by Harry Nix
It hit the source of the ward and began shredding it to pieces like a sharp knife into warm, living flesh. He was aware there were mages in the house, at least ten or so, and he felt their fear as the ward began to tear apart. The rune spell seemed happy about it. It was doing what it was designed for. As the ward tore, and the mages inside desperately poured magic into it, the power within the ward fed back on itself. The ward suddenly shrunk, compressed itself down to the batteries that were charging it, and then exploded.
The mages inside were turned into chunks of flesh and splattered around the walls while the house itself shook with the force of it. Alex felt their deaths, their confusion, their pain, and then as the ward was finally destroyed, the rune spell broke apart, spinning away.
Alex suddenly found himself back in his own body, Jacob beside him, panicking and shouting, running the last of a spluttering healing flame spell over a deep cut in his leg. Alex looked down and saw white bone. The flesh had been split and veins were spurting blood. The deep femoral artery was cut wide open. His head felt muzzy and dazed, like he could easily slip into a warm sleep that even in this state he was aware he'd never awaken from. He managed to flick his spell screen back to the status. The runes had taken every bit of magic he had, leaving him nothing but the natural mana his body drew and hardly any of that at all.
He simply wasn't healing fast enough to recover from his injuries. They were listed down the side. Deep cuts and wounds all over his body. No bones broken, but veins were burst, flesh cleaved. Alex felt Jacob pull the healing ring off his own finger and put it on so he could use it. The cut in his leg was gradually closing up, but there were so many wounds on his body, Alex knew he wasn't going to last more than a minute or two. He looked down the list of mana to see what he could quickly recharge. Sex magic was out, for obvious reasons. Death? Perhaps if he'd been down the street near those mages who’d died. They would have punched a hole right through to death and he could get something out of the wet chunks left behind. Pain? Although he was torn up, he couldn’t feel any pain.
His eyes went to nature, and as soon as they did, he became aware of the trees nearby, the grass, and the flowers gently bobbing their heads. Alex reached out, lifting his hand. He noted distantly he could see the bone of his arm too. He pulled on the nature, drawing the magic through it. Here in this area with more plants and more life it was easy. The magic came through and he immediately poured it back out to heal himself. The healing flame that burst from his finger was tinged with green.
He set his hand against his thigh as the green went to work, stitching up the wound, then snapping to his other leg where there’d been another wound hidden under his clothes. Jacob’s ring was exhausted, and there was nothing more he could do except sit and watch as Alex managed to heal himself. As Alex pulled on the nature, he caught a sense of the trees and leaves themselves. As he healed he became vaguely aware that the grass between him and the sidewalk was turning a deeper shade of green. Some of the plants were starting to grow and move. Alex felt a jolt in his head, the healing snapping to somewhere in his brain and his thinking cleared before the zap went down to his feet. He realized he was unable to use all of the nature he was drawing, so some of it was flooding back out, causing the plants to go crazy. He saw a creeper on the fence suddenly thicken and grow before tightening. There was a creaking noise before the entire picket fence shattered into pieces and fell over. The creeper then wrapped its way around the letterbox that was still standing and began to crush it.
It was with great difficulty that Alex let go of the magic, let go of the loop that seemed to want to grow. He’d healed enough to not be at risk of dying, but his entire body throbbed and he realized he was missing a few teeth that he must've spat out at some point.
“Um, let's swap seats because there's a fire now,” Jacob said. Alex did as he instructed without saying a word, feeling like he was only half-conscious. The ward explosion had started a fire and a thick cloud of black smoke was now pluming up into the air. Alex briefly wondered whether the Great Barrier had anything to do with it, starting a fire to destroy dead bodies, but surely it didn't think that far ahead. Maybe it was just a coincidence.
