The Stray Human: A collage age urban fantasy with werewolves, werewolf community center book 1

by Abigail Smith

  The werewolf in question gave him an exasperated look and shifted into his hybrid form. He smashed his hand through the wall, revealing a staircase behind it.

  Leonardo, taking this embarrassment in stride, confidently walked down the staircase, followed by the mages. I bent down, noticing the werewolves pretty much took up half the height of the thing, and I didn’t want the chance to bump my head.

  I gave Silvia a few pets, thinking I was helping her through this stressful time. Meanwhile, I was the one needing and getting stress relief. Her fur was so soft. I loved it.

  The staircase spun and curled around as we went really deep. “How could they have made this so quickly?” I asked.

  “Maybe they used magic?” Fumnaya suggested from behind us.

  “That can’t be right. They hate the community centre because of the magical people in it. I’m sure that book gas guy got away with it because he was the emissary of God or something. They wouldn’t be able to make this in a night, right?”

  “Maybe it was just him doing it? Like, he has a spell that takes space and kneads it like sourdough, and it makes something like this attached to a place where it shouldn’t be?” Fumnaya said, making me hungry.

  Silvia tilted her head and tried to scratch at the walls. Nothing happened, and she shrugged. I got nervous and started to use my hand signs, to focus myself. We were entering a possible combat scene, and I had to be ready.

  As soon as I was finished, we heard singing, no… chanting. They were chanting something.

  “Shit, it’s like Miriam said. They’re trying to summon him back!” I called out.

  Slowly, the people who heard tried to quicken their pace. This travelled down the line to make Leonardo quicken his pace.

  We must have made it down at least ten flights of stairs before we finally got to an opening.

  The roof was tall, about three stories, arched with tentacle-looking arches, which branched out almost like trees into the roof’s high-doomed tiles.

  A large circle, much like the glyphs the book gas guy used, but made of chalk, was drawn in the centre, and the people around it chanted. Ahead of them came a group of twenty people, wielding alchemical silver swords. Then the swords caught on fire.

  I was also thinking, judging by how white two of the swords were, that these were made out of bone or something. Either way, the mages floated up and chanted their own incantations. The werewolves ducked under to defend them.

  The group of attackers had lined up in formation and seemed to get ready for one big rush.

  “Silvia, to the side!” I shouted, grabbing one of the flame flasks I’d attached to my side.

  She skirted around the line of skirmish, and I lobbed the flask over the line. It smashed right in the middle of two chanters. They screamed and ran to put it out, causing the chalk to lose some of its luminous white glow.

  “Aim for the chanters. The spell they’re doing loses power without them!” I shouted to the mages.

  Leonardo didn’t like taking orders from me, obviously, but he fired his ball of lightning at the one furthest away. Perhaps he already knew that, but he didn’t comment.

  The attacking team ran to the defending line of werewolves, spinning and making large slashes with their blades. Werewolves growled. Their fur and flesh popped and sizzled as they jumped the attackers and clawed at them. One in particular was simply pushing the werewolves aside. He was armoured, unlike the others, wearing a silvered helmet, breastplate, and arm guards.

  He headed straight for Leonardo, and Gavin, Lorenz, and David shifted and fought him together, all slashing with their Clawv Maga.

  The bulky man took that as a challenge and swung his sword in a big overhand slash. David ducked right of it and clawed at the man’s helmet. The place where his claws met metal, there was a scraping sound, but also smoke rising from it.

  The werewolves’ vulnerability to silver was really not helping, even if it wasn’t alchemical silver. The man chopped sideways, and David ducked by transforming to wolf form and biting the man’s leg.

  I grabbed the alchemical gun and blasted the man before he could strike David, who’d inadvertently made himself a target while he bit the man’s leg.

  The legs, oddly enough, weren’t armoured, so it seemed like that was his Achilles’ heel. No pun intended.

  The front line of werewolves was slashed by the swords every now and then. They were much more agile, but with that big a sword and the tightness of their formation, it happened more than they liked.

