by Renée Jaggér
Most of them scattered in time to avoid the one, while Bailey magically caught the other in midair, set it on fire, and then dropped it on her foes. The commander stopped it mere feet from herself and instead chucked it a quarter-mile behind her toward a group of wolves who’d come from that direction. The flaming wreck crushed at least two of them.
“Goddammit,” Bailey raged, changing back to human. “You guys circle around them. Draw fire and strike when you can, but don’t risk yourselves. We need more Weres fighting together.”
Looking around, she realized that while the majority of the enemy were grouped in the middle of Greenhearth, other small groups of witches were prowling around the edge of the town, acting as skirmishers and harriers, preventing many of the werewolves from joining the main battle.
On the plus side, Roland, Browne, and the deputies had grouped together near the front door of the station, well-protected by the wizard’s shields.
There were three Weres approaching the melee from a side street. A single witch appeared behind them, drawing their attention with minor electrical shocks, and they turned to attack her.
“No!” Bailey cried, running, still in human form but magically boosting her speed and distance, to cover them from behind.
A storm of magic came from the central coven. It would have incinerated them all had Bailey not conjured a shield at the last instant, which she combined with a telekinetic reflective force that turned half the deadly mass back on its casters. Witches dodged or blocked, with one failing to do so. Lightning, fire, plasma, and acid engulfed her, and she fell apart in a mass of blackened bones.
The three Weres she’d just saved looked at Bailey with wide eyes. They’d killed the witch who’d distracted them, but they knew they owed her their lives. She motioned them on, telling them to fight smarter.
For a moment, as wolves converged on the battle and started acting according to strategy, it seemed like Greenhearth might be getting the upper hand over the Order’s troops. That was when Marcus stepped out of the shadows beside Bailey as she paused for a second’s rest.
“Can you help?” she asked immediately.
He shook his head. “I cannot. Not directly, anyway, without bringing the wrath of the other gods down on us all. We don’t want that. But…”
He opened a portal behind him and seven or eight werewolves streamed out, falling upon a formation of witches who’d moved toward Bailey in a growling, thrashing mass.
“…I was able to recruit more warriors to our cause.” The god smiled sardonically.
Bailey breathed. “Better than nothing.”
“And,” Fenris added, “I saw you risk yourself to save those three a moment ago. You’re doing exactly what you need to. Keep fighting and keep leading!”
Then he was gone.
Bailey rejoined the battle. The moment of their community’s advantage was brief, however.
At the four points of a square around the town center, glowing amethyst portals opened and out poured witches. Two leather-clad Venatori emerged from each, and following them were other non-Order witches, ranging in number from two to six—local sorceresses they had recruited to their cause, brought in as reinforcements to the already massive force of witches assaulting the town.
Bailey motioned four big Weres over to her. “We’re gonna charge those new arrivals,” she said. “Take out the ones in the leather catsuits first. They’re stronger and more dangerous. I’ll lead since I’m the one they want most. It’ll draw most of the fire away from you guys. Got it?”
They did. Taking a deep breath, Bailey shifted again into her wolf form, then bounded toward the cluster of smirking women near the closest of the purple doorways.
She narrowly dodged a fireball, then crashed into one of the two Venatori, a pair of the Weres with her attacking the other while the remaining two wolves pounced on the lesser witches.
One of the lycanthropes took a nasty burn on the hip and leg, inhibiting his ability to run or pounce, but he could walk stealthy enough to act as a lookout or lie in ambush. As for the witches, all lay dead and bloodied on the street.
“We lost the element of surprise,” said Bailey, “so we gotta be more careful with the next group.”
This time, she circled around the pack, summoning magic as needed while in her wolf shape to repel or distract the lead witches as her Weres took out the lesser ones. One of them leapt at a Venatori soldier, only to yelp and slump dead to the ground, a magenta plasma-blade stuck through his mouth and out the back of his skull.
Bailey roared and pounced on the witch, ripping her head off in retaliation and spitting it out. The remaining non-Order sorceress fled screaming toward the main group near the Scottish leader.
Bailey saw that the Venatori controlled most of the town’s territory and that far too many lupine forms lay motionless in the streets or against walls, or otherwise torn and burned and blasted beyond all help.
They were slowly losing. They simply didn’t have the numbers to repel such a powerful force of invaders. The average witch was a match for the average werewolf, and most of their nemeses were full Venatori, each as powerful as a small coven of lesser channelers.
She sought out Roland and found him still working with the cops who’d emerged from the deathtrap building to protect them from magical attacks while they counterattacked with simple but effective bullets, dropping a witch here and there with well-placed shots.
“Roland!” Bailey called. “I’m sorry, but we need to do this together with magic. My wolves can only do so much.”
“Do it here, then,” he demanded, gritting his teeth as he tried to repel five different kinds of arcane blasts at once and also struggled against unseen waves of fear, despair, and confusion. “If I leave this spot, these guys are all going to die.”
The cops and deputies clearly heard him but they didn’t react, focused as they were on firing, taking cover behind streetlights or piles of rubble, and reloading.
