The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  “Bailey,” Jacob asked, “did you ever get that thing running again?” He gestured to the truck.

  Bailey grinned. “Yessir.” She didn’t try to hide the pride in her voice, and she could feel her brother’s pride in her.

  Roland rubbed his chin as he examined the vehicle. “Not bad. What was wrong with it?”

  “Tell you later,” said Bailey. “You know, I’m thinking maybe we need to get out of town-town. I mean, we’re kinda on the edge here, but Main Street isn’t far. Our friend from Seattle will be safer out in the country, I’m thinking.”

  Russell glowered, already calculating the risks. “How far out are we talking?”

  “Probably,” Bailey began, “one of the old farms to the northeast. That’ll take us out of town and also away from South Cliff territory, just in case those dipshits end up getting involved.”

  The brothers nodded slowly. They did not miss the implications of Bailey’s choice of words: us. She didn’t intend to send the wizard off by himself.

  Meanwhile, Roland kept silent. He clearly trusted their judgment and had until further notice placed himself in their capable hands. He was apparently smart enough to grasp that the Nordins knew the countryside around here a lot better than he did. He wasn’t about to queer things by asking what they were getting out of it. He figured he’d find out sooner or later, and they seemed like good people.

  Jacob scowled. “Bailey, you’re a grown woman and all, but Dad’s still going get worried as hell if you’re gone too long. We can stall him for a little while, but you ought to come back after a day or two, at least to check in. Don’t forget about Gunney, either.”

  The girl smiled. “I won’t. Just tell Dad I needed a vacation. Too many assholes around lately.”

  Roland cracked his knuckles. “I can agree with that. Just one question, though…” His voice trailed off, and he waited till he had their attention. “How will we get to one of those old farms?”

  Half of Bailey’s smile returned, and she playfully prodded the wizard’s foot with her boot. Then she gestured to the center of the pole barn with her elbow.

  “How the hell do you think?”

  Chapter Six

  The truck careened down the bumpy, rutted, quasi-paved road. It left mud tracks on the patches of decades-old asphalt and then picked up more mud when it hit an unpaved section.

  Bailey glanced at her passenger with a barely suppressed smirk on her face. “You ever been this high up in a vehicle before?” she inquired.

  Roland seemed to mostly be enjoying the bumpy ride. His face was often broken by a goofy, crooked smile, or he’d laugh and say “Whoa!” when they went down a slope too fast and got that special feeling in the pits of their stomachs. He did brace himself against the seat whenever they hit a particularly large bump, though.

  “Well,” he responded, his hair flipping over as the vehicle rocked in time with his turning toward her, “I do seem to recall being on a school bus a few times as a kid.”

  “Hah!” Bailey scoffed. “They can’t get away with driving like this. Don’t you worry. I know what I’m doing, and I know what this vehicle is capable of since I practically built the damn thing. It’s one of my babies.”

  “One of?” Roland repeated. “The other one isn’t a poodle, is it?”

  “Hell, no!” She decided not to be offended since it was obviously a joke. It probably hadn’t occurred to him that Weres did not keep dogs as pets on general principles.

  Instead, she stuck to the subject at hand. “I’ll tell you about the rest of my babies some other time. As for the Tundra here, I bought it used and in pretty shitty condition just over a year ago. Ever since then, working on it off and on has been a project of mine. Now, when I first looked under the hood…”

  She went on to describe in detail all the problems the vehicle had suffered from—busted engine parts, weak tie rods, a coolant leak, old-ass tires, and a rusted bed—and all the labor she’d put in to get it up to speed, in fact making it better than it had been when new.

  The wizard didn’t understand all the technical details since he wasn’t a car person, but he listened anyway. “Interesting.” he opined.

  To her delight, Bailey concluded that Roland hadn’t just said that to fill in the gaps in the conversation. He truly, legitimately did find it interesting. He seemed curious about things in general, and he listened to her when she spoke.