Alex got in the passenger side as Jacob got behind the wheel, grimacing a little as he sat in a pool of blood that had leaked out of the car and onto the road, but there was nothing to be done about it now. April would have to come back sometime later and cleanse it, hopefully before some mages found it and sent a weredog after Alex. Jacob got the car going, and if Alex had been more awake, he would have told him to go in the opposite direction, but as it was he just slurred something at the kid who ignored him and then drove right past the burning house. Alex could see there were actual chunks of flesh sitting in the front yard that had come splattering out through the windows.
“Great Barrier is not gonna like that,” he said to Jacob, or thought he did.
“What? Don't speak. Your jaw’s all screwed up,” Jacob said.
Alex sat back in the chair with his eyes closed, looking over his spell screen and the tiny sliver of natural mana he had that was slowly healing his body. He was already anticipating what Nia and April were going to say to him. It sure wouldn’t be good, arriving home with a car full of blood.
As they drove back out to their property, Alex took another look at the black rune spell. Although it appeared still deadly and sharp, there also seemed to be a sated quality to it, as though now it had feasted, it could rest a while. Alex wasn't sure if that was his imagination and if they came upon another ward whether the spell would be ready to leap out to shred it. There was also the question of how big a ward they had just destroyed. Any larger and he would have been torn to shreds along with it.
Alex felt around his mouth with his tongue, counting missing teeth. He opened his eyes and looked down to see a few of them sitting below Jacob’s feet. Although he couldn't read the rune spell, not a single line, he had the distinct feeling that it had lashed back upon him because it wasn’t the entire spell, it was only a part of it, the damage going outwards and inward at the same time.
If only there was some way he could complete it, he would have a weapon beyond compare.
9
It took two full days for Alex to heal up properly. Sure, his muscles and veins had stitched together quickly, but there was a deeper healing to take place, so he’d spent the last two days locked in the office, shuffling around like an old man while trying to focus on his spell writing.
He was starting to get antsy, hell, the pack was starting to get antsy, so he finally agreed to let them go out into the city. One of their first trips was to buy proper bedding for everybody and to work out how to get it home without attracting too much attention with multiple delivery trucks going out to the middle of nowhere. Jeremiah was in charge of that, and Alex trusted him.
Having his muscles torn to shreds was bad, but not quite as bad as April and Nia ripping strips off him for his reckless experimentation. He knew it was coming so he'd taken them to one of the farthest abandoned houses before he told them exactly what had happened. From then on, for about half an hour, it was two-on-one tag team yelling, Nia and April both furious. It was possible that April was angrier than Nia, considering she was a spell caster and knew exactly how dangerous it could be. Alex said all the right words, apologized many times, and gradually coaxed both his mates back to calmness. He couldn't begrudge them a yelling session, after all they had come home with a car full of blood and Alex barely able to walk after what was meant to be a simple mission to try to discover the edges of a ward.
April had to perform a cleanse on the car and then go back to where the necromancers' house had been burning to do it again on the blood there. She reported back that the house had burned to the ground, the firefighters unable to save it. The event had then appeared in the newspaper and online being described as a drug lab explosion. Alex supposed that was the Great Barrier at work, confusing the normals who visited the scene, who’d probably
found various supernatural things like wands and rings and who knew what else.
As part of coaxing his two mates back to calm, Alex had promised that he would share more of what he was doing. In the spirit of that, he told Nia and April about the code ring that he and Stephen had created. Stephen had stolen the original, the ring that appeared to change the so-called code of the person wearing it. Upon telling them his hypothesis—that it might allow normals to be unaffected by the Great Barrier—both Nia and April immediately insisted he test it, so now here he was on the third day after burning down the necromancers' house and shredding the ward, creating another code ring. After deleting most of the Great Barrier material, Alex only had small fragments of it left, but he’d remembered to keep the code for werewolf.
Alex spent most days now enchanting rings, and they were starting to amass quite a collection, most of which would go out to other werewolf packs to secure the alliances that Julius was working on. They hadn't heard an update from him yet but assumed he would get back in touch soon. As a result of his frequent enchanting, Alex was becoming better at it by leaps and bounds. He'd gone from being able to enchant one ring in a few minutes, to being able to enchant multiple rings in under a minute. The slow part of it now was him, being forced to concentrate, to set the spells in motion and cast them one by one.
