The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  “Now,” Roland said, “on the other side of the bridge, just under it, is the Fremont Troll. Maybe we can see that if we have time after we check things out at the library, but for now, let’s just keep going and get there.”

  The girl shot him a skeptical glance. “Troll? I mean, yeah, we just had a goddess in my backyard, but still. Never heard of trolls being real before.”

  He laughed gently. “It’s not a real troll, just a sculpture. At least, that’s the common understanding. There’s a chance it was a real one and stupidly got itself turned to stone. I keep meaning to investigate the matter, but there are always people hanging around when I’ve been there. Wouldn’t want bystanders in the vicinity if I were to accidentally wake it up. But it might just be a statue.”

  Blinking, Bailey just responded, “Whatever. Fair enough. Wizards and their ‘investigations’ and shit.”

  They fell silent for a few moments as Bailey took the Trans Am over the causeway, briefly admiring Lake Union and the white masts of the many recreational boats ringing the edge of the water. Traffic seemed a bit lighter, too.

  She tried to spot the infamous Troll, but with it being under the bridge, she failed. Roland had gotten her curious though, so perhaps they could come back to it.

  Once across the water, Roland directed her to make a couple of turns, and they found themselves at the library almost immediately.

  Or so Roland said.

  “Where the hell is it?” Bailey asked, confused.

  The wizard waved his hands, pointing things out. “Park over here in this lot across the street. The library is that place right over there.”

  Bailey obeyed his suggestion but scoffed. “That’s a library? It looks like some old lady’s cute little cottage or something.”

  “Exactly,” he replied.

  As Bailey parked the car and killed the engine, she sighed, suddenly realizing that they were once again about to plunge into something for which she had no frame of reference.

  “I’m guessing you’ve been here before, and you know what you’re doing,” she surmised.

  The wizard cleared his throat. “Uh, actually, no. There are two libraries in town with stashes, and I’ve only been to the other one. The subject matter there was a bit closer to my interests at the time. But I’ve at least driven past this one, and their stash is more likely to be useful to us right now. Besides, how different can it be?”

  Scowling, Bailey quipped, “I’m pretty sure I’m the one who oughta be asking that.”

  They stepped out and locked the Trans Am. Briefly, the girl worried about leaving such a beautiful car unattended, but this looked like a nice enough neighborhood, and there was only so much she could do. They needed to see what was in the library if they wanted to comprehend what the hell had been going on lately.

  A quick stroll brought them through the front doors, and within, the place was almost as homey as it looked from the outside. It was pretty similar to Greenhearth’s modest library, which was to say, small enough that if it contained some secret area full of magical stuff, it had to be underground—or concealed by a powerful illusion, maybe.

  Bailey followed Roland as he led the way to the desk past tables of older folks quietly reading. Two people were behind it, a woman and a man conferring in soft voices. The woman was a pleasant, average-looking lady with curly red hair and rosy cheeks. The man was taller and dark-haired, though his back was turned to them.

  Roland coughed lightly. “Excuse me,” he opened, “I’m looking for a very specific set of books, and I’ve heard you have them at this facility.” Earlier, Bailey had seen him writing something on a scrap of paper, and now he slipped it out of his pocket.

  The woman looked up at them, and the man turned around. He had a narrow, almost impish face, not unhandsome, with twinkling eyes and shoulder-length black hair.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, “let’s have a look, then. I’m the head librarian here, and we’ve just taken inventory, so I’m quite familiar with what we have in stock.”

  He spoke with a slight European accent, British, or maybe Scandinavian. Bailey couldn’t quite place it. She didn’t have much experience with foreign accents outside of what she’d heard in movies and TV.

  Roland slid the piece of paper, face-down, across the desk, and the man plucked it up to examine it while the woman looked on with mild curiosity.

