Werewolf Mage Box Set 1

by Harry Nix

  He immediately howled and then shifted to hybrid form, laughing, and jumping around.

  Alex skidded to a stop at the tree and shifted too, panting heavily.

  “Yes! The young werewolf wins again! Can you believe it folks? The aging champion has failed to hold his title!”

  “I’ll give you aging champion,” Alex said, swiping good-naturedly at Jacob who nimbly dodged out of the way, still laughing.

  Despite the darkness of yesterday and the still darker implications of what it meant and what Alex feared he had to do in the future, seeing Jacob laughing made him happy. When he’d first met the kid, he’d kept his head down and mouth shut, seeming afraid of Alex. From what he’d gathered, Jasper had ruled his pack with a good dose of fear and physical punishment.

  Of course, with Jacob opening up and relaxing had come a flood of shit-talking, the young werewolf challenging Alex to various physical games and often beating him. More than once Alex had ended up in the mud pit after Jacob pushed him off the wet log. He took it all in stride though, after all, he’d missed growing up as a werewolf and had a lot of catching up to do. As it was, he still screwed up leaps from time to time, frequently shooting past his intended target.

  Jacob suddenly went silent and Alex followed his lead. They were on the edge of the forest proper now, a place that teamed with animals, including boars, some of them large enough to provide a challenge to even an adult werewolf.

  “Soldiers?” Alex whispered, listening hard.

  There was definitely something out there. Various birds had gone silent, which was always a sign.

  “I smell boar,” Jacob whispered back.

  Alex relaxed, but only a little. There had been a lot of debate about what to do exactly about the fact six soldiers, twenty weredogs and then ten more junior necromancers plus some unknown number of senior necros had made it deep into their territory without being detected.

  The simple fact was that Alex’s pack wasn’t large enough for the territory that had originally been held by the Greenacre pack, which had numbered around two-hundred and fifty.

  Alex had been surprised to learn that number—from his observations when they’d first come here it had appeared to be far less. On the other hand, he saw how it was useful to hide your true strength and numbers from outsiders.

  It had also stung a little to learn the true size of the pack that had walked away after Jasper had been killed. He had only thirty-six in his pack, six of whom were children. So few had returned. It was true those thirty-six werewolves were eating him out of house and home, but Alex knew if he’d had a hundred, the attack yesterday would have gone very differently. At the very least, the invaders wouldn’t have made it so close to the village. With thirty-six, they hadn’t detected them in time.

  Thirty-five Alex amended to himself, now that Bish was dead. They planned to hold a funeral later today.

  And possibly thirty-four if Gem never wakes up, he thought.

  With such a small pack, there physically weren’t enough werewolves to hold the territory. Holding, as Alex had learned, was an active process. Members of the pack constantly roamed their territory, chasing out interlopers, and, much to Alex’s amusement, pissing on trees.

  He’d smelt it before, when running the boundaries of the territory but hadn’t put two and two together. Despite satellite phones, televisions and all sorts of modern technology, the werewolves had an animalistic part of their nature. And so, they pissed on trees, too.

  The angry werewolves wanted vengeance for the attacks and also wanted to keep roaming the territory to the boarders. Alex had listened to all the arguments and decided: yes, they could keep roaming to the borders but the minimum group size was now five if going further than a mile from the central village.

  “This way,” Jacob whispered and shifted to wolf form.

  Alex shifted too, the colors around him lighting up. Although actual wolves saw fewer colors than humans, werewolves had far better eyesight. The tones of the leaves were richer, the grass greener and his night-vision greatly improved. The darkness of the forest became not so dark, which allowed him to see their prey.

  It was a boar, a whopping beast of a thing. It was almost as big as Jacob and pitch black. It had two large tusks that looked deadly sharp and although it was standing still in the forest, Alex sensed a mad violence to it. If it saw them, it would charge.

  It had obviously heard Jacob howling and the two of them laughing but so far hadn’t spotted them.

