by Harry Nix
“Alex, this is Mirabel. She’s in charge of attempting to break the magical lock, to no success. Mirabel, here’s the world’s one and only Werewolf Mage, here to do what you couldn’t,” Hera said. Her tone was cool but cutting.
“And I see your daughter has mated with him, how typical,” Mirabel said. Alex had heard Hera and Juno go at it like cats circling each other, preparing to fight, but at least underneath their cutting words was some level of respect. Mirabel was talking as though she had poison in her mouth, something bitter that she couldn’t spit out. Alex decided to ignore it. The lessening of the pressure of the favor made him feel good and he began stretching, as though he was just about to go for a run.
“So I need to go in and kill a monster. Is that all you can tell me?” he said, grinning at Mirabel as though she was his best friend. Inside he was thinking, Fuck you for saying that about Juno. Mirabel looked at him like something scraped off her shoe and then waved at the building, indicating that he was to follow her. He did, with his mates backing him up, and then the rest of the witches. They soon came to a front door, which was ornately carved wood. As they approached, Alex saw a light shimmer over it, some kind of barrier.
“Analyze it, if you’ve learned that much,” Mirabel said. Alex resisted the urge to smack her in the back of the head or to shift to hybrid right in front of her, and cast Analyze on the door. Normally, when analyzing something like a ward, it would show up with numbers, such as the number of active spells combined together to form the ward. Alex caught a brief glimpse of that, seeing there were just four spells running concurrently, before it flashed away and an image appeared. It was like a jittery, short movie from the 1920s, but in full color. It showed a werewolf, not him, casting a fireball into his hand and then a pair of doors opening outward, before repeating. Alex watched it a few times before canceling the spell.
“So it shows this short film, and we’re meant to trust that if I stand over there and summon a fireball into my hand, it’s going to open up for me?” he asked.
“It can be any magic, but yes,” Mirabel said. Alex glanced around at the assembled witches. Juno had her arms crossed and was looking at Mirabel with a slight smile on her face that Alex had seen before. It looked to be the one before Juno pulled out a butterfly knife and threw it. He guessed that if Mirabel made any more comments about Alex, things might suddenly go quite sour out here. It wasn’t even nine in the morning yet, thanks to how fast they’d rushed out of Baxter, so Alex stretched a few more times before turning to April.
“Dose me up,” he said. She started passing him potions, and he waved away her explanations, just gulping them down one after the other. The first was like a coal in his stomach that grew hot and then cold. Others had no immediate effect, but the final one, which tasted like bitter toothpaste, caused a shiver that went through his skin and then he heard a light creaking noise as the flesh itself hardened.
“That one lasts about eight hours, so please be faster than that,” April said. She gave him a kiss and then slipped off his shifter charm. Alex undressed, ignoring the fact that all the witches were watching him. Once he was naked, he shifted to hybrid form, growing taller and layering over with muscle and hair. He held his hand out to Nia, who gave him ten unenchanted rings. With all the witches watching him, Alex went up to the front door and summoned a fireball. He heard a faint chime that sounded so much like April’s magic that for a moment he thought it was her, before the door suddenly swung open, inward.
Alex stepped through, into the cold interior, and then the door slammed shut, the magic lock reengaging with a thud that sounded like his doom.
7
The first thing Alex did was crouch down and scatter the unenchanted rings that Nia had given him on the polished wood floor. Keeping an ear out for anything approaching, he brought up his spell screen and saw with relief that his natural mana was already recharging from when he cast the fireball to gain access. There had been a worry that with the magical lock everything might be cut off, including access to mana.
Alex immediately got to work enchanting, making two shock shield rings in quick succession and then setting them to the side, about a foot apart. There was still an inconsistency there, which meant his success rate floated anywhere between 50% and 70%. What it meant in real terms was that the rings often shattered or sometimes melted. Thankfully, if they were going to do so, it was often quite quickly. The noise might attract the monster, but Alex didn’t want to be going in unarmed with only his natural attributes.
