by Harry Nix
Alex followed Nia as they ran, speeding across the landscape. He found himself watching her as she ran, her copper fur gleaming in the sun.
She’s hot no matter what form she’s in he thought and then surprised himself by giving a happy bark.
6
“Thank you for the ride!” Nia called out, holding the container of shortbread cookies that had been forced upon them.
“You marry that girl now, ya hear?” Earl said, waving a finger at Alex.
“And you say yes too!” Edna called out to Nia as the Huberts drove away.
After a detour to steal some clothes and shoes, Alex and Nia had ended up on the side of the road. The very first car along had been Edna and Earl Hubert who were driving to Baxter to meet their latest grandchild.
As Nia cuddled up to Alex in the back seat they’d immediately set in on them with the grandparent thumbscrews about marriage, babies and everything else.
Nia had slipped on one of the mage’s rings, a thin gold band with a green emerald and immediately played along that while it wasn’t an engagement ring, she was expecting one soon.
Alex, wearing stolen clothes that were a little tight on him, laughed as Edna kept up with the questions and force-fed them sandwiches, biscuits and other things from a cooler she had in the front.
By the time they got to Baxter Alex was stuffed – something he thought virtually impossible now he was a werewolf but somehow Edna had managed it. Nia had teased him the entire way about having babies and in the end Alex had given in, promising Edna they’d make lots of babies together.
With Nia holding his arm and pressed up beside him, he saw for a moment that it wasn’t a joke but a glimpse of the future.
Again the calm certainty washed away what would normally be shock.
Edna and Earl had insisted on taking them to their destination so now they were out the front of a two story house painted bright yellow waving as the old couple drove away.
Nia immediately turned to him the moment they were gone.
“So babies huh. How many babies are you going to put in me?”
She pressed herself up against him, the scent of her filling his senses.
“Well, you heard me tell Edna – lots and lots,” Alex said, clasping her arms around her and planting a deep kiss.
They were absorbed in a private world when a voice called out from above them.
“Hey, get a room!”
Alex looked up and saw only a flash of blonde hair vanishing from an upper window.
“That’s Juno, short for Juniper but don’t ever call her that unless you wanna get stabbed,” Nia said, taking him by the hand and leading him up to the front door.
Alex looked down the street and saw a few of the houses were painted in bright primary colors like Juno’s house. Others were utterly normal. Did witches live in the colorful ones? More questions to add to the list.
Nia rapped on the door and Alex sensed someone – a girl by the scent – was standing behind it.
“Little witch, little witch, let me in,” Nia called out.
The bright yellow door swung open to reveal Juno, standing all of five feet in what could have been a sexy schoolgirl costume – tartan skirt, white shirt, knee-high socks and even a loosely knotted tie. She had bracelets on her slender wrists and multiple necklaces, some with gems that sat in her cleavage. Her eyes were a blue that verged on green and her blonde hair was tied in a braid that curled around her neck.
“Nia, a gift for me? You shouldn’t have,” Juno vamped and then flung herself into Nia’s arms, kissing her on the lips. Alex realigned his thinking as he realized that Nia and Juno were definitely more than just friends from the way they connected.
Juno broke the kiss and then grabbed Alex’s hand, pulling him behind her into the house and into a lounge room.
“Okay, so take those clothes off to see what we’re working with here,” Juno said, looking up at Alex with a devilish grin.
“Hey, he’s mine. Alex Lowe, Juno Harbinger,” Nia said, pushing the bundle of magical items on to Juno.
“Aw, so he’s not a present you got for me?” the little blonde witch said with a pout.
Nia looked at Alex with a smile and then back to Juno.
“If you’re good and help us then maybe,” she said.
What? Alex thought. He hadn’t said anything but now he’d apparently been traded for sexual favors?
A deep wolfish part of him was completely fine with this and in fact looking at Juno like she was his next meal.
Juno looked him up and down with a naked hunger.
“Deal. What do you need and what’s with all the magical jewelry?”
“Five weredogs attacked us and Nia says you can help with something called a cleanse?” Alex said.
“He can talk! What a miracle,” Juno said. She unwrapped the unicorn sheet bundle and dumped the contents on a small coffee table. Nia slipped the emerald ring from her hand and added it to the pile, setting the box of shortbread beside it. The total haul from the dead mage was seven rings and one wand.
“So what did you do to upset the dead mage you took these from?” she asked, picking up each ring in turn. As she did, Alex felt a slight pull, like a gentle current moving against him.
“I have no idea. I didn’t even know I was a werewolf until three days ago,” Alex said.
“And this dude sent five weredogs after the two of you? That’s a lot of overkill.”
“Plus another one, the first one that I found trying to track him. You’re not gonna believe this either but Alex has magic.”
Juno dropped the wand on the table and put her hands on her hips.
“A werewolf mage? No, are you serious? Do something magic.”
“I can’t do anything magic... I only did one thing and that was floating a few things in a bedroom while we were...” Alex trailed off.
Juno turned to Nia and poked her.
“So he’s barking up your tree, so to speak, and he does magic?”
Nia swatted her hand away and blushed.
