by Harry Nix
“Yeah, you're right, it is about how you use your inches,” Jacob said with a laugh. He continued flicking through the junk mail.
Although Alex had no children of his own, between the children in the pack and Jacob, he was getting a preview of what it might be like. The six children were adorable little things, although they were going slightly wild from being cooped up in the house. They were constantly running, screaming, and playing games, happy just to spend a huge chunk of time on a game involving a stick. Even in the short time they'd been in his pack, he was amazed at how rapidly they'd changed. Lewis, the youngest, who would turn to hybrid form if he thought he could shred the bottom out of a shopping bag to get what he wanted, had barely been speaking when Alex had first taken over, but was now managing to piece together sentences to get what he wanted.
Jacob on the other hand, and the other teenagers, were giving an overview of the kind of pressure teenagers could exert. Jacob had brought up getting a giant television more than once and now, somehow, happened to have a piece of junk mail he was very excitedly looking through. He was talking to Alex as though getting a giant TV was a foregone conclusion, and they were just negotiating the finer details. Alex didn't have the heart to tell him that he would have to wait until another chunk of cash came in.
“There's a car coming,” Jacob said, looking up. Alex pricked up his ears and then he heard it too. Where their home was in the rundown border between industrial and residential there was hardly any traffic. Over here it was almost completely isolated. It was like this was where the death of manufacturing had hit first.
They huddled down as the car drew closer and then finally appeared. It was plain black and unlike Ignis’ fancy expensive cars this one looked like it had a few hundred thousand miles on it. Alex knew that some enclaves had more money than others, but you could really see it in things like this. There were three mages in the car. They waited as an automatic garage door opener went to work, squealing as it pulled the rusty metal garage door up. They drove inside, then Alex and Jacob waited as the door squealed back down again.
“So, should we kidnap them too?” Jacob asked, flexing his claws.
“No, we’ll watch for now. If they go anywhere, we’ll follow them. Maybe we can find some other locations,” Alex said.
For many nights now, he’d lain awake, turning over plans in his mind. The Ignis plan was simple. Get some Ignis mages, and if they knew where Juno was, find that location and hit it as hard as they could. If she wasn’t there, climb the ladder location by location, destroying them as they went, until they found her.
He’d also been considering a single night of carnage. Locate as many enclave houses and compounds as possible, then attack en masse so they didn't have a chance to prepare. The flaw to that plan, of course, was that his pack was small now. He needed allies or mercenaries and now he owned land but had no money. Even getting to Ignis might be a problem.
The Corvus compound that Juno had attacked in a rage had maybe twenty mages there, and Alex knew that he and Juno had been very lucky to survive. Juno’s grief at Bailey’s death had supercharged her chaos magic and without that in their favor they could have both died.
Alex didn't want to leave Baxter, not while Juno was still missing, but he felt like he might need to go out into the wilderness to see whether he could recruit werewolves to fight for his cause.
“They’re coming out again,” Jacob said and the garage door started to open. Alex shook his head with a smile. Although he was only twenty-five, he sometimes felt like an old man next to Jacob, whose sense of hearing seemed to be keener than Alex's.
“Yeah, well, don't get cocky about it,” Alex said and flicked Jacob’s ear. The young werewolf swatted him away. They'd taken the old wreck of the car and now Alex wasn't quite sure how this was meant to work. It was so isolated out here that surely another car following the mages would be seen immediately. He figured there was no solution for it. They’d just have to do it, and if the mages spotted them, well, they spotted them. They could always grab them and torture them if they had to.
The two werewolves jumped from the factory roof into the shadows below and ran to the car, shifting to human before getting in. Alex waited for the mages’ car to pass before starting the engine, which coughed and spluttered a few times before finally getting going properly. He drove out onto the road and followed the mages, leaving a great deal of distance between them, hoping they wouldn't look back. Thankfully, this part of the rundown, broken city wasn't too far from where it was more populous.
Soon, there were other cars on the road and Alex relaxed, closing the distance between them. At night, it was hard to keep track of the black car, especially considering there were only a few streetlamps, due to the rundown nature of the entire area.
“What we need are tracking bugs and stuff like that,” Jacob said. He was jittering his legs up and down with some kind of energy he couldn't get rid of.
“That’d probably work right until it went into a ward. I’ll talk to April about it,” Alex said. It had crossed his mind that such things existed in the normal world—surveillance equipment, bugs, and whatnot—but Alex assumed the Great Barrier would destroy them. He still wasn't entirely sure how wards worked. Apparently, you could use a phone while in a ward and not be traced, but outside of it you possibly could. What would happen to a GPS bug if it was driven into a warded area? Would it explode or simply stop transmitting information?
