Big Bad Wolf

by Jayne Hawke

  Ash reloaded.

  “I doubt we’ll see more humans, Rafe excluded. If we do, they’ll be trained killers, not... whatever these were. Rhian, I think you deserve to take point on this. I assume you’re going to do this in canine form?”

  “Lupine,” she corrected with a snarl, her face already changing as she transformed into a lean, cunning-looking wolf with tawny fur.

  “Lupine,” Ash agreed. “I’ll cover her, make sure she doesn’t get do- overwhelmed,” he said, catching himself before he used the unfortunate idiom.

  “Cover us both,” I said. “I’m going to have to do a massive amount of spellbreaking to keep the artifacts in check. Especially the mirror images.”

  “Right, so Rhian you prioritise killing Nicholas and whomever else he has deploying his art collection, Rowan you’ll minimise their impact in the meantime. I’ll shoot everything that comes into line of sight. Sounds solid. Let’s go kill some folk.”

  With that, we stormed into the warehouse. The moment we stepped inside, the door closed and locked. More concerning, though, was the fact that we were caged with an entire pack of slavering shifters, doubtless more victims of the same magic that had drawn us here in the first place.

  Rhian leapt out before any of them could react, her ferocity making me suddenly realize that the monstrous rage we’d seen from her before was, in reality, the calm before the storm. Ash was a split second behind her, guns in his hands delivering fire and death in equal measure in an ugly spray of quick shots meant to saturate the area.

  They didn’t need my help, and I knew there was more to this than there appeared. The shifters had been an expensive toy, there was no reason he’d dump them on us unsupported unless there was something more happening. I quickly reached out with my magic and found huge reserves above us on the ceiling, hidden within opaque demi-orbs that likely began life as light fixtures.

  Moonlight.

  Moonlight was normally anything but threatening, a finnicky but diverse magic mostly used for complex transmutations, transformations, and of course shifter magic. In large enough doses, though... I opened a vial of ice magic, a precious resource gathered in winter and stored for moments of absolute necessity.

  Quickly gathering the threads of it before they could scatter in the heat, I began to form a layer of dense, hard ice over the orbs above us, containing the magic within. The ice would melt in time, but if I could weave the spell efficiently there would be more than enough of it to hold the bombs in place and intact long enough for us to finish the ongoing fight and get clear of the cage – and the blast radius.

  Before I could finish, a runty, mangy looking wolf leapt on my leg, savaging my achilles tendon and trying to drag me to the ground.

  “Anyone want to play dog catcher before we all get moonbombed?” I asked, exasperated as I saw cracks start to form.

  As it turned out, the answer to that wouldn’t come soon enough. One fixture was entirely contained, but the second managed to crack apart just enough to allow a thin line of concentrated moonlight pour free. It spread over the area, casting pitch-black moonshadow beneath each of us and scorching Ash’s and my skin like an instant sunburn.

  I screamed and collapsed, trying and failing to somehow cover my bare arms, the world forgotten. I was brought back from it by a piercing howl, deafening and triumphant. The shifters weren’t burning, they were soaking up the power, almost glowing with it as their wolves were driven to primal heights of power, the dire wolves of ancient times revived and surpassed.

  I focused on the sound, shut out the pain. That sound would be the end of us, even with Rhian growing alongside the rogue pack, unless I could somehow fix the hole. I tried to get a grip on the glass and reform it, but it was too thin, too impure, and too distant. There just wasn’t enough earth magic there to work with under these circumstances. I needed to get us free, get Ash and I back in the fight.

  I felt the wolves go back to work, the runty thing at my side now a massive, glowing beast, too big for me to fight hand to hand, let alone ignore. I drew my dagger and thrust at it, fending it off as best I could, but it knew what it was, where it stood in the food chain. It revelled a moment more in its still-growing power, and that moment was all that saved me. Rhian came crashing down on it, now a divine she-wolf to match Fenrir himself.

