Were War (WereWitch Book 4)

by Renée Jaggér

  Were War

  WereWitch™ Book Four

  Renée Jaggér

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  Cover by Cover by Fantasy Book Design

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact support@lmbpn.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US Release, September 2020

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64971-154-0

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64971-155-7

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Note from Renée

  Books from Renée

  Chapter One

  A young woman in jeans and boots and a flannel shirt tied at the waist stood upon a brambly hillock amidst a landscape drawn from a disturbing dream. No wind seemed to stir the gnarled branches of the ancient black trees, nor did the slate-colored clouds move much across the deep purple sky, yet it seemed like a breeze lifted the girl’s brown hair.

  She looked out across the boggy, mist-shrouded wastes of the Other, the parallel world formed of the residue of other worlds’ magic.

  Here I am, she thought. I was told that things would start getting better. That being a shaman would make my life less dangerous, and that I’d finally have the chance to get the hell away from trouble for a while.

  A dark shape like the silhouette of a huge bat or a pterodactyl streaked across the sky, but she barely registered its presence.

  How was I supposed to know that the trials to become an apprentice would be a million times more likely to kill me than anything else I’ve done? And I’ve had people trying to take my head off for a while now.

  She sighed and steeled herself as the hulking figure across the hill from her raised his hands, which were crackling with the power of deadly spells.

  Magic, she concluded. Ain’t it a bitch?

  The man attacked.

  At first, a vertical line of dark purple light appeared in front of him, as though it were about to streak toward her in the form of a fiery beam, but then it spread to either side, protecting him as a shield.

  Simultaneously, a crackling bolt appeared behind her. She’d expected some kind of trickery, though, and her sharp lycanthropic senses picked up the change in the air in an instant. She launched herself straight up and let the bolt pass under her. It struck the man’s shield instead, where it sparked massively before fizzling out.

  While airborne, Bailey summoned her counterattack—a gout of flame that erupted from the earth beneath her opponent’s feet, combined with similar blasts that came in from the sides just above his head. The idea was to catch him as he jumped away from the first strike.

  Instead, he shielded himself from below, dissipating the flames so they resembled a giant orange flower, then rolled forward. His coat started to smoke but didn’t ignite as the horizontal firestorms crashed and exploded just above the point where he’d been standing.

  “Shit!” Air rushed past Bailey, and the ground sailed up to meet her. She fought its pull, slowing her descent and coming to rest in the upper branches of a tree. By the time her feet found their perch, she was tossing a spiraling mass of lightning and ice at the tall man.

  He spun to face her and caught the blast with one hand while hurling electrified plasma at her with the other.

  Although her body was strained, Bailey’s mind felt lucid, focused, almost calm. The Other naturally tended to impose limits on magical expenditure, sapping the power of spells, but for a sufficiently experienced channeler, there were ways around it.

  Distributing her energy as efficiently as she could, she caught the man’s plasma bolt and threw it back. She also maintained her hold on the mass of death hovering in the air just in front of his position, trying to force it back to engulf him.

  The two concentrations of arcane power blended, eventually becoming a sort of spherical vortex of multicolored light and matter that bulged and twisted as each combatant sought to gain control of it. Random lances of blended elements shot out from the central mass here and there.

  One went safely below Bailey but struck the tree she stood in. She clamped down on her sense of alarm as the blackened wood exploded in a shower of fragments, dropping her to the ground.

  Striving not to get too self-conscious about it, she kept control of the magical vortex even as she fell and rolled. Her opponent moved it back toward her, but she didn’t lose it.

  Once she was able to stand back up, she sent a rippling tremor through the earth toward the man, knocking him off balance, although he maintained his hold, too. He looked at her, his eyes visible even through the storm of magic.

  Marcus raised a hand. “Hold,” he commanded, the terrible force of his spells dwindling and growing quiet.

  Bailey allowed her attacks and defenses to dissipate as well, although she remained on guard. She might have to renew them at any moment, since that, too, might be part of the tests.

  But no further assault came. “Let us call it a draw,” said Marcus.

  Drawing ragged breaths but unbowed, Bailey put her fists on her hips. “I guess that’s one way of admitting I’d have beat your ass sooner or later if we’d kept going.”

  The tall man almost smiled. “Perhaps you might have, just maybe. But for now, let’s just say that I feel you’ve continued to progress at the pace you should. We’ve done all we can for now.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the girl shot back, then her face broke into a grin. “That’s what they all say.”