Alex focused on the car and pushed these questions out of his mind. It was once again an example of how far out of his depth he was, coming into a world that he had no idea about. Although, he concluded, perhaps he was being a little too harsh on himself. As he wasn’t raised as supernatural, he felt sometimes he had an insight into things that those who relied on spells didn't. As a programmer, he could see holes all over the place. He just didn’t have the skill to exploit them. Like a GPS bug transmitting and then suddenly stopping would tell you where the edge of the ward was perhaps. Get enough of them and you could probably pinpoint the location of the ward. Alex idly wondered if you set up a grenade launcher somewhere, and fired at a set of GPS coordinates and it landed on a warded house, what would happen there? The wards weren't omnipotent. If someone decided to shoot a missile at you from a hundred miles away the ward wasn't going to somehow know that and scrap the guidance system. If it was moving fast enough would the ward be able to stop it before it hit? Alex knew he couldn’t get a missile, of course, but hurling Molotovs into a warded area or grenades…
“They’re stopping. What's that place?” Jacob said.
“Put it on the map,” Alex said.
Jacob reached into the back seat and pulled out the old-school paper map that Nia had bought.
Alex drove closer and saw the mages had stopped at a mortuary. He did a quick lap of the block and parked down a side street. Then they waited, another hour passing, talking about televisions every now and again. Although Jacob didn't like the city much for how it smelled, he seemed to have adapted to it reasonably well and was coming to appreciate the things civilization could offer.
Eventually the car emerged again from the mortuary and they continued to follow. It was now well past midnight, heading to 1 a.m., and the traffic was becoming thin. Over the next hour the mages stopped at two other locations. One was a nondescript house and the other was a funeral home. It was nearing around two in the morning when Alex suddenly found himself driving down a random side street. The mages were gone. He hit the brakes so sharply the car shuddered to a halt.
“The hell was that? Where’ve they gone?” Alex said.
Jacob blinked and rubbed his eyes from his position in the passenger seat, as though coming out of some kind of stupor. “They were just in front of us,” he murmured.
When they'd first come back to Baxter after the attack, and Alex had gone to Juno's, he'd experienced what hitting the ward was like. He tried to find Juno's and then was down another street, surprised and lost. This felt
similar, although it seemed to have some kind of extra stupefying effect. A kind of sleepiness or dulling of the mind. Alex felt like he'd woken up after a long night of drinking.
“Mark our location and see where we are,” Alex said. He drove on until they found the next cross street and Jacob located it on the map. They were about five miles away from the last known location, the funeral home. Alex tried to think back to what they were doing. He was sure they’d just been driving in a straight line, the mages going down a main road. Now, suddenly, he was five miles away. Alex took the pencil from Jacob and marked another spot on the map, guessing it was the last time he remembered being conscious of what he was doing. He hadn’t been keeping a close watch on the time. It seemed that there were five minutes in there that had vanished.
“Did those death lovers use a spell on us?” Jacob said.
“I think it was a ward. They must have been going to a more secure building,” Alex said. They drove back to the mortuary, although as soon as they were there Alex wasn't quite sure which direction he remembered the mages going. Whatever the ward had done, it had messed with his memory a little, which seemed to suggest that wards held some kind of mind magic as well. Whatever it was, it was incredibly powerful, for it had caused a gap of a few minutes that he didn't remember. If you could weaponize such a thing, it would be incredible.
Alex brought up his spell screen, casting Know Thyself out of habit, and searched through it. There were no other active spells on him, and his resistances and everything else looked normal. Usually when he encountered a hostile spell, his body popped up a resistance fairly quickly, but there was nothing there just yet. Maybe the exposure hadn’t been long enough.
He kept the spell screen open as he picked a random direction and started to drive, hoping he'd at least see something pop up in the active spell list before the ward got to work on him. They hadn’t driven more than half a mile before the pages of Alex's spell screen flipped by themselves, away from the status and over to where the spiky rune spell sat, malevolent and sharp.
Alex felt a pulsing that hurt like a toothache and seemed to be coming from the spell itself. He slowed but the pulses of pain grew closer. It was clear he was approaching something and somehow this partial spell was detecting it. Each time it pulsed, Alex winced, the pain pulling in his head, spilling down to his body. He was having trouble focusing on the road, but he didn't want to close the spell screen because he knew on some level that this would stop whatever was going on right now.
There was a sharp throb and for a moment Alex saw the execute button light up underneath the spell that had lodged itself in his mind. Then there was a gap before he found himself on a random street.
Alex hit the brakes and touched Jacob on the shoulder. The teenager looked up at him with sleepy eyes.
“Damn. They did it again,” he said. Alex took the map from him, and then as soon as he found the nearest cross street, marked another spot on it. They only had two locations so far, this one also about five miles away from the mortuary.
Alex had briefly discussed wards with Ruby and Juno, learning that with enough time, people, and attention, you could estimate the location of warded buildings and places by working out where they lost attention.
Although Alex only had the mortuary and the two locations where they'd woken up, he saw this was another project that he and his pack could take on, provided they could get some cars and work in pairs.
He drew a rough circle on the map. The top quadrant of the city was an enormous area but somewhere in there was an important Xavo building.
Alex opened up his spell screen again, then flipped over to the black spiky spell. The execute button was grayed out again, but it still felt as malevolent and sharp as ever. Although he felt the urge to do it again, with only Jacob in the car it didn't seem safe to risk it. In the moment before getting distracted just after the spell lit up, Alex had felt an intense urge to hit the execute button, to cast whatever spell this was, to throw it free into the world. It was perhaps only because the ward had scrambled his mind so quickly that he hadn’t managed to do it, but who knew what would happen next time? Alex closed the spell screen and then headed for home.