  He went on, “Where I come from, most people only have trucks if they really like them—fanboys, collectors, and the like, mainly—or if they need them for labor purposes. Like if they’re a contractor and need a flatbed to load all of their construction materials or lawn care tools or whatever. Professional purposes. No one drives a truck simply because they think it’s practical.” He shrugged.

  “Weirdos.” Bailey chuckled. “I guess the land up there is mostly flat, and all the roads are paved.”

  “Mostly.” Roland sighed. “Although some of the less-popular streets have potholes that I’m pretty sure would swallow even this thing,” he gestured around them, “without a trace. They’d have to send in a team of professional spelunkers just to find it.”

  Bailey snickered at that. “Your tax dollars at work.”

  Silence set in, but it was an easy, comfortable silence. For a couple of minutes, they were content just to drive, the road now heading back uphill as they pushed deeper into the foothills. The afternoon was growing warmer, and they rolled down the windows.

  Roland leaned back and let the cool, damp breeze blow his straw-colored hair back from his face. “I have to admit,” he began, “I’m pretty damn curious to see what it will be like to spend time on an actual farm.”

  Bailey turned to him, squinting with mock surprise and disapproval. “You’ve never even been on a farm before? For shame!”

  He just shrugged. “Seattle is a big city, and once you get outside the city-city, you’re in the suburbs. Those might be more spread out and with fewer tall buildings, but they’re no less developed. And then you’re back in an urban environment, more or less, as you head south into Tacoma, and then more suburbs until you’re in Olympia.”

  Bailey shook her head slowly. Her brain could grasp the idea of a metropolitan area that stretched for miles and miles, but she’d never seen one, been in one, or had to navigate one. Greenhearth was just Greenhearth, and then there were the rustic outskirts, the forest, and the mountains. That was all.

  “So,” the wizard went on, “farms are mostly a concept to me. The way death and the solar system are concepts. People are aware of them, but no one has the first-hand experience to say they know such things the way they know their own neighborhood or a game they’ve beaten eight times or a job they had for ten years.”

  Bailey burst out laughing. “I was just thinking the same thing about cities. Like, I can kinda picture what you’re talking about, but I’d have to see one firsthand to get a feel for it.”

  Roland smiled and gave her an appreciative nod. “In that, you might say we have something in common, precisely because of what we don’t have in common. If that makes sense.”

  “It does,” she acceded. “Everybody has their own story, even if it’s a different story.”

  “Right.” He ran a hand through his hair, and she suddenly wished the sun was shining to emphasize its gold hue. “I’m sure somewhere in the Brazilian rainforest or on the Mongolian steppe, there’s someone to whom even Greenhearth, Oregon, would seem like a bustling, ultra-modern metropolis.”

  “Well,” Bailey quipped, “wouldn’t that just be the nicest compliment ever. Of course, to someone like that, Seattle might, I dunno, kill them.”

  Roland sighed. “The traffic probably would, yeah.”

  The wizard reclined in his seat, and something about his energy changed. It was difficult to describe, but Bailey picked up on it nonetheless, a product of both her female intuition and her advanced senses as a Were. He was preparing to say something that, until now, he’d been holding back. />
  “I wasn’t sure if I should even talk about this,” he began, instantly confirming her suspicion, “but, well, I feel like we have a good, easy rapport by now. I don’t have an agenda or ulterior motive in saying this. It’s just something I’d like to get off my chest.”

  Bailey shot him a glance before returning her attention to the road. They were bumping through a winding, somewhat difficult stretch of hillside forest that acted as the final challenge before the relatively flat land of the old farm. She hoped she looked open and sympathetic since she wanted him to go on.

  He did. “So, I might have been putting on a tough façade, trying to act confident and like everything is no big deal. It’s true that I can handle myself most of the time, but I’m honestly uneasy as hell with this situation.”

  The girl’s gut clenched. Just when she felt like things were good with him, he had to go and drop a bombshell like that. Before she could ask him to clarify what he meant, though, he continued.

