by Harry Nix
Alex had had other semi-unwelcome sober thoughts arrive in the midst of their drunkenness, like worrying about his pack. What would they do if there was another attack? Nia had told him that she’d called and spoken to Lydia and Esme and some others via the satellite phone, but then, after Alex couldn’t let it go, she smacked him in the back of the head, telling him they were werewolves and they’d be okay. Alex wasn't quite so sure. Maybe it was something about being the Alpha, being in charge of it all, of having responsibility. He felt that split in him, the desire to return to the wilderness but then also wanting to stay in Baxter.
The first time he’d returned from the wilderness, Baxter hadn't smelt so good. Exhaust fumes and plastic pollution. This time it wasn't so bad. There were many things the city had, first and foremost steaks, bottles of gin, and cheesecake, that the wilderness simply didn't have. Not for the first time Alex wondered whether it was possible to move the entire pack from the wilderness to the city. He had no idea how you would do such a thing. At least out there, they had a territory they could hold if they could continue to defend it. What other option was there? Bring a pack of werewolves and try to keep them at Juno's? Have them sleep in the garage?
Alex tried to focus back on the here and now. Stephen was rambling about something, sitting on the grass with half a glass of gin and tonic in his hand. Although there was light pollution from Baxter, there were still plenty of stars above and in Alex's inebriated state there were two or three of each as his vision blurred.
“You gotta stop thinking of it as a one or a zero, on or off. Life and death is a continuum. Your whole body is full of cells that are living and dying all the time inside you like this giant frothy… stew… in the shape of a man. Stuff is constantly dying inside you to make way for the new life, and then one day you slowly slide further down the gradient until all the bits of your physical body are dead but then, there are still other bits that remain sometimes,” Stephen said.
“Sounds about right,” Alex said. From inside he could hear karaoke, Ruby and April doing a duet. Every now and then, he heard the chime of April casting a spell. He wasn't quite sure what exactly she was casting.
“So you really didn't know you’re a werewolf?” Stephen said. He took a gulp of his drink then made a face before putting it down on the grass where it immediately tipped over. The kid didn't seem to notice or care. Perhaps he was finally reaching his limit.
“Nah. Just living my life, making a post-apocalyptic farming game and then suddenly find out I’m a werewolf. Apparently, there was some spell on me for all those years,” Alex said. He couldn't remember saying anything to Stephen about himself, but then again, there were already patches of missing memory. The drinks Ruby had been brewing up were incredibly strong.
“Must've been some crazy powerful spell that lasted twenty-five years. Do know who cast it?”
“Nope.”
They sat outside in silence for a while, Alex watching the stars drift and multiply before snapping back into place. The karaoke inside was now hitting the 1980s and not the good part of the 1980s either. Ruby and the three girls were singing their hearts out.
“So, can you let me go?” Stephen said. He picked up his empty glass, finding a trickle in it and tipped it into his mouth.
“Yeah, I just wanted you to get to know me, trust me, see me as a person you know?” Alex said.
“They tell us that werewolves are more like animals. That’s when they tell us anything at all.”
Alex had gathered some information from Stephen in shouted conversations over the music and things the kid had let slip. Alex wasn't quite sure how much of it he was going to remember. The overall impression he got was growing up in the Xavo enclave wasn't good, but that Stephen didn't know what else he could do. Both his parents had been Xavo and both were now deceased, killed by other mages. The enclave was his home, his family, and his parents all wrapped up in one.
“Can’t you just leave that enclave? Go become like an accountant or something?” Alex said.
“I can leave but it’s a one-way trip. They do teach us things. Not many mages end up going back into the normal world.”
Alex was about to ask Stephen something about that, but then because he was drunk, his mind suddenly slipped across to his homemade flame sword spell.
“Hey, I want to share this spell I wrote because I can't work out how to fix it,” Alex said.
They were close enough on the grass that Alex could reach out his hand and touch Stephen on the shoulder.
