Winner Takes All (Were Witch Book 9)

by Renée Jaggér

  Bailey waved the agents into the living room. “Lemme sit down and get a single mouthful of coffee in me, okay? Then you might as well give it to me raw.”

  The instant she swallowed, they did.

  “Our scanners,” Velasquez began, “have picked up staggering numbers of paranormal entities moving across the barrier zones we’ve established in the direction of our universe. We sent teams in to conduct recon, but half of them vanished, and we had to pull the other half back before they could report on much.”

  Park asked, “Any of this ring a bell?”

  “Sure does,” Bailey grumbled. “You probably should have come to me first. Here’s what it is. Multiple simultaneous invasion forces from hostile-ass monster races, all of them stirred up by a god who’s trying to pull off a coup within Asgard and kick off the frickin’ Norse apocalypse. Which supposedly will start a chain reaction of crap that will not spare the Earth. That’s the long and short of it.”

  The three agents were silent for four or five seconds, then a morose-looking Agent Park pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to Townsend, who slipped it into his pocket.

  “I knew it,” the eldest agent gloated. “There was no way Bailey would fail to hit peak critical mass in terms of her fucked-up ability to attract unlimited shitstorms of fuckery and myriad bullshit. Judging by the accelerated rate at which every single thing she’s been involved with has been worse than the one before, I had no doubts whatsoever that this time, it would be the end of the world as we know it. That twenty was mine yesterday, Park. Today is simply the day the inevitable transfer took place.”

  Park muttered something in Korean while Velasquez snickered and looked at his tablet.

  Bailey took another swig of coffee.

  “Yeah, yeah, fuck off. Anyway, I can help you in a manner of speaking, but it’s gonna have to be on my terms, and you’re gonna have to bring your own gear and firepower. I’m already dealing with this stuff on my end, along with the other gods, so it’d make more sense for us to incorporate you guys into our plans instead of the other way around.”

  The three exchanged emotionless glances, and Townsend said, “Fine.”

  “Okay. We’ll figure out the details momentarily. First, did you find anything useful? Your equipment honestly is about as good as half of my magic. On a good day, anyway.”

  Velasquez pulled a chair closer to her and set up his tablet on the end table. “We did. Here’s one of our screens that plots the energy signatures of supernatural beings on the move. Things were relatively quiet this morning, but right before we arrived, we got a bunch of activity spikes here. Does this place look familiar?”

  Bailey blinked at the display; it took a second for her brain to process the crude lines of the landscape relief, along with what looked like multiple smaller buildings inside a segmented wall with towers at its corners. Blobs of light converged on the complex.

  “Oh, fuck,” she gasped. “It’s the academy—the training grounds. There were still some students there, last I heard.”

  After she’d left the five survivors in the castle, she’d told Loki and Balder about it, assuming that one of them, or their subordinates, would render the necessary aid. She still felt guilty for not double-checking herself, and there was no time to ask around Asgard about it. If anyone was still trapped there…

  The werewitch guzzled the rest of her coffee and pulled her boots on with one hand while pulling out her phone with the other. She texted Roland, telling him to get Dante and anyone else he could muster and to meet her here.

  Then she turned to the agents. “You guys packing heat?”

  Park snorted. “Of course.”

  “In fact,” Townsend elaborated, “we brought the big guns this time. To be safe.”

  “Good,” said Bailey. “Agent Townsend, I dunno if you’re up to it, but we need all the warm bodies we can get for a potential rescue mission. Now.”

  Townsend stood up, his legs trembling. “Let’s say that it’d be better to put me in the rear. But I’ll come.”

  “Told you!” Velasquez exclaimed.

  Park, scowling, fulfilled his end of the bet and went out to fetch the weapons. Bailey followed him, concentrating on the academy and then opening a portal to the same place she’d entered before. As soon as it looked like the agents were ready, she plunged in, not waiting for them to catch up. Besides, it might be better if she scouted ahead.