Thanks to the sheer amount of enchanting he’d been doing, the amount of mana it took to enchant a ring was decreasing every time he did it. In under fifteen minutes, he’d enchanted ten rings, one for each finger. They all split equally between defense and offense. He had a standard shield ring, two flame shields, two shock shields, two fireball, and three shock ball.
Once the rings were enchanted, Alex put eight of them on, leaving the shock shields to the side just in case they decided to explode. He sat back on his haunches and listened. The library had the smell of an old abandoned house. It was dry and dusty. As he sat there breathing in, he caught the smell of paper and the glue used in the bindings. There was something else under it, the faintest edge that raised the hackles on Alex’s back. It was like spoiled raw meat, but so faint, he wasn’t sure if it was just his imagination.
After sitting there for a good half hour, Alex slipped the final two rings on, dearly wishing he’d been able to bring in the shifter charm. A shifter charm wasn’t just useful for keeping clothes on when moving from human to hybrid, but also for hiding rings away when moving from hybrid to wolf. If Alex shifted now, the rings would fall off some fingers or be stuck on others as his hands changed to paws. It felt right to be in wolf form for this, slinking low, a hunter in the darkness, but if he wanted to keep the rings, he would have to fight the monster in hybrid form.
After a few more minutes of waiting, Alex finally began to slowly creep forward out of the darkened entrance way. The corridor he was in was polished wood before a rich carpet began. Branching off it were a number of doors, a few closed but most open. Through the nearest one, Alex could see shelves of books lit up by a dim glow above. As he crept along, the incongruous nature of the witches’ library became more apparent. It was like the outside, a mashup between an old fortress and a modern building. There were light switches down the corridor, but then the lights themselves had small flickering flames in them, sealed up and burning eternally, apparently. Down the corridor, some of the doors were ornately carved, and the ceiling also, with cornices. The feeling of stepping back to the 1920s was then oddly set off by an old computer sitting on a table in the corridor, some blocky thing with a black screen. Alex was sure if he could get it to work, it’d probably be displaying green on black. From a distance, it looked to be an old Commodore 64.
Alex eventually came to the first open door and paused at it, twitching his ears as he listened. There was no sound from the other side, and the unease in Alex’s stomach grew. He realized why a moment later. There was a total absence of life. Even in the most pristine of homes, there were tiny bugs under the floorboards or in the walls or outside in the garden, the chirping of birds, the murmuring of bees. The silence in the library was complete. No cockroaches, no bugs, not even a spider spinning a web.
Alex crept through the door, emerging into an expansive library with multiple floors. He was surrounded by shelves of books that stretched away until they reached an open area that was tastefully decorated with chairs and tables, including some study desks. The floors above held multiple bookcases and were lit with the same flickering flames, controlled by light switches. Alex turned to check the bookcase, wondering what kind of things witches would keep, but was slightly disappointed to find they were just standard books and he’d apparently entered into the children’s fiction section. The first book he took from the shelf was Alice in Wonderland, an old dusty copy. He slipped it back onto the shelf, cringing a little at th
e rasping sound the cover made against the other book, and continued on, thankful for the thick carpet under his clawed feet.
It was as he neared the end of the row that he saw the first skeleton. It was on the ground near one of the chairs, splayed out flat, as though the witch had been crawling. After being told the monster had killed witches Alex had expected bones, but not that they would be intact. He was expecting chewed and gnawed things, splintered remains, but this was as though someone had taken a medical skeleton and carefully toppled it over onto the ground. At the end of the corridor of books, there was a pool of light from high above and Alex hesitated, not wanting to step through it. He peered around the corner and saw more skeletons scattered and the first signs that there had been a fight.