  The black-haired man nodded, and a faint smile teased the corners of his mouth. “Ah, very interesting. Magic and the occult—some of our most popular topics. Just out of personal curiosity, may I ask what they’re for?” He locked eyes with Roland. His gaze was intense, but there was no malice or judgment, only a shadowy, mischievous amusement. It reminded Bailey of Roland, in fact.

  The wizard flashed a public-relations smile and scratched the side of his nose with his index finger. “We’re studying the history of lycanthropic folklore and its relationship to both pagan European mythology and the elements of European occultism dealing with it, which we suspect acted as a sort of reservoir for the preservation of pre-Christian traditions. If I’m lucky, I ought to get a Ph.D. out of it.”

  Bailey tried not to gape. Roland had found it awfully easy to rattle off that many big words in sequence without sounding like he was making shit up on the spot. She wondered if he had mentally practiced what he’d say in the car on the way here, or if he’d pulled it out of thin air.

  The head librarian nodded. “But of course. Come along; I’ll show you where to find the texts and then leave you to work in peace. Janice, you’ve got the desk for a few minutes. That will be all right, won’t it?”

  “Certainly.” The redheaded woman smiled.

  The man stepped out from behind the desk and took them past some stacks toward the rear of the building. Suddenly, the librarian stopped.

  A pile of books spilled off the nearest shelf, blocking the path. Bailey found it odd that the man had stopped before they’d fallen like he knew it was going to happen.

  The librarian stepped over the pile, then turned as Bailey prepared to do the same thing. He extended a hand toward her.

  “Here,” he commented, “allow me to help you.”

  Bailey wasn’t used to men treating her this way. Under other circumstances, she might have been mildly offended since she could take care of herself, but something about the man’s demeanor disarmed her. He seemed so casually old-fashioned and gentleman-like, and yet also someone who didn’t take himself too seriously.

  She didn’t think he was preparing to flirt with her, either.

  She took his hand and stepped over the books. When her fingers touched his palm, a sharp, jolting spark ran up her arm, rattling her briefly with pain and shock. It was over the instant she’d noticed it, and by the time she was on the other side of the small obstruction (which the redhaired lady was already rushing over to clean up), the head librarian had moved on. Roland gave her a strange look.

  The girl shook her head. The pain of the static electricity spark, or whatever it had been, was gone, but she felt lightheaded, and there was still a faint tingling all over her body.

  The tall man waited near the rear corner of the building by a small hall branching off toward what she assumed was either a bathroom or a rear exit.

  The librarian gestured for them to move past him. Then he stood so his body blocked the two of them from the sight of the rest of the building. He smiled.

  “Right there,” he told them, pointing at a blank stretch of wall. Before Bailey could protest, he added in a lower voice, “Knock three times quickly, and then a fourth a second later when you get to the door. I’ll leave you to it. Enjoy yourselves.”

  He didn’t move from where he stood.

  Bailey squirmed with unease and confusion, but Roland did not seem worried in the slightest. “Ah, yes,” he murmured, facing the wall.

  Then he stepped through it and was gone.

  The girl had to bite her tongue to keep from letting out a loud exclamation involving a f
our-letter word or two; that wouldn’t have been appropriate in a library. Instead, she rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Okay, then,” she muttered and walked straight toward the vertical surface before her.

  She felt nothing, only the light touch of moving air. Suddenly she was standing at the edge of a staircase leading down to a narrow stone-lined corridor. Roland was already at the bottom, waiting for her in front of a heavy wooden door.

  “See?” he said, looking cocky. “That wasn’t so bad. Nice of the head honcho to cover for us during our mysterious disappearance. He’s clearly a knowledgeable man.”

  Bailey blew air from her nostrils and ambled down the stairs. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Roland knocked four times in the sequence the librarian had described. The door clicked and creaked slowly open, apparently opened not by a person but by some unseen mechanism. Or enchantment.

  They stepped into the room beyond and closed the door behind them. The air was cool but not uncomfortable.

  “Here we are,” Roland announced. “The fabled Fremont vault. This is another of those places I’d always meant to get around to seeing, but you know how it is with local attractions. Hell, I bet you haven’t seen one hundred percent of Greenhearth.”

