by Harry Nix
April wrapped her hands around Alex and gave him a brief hug and a kiss.
“Do you think he’s finally going to get it now? Or is she going to have to drag him off to the garden and jump on him?” April said.
“My bet is on the garden. Never underestimate a male’s ability to miss blindingly obvious signs,” Alex said.
April reached down and grabbed him between his legs.
“You mean like this?” she said.
“What? You know, I think I need to go to bed. I'm tired,” Alex said, teasing her.
“I’m going to wash up, then I'll come to bed,” April said. They went inside, Alex briefly passing through the bathroom first to make sure he was clean as well and had no blood on him. Soon he was in bed on the new mattress the werewolves had picked up, beside Nia who was deeply asleep. April came into the bedroom, closing the door behind her, then stripped off before sliding into bed next to Alex.
“Don't wake the werewolf,” April whispered.
“I make no promises,” Alex whispered back, his hands already running over her body.
11
“Okay, you're all filled up now,” April said with a happy sigh as she slipped herself off Alex and tumbled down into the grass.
“But I wasn't finished,” Alex complained as a last glimpse of red and green hit him.
“There's work to do,” April said, pushing him away.
Things had moved quickly in the last week. Nia had finally heard from Julius and had marked up the maps that he’d left behind. He’d been successful beyond Alex's wildest hopes, negotiating with ten werewolf packs to support Alex in exchange for healing flame, shield, and fireball rings. Alex had briefly spoken to Julius, who'd explained the volume of rings needed was to secure the alliances. Alex accepted what he said but he was starting to regret promising that he would fulfill whatever was needed. Just one pack wanted two hundred rings combined. So now, Alex felt as though he was a sex slave/enchanting slave. Virtually all he’d done for the past week was enchant rings, have sex with his mates to draw power, and to try to draw power from nature as well.
The nature magic was a fickle thing, however. April explained that because nature magic had to do with life and growth and living things enchanting was antithetical to its spirit. So, Alex could use it in some parts of the enchanting but not others. Sometimes it worked, but other times, it failed entirely.
April had tried to get involved to see if she could do some of the preliminary steps, but it was no use. If nature magic wasn't going to cooperate for him, a half-nymph who was entirely steeped in it seemed have no chance at all.
He'd heard briefly from Jeremiah about Roma. Since they hadn’t run into any trouble in a while, the werewolves were getting out more, although still in groups and still taking pains to cover their tracks when returning home. Roma had taken more shipments of rings, which further strained Alex's enchanting ability. The werewolves had used the cash to begin upgrading the homes they were living in. Everyone was sleeping on proper beds now, had decent clothing, and enough food.
For the past week, the werewolves had been attempting to make their way to the warded location on Jameson Street.
They still didn't have enough money to buy another car, so some of the pack had gone on foot, taking a map, and doing their best to mark where they lost consciousness of what they were doing. In the blur of sex and enchanting Alex sometimes wondered, once again, how the wards really worked. After all, there were mages and witches all through Baxter. He'd surely driven past warded locations and the ward hadn't triggered at all, which meant on some level, a ward was scanning constantly, almost mind-reading, trying to find the intention of the person to see if they were looking for that address or location.
Alex had wondered whether there was a second degree of subterfuge he could use, like hiring a normal private detective, telling them to do surveillance at that address. Would the ward trigger at being observed by a normal? How many layers down could you go? Hire a private detective and tell him to hire someone else, and tell them to hire someone else, abstracting it, telling them to survey the entire street or tell them to set up a video camera to watch all incoming and outgoing traffic of the entire street itself. And if the ward did trigger for those things, surely that meant it was drained… which if they were lucky enough meant they might be able to break it.
There was something else that had been pulling on Alex. As the only magic users, he and April had been forced to recharge the house ward themselves which, after a long day of enchanting, sometimes Alex found difficult to do, his levels of mana down to zero.
Alex grumbled to himself as he got dressed and went back to his office and spent the next hour enchanting rings, using up the sex magic and what he could of the nature, being wary not to exhaust himself completely. He’d just finished enchanting a fireball ring when Nia came walking into the office. It was still hot weather, and she was wearing almost what she had on the first time he'd seen her: Daisy Duke shorts and a tartan top knotted with cleavage so deep you could lose an arm in it. Despite how delectable she looked, Alex almost felt too tired to reach out and grab her, which was something Nia immediately noticed. She leaned down, lining up her cleavage with his face.
“Are you telling me you're tired and you don't want any of this?” she teased.
“You are, as our friend Emile said, hotness incarnate, but I am very, very tired, my love,” Alex said. Nia grabbed him, squashing his face up against her breasts before letting him go with a tickle under the ear.
“Well, we’re ready. It's me, you, Matilda, River, and Jacob. That's all we can fit in the car and Yvonne's inside, pouting for obvious reasons,” she said with a laugh.
