by Renée Jaggér
The god of light was watching them from his position just up the slope, fingers stroking his beautifully shaped chin. “I see,” he stated in a softer but no less melodious voice. “Very interesting.”
The young woman wiped sweat from her brow and moved the hand back through her hair, slicking it away from her face. “So, did we pass?” She was worried that the answer would be no since the spirits probably could have killed them if they’d wanted to.
Baldur walked a few paces closer toward them. He looked almost confused by the question. “I discovered much I wanted to know,” he replied. “Namely, that you do not pose an immediate threat to the gods.”
Roland coughed. “Thanks.”
“However,” the tall deity went on, “you clearly have the potential. Both of you are stronger than usual for mortal weavers of spells. Also, you fight well together, almost like soldiers who have served side by side in many conflicts.”
Bailey nodded. She and the wizard had battled together a hell of a lot of times by now, even if they’d only known each other for maybe two months.
Baldur raised both hands and looked from side to side at the spectral host he’d summoned. “Heroes of old who died bravely in battle, your task here is ended. Return now to Valhalla and Sessrúmnir until you are called upon again.”
The sound from before, like a clanging gong of tremendous size, spread across the plain, and the Viking spirits slowly faded like night mist burned away by the sun.
Watching this, the werewitch and the wizard emptied their lungs in relief and relaxed their postures. Both wondered if the incorporeal warriors would have destroyed them or stopped at the moment of truth, as they had a moment ago. For now, nothing suggested that Baldur would threaten them with anything further. The danger had ended.
The god did, however, stride toward them, each footfall ringing an invisible bell and creating a flash of light.
Bailey wondered why no such effects happened when Marcus moved around, but then remembered that he usually traveled in disguise. What she saw before her was Baldur’s true form, comparable to the towering wolf-beast Fenris had reverted to when he’d finally revealed his identity.
The deity stopped about ten paces from them. “Tell me,” he asked pleasantly but with an enigmatic twist of curiosity on his mildly smiling mouth, “why has Fenris seen fit to train you? What is it about you two that so greatly arouses his interest?”
Bailey seemed confused or annoyed by the question, so Roland figured he’d have to be the one to answer it. He almost made a smartass quip focused on “arouse” but thought better of it. Baldur’s oddly pure and naïve personality was such that he probably wouldn’t get the joke.
Instead, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to cover for her.
“Well,” he intoned, “I think Fenris has no serious interest in me. I’m not one of his ‘children,’ so to speak, so he just figures he might as well help me fine-tune my magic a bit. Probably the same thing with both of us.”
Baldur cocked his head to the side. “And yet Bailey is one of his children, so she must be his chief focus. Why?”
Roland hoped Bailey would be smart enough to keep quiet. For his part, he did something he would never have pictured himself doing—giving the silent treatment to a god.
Chapter Four
Bailey straightened up but otherwise relaxed as the haze of battle receded. She’d found it difficult thus far to come up with any satisfactory answer to Baldur’s questions besides the one she’d already given—that Fenris was training her to use her powers responsibly.
As such, she was glad that Roland was stalling the deity with his usual flippant bullshit. Now, he seemed to be reduced to staring the tall, shining man down, and a mortal was guaranteed to lose that sort of contest.
She swallowed some leftover spit and found her voice again.
“Because I have magic,” she stated. “It’s that simple. It’s been a long time since any werewitches were born, just a few male shamans here and there. I guess he wants to make sure I’m trained right, so I know what I’m doing and can help the Were people. I have more power, so he figures I have more responsibility.”
She spread her hands, palms toward Baldur, and arched her eyebrows. It wasn’t a shrug; she hoped conveyed something like, “That’s it. What more do you want me to say?”
Which was, of course, how she felt.
The god tilted his head back to its normal position. “I see. That is most intriguing—that you would be such a rare specimen, and he would desire to see you realize your potential according to such notions of wisdom and justice.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond to that.