  The werewitch emerged from the astral tunnel into the field directly before the gates of the main castle complex. Things were much the same way they’d been during her previous visit. The place was dead silent, and the castle was still scarred with battle-damage. No hazards or enemies were anywhere in sight.

  Bailey jogged to the front gate and peered through it, seeing nothing so far. She glanced backward. The three agents emerged from the portal. Once they were clear, she did not close the doorway, but blocked it off from misuse with a heavy arcane barrier.

  Making eye contact with the three men, she raised a finger to her lips. They nodded, advancing without speaking.

  Then Bailey noticed the weapons they carried. They looked somewhat like thick silver shotguns, attached via cords to silver packs they wore attached to their belts. Both the arcanoplasm rifles they’d used against the Venatori and the disruptor devices they’d wielded against Callie’s clone-spirits had been slightly different. She was curious about what the so-called “big” guns were capable of.

  Raising an arm, the girl summoned her sword, the blade flashing into her hand in an instant. She held it up beside her shoulder as she strode ahead.

  They entered the gates, examined the outer grounds, and found nothing. Moving through the next set of gates to the inner bailey, they could see that the dome-shield the werewitch had left over the keep was gone, and the crude material barrier the students had set up had been taken down.

  Bailey crept closer, squinting. The blockade had been carefully disassembled rather than destroyed, which suggested that the survivors had taken it down themselves as opposed to a hostile entity battering through it from without.

  The girl motioned for them to explore around the far side of the keep. The agents nodded and followed her, their rifles held ready.

  They’d barely gone seven steps when the ground rumbled with the unmistakable sound of approaching feet and bodies, charging them. Oddly, though, they seemed to be moving from the forest toward a solid section of the castle wall.

  Bailey jumped fifteen feet into the air to have a look.

  “Shit!” she exclaimed, noting the diverse mass of unfriendly creatures streaming toward them. A faint purplish glow suggested they were using magic, but there was no time to see what. The werewitch allowed herself to fall back to the earth, deciding it was better to stand with her human comrades than to dive-bomb the enemy alone.

  Something struck the stone in front of them. It rattled, and dust fell to the ground. Townsend breathed in deeply through his nose and cocked his gun.

  All at once the wall collapsed, the stones falling apart in a miniature landslide and the mortar spraying as dust. In streamed a jumbled crowd of too many types of monsters for Bailey to identify them all at first glance, though she did notice an ogre and a handful of dark alfar.

  One of the elves was obviously a sorcerer since he held up his hand and maintained a purplish translucent shield a yard or so ahead of the front lines.

  Bailey had been about to simply hit them with a river of fire, but the shield gave her pause. She could probably blast through it with sheer force. However, it made her wonder if the creatures had enough intelligence amongst them to enact a diversionary ploy, like a sound-masked rear ambush while she and the agents were distracted by the wall breach.

  Her second’s hesitation allowed the beasts to stream in. Most charged straight in behind the shield, but half a dozen sprinted to each side, looping around to flank the mortals.

  Bailey gestured to the auxiliary forces. “Deal with them! I’ll take the cen
ter.”

  She advanced sidelong but at speed, making a narrower target of herself as she hefted her sword. She looked to the left.

  Agents Townsend and Velasquez aimed their imposing weapons and fired balls of superheated plasma, white and violet-tinged. Each bloomed quickly to the size of a volleyball and the projectiles struck the small flanking group head-on, exploding into a dome of fire that vaporized five of the six creatures at once and drove the last one reeling back, burned and on the cusp of death.

  Nice, the girl acceded. I ought to see if they can spare a couple of those things for the sheriff’s office in Greenhearth just in case.

  Then she crashed into the main force.

  Her sword cleaved straight down, splitting the arcane shield asunder, and she was past it as it fell away, beheading the elf mage who’d conjured it with another fast stroke of her blade.

