Werewolf Mage 5

by Harry Nix

  “Nia?” he called out, hearing his voice echo through the dark.

  He walked into the hall, looking around until he spotted movement from up in the small room hanging high above the warped boards. Nia popped her head out and looked down at him for a moment before she waved and disappeared.

  Alex looked around but he couldn’t see any other way up now that most of the gantry was disconnected and on the ground. Although it was quite high, he could jump it provided he didn’t overshoot and crash into the roof. Hoping the small room up there would be able to hold his weight, he took a few steps back and took a running leap, rising easily up into the air. He didn’t quite get it right, going slightly high than he’d wanted, one of his clawed hands brushing the roof. Then he managed to grab the edge of the hanging room and swung himself in, landing with a thud that shook the whole thing.

  “Okay, just take it easy, you’ll kill both of us,” Nia said.

  She was sitting at the back of the small room with her arms crossed. She was in hybrid form. With Alex up there, he was worried the whole room would come smashing down to the ground with the weight of them. He took careful steps across the old carpet and sat down in front of her. The tiny room must’ve once held a projector, but it had either been stolen or removed at some point, leaving a few bolts in the ground. The rest of the floor was old carpet and on the walls were a few posters from previous school productions. There was a small door on one side that led to the destroyed gantry.

  Alex took a quick look around and then back to Nia.

  “They let kids up here?” he said.

  “I know, it was super dangerous. You had to wear this belt and get tied on with this rope like you were abseiling, but half the time the teachers weren’t even looking. If you fell out of here, you were dead,” Nia said.

  “Anyone ever fall?”

  “This one kid, Jake Callahan, but it was only off the gantry over near the wall where you first get on it. He hadn’t clicked the rope on so he only fell like six feet maybe. Broke both his arms and smashed his nose. Turned out pretty good for him in the long run though. While he was in hospital he lost a bunch of weight. He had to have surgery on his nose which made him look different. When he came back, within like three months he had a girlfriend. And like a hot girlfriend too. Amber Holloway. You could say him being a complete goddamn moron was the greatest thing that ever happened to him,” Nia said.

  “Yes, I can see how being a complete goddamn moron could be the greatest thing to happen to someone,” Alex said with a smile.

  Nia still had her arms crossed despite the light banter. He got the feeling that she was waiting for him to yell at her or something like that. He decided to just cut right to the core of it.

  “You were right. I shouldn’t have allied with the kid. I should stop calling him a kid, he’s an adult. And I’m going to cut off the agreement with Vorbo too. Then if we starve, we starve together,” Alex said.

  He saw Nia relax just a little, but then she started biting her lip.

  “I’m sorry to do this but I think you’re going to have to wait and maybe be more sorry in depth later, because I came across something tonight and you really need to see it,” Nia said.

  “Follow me,” she said and squeezed him on the shoulder as she passed.

  She opened the small door that led to the missing gantry and pulled herself out onto the outer side of the room, heading towards the roof. Alex peered out and saw there was actually a skylight, which Nia opened before climbing out onto the roof itself. He followed her and was soon out on the roof, looking out over the suburbs and buildings around them.

  “We’re going to run and jump. Keep running and jumping till I say stop,” Nia said.

  With that she took off at high speed and leaped from the edge of the gymnasium roof, shooting out through the air towards another building. She landed and rolled and kept running. Alex took off after a moment to follow her. The first jump he almost screwed up, coming short and having a scramble his way up the building, his ribs aching as he thudded into the brickwork. But after that, he managed to keep up reasonably well. They leaped across five or six buildings, leaving the school and moving into an industrial area. Soon they were looking down at an enormous site filled with warehouses. Nia crept up to the edge of the building and Alex joined her, looking down.

  Most of the warehouses were dark but there was a cluster surrounded by lights. There were men and women all carrying guns, protecting trucks that were being loaded up with gear. Alex could see immediately that there were mages. Some of them were still wearing robes, but also others were using magic to lift heavy crates, safe from the Great Barrier as there were no normals there.

  “Trucks full of mages, trucks full of weapons and all these boxes. The trucks are driving out into the territories,” Nia said.

  She pointed in the distance where the edge of Baxter petered out and soon became wilderness split by aging roads.

  “What’s that direction?” Alex asked.

  “There are a few packs in the way. If you go in a dead straight line, which is where I think they’re going, it eventually goes to where the wild packs are, the ones that kill on sight. Given how many of them are going out there, that has to be it,” Nia said.

  Alex looked across the trucks below, realizing he was counting mages. There were over a hundred of them and plenty of them armed to the teeth.

  “This is an invasion force?” Alex asked.

  “Look down there. You see the diggers? I think they have them for mass graves,” Nia said.

  Alex looked where she was pointing and saw a row of small Bobcats some of the mages had loaded onto the backs of trucks. As they watched, one of the trucks pulled out, followed by another loaded up with boxes and a bunch of mages sitting behind them.

  They drove out the gate and headed away from the city. More trucks came in loaded up with mages who quickly disembarked and began shifting boxes.