Baldur smiled again in his faint, enigmatic way. “Thank you, mortals, for treating with me. Each of us, the ruling family of Asgard, must take heed of the actions of the others. Now, having tested you, I must go. Farewell.”
He gave them a coy nod of the head that was oddly ladylike and then walked back up the slope toward the point where he’d first made his entrance. With a wave of his hand, the massive golden door opened on the realm of crystalline sunlight and the deity vanished into its blazing depths.
The portal slammed shut behind him and disappeared. It left only a faint metallic ringing in the air behind it.
Roland slumped against a tree. “Good lord, I’m glad that’s over. Any dealings with powerful entities from other planes of existence are potentially hazardous as all fuck. We’re more or less humans, and no matter how smart we are, how the hell are we supposed to know how a god or a demon or a fairy sprite or an elemental or anything of the sort thinks? You never know where you stand with them.”
Bailey stood, hands on her hips, staring at the empty patch of air where the gateway to Asgard had been only a moment ago. Something roiled in her stomach. She was disturbed, but she didn’t know why.
She turned to the wizard. “Is that why you seem kinda standoffish with Marcus? Wait, you were like that with him even before we knew who he was.”
“Eh, you might say it occurred to me that something about him was a bit…off. Though aside from putting us through all this Spartan crap and never seeming to show up when we need him most, he hasn’t done anything I can take issue with, so maybe I’m wrong. But why would Baldur be interested in us?”
The girl was wondering the same thing. “Yeah, it’s weird, but like you said, we can’t understand their way of thinking. Maybe it’s like some, uh, I dunno, upsetting-the-cosmic-balance type of thing.”
The wizard stood back up and began strolling casually up the slope. “Could be. Something like that. I’m not an expert on the inner workings of frickin’ Valhalla. It makes me curious, though.”
Bailey fell into step beside him, slowing her pace once she’d caught up. It occurred to her that she probably knew what Roland was about to say, and she didn’t much like it.
“What?” she prompted.
“I’m wondering,” he extrapolated, “if there’s internal strife going on up there. Office politics, Machiavellian shit, or just plain old family drama. Why is Fenris spending so much time on Earth? What’s his standing in the pantheon right now, anyway?”
Bailey frowned. “Well, if we can’t understand how the gods think, we sure can’t expect to understand all that shit. And the reason Fenris is here is to train us seems pretty damn obvious to me. Or train me, at least. He’s taking an interest in us. His ’children,’ as he’d say.”
“I suppose,” the wizard murmured.
They trekked up the gentle slope into a rocky, brambly area. Up ahead was a hillock that looked familiar, probably the one that rose above the Pool of Dark Reflections.
Bailey turned things over in her head, examining them from different sides. “If Baldur is concerned about Fenris, why doesn’t he just find him and talk to him? Why ask us? Plus, he said something about deciding we weren’t a threat to the gods. Maybe the Asgardians have been drinking the same Kool-Aid as those dumbass packs that thought I was gunning for their alphas.”
>
“I don’t know,” Roland admitted.
They continued toward the hillock. It wasn’t the first place they’d seen in the Other—that was an even swampier area, far distant from here—but it was the first place they’d come with Marcus by their side, and where they’d begun their serious training. It seemed like the best place to wait for their teacher.
Neither of them had any desire to descend toward the black pool.
When they were about halfway up the hill, another portal opened at the crest. This one resembled the others they’d see: door-sized and filled with a slow-moving, luminescent purple liquid.
“Well, there he is,” Bailey remarked.
“Finally,” Roland added.
But the first individual to step out wasn’t Marcus. And he was followed by nine others.
Under his breath, Roland grated, “Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
The wizard had recognized the new arrivals as Weres. To Bailey, it had been even more obvious. She seldom failed to know her people when she saw them. They were not, however, anyone she’d met before.