“Go for it, I want to see it,” Stephen said. He had his eyes half-closed and was rocking his head around, the alcohol obviously still working on him.
Alex brought up his so-called flame sword spell. It was hard to sense whether Stephen was accessing it. The alcohol was dulling all his sensations but obviously the kid was.
“Okay, so I got like this guy and he’s standing by a photocopier, and there's a campfire on top of it, and he's going crazy copying the campfire and then throwing the paper on the ground, and then copying it, and putting another one next to it until he’s just got this huge line and then all the campfires are bursting into flames off the paper, so he’s got like twenty campfires in a row. There is also this other guy holding the dude, like he’s grabbing his shirt and pulling him back so he can't go any further,” Stephen said.
“That's exactly the nonsense happening!” Alex said and without intending to, cast the spell. Thankfully, the flames appeared on his other hand, not the one he was using to touch Stephen on the shoulder. It stretched out a long line for a second, hitting the lemon tree, before Alex pulled his hand back and pointed it straight up into the sky, the flames making a whooshing noise in the darkness.
“Yeah, that sucks, that’s not right at all,” Stephen said. Alex quickly canceled the spell before the girls inside could see what he was doing.
“I was trying to make a way to throw the flame. Like appear and then throw it, but all I managed to do last time was make the flame appear inside the house. I burnt the curtains and nearly burned the house down,” Alex said.
“Bring it up again. I can fix it,” Stephen said. Alex brought it up again after a few false starts. He could feel Stephen doing something. When his spell screen appeared above his head he had the entire spell there, but with chunks of it rewritten.
“Okay so now there’s the same dude, but he's making a fire, and I got rid of the other one holding it, and then he’s like dressed as a baseball guy and then he makes the fire and then he throws it wherever he is looking. Plus, I put like a temperature gauge thing on the fire so can make it hotter if you want,” Stephen said.
Alex was struggling to read through the code, and he had no idea how Stephen's changes translated to code anyway. He'd already deleted his original homebrew healing spell, replacing it with the upgraded one so he had enough space to copy the improved spell back. It took more than a few times thanks to the alcohol, but eventually he got it all.
Without worrying about whether he was about to kill himself, or whether Stephen had set a trap for him, he executed the spell and a ball of fire appeared in the palm of his hand. Without really intending to, Alex fed some more mana into it. It grew to size to the size of an orange, then, laughing like a fool, he threw it, thinking it would just hit the back fence and harmlessly burst apart. The fireball roared across the back yard and hit the back fence, immediately setting it alight. There was a vine hanging over the fence, parts of which were dry, which immediately caught fire.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit!” Stephen said.
“Get the garden hose,” Alex said. He tried to stand up and immediately fell over on his face before getting to his knees. Despite the fact the kid was obviously drunk off his ass too, he managed to get the garden hose, turned it on, and quickly doused the fire.
Alex managed to get up eventually and checked to see if there were any embers that would burst into flames again. Even in the dark, he could see the huge burn mark on the fence from where
he had hit it with the fireball. He looked towards the house where the sounds of karaoke were still echoing.
“Okay, we don't know what happened; it was nothing to do with us,” Alex said.
“Yes, absolutely. I think we should go inside,” Stephen said.
Stephen put the hose back and then the two of them rushed inside, in their haste leaving their glasses out on the lawn. They got into the lounge to find Ruby, Nia, Juno, and April still had the karaoke music blaring and were now playing drunken strip poker, sitting on the floor around the coffee table. Nia and Juno were both topless. April was fully dressed, and Ruby was down to a bra.
“We’re playing strip poker and this slut is cheating,” Juno said, pointing a drunken finger at her grandmother.
“Don’t fire the kitchen if you can’t handle the fire in the kitchen,” Ruby said, struggling to focus on Juno before gulping down more of her drink.
Alex saw Stephen's eyes go wide, much the same way Jacob’s had when he'd seen Alex's mates topless. Alex wouldn’t have minded strip poker with his mates, but with Ruby… not so much.
