. A Cobra?”

  “This,” the mechanic explained, “is a ‘65 Shelby Cobra. Or AC Cobra, which is what they called it in the UK since it was first made over there. Renamed the ‘Shelby’ when it was sold in the U.S. of A. Ford V8 engine, not something you see every day. I’ve been working on it more or less in secret for, oh,” he breathed out, “nine years or so.”

  She gawked at the thing. “Those two white racing stripes up the front are a nice touch,” she observed. “I’ll probably burn in hell for saying this, but it kinda reminds me of an Edsel, only not shitty.”

  “An Edsel?” Gunney gasped, paling in horror. He swallowed and took a moment to get himself under control, his eyes going distant as he dismissed the last half-minute from his mind, suppressing all memory of it ever having happened.

  “Now,” he went on, as though she hadn’t made that remark, though she had to chew a lip to keep from laughing, “since today is its debut again, I’ll drive. You can ride shotgun. Let’s go.”

  She climbed in, noting how old-fashioned and attention-grabbing the thing was while still being classy. It wasn’t her usual “type” of car, but Gunney was obviously thrilled with his handiwork.

  He fired up the engine, then stopped the car out front while he quickly locked up the shop before hopping back in and piloting it out onto Main Street. Once they’d reached the edge of the town, his foot turned to lead.

  He chuckled. “Sit back, and let me show you what this old man can do.”

  Bailey grinned evilly as the speedometer climbed past eighty, Gunney maintaining his speed in spite of the increasing curvature and elevation of the road. He was forced to drop to “only” seventy once they were in the mountains, but she had to admit he was handling the vehicle with tremendous skill all the same.

  What he was doing was also dangerous as hell, and the fact that she recognized it seemed strange to her.

  Not too long ago, she, as a reckless post-adolescent, wouldn’t have cared. She’d just have enjoyed the thrill of it. At present, her mind seemed to have grown up since she was calculating all the things that could go wrong.

  It made no sense since her past self would have been doomed if anything had gone wrong, whereas these days, she as a goddess could avert catastrophe with a flick of her hand.

  Still, she enjoyed the ride, and so did Gunney. They traded jokes, encouragement, and off-color remarks as the eastern Cascades zipped past, the cliff wall to their side growing shorter as the gorge grew deeper. Finally the Cobra sped onto the scenic lookout picnic area in a faint cloud of bluish smoke.

  “Well, shit,” Gunney panted, “that was about the most fun I’ve had since, well, the time you and Roland and me raced up here a week or two ago, however long it was. But aside from that, it’s the most fun I’ve had in years.”

  She smiled and hugged him. “Hell of a ride,” she concurred.

  They spent a quiet half-hour together, looking out over the hazy peaks and green woods, before climbing back into the antique sports car and driving back home. This time, the mechanic went slower.

  He offered to drop her off at her family’s house, so she had to remind him that her car was still at his shop.

  “Oh, right.” He grunted. “Slipped my mind. I guess I am getting old, after all.”

  “Not too old,” Bailey reassured him.

  They climbed out of the car after Gunney had locked it up in a lean-to shed in the far corner of the scrapyard. Before Bailey departed, the older man took her in a tight embrace.

  “Bailey,” he said softly, “I’m proud of you, girl. You probably know that, but it bears repeating.”

  She rested her cheek against his hat. “I do, but yeah. Thanks. It’s nice to hear.”

  “Go do what has to be done. And kick some ass. Like you always do.”

  He gave her a final pat on the back, then watched as she walked away, climbed into her Camaro, and made ready to drive it the short way home.

  Near dusk, Bailey decided she’d rested enough, and there were people who needed her help.

  She breathed in. “All right, Roland, hope you and your witch buddies from Seattle and those damn government guys knew what you were doing this whole time.” She supposed that if they’d truly needed her, they would have found a way to call for help or sent someone through a portal.

  Or something. Anything. She refused to consider the prospect that bad shit could’ve gone down so fast that none of them had had time to reach out to her.

  Having been in the portion of the Other where they’d attacked the army of witch-specters, Bailey found it fairly easy to locate it with her mind and open a portal of her own to it. She pictured the mouth of the tunnels that led into the cliffs and down into the main canyon, which, last she’d seen, the agents had established as part of their turf.

  A purple gateway opened before her, and she stepped through. Cold; dizziness; then it melted and she stood on red rock in a desolate landscape of tall crags and dark violet skies.

  She bumped into Agent Park. “Whoa!” he exclaimed. “Nice to see you again, but still. Careful.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she retorted, taking in the scene before her. “Sorry.”

  Most of the ice wall she’d conjured still stood, but there were two holes or tunnels in it, near each wall of the canyon. Probably made by the mortal forces for excursions deeper into enemy territory.

  For the moment, everyone was resting, though they looked tired and bedraggled. She must have caught them shortly after a battle.

  Roland pushed his way through the ranks of men and women. “There you are. How long has it been back on Earth, anyway?”