Alex had just finished enchanting his code ring when Nia came walking into the dusty office right on time. Ten in the morning. It was going to be a blisteringly hot day, and she was wearing an incredibly micro skirt and a thin T-shirt. She smelled of sunscreen and, underneath, her natural scent. As soon as Alex saw her he reached for her, but she swatted him away and danced out of his grasp.
“Uh-uh, we've got work to do, remember? Important work that you share with your mates. I’m going to need a few more healing flame rings, please,” Nia said, holding out a hand. The temptation to leap on her was great but Alex knew he wasn't entirely out of the doghouse for his experimentation, so he took five more healing flame rings from the pile and gave them to her.
“Are you ready to go? I feel like we can find a squatter somewhere nearby,” Nia said.
Alex grimaced. The question of who exactly he would test his code ring on had been bothering him. He had a lot of thoughts about ethics and consent. But of course, because of the Great Barrier, no normal could consent because he wouldn't be able to explain to them without the Great Barrier snapping down. Going to test it on a squatter felt like a whole new level of morally wrong, reminding him of how the army in years gone past had experimented on homeless people.
“Do you think… ethically, that we can experiment on a normal like this? What if it's dangerous?” Alex said.
Nia sighed and ran her hands through her hair, a move that Alex found greatly enjoyable as it lifted her thin T-shirt and exposed her flat stomach.
“You know what Juno would say? Something inspiring, probably from Air Bud. Look—I've never seen the Great Barrier hurt a normal. They look, they look away, they run. The Great Barrier usually only hurts supernaturals, so really the greatest risk is to us.”
“I just don't know how they can consent when we can't explain it to them,” Alex said.
“I got your consent right here, let's go,” Nia said, grabbing her crotch. Then she reached into the pocket of her tiny skirt and pulled out some cash. “Plus, I took a thousand dollars to pay them. Does that make you feel better?” She walked out of the office and Alex followed her. He supposed all these questions of consent were quite ridiculous considering they walked past two captured Ignis mages. They were still looking reasonably okay, despite having been chained up for days on end now. They were both staring, slack-jawed, into nothing. The scarred one had drool running down his chin. Alex crouched down beside them.
“Are you going tell us an Ignis location today?” he asked but there was no response, although the scarred one’s eyes flickered in his direction before looking away. They’d been like this since yesterday and April assured Alex that it was fine. She was confident that soon they'd be singing like birds. Alex left them there and followed Nia out to the street, deliberately walking half a pace slower for a while just so he could see that beautiful bubble butt swaying in front of him until she realized what he was doing, smacked him one, and grabbed him by the hand to pull him into her side.
“Eyes to the front, Wolf, we need to find someone to try this ring on,” she said with a smile.
They were about two blocks away, walking down the desolate street, when they saw someone moving in a window. A young man with spiky black hair and a bunch of tattoos running up and down his neck.
“That's our guy,” Nia said, leading the way. The front door of the house he was squatting in was barely hanging on and opened at a push. Although the day was blisteringly hot already, inside it was cool because most of the windows were covered and everything was dark. Nia walked in like she owned the place. Alex felt like he was invading someone else's space even though he knew the guy was a squatter.
“Hey, we want to talk to you,” Nia yelled out. The young man appeared down the end of the corridor, keeping a safe distance from them. Alex guessed he was about twenty-five. Despite the heat he was wearing leather pants and a T-shirt with Iron Maiden on it. The tattoos striped down his neck continued on to his arms and he had a few chunky rings on his fingers and spiked up black hair.
“What do you want, hotness?” he said.
“Hotness? What's your name?” Nia said.
“Emile, and I repeat: what are you doing in my house?” he said.
