Werewolf Mage 2

by Harry Nix

  Alex felt a stabbing pain in his back as Jasper slashed at him again, a chunk of flesh coming free. The spell screen was still up but with them rolling and jolting, Alex was having trouble concentrating on it. He wasn't going to let go of Jasper though – he might not get this chance again.

  Alex tried to cast flame shield, but in the fighting missed it, and he cast purify instead, charging it with pain.

  The spell raced through Alex and then flowed down through his teeth and into Jasper’s leg. It was as though he had his teeth in so deep the spell couldn’t tell where Alex ended and Jasper started.

  Jasper groaned as his skin suddenly split in multiple places, black liquid pouring out, washing over Alex. It smelt like metal and something burned. The flood was over in an instant and then Jasper's leg suddenly crunched, the bone giving way and the werewolf roared in pain.

  Alex shook his head, tearing at the leg before ripping it away and spitting it out. He shifted then to his hybrid form, leaping atop Jasper and pushing him down into the dirt. He started slashing at him, aiming for a killing blow.

  Although Jasper was strong, whatever it was that Alex had pushed out of him had been the source of his power. There was no final grand moment. It was just Alex and Jasper slashing each other, Alex struggling against the red and black tide that was threatening to overwhelm him.

  Finally he broke through Jasper's defense and tore his head off his shoulders.

  As soon as he did, Alex staggered away from the body, blood dripping from his claws. Juno and April rushed forward to grab him. Juno had no magic left but was borrowing power from April to cast a healing spell. Alex still had Know Thyself open and saw that he had a large wound on his back, gushing out blood.

  Nia grabbed something off the ground and Alex realized with shock that it was a chunk of muscle that Jasper had carved out of him. It was covered in dirt and blood. Nia shoved it into the hole in his back and Juno pressed her hands to it, trying to seal it up to stop the bleeding.

  “You won,” April said.

  Alex looked around at the gathered werewolves who were watching him in silence. Suddenly, as one, the circle disintegrated, the werewolves walking away without a second glance.

  Only Eric approached them, with Alara by his side.

  “Congratulations, you are the Alpha of the Greenacre pack, or what will remain of it. As you can see, many are leaving,” he said.

  Alex looked around. Julius had never mentioned this part of the challenge. What did he mean they were leaving?

  “Unless you wish to fight some of them to force them to stay? I’m sure there are some children you could hurt to ensure their loyalty?”

  His head was muzzy from blood loss but Alex managed to remember his desire to kill Eric for the binding spell.

  “You cast the binding spell,” he snarled.

  “No, I found a wand out there that you can examine yourself. I assume you’re skilled enough,” Eric said.

  He pulled a wand out of his robes and when no one took it, dropped it on the ground.

  Alex looked up into the village. The werewolves were shifting and running off into the darkness, leaving everything behind.

  “I better not see you here come morning mage,” Alex said finally.

  Eric merely nodded and then walked away with Alara, disappearing into the night.

  The four of them went into the main building, Alex trying to work out where exactly they could hole up until dawn. He was too injured to travel far but Juno was worried there was another binding wand out there. If they got locked into a building again with a fire, they’d die this time. They either had to stay in the main building and hope it was too large to cover or leave right now.

  They were discussing, standing in the main entranceway when a group of werewolves entered.

  There was a young man, maybe seventeen years old and five women. Three looked to be teenagers too and the last two were elderly, in their eighties at least.

  “Everyone else is gone and they won't be coming back tonight. What you want to do Alpha?” the young man called out.

  Alex was still having trouble standing upright. He was drawing on the magic around them to help heal his wounds, seeing his pain mana refilling quickly.

  He looked at the six of them, feeling his heart sink that a kid, three young girls not old enough to vote and two old ladies were the only ones who’d decided to stay.

  “Find something to bar the doors and then we can keep watch until morning,” Alex said.