  “Uh,” she replied, hugging him, “a full day, maybe a bit more. I had a slight perceptual illusion yesterday, so that threw me off slightly. Don’t ask. Fill me in on how things’ve been going in here.”

  He did. As she would have guessed, the human forces had made the holes in the ice and launched a couple more attacks against the horde of ghost-crones, eliminating another hundred or so of them and pushing their lines farther back.

  Park explained, “We had some of the boys from HQ portal in to bring us more of those poles, so our perimeter extends past the ice wall about a hundred feet in a semicircle from the mouths of those two tunnels.”

  Velasquez had trotted over by now. “We’ve made progress, but it’s going to take a big push to reach the nearest of those light-pulses on our scanner screens. Based on what we can see, there should be a slope or path on that side of the canyon,” he gestured with his chin, “leading up to the first one on that plateau beyond. Your help would be immensely appreciated, Bailey.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Hey, what are friends for?”

  The force spent another five minutes preparing, mentally and materially, for battle, then took their positions as Bailey, Roland, and the lead agents conferred on strategy.

  “Me out in front,” Bailey said immediately. “Right? Roland should be near the fron
t also since he and I are experienced in fighting together, and he’s damn good with a shield. I imagine you’ll want your guys close behind me.”

  “Yes,” Velasquez confirmed.

  Everyone took their positions near the ice tunnel farther from where Bailey had portaled in. On their scanners, this corresponded to the top of the screen, so they arbitrarily referred to it as “north” even though the Other wasn’t likely to have magnetic poles the way a planet did.

  At the head of the column, Bailey strode through the tunnel, noting the eerie silence within the thick ice. Up ahead, she could see the faint purplish field created by the barrier poles, and beyond it, the horde.

  They emerged into a small area crammed against the reddish rock of the canyon wall. Otherwise, they were surrounded by eldritch crones pushing futilely on the arcane wall, then retreating in pain and fear or hovering a hand’s breadth before it and moaning and howling at the mortals.

  Bailey glanced over her shoulder at her allies. “Get ready.”

  Moving her head toward the mass of enemies, she raised her hands. A rippling series of explosions of fire and plasma began right on the other side of the poles’ barrier and streaked onwards into the rest of the canyon, blasting and consuming witch-spirits as it went.

  Velasquez barked, “Move!” and everyone surged forward, while Bailey used another round of freezing rain to cool the smoking rock. Behind her, agents vacuumed up the remaining phantom essences while Roland handled shields and the other casters tossed offensive spells at the retreating horde.

  The squad pushed forward, annihilating at least a hundred of the crones. Soon they reached a portion of the canyon wall to their left that had collapsed in a rockslide, forming a crude ramp or staircase onto the plateau to the “north.”

  Bailey moved past it, then, remembering the earth magic Coyote had taught her, cut the canyon in half by manipulating entire shelves of stone, walling off the portion controlled by the specters from that controlled by the mortals.

  “Fuck, yeah!” Park gloated. “Nice work.”

  Bailey smiled. “Thanks.”

  Having again increased their territory, agents moved the poles forward to claim and protect the extra space. Everyone briefly rested to prepare themselves for the next phase of the operation.

  Bailey also smoothed out the jumble of rocks on the upward path, making it less treacherous and more like an uphill road. It was harder than she’d thought it would be, but she managed. The difficulty made her wonder if constructive and transformative magic was harder than destruction.

  Velasquez waved his hand and the human force jogged up the path, Bailey once more on point.

  On the plateau beyond, they encountered only random stragglers—pockets of six, eight, or ten crones at a time, which they easily destroyed. As they neared the point of light the agents’ screens had shown, they encountered a mass of phantoms about fifty strong.

  “Positions!” the lead agent shouted.

  Not wanting to accidentally damage the mysterious power source they sought, Bailey surrounded the crones with a spiraling vortex of lightning and frozen acid shards, with enough gaps between the elements for some of the specters to try to slip through.

  A smattering of individuals succeeded, but most were caught in the barrage and ripped apart. The few that made it past were quickly vaporized and contained by the Agency’s weapons.

  Roland let out a deep breath. “Well, we’re undefeated so far. Let’s see if our luck holds out now that we’ve found...this, whatever it is.”

  Bailey dismissed the deadly cyclone, and they all moved forward.

  The object was in sight. The agents confirmed that it was the pulsating nexus of arcane energy their scanners had turned up, and since the crones had seemingly been defending it, Bailey had no doubt that they’d acquired their target.

  “Man,” one of the guys behind her remarked, “that is just weird.”

  She had to agree.

  The thing was partially sunken into a shallow depression in the earth like a miniature crater, yet it reached higher into the air than the tallest man in the group—seven feet or so. It was as big around as a large tree, but it did not resemble one in any other way.

  At first, Bailey wondered if it was a living thing. It was a bulbous mass of pulsating nodes connected by thick, sticky tendrils and a heavy gelatinous substance. The thing was black in certain places and clear in others, mainly in the centers of the nodes, though those glowed with blue light. It made an odd humming sound that rose and fell as though it were breathing.