  “The Bobcats are to dig graves. This an invasion force. They’re going to invade and take the territories,” Alex repeated.

  Nia touched his arm and squeezed.

  “You’re not thinking big enough, my dearest one. They’re invading, but that’s secondary. I think this is a genocide.”

  19

  Alex crept through the dark, with Nia and Jacob by his side. They were all in wolf form, as was the rest of the pack, quieter than the shadow moving across the landscape. As Alex moved through the darkness, he could feel his pack spread out around him. The connection had been growing stronger, and it was almost as though he had a blurry map in his mind, showing the location of every werewolf. Right now, they were spread around the eastern side of the mages’ camp, up in the hills throughout the forest.

  In his wolf form, furthest away from human, Alex delighted in creeping through the dark, a vicious predator watching unsuspecting prey. He slinked behind a fallen tree and then looked down the hill where the mages had been building for three days straight now. The large boxes they had shipped out had been full of building materials, trellises and the like, quickly assembled and covered with tarpaulin, the mages setting up a forward operating base. They were around seventy miles from Baxter, in an area where there were no werewolf packs. All Nia knew was that, according to Julius, there had been werewolf packs there as recently as three weeks ago, but now they were gone, vanished from existence.

  The mages had stopped near an old burnt out building and begun to build their camp up around it. It wasn’t just the quick shelters they were building. There were also stronger walls going up, like kit homes and barracks. After watching for three days, Alex had become convinced that Nia was right: this wasn’t an invasion force. This was an army designed to wipe out every werewolf for the next five hundred miles. Alex felt Jacob shift beside him, going from wolf to hybrid, and let the pull take him as well, stretching out from the ground, flexing his claws as he stood up.

  “All we need is, like, a boulder with grenades strapped to it and just roll it down t
he hill,” Jacob murmured.

  “How will it get over that pit they’re digging?” Alex asked. It was only around a quarter of the camp so far, the Necromancers using reanimated dead to dig what was clearly a moat, although it was just a trench right now.

  “When it gets close enough, you just flick it with some telekinesis, jump it over the gap, easy. I mean, you’re the werewolf mage, right? What, can’t you do that quietly?” Jacob said, grinning in the darkness. Alex shoved him, but the young werewolf just slipped away.

  “The only one not quiet around here is you and that girlfriend of yours,” Alex said, before turning back to the camp. He heard a sniff from somewhere up the hill behind him and cringed slightly. Yvonne must be up there somewhere, and he hadn’t intended for her to hear him giving Jacob shit. It had been too hard to resist though. The two werewolves had been all over each other for the entire trip out to the territories, running side by side, nuzzling and licking at each other at every opportunity they had.

  “We definitely need to cut this growth off before it gets any larger,” Nia said.

  “Let’s get going,” Alex said. He’d taken two hundred werewolves of his pack out with him, leaving just a bare fifty or so in Baxter, but he’d also called on the Slipways Fortress. He’d either directly called packs which had allied with him or sent messengers for them to come.

  What had started off as a few hundred mages was now a quickly swelling camp. There were probably eight hundred or more. From the number of buildings they were constructing, it looked like they planned for thousands to live there. Thankfully, there was only one road in or out, and at certain points it became quite narrow. It also passed through some thickly wooded land, and with a pack of werewolves, Alex knew that he could cut off the supply of trucks, at least for a while.

  It was clear the mages knew they were being watched, despite the fact the werewolves stayed hidden during the day and only came out at night. The mages had set lights up all around the camp and there were guards all along the perimeter.

  Alex shifted to wolf with Nia and Jacob following, and they left the camp, streaking through the darkness. They stayed well away from the road, which still had the occasional truck driving along it, bringing more mages or supplies to the camp. In the night, it slowed to a trickle, the mages perhaps wary of attack.

  As they ran, Alex chewed over his plans once more. Firstly, it was clear this wasn’t just Xavo mages. Ignis were also involved, Alex having seen fire mages going out, burning trees and undergrowth away from the camp to remove any place that a werewolf could conceal themself.

  The risen dead, brought there as bodies stacked in the trucks, were being used to dig the moat, being far stronger than any mage and able to work ceaselessly. There were also other mages about the place, too, not Xavo or Ignis, and Alex had come to assume that it was Tradinium. He had no real idea, though.

  Juno had attempted scrying, peering into their camp, attempting to listen to conversations, but most of the mages worked in near silence, eating without talking and then sleeping. After the first night, she’d been unable to scry into the camp, the way being blocked by something like a ward. Although it hadn’t been Alex’s plan to track these mages and their growing camp, it’d quickly become the most pressing matter. If they were going to start wiping out werewolf packs, then what was the point of all his alliances, especially if this force just took them out one by one, claiming the land for themselves?

  But Alex had decided this wasn’t like before with the Corvus mages, when his pack had marched into open battle and had to rely on the witches to help defeat them. Out here, the mages were in werewolf territory. Werewolves who could strike in the night, howling down from the hills, snatching anyone who left the safety of the lights and retreating into the darkness, driving fear and terror into the hearts of their enemies.

