by Harry Nix
Alex began moving slowly, keeping a tight hold on Nia, so she couldn't get away. The concrete was distinctly uncomfortable. He and Nia were both covered in fur which provided some padding, but still, this was a position not made to last. There was something about the pain of it on his knees that Alex enjoyed. He was still fighting the urge to draw mana through pain. He could still feel it, but he'd slowly become more successful at resisting the stupefying urge to revel in it.
Alex moved in and out of Nia and she began to pant and moan. With a smooth move, he slipped down to rest over her, sliding one arm around her throat, and entwining the other in her hair.
In this position, his mouth was beside her ear. Alex knew that she could hear him breathing. He glanced up at April whose fingers were now between her legs, her eyes half-lidded, watching them.
Alex kept moving and started whispering in Nia’s ear.
“You like to be watched while being fucked, don’t you?” he whispered. Nia moaned and he felt her clench around him.
Alex kept fucking her, his knees hurting now, pressing against the concrete, sometimes looking up at April who had her fingers between her legs. Glints of red were flying out of the air, hitting Alex, but he was already charged to the maximum.
Sparks of green appeared sometimes and flew towards April. Between Nia’s moaning and the noises April was making, soon he felt an enormous rush, and he grunted as he came, Nia moaning and sighing beneath him. They slowed down soon after that, Alex loosening his grip and kissing Nia gently. He looked up at April who still had her fingers between her legs and her eyes closed.
She let out a sigh and then opened her eyes. April stood up from where she was and walked unsteadily over to a piece of machinery they’d utilized before, that had a large flat surface. She turned, hiked up her dress, and looked back at Alex.
Alex grinned as he stood up.
Sometimes it was good to be alpha.
2
“Wake up, Wolfie,” Ruby whispered.
Alex jerked awake at the sound of her voice and realized he must've shifted to hybrid while he was asleep. Sometime during the day a few of the pack had come across some large mattresses of dubious origin, so they’d replaced the inflatable beds. At least now, he, Nia, and April could sleep together. The mattress let off a squeal of rusty springs as he sat up and saw the old witch standing framed in the doorway. He instantly smelled blood—quite a lot of it—and it seemed it came from multiple sources.
“This way, to the kitchen, I need your help with something,” Ruby whispered, then walked away. Alex got out of bed as quietly as he could, still not sure how Ruby had managed to get in past the guards and everyone else in the house. He put it down to sneaky witch magic, but it also spoke to a giant hole in their defenses. After all, if she could get in, anyone could. Alex shifted back to human, his boxer shorts reappearing. He quickly grabbed shorts and a T-shirt and put them on before creeping out of the room and heading down to the kitchen.
When he got there, he found Ruby sitting at the rickety kitchen table. In the glare of the lightbulb above her, he saw that she was wearing thick, heavy boots, army combat pants, and a T-shirt advertising a hot wings restaurant in town. She was also splattered in blood up and down her clothes. She had both hands on the side of the body, murmuring to herself, casting some kind of healing spell from what Alex could see. He rushed over to her. Thanks to his roll in the hay with Nia and April, he was charged up with magic.
“What do you need?” he asked.
“A bit of that healing flame would be nice,” Ruby said. Alex knelt as she lifted her shirt. She had a gash on the side of her stomach running up and across her rib cage. Deep red blood was welling up. Alex immediately cast healing flame, charging it with the sex magic. Ruby pulled her hand away from the wound as Alex began to run the flame over it. Charged up like this, it went deeper into her body, healing internal wounds.
Normally, healing flame would heal up a wound quickly, but as Alex ran his finger over it, he felt some kind of resistance there.
“What did this?” he asked.
“I was having a discussion with some mages,” Ruby said. Finally, the resistance in the wound gave way, and Alex saw a streak of black leaking from the wound, mixed with Ruby's blood. She sighed in relief as it came out and then the flesh stitched itself up. She jolted before pushing Alex's hand away.