  The two elderly werewolves took themselves off somewhere into the building while the three girls and the kid hastened to follow Alex's instructions, finding chairs and tables and stacking them up against the door.

  Alex turned away from them and saw Juno, Nia and April watching him

  “Well, we just killed the emissary but, hey, we got some land,” Juno said.

  Alex gave a weak smile and then his gaze settled on Nia.

  “What do you think your dad's going to say about this?”

  Nia shrugged. “Yeah, he might be a bit annoyed but Jasper has always been a bit of an asshole.”

  18

  At four in the morning Alex got out of bed and went downstairs to find the kid was guarding the barricaded door.

  “Do you want to go out Alpha?” he asked.

  Alex was tired from poor quality sleep and although most of his wounds had healed, the one in his back was itching like crazy on the surface and throbbing down in his spine. He looked at the who cast his eyes the ground as though he was afraid of Alex.

  “What’s your name?” Alex asked.

  “Jacob.”

  “Okay Jacob, just call me Alex and yeah, I want to go outside,” he said.

  “Yes Alph – Alex,” Jacob said. Alex helped him unbarricade the door and then walked out, Jacob falling in behind him.

  It was still dark and clouds were passing overhead, sometimes obscuring the moon and the stars. There were lights on in some of the cabins. The werewolves who’d abandoned the pack simply walked off, taking nothing with them and apparently not even turning lights off or closing doors.

  As soon as he got outside, Alex shifted to his hybrid form, so he could see better and took a deep breath. Over the smell of gardens and dirt and everyday life there was blood. Jasper's body was where Alex had left it. It was still splattered with the black liquid Alex had forced out of him.

  Alex walked over to Jasper with Jacob following behind him. He crouched down to look at the body but then hesitated to touch it, not knowing what the black liquid was.

  “He was really mean,” Jacob said.

  “I think he was working for the mages too,” Alex murmured.

  After all, what other explanation could there be? Alex had come to speak with the emissary who would in turn contact the mages, looking for an answer. But then they'd immediately been attacked, clearly by werewolves in the pack. Alex's money was still on the mage, Eric, but also he had some doubts about it. It seemed a lot of what Eric had said to him yesterday had wormed its way into his brain.

  What if it wasn't Corvus that had attacked him? Maybe the mercenary had been spelled to say that it was, or tricked.

  Jasper had clearly been using some magical potion to strengthen his bones but Alex guessed such things were common, given there were pawn shops that sold wands, rings and spelled armor.

  Alex stood up and looked around, taking in the cabins and paths of this little bit of civilization amongst the wilderness. He stepped around Jasper's dead body and headed off down one of the paths with Jacob behind him.

  “So how long have you been in the Greenacre pack?” Alex asked.

  “My mother came here when I was a baby. She died when I was two, so fifteen years ago now,” Jacob said. The passed a small house with it chicken roost behind it, surrounded by wire. In through the small arch door Alex could see sleeping chickens perched.

  “The same thing happened to me. My parents, when I was two. It sucks,” Alex said, realizing he was slipp
ing into teenager talk.

  “Yup.”

  “Why did all the werewolves leave last night?”

  “I think it's kinda symbolic. Like when the Alpha dies, the pack is dead too and everyone leaves and then maybe some of them return to a new pack. That’s if it’s peaceful. Sometimes a new Alpha takes over and it’s join immediately or die.”

  “Does that mean werewolves are coming back today?”

  “I think it is anywhere from a day to, like, weeks,” Jacob said. The kept walking, Alex examining everything around them, his brain starting to do the mathematics of it all. There were fridges full of food. Some of the houses had gas tanks on them and diesel generators. There were solar panels on roofs.

  In addition to there being chickens behind virtually every house there was a large barn full of goats and behind it, some pigsties.

  Alex stopped upwind from them and turned back to look over what he supposed was now his. What am I meant to do with all this? he thought.

  A challenge and was he meant to become a farmer now?