Bailey almost panicked. Anywhere she tried to go to redirect her own efforts, she left someone weaker, while the Venatori seemed just as strong as they’d been at the start of the fight.
From the sky came a growling, buzzing roar, and Bailey shot a glance at the heavens, expecting something like a lightning storm or a swarm of meteors to descend upon the town. What she saw shocked her to momentary stillness.
Over the mountains came a squadron of black helicopters. At least a dozen, with seven or eight coming from the south, but a couple more from the other three directions, too, all converging on the Hearth Valley.
Roland saw them, too. “Holy shit!” he exclaimed, his eyes wild and his sweaty hair flying in the hot breeze. “Gondor called for aid, and the Riders of Rohan came. Hah! Oh, this is great!”
Turning her eyes to the roads leading out of the hills, Bailey saw that the choppers weren’t the only vehicles coming into town. Black jeeps and vans streamed in off side roads as well as the main highway. One of them rammed a startled witch and crushed her beneath its wheels.
They came to a stop on the high ground surrounding the town center, then doors opened and men in dark suits and glasses jumped out. All of them held strange silver guns that looked like something aliens in a science fiction movie would wield, and they wasted no time.
Beams of magenta-white arcanoplasm shot into the melee, sending witches scurrying for cover, carving through magic shields, kicking up molten fragments of earth, and in some cases, striking the sorceresses and reducing them to piles of bleached ash.
Will Waldsbach, bloody-faced but alive as he struggled atop the roof of the grocery store, threw up his arms. “Yes! Yes, goddammit!” He let out a howl of triumph. Other Weres, scattered around the valley by the violence, echoed him.
The helicopters swept overhead and agents leaned out of doors to fire similar beams from the sky, killing a few more witches and putting others on the defensive. Bailey suddenly realized with a leap of her heart and spirits that the battle was winnable.
Bailey knew what she had to do. She turned to Roland. “Stay here. Help them,” she barked, and then she fell to her hands and knees, already shifting, and leapt over the top of the nearest building to bound through the streets.
With the Agency harassing the main force of sorceresses, Bailey made the rounds, directing her scattered wolves to encircle the town and systematically hunt down and destroy those witches who were positioned away from the central group.
Some of the Venatori and their non-Order patsies fought valiantly, almost arrogantly, as though they refused to believe that the tide had turned. Others panicked and tried to flee.
Most died. The few who tried to surrender Bailey just wounded, biting down on their legs or tossing them hard into walls and leaving them to be rounded up by other Weres. She’d have to trust them to keep watch and the witches not to try to backstab them. There was still the rest of the battle for her to fight.
Magic rained down, and furry shapes pounced. Bodies dropped. Bailey knew her people were still dying, but with the battle’s outcome looking favorable, their sacrifices might well lead to victory. Given that the wolves knew the town and countryside, and using their superior physical abilities, the Venatori were having more trouble pinning them down.
Soon, Weres again controlled the outskirts of the town and the forested slopes of the surrounding foothills, all the peripheral witches having been killed or otherwise neutralized. The main battle between the women in leather and the men in sunglasses still raged at the center of Greenhearth, however. With mounting horror, Bailey saw that agents were starting to soar into the air, clearly not of their own accord, some of them rising half a mile into the sky before plummeting back into the hills, screaming all the while. Cars levitated and smashed down among the men’s ranks. It had to be the Scotswoman; Bailey had been able to feel her power.
Bailey shifted back to human form. Two wolves stood nearby, waiting for instruction.
“Keep patrolling the edges and pick off any witches you can,” she said. “I’m going to help.” She set off at a run toward the main battle.
The shortest route lay through an alley between two buildings. Bailey sprinted through it, thinking only of how she could pile magical pressure on the Venatori without hitting any of the agents or getting in the way.
Then she tripped. Something had snagged her ankle, and flailing her arms, she flew straight toward the pavement. Beneath the point of impact, a burbling mass of blackish-purple fluid like a dark melting giant flower suddenly appeared.
“Oh, crap!” she exclaimed as she landed in it. It clung to her limbs and body and hair like glue, and she struggled to turn over enough to see what was going on.
Above her stood Rhona, laughing with glee as her brown braid whipped behind her like a snake’s tail. She’d set some kind of invisible tripwire and caught Bailey like an insect on flypaper. A violet plasma-blade grew from her hand.
Then she screamed. Another magical blade, this one emerald, protruded from her chest, and she looked down at it even as her eyes went glassy. Roland tossed her aside and her body slumped, unmoving, against the wall.
“And to think,” the wizard gasped, “I was starting to feel like a third wheel.”
“Roland, help me get out of this stuff,” Bailey urged. “And thanks. I need to get into that battle. It’s looking like a stalemate.”
Grimacing, he knelt beside her and drew all the moisture out of the strange black substance so that it hardened and then crumbled to dust. She broke through it and struggled back to her feet. Then, together, they charged toward the battle.
Once they were out on the highway, a quarter-mile or less from the edge of the melee, Bailey realized that they might be too late.
