Werewolf Mage 5

by Harry Nix

  Werewolf Mage 5

  Harry Nix

  Galactic Royale

  Werewolf Mage 5 Copyright 2020 Harry Nix. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.

  Harry Nix

  GalacticRoyale.com

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  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogs in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

  1

  Alex sweated as he sat and stared at the wall of the small office in the rear of the factory. The midday sun was high in the sky. It was blisteringly hot, and in the tiny office Alex was slowly broiling. He was in hybrid form too, covered with thick fur, and occasionally wondering what the hell was wrong with him—was he deliberately punishing himself?

  The last time he’d done this, he’d been back at the village in a freezing cold meeting room, doing his enchanting experiments but staying in human form and freezing his ass off. That had been back when things had been utterly fucked. Alex longed for those days. They’d passed through utterly fucked to the distant calm waters of super-fucked or maybe mega-gargantua-fucked.

  He was the only one that remembered the Great Barrier’s little puppet show. It had been a week now since they, with the aid of the witches and additional werewolves, had wiped out almost a thousand Corvus pain mages, plus their weredogs, blood golem and vampires. The victory hadn’t come without cost, of course. They had lost Pearl, a teenager—she’d been killed, as had Zara and Maggie. River had almost died, the bones in both his legs shattered by a spell. Anton and Mattias, two of the guards at home, were both dead.

  From the fifty new werewolves that Alex had only recently welcomed into the pack, seventeen had died, and of the reinforcing werewolves, at least half had gone down.

  Alex had bargained for a hundred witches on the battlefield, and from what he had seen, at least half of them had been killed. But Juno was being her typical, witchy, secretive self, and refused to confirm the number.

  To Alex, the battle had almost been over. He’d just managed to defeat Titus, and then the Great Barrier snapped down on every supernatural in the area, making them into puppets, forcing them to load dead bodies into the mages’ trucks. Those with rain spells cast a great and terrible storm that washed away every drop of blood.

  All around, werewolves, witches and mages jerked like puppets on a string.

  The next clear memory he had after that was running in terror along with everyone else, the Great Barrier working on them, making them flee.

  The story the rest of the pack told was wildly different. To them, they had fought to the end of the battle, had overcome their enemies, tearing them limb from limb, and then they’d left the battlefield, leaving behind the dead in public for the enclaves to see, so they could see what would happen when you fought a werewolf or witch.

  Alex had thought Nia was joking when she’d first said it, some kind of macabre humor, when everyone had stopped running a few miles away from the scene of the battle. But no, she had been serious, and as he’d asked questions, he felt the Great Barrier pulling on him, digging into his muscles as though it was taking a direct and personal interest in him alone.

  Then Nia had started to get upset, as though he’d been making fun of her. Both Juno and Nia had told him long ago that if you did magic in front of normals, trying to show them the truth, the normals would eventually accuse you of lying to them. They might even become angry and eventually would attack.

  The Great Barrier would destroy any relationship to protect the separation between normal and supernatural.

  A few days later Alex had attempted to ask Nia what happened to the dead werewolves and the Great Barrier had hit him with such force that he’d blacked out.

  When he’d come to, it was to spit out a mouthful of teeth. He’d clenched his jaw so hard he’d busted half the teeth out of his mouth.

  Worse than that, Nia had been furious, the Great Barrier working on her.

  Alex knew he couldn’t talk to her or anyone else about it without risking serious harm or having the relationship torn to pieces.

  Wary he might be injured by the Great Barrier, he’d returned to the site of the battle with some of his pack as security. Aside from the wrecked and destroyed buildings around them, there were no other signs that close to a thousand Corvus pain mages had met their end there. Alex had searched for tracks, figuring that the Great Barrier must’ve puppeteered the mages to drive the truck somewhere to dump the bodies, but the storm summoned by the witches had obliterated every trace.

  And so with that, a week had passed, a week of blistering hot summer. The werewolves mourned their dead, but were jubilant over their victory.

  Alex let out a breath of air, staring at the wall, chasing his thoughts around. He had a pen and some paper, but he was scared to even write down what he thought, just in case the Great Barrier came.

  “So this is super fucked,” he murmured to himself.

  Alex wasn’t even sure if he could bring up the black rune spell now without something bad happening. He’d felt it throbbing at the end of the battle, temporarily breaking the hold the Great Barrier had on him. He knew in that moment that the Great Barrier was nothing more than a ward, a super powerful, incredibly complicated ward. The black rune spell had destroyed other wards, and for a moment, Alex had felt the desire to hurl it at the Great Barrier, knowing that it would tear him to pieces and do nothing to damage it.

  The black rune spell was incomplete… and he had no idea how to complete it. Keep breaking into vampires’ mansions and hope that one of them had a tapestry with the rest of it woven into the fabric? Then what? Hurl it at the Great Barrier and hope he didn’t die?

  His thoughts strayed to the woman and her son, the ones Titus had stabbed and Alex had saved from death. Had the Great Barrier snapped on them a moment earlier, what would have happened then? Would they have just been left dead in the grass? Their bodies picked up by mindless puppets and dumped into the backs of trucks?