  “So what happened to your hand?” Jacob asked.

  In the darkness Alex's hand was sparkling, the tiny flecks of metal reflecting the moonlight.

  “Got torn off by a little old lady brought back from the dead. I regrew it and I think it incorporated metal in my body, I guess.”

  “Oh wow. So the same thing happened your eyes?”

  “What do you mean my eyes?” Alex asked.

  “They have little glittery things in them too,” Jacob said.

  Alex headed straight for the nearest cabin and went to the bathroom to check in the mirror. Sure enough there were flecks of a silvery metal through both of his eyes.

  “What the hell?” Alex said.

  In his werewolf form he had long claws, so he shifted back to his human form and gently touched a finger to his eyeball. There was a tiny hiss and Alex pulled his finger away at the jolt of pain. He looked his finger and saw a small burn mark, the same as last time he’d touched silver.

  “You have silver in your eyes? How is that possible?” Jacob asked, standing behind Alex on a bright green bath mat.

  “I don't know,” Alex said quickly bring up his spell screen. He cast Know Thyself and checked through the pages, but aside from the deep injury on his back there was nothing special about his eyes themselves. Alex cast Know Thyself three more times, compressing the spell over onto itself, but no additional information appeared. He experimentally touched his finger to his eyeball again and got the same hiss and jolt of pain as the fleck of silver that was now part of his eyeball burned his finger.

  “Why isn’t that burning your eyelids?” Jacob asked.

  “It's integrated itself somehow,” Alex said.

  He was looking at the purify spell and wondering whether he should cast on himself. There were more than a few flecks in both eyes. Who knows how deep they were? What if he cast it and shredded his own eyeballs? He’d cast it yesterday in the fight but it appeared the silver had grown in overnight.

  Alex looked at the spell a few times before wiping it all away. If he had to stumble back to the main building with no eyeballs he knew that the girls wouldn't let him forget it. Plus there was the whole shredding his eyeballs side of things.

  He left the cabin, turning the lights off as he went and shifted back to hybrid form. All he could smell was nature and chickens and the old scent of werewolves who were now gone.

  “Can you teach me how cast spells?” Jacob asked.

  “I haven’t met a werewolf yet who can do magic, except me,” Alex said. “But hey, let's give it a try.” He held out his hand to Jacob, who after a moment of hesitation took it. Alex then opened his spell screen again and brought up the shield spell.

  “Okay, let's see if you can feel the magic and sense the spell,” he said. Alex started drawing on the magic around him. The spell opened on his spell screen.

  After a moment, the young werewolf shrugged.

  “I can’t feel anything.”

  Alex cast shield, the spell encapsulating his body. Jacob took a step back in surprise but didn’t let go of Alex's hand.

  “Nope, still nothing,” he said. Alex canceled the spell and let go of his hand.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  Alex headed off again around the small village, holding his breath as he passed the pigsties. He was trying to get a feel for how large the area was.

  “There were a lot of werewolves living here – where did you get all the food?”

  “Trucks come to a drop-off point and then we’d have to haul it on our backs because there’s no road. Sometimes there are airdrops – pallets with parachutes on them. The rest of the time we make do with pigs, goats, chickens, wild boars and whatever else we can catch. There were always werewolves coming and going, working in Baxter for a while, sending back money,” Jacob said.

  Alex didn't know the financial sums behind it but an airdrop sounded expensive. This was essentially an agrarian community. Where were they getting all the money from? After all, the werewolves going to Baxter weren’t taking up some high-paid finance role for just a couple of months to make some cash. They were probably working laboring jobs, stuff that was low paid. Just looking at the buildings around them, a lot of money had been poured into this community.

  Given his suspicions about Jasper, Alex wondered if mages and vampires were secretly funding this all.

  They kept walking and Alex soon caught the scent of blood of some small animal. In one of the small fenced areas behind a cabin there was a chicken on the ground, its throat streaked with blood. It was breathing but barely alive.