Even in his human form, Alex could sense the nervous energy coming off Emile. If he had to guess, he supposed there’d be a baseball bat or weapon nearby that he was ready to grab. Nia held a hand out to Alex and he put the ring in her palm.
“Here’s the deal. Put this ring on for a few minutes and we’ll give you a thousand dollars,” Nia said.
Emile looked between them, frowning.
“What the hell is this? Some weird sex thing? Because while you are hotness incarnate, I have no interest in dudes, dude.”
Nia turned to Alex. “Hotness incarnate. Did you hear that?” she said, preening.
“I did. And you are. Can you get the cash out?” Alex said. Nia pulled the cash out of her pocket and Emile's eyes went wide.
“It's not a sex thing. Is a thousand too much? Would you prefer five hundred?” Alex said.
Emile rushed down the corridor and grabbed the ring from Nia.
“No, I'll do it!” he said as he slipped it on. “There, see, wearing the ring, here we go, got the ring on, this is good, yeah?” he said in a singsong voice.
Nia shifted to hybrid, her shifter charm taking her clothing.
“Holy fuck!” Emile shouted, jumping backward before tripping on nothing and crashing against the wall.
Nia turned to Alex. “No Great Barrier pulling.” She turned back to Emile. “You can see I’m a wolf girl, right?” she said.
Emile had shuffled back and pressed himself against the wall, putting his hands over his face.
“Damn, I know I shouldn't have taken that LSD. Had some bad juju in it,” Emile moaned.
“Hey, Emile, look at me,” Alex said. When he did, Alex summoned a fireball to his hand.
Emile cringed and tried to squish himself into the smallest corner of the wall. “No, no fire. Don't burn me,” he pleaded.
“Looks like it works to me,” Nia said to Alex.
“Argh!” Emile suddenly shouted. There was a sizzle as the ring heated, Emile grabbing at his finger to pull it off. He managed to throw it through an open doorway into the next room. The moment it left his hand, the Great Barrier snapped down on them. Alex dropped the fireball as fishhooks dug into every muscle and Nia whimpered and shifted back to human.
Both of them had to leap out of the way as the fireball burst on the floor. Alex stomped it out, melting part of his shoe. In the other room there was a bang as the ring exploded and a few pieces of burning hot metal clattered as
they came flying out the door. Emile swore again before rushing in. Alex and Nia followed, seeing that a few pieces had landed on a bed, which was now smoldering.
“Dude, don't throw your cigarette butt on my bed!” Emile yelled as he brushed the hot metal to the floor. Alex helped him get the last few bits of it off before it could set the bed alight. Fortunately, the ring fragments was cooling quickly, so by the time it hit the floor, there was no danger it was going to burn the house down.
“Sorry, my mistake,” Alex said. He had that strange metallic taste in his mouth again.
It appeared he'd exempted Emile from the Great Barrier for a very short time but now it come rushing back and in Emile's mind it was not a burning hot ring that had landed on the bed, but a cigarette butt, despite the fact he was brushing shards of metal onto the ground.
“Yeah, sure, just get the hell out!”
Emile was shouting now, the veins in his neck standing out, and his face going red. The wolf inside Alex felt ready to fight, aware that if they didn't leave immediately, Emile would likely attack them.
Nia let out a growl under her breath, but then grabbed Alex by the hand and pulled him back towards the front door.
“Don’t you want your money?” Alex said as they went.
“What?” Emile said, following them out.
“The money for wearing the ring?” Alex was curious just how far the Great Barrier had gone.
“What the hell you talking about? Look, I don't have any drugs to sell you so get moving,” Emile said, trying to herd them out the door.
Alex stopped in the doorway. “Nia, give me half the money,” he said.
She handed over five hundred, which Alex immediately gave to a very suspicious and angry Emile. It seemed to calm him a little. Alex wondered if the force of the Great Barrier on him was now lessening.
“Look, thanks, dude, but as I told you I have no drugs, and you can't pay me now and expect me to deliver later,” Emile said, counting the money in his hand.