  Alex recalled Julius talking about the Great Barrier and all the crimes that it hid… Monroe had said something similar. Evidence went missing. Security cameras stopped working. People literally didn’t see what was before their eyes, like a dead mermaid on the beach with a knife in her heart appearing as a seal that the local supernaturals needed to shove into the water, so the normals wouldn’t look at it.

  Alex was beginning to understand how various werewolf massacres and disappearances must’ve played out. Long ago, when they had visited Julius’s pack, Alex had learned about the tumultuous and vicious history of the werewolves. At the time, he’d taken it as a given that if there was inter-pack warfare, of course there’d be deaths. Werewolves just vanishing. Nia had told him stories of packs of more than a hundred going off to war and never returning. Had the Great Barrier stepped in then, too? Puppeteered mages burying bodies? Would there be mass graves spread all over the place? Was the Great Barrier thorough, cremating the bodies, destroying any trace?

  Alex opened his spell screen. He wiped some sweat out of his eyes, but still didn’t shift back to human. He was uncomfortable as hell and maybe that was what he needed right now, to try to get a grip on what was happening.

  Down his list of resistances he had silver, vertigo, gasp and various other spe
lls. After the battle, six new lines had been added. Question marks with plus symbols next to them. He’d developed resistances to spells or something but had no idea what they were.

  Alex picked a random one, folded analyze over itself, and cast analyze 50x. The spell took a huge gulp of his mana, but like last time, revealed nothing.

  Alex saw movement out of the corner of his eye over near the factory door. More of his pack coming and going. He knew it was his pack because he was alpha and he could feel it now. In just the last week, more than two hundred new werewolves had come walking out of the wilderness to find Alex.

  They’d filled every house he owned and then spread out like a diffuse cloud over miles around the central property. The more werewolves joined, the larger Alex could feel his territory growing.

  Alex closed his eyes and reached out for the thread he’d pulled in the battle. He found it easily. There were at least fifty werewolves within a half a mile. It was near lunch and they were congregating.

  The first time he had felt the thread, it had been like a slippery bar of soap, easily lost, but now his grasp was growing more sure. It was easier to find and easier to push and pull on it. It had been in the back of Alex’s mind, then he’d started to do it unconsciously.

  After all, his original pack was now dramatically outnumbered by werewolves that had come from various packs and had no reason to trust each other. Alex knew that he was exerting a calming and unifying influence on them.

  It also had been on Alex’s mind that perhaps this was why he’d been hunted from the moment the spell that had been upon him until his 25th birthday had broken. He was doing the impossible, unifying werewolves, arming them with magic rings. A small number of witches and werewolves had faced off against a thousand Corvus pain mages and two hundred weredogs, and had utterly obliterated them.

  It had crossed Alex’s mind more than once that perhaps he shouldn’t sit in Baxter waiting for the werewolves to come to him, but should take his pack and march out into the wilderness, not making alliances anymore, but just taking over.

  When Nia rapped on the door, it was no surprise to Alex. He’d felt her approach. He opened his eyes and let go of the thread as she pushed the door open and then wrinkled her nose.

  “Oh, seriously? What are you doing? It’s six billion degrees in here and it smells like ballsweat. Shift out of that before you get heat stroke, and come inside with us and have some food,” she said. In deference to the boiling weather, his mate’s clothing had become even skimpier recently. Today, Nia was wearing a pair of shorts and what effectively looked like a sports bra. She was barefoot with a bracelet around one ankle, wearing a shifter charm around her neck. Her beautiful red hair was tied up, keeping it off her neck, and with the heat, she glistened.

  “Come closer and say that,” Alex said, looking her up and down.

  “There is no way I’m coming into that office to have sex with you. It’s forty billion degrees,” Nia said.

  “I thought it was six billion in here.”

  “Duh, I just came in so it got hotter, clearly.”

  She turned tail and walked away, but not before glancing back at Alex, who’d been watching the sway of her hips. Then he felt the slightest ripple as Nia partially transformed. The shifter charm took her clothes, but she only grew a tail and a set of ears, and was naked otherwise. She waved her tail at him and then spun around so he could see her entire body, before laughing and shifting back to human, her clothes reappearing as she did so. It was a trick Alex hadn’t mastered. Anytime he tried to shift even a little, he went the entire way. He couldn’t make just a tail or ears appear. As Alex watched Nia’s long legs disappear around the corner, and that cute little bubble butt, he concluded that, yes, although things were absolutely super mega fucked, perhaps not everything was a disaster.

  2

  “That doesn’t sound good,” April murmured as they ate their lunch. Today was a sausage and tomato mix with rice that River had whipped up with help from his sometimes-begrudging assistant, Yvonne. Despite the fact it was a hot day and the mediocre air-conditioning was doing little to cool the house, the food was delicious, even if everyone in the pack was now sweating even more than before. Nia’s plate sat half-eaten on the table. Her father Julius had called and now she was in the front room talking with him, every now and then cursing under her breath.