  “I’m being hunted,” he stated. “For my body, like an animal being chased down for meat. There’s something inherently unsettling about that, no matter how you slice the details.”

  Bailey relaxed at once. He meant the broader situation involving the three witches, not the immediate one involving her.

  “When you put it like that,” she agreed, “it does sound pretty damn bad.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And this isn’t a new thing, either. I’m tired—really, truly sick and tired—of being pursued by people like them who just want to use me as a sex toy or a sperm dispenser. Oh, yes, ha-ha, I’ve heard all the jokes, like what those two guys at the sheriff’s station were saying, or your brother after that, no offense to him. But it’s not like that. Most people can’t understand.”

  She nodded, waiting for him to go on with his story.

  He sighed again, this time deeper and lower—a sound born of years of exasperation and disappointment.

  “I just wish it was possible to meet people under normal circumstances and find someone who likes me for me, wizard status and all that magical power bullshit notwithstanding. To get to know someone and have things grow organically with them, not just be treated like a prize racehorse everyone wants to purchase or steal.”

  Listening to him speak, Bailey’s stomach tightened once more, but this time it was different. Everything Roland had just said had struck a nerve. For a brief instant, she wanted to wrap her arms around him and tell him that she understood and that everything would be okay.

  But she still had to drive. They were near the end of the winding forest path.

  Roland waved a hand slowly. “So, I don’t know; maybe it doesn’t make much sense. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned more about the way regular people live, and sometimes I envy them, to be honest.”

  Bailey said, forcefully but with warmth, “You don’t have to say that or apologize or anything. It does make sense, believe me.”

  The man turned his head toward her, tilting it at an angle and almost staring at her. “Does it? That’s a pleasant surprise, if so.”

  “Yeah,” she assured him. “And I’m happy to surprise you, even if my reasons aren’t all that pleasant.”

  He rubbed his chin with his fingers. “I see. Something to do with, well, being a werewolf?”

  She nodded fiercely. “That would be it. There’s more to it than you know. You heard some of the crap Dan Oberlin was saying about me scaring off potential mates and all that?”

  Roland sat back in his seat as they emerged from the woods into a small valley where tall grass covered most of the open land.

  “I did hear that,” he confirmed.

  “Well,” Bailey explained, “that wasn’t just him being a loudmouthed no-account Cro Magnon bastard, as sorry as I am to have to say that. We—our people—have, y’know, our own rules and traditions and things like that, especially governing marriage. And breeding. And most of those fall harder on the women.”

  He frowned. “I see. You can tell me about it if you want.”

  She did want to. In fact, she’d wanted to be able to vent about it, to spill the beans to someone—anyone—who didn’t have a preconceived opinion on the matter. That was a luxury she hadn’t had anytime recently, if ever.

  “According to the all-important pack laws,” she went on, “all females have to be married by the age of twenty-five. If we haven’t already found a mate—husband—by that time, we get the arranged marriage treatment and are hooked up with whoever’s considered the best available bachelor at the next all-packs gathering.

  “Well, I’m twenty-four and some change, and my birthday isn’t too far away. I ain’t exactly looking forward to it. Don’t know whether to shit or go blind, as Gunney would say.”

  Roland’s serious demeanor cracked, and he snickered at the last bit. “Sorry,” he added quickly, “I just never heard that particular colorful expression before. Not laughing at your plight. If anything, well, it sounds a little too familiar.”

  Bailey allowed her face to settle into a mild, gentle smile. “I knew you weren’t laughing at me. This doesn’t apply to the males, by the way. There are ways they can get out of it. I’ll tell you about that another time.”

  “Yeah, okay. Who’s Gunney, anyway? Hopefully, I’ll get to meet him before this is all over,” Roland suggested.

  Bailey thought that sounded pretty ominous, but she tried to ignore it. “Hopefully, you will. Gunney’s my boss at the auto shop. Honestly, he’s almost like a second father. He’s full of what you would call ‘colorful expressions.’ You might like him. Anyhow, all of a sudden, I’m wondering. Like, there are people who will pursue someone they want no matter what, but generally, a person gets left alone more if they’re, you know, taken.”