“Yeah, golden sparkles and everything. Felt just the same as, you know.”
“When you were barking up her tree,” Alex quipped.
Now it was Juno’s turn to turn pink in front of Alex.
So it’s true, he thought, looking at Juno. Nia was standing beside him, wearing a set of slightly too small clothing and looking hot as hell but he also was appreciating Juno. Some deep part of him was urging him to just reach out and grab her.
Nia must have seen the look on his face. “Just hold on there Alpha. Let’s get safe before we do... other things.”
She touched Juno on the shoulder to get her attention. The little witch seemed half hypnotized.
“We need a cleanse for both of us to start with. Can you do it?”
“Wha? Uh... yeah... for a fee, of course.”
“Name your price,” Nia said.
Juno started moving around the room, cracking her knuckles and shaking out her arms, like she was warming up.
“Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me,” she finally said.
“The Godfather, 1972. An unspecified favor from me or both of us?”
“You got it. One each. Cleanse guaranteed.”
Alex looked to Nia. “She’s your friend, you tell me if this is a good deal.”
“Witches,” Nia muttered before finally nodding. “Okay, do it.”
Juno sized up the two of them and then took five of the rings and the wand from the pile. “It’s a big job so I’m going to need to draw on these too. You good with that?”
“We are,” Nia said.
“Let’s kneel in a circle then,” Juno said.
She moved the coffee table out of the way and then the three of them knelt on the carpet. Alex felt his stolen pants protesting. They were a size too small. He’d have to return to his apartment soon to collect his clothes.
Wait – is it safe to do that? he thought. Giv
en weredogs were after him maybe going back to the apartment was a bad idea. On the other hand, it was literally his entire life in there, including his laptop and all the stuff he was working on for the game.
The game... Alex suddenly realized things might be over for that too. Unless that mage was some one-off loner (and that didn’t seem likely), how could he return to his normal life? He couldn’t be working with Puzo and Howey when at any moment a giant weredog could come smash the door down or some crazed mage with a lightning wand decided to fry them.
“Hold my hands, and you Alex, watch and learn,” Juno said.
Alex pulled himself out of dark thoughts about what exactly his life was now and held hands with Juno and Nia.
As soon as he touched Juno he felt her connection to the magic. The witch must have felt the same because her eyes widened and she glanced at him. To Alex, Juno’s magic was like wildflowers, honey and hot chili mixed together.
“You really do have magic, a lot of it,” Juno whispered before turning her gaze to the pile of rings and wand in front of her.
Alex wasn’t quite sure what to expect – chanting, herbs being thrown around, maybe a cauldron – but what happened next had never been mentioned in any book or movie about witches ever.
A faint transparent green screen floated up above Juno filled with gibberish. It spiraled down the screen, line after line and Alex understood immediately this was the cleansing spell, or spells, that Juno was casting.
The gibberish looked like code, all letters and numbers and odd symbols that looked like Norse runes. There was even a sprinkling of emojis through it and a few Japanese characters.
It was completely unreadable but as it flowed he began to get a sense of patterns. Nonsense string #1 repeated a few times, seeming connected with another nonsense string.
Was this magic? Some sort of universe code you could manipulate once you learned the language?
“Wow, the two of you are strong together,” Nia whispered. Alex could feel the flow of magic from her hand. It was rushing around in a circle joining the three of them. He could also feel Juno drawing on it from all around them. The sensation of a current was there again, the flow pulling towards Juno.
He could see how she was drawing it in but unlike the werewolf shift, it didn’t come naturally to him. It was some sort of relaxation but focus at the same time. A tension but release simultaneously.
As the magical code spooled out on the screen, tiny gold sparks drifted up from the backs of Juno’s hands, like snowflakes falling in reverse.
Alex couldn’t read any of it but he got a feeling he could see how the magic worked. There were hints of travel and then change, like these sparks were going to find his and Nia’s blood and alter it somehow, render it inert.
The scent of Juno’s magic grew stronger as she pulled more of it from her body to fuel the spell. He caught a flash of something on the screen and thought that’s the battery before it vanished.
A new chunk of magical code landed on the screen. This was different to the rest – the symbols written in harsh strokes. It was angular and sharp, somehow utilitarian but also slightly dangerous, like the way a kitchen knife could be a tool or a weapon.
Golden tendrils streaked with black stretched out from Juno’s hands and enveloped the rings. Immediately the sickly scent of roses filled the room.
The mage’s scent Alex thought. He’d smelled it on him before he’d crushed his chest and broken his spine. Perhaps all mages had a scent unique to them?
The tendrils sucked magic out of the rings like milkshake up a straw. When they were drained they moved to pull on the wand. If the rings were flashlight batteries, the wand was a car battery, multiple times more powerful. The scent of rose petals was joined by the smell of the ocean, salty and wet.
A different mage made this wand Alex realized.
No matter the source of the power, it was sucked up into Juno’s hands and the golden sparks grew stronger, becoming more numerous until a cloud of them swirled overhead.
Alex looked down from the cloud and saw Juno was biting her lip. She was frowning too and a trickle of sweat ran down the side of her face. Can I give her magic he wondered but didn’t know how to do such a thing.