The first man to come through, she immediately pegged as the group’s leader, and quite possibly the pack alpha. He was a little over six feet tall, with a bulging gut but plenty of muscles to go with it. He had a trimmed beard and a ponytail, both dark brown but streaked with silver. She guessed his age at forty-five or so. He was arguably a bit past his prime, but he still looked formidable.
The others were younger men, ranging from about eighteen to thirty-five, and many of them took after their boss in being bearded and wearing their hair long. All were noticeably dour and dressed in heavy clothes of gray or black.
Roland waved. “Oh, hi. We were just planning on leaving, so you guys can use the Other without us getting in the way. Happy training.”
The shadow of a sardonic, crooked smile was briefly visible on the alpha’s face. He crossed his burly arms over his broad chest, and behind him, his troops fanned out to block the way to the portal.
“Actually,” the man said, “we came for you.”
Alarm bells went off in Bailey’s head and she stepped forward, preparing to negotiate, explain, and threaten if need be. To her surprise, the troupe seemed totally uninterested in talking.
They shifted in unison, and ten big iron-colored wolf-beasts stood before the pair. Then they attacked.
“Fuck!” Bailey exclaimed as the alpha lunged for her. She pivoted to the side, speeding up her movements through subtle telekinesis. “No, goddammit! We’re just here training! What the hell are you doing?”
Roland snorted. “They’re trying to kill us, obviously! I’ve had it with this shit. Take ‘em out. They’re your people.”
Two wolves jumped at him, their jaws open and trailing drool, and the wizard launched himself twenty feet into the air before floating backward. He kept his hands outstretched to ready a spell, but was hesitant to strike.
Bailey likewise tried to steer clear of the wolves’ attacks without hitting back. “Knock this shit off! I’m a shaman’s apprentice, and I’m here for training. He’ll vouch for me. I don’t even know you guys!”
The reply she got was a snapping pair of jaws coming toward her face. She ducked back, seized the wolf around the neck, and hurled him aside, using a bit of magic to send the creature flying farther than he would have otherwise. She also slowed his descent so he didn’t break his legs on impact.
“I’m not an enemy!” she shouted, her frustration near the breaking point. If they didn’t cease immediately, she’d have to retaliate. “I’m training to be a shaman to werekind under Fenris himself! Haven’t you heard? Do you realize what that means?”
A lycanthrope crashed into her from behind. She lost her balance, but by the time she fell to what would have been her hands and knees, she was standing on four legs. Black hair had sprouted all over her body, which was now elongated and lupine, and her eyes glowed red. She growled.
Bailey launched into them, nimbly dodging their brutish assaults and shouldering pack soldiers aside. She pounded their furred breasts with her paws, sweeping their legs out from under them and wrestling them to the ground by the scruffs of their necks.
But she didn’t break limbs or spines or rip out guts or throats.
Roland, watching how his partner in crime fought, picked up on the hint that this wasn’t meant to be a battle to the death. He adjusted his tactics accordingly, conjuring magic that would stop, slow, disorient, and possibly injure the Weres, but nothing that was likely to kill them.
A few were charging at him now, so he raised a wall of ice in front of them. It was not so thick that they risked cracking their skulls open on impact, but thick enough that crashing into it, or through it in the case of the biggest one, left them reeling and dizzy or crumpled in shock and lightly bleeding from minor cuts where the ice fractured.
Then he conjured a tornado made of equal parts wind and pure telekinetic arcane force, which scooped up three of the Weres, and spun them in disorienting circles before tossing them into patches of thick, gnarled roots.
With the herd thinned some, Bailey turned her sights on their alpha. She watched the lead wolf closely, her eyes and brain working rapidly to process all pertinent information and timing the way he moved. He was strong and skilled, but not as fast as he likely used to be—and not as fast as she was.
Bailey pounced. Her wolf body, large as it was, passed nimbly under the alpha’s claw-swipe and she knocked him over, her jaws clamped around his throat. She growled as loudly as she could.
Within a second, the fighting had stopped. The other werewolves had all turned toward their leader, now helpless and an instant from death if Bailey chose to kill him. Roland too drew back, still alert but not casting spells for the moment.