“That's fine. I can handle my sore back on my own,” she said. Alex assumed that healing had jumped to the source of the next injury.
Alex stood up and pulled back a kitchen chair and that's when he noticed the black duffel bag, half-unzipped underneath the kitchen table, filled to the brim with cash. Sitting beside it was a long stone cylinder that he recognized. It was one of the house ward batteries from Juno's house that had been down in the basement.
“That’s your cut from the heist. Two hundred and eighty thousand all up. Maybe you can use some of it so you can legally buy this palace you’re currently living in. The battery is there so we can set up a house ward for you instead of having you out in public sticking out like a sore thumb.”
Alex shook his head and then sat down, the old chair creaking somewhat under his weight. He suddenly realized that, after the shock of seeing Ruby, he hadn't said the first and most obvious thing.
“Fire mages took Juno two weeks ago now.”
“We know. Don't worry, I'm working on it,” she said
Alex was waking up properly now, and no, he didn't want to yell at Juno's grandmother, but a hot ball of anger was forming in his stomach.
“I tried to come to your house two weeks ago, but I'm not on the ward list anymore. I couldn't find it. And now, apparently, every witch in town has vanished somewhere, and April and Nia tell me that maybe that's the witches preparing for war but maybe sometimes they vanish just to screw with people… which is incredibly bad timing when your witch wife has been kidnapped by fire mages who slaughtered ten of my pack and destroyed the village at my territory.”
Alex wasn't yelling at the end of it, but he certainly raised his voice, his heartbeat speeding up.
Ruby sat there for a moment before waving her fingers over to the counter. “Pour me a triple shot of that whiskey you've got up there,” she said. Alex did as she asked and poured one for himself as well, gulping it back, then filling the glass again. He carried the bottle back to the table in case he needed another.
“There’s a business card in the cash. It’s for an incredibly dodgy accountant who’s going to set up a company for you, file paperwork, all that nonsense. So then you can buy this property or other properties or whatever you want, and the actual owner will be obscured. You understand? You do not buy any properties to live in under your name or the name of anyone in your pack.”
If it wasn't for the burning in his throat from the whiskey, Alex nearly would have sworn he was asleep, and this was a dream or a nightmare. Ruby, splattered in blood, was seeming to take it quite calmly that Juno was gone and talking about money and land and some dodgy accountant. The way Alex felt at the moment, the only care he had for money was to use it to hire mercenaries to slaughter every single fire mage and then move on to Xavo, the necromancers who’d silvered the village.
“Perhaps you can share with me where the witches have gone or how I can get in contact with Hera? Maybe I can use some of that money to hire witch mercenaries. Didn’t you talk about hiring them? The black… somethings?”
“The Black Wings. They’re unavailable right now.”
Alex took another drink, the alcohol beginning to blunt the edge of his rage a little.
“Where are the witches?” Alex said.
“Acapulco beach. The windsurfing is amazing this time of year.”
“Witches,” Alex muttered.
“Come help me put up the house ward, and I’ll tell you a little story,” Ruby said. Alex picked up the stone cylinder at Ruby's instruction. It was heavy enough that he wondered how the scrawny old lady had managed to carry it. She had him
carry it over to the wall of the kitchen and press it against it. As he held it in place, her spell screen flickered above her head and she started talking.
“I presume Juno didn't tell you… my husband, her grandfather, was a werewolf. We only had one daughter, Hera, and the way it works with witches and werewolves is if the baby is a girl, she's a witch. A boy would have been a werewolf.
“Juno never got to meet her grandfather. He was killed when Hera was only six years old by some vampires. They killed him because they wanted the land that we were holding. It was here in Baxter, two houses side-by-side that some vampire decided they wanted for whatever reason. When we didn't sell and rejected the other pressures they put on us, the best we know is he got jumped one night and murdered.”