Yvonne and Jacob weren't quite all of the gossip of the pack, but most of the gossip, with every adult making jokes between them as the young werewolf fumbled his way through things. It seemed that Jacob and Yvonne hadn't quite gone to the next step, and Alex realized that one of the problems was that they didn't have any privacy. In better times he would have given them a wad of cash and told them to go out to the city, but with everything going on, it just wasn't safe. With him and his mates taking the garden so often, that was out of bounds too. There were still plenty of empty houses but Alex guessed that, despite Yvonne's clear desire for Jacob, she probably didn't want their first time to be in some rundown wreck of a place.
“Let's load up the car,” Alex said.
Jeremiah had used some of the cash to get the car serviced, the mechanic telling him they should just buy a new one. Although Julius had made alliances with ten packs, Alex was only going to visit three over the next few days and then meet up with Julius to deliver the shipment of rings.
Julius was then going to carry them on, before returning to his own pack as it wasn't good for an alpha to be away for too long.
Eventually they got the car loaded up, taking newly bought hiking packs with them and food as well as all the rings, now tied up in bags and clearly labeled. Alex was driving as they left, with Nia in the passenger seat, and Matilda and River in the back, joking and laughing with each other alongside Jacob who was silent and sullen. Alex was unsure if the teenager was upset because he was leaving Yvonne or if it was just because he was a teenager. They said goodbye to the pack and drove out of the ward, heading out of the industrial, rundown part of the city for the outskirts. Eventually Jacob warmed up and started talking with the rest of them. As they drove Alex could feel a bubbling excitement inside of him.
He knew that the Jameson location was likely a trap… and there was even a chance Juno wasn’t there, but there was something positive about getting results, making progress. If these alliances were what Julius had promised, he’d be able to call packs to his aid to come to the city to launch their attack on Ignis and to rescue Juno. Although Alex's thoughts strayed to her often, he realized he was planning beyond Juno, as though getting her back was some foregone conclusion. If the packs did actually come to his aid and worked well together, then he wou
ld be able to continue making alliances, forging the werewolves into a weapon that he could use against the mages and the vampires who had hurt his people for so long.
“Six dollars for your thoughts,” Nia said, gently pinching Alex on the arm.
“What? Sorry?” Alex said.
“Jacob was saying we should install a pool at that house that's over the back fence from ours, but I don’t know if we have enough money for a pool and a sixty-five-inch television, what do you think?”
With the windows wound down and the air-conditioning struggling to even let out a slightly cool breeze, Alex knew which one he would pick.
“The pool in this weather. I’d just live in it,” he said.
“I think a TV if I have to choose. TV’s year-round. No one is going to be in a swimming pool when it’s snowing,” Jacob said earnestly.
“You can't get a girl if you're sitting around watching too much TV,” River said and got smacked on the leg by Matilda for his trouble. He was doing his best to help the young werewolf, but so far, his hints and suggestions seemed to be bouncing off Jacob.
They drove to the outskirts of Baxter and then further to a spot Julius had marked on the map. It was a makeshift parking lot, much like the one that was in the direction of the village where they had often left Boris. Although Alex had understood there was an entire world of supernaturals quite a while ago, he was seeing a system in motion that sometimes woke him up to it again.
There were six trucks at the parking lot in the middle of nowhere and Alex guessed they all belonged to werewolves, various packs who went to Baxter for supplies, then returned before using the slipways to make their way back to their pack territory with whatever they were carrying.
It was as they were unloading themselves that Alex realized he should set up an outpost in one of these parking lots, bribe passing werewolves with rings, get them to take them back to their alphas, make a trip out every two weeks, and arrange meetings. It seemed a better idea than schlepping all over the countryside and taking the risk of stepping onto a werewolf’s territory or being attacked.
Alex told Nia to tell the others his idea, and although they agreed it was a good one, it wasn’t one they could use right now. Time was of the essence. They had to get Juno back. They all put their packs on, which were all finely calibrated to the shifter charms they were wearing. The shifter charms had a maximum weight allowance they could vanish away when the werewolves shifted. That included their clothes and shoes and anything they were carrying. They'd used the most powerful shifter charms they had in their possession, but even so, they varied wildly. Jacob’s was the weakest, so his pack was only half full of food. River was wearing the strongest charm, and as a result, his pack was loaded down with most of the rings, the remainder being shared between Nia, Alex, and Matilda.
Once they got ready, they shifted into wolf form, shifter charms taking their clothes and backpacks, and set out for the first pack. Although it was still reasonably early in the day, the sun was well and truly beating down on them and Alex was thankful they passed a few running creeks, the werewolves gleefully leaping in, splashing around, trying to soak themselves before they continued jogging on.
Although Alex was the alpha, he wasn't taking the lead, letting Nia do that. He found he could jog along, keeping roughly in line with her, instinctively jumping over logs and dodging around rocks which allowed him to have his spell screen open. His efficiency working this way was only about half of what it was when he was sitting in the office with full concentration but still, he could make progress. Between studying Juno’s Cantrip and the work he had done looking at the rings given to him by Roma as well as repeating his basics over and again whenever he had time, Alex had managed to gain some more space, enough that he could copy in the entire spell from the joke shock ring with space left over to work on parts of it.