  The flankers tried to go around to encircle them, but the ritual forced them back and left them open to be attacked with a lunge from the flanks of the attackers. Most who tried shifted back to human form and backed off.

  The alchemical silver blades cut through their flesh like butter. Luckily, they were trained soldiers. They knew how to mitigate damage from things like this, but it still left them with large, red, pulsating scars where fur would likely never grow on their body again.

  The centre man swirled his sword around once he’d gotten up, slashing at every one of my friends at once. I reached down and grabbed the sniper rifle. It’d hurt like hell and probably deafen a few people, but this was a normal guy with very burnable and zappable flesh.

  Silvia barked, and every single werewolf lowered their ears. She then braced to help absorb the recoil. I aimed the two sights at the man. I spared a thought about how much I’d used this long-range rifle for handgun distance.

  The man threw off Gavin, opening up his chest, and I fired. The blast made a satisfying dent in his armour and set it ablaze. He didn’t look concerned, though, as the fire didn’t seem to singe his flesh.

  Okay, demon-follower or something, I thought. Lightning will do the trick! I fired when next I got the chance, missing his shoulder by about a centimetre. I reminded myself that though I used this thing to take out one demon twice, that was far from making me a sharpshooter.

  Lorenz jumped up to dropkick the man, but he grabbed the thrusting leg in mid-air and dropped Lorenz. He went for the coup de grâce, but David and Gavin smacked him back together.

  Down to frost, I fired. Gavin had to duck out of the way of the ice blast, but I thought it’d be worth it. The bundle of ice fell to the ground and shattered, and another dent was left in the man’s armour.

  “Oh, oh, oh, wait, I think I know what’s going on!” Fumnaya shouted as she moved her hand over her page.

  “Hurry up!” I said, feeling a sense of hopelessness as the man slashed David across the face.

  “Yeah, he’s got a spell on him, one that gives him elemental resistances! I can try to dispel it like I did buddy’s sword and acid sprayer!” Her book’s pages quickly flipped to the right page, and she called out confidently, “Zambol-nagur-exulta!”

  Lorenz had gotten up, and the three now surrounded the main guy in a triangle formation.

  A low glow was gone from the man. Not only did he seem vulnerable, he seemed slower. Fumnaya fell to her feet on the ground.

  “Oh, that can’t be good,” I said, before getting my sights lined up.

  “Guess I’m out of mana? Or something?” she mused.

  I fired at him, just catching a leg as I had to swivel not to hit Gavin again. This time, the ice stuck and pinned him to the ground. Not to mention I saw his blood start to pour onto the ice, unlike before where it just dented his armour.

  Now that he was immobilized, the trio grabbed at his sword arm, biting it fiercely as Gavin reared up into hybrid form and slashed his armour apart.

  I turned away before that scene got too grisly when, suddenly, the entire building started to shift and rumble like there was an earthquake. I looked to the glyph in the centre of the chanting people as it began to glow a bloody crimson.

  Chapter 47

  I groaned as the shaking reached a crescendo. I didn’t want to deal with the book guy again. Even if he didn’t have a book, I was sure he could do something or other to destroy us. Or make things harder for us.r />
  What rose out of the glyph was much too big to be that cloaked figure, though I looked around for signs of gas, anyway.

  What appeared was a fat demon, with curled horns on the side of his head, a monocle, a formal vest and dress shirt, along with a pocket watch tucked into his pocket. Taking into consideration that he was two stories tall, he must have been one heavy guy to have such a gut.

  “Oh, boy, look at the time,” he said, taking out said pocket watch.

  It almost sounded like a British accent, but like a pale imitation of one. The group of sword wielders stepped in front of him as though they were riot police protecting a VIP.

  Gavin, David, and Lorenz retreated to the werewolf line and transformed into wolf form.

  “It’s negotiation time. I do love myself a fair bit of negotiation! So, what can I do for you so that you could let me expand into this new frontier? I hear there’s a large, big green land somewhere. You humans like the colour green, right? Do you want to rule there?”