Alex kept quiet, holding the stone cylinder against the wall, feeling slightly ashamed of his earlier anger that he'd wanted to direct at Ruby. There was another layer to it also, the feeling again that he knew nothing about his mates, that it had all happened so fast, that they hadn't gone through the standard things people learn about each other's families. Occasionally, Alex glanced at the spell screen flickering above Ruby's head, amazed that the witch could talk and cast spells at the same time.
“Juno's father too, he was a werewolf. I say was because he vanished, presumed dead, when she was seventeen years old. We searched, we used the magic available to us, we even paid in favors and blood and did what we could to find him, but there was no trace. So what you may take from these two stories is that we witches know all about the crimes committed by mages and vampires against the werewolves, because a lot of them were crimes against us too.” There was a surge in the magic then, and Alex rocked a little as an invisible wave washed over him. It was warm and then a cold chill moved past as though he was standing in the deep ocean. He felt the weight of the cylinder suddenly vanish as it bonded itself to the wall. Ruby stepped away and the spell screen vanished.
“There you go, house ward. That will cover this place, maybe half of next door, and probably halfway into the factory. All your pack are automatically on the list, and you're the only one who can add people or take them off. It's up to you whether you give permission to someone else to do that.”
They went back over to the table, Ruby pouring herself another shot of whiskey and gulping it down. Alex lifted his glass but didn't drink from it.
“How did you get in here? There are guards out front,” he said.
“It was easy. I just did a bit of va-va-voom, you know, a low-cut top, bent over to pick something up, distracted them, and in I came,” Ruby said, wearing a sly grin. Alex quickly stepped out of the kitchen to look through the front window and found the two guards at their post, keeping watch.
He came back to the kitchen and found Ruby had hefted the duffel bag up onto the table. She grabbed a business card and set it to the side, tapping a nail on it. “This guy is your man or maybe this man is your guy. Whatever, he'll help you,” she said.
“How can we find Juno? We've been going to the city, hoping to catch an Ignis mage, but we haven't even seen one.”
“Keep it up. I'm sure you'll catch one eventually. They love driving around in those fancy cars of theirs, and sooner or later, one of them will be casting a spell and then you can snatch him and drug him and break his mind. Just remember, where there is one, there are more, so be careful. Now sit down, I want to give you a spell,” Ruby said.
Alex sat and put out his hand. Ruby placed hers in it and he tried to ignore the dried blood under her fingernails. Although he was in human form, he could still smell it, but thankfully it wasn't as strong as when he was in hybrid form. Ruby’s spell screen opened up above their heads as the connection was made between them, and Alex saw the spell appear. It was called Juno’s Cantrip. He felt his chest constrict at the sight of her name, a sudden sharp jolt of pain that the alcohol he’d drunk did nothing to dull. Ruby, who was connected with him through the magic, shuddered a little and then let out a long, slow breath.
“It's okay, we’ll find her. Now, can you make some space?” Ruby said.
Alex took a few deep breaths and focused on his own spell screen. He didn't have enough space to copy Juno’s Cantrip. Between the original ten spells and the others he had made himself and then improved with Stephen's help, he was already running out of space. Then, when he'd cracked open the Great Barrier spell, he'd copied parts to see what he could learn.
The big problem was the black spiky runes that had wedged into his head, the ones that were torn free from the partial tapestry, hanging in the vampire’s basement at the mansion. Alex had tried ignoring them, but they were stuck, sitting on some pages of their own, and any time he went to cast a spell he could feel them, there just a page or two away, somehow sharp and dangerous. What was worse was that they'd overwritten pages, taking away some of the code he’d copied from the Great Barrier spell.
He’d discovered he couldn’t share it with anyone. April sensed danger but couldn’t see the runes at all. In a moment of anger he’d tried to delete it and found it was permanently stuck, just sitting there in his head, taking up space. There was an execute button under it, but it was still grayed out, so whatever it was, the spell was incomplete, unable to be cast, written in some incomprehensible language.
