The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  There were six such cages, three along each wall, and five were occupied, with two or three young women each. Bailey didn’t recognize any of them, but their scent would have told her all were werewolves even if Roland’s tracking spell hadn’t already made that obvious.

  “Good,” Roland whispered. “Found them. Looks like there’s a problem, though.”

  Before Bailey could figure out what he meant by that, she heard footsteps and put a finger to her lips, catching his eye and making sure he understood. His hearing wasn’t as sensitive as hers, but he noticed the steps as well a second or two later.

  They fell back, hiding behind a shelving unit as the sentry walked between two large metal shipping containers at the center of the warehouse and shone a flashlight in their vicinity. The beam played over the cages and the rear corner near the door, but it did not fall upon the two rescuers. Then it moved away, and the guard walked back up front, either to patrol there or to rest until he needed to make his next round.

  Roland had closed his eyes and was waving his hand in a circle, his fingers wriggling. He ended the spell with a tapping motion. “There,” he said. “That ought to muffle any sounds we make for a little while.”

  Bailey nodded, and they returned to the cages.

  Closer to them, she saw what he’d meant a moment ago. Most of the girls were awake, their eyes wide and staring, but they weren’t aware of their visitors’ presence. Or if they were, they didn’t care.

  “Shit,” Bailey cursed. “They drugged them more. In Portland, they were sedated, but not to the point of being zombified. These poor girls look like they’re stoned out of their minds.”

  Roland rubbed his chin. “Yes, our friends in the brown suits must have changed their procedure, thanks to our previous shenanigans. This is going to make things difficult. I might be able to enchant them back to normality, but it could take a few minutes. Can you keep an ear out for that guard?”

  “Of course, I can. You’re half-deaf compared to me.” She nudged him with her elbow, although she wasn’t actually feeling all that jokey. Seeing Were girls lolling like living dolls was a disturbing experience.

  They moved toward the cages, and both seemed to reach an important conclusion at the same time. In contrast with the place in Portland, they had one distinct advantage this time. The area where the cages were kept was sufficiently private that they could open them the conventional way, rather than having to melt through the bars and pull the girls awkwardly out one at a time.

  Roland looked at his partner. “I’m going to spring the locks on all of them and then worry about rousing the girls. That way, we can shuffle them all out of here at once—hopefully after we’ve overcome the effects of whatever sedatives they used.”

  “Good idea,” Bailey complimented him. “There’s, what, a dozen girls just in this warehouse, though. There’s still the other two buildings. How the hell are we going to get them all out of here?”

  Shrugging, the wizard snapped the lock off the first cage, a tiny green spark from his hand flashing in the shadows. “We sure can’t stuff them all in the Trans Am. Magic doesn’t go that far, at least not mine. If we can get them somewhere public, we can call the cops, as long as we get a headstart. The bad guys won’t dare try to re-abduct them in plain sight. I don’t think.”

  That sounded like as good a plan as any.

  As Roland moved on to the next enclosure, Bailey reached into the first, pulled out a blonde girl a few years younger than herself, and shook her gently.

  “Hey,” she said. “Wake up. Can you see me? We’re getting you out of here. Don’t worry.”

  The young woman was both stiff and limp. Her muscles seemed oddly tense, but her movements were pliant. She didn’t react, only stared blankly into the empty space past Bailey’s shoulder.

  “Damn.” She stood up, leaving the girl sitting against the cage, and pulled out the next prisoner so that at least they’d be clear of the cage by the time Roland worked his magic.

  The footsteps they’d heard had stopped for a moment toward the front, but then they started again, moving toward the opposite end of the building. Bailey listened closely, silent and tense.

  Meanwhile, the wizard had focused his attention on all twelve of the kidnap victims and crouched, mumbling strange words, his hands clasped. Bailey hoped he knew what he was doing.

  By now, the footsteps of the sentry or overseer or whoever it was had rounded the front end of the warehouse and were coming back toward where the cages lay. There was no way they’d get all the girls out the back before the patroller reached them.

  Bailey hissed, and Roland paused and looked up at her for a suggestion. She waved a hand to cut off whatever he might have been about to say.

  “Keep doing what you’re doing,” she mouthed. “I’ll take care of this.”

  Turning away without waiting for him to respond or react, she slipped between the two shipping containers that divided the floor space in half, then fell to her belly to crawl behind a large mass of boxes as the steps approached from her right.

  She peeked from her hiding space. The footfalls belonged to a man of average size in a prototypical rent-a-cop type uniform; a private hireling who was acting as a security guard, then. He was human according to her nose, so he probably wasn’t a member of their mafia or whatever it was.

  The man slowed as he approached the gap between the huge containers, and Bailey rose to a crouch, then crept up behind him, her boots padding softly on the floor, timing her movements so the man’s footsteps masked hers.

  In the dim light, her vision now fully adjusted to take advantage of her Were senses, she could make out a few of the guy’s features. He was slightly overweight, around forty, and looked reasonably strong but not formidable. At his hip hung what at first she thought was a pistol, but was actually a stun-gun.

  An average joe, collecting a paycheck. Her immediate inclination was to go easy on him—knock him over and tell him to get out of here, quickly and quietly, and see how that went—but that would create unnecessary risk. The man might be sufficiently loyal to his duty to sound the alarm and take a chance on whatever she might do to him.

  Furthermore, he had to know exactly what he was doing since he was guarding young women in cages. It would be pretty fucking hard for anyone who worked here to claim ignorance of what was going on.

  Bailey gritted her teeth and pounced as the man passed into the space between the containers, seconds before he would have seen Roland by the cages.

  The guard half-turned as she grabbed him, his eyes widening and mouth falling open to snarl or scream. By then, her fist was driving into his head, and as he reeled back, she got a foot between his legs to trip him. He stumbled and landed on the concrete floor with a hard thud, unmoving and unconscious except for a bit of twitching and a faint groan.

  He wouldn’t be getting up for a bit. Still, just to be safe, Bailey took his stun-gun. Then she unbuckled his pants, slid them down past his boxers, and refastened his belt nice and tightly around his knees. He’d either fall back on his ass if he woke up and tried to rise suddenly, or it would take him a minute of awkward fumbling to manage it.

  Bailey stepped past him into the rear half and saw that Roland had successfully freed all the girls in the first two cages, although they were still unresponsive. He looked up at her.

  She gave him a thumbs-up. “Got him. He’s not dead or anything, but shouldn’t be a problem. Looks like we can—”

  Just then, a door opened somewhere up front.

  Bailey mouthed the word, “Shit,” then transformed her thumbs-up gesture into a raised forefinger to indicate that she’d be back in another minute. The wizard rolled his eyes but waved at her to go do her thing.

  This time, she realized, she ought to be able to ambush her prey rather than having to stalk him beforehand. She briefly allowed herself the silly fantasy of being a wolf, then remembered that on two brief occasions, she had been.

  It creeped her out. She d
idn’t want to shapeshift at the wrong time and bite someone’s throat out when kicking their ass would suffice. Even when scumbags who were accessories to human trafficking were concerned, she’d rather not deal with the ramifications of that.

  Bailey selected a nice shadowy nook behind a small crate, one she could easily vault over, attacking as she moved. Then she waited.

  The footsteps came closer. “Troy?” a voice called. “Hey, Troy? Where are you, man?”

  The girl bit her lip. If the man didn’t get an answer within the next