  Jacob slinked from tree to tree, making sure always to keep something between him and the boar. Alex followed, keeping as low as he could and carefully placing his paws. It had only just been over a week now since he and Juno had returned from Baxter and although Alex was diving into werewolf life headfirst, he hadn’t yet had the chance to hunt.

  A stick cracked under his paw and Jacob froze, giving him a glare. Alex held his breath and listened. He could hear the boar breathing and faintly detect its heartbeat too. It didn’t sound like it was moving. After a moment, Jacob gave him another look that Alex didn’t need a dictionary to translate: stop stomping around and making noise!

  Together they circled around the boar, moving deeper into the forest as they did. Here, the density of the trees and darkness meant they could hide more easily. They were also downwind of the boar so it couldn’t smell them. The downside was that a field of silence spread around them too as birds and other small creatures sat still and silent, waiting for the Alpha predators to pass.

  The boar must have sensed the change in the sound too because it turned around, its ears twitching. It appeared to be deciding between charging in, stomping and making a show or bolting away. Both were viable strategies and one of the reasons it had lived so long and grown so large.

  In the darkness, Jacob motioned with a paw and his head and it took a moment for Alex to understand. He was to go one way and Jacob the other. Then they’d attack together from separate sides.

  Alex nodded and then Jacob slinked away, moving further around the boar. As he did, a small field of silence went with him. The boar started looking back and forth from where Alex was, to where Jacob was moving.

  As he waited for Jacob to get into position, Alex decided he’d ask if the werewolves hunted and killed birds and the like. The idea situation would be that birds and other small creatures didn’t fear them at all. The cone of silence may as well have been an alarm and Alex could see how it was both a help and hindrance when it came to defending territory.

  Once Alex judged that Jacob was roughly in place, he started creeping forward, sometimes only a few steps at a time before freezing again. He could see the boar through some low ferns and every time it turned its head to where Jacob was, Alex moved. He knew the young werewolf would be doing the same.

  As he crept, he could feel a wild excitement inside him. That feeling of right was back again. This was correct, what he was meant to be doing. Forget politics, forget asymmetrical warfare. Hunt boars, mate with his women, hold his territory!

  Alex reflected it wasn’t far off Conan the Barbarian’s motto: What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

  He shook his head at himself, forgetting for a moment where he was and what he was doing. The small movement was enough for the boar to see him.

  With a great roar, it charged.

  Shit Alex thought. He was in wolf form, but his human mind had screwed things up. It was no matter though—now the fight was on, his instincts took over.

  He ran at the boar just as Jacob, still in wolf form, came pelting out of the dark behind the animal.

  Alex had intended to go for the throat but the boar, survivor of countless battles was far too wily for that. As Alex dived, his jaws open, it ducked its head and lashed out with its tusks. It caught Alex in the side, the tusk going deep.

  Then Jacob hit it from the back, knocking it over and making things far worse as it landed on Alex, crushing
him against a tree. The tusk snapped off and the boar squealed in pain.

  Alex found himself in agony. The tusk had pierced his lung and now the boar was free of him, it swung to gore him again.

  In the fight with Jasper, Alex had realized a key flaw: he’d been practicing spells in human or hybrid form, the movements designed for hands to trigger spells. He hadn’t been able to cast any while in wolf form. In the intervening week, Alex had rectified that. The stabbing pain in his body was yelling at him that he had a long way to go to learn how to hunt like a true werewolf. He hadn’t used a spell specifically so it wouldn’t become a crutch.

  The hell with that Alex thought and cast Flame Shield.

  The fire burst out around his body and caught the boar as it attempted to jam its remaining tusk into Alex. There was a hiss and it squealed again as it burned its face against him. The boar reared up and pulled itself away from the sudden fire in front of it. Alex saw Jacob and then felt his shift as he transformed into hybrid form. For a moment he thought it was so Jacob could use his long claws on the boar but then realized it was so he could speak properly.