  Roland came up beside her. “I don’t think it’s a creature, exactly. My guess is that it’s the arcane equivalent of a mineral deposit, only it’s ‘animated,’ you might say, by a large amount of magical essence. So, more like a machine, really—inanimate matter that moves around because it’s charged with energy.”

  “I see,” Bailey mused. She could sense a strong aura of occult force emanating from it.

  Agent Velasquez joined them. “Is it acting as the anchor for these things like we theorized? The scanners are picking up a ton of signals coming off it.”

  “Probably,” said Dante, who’d been standing five or six paces aside from them. “I don’t see what else it could be. We’ve stumbled upon a dumping ground for coalesced magical potential.” He smirked. “Let’s destroy it and see what happens.”

  Velasquez arched an eyebrow. “You sure about that? I’m all for it if you guys are confident it will dissipate the crones. What we don’t want, of course, it to be caught in a nuclear blast or to get possessed by unleashed spirits or something fun like that.”

  They agreed that everyone would stand at a safe distance, that Roland and a handful of other witches would maintain a powerful shield, and that Bailey, aided by Dante, Charlene, and the agents’ disruptor rifles, would destroy the pulsating mass.

  Bailey reminded her lover, “Don’t worry about making a hole in the shield for me; I can summon shit on the other side of it. If that doesn’t do the trick, and if there isn’t a big kaboom, you can make holes for the agents to fire through.”

  “Roger,” said Roland.

  Once the thick wall of translucent light protected them, Bailey took a deep breath and unleashed hell.

  The sky opened up, and a column of white light consisting of concentrated heat, electromagnetic energy, and arcanoplasm descended on the slimy blue-black thing. It was briefly silhouetted within the destructive radiance before it dissolved and flew apart in spattering pieces.

  Dante, Charlene, and the others joined in by flinging bolts of lightning and sheets of flame at dispersed chunks, which were blown apart or burned with ease.

  There was no obvious blowback. However, Bailey did feel an odd, nauseating sensation as the power stored within the bolus vaporized, and a faint blue light lingered in the air where it had been.

  Then they heard it: wailing cries in the distance like wind through trees, rising in a crescendo and rapidly fading.

  “It’s them,” Deanna surmised. “They’re dying without this thing to anchor their strength.”

  The bulk of the spectral horde was too far away to see much, but it did look to Bailey like some of them were vanishing and the mass was growing smaller.

  “Hah!” Roland laughed. “It would appear we were correct. However, I think we only affected some of them. There have to be more of these things, and possibly something bigger controlling the entire horde. At the very least, we’ll need to dispose of the remainder of these lovely spore-blob-trees or whatever they are to neutralize Callie’s army.”

  A brief discussion followed, though its only conclusion was that Roland was probably right.

  “All right,” said Velasquez, speaking to his men as well as the witches, “let’s make camp. We move against the next one as soon as we’ve rested and recharged.”

  Chapter Ten

  They’d destroyed the third of the spore-anchors and were taking a meal break when a tall dark-amethyst portal opened in the c
enter of the camp.

  Bailey sat up straight, instantly alert, as Fenris stepped out of the doorway. Everyone stared at him, but the wolf-god paid no heed to anyone but Bailey.

  Looking at her from under his hood, he stated, “I need you again.”

  She frowned. “Is it urgent? I’m helping these guys take care of this army of witch specters. We’ve wiped out two hundred or so, and we’re less than half of the way through the damn things. They’re going to invade the Northwest if we don’t deal with them soon.”

  Fenris glanced around, taking in the situation in the span of two or three heartbeats.

  “Yes,” he replied, “it’s urgent. What you have here is a matter of some concern, but your friends should be able to handle such weak manifestations with their combined skills and weaponry. I need you to oppose another and different incursion, one which will require a goddess.”

  Behind him, a couple of the greener agents grumbled in protest at having their heavy artillery taken away, but Velasquez stepped in and informed them who their new guest was.

  Fenris clearly heard this exchange but ignored it.

  Sighing, Bailey got to her feet. “Okay. I’ll come with you. Tell me about it on the way in. One condition, though. As soon as the worst of it is dealt with, I will come back here to finish aiding these guys.”

  The hooded figure nodded. “Agreed. But come with me now. We don’t have time to waste.” He stepped aside from the portal, giving her a clear path into it.

  The werewitch looked at Roland, whose face was drawn with concern. “Don’t worry,” she told him, “you guys will be okay. And I’ll be back soon.”

  With that, she walked into the purple gateway, and everything vanished around her.

  They stepped out into a portion of the Other she was familiar with: the endless dismal swampy area of gnarled trees, spongy ground, black ponds, and curling mists. She looked at Fenris. “Is the threat here, or is this just our stopping-off point?”

  “The latter,” he answered her. “We will need privacy while I brief you on the nature of the mission before we plunge in.”