  Marcus just beckoned for her to follow him. They trudged down the hill and through a brambly, swampy patch of woods. Wraiths made of material darkness hovered in the shadows between the trees, watching them but hesitant to act. The creatures must have sensed the massive power of the two visitors and known they would fail to claim a victim if they attacked.

  Time did not pass in the Other as it did in the mortal world. Still, it seemed like only a few minutes had gone by when the pair reached the edge of a murky lake with mist hovering around its shores.

  Bailey sighed with relief. For a second, she’d worried it was the Pool of Dark Reflections, where she’d beheld two nightmare visions and seen four witches die. But it was another lake, just an ordinary body of water.

  To the extent that anything here was “ordinary.”

  She sat down on a raised bank of sand and silt the color of graphite, and Marcus piled up a mass of sticks and branches he gathered from the tangled forest. Then, with a couple of quick motions, he coaxed a campfire into existence.

  It burned steadily and with less smoke than Bailey would have guessed, given the dampness of the place. She rubbed her arms and closed her eyes in satisfaction, glad for the relief it
brought from the realm’s clammy chill.

  The shaman lowered himself to ground on the other side of the blaze.

  “Let us talk,” he began, “about how you’ve been doing. And about the further course of your training. Now that you know who I am, I’m sure you can appreciate that I have good reasons for putting you through all this.”

  A slight tingle worked its way along the young woman’s back. She still could scarcely believe that the man she’d thought was an obscure shaman from somewhere in the wilds of the Cascade Mountains was in truth Fenris, god of wolves, father of all Weres.

  But she’d seen his true form, and so had the Eastmoor Pack, who even now were probably spreading the word all throughout Oregon, if not the entire western half of North America.

  “Yeah,” she replied, unable to keep the obvious fatigue out of her voice. “It’s rough, but I understand. Mostly, anyway.”

  The shaman nodded. “You’ve progressed a great deal in terms of power and control. You wouldn’t have been able to defeat those Venatori witches if you hadn’t, but there’s still more to learn. Now we need to focus on building your stamina.”

  She gave a slow nod; that was about what she’d guessed. And, she had to admit, what she’d been afraid to hear. It was hard to go much beyond the point to which she’d already been pushed.

  Marcus went on, “That is why we’ve been at this for so long—almost two days back in your world—with so little rest, and in the taxing environment of the Other. This will train you to deal with even the most difficult of all circumstances so that lesser challenges will not be so intimidating.”

  Some days ago, he’d said something that had stuck with her. Practicing magic in the Other, where expulsions of arcane power were suppressed and weakened, was like doing aerobic training with an oxygen deprivation mask. It forced you to become more efficient.

  She thought she’d broken through the barriers the place imposed, but being in here for this long, she was feeling the old strain again.

  “The Other,” he continued, “is also a safe place to train. Not so much for us, but for other people, as well as the land and woods. Your responsibility as a shaman is to protect and guide your pack, and to be a good steward to the integrity of the land. That means no wanton destruction unless absolutely necessary, and measured responses rather than reckless ones.”

  He stared at her for a moment after making that last comment.

  She grimaced. It was no secret that she was impetuous. She sometimes overreacted to threats and challenges, and that she didn’t think too hard about safety or collateral damage when the shit hit the fan.

  That tendency had been with her long before she’d known she had magic. Everyone in town knew that Bailey Nordin wouldn’t shy away from a fight, a dare, or an opportunity to drive like crazy over rough roads and worse terrain.

  “I understand,” she stated.

  “Good.” The man looked into the hazy distance of the deep-violet sky. “The shaman and the werewitch are unlike the common lycanthrope in more ways than one. Being able to channel the arcane gives you the ability to go farther and longer in fights, mustering higher levels of force for prolonged periods. It’s a kind of endurance that goes beyond what even the strongest of the regular shifters can achieve.”

  She felt like she was already at that point but didn’t voice her protest for now. She just let him speak.

  “A truly adept shaman,” he elaborated, “is of only limited use if their abilities come forth in short spurts, like a puff of smoke that looks impressive but dissipates soon after. Power, control, and endurance. The third is what we’re now focused on. It’s one of several things you still require.”

  She squinted at him through the tongues of fire. “What are the others?”

  Waving a hand, he said, “We’ll come to those in time.”

  Bailey sighed and looked down at the wood, where red coals were forming. It seemed just then that the campfire separated her from her teacher by a distance of far more than a few feet. The expanse of the Other around here seemed to cut her off from everyone else as well. For the first time in a long time, she felt alone.

  Marcus must have noticed. “You miss Roland,” he declared. “He’s been by your side through most of this.”