  “Put the fire out!” Jacob yelled.

  The boar shoved him, and the werewolf went down with a curse. If it had attacked then, Jacob would have been in serious trouble, but the boar was in too much pain to stay and fight. It had lost a tusk and burned itself. It went crashing off through the forest at high speed.

  Alex canceled the spell, but it was too late. He’d already set fire to some dry wood and undergrowth. He also made a mistake canceling the spell before getting out of the flames. The flame shield spell protected him from fire while it was active. The moment he canceled it, he got burned too.

  With a grunt of pain, Alex rolled out of the flames and shifted. The pain from the embedded tusk was roaring but Alex knew better than just to tear it out immediately. He had enough magic to heal but first, they had a fire to deal with.

  Jacob had started stomping the fire, squashing it out but it was spreading quickly. Alex joined him, blood running freely down his side. It was after his foot burned again, he realized his stupidity and cast the standard Shield spell. Now when he stomped, it activated, protecting him somewhat from the flames.

  It took all of ten seconds of stomping and yelling for both of them to realize the fire was out of their control.

  “Run,” Alex yelled, pointing in the direction where the forest thinned out.

  Jacob compiled and Alex managed to keep up, despite the pain. Soon they were out on the grassland.

  Alex wasted no time in sitting down and casting his homebrew Healing Flame spell.

  “Jacob, pull the tusk out on three,” he instructed.

  The young werewolf must have been spending too much time with Juno.

  “Do you mean, one two three go or go on three?” he asked, grinning for the first time.

  “No more Lethal Weapon for you unless this tusk is out straight away,” Alex said with the best smile he could manage through the pain.

  Jacob gripped the tusk but didn’t wait for a countdown. He simply pulled it out. After he cursed, Alex stuck the flaming finger directly into the wound as deep as he could. As he’d learned from healing Stephen, the spell was somewhat by touch. It could easily heal up surface injuries and leave deeper ones untouched. Alex supposed it was the downside of his hastily written healing spell. It was far more compact than the one Juno used but hers went everywhere in the body, the healing power finding its way to the worst injuries first.

  “That is so gross and cool,” Jacob said with reverence as Alex slowly pulled his finger out of the wound, the flame healing at it went. He’d pulled up his spell screen and saw his long list of injuries. The punctured lung was the worst of them, and he’d held his finger in place until it had disappeared.

  Soon the wound closed up, which was good because Alex was running out of natural mana. He had plenty of sex magic, a full bar actually, to power it but he wanted to keep it for an idea he had.

  “Burning down the forest, are we?” April said from behind them. Both werewolves jumped, surprised she’d managed to get the drop on them.

  “Fighting a boar and I used flame shield,” Alex said.

  Despite his wound, despite the fire that was now taking hold in the forest, a part of him wanted April badly. She was wearing overalls and a t-shirt and was covered in mud, which went up both arms to her elbows. To Alex, she looked unbelievably sexy. Her pink hair was shimmering in the sunlight and the grave-robbed necklace with the emerald was a deep green set against gold. It had mud flecks on it too, but it just completed the image of April as a forest nymph.

  “Yes, I saw, very impressive. Now give me some of that sex magic I know you’re carrying around,” she said.

  She didn’t wait for Alex to agree but came to stand in front of him, facing the burgeoning forest fire. It was starting to roar now, the flames growing as the breeze picked up. Although Alex knew forest fires were natural and required to clear out dead wood that would only make future fires more intense, he was glad April was going to attempt a spell of some kind to get it under control.

  He put his hand on her shoulder and they easily connected. They were in nature already but now Alex smelled fresh wildflowers and damp earth, the scent of her magic. Music burst out of the air as April lifted her hands and cast two spells in quick succession. For a moment Alex saw the screen above her head, translucent green and spells compiling.

  The first spell took half of Alex’s sex magic, the bar dropping quickly. The second took the rest of it and then April dropped her hands, her spell screen dropping.