The Venatori’s commander, grinning hugely as her hair flapped in the breeze, raised both her hands and made another sound-enhanced announcement even as beams and bolts and waves of force streaked around her. Bailey had the disturbing impression that not only was the woman relishing all the violence of combat, but she also enjoyed showing off.
“You men think you’re hard,” she proclaimed, her voice echoing over the din. “Do you know how old I am? Thirty-six. And I sit on the ruling council. You think I got that far that young by being soft?”
With a swipe of her hand, the hillside behind her shifted as though an earthquake had struck it. But it wasn’t the land moving; it was the trees.
At least two dozen fully-grown pines detached from the slope, their roots torn free of the ground, and flew upwards in an arc, descending toward the lines of the agency’s soldiers like colossal green javelins.
“Holy living fuck!” Roland shouted. “Well, she obviously specialized in telekinesis.”
The agents fired their alien weapons skyward, destroying some of the trees and sending burning fragments raining down. Without the beams pressing down on the witches, lightning and ice shot out from the ranks of the Venatori toward their foes. Two agents fell dead.
Bailey threw up her arms. “We gotta stop those things!”
Roland was already on it. A huge mass of shimmering green light, the biggest shield he’d ever conjured, spread above the men in black. The trees struck it and slowed but did not stop. Their large mass, combined with the broad area he’d had to cover, made it impossible to keep the shield strong enough to immobilize the projectiles.
Instead, the werewitch reached up with her mind and grabbed them. One or two at a time, she directed telekinetic force of her own against them, shifting them off-course and causing them to thump into abandoned side streets or fly back toward the hills to crash amidst the forest.
It was all the help the agents needed. Townsend had rushed back to his jeep and come back with what looked like a silver grenade. He pressed a button and tossed it into the mass of the witches, right toward their leader.
The woman’s resounding laughter cut off as the bomb detonated. A huge sphere of crackling purple light spread over the sorceresses, ensnaring some of them in a static field that left them immobilized and writhing in pain.
The Venatori leader had already countered, though. A mass of hazy darkness spread from her to the witches nearest her, encompassing and protecting them, and then, her face contorting in a snarl, she whipped a hand in front of her face, and all the women within the gloomy substance vanished with a purple flash.
It was over. The witches’ leader had retreated, leaving only the dead and the captives.
Bailey fell to her knees, her arms flying skyward. “Yes! Oh, gods, I can’t fucking believe it. We did it. It’s over!”
Similar shouts and howls and cheers went up around the valley as Weres and agents and normal humans were overcome with elation and relief. They’d repelled the seemingly insurmountable attack. They still lived.
Roland came up behind the girl as she knelt and put his hands on her shoulders. She leaned her head back against his lower body. He handed her a man’s shirt he’d found somewhere.
“You know,” he pointed out, “you really should be facing the opposite direction for that.”
“Shut up.” She laughed. “You’ll pay for that later. For now, though…”
She sighed, got to her feet, and put on the shirt, which came almost to her knees, then they walked toward the center of town.
The Agency’s personnel, aided by the sheriff and his deputies, were securing the area and detaining the witches who’d been caught in the purple energy field created by the silver grenade. From around the edges of town, Weres dragged other sorceresses they’d wounded or captured.
Sirens blared as a fire truck and a couple of ambulances made for the village’s center—not a long drive since Emergency Services was right next to the sheriff’s station. Random citizens
drifted out of their homes, frightened but slowly realizing the threat had passed.
Townsend greeted the pair. “I told you,” he said, resting his silver plasma gun on his shoulder. “I said I’d get through to them eventually. I wish it had been sooner, but it wasn’t too late. And we’ve sent a message, one they’ll have no choice but to get.”
Roland nodded. “Let’s hope they get it good and hard.”
Behind Townsend, other agents clapped anti-magic handcuffs on the frazzled witch captives, peppering them with questions and promising them clemency if they cooperated.
Soon, emergency workers began to care for those who needed it, and the Weres who’d fought so bravely congregated around Bailey.
“Thank you for all you’ve done,” she told them. “We’ve lost more of our brothers, but it was thanks to our actions that we saved a lot more.” Looking around, she saw Russell among the surviving warriors and almost melted with relief. He was spattered with blood, but it didn’t seem to be his.
The Weres saluted, the fierce gleam of pride and admiration in their eyes saying more than words could.
Bailey went on, “I gotta help with the cleanup and make sure everyone else is okay.”
Roland accompanied her as they returned to the mass of humans. Behind them, the lycanthropes melted into the forest.
Gunney came down to check on them and the Camaro. Parked in the rear corner of a lot just outside the town center, it had somehow survived the miniature apocalypse, much to the relief of both him and Bailey.
Townspeople came by to offer their thanks or congratulations. Occasionally they were livid with residual fear over the fact that this had happened, but on the whole, it seemed that everyone understood what was going on and why.
As Bailey did what she could to aid them all, some put their hands on her shoulder or gave her nods as they passed.