Some of the chairs were knocked over, others destroyed, and down the far end of the library, multiple shelves had been knocked over, books spilling out onto the ground. There were large tears in the carpet, as though cut by enormous claws. Some of the bodies down there were in pieces. Alex saw an arm and hand resting atop the pile of books with no body connected. There was a slight stain on the books, dark brown—old blood.
As Alex looked around, he realized this was no place to fight a monster. There were too many entrances and exits. The multiple floors meant he could be ambushed from above. There was no place to corner the monster to stop it from escaping or to force it into a smaller corridor to restrict its movements. Alex started counting, getting to forty-two skulls that he could see from his position. The witches’ library had been full that day.
Keeping an ear out, Alex carefully backtracked back out the door and went to the nearest one on the other side of the corridor. Out there it was no better. The witches had obviously believed in symmetry, building the other side in exact replica. However, the fight must have been more violent because most of the shelves were knocked over and destroyed, and there were bones everywhere. Alex could see complete legs and arms sitting in odd positions, obviously torn off bodies and dropped or thrown.
Looking up at the ceiling, something caught Alex’s attention, although he couldn’t say what it was at first glance. There was just something… wrong… up there. He could feel the hackles on the back of his neck again, that feeling of pins and needles, and he crouched down, flexing his claws. He looked over the upper floors, at collapsed bookshelves and piles of books, until he came to a bookshelf three floors up that was still in place. The feeling of wrongness grew. There was definitely something up there, perhaps something concealed.
Alex stood and waited, practicing all the lessons he’d learned as a werewolf hunting in the forest. The first virtue of a hunter was patience. The ability to outwait your prey, to remain still and calm, sometimes for hours, could be the difference between life and death. Alex was aware that April’s potions had a limited time span, but still he waited, time ticking by. After an hour, he finally brought up his spell screen and then cast Analyze on the bookshelf. A screen opened up, and it was as Alex expected. Wood and a small amount of metal, the screws to hold it together, wood glue. Alex moved his focus higher up on the bookcase and cast it again, opening another window. It returned the same result. He kept moving, changing his focus by a few inches, until finally he had seven windows open. It was on the eighth that he finally hit success. The screen opened but did not display wood and glue and metal. It was mostly full of question marks, but it was clear he was now analyzing something alive that had wrapped itself around the bookshelf and was currently camouflaged.
There was minimal information about it, so, hoping that he wasn’t about to do something stupid, Alex doubled up the analyze spell and cast it again. A few of the question marks changed to information, including a heartbeat. It was less of a heartbeat than a slow squeeze, a pulse once every 10 minutes or so.
Alex was very aware that he was surrounded by piles of paper and wooden shelves full of books, and so he chose the shock ball, summoning it from the ring to preserve his natural magic. He knew he could explore more, perhaps find a better place to fight, but the monster might awaken and right now he knew where it was.
The shock ball appeared in his hand. Concentrating on the bookcase, Alex stepped out into the light and hurled it. It shot upwards in a perfect arc, passing between the ornate metal fence that was the barrier to stop witches falling, and hitting the monster dead on.
It couldn’t have gone more perfectly—the shock ball exploded, tendrils of power jolting outwards. The analysis spell itself showed a heartbeat suddenly appearing, flesh being damaged, and then something enormous and fast smashed Alex in the back of the head, flinging him across the room where he crashed into a pile of fallen books.
Alex got to his feet as the shield ring on his finger broke to pieces and dropped to the ground. The blow had been so sharp, so strong, that although the shield had triggered, it had overloaded and some of the force had gotten through. The flame shield and shock shield rings didn’t work on the same trigger and had to be manually operated, so as he stood up, Alex triggered the shock shield, small bolts of lightning appearing about an inch away from his fur before vanishing, waiting for an attack. Whatever had hit him was gone or had turned invisible, perhaps.