  Bailey glanced around. “Eh. A good ninety percent, at least.”

  The vault was spacious and divided into two sub-rooms by an earthen half-wall. Shelves lined the perimeter, stacked not only with books but with strange devices and mechanical parts, none of which the girl recognized. The ceiling was low, and a dehumidifier hummed in the corner.

  “That thing,” she remarked, gesturing to the dehumidifier, “kinda kills the mood, don’t you think?”

  Roland sighed. “Yeah, it does, and it also kills any mold that might destroy these old books. Oh, and look, there’s a computer over there in the other corner. Anyway, the contents of this place are more important than the interior decorating or the ambiance. Let’s have a look.”

  He stepped to the nearest bookshelf and examined the spines, trawling through the entire collection over the course of five minutes. After he had skimmed everything, he went back and picked out two tomes.

  “What are they?” Bailey asked, growing impatient.

  The wizard held up the first, thicker one. “This one is about werewolves. Most of it is probably review for you but might have some useful info. I’ll see if we can check it out. It’s pretty clear the administrator knows what I am, which will help our chances, though usually these are treated as references and are supposed to stay here.”

  Bailey nodded.

  “And this one,” Roland continued, displaying the second and thinner book, “is an instruction manual. Which is even more interesting.” He opened it, flipped through some pages, and held it up in front of his companion’s face.

  She squinted. “Uh, all I see is half-assed smudging, a jumble of nonsense, and some scientific-sounding crap. I’m not even sure if it is English.”

  Roland retracted the book, glanced at it again, and smacked himself in the forehead. “Oh, right, I’m an idiot. Hold on.”

  He closed his eyes and waved a hand over the opened tome. Then he flipped it back for her to see. “How about now?”

  She pursed her lips. “Yeah, handwritten notes up in the margins. Looks like…shit, assembly instructions.”

  The wizard smiled. “Exactly. Witches and wizards can leave messages for others of us to find in invisible ink, which we can make visible if we choose, though we can read it either way. Usually it’s in books that are full of dense bullshit no one can understand, as a sort of diversionary tactic. The real information is in the notes.”

  “That’s clever,” Bailey admitted.

  Roland explained that the instructions were for how to put together a device using the strange parts found within the vault that could be used to test a person’s magical potential.

  She crossed her arms. “So, we can use it to figure out just how much above average you are, which might answer a few questions.”

  “Yes.” He went to the shelves and gathered the first couple of pieces. “I should have done this long ago, but I guess I just took it for granted that I was above most people—most witches, I mean—but still within semi-normal range. With Freyja having shown up, well…”

  There was no need for him to finish since they both knew what he meant.

  She helped him assemble the contraption, which looked like a cross between a high school chemistry kit and a steampunk-style invention out of a Jules Verne novel. Once they got started, Bailey’s innate talent with machines kicked in.

  “Ha,” Roland chortled. “I should have known that having a mechanic around would help with this. Probably would have taken me another twenty minutes by myself.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “Twenty minutes isn’t too bad. You might even make a proper car person with more instruction.”

  The completed device stood before them, its brass gears and glass tubes and porous crystal filters sparkling even in the dim light.

  The wizard inhaled. “Okay, pretty simple. It works like a pH test. We put a drop of blood in the beaker, add pure water on top of it, and put it through the machine. The color indicates the degree of arcane concentration in the bloodstream. A normie with zero magical potential would have dull, slightly yellowish water. An average witch, a noticeable red-orange. I’m not sure if Freyja has blood, but if she did, then hers would glow neon-scarlet.”

  “Gotcha,” Bailey acknowledged. “I’m guessing that silver pitcher there is the pure water?” She scrunched her brow. “Do they keep water in here all the time?”

  “Probably,” Roland responded. “Silver has antiseptic properties, you know. And it might be auto-refilling. Don’t ask about the details involved in that.”