The girl shifted back into human form. Doing so gave the alpha an opening to strike, and he could have bitten her leg off if he was fast enough. But he didn’t, and once she was comfortably back in her usual shape, Bailey put her foot on his throat.
Then she threw up her hands. “Okay, this fight’s goddamn over. Now, will everyone please calm the hell down?”
A few low growls emerged, but mostly the wolves looked like they’d lost the will to continue the battle.
“See,” Bailey went on, “I just beat your alpha. If I can do that to the strongest of your pack, imagine what I could do to the rest of you. And it looks like Roland was handling you all pretty well, too. None of you are dead. We don’t want to kill your asses, even though you earned as much. Now, how about you tell me why the fuck you attacked us?”
Beneath her boot, the alpha shifted back to his human form, now naked. She removed her foot from his neck and allowed him to scooch back and sit up. His pack warriors followed his lead and changed back as well.
Roland let out a half-sigh, half-groan. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he quipped. “It’s been a long day. Or a long segment of eternity, whatever applies to this bizarre place.”
Cautiously, the two factions gathered their shredded clothing, keeping eyes on each other, and reconfigured their positions so Bailey and Roland soon were on one side of the hilltop and the strangers on the other.
The alpha stood near the front and regarded the pair with heavy-lidded eyes. He was clearly in some pain from the exertions of the battle, combined with how hard Bailey had slammed him into the ground.
“We came here to seek you out on the advice of another pack. Neighbors of ours and friends. Their apprentice shaman told us he had reliable information that you—Bailey—were a threat that had to be dealt with. That you were plotting against our pack and that the shit you’ve been pulling lately is bringing a lot of attention from those European witches. The same ones who murdered the Junipers’ shaman.”
For a second, Bailey wanted to double over with grief. Her victory over the Venatori outside of Greenhearth had been rendered bitter by the discovery that they’d killed old Estus.
Then she got angry.
“God-fuck
ing-dammit,” she shouted, and the Weres tensed, half-expecting her to start fighting them again. She didn’t, though; that wasn’t the kind of rage that consumed her now. “How many fucking times do I have to go through this shit? The Junipers were the first pack to come after me because someone gossiped that I was gunning for their alpha. You’d think that if people heard about what happened to their shaman, they’d also have frickin’ heard that I made peace with them and they agreed that the rumors were a crock of shit.”
The alpha across from her looked almost embarrassed.
“And then,” she went on, “the Eastmoors came after me, and one got himself killed, even though I sure as shit didn’t want it that way. Them too—they’d heard this crap about me wanting to take over the whole damn Pacific Northwest. Who the hell is spreading this shit? Dan Oberlin’s friends? If that’s the case, why is anyone listening to a bunch of scumbags who were kidnapping Were girls right out of their own towns? For fuck’s sake!”
Roland put a hand on her shoulder. Feeling it there, she started to calm down and slowed her breathing deliberately, deciding she’d ranted enough. They both waited for the mysterious pack to respond.
The leader cast his eyes to the side for a second, then inhaled and puffed himself up. Bailey grasped somehow that he was contrite. Ashamed, even, although he had to save face in front of his men. She’d be willing to meet him halfway as long as he tried to be reasonable.
“Let us introduce ourselves,” he said. “My name is Alfred Warner, and we’re the Whitcomb Creek Pack. West side of the Cascades between Salem and Eugene. We were acting on what we thought was accurate information in the interest of our pack like anyone would. It wasn’t personal. And we appreciate that you didn’t try to kill any of us.”
His words, she saw, had the effect of calming some of his followers, who looked like they still had half a mind to try ripping her head off.
She nodded and crossed her arms. “Okay. Fair enough. But who gave you that information, which obviously wasn’t accurate? Like I said, this is the third time someone’s tried to take me out, based on slander. All I’m trying to do is learn to handle my powers and become a decent shaman. No bullshit.”