With his ears still ringing, Alex crept down from the pile of books to the carpet, his claws out. He still had the analyze spells running. He quickly canceled the ones just analyzing the bookshelf and then saw something strange with the final one that had been analyzing the monster. Some of the question marks were flickering now, the heartbeat speeding up and slowing down, and then all of a sudden, it vanished as though he’d been analyzing nothing, all of the details zeroing out. Alex glanced up at the shelf and saw pieces of light breaking away from the bookcase.
“What the hell?” he murmured. Had that been an illusion? One that was good enough to fool an analyze spell? Alex took a step before something hit him from behind. This time, the shock shield engaged and then instantly overloaded. It managed to largely protect Alex. He felt like he’d just been shoved from behind and managed to turn it into a dive roll, landing between two sofas and jumping to his feet again.
Behind him, the monster appeared, small shocks creeping across its skin. It was, as one of the witches had claimed, about the size of an elephant, or maybe larger. It was hard to see exactly, as its skin mirrored its surroundings. Alex caught the faintest hint of movement. It looked as though the books themselves were rippling like water as the monster moved. It was fast, too, despite the shock it had taken, moving with liquid speed. Alex triggered the next shock shield and then dived at the monster with his claws out. To him, it looked like he was diving towards a fallen bookcase, as though when he slashed at it he would hit metal and wood, but his claws sank into flesh, piercing first through a hardened scale that actually tore one of Alex’s claws off.
He pulled his claws out, ignoring the pain, and slashed again as the monster screamed. Alex wasn’t sure what part of the monster he was on, its back or front or side. It was just a wall of camouflaged flesh. As he swiped, his claws brought up sparks, skittering uselessly off the scales. He’d gotten lucky with this first dive, piercing through a small gap, perhaps a new or old weakened scale. Alex immediately slashed at the same spot, knowing that if he could open a hole and do enough damage, perhaps he could kill the thing. The great bulk of the monster swung, flinging Alex off as though he was nothing more than an irritating tick on its back.
Alex crashed into a pile of books which were scattered with bones and then swore as the ring on his hand overheated. He quickly pulled it off. The monster had been shocked again, small bolts of lightning running over its skin, and Alex saw it was larger than he’d first assumed. It was more like a few elephants now, approaching the size of a school bus. It turned towards him and roared, a disconcerting effect because the camouflage went all the way down, even its teeth and throat and tongue. To Alex, it was like seeing a faint, ghostly afterimage, the tiniest delay between the camouflage and what was behind it. The only part of it that wasn’t keep
ing up was the small wound that Alex had made, which he saw now was down near a tail that was as thick as a crocodile.
The shock spells were working well, so Alex saw no reason to change tactics. With the rings used, he cast shock shield out of his natural mana and then summoned a shock ball, charging it up with what was left of the death magic. It changed the ball from yellow to black, and then Alex hurled it, hitting the monster in the side. He followed up by diving at it, aiming for the wound, but it twisted and moved and he crashed into its back, scrabbling for purchase. For a moment, he was atop it, but the scales were slick up here and he had the disconcerting view that he was floating above the ground as the camouflage showed him the carpet beneath.
Hoping he wasn’t about to start a fire, Alex cast fireball from one of the rings, and instead of hurling it, shoved it directly down to the monster’s back, casting flame shield as he did so he wouldn’t be burned. The monster screamed, and then with a great lurch, it rolled just as the fireball burned its way into its flesh. Alex barely made it clear, launching himself off its back and managing to grab onto the railing of the second floor before pulling himself up.
Although he hadn’t had the opportunity to train recently, having lost the obstacle course, it seemed the lessons he’d learned had stuck. He was finally more comfortable in his hybrid form, used to his strength and power, and with the slight upgrade was now faster.
Alex turned, planning to jump down on the monster again to begin hacking at the burnt spot on its back, shoving fireballs in there until he crisped the thing from the inside. There was a ripple through the air as it swung a claw. He saw things flying towards him and dived to get out of the way, but whatever the monster had shot, there had been hundreds of them. The flame shield took most of them, but Alex felt a piercing pain in his leg and his shoulder.