  Two goblins tried to attack her legs, and she killed them both with a broad lateral swing. Then she unleashed a kinetic blast that drove half the monsters back to the bottleneck of the fallen wall while causing the rest to stumble forward and to the sides, right into the agents’ line of fire.

  Bailey leaped a good thirty feet off the ground, scanning the area for signs of any other attacks. There were none that she could see or sense, meaning they ought to be in the clear once they vanquished the current band.

  As she floated downward, she channeled lightning through her sword, moving it like a hose across the disoriented mass of foes and destroying most of them before they could regain their composure. By the time she landed, only a single badly-damaged rock giant, two alfar, and two goblins remained. The agents had incinerated the rest.

  The girl’s sword made short work of the smaller combatants. The rock creature, bigger and certainly stronger than the others, might have posed a problem in a one-on-one confrontation, but Bailey was too eager to find the survivors among the trainees to bother with a duel. She detonated a small sonic boom in the center of the golem’s chest, shattering it to pieces that were quickly lost amidst the rubble of the wall.

  Things went quiet. Surveying the area around her, Bailey saw the agents powering down their guns, looking with grim satisfaction at the smoking sludge and white-hot particles scattered across the ground—the only remaining traces of the monsters they’d blasted.

  Townsend looked up. “Like I said, we thought it would be prudent to come with proper weaponry.”

  “Very proper,” Velasquez added.

  Park scowled. “The military doesn’t have this stuff yet. Might come in handy, but then again, that creates openings for China to steal it and reverse-engineer it, so maybe it’s better kept as one of the Agency’s little secrets.”

  Bailey muttered, “I wouldn’t call it little, exactly. Come on, we need to look for any students who might have survived.”

  They continued around the back of the keep and soon came to a small stone outbuilding that had another hastily-erected and crude barricade over the door.

  Bailey approached and knocked against a wall with the butt of her sword, calling, “Hey, it’s Bailey. Anyone in there? It’s safe out here. I’ve got backup, too.”

  Footsteps moved, and the door opened inward behind the barrier of debris. “Come inside,” said a voice. “Sorry about all this.”

  “No problem. Step back, please.” She waved for them to remove themselves to safety while she split the barricade with her sword and shoved the pieces off to the sides. Then she strolled into the structure, Velasquez and Park following her while Townsend stood guard outside.

  Within were eleven people, ten of them unfamiliar. Bailey recognized one as the uninjured young man who’d spoken to her before.

  “It’s you,” he greeted her. “We weren’t sure if you were coming back. Someone who said he was sent by Loki came a day ago, maybe? He took the most badly wounded away right as other people filtered in from the woods.”

  She nodded and waited for the inevitable bad news, thinking of the students of Balder’s who’d turned on him during their forestry exercises.

  “I stayed behind to greet them. It turned out it was about half students of Balder’s who had disappeared days ago and half other students who’d come back to check on things. And then...”

  The boy’s face was drawn with pain and fear, and it was a few seconds before he could speak again. “The ones who’d been with Balder turned on us. They killed two people, then ran away, alerting those things that we were still here and defenseless. I don’t know why they did that. Who are they working for? What made them betray everyone?”

  Bailey wanted to blurt the answer, but she couldn’t risk it. The fewer people who were in on the counter-conspiracy against Fenris, the better.

  Instead, she nodded and said, “Yeah, Balder said something about that when I found him. He isn’t aware of what the hell’s going on yet either. We’re going to find out, though, I promise you that. But for now, let’s get you out of here and back to safety.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Fenris stepped out of the portal and advanced, allowing Carl to emerge behind him before closing the gateway. He nodded at his apprentice, then turned to survey the scene before him.

  Under a blue sky filled with white clouds spread an autumnal forest of tall, thin pines interspersed with oaks and maples whose leaves had turned from green to a profusion of bright reds, yellows, and oranges. The trees rose on the slopes of low, broken mountains and hills, and gulches and ravines crisscrossed them, filled with rushing and burbling whitewater streams. Dead brown leaves crunched underfoot, giving off a musty yet pleasant scent that rose and fell on the cool, gentle breeze.