  “I-is he referring to Iceland?” I asked, looking around.

  “Of course not, my dear!” He drew my attention to him right as he picked up one of the cultists and placed them into his mouth without a second’s hesitation. Everyone heard the pop and crackle of his bones as the thing chewed, and my stomach lurched.

  The others, realizing what they’d unleashed, tried to run, but the glyph grabbed at their ankles and kept them in place. I now felt good that I’d burned two and got them away from the circle. That was a better death than this, if they had died. I had lost track of them.

  “I’d never want to give you a frozen wasteland so covered in ice it was called Iceland!”

  “That’s what we’d get if you gave us Greenland,” I mumbled.

  “Please,” Leonardo said, holding his hand up, palm outward and fingers together, “do not try to confuse the demon with geography.”

  Leonardo spoke again. “Those of our ranks are a silent upper class. Nothing given to us can make our situations better. Should you not fall here, you will fall before so much as a single country is taken,” he said, folding his arms and floating strong.

  “Hard sell, yes, yes, good. I’ve been wanting a challenge, Power, how about power? Don’t you want more power over people?” he asked, looking directly at Leonardo.

  “I already command a military force. I have power, and I exercise it in the goal of saving people.” I rolled my eyes, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

  “You have power, sure, but what about your subordinates? Wouldn’t it be grand to have a tier of servants under each and every single soldier?”

  Leonardo tsked. “If there was one thing I learned from the past two weeks, it’s never put your woofers and sub-woofers together.”

  Literally everyone turned to him, confused at that remark.

  “Care to explain the cultural significance of that joke?” the demon asked. “Doesn’t seem to have landed, but who knows?”

  “I think I’ll leave it at that. The point of the matter is that there’s nothing in terms of power you could offer any of us. Nothing that’ll make us sell out seven billion people. Even if you could subjugate all of them.”

  “You don’t think I can? I have an army of demons and am pretty powerful myself,” he said, putting his clawed hand to his chest.

  “Magic has limits. Limits that have been far exceeded by the human race. Soon as your army takes a city, they will be annihilated in their entirety.”

  Steam rose from the demon’s nose. “How do you figure?” He leaned in, clearly interested in the conversation.

  The entire room was tense, and all eyes were on Leonardo. He stroked his chin, clearly contemplating his next words wisely.

  “People who don’t tell you details are the ones you know are bluffing,” the demon teased. “Surely, you know that hollow threats are not going to save your life today!”

  The demon chuckled, his belly jiggling with the force of a wrecking ball. I undid the magazine quickly and pulled out the force bolt. This one I kept by putting it into my bra. It was the only thing that could hold it.

  Note to self, ninja pockets.

  The demon’s eyes turned to me as I loaded up another magazine and took out the fire round. I put it into the other cup to even it out.

  “I’ll explain to you what it does, so you get your detail, but I’m not giving you any tactical information, for obvious reasons.”

  “Smart boy.” The demon seemed a bit disappointed as Leonardo explained how the nuclear bomb worked.

  He kept it so vague it’d probably take an advanced society that didn’t know of it a fair way before they discovered what elements did what. This information didn’t seem to dissuade the demon for long, though.

  “I’m sure this thing may be powerful, but with you blokes gone…” His body, which had been illuminated by the glow of the glyph, lost its glow, and he stretched. Something told me he was now fully in this reality.

  “No one knows I’m here,” the demon smiled

  “Fire!” Leonardo shouted as his mages all formed their elemental assaults.

  Having just ejected my fire round, I lifted the gun and fired the lightning shot. It zapped around on his chest before fizzling out. I gulped and pulled back on the saddle to get Silvia to retreat a bit.

  The werewolves quickly surrounded the demon, and fang and claw met fiery red skin and rent and tore at him. The dream team jumped up and grabbed hold of the business vest and scrambled towards the demon’s face.