“We're going to the kitchen!” he declared and grabbed Stephen by the arm and hustled him out of there, the two of them laughing as they went. They ended up at the kitchen table where the final quarter of the cheesecake sat, the two of them picking at it.
You know what, this is way more fun than being in that stupid enclave,” Stephen said.
Then, without fanfare, the young mage slumped back in his chair and slipped under the table, snoring before he hit the ground.
Alex looked at the cheesecake. “These young kids can't hold their liquor,” he said to it.
11
Alex woke up, his head pounding, when the three girls clattered into the bedroom.
“Time to get up,” Juno trilled and flicked his ear.
Alex tried to open his eyes but found one of them was glued shut. This probably was a good thing too because Nia opened the blinds, filling the room with light that even through his closed eyelids was like being stabbed in the brain by red-hot pokers.
“Can you let me give the poor boy his potion first,” April said from beside him.
Alex didn't remember coming to bed, although he had woken up at one point in the middle of the night when someone had smacked him in the face while sleeping.
Juno, April, Nia and he had all shared the same bed, which now that he was awake, he supposed was because Stephen had possibly taken a room, and he guessed that Ruby must have one too. Not that this was on his mind this morning. He was lying face down on the bed and his stomach was churning, his head still spinning, and he was pretty sure he was still drunk.
April knelt beside him. She was wearing a short white miniskirt and looked like she was about to go off to a tennis lesson and on any other day he would have loved to drag her into bed, except for today when he felt like he was about to die. She was holding a small glass bottle and inside it was a green liquid with small glints of gold through it.
“Is that the stuff you gave us out in the wilderness that tasted really horrible?” Alex said, trying to get his eyelid unstuck.
“It was like if someone took the smell of a dead whale and somehow made into a drink. That's what it tasted like,” Juno said.
“Hey, that was only because I had to use what I could find out there in the wilderness. As you well know, this one tastes delicious,” April said. She waved the bottle near Alex and he caught the scent of lemon and hints of vanilla. Willing to drink anything to get rid of the horrible feeling, he swallowed it down. It tasted strongly of lemon with a slightly bitter undernote to it, but also vanilla, almost a little like the lemon cheesecake they'd eaten last night. The effect on him was immediate. His churning stomach calmed, the pounding in his head went away, and the cobwebs cleared.
Within a moment, he sat up after rubbing his eyes, getting a proper look at Nia, Juno, and April. He wasn't sure if they were coordinating but all three were wearing short white skirts. Looking at the three pairs of beautiful legs, the blood flow immediately went south, and he started to reach for April, but she jumped out of his way.
“No, no, no, you need to head off for a shower while we open the windows and change the sheets because last night four people who had drunk way too much gin all slept in this room,” April said.
It was then that Alex noticed Nia was holding a clean set of sheets. He sniffed, his nose clearing, and suddenly caught the scent of alcohol.
“You better get going,” Nia said, nodding towards the door. Alex leaped out of bed and found he was stark naked, not even a pair of boxer shorts. He immediately saw April, Nia, and Juno's eyes track downwards and Juno bite her lip.
“Go have a shower and come back quickly,” Juno said. Then she blinked herself out of her daze and opened the window to let in some fresh air. Alex practically sprinted to the shower and it was only when he got there that he suddenly realized he'd run naked through the house. It appeared, however, that Ruby and Stephen were either still asleep or weren’t around.
Alex showered quickly and then brushed his teeth before racing back to the bedroom. In the intervening time, the girls had transformed it. They'd changed all the sheets, opened the blinds, and now it was bright and well-lit on a sunny morning. April was sitting on the bed resting against the pillows with one of her legs up, her short skirt barely covering anything. Alex saw she wasn't wearing the stolen graveyard necklace now but Nia was. He’d come back intending to ask about Stephen and Ruby but he focused on that instead.