  She was the key. I couldn’t seal the magic back up, but I could divert it. My skin still burning, I began to gather the threads as they fell, making of them a simple but functional stream that pressed itself readily, willingly into Rhian’s form. She glowed and grew, her form beyond all proportion as she burned through the magic. She jumped from side to side, tearing the other wolves to shreds like helpless livestock. She was the only alpha there, and she was the only one with her own witch. As she grew, she drew more and more of the magic to herself on her own, and I could expand my work to protect Ash. It seemed like a lifetime of grasping, weaving, and directing, my mind shut down to all but the magic and the weave.

  When the magic was gone, I felt exhausted, my triumph dimmed by the fact that it had eaten all but the last of my energy. I could see the magic rolling off of Rhian still. She’d burn through it fast, but for now she was going to be a terrible foe for Rafe and whatever was left up his sleeve. She smashed through the gate holding us and ran off into the warehouse, hidden from sight by the rows of massive boxes but evidenced by the snapping of her massive jaws, the heavy footfalls of her impossible paws.

  I took a moment to gather myself and then smashed a bottle of sunlight on the floor, too far gone to work the lid. I drank in the energy, not conscious of the threads themselves. My subconscious could do that much, at least, and I felt my strength restore. My skin began to heal, a stinging itch different and infinitely worse than healing a normal wound. When I opened my eyes, it was to Ash holding out his hand to help me up, a pool of empty health potion vials at his feet.

  “Time to get up. The wolf will burn out before all is said and done,” he said, firmly but not unkindly.

  “Easy for you to say. You got to use the potions, I had to actually heal myself.”

  “Excuses, excuses,” he said, his eyes dancing as he pulled me to my feet.

  He reloaded his pistols, one magazine of shadow and one of poison – partly the rounds he’d made out of the magic outside the rebel pub and partly the leftovers of a batch of mistletoe that had been hanging somewhere in a bizarrely out-of-season Solstice decoration.

  “Gimme your shotgun. Next time I’m not gonna get chewed on by a wolf while I’m trying to work. Also, don’t let me get chewed on by stuff while I’m trying to work.”

  He handed it over and I hung the strap over my back. It felt awkward there, out of place, but I knew for a fact I’d be glad to have it. I felt for magic and found it was loaded with mundane shells. Boring. We started to make our way quickly towards the sounds of wolf snarls. It sounded like she was still on the offensive, but when the moonlight was done she would be too if we weren’t there to help.

  The place was a maze. We saw several sprung traps, dangerous things that Rhian had sprinted through without thought. I wondered if she’d have been that reckless under normal circumstances and doubted it. She wasn’t a cub, she knew her limits. It was just that her limits weren’t quite normal right that second. Heaps of unidentifiable meat here and there were evidence enough of that.

  I was getting frustrated at the maze we’d gotten trapped in. There was no time for wandering, and the trail of bodies had gotten too thin to follow. We needed to get back in the fight, needed to be doing something that mattered, and all we could do was try and follow the path of the wolf. I needed a way to improve my sense of smell, to track her the way she’d track another wolf, but I didn’t know how. It had to be possible, but I couldn’t imagine how. I kicked myself for not bothering to learn it.

  “Alright, bored now,” Ash said, turning unceremoniously and beginning to climb the twenty-foot-high shelves.

  I couldn’t tell from where we stood, b
ut I’d assumed they reached the ceiling. Still, it couldn’t hurt to try. I watched him climb and wracked my brain, trying to think of some way to outsmart this. I could break through his inventory towards her sound, but that would take massive amounts of energy and probably wouldn’t be any faster than guessing at the maze. I could try some sort of echolocation thing, but with no experience at it there was little to no chance that I’d be able to usefully interpret the echoes.

  I was just short of starting a fire and hoping it burned things down in more or less the right direction when Ash called down.

  “Climb! I can see all the way to the other wall from here. We just need to jump from shelf to shelf!”