  “Will they leave?” Nia asked. Alex, Juno, and April shared a glance. Since the battle a week ago, nothing much had happened, which had been a welcome respite. Alex gulped some tepid water, hoping that whatever this was would be solved easily, but given how things had been going, that seemed unlikely.

  Eventually Nia ended the call and came back to the kitchen. Everyone else was finishing up their meals, so Nia waved to the three of them and took them to the front living room, where they stood in front of the droning air conditioner. It was dripping water onto the dirt outside the window.

  Nia was flexing her hands as though she was about to change to hybrid just to have sharpened claws to swing around. When Juno touched her on the arm, she flinched and then let out a long breath.

  “Some planes bombarded my dad’s territory with silver this morning, right onto the home and all around it. There’s a lot of injured werewolves and the silver’s so deep it’s going to take weeks to months to get rid of it, if ever. Other planes have been spotted taking aerial photographs,” she said.

  “Blowback for the Corvus mages, I guess,” Juno murmured.

  “I can send some healing flame rings. We have some stored up,” Alex said, touching Nia on the arm. She nodded and sniffed and he thought for a moment that perhaps she was crying before she suddenly shifted and punched the wall, putting a hole in it.

  “We need to kill these mages,” she growled. She was breathing heavily as though she’d just sprinted. When she’d shifted, Alex had felt the pull strongly in his own body and he almost went with her. He could sense her rage, a deep and endless pool of it.

  April reached out and touched Nia, taking her by the hand, which was large and clawed. Alex heard a light chime as April cast a calming spell, one that she had used on him many times. Nia relaxed, and then after a moment, shifted back to human.

  “If they’re using planes to dump silver, that means there must be an airstrip somewhere that they’re taking off from. Maybe we should find it. Get in there and give them the ol’ Malaysian Milkshake,” Juno said. Everyone frowned.

  “What’s a Malaysian Milkshake?” Alex finally asked.

  “Well, it’s like the Egyptian Head Massage except you leave the bodies out in the open,” Juno said. Nia laughed at the absurdity of it but soon the smile vanished from her face.

  “Dad says that men have been fighting out in the territories, hunters. They’re killing any wild animal they come across. Some of them are being poisoned too, like they’re trying to cut off the food supply,” Nia said.

  “We’ll put a stop to it. That and the silvering,” Alex said and briefly embraced Nia, who finally relaxed and wrapped her hands around him. It was too hot to hold each other for long and they soon pulled apart.

  “We really need to upgrade the air-conditioning,” April said, and just then with perfect timing, the power died, the air conditioner spluttering to a stop.

  The children who were down at the other end of the house all cried out in dismay as whatever they were watching on the television vanished.

  “Great, what now?” Juno said. She looked up at the ceiling and then pointed a finger at it. “Listen up, JP, we need help here. Not stuff like the power going out because of a heat wave,” she said.

  From where they were standing in the front room, Alex could see out into the street. A small brown car appeared, puttering along the street, driven by a man. He parked on the street and got out. He was wearing brown pants and a brown shirt and had a lanyard around his neck with a pass on it. He rummaged in the backseat of his car before he pulled out a clipboard.

  “I’m going to say either h
e’s here to sell us accountant services or he’s a bureaucrat of some kind,” Juno said, watching him as he approached the house. The man passed into the ward with no effect. Alex was half-expecting him to get dazed, turn around, get in the car and drive miles away, but it was clear whatever was happening wasn’t supernatural.

  With the girls following him, Alex went out the front to find the man was now asking the two guards to step aside. In his hands, he had a large red sticker with condemned printed on it.

  “Is one of you the owner?” the man said. With his free hand, he held up his lanyard to show his ID. His name was Daniel Harris and he worked for the city of Baxter.

  “I’m the owner,” Alex said.

  “I’m here to advise you that this property has been condemned. I’m here to affix this sticker to the front door, and by law, you are not allowed to remove it. If you wish to appeal this decision, you must contact the city council,” Daniel said.

  “Condemned! That’s bullsh—” Juno started to say before Alex touched her on the arm. Daniel obviously had done this many times. Although his face was impassive, there was empathy in his voice.

  “I understand this is upsetting. I’m just here to do a job. It’s not personal. It’s just a decision by the city. So if you would step aside, I can affix this sticker to the door and then I highly suggest you contact the council to work on getting it overturned.”

  “You can come inside. There’s no reason to condemn this house. Sure it looks a bit run-down, but there’s power and water and cooling and beds,” April said.

  “I understand. But that’s not my role. I can’t come in to do an inspection. You need to contact the city. Now could you please step aside so I can affix this to the door?”

  Alex could see that although he’d done this many times and appeared unflappable, he was perhaps getting unnerved by the two werewolves standing by the door, both of whom were hulking giants. Alex waved them aside and they stepped out of his way so Daniel could press the bright red sticker to the door. As he did, some of the children appeared in the corridor looking at him with wide eyes.