  “No matter what we do, foxes still get in,” Jacob said. Alex hopped over the small fence to check on the chicken. It took two more breaths and then closed its eyes for the last time.

  “Better get someone to pluck it and roast it up,” Jacob said, unperturbed.

  Alex crouched down beside the chicken and then looked at the roost. Inside were three more dead mauled chickens. He shook his head as he looked the scene over. Sure, him, Howey and Puzo had been working on a post-apocalyptic farming game but beyond tilling the soil and planting things he had zero idea about farming or grazing animals.

  Alex reached down to touch the chicken, thinking he might take it back himself. He felt a small tingle in his finger, a buzz almost, like the dead chicken was vibrating.

  Alex placed the palm of his hand against its feathers and the buzzing sensation increased.

  As though he was born to do it, Alex began to gently pull on the magic around them, drawing it through the chicken’s body. The buzzing rose up his arm into his shoulder and down into his chest. There was something pleasant about it, like sitting in a massage chair.

  “What are you doing?” Jacob asked.

  Alex opened his eyes, not realizing he had closed them in some kind of trance. He looked at the chicken and saw how it must appear: the new Alpha squatting down with his hand on a chicken, totally silent, apparently having some kind of deep emotional moment.

  “There’s some kind of magical power from the dead chicken,” Alex said and then immediately regretted it for how crazy that sounded.

  Remembering what Henry had said, Alex opened his spell screen. The moment he did, a new bar of mana appeared. It was black with red threaded through it like a vein full of warm blood.

  It was barely filled however, just a fragment. As Alex watched, the word death appeared beside it.

  Alex tried to pull on the magic through the dead chicken but the vibration couldn't be held. It retraced its path out of his chest, down his arm and then was gone.

  “Don't tell anyone you saw me do this,” Alex said, bringing up his minor necromancy spell.

  “Absolutely,” Jacob said.

  Alex had read over the spell countless times but there were structures and code in it that meant nothing to him. There was almost nothing similar between it and any other spell he’d read.

  But what could he do? I
t was either delete it because it was maybe a trap or use it, trusting Henry.

  If he had to roll the dice on Henry he was going to go with trust.

  With that, Alex placed his hand on the chicken and cast the spell.

  Three-quarters of his blue mana went in a gulp. The dead chicken opened its eyes. They lit up brilliant green and then it stood up.

  “This is crazy! Is that a zombie chicken?” Jacob asked in awe,

  Alex removed his hand from the chicken and stood up.

  “Yeah, I think so.” He could feel a connection to the chicken almost as if it was a part of his own body.

  “Walk over to the gate chicken,” Alex said. The chicken did as he instructed, although with a slight limp. It’s left leg had been damaged by the fox and some of the meat was torn away, showing bone.

  Alex checked his blue mana and saw it was perilously low. He wasn't sure what would happen if you hit zero when he had the other bars charged up. Would it feed on them and he’d maybe end up with a supercharged zombie chicken? Now was not the time to find out, so he canceled the spell. The green left the chicken's eyes and it dropped dead to the ground again.

  “I'd stick with that flame on the finger thing. That's impressive. Zombie chicken is just weird,” Jacob said.

  Alex laughed. “Good advice,” he said.

  He stood up and decided to leave the chicken where it was. He’d get someone to collect it later, pluck it and figure out how to cook it. He didn't want to make assumptions but he figured the two old ladies might have an idea of what to do with it.

  The first warm glow of the rising sun had now appeared on the horizon.

  “Come on, let's go,” Alex said. He set off again, with Jacob falling in naturally beside him.

  “So you're seventeen?” Alex asked.

  “Yup.” Jacob said.

  “You get into Baxter much?”

  “Went a few times with others to get clothes or go to some shops. Most the time I’ve been living out here. The whole city smells weird to me. It's not like it air you’re breathing but the breath of other people,” Jacob said.