  I started climbing after him, throwing myself upwards with all the strength adrenaline could lend me, willing myself to push past my limits. Ash was already gone, moving shelf to shelf towards the signs of fighting. He’d be a godsend for her, but they still needed me and I still needed to climb another fifteen feet or more. I paused for a brief second and pulled out a life vial, uncorking it and using the threads inside to press my muscles into overdrive. It wouldn’t make me a champion climber, but it gave me the boost I needed.

  I made it to the top and over, not pausing to take in the view before I started leaping across the precarious distance between shelves. They’d been made for lifting equipment to pass between, and that combined with the uneven terrain made this a dangerous and difficult proposition. The gunfire was starting, and I was grateful I’d had the sense to improve myself as I managed jump after jump with what I was quite certain was picture-perfect form. Within less than a minute, I’d reached the arena-esque area in which my allies were fighting.

  Ash had jumped down next to the shrinking and increasingly ragged-looking Rhian, prioritizing accuracy and attention over safety. I wasn’t of the same mind. I had no interest in drawing attention to myself. Peace was exactly what I needed, and lying flat on top of the boxes gave me just that.

  They were fighting against the images, Ash’s shadow bullets dispersing them in one shot each. Rhian, on the other hand, was at a loss for how to serve any purpose against them. They didn’t feel pain because they didn’t exist, and the fact that they were illusions didn’t appear to make the wounds they inflicted any less dangerous.

  She was going to die without me. I reached out and began to grasp onto the magic of them, using the rare inborn talent of spellbreaking that made me so respected in training but which had been useful to me on surprisingly few occasions in the field. One by one I shredded them, their magical basis complex but weak as the mirror materialized them before our eyes en masse from somewhere unseen.

  The problem was, even if I could have done it forever, which of course I couldn’t, we had no reason to think the magic mirror wasn’t drawing its energy directly from the god plane or something, capable of producing images until they overwhelmed us. Worse, Rafe and Nicholas were doubtless close at hand, waiting to strike at the worst possible moment.

  It wasn’t long before the shooting stopped, and when it did my workload doubled. I needed them to be smart, to find the damn mirror, and as I saw Ash trying to pistol whip them like the king of the morons my heart fell. Before long, though, I felt his magical gaze, weak but scanning. I could only hope he was close enough to find it, because I had no focus to spare for the task.

  I saw his focus change, the images forgotten in a second as he dropped the empty 1911s so recently repurposed as clubs, drew his colts and, changing chambers as he brought them to bear, fired two shots. One broke something so tiny it was barely a black dot from where I stood, the other brought down the mirror which was suddenly clear as day in front of them once the other artifact’s presence no longer protected it.

  The colts were back in their holsters before I even saw the mirror break, his 1911s back in his hands as if by magic and the juggling act of reloading well under way. At that very moment, Rafe flew in overhead with Hermes’ sandals carrying him in the picture of subtlety. It was obvious he'd been caught offguard. This was not the approach he’d planned. We were supposed to have been fighting the images for another several minutes so he could come in at our moment of greatest weakness. As it was, he was settling for an attempt to take the initiative while we were catching our breath.

  It worked as well as you might imagine.

  I felt the poison magic arc out with the enchanted bullets as Ash opened fire on him, but the sandals were faster. I reached out to break their spell, but the weave was denser than Kevlar and orders of magnitude stronger than my spellbreaking. They were an artifact of the gods, and I was as likely to break them with my meagre witching magic as I was to close up the Grand Canyon.

  I broke open a vial of lightning and began to lash out at him with quick strikes, a single thread a piece, but the electricity tracked onto light fixtures, beams, and shelving as he spun gracefully away in perfect silence.

  He still wasn’t attacking, though, and that concerned me. I heard a strange, understated growl from Rhian and wondered if she was thinking the same thing. I stopped attacking him and waited. I couldn’t hit him, and he wasn’t trying to hit me, which made him a non-factor. The question was, what was in play that made it worth exposing himself? He continued to frolic through the air under fire from Ash, who either didn’t see the issue or was leaving it up to us to solve.