“Are you taking turns with the necklace?” he asked.
“Figured we’d see if someone else could get a clue as to what's going on,” April said. As she spoke, she trailed a hand down her waist. It came to rest on her thigh, her fingers tantalizingly close to the hem of her skirt. Juno came walking over and shut the door behind Alex. Then he saw a flicker of a spell screen and felt a slight pull on the magic around them.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Silence bubble so now no one outside the room can hear what's happening,” Juno said. Alex had come back with a towel around his waist. Juno gently brushed her fingers across it before going over to sit on the end of the bed, folding one leg over the other. Seeing two of his mates on the bed made his temperature rise. Despite that, he still managed to ask, “Where are Ruby and Stephen?”
“Grandma took him out. I think breakfast and some shopping. That was some party last night,” Juno said.
“We were a little disappointed he passed out of the kitchen table, especially when the rest of us had lost all our gear playing strip poker,” Nia said with a slight smile.
“I swear she’s cheating but haven’t been able to prove it yet,” Juno said.
“So how long do we have before they come back?” Alex asked. Nia walked across and sat next to Juno on the bed, lightly placing her arm across her shoulders.
Juno wasn't wearing a watch, but she made the motion anyway, looking at her arm. “They’re gone until… half-past the freckle which I think is about two hours and the silence bubble is there just in case they come back early,” she said. Alex was about to move but suddenly a green glint popped out of the air in front of them which was quickly followed by a red one.
“How is that happening? No one has even done anything yet,” Alex said.
“You are standing there in a towel,” April said. She trailed her fingers down her thigh and just below the hem of her short skirt. Alex wasn't entirely sure and couldn’t see properly, but he suspected she wasn't wearing any panties. As though they'd rehearsed it, Juno and Nia climbed up the bed, each taking hold of one of April's feet. She gently moaned as the pair of them began massaging her, squeezing her feet.
“Come over here and help us,” Juno said.
The wild inside Alex wanted just to grab them, screw them senseless, but he managed to restrain himself as he climbed up onto the bed. The bed wasn't overly large, but there was enough room for him to sit between April's legs. With both her fe
et up in the air and a skirt barely covering anything, Alex could confirm that, in fact, she wasn't wearing any panties. Even in his human form he could smell the scent of her. He cupped her calf and began squeezing it between his hands, gently rolling it as April groaned and closed her eyes. Sitting between Juno and Nia he could smell both of them too, the wet heat of their need. He wasn't quite sure why the three of them were so worked up, but he felt it too. Alex moved over to the other calf and began massaging it, resisting the urge to dive in between April's thighs. Every now and again, Juno or Nia would touch him on the back, tickling their fingers across his shoulders, gently touching him.
“Go higher,” April whispered. Alex massaged up past April's knee to her thigh. April was now leaning back against the pillow with both her legs up in the air thanks to Juno and Nia. Aware of his strength, Alex was careful not to push too hard as he massaged the muscle above and below before turning to the other leg and repeating it, April's breathing had begun to quicken and every now and again a green fleck would pop out of the air and shoot towards them. Sometimes it would hit April but most of the time was flying into Alex.
“Higher,” April said.
There wasn't anywhere higher Alex could go really, so he took this as the cue to lay down on his stomach and use his fingers to trace them over April's inner thigh. From behind him, he could hear Juno and Nia and their breathing.
“How much longer are you going to tease the poor girl?” Juno whispered.
“She could use a bit more teasing, I think,” Nia said. Alex brushed his finger across and down and then leaned forward to kiss April on her inner thigh. April moved, trying to lower herself on the bed and her skirt bunched up a little. Alex gently traced his fingers across her thigh and across again, repeating the pattern: a gentle touch and then a kiss as April sighed at the touch of his lips. The green glints were coming faster now, and they'd barely even begun. Finally, Alex kissed her but then continued on his way up. April moaned as his Alex opened his mouth and enveloped her.