  The wolf-father tilted his face upward, sniffing the air and expanding his consciousness throughout the realm to seek the energy signature of his target. He found it soon enough and gestured toward a high promontory overlooking a densely wooded vale.

  Carl smiled and followed his master. The two scaled the slope toward the cliff, their view blocked by the trees and bushes. Fenris conjured a light wind to disperse the carpet of fallen leaves so they could approach in silence.

  The pair emerged between two pines into an open space before the angular, moss-carpeted promontory. A figure sat with its back turned to them in front of a dead fire. A single thin wisp of smoke rose from amidst the ashes and blackened logs.

  The seated humanoid wore a vest and short trousers of tanned leather and had furry doglike ears along with slender, half-canine limbs to match. A slight movement of his head indicated that he was aware he had guests.

  Coyote began, “Hello, Fenris, and your young friend Carl. I’m unsurprised to see you at such an unusual time. When I’m so...vulnerable.” He chuckled as though at a private joke.

  The wolf-god took one heavy step forward. “Coyote. We have business to discuss.”

  The trickster god unfolded his legs and stood up, not bothering to turn around. “Ah, of course. That’s your curious idiom for intending to kill me and assuming I wasn’t aware. Not only did I smell you all the way from the base of this hill, but I’ve also noticed a distinct stench of treachery on you for, oh, quite some time.”

  Carl shot Fenris a narrow-eyed look of concern, but his master waved it off.

  “So,” Fenris intoned, “you were aware it would come to this, and you’ve accepted that there is no escape. You might as well turn and face me.”

  Coyote did, his dog-like features preserving a trace of his usual good humor, though his eyes looked deep and tired and ancient. Next to Fenris, he was relatively small and thin.

  “Better?” the trickster queried.

  The wolf-father moved two paces closer. “Yes. I can see how old you’ve grown. Immortal or not, time has taken its toll, and we have come to the end of your journey. Being a lord of tricks and boondoggles will not save you this time since you can’t simply magic your way out of your predicament. You face a battle in which your victory is impossible.”

  Carl moved to the side, blocking a section of the slope t
hat the other deity might have been able to escape down if he’d dashed past Fenris fast enough. “Impossible,” he repeated. “I like the sound of that.”

  Coyote only smiled. “Yes, it’s true that I’m old, but I might, perhaps, have a few more tricks to play.”

  Before Fenris or Carl could act, the canid god jumped a yard to the right at the same instant that he conjured a dozen illusions of himself, the thirteen figures moving with such haphazard speed that it was impossible to immediately determine which was the real one.

  The ground beneath the feet of the were-father and the scion turned to liquid, trapping them up to their ankles as the clones struck them in the torso and face with fierce blows of fists coated with magical kinetic force.

  “Damn you!” Fenris growled, sending out a semicircular wave of electricity that engulfed, froze, and destroyed most of the illusions. Carl, meanwhile, shielded himself from further attacks as he struggled to pull free of the melted ground.

  Coyote leaped into the air, avoiding the arc of lightning, and tossed a cascade of icy water and freezing gas downward so as to further trap and immobilize his foes.

  Fenris, rather than react directly, detonated an explosion within the cliff. The entire shelf of rock collapsed in a shower of rubble, the wolf-god and the scion falling downward ahead of the frigid torrent. Carl raised a shield above their heads for further protection while Fenris floated aside, aiming to land on a nearby crag.

  Coyote flew down and around in a loop. Fenris guessed the trajectory of his movements and struck him with a sudden small but powerful meteor that made the trickster deity burst into flames while also knocking him out of his gentle flight and sending him careening down into the forested valley.

  Fenris and Carl landed on the small peak in time to see their enemy vanish amidst the trees below. The scion struck the area with multiple lightning bolts, igniting the dead leaves and pine needles as well as the wood of the trunks.

  “There,” Carl grated. “That ought to teach him to ruin my boots.”