  I heard Rhian’s snarl leap up a few dozen decibels and looked down to see her with blood running down her snout in rivulets, her teeth sunk deep into... nothing. I looked on in shock for a long moment before I remembered the crown of invisibility. Nicholas must have been sneaking in with it while our focus was on Rafe. Once again they hadn’t counted on our having a wolf shifter with us. Her sense of smell made invisibility no more useful than a particularly dark coat.

  Ash turned to finish the witch off, and that just left Rafe, whose absence was concerning. My concern turned to alarm as I caught him out of the corner of my eye, sweeping up from the ground with fists extended like Superman to smash me off my perch. Working on reflex alone, I grabbed the shotgun off my back and brought it to bear. He was too close to dodge, too late to do anything but register a second of fear as I pulled the trigger and put a blast of buckshot through his self-assured face and out the back of his head, leaving nothing in its wake but a chunk of high-velocity meat.

  Unfortunately, the meat was still on target. What was left of him slapped wetly into me, throwing me from the shelf with thirty feet of not much between me and the concrete below. I tore at the air around me, pulling on the strings of magic and forming a cushion for myself as fast as I could. I bled off speed, but there wasn’t enough magic or enough time. I braced myself for an intensely painful landing, hoping and praying to avoid the sort of spinal injury that even my magic couldn’t cure.

  Just then, I landed on a soft, grunting pillow made up of my dear partner’s very bruised self. I laughed like a madwoman and he joined me, relief at my survival and amusement at the undignified heap we’d become blending into a moment of pure bliss. As we came around to the real world again I glimpsed Rhian giving us a curiously lupine look, her head twisted 45 degrees as she watched the war witches of a moment ago become the giggling lovers of the future.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  We had followed Rhian back to the pack. We needed to be sure that this was really all over. She ran up the stairs with us hot on her heels. The guards outside of Ben's room looked at her warily. The blood stained clothes weren't helping her credibility any in a time when every other wolf seemed to be going mad.

  "Let us in," Rhian growled.

  The older of the wolves reluctantly unlocked the series of padlocks on the door. Rhian rushed into the room and pulled Ben into a tight hug.

  "Are you ok?"

  "I can't breathe," he whispered.

  She laughed, a sound of pure relief and joy.

  "Are the nightmares gone?" I asked.

  "Yes. They slipped away about fifteen minutes ago. I'm exhausted, but my mind is my own again. Th
ank you. All of you."

  Rhian hugged him again. Poor Ben looked as though he was going to pop a vessel if she squeezed him any tighter.

  "The pack is as it should be. Thank you, knights," the alpha said from behind us.

  We turned to face her with our eyes down.

  "You're welcome, alpha."

  "If you'll excuse us, we need some bonding time."

  "Of course," I said.

  I didn't dare linger and intrude on something as personal as that. Ash grinned like a fool as soon as we passed the alpha. We'd done it. The rogues were no more. Ben was free. This was the part of the job that I really loved. The huge wash of relief and the joy on the faces of those we'd helped.

  We got ourselves fish 'n' chips to celebrate and were packing everything up, ready to move on when our phones buzzed. I opened up the group text with other knights of our generation. The fae had stepped in and were pushing to shut down the zoo full of supernatural beings. There was still some red tape to deal with, but at least they were trying.

  "We kicked ass!" Ash said.

  I shook my head.

  "Dork," I said affectionately.

  He beamed at me, and I had to laugh. Looking around the apartment, I wasn't going to miss it.

  "We'll need to patch the car up," I said.

  Ash wrinkled his nose.

  "I've already booked us some time in one of the coven cottages in near Torquay."

  I bit back a sigh. I didn't much like being that close to the main coven mansion, but we needed somewhere safe with all the appropriate tools to patch the car up. It would give us time and resources to restock our magic too.