  With a wave of his hand, a rush of flames blasted all the werewolves back and set most of the mages on fire. I lined up my next shot and let the frost round out into his hand. The bullet went right through making a small hole, but the explosion of ice came out both ends, covering his hand in thick cold icy crystals.

  He lifted his hand, and a fireball formed. “He doesn’t even have to say those silly words?” I whined as Silvia jumped out of the way.

  With him clear of werewolves, I aimed at his chest and fired. His smouldering eyes seemed to follow it through its supersonic journey, and then it curved away from his body and landed in a wall. Uselessly.

  I grunted as I moved the bolt back and forth. “Probably should have just asked for a frost only magazine,” I complained.

  The wolves at that point had put themselves out and once again surrounded the demon with their razor-sharp bites and scratches. The mages still went with lightning and fire attacks, throwing them uselessly against the demon’s chest.

  “Silvia, do they even know any ice-based attacks?” I asked, looking down.

  Silvia shrugged. Apparently, what the mages could do was not common knowledge. Our mage flipped through her book.

  “Come on, come on… ice magic… ice magic,” she whimpered, waving her hand over her grimoire rapidly. “Gah, there’s only one, and it’s super complicated. I’m not even sure if I can cast something with so many runes yet,” she said, giving me an apologetic look.

  “Figures. It’s a demon spellbook, after all,” I sighed.

  With the thing distracted, I took another shot. He heard the sonic boom but by then it was too late, the bullet was at his chest. The problem with that was that he hardly flinched at the effects.

  He groaned and shifted his stance. As werewolves jumped on him, he took wide-sweeping strikes, smashing them so hard into the surrounding walls that they had to transform back to human form instantly. I started to panic and looked over the glyph for anything that might help.

  I thought back to all my knowledge of alchemy, which was limited. Most reactions seemed to have effects that were fairly self-explanatory when you understood them. All except pyro putty, which more or less just seemed to activate something as opposed to anything fire-related.

  I pulled Silvia back. “Transform to human. I think I have an idea,” I said, hopping off her.

  She transformed, and our mage floated with us, throwing up a shield spell while we planned.

  “Okay, so, we’re not making much p
rogress. Our only saving grace is how well-trained the werewolf soldiers are when it comes to dodging bigger thing’s attacks We need to get this guy back on the other side of the barrier, and I need to know something quickly.”

  The two nodded, looking me right in the face. I gulped as I got ready to air my plan.

  “We’ve got some of that stuff to make a poison antidote, right? What if the substance could reverse the effects of the summoning circle, making it an unsummoning circle?”

  Silvia tilted her head and thought about that one. Fumnaya shrugged. She wasn’t as familiar with alchemy, but how could she be?

  “I guess it could work, but we’d have to be able to chant the incantation, and like before, it’s possible to pull the chanters in and… well, you saw.”

  “I’m afraid at this rate, even if he gets a few, the fatality rate will be the lowest. They are tough. They should be able to dodge his hands, hopefully.”

  “There’s a chance it could work. We’d have to get the full ring around him soaked, and then activate it with some pyro putty, but it could conceivably work.”

  “Leonardo! We’ve got a plan. We need your team to cover us!” I got out the supplies, using some of them. I made a spout of water that Fumnaya formed into a tight sphere to hold it in. I put the reversal agent in and watched as the colony of bacteria expanded, making more of what we needed.

  Most likely the reason for the growth was the supply of exhausted or dead bacteria that had made the blob of water served as quite a good amount of fodder.

  Leonardo, growling under his breath, read out a string of strange syllables, and a blinding light filled the area, for all except me, Silvia, and Fumnaya. We rushed in, I held Fumnaya’s hand and onto the wolf saddle, and we rushed around the circle before the demon could realize what we were doing.

  I threw a wad of pyro putty down near the end of the loop, nearly losing my balance in the process, and the glyph started to glow a dull yellow.

  “Get the werewolf troop to chant what the others were chanting!”

  “Hybrid form!” Leonardo shouted, and each werewolf struck the ground with their paws to lift them to a bipedal stance.