The spell came quickly to its conclusion, the magic code on the screen collapsing down into smaller more dense lines, like it was compressing into a purer form. Finally something that looked like an intricate mathematical formula shot off the screen, leaving it empty.
Wow thought Alex and then sat back in surprise as wow appeared on the screen above Juno’s head. The little witch frowned and shook her head and the text vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The screen followed a moment later and then the golden sparks shot as one straight out through the wall.
Juno let go of their hands and went to sit back but collapsed.
“You both owe me,” she whispered, her voice thick with sleep as she toppled down on the carpet and passed out.
Alex quickly grabbed her, pressing a finger against her throat to feel for a pulse. She was still breathing and her heartbeat was regular, if a little slow.
“She just overdid it. Should have used all the rings but she was probably trying to impress you,” Nia said, stroking her finger down Juno’s arm.
“Why would she try to impress me? We’re the ones who came to her for help.”
“Witches and werewolves go together like peppermint and choc chip. Almost every alpha ends up with a witch at some point... and witches do like their alphas too,” Nia said.
Alex looked down at Juno, who now appeared to be sleeping, her pink lips slightly parted. There was something about her that made him want to kiss her, to carry her to the bedroom, to possess her the way he’d possessed Nia.
“It’s natural,” Nia whispered.
He glanced at her and saw her cheeks were flushed. Was she excited by this?
Despite the inner wolf saying it was natural too, Alex resisted it.
“But aren’t you my mate?”
Nia moved over closer to him, placing her hand on the back on his neck and gently stroking it.
“You’re the Alpha... my Alpha and you’ll have many wives. We need a pack if we are to survive and thrive and adding a blonde witch sounds very good to me. I was Nia Whitewood. Now I’m Nia Lowe.”
“You’re my wife?”
“Mate, wife, it’s all the same,” Nia said with a shrug.
No matter that calm sitting in the core of him, Alex could still feel himself resisting it. What do you mean wife! Three days ago he was on the brink of turning twenty-five and now he was essentially married for life to a werewolf girl he barely knew! What are you, crazy? Oh, and you want me to add a sister-wife too? You want a pack?
He might have lost it then and there but then Juno snorted in her sleep. “Heh, alpha,” she said and rolled back over into sleep.
“She needs to rest after that spell. I’ll take her to bed,” Nia said, standing up and scooping the witch up.
“Just to sleep, I mean,” she amended when she saw the hungry look on Alex’s face.
Alex watched her go, his mind still spinning. Magic and witches and a pack and a wife and a second wife?
He’d have to ask Juno about the faint green screen when she woke up too. How could he access that? Were there books he could learn the code?
He touched the dead rings and wand and felt they were empty now, nothing more than mere jewelry and a fancy stick. Magic into items to store power and release it later – what a fascinating idea. That code Juno had used to drain them – it had been completely different to the rest, as though it was written by someone else entirely. More questions.
He got up off the floor and sat back on the sofa, absentmindedly opening the container of shortbread biscuits and eating them. There were a ridiculous amount of things to learn. An entire world of knowledge and a thousand questions, starting with who the hell was trying to kill him?
With Juno gone he couldn’t feel the magic around hi
m now, no matter how hard he tried.
Maybe Nia was right – he, and they, needed that witch.
7
“Alex, wake up and come to bed,” Nia said, touching him on the arm.
Alex awoke to a darkened room. Wait, what time was it? It had been early afternoon when Juno had cast the spell and now the sun was setting. He’d fallen asleep on her sofa after eating most of the shortbread biscuits.
He sleepily followed Nia to a bedroom, stripped down to nothing (there hadn’t been any underwear to steal) and crawled into bed.
“Oh, it’s so good,” he murmured, his head sinking into the soft pillow.
He felt Nia slip into bed beside him and then her hand stroking the back of his neck.
“You’re still changing and growing from the shift. It’s hard work for a body. Plus you were up all night,” she said.
Alex felt sleep pulling on him but he still responded to the tone in her voice. He reached over to touch her and found she was naked. He pulled her close, pressing her body against his.
“Oh my Mr. Wolf, what is that large thing you have for me?” Nia whispered. She gave him a soft kiss before turning over, pressing her butt into him.
They went from spooning to connected in just moments, Alex sighing as she pushed back on to him. He curled an arm around her neck and put the other on her hip before he began moving. Nia’s soft sighs soon turned to gasps as they found their rhythm.
It wasn’t long before he wanted to speed up so he moved Nia, turning her over on to her stomach, staying connected the whole time. Now he had leverage and power and despite the tiredness clouding his head, he sped up, delighting in the sounds Nia was making.
Nia pulled a pillow over her face and let out muffled squeals in time with his thrusts. Soon she moaned, practically stuffing her mouth with the pillow to hide the noise and Alex felt her contracting around him. That was enough to pull him along too. He bit her on the back of the neck as he emptied himself into her and then felt his legs give out. He managed to hold his weight off her with his arms and so they stayed laying there for a few moments before Nia made a sighing noise and Alex slid off of her, ending up on the other side of the bed.