  Roland’s brow furrowed as her words sunk in. So this was what she would get out of it. He’d hoped she’d get to it sooner rather than later.

  She pressed on. “Or at least, if everyone thinks that they’re already taken. So, um, to put it bluntly,” she drew a breath, suddenly nervous about how he might react, “I wonder if it might help, y’know, alleviate both our problems if I pretended to be your girlfriend?”

  Silence followed her suggestion, and the following seconds seemed to last for minutes each. They were almost to the farm now and she slowed down, trying to breathe normally.

  “Huh,” Roland mused. “That’s…actually a pretty goddamn clever idea.”

  Bailey’s eyes closed of their own will in relief, but she made herself open them again right away so as not to be too obvious about it. She didn’t want him to think she was desperate or anything.

  The wizard continued, “I mean, it’s no guarantee. These women who are after me won’t care, although it might give them pause. Still, they’re ruthless enough to consider any girlfriend I might have illegitimate, as just an obstacle for them to sweep aside. That Oberlin prick doesn’t seem much better. But it’s worth a shot. It ought to at least shut everyone else up—the people who aren’t psychopaths but aren’t helping, either.”

  “Yeah,” Bailey agreed. “It’s worth a shot. Besides, it might be fun.” The mischievous grin crept back onto her face.

  Roland matched the expression, to her pleased surprise. “I can agree with that. It’s been so long since I’ve had a girlfriend. It seems like I’ve spent years dodging magically empowered insane bimbos, which really gets in the way of going on dates. At this point, even having a pretend girlfriend ought to be nice.”

  They rolled up the front drive of the farm.

  “Yeah,” Bailey said. “I think it will be.”

  * * *

  The farm had originally belonged to one of Bailey’s great-uncles, and the family still owned the land. The old man’s children had neither the taste nor the talent for agriculture, so after he’d passed away, there had been no one to take his place. The farmhouse sat vacant while the fields went fallow and began to return to the wilderness from which they’d been carved.

  The house was li
ght blue with a roof of black shingles, although the paint was peeling in places and some of the shingles had fallen off. About once a month, the Nordin kids would visit and do some cursory sweeping-out of the house’s interior just to keep it from becoming too filthy, but no one had the time, energy, or inclination to make it livable again.

  Back a few hundred feet from the house was a big red barn. It wasn’t a pole barn like Bailey’s, but full-sized—the real deal. It also looked dilapidated, but it was so sturdily built that the years had not compromised its basic integrity. It might stand for decades yet.

  Bailey wheeled the truck around the house to the side and parked in the muddy lot out back, so the vehicle would not be immediately visible on the off chance someone came down the road and scoped out the property.

  Of course, there was still the matter of the fresh tire tracks in the mud, but she couldn’t do much about those unless she felt like smoothing out half a mile’s worth of road with a shovel.

  “Well,” she announced as she shifted into park and killed the engine, “we’re here.”

  Roland smiled and nodded. “Home sweet home, for now. Pardon my asking, but does this place have things like heat and electricity and running water?”

  His companion grimaced. “Shit. No, it doesn’t. Probably should’ve thought of that.” She exhaled and tried not to be angry with herself.

  Instead, she turned her mind to practical solutions. “We’ll make do, though. Ought to be fine for the rest of the day, at least, and under cover of night, I can sneak back home or into town and get us some bottled water, a kerosene heater, battery-powered lights, and all that good stuff.”

  Roland unbuckled his seat belt and shrugged. “That’s a start. Not sure I—we—will be able to live like that indefinitely, but if we’re lucky, it will suffice for a few days while we hide from both of our groups of unwanted suitors.”

  They both opened the doors of the cab and stepped out, inhaling the fresh air and feeling the earth beneath their feet. Roland wasn’t dressed “country,” and he wore shoes rather than boots, but his wardrobe was casual enough to get by. He didn’t seem too bothered by the mud.