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “I guess it’s kind of stupid since he’s around. He still is, right?”

  The shaman nodded. “He has tasks of his own to work on. They will make him a more effective companion for you.”

  The implications of the word “companion” made her face flush but also brought a warm tingling sensation she wasn’t prepared to deal with right now.

  Instead, she asked a question. “What’s his problem, anyway? I mean, what do you think the big hurdle he’s trying to clear with his training right now is?”

  Marcus rubbed his whiskered chin. “An inner conflict of sorts. He already has power and control, although as a wizard, the style of magic he learned was limited by his people’s traditions. I’d say his big challenge is coming to terms with his ancestry, his role as a powerful male witch, and the ways in which his very existence seemed to disrupt the usual order of things in his community. In that regard, the two of you are similar.”

  She gave a low, snorting chuckle. “You got that right. Hell, I never asked to be special or whatever. Speaking of which, what should I work on? Endurance, yeah, but more specifically, what kinds of exercises are we gonna do next?”

  The man paused. To her chagrin, he didn’t give her a direct answer.

  “You are not even an apprentice shaman yet, more of a trainee. Right now, you are passing the trials to determine your eligibility for beginning your apprenticeship. There are sophisticated physical and spiritual trials to go through. At this point, you have fulfilled the prerequisite of proving that you’re not going to kill yourself with your magic.”

  Her gut clenched. She’d somehow thought she was already well into the process of becoming a shaman.

  Why wasn’t he clearer with me about that? Is that part of the trials, too? Seeing how well I take disappointment?

  Marcus continued, “As a natural werewitch, you have the potential. But with that much raw power…well, those who train you or interact with you don’t want to be blown apart, nor do they particularly want you to blow yourself to kingdom come. That danger is passing as you gain control. What comes next, though, will be even harder.”

  Suddenly she was annoyed with all the ominous crap. She recalled that she’d already done stuff that was truly incredible.

  “Okay,” she said, her voice a little stronger, “bring it on. What’s next?”

  The shaman tossed a stick into the fire. “The spiritual quests you’ll have to undergo will tax you in ways you might not expect. They will make you question who and what you are, and the questions you find yourself asking will not always be the kind that you want to hear the answers to. They will strip away your illusions—the layers of psychological defense mechanisms and self-justifications we often employ—leaving only the raw and naked core of your personality. It’s a process that not everyone comes back from with their mind still intact. Some have gone mad.”

  She sat holding his gaze and digesting his words but did not respond since what he’d just said was only half of what awaited her.

  Marcus proceeded to the second half. “The physical trials, on the other hand, are designed to threaten your life, abusing your body in ways such that it has no choice but to regrow stronger than it’s ever been. It will prove how much you’re willing to go through—strain, deprivation, exhaustion, and pain—all of which are a preview for the challenges posed to shamans.”

  Something crazy deep within the girl’s brain, primitive and ferocious, took over and she grinned, showing her teeth.

  “You line ‘em up,” she stated, “and I’ll knock ‘em down. I’ve kicked the ass of everything else that’s come my way so far. No reason to think it won’t be the same way with the rest.”

  Marcus smiled back,
but his expression was far more subdued. “Good. You’re certainly not lacking in courage or determination.”

  He stood up with a nimbleness and speed that belied his age. Or would, if he were a man instead of a deity in human form.

  “Stay where you are,” he told her, “and rest. Think. Meditate. Roland might be back soon. How soon depends on him, of course. I have an errand or two to run. I’ll return for you, though.”

  She shrugged. “Okay.” It was customary by now for the shaman to excuse himself whenever he saw fit.

  The girl half-watched him through the flames as he strode off into the dark woods, making no more sound than a lean wolf on the hunt.

  The young man was only twenty-six, but the hard lines of his face, along with his shaved head—he’d likely started balding prematurely—made him look ten or twelve years older. He was fit and powerful of build, though, and his small black chin-beard gave him a curiously regal or authoritative appearance that was in no way detracted from by his sleeveless shirt, tattooed arms, or ripped jeans. He seemed to be a kind of redneck statesman in the making.

  As well as a shaman in the making.

  “You must understand,” Marcus stated, his voice low but steely-firm, “that I wouldn’t have come all this way and gone under and around your master’s authority if it wasn’t important. The fact that I’m speaking to you now is evidence of the magnitude of the threat we’re facing.”

  Nicolas Jezak nodded with his chin. “Okay,” he replied in a voice almost as gravelly as Marcus’, though a half-octave higher. “What is it, then? I gotta get back to training shortly.”