  She went over and grabbed the pitcher. “Fine. Now, you gonna supply the blood, or what?”

  He was already sanitizing a small scalpel with a tiny yellow flame he’d ignited in one of the pipes on the edge of the machine.

  “Here goes,” he murmured and pricked his left index finger. He squeezed a single crimson droplet into the beaker. “Now, pour in the water up to that line.” He pointed to a red mark two-thirds of the way from the bottom of the receptacle.

  Bailey did as he said, and he swished the mixture around before pouring it into a broad funnel-spout. The machine gurgled and then came to life, the gears spinning and things bubbling through the tubes. Steam emerged from a small grate on the top.

  She chuckled when she realized the contraption wasn’t plugged into anything. Whatever powered it, it wasn’t the municipal electric grid.

  After a moment, a spout at the other end began dispensing the liquid into an empty beaker. They both held their breath.

  The water was a concentrated red. Not neon-scarlet, but a vivid ruby shade that reminded Bailey of fruit punch.

  Roland exhaled sharply. “So, yeah. According to the instructions, that’s, well, unusually high, but not that unusual. I’m a prodigy but not a deity in the flesh. About what I would have figured before the incident yesterday. Frankly, I don’t think it’s a high-enough concentration for the goddess of witchcraft to be taking such an interest in me.”

  Bailey said nothing. She was somehow disappointed, and they were no closer to understanding Freyja’s motivations.

  Then a thought popped into her head.

  “So,” she began, awkwardly, “um, as long as we’re here and have this thing all put together, think we could test me?”

  He gazed at her with that neutral intensity of his. “I don’t see why not. We’ll just need to rinse the beakers thoroughly.”

  They did. The silver pitcher never seemed to grow lighter, confirming Roland’s suspicion that it replenished itself through sorcery. There was a small drain in one corner of the floor, which made things far easier.

  “Okay,” said the wizard as he rinsed and flame-sanitized the scalpel, “give me your finger. Or whatever body part you t
hink would be best.”

  “Finger’s fine,” she grumbled.

  He punctured the skin, and she squeezed a drop into the cleaned receptacle. Then they repeated the whole process, waiting for the water to emerge in a dull yellowish shade.

  “Wait,” Roland gasped.

  The water was bright red, but then it faded to a translucent yellow-orange, then intensified to vermilion, almost as ruby-hued as Roland’s had been before fading back to almost colorless.

  The girl gaped. “What the hell? Does werewolf blood short the damn thing out? Was there some residue from yours still in there?”

  Roland rubbed his chin. He’d fallen into a quiet seriousness that disturbed her.

  “No,” he stated. “Different sub-species have no effect, to my knowledge. And I cleaned both beakers as thoroughly as possible. Bailey, I think you have magical potential. What I can’t say, though, is how much since it kept changing color like that. So strange.”

  Before she could suggest as much, he was already poking around in the instruction book.

  “Nothing.” He sighed. “Either there was an unforeseen screw-up, or you’re something the machine wasn’t prepared to measure.”

  Chapter Six

  Roland leaned against the wall, rubbing his temples. “We talked about this.”

  Bailey was almost afraid to answer him. She’d gone cold all over as years’ worth of taboos rose up to accuse her and as a lifetime’s worth of memories suddenly demanded to be reevaluated.

  She said quietly, “Why the hell would I be one? That doesn’t make sense.”

  He looked at her, his eyes narrowed in concentration. “Why would you be one of what?” He had looked up everything he could on the arcane web, which wasn’t much, and he wanted to see what she knew.

  She swallowed the saliva that had begun pooling under her tongue. “A Werewitch,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper.

  Roland snapped his fingers. “Yes, yes, I remember now. When we were leaving Greenhearth for the first time, the sheriff mentioned that. A Were with magic. Something about…ugh, an ancient taboo against them. Burnings at the stake and all that fun stuff. Making sure the pack alphas didn’t have too much competition.”