by Harry Nix
Alex had read through it a few times now. Darwin had not just copied down the standard alphabet but also seemingly random words. For example, he had a small symbol and then the word eviscerate under it. On another line he had a symbol and the word cut and Alex could see there was a similarity between the symbols as though the curves of the lines themselves were what made up the word. Eviscerate was cut plus something else merged together, as though the letters had been written on top of each other.
Despite the fact he had a translation guide, Alex didn’t look at the partial spiky rune spell during their drive. If he hit a ward, although it was unlikely out in the territory, he didn’t want it to cast itself and rip the meat from his bones.
Instead he’d talked with his mates about the witches, the library, and Juno’s nascent idea that perhaps they should focus on stealing a spell book if they could, preferably from mages but the witches would do in a pinch.
They’d finally reached the small parking lot where they left Boris and began their walk into Julius’s territory.
Now they were on their way there, April having won the rock, paper, scissors against Juno to ride Alex, her pumpkin pie beating Juno’s silent tree falling in the forest by some unknowable and complex set of rules that Alex couldn’t quite grasp yet.
Alex had briefly spoken with Jeremiah via the satellite phone but not much had changed since the morning. The fired werewolves were already looking for new jobs and Jeremiah had assigned werewolves to navigate the bureaucracies they were up against. Alex knew things were in capable hands so he left them to it.
As he padded along through the forest feeling the presence of nature around him, Alex was chewing over the idea of what it really meant to be an alpha. When his pack had been small, every decision had been his. He’d listen to his pack to make them, of course, but he was intimately involved and knew everything that was going on. With the sudden flood of new pack members it was like he was operating a corporation now; he had to rely on others and sometimes found things out secondhand, like that some of the werewolves had set up homeschooling for the children and were now running classes.
“I’m really looking forward to some of that spiced vodka,” April whispered in Alex’s ear, squeezing his back again with her legs and rocking gently back and forth.
Alex made a chuffing noise again. It was quite difficult to talk in wolf form, the shape of the tongue and the jaw feeling wrong. He agreed with April though: he was looking forward to their visit to Julius, despite everything that was going on. Yes, it was deadly serious, and they meant to talk to the older wolf about alliances and other things that were going on including the fact that a lot of packs had been bombed with silver, but Alex was also looking forward to the other side of it: roasted boar with salt and fat, good alcohol, and finally, perhaps a private place for him and his mates to spend some time together.
As April gently massaged her fingers through his fur, humming slightly to herself, Alex brought up his spell screen and, figuring this was as good a time as any, switched over to the black rune spell. It still felt as dangerous as ever, a sharp thing like a ball of blades, and Alex could only hope that they didn’t run into a ward way out here in the territories because he knew the spell had an urgent desire to destroy any ward it came across.
He’d been mulling over his interaction with Darwin, especially his comments about the Great Barrier that in itself was harmful to the supernaturals. Alex had heard similar things before, including from Julius. The Great Barrier kept the supernaturals separate from the normals, would blank out security footage, cause people to see different things than what was there, and generally kept them safe through the normal world not knowing they existed.
But as every supernatural had experienced, the Great Barrier had a painful side, those fishhooks that compelled, to stop supernatural things going down in front of the normals. It also meant when supernaturals were murdered the police force and forensics were of no use. There was no court system to bring to bear.
On the other side of it, normals could die at the hand of supernaturals, puzzling deaths that then would also be hidden away. Even as Alex thought about the Great Barrier with the black rune spell open in front of him he could feel a slight anxiousness in his body. The Great Barrier had snapped down upon them all at the end of the battle against the Corvus mages, making them load trucks with dead bodies, forcing witches to cast rain spells to wash away blood, and so far Alex was the only one who truly remembered what had happened.
He still had the feeling that it was dangerous to even think about the Great Barrier considering he’d been knocked unconscious when he’d attempted to talk about what had happened. It was like dancing around an opponent who knew every move you might make and so you had to somehow try to be secretive while standing in a spotlight.
Alex knew that no matter how powerful the Great Barrier was, there must be a flaw somewhere. It must have compelled the mages to dispose of the bodies somehow. How clever could it be? It wasn’t as though there were the facilities around to cremate close to a thousand bodies, to make them disappear.
Alex’s money was on a mass grave of some kind, which meant if he went searching for it perhaps he might find it… although there was the concern of what the Great Barrier might do in that case. It was a spell which Alex was interpreting as being an incredibly powerful program. It had snapped down upon them to hide the battle, to hide the dead bodies, but now it was done was it really paying attention still?
If Alex came upon a dead werewolf out in the forest the Great Barrier wouldn’t bother pulling on him. After they’d been attacked by dead mercenaries and had destroyed them, the Great Barrier hadn’t compelled them to bury them. Alex and his pack had dismembered the dead, including what was left of the necromancers, and buried them out in the dirt, all without the Great Barrier compelling anything.
Alex chewed over this for a little while longer before finally directing his attention back to the black rune spell. He’d been holding it open hoping the feeling of danger would decrease like a kind of exposure therapy, but the spell still felt as it always did, like some coiled sharp machine.