  Although this wasn’t Alex’s territory, in just the short time he’d been here he’d come to know it, felt as though he knew every hill and tree, the hidden creeks, the gullies, the places to ambush, and the places to hide. It was the werewolf power, feeding him information from his pack.

  They jogged for an hour in the dark until they came upon the bulk of the pack, which had been quietly felling trees, keeping watch for any trucks approaching and hiding as they passed. April was a shimmer in the dark. She’d covered her hair and was whispering to the werewolves which trees to cut down. She’d called up a rainstorm earlier in the day to soften the earth, flooding some of the local area as well. Alex shifted to hybrid and squelched across the damp earth to April.

  “Right on time. You can take that big tree there,” April said. She touched him on the arm, and Alex felt her connection to the nature around them. The big tree that she was referring to was eighty years old, a redwood, but it was dying. At some point in the past, the people building the road had cut through its roots, and then perhaps a year ago, it had been poisoned. It was too far gone for April to save, and suffering, desperately thirsty for water and in pain from the poison. Alex waved to his pack, some of whom came forward carrying axes which they had painted over in black so they wouldn’t shine in the moonlight.

  Listening for approaching trucks, they began cutting, Alex picking up an ax himself and chopping away at the wood. He could feel it was hurting the tree, but it was a mercy. It wouldn’t have to live in suffering anymore.

  All up and down the roadway, other werewolves were chopping, and soon there was a crack in the distance as the first tree fell, smashing across the road. It obliterated what was left of the surface, embedding itself. Even if the tree could be removed, the road would need serious repair to hold the trucks that the mages had been sending. Soon, all up and down the road, trees began to fall, werewolves scattering out of the way. They weren’t all perfect drops—one of the trees went down at a 45 degree angle, crashing against another and almost hitting a cluster of werewolves who barely got out of the way in time.

  Alex felt his tree beginning to go and waved his pack out of the way. He shoved it and it splintered and toppled, landing with a boom. With the main trees down, the werewolves quickly ran into the forest, picking the logs up that they had been cutting during the night. They piled them up behind the larger trees, wedging them, trying to make an impenetrable maze. Some of the logs they nailed to others, wrapping black rope around them, tangling it up. In under half an hour, they had thoroughly blocked the road, destroyed most of it, making it utterly impassable.

  It was perfect timing, too. The drone of a distant truck engine approached. They had chosen their blockade position well, putting it just over a hill, so the approaching driver wouldn’t be able to see it until they crested the hill.

  The werewolves melted away into the darkness as the lights appeared, the truck downshifting as it drove towards the barrier. As Alex watched, he couldn’t believe that the driver was getting this close. Surely trees blocking the road that should be clear were signs that there was an ambush. But still the truck drove closer, and as it did, Alex saw the driver, a teenager no older than eighteen, if that. There was an older mage sitting in the passenger seat, but he had his eyes closed, sleeping. The truck came to a stop, which woke him, and after blearily rubbing his eyes, he started shouting at the kid, but it was far too little, far too late.

  Werewolves erupted out of the forest, some jumping to land on top of the truck, others coming around the back. Jacob used the arm that he had utilized to throw oranges at Alex’s head plenty of times to pick up a heavy rock and hurled it like a pitcher at the World Series. It smashed the side window and hit the older mage in the head, coming close to knocking him out. Alex ran with his pack in hybrid form and felt magic flaring. The back of the truck had mages in it, but they must have been sleeping, lulled by the rocking rhythm of the truck. A few fire shields flared, and one werewolf shot out of the back of the truck and crashed into the trees, bleeding from a sucking chest wound but still alive, before the werewolves took the truck entirely.

  Alex had given instructions n
ot to dismember the mages if they could help it, and as he leaped into the back of the truck, he saw that although his werewolf pack had done their best, there were arms and legs and a few decapitated heads rolling around. There were, however, six dead mages in the back fully intact.

  He went around the front of the truck where his pack was holding the driver and the older mage. Both had been stripped of their clothing and had claws to their throats. The older mage was staring up with undisguised hatred but the younger one was shaking like a leaf, and as Alex approached in his hybrid form, he could smell that the kid had shit himself. He had piss leaking down his leg as well.

  “Tell me what the mages are doing at the camp,” Alex said, striding out of the darkness with his claws flexing. The older mage spat on the ground, a deliberate insult, and then screamed as Alex leaped at him, grabbing the back of his neck and driving a claw into one of his eyes, not deep enough to pierce his brain but enough to tear it from its socket. Alex pulled his claw back and held his finger in front of the man’s other eye, which was wildly rolling.

  “This is your eye, and if you don’t answer me, it’s going to be your testicles on these claws,” Alex said in a low growl.

  “Please, we don’t know, we’re just drivers,” the young mage begged.

  “Alex, another truck’s coming,” Jacob said from behind him.

  “You’re fucked now, werewolf,” the old mage spat. Alex had to hand it to him, it was impressive bravado in the face of certain death. He stabbed his claw through the mage’s other eye, but this time kept going into his brain, holding the body as it shook and shit itself before dropping it to the ground. Then he turned to the kid, who was so pale he looked like he was about to faint.