He'd been cutting and rewriting, trying to get rid of excess code on and off for a few days now. Admittedly it hadn't felt like he was making much progress, not with all the enchanting he had to do, and from what he recalled last time he looked at it, he hadn’t gotten anywhere. But now as they jogged and Alex had the spell open, he saw that some of the code appeared slightly different. Even now it was still rewriting itself, changing its appearance to suit his desires. Strangely, a symbol had appeared in the code: a small lightning bolt which seemed to have swallowed a lot of the lines. It made the spell faster and far shorter. Alex focused on the small symbol and then was surprised when an even smaller window opened up, showing the code it had subsumed. It had somehow abstracted itself on its own, replacing lines with a picture.
Alex still had enough space to make a duplicate of the flame finger spell, so he did so, then cut out the section that he thought had to do with generation of flame and stuck in the picture of the little lightning bolt instead. This radically cut the size of the spell. He was almost tempted to just cast it, but, of course, he still had April and Nia’s yelling ringing in his ears. So next time they came to a stream, he stopped, transformed back to hybrid, and explained what he was doing. They had with them a few hundred healing flame rings now so if things went wrong, he was sure he would be able to survive.
The execute button lit up under the spell and Alex held up his hand and cast. The spell compiled almost as fast as Juno’s Cantrip because so much had been cut out of it. A pure mathematical expression blurred across and then it was cast. But nothing happened. Alex could feel the spell working; it was drawing the tiniest sliver of power from his natural mana but not enough to even move the bar as he was generating more than it was using. His pack were watching him expectantly, each of them armed with multiple healing flame rings.
“Did you do it?” Jacob asked.
“Yeah, it's cast but nothing is happening.”
“Well, you didn't die so high five,” the teenager said and swiped at Alex's hand. The shock flung Jacob onto his back into the leaf litter, and Alex lost half his natural mana bar in an instant.
“Hey, it works. How’re you feeling, electro boy?” River said, walking over to prod at Jacob with his foot.
“What is this bs?” Jacob groaned. When River prodded him again. Jacob grabbed his foot and flipped the werewolf who then immediately rolled and tossed Jacob who landed in the nearby creek.
“Need to be faster than that,” River said good-naturedly before jumping into the creek to pull the teenager out. Jacob looked a little shocked but was still smiling.
“I volunteer Matilda to try it again,” Nia said, pushing Matilda towards Alex.
“No way! I don’t want to get shocked,” Matilda said, jumping out of the way. Alex canceled the spell silently and then waved his hand toward Nia and Matilda.
“Watch out… who's it gonna be…” he said as they started ducking away from him. He ended up chasing both of them into the creek and then plunged his hand into the water and pretended to get shocked before splashing both of them. They were taking a break, splashing around, when Nia suddenly stopped and grabbed Alex by the arm.
“Werewolves are coming,” she said, looking up to the hill beyond the creek. The five them stopped messing around and got out of the creek on high alert. Alex could hear it now. That same odd silence that preceded werewolves walking through the forest as birds and other creatures became quiet. When they were stalking other werewolves, it was annoying, and bad, but it was certainly useful when someone was coming in your direction. Alex only wished that the birds would be quiet for mages too, or the dead. At least they might get a bit more warning of another attack. It wasn't long before a pack of six werewolves came down the hill, making no attempt to hide themselves.
“I think this is Darius. They lost fifteen werewolves to the blood golem,” Nia whispered to Alex. The six werewolves were all in wolf form, gigantic creatures, all pitch black, and when they transformed back to hybrid, Alex saw they were all easily as tall as him, and Darius—he presumed the wolf at the front was the alpha—was perhaps slightly taller. There were three m
en and three women.
Without saying a word, the lead werewolf scraped his claw in the dirt making a line. Alex knew that technically they weren't in anyone's territory as this was the slipway but he understood what was happening. The werewolf alpha was drawing the line in the dirt for the challenge. Alex walked up to the line with his pack behind him and stomped his foot on it, letting half of it sit over the line.
“I'm Alex Lowe, werewolf mage, and I have come to bring you rings,” he said. Darius stared at him and then sniffed the air before suddenly swiping his arm at Alex. Nia had given Alex a quick refresher that morning about various challenges werewolves would make; the most important part was that you did not move and she had even rehearsed a few times with Alex. It was a good thing she had, because the urge to bring his arm up to block the blow was incredibly strong. Alex managed to keep still as Darius’s claws stopped an inch from his face.
The werewolf then held out his hand and grinned.
“I'm Darius. Welcome,” he said and pulled Alex over the line.
12
Alex's head throbbed as he plodded along behind Nia, trying to keep up, wishing he had some of April's anti-hangover potion. The way he felt right now, he’d even take that disgusting one that tasted like bin juice that had been left out in the sun.
Despite how crappy he felt, Alex was happy. Things were going incredibly well. He’d traded rings with Darius and then they'd slept in a small cave on the edge of his territory. Although Darius was somewhat hospitable, providing them roasted boar, Nia warned Alex against drinking any alcohol or letting his guard down. Although there was an alliance, they couldn't assume that they were safe. It wasn't like her father's pack. So, early the next morning, they left the new allies, Nia trading phone numbers with them upon learning they had a satellite phone, and went on their way.