Alex spent a moment flicking around between all his spells. He didn't want to delete the Great Barrier stuff, considering how difficult it was to obtain—casting Know Thyself 100x and almost killing himself in the process. His eyes strayed back to the original list of ten spells that he'd been taught. He went down them and saw some that he had barely used, and others he had never used at all.
“I’ll delete Unlock, Find Food, and Conceal. I never use them,” he said.
Ruby shook her head. “No, you must keep the original ten. I swear, once we get Juno back, I'm going to have a talk with that young witch. The original ten spells are your guide to magic in this world. First, you must Know Thyself to know yourself first, to understand yourself. Then Analyze to know the outside world. Once you have begun to know it, there is Shield to protect yourself and others. As you dig further into the world, there is Purify to keep the toxins of the world out. Then Flame Finger to manipulate the elements, to begin to exert your will. That follows to Telekinesis to move the parts of the world and then to Haste to move yourself, to alter yourself. Then Unlock to break into the secret places of the world. To explore and take knowledge, especially that which is forbidden to you. Find Food looks simple and useless but the path to finding anything starts with finding something simple. If you can master that, you can find anything you want. Finally, Conceal because it is a dangerous world out there, and you can use it to hide yourself away so you may practice your magics in peace.”
Alex gave a double blink at the old witch. Normally she was snarky and sarcastic, but she’d lowered her voice and he’d felt her feelings in the connection between them.
“I don't have any other space left otherwise,” he muttered.
“Get rid of the Great Barrier material. You don't need it at the moment. As my granddaughter hasn't been teaching you correctly, let me ask you this: what do you think a ward is? Hypothetical question, don't answer. It's a concealment spell writ large. What do you think the Great Barrier is, but the most powerful ward ever written? You must practice your basics over and over again. Now, please, I need to go so make space and copy Juno’s spell.”
Alex took a quick look through the code he'd scraped from the Great Barrier spell, and with a slight pain in his heart, wiped it away, making space. He then focused on Juno’s Cantrip and copied it across. It was actually quite a small spell in the end. In the notes about it Juno had written to sit sarcastic motherfuckers on their ass.
Once Alex had copied the spell, he read through it a few times. There were structures in the code that he hadn't seen before. Loops and such, ways of compressing it that shrank the spell down and made it easier and faster to cast. He recognized a piece of the code as something from Tel
ekinesis but then there was another part that looked to be from Conceal.
“Wait, is this that shoelace tying spell?” Alex asked.
“She wrote the first version of it when she was a teenager, and then she worked on it for years, making it shorter and faster. You see, it moves the lace, ties the lace, has a slight look away, but not so much as to arouse suspicion. It distracts, it’s subtle and blazingly fast.”
Alex frowned.
“Do you want to explain to me why I just got rid of code from the Great Barrier that was almost impossible to get, just to learn a spell to tie shoelaces together?”
Ruby grinned at him, and he saw that some of her teeth had been stained with blood as well.
“The mages and vampires get it wrong—they always focus on big killing spells, power and wielding the elements of the earth. They’re all so bloated but this spell is subtle, quick, small. You don't need to be ripping a blood golem out of the earth. Look at the healing spell you wrote for yourself while you were injured. It was smaller than any I've seen, and yet it’s still bloated. Juno’s Cantrip is a lesson, because to learn the spells you need, you don’t have the space nor the time, nor does anyone else. You need to shrink down what you have, get better at it, learn to copy and shrink spells as you go. Work on this, and the next time I see you, I hope you’ve cut some fat from other spells.”
Ruby pulled her hand away then and their connection broke. Alex glanced at the clock and saw it was 3 a.m. Despite it being the middle of the night and knowing he needed to sleep, he wanted to pull more out of the old witch, starting with discovering where he could hire some mercenaries if the Black Wings weren’t available.
“I'm starving. Pass those cookies,” Ruby said, pointing at the counter behind him. Alex turned to get them, but when he looked back, the old witch was gone.