  She turned around and quickly grabbed their hands. A moment later, the second spell hit, and Alex felt like running, anything to get away from here. Jacob took an involuntary step away from April, but she held both of them tight.

  “Flee, it’s called. Just resist it, hold on,” she murmured in a calming tone.

  Alex still had his spell screen up and he saw four question marks change to Flee under his active spell list.

  “I want to go,” Jacob said. He was breathing heavily but not struggling against April’s grasp.

  “It makes the animals run away, in case I can’t stop the fire,” April said, gently smiling at them.

  Alex let out a breath and focused on his mate. Her lips. That muddy necklace. The hint of cleavage he could see. Her eyes. Her vivid pink hair.

  “Just look at me Jacob,” April said.

  Jacob did as she asked, but Alex saw he was still tensed up, ready to bolt if she let go.

  They stood there for a minute until the spell canceled and then April let them go.

  Both of the werewolves shook themselves, as though they’d just gotten out of a bath.

  “Is that some kind of fear spell?” Alex asked. He knew Juno was keeping spells from him, which he’d put down to her secretive witch nature, but assumed April had been more open.

  “It’s a sort of ‘there’s a predator coming to eat you’ spell. It works best on animals and also affects werewolves at about half strength, due to your wolf side. Doesn’t do much at all to pure humans.”

  “That was half strength? I was going to sprint away!” Jacob said in amazement.

  “What was the first spell?” Alex asked, touching April on the arm. He wasn’t going to give away his thoughts, but he got the sudden impression he was being managed by his three mates, or at least magically so by Juno and April. He knew they were worried about his magical experimentation but also knew why he was doing it: he needed to get good, and fast.

  But he’d had hints before that both of them weren’t revealing entirely everything they knew, spell-wise. He remembered asking April a magical question and somehow it had turned into her dragging him to bed and after that the question had been forgotten.

  He wasn’t angry, or even annoyed but he realized he was going to have a more serious conversation with his mates in private and put it out on the table that he needed to read as many spells as possible. Ho
lding back because they were worried he’d blow his finger off (which he’d done with an early enchanting experiment) or start a fire (which he’d also done, more than once) or injure himself wasn’t going to work long-term.

  Alex wasn’t sure he kept all his thoughts off his face, however. April was watching him closely.

  “It’s a weather spell. The first part asks the trees and plants to give up some water to save them all. The second part pulls in moisture, trying to make it rain. It’s a warm day so that’s why I used your sex magic to power it. I’ll show you later.”

  Alex saw Jacob smile as he ducked his head. The young werewolf had seen both Nia and Juno topless not too long ago and was clearly still overwhelmed by April’s beauty. Talking about sex magic around him was a bit too much for the teenager.

  “I’d like that,” Alex said and smiled at her. Both were being kind and friendly, but they were also holding back from saying what they really wanted, in front of Jacob.

  Alex was sure much would be said about using a fire spell in dense forest.

  He looked back to the fire, which had now well and truly spread. The fire crackled and climbed the trees and as the wind blew, sometimes it roared. Smoke was spiraling up to the sky.

  It was then he felt the chill in the air that was clearly unnatural. It swiftly deepened and Alex was glad he was in his hybrid form. When he breathed out, a plume emerged from his mouth.

  “So awesome,” Jacob said, breathing puffs into the air.

  Alex had seen plenty of spells, but they’d all been instant-effect ones. April’s spell was slower. Despite not being connected to the magic via her, Alex still had his own connection, albeit weaker, and he could feel the currents in it. The spell was still drawing on the magic after April had cast it, which on its own was an interesting development.

  First, the trees and plants gave up water, which was pulled out of them, forming a mist. Droplets began to fall as it coalesced, but it wasn’t enough to stop the fire. Then the second part of the spell kicked in. The cold around them pulled water out of the air. Alex got a vague sense that April’s spell stretched high up above them, like a spike.