By the time they got there, Jacob was softly snoring, his head leaned up against the glass. Alex woke him up, then they went inside, the young werewolf quickly heading off to find his room, carefully stepping his way between little children.
Nia murmured as Alex sank down beside her onto the mattress, putting her hand on his chest. April was pressed up against her back, spooning her. Alex felt sleep tugging on him, but it was like he’d been dosed with ten cups of coffee. He had no idea what the spell was that had been forced into his mind, apart from that it felt sharp and dangerous, but that throbbing pain had been like a beacon, telling him he was heading towards a ward. He was sure of it.
Now the only question was: was it stupidly dangerous to do it again but this time cast the unknown spell?
7
Alex was in his dusty office deep in study of the small electric shock ring when Nia came in and dropped a pad beside him with a list of names on it.
“You need to add my father and these five other werewolves from his pack to the ward,” she said.
“Are they coming?” Alex asked.
“They’re at the Grease Trap right now, finishing up a meal, but then they'll be here in about fifteen minutes so I need you to add their names,” she said.
Alex read the list. The first name was Julius and then the rest were members of his pack. He was a little surprised that Nia had called her father, especially without discussing it with him. His face must have betrayed his thoughts because Nia squeezed his shoulder, perhaps a little harder than she needed to.
“Look, I'm a werewolf too. I know how it feels to turn inward, to stick with the pack, to not reach out for help, but we can't do that. Those mages all make alliances, so do the vampires and then what happens? They come to our home and they kill us. Do you know that we actually outnumber the mages, or we used to, at least? I know this almost goes against every werewolf instinct, but if we worked together, we would obliterate them,” Nia said.
“Yeah, you're right,” Alex sighed. It had been somewhere on the endless list of things to do but he just wasn't quite sure how he was meant to accomplish it. After all, he’d gone out to the Greenacre pack, challenged Jasper, and killed him, only to have the entire pack walk off into the darkness and only a small number return to join his pack. Was he meant to find one of the packs that had been raided for werewolves used to fuel the blood golem, fight the alpha, and then threaten everyone to stay?
There was also the problem of not knowing which packs he could even talk to. Julius had told him there were some wild packs who wouldn't bother with the ritual challenge, the scraping of the line in the dirt, and then pulling the other werewolf over it. They just killed anyone who was an outsider.
Alex supposed this day was coming though, and it was better sooner than later. He was stuck trying to rewrite spells, trying to find a way he could duplicate more rings to help bolster his pack. Perhaps Julius had better ideas. Not for the first time Alex wished that Stephen was still around. Yes, the kid had been part of an attack that killed one werewolf and put another into a coma. Gem had been shot in the head and had never recovered, then had died during the Ignis attack, having never awoken from the original injury. But damn, him and the kid together had broken new ground in spell writing. He'd taken Alex’s fire sword spell, his attempt to create flame, and made it into a proper fireball spell and all while both of them had been so drunk they could barely stand.
He’d helped Alex learn to enchant rings, at least to a degree, enabling him to churn out rings and sell them for money. Just looking at the minor spark spell on the ring he was holding, Alex was sure that if he could share it with the kid, he’d have some ideas of how to cut it to pieces, shrink it down, make it stronger, and stick it on a ring. Then maybe next time Ignis came calling, werewolves would
be firing lightning bolts out of their fingers rather than fireballs. But the kid was long gone, disappeared into the night, leaving behind only the address of the necromancer location.
“So, my dad doesn't like to be kept waiting…” Nia said.
“Okay, let’s do it,” Alex said. He closed away his various spell screens that he had opened. He’d spent most of the morning comparing the electric spark to the flame finger spell considering they were both based on creating a physical reaction. As far as he could tell, the flame finger worked pretty much the way fire worked: creating enough friction to generate heat to combust but it somehow did it without any obvious fuel source other than the oxygen in the air itself. There were parts of the spark ring code that looked similar, except somehow it generated an electric spark rather than a flame. Alex couldn’t even find a number in it that he could use to increase the number of charges it had, or its intensity.
Letting it all go, he followed Nia out of the factory, past the two Ignis mages who were still in their dreamy daze, and went inside. Approaching the house ward, he put his hand on the kitchen wall and then mentally went through the list one by one, adding the names. He knew Julius and Elise, one of the other werewolves on the list, but had no idea who the rest were. Again it brought up questions about how the ward knew who they were. If he added, for example, ‘Michael’ to the list, did that mean anyone named Michael could come in, or was the ward somehow understanding his intention to admit the werewolf Michael, who was part of Julius’s pack?
The ward itself was a complicated amalgam of spells, one that spoke to how powerful Ruby truly was. Looking at it now he realized that Ruby couldn't possibly have cast all those spells that single night when she’d bonded the battery to the wall. Perhaps some of them were just sitting there, waiting to be activated.