Alex pulled up Darwin’s Rosetta Stone in the window beside it and the effect on the main spell was immediate. Before, it had been grayed out, unable to be edited or changed or executed without coming in contact with a ward. The spell suddenly sprang to life and the sense of danger increased. Now it was like a nest of vipers with razor blades for fangs. Alex looked at the word and rune for cut and then recognized some of the symbols throughout the black spell. He started flicking between one and the other trying to identify words. As he was staring at one of the runes in the spell a smaller window suddenly opened and filled with twenty other runes.
Alex made a grunting noise which in his wolf form essentially meant holy crap. It appeared the runes of the main spell were in fact multiple other runes laid on top of each other, forming a single symbol. Those runes in turn appeared to be multiple runes laid on top of themselves too. As Alex looked at one of them, another smaller window opened and four runes appeared in it, the base level.
It was such a strange way to code a spell but Alex saw it wasn’t much different from the small images he could now manipulate. After all, his lightning bolt or flame were compressed code. It was just a matter of intensity and degree. Four runes made up another rune; there were twenty of those which meant something like eighty to one hundred runes underlying it. They compressed down and then those runes compressed on top of each other down to a single symbol. It took great concentration for Alex to open up multiple windows, and as he did he realized his natural mana was rapidly dropping, the exertion of it draining his magic away.
“What are you doing?” April said, her hands buried in Alex’s fur.
“Share your magic,” Alex carefully said. He didn’t have the time to explain that every time a rune uncompressed, it swallowed mana.
“I see a single wound open on you, you’re dead,” April warned in a low to
ne. She began sharing her magic with Alex. Although they were surrounded by forest he could now smell pine needles, wet leaves and earth as the half earth elemental shared her magic with him.
Alex kept opening runes. One master rune was crazy—it had a hundred runes under it and each of them another twenty or so. Alex kept going lower until he hit the bottom level, just two runes overlapped. They didn’t take much magic to open at that point but it was enough that Alex’s magic level soon stopped rising even with April’s help, and began slowly dropping again.
He kept scanning between all of the screens, trying to understand simple words and phrases. He found three small runes which were the words cut, eviscerate and work. Together they combined to a smaller rune which then formed part of a group which Alex got the feeling was a process that was almost surgical—slicing, cutting and removal but with great care.
Another set of runes seemed to be about direction and it was in there that Alex got the feeling that parts were missing. He could sense there were connections between the runes as though they were sending information to others or feeding from them.
In the section about directions he could tell there were parts missing; a sensation like an empty tooth socket. Although he was only on the edge of understanding he suspected this was why the spell backlashed upon him when he cast it. Although it wanted to pull itself into a ward and slice it to pieces, it had no direction, and so it came back upon the caster, inflicting physical wounds.
Alex could see there were other runes about direction and intention and when he opened up some of the screens there was even a blinking cursor now, but he didn’t dare attempt to write a single part of a spell. This wasn’t like the code he was used to using where he could work it and massage it around and he had a natural understanding. This spell was like a freight train moving fast and dangerous. He wouldn’t be able to start small with it. If he was going to figure out how to direct it he might have to start writing a new spell entirely, but only after a lot more study. He had to hope to hell he didn’t get the runes wrong.
Alex had a rune that meant light and he figured that might be a good place to start but there was no way he was doing it right now. If he was going to do any experimentation with his new language, he’d be surrounded by his mates plus a bunch more werewolves all carrying healing rings, so that if something went wrong he had a good chance of surviving.
“Okay, I can’t take much more now,” April said, squeezing her hand through his fur. Alex collapsed away the windows, the pull on his magic decreasing until they were all gone and he was left with the master spell. Even with a rough count it was thousands and thousands of runes laid down upon each other. Alex swiped it away and wondered why this pile of a spell had been stitched into a tapestry just hanging in a vampire’s private collection waiting for him to come and get it. He’d talked with April a few times about the origin of the necklace they’d dug up but there was no progress to be made there. She’d left her home, at some point met someone who had given her the direction to find the necklace, and then had voluntarily chosen to have her memory of it wiped. Even estimating how far April could travel on foot meant it was thousands of miles of territory to cover. Alex was starting to think though that it might be a good idea to find this person. He had a lot of werewolves now and if they all went at once they could cover a lot of ground.
It wasn’t long before the birds in the forest ahead of them stilled their song as Julius’s pack slinked behind trees following their progress. Although they were originally Nia’s pack there was a kind of tradition to this sort of thing. Alex could even feel it himself—even when it was friendly, there was a joy in stalking.
Alex closed all of his spell screens and focused on the path ahead, his stomach rumbling at the idea of some salted boar. He could already smell roasting meat drifting on the breeze. He took a deep sniff and then felt the flutter of sensation that was the thread he pulled on, the one he’d used to direct the weredogs, the one that he had felt around his pack in the middle of battle. It was incredibly faint at first but then grew stronger the closer they came to Julius’s territory. It didn’t feel quite the same though. Alex kept reaching for it but it eluded his grasp. It was tenuous and slippery almost like the first time Alex had encountered it. Although he tried very carefully to mentally grasp it, it was like he couldn’t get a paw to it, and although he could sense it was stronger he couldn’t grab it at all. Alex finally gave up on it as they emerged from the trees and saw Julius and some of his pack across the other side of the clearing.
April and Juno got off Alex and Nia who shifted back to hybrid form, Alex taking the lead as he walked across the small clearing. Some of Nia’s sisters were there, as well as her mother who looked disconcertingly like Nia. Julius wasted no time in quickly getting through the introduction ritual. Nia, Juno and April were soon talking a mile a minute, Alex struggling to follow the hundred conversations that had seemingly sprung up. He heard the word baby and then Julius grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him away from the pack, leading him into the village proper.
“Let’s get some actual work done before they realize we’re gone,” Julius said with a grin.
The last time Alex had been here it had been in a cooler season and there had been werewolves everywhere including children playing. Now, at the peak of summer the village baked and there was hardly anyone to be seen. There were a few werewolves roasting meat but even they had set up under the shade of trees.
Julius took Alex to the main building they’d been to before and inside. Alex shifted back to human with relief, feeling the cooling effect immediately. Julius followed, for a moment appearing stark naked before grabbing clothes out of a basket by the door and getting dressed. Alex knew that Julius had enough money to buy some more shifter charms and for a moment felt a twinge of regret for the money his mates had spent on fancy dinners and staying in a hotel. Julius directed all of his resources back into the pack to the point of not owning a shifter charm himself. Alex let that go as they went into what Alex thought of as Julius’s war room, the older werewolf going over to a small fridge and pulling out a beer which he handed to Alex.
“To Corvus having their head cut off,” Julius said, holding up his bottle. Alex clinked his against it and then saw Julius wink at him.
“That was a crazy battle,” Alex said.
“I was very much in favor of you giving them a bloody nose to make them stop, but you damn near tore their head off. Titus is dead which means they’re deciding on a new leader, plus a thousand Corvus mages are gone. It’s unprecedented,” Julius said. Alex glanced over to the maps on the wall and saw that Julius had updated one with Baxter. There was now a large red mark to the north and notes written next to it identifying where Alex and his pack along with the witches had killed the Corvus mages.
“Do you think that will get the mages to back off?” Alex asked. Julius took a gulp of his beer and then burped.
“Maybe. Although the mages are more cohesive than werewolves, there are still rivalries there. Tradinium are the strongest of course, but Corvus wasn’t far behind. Losing a thousand mages only takes them down a peg or two, it definitely opens them up to competition with a few other enclaves. Tell me about the weredogs and how you controlled them,” Julius said, suddenly switching topics.
Alex had chewed over what he should say a few times, but still hadn’t come to a good answer. Feeling a pull on the werewolves and then actually drawing power from them which had resulted in two upgrade points seemed awfully like some kind of terrible magic. The feeling that he could influence via that power as well wasn’t something that he wanted to spread around. If he could truly do it and werewolves knew he could, then surely they would avoid him. Julius must have seen the hesitation on his face.
“Shall we say it’s… what is it, avocados out the butt or is it handkerchiefs?” Julius said.
“Handkerchiefs, lots of handkerchiefs,” Alex said, taking a swig of his beer.
Julius stood looking at
him, waiting him out.
“I could just sense them, that’s all. Like the mixed werewolf blood they’d been injected with—and then suddenly they were on my side,” Alex said a moment later, feeling he needed to give some kind of explanation.
Julius took another drink and then walked over to the map, tapping his finger on it.
“There’s something definitely going on. I’ve been trying my whole life to fit civilization over the top of the werewolves to get cooperation, and somehow you’ve done in only a few months what I failed to do in decades. Even me going out to make alliances… that’s something I’ve tried before with bribes of food and supplies, but suddenly I turn up with a handful of your magic rings and alphas, some of them very disagreeable alphas, have come around to your way of thinking. This has to be why the mages want to kill you. Look at what a small pack of unified werewolves did with the witches allied! A thousand Corvus mages destroyed, their weredogs turned against them. Could you imagine what you could do if you could get all of the werewolves to work together? Maybe we should stop thinking diplomacy and start thinking conquest,” Julius said.
“What do you think that would look like?” Alex asked carefully.
“You have the Slipways fortress already. Between that and your pack it’s the largest collection of werewolves in that area all working in the same direction. I’m thinking at the very least that the territories outside Baxter become forbidden for mages and vampires. And then, who knows, maybe we purge them from Baxter too,” he said.
Alex took another swig of his beer to hide his surprise. Given Julius’s background, his efforts towards civilization, it was surprising to hear him use words like purge. Did he mean kill all the mages? Run every single one of them out of Baxter? Surely that couldn’t be the only city in the world where werewolves were having trouble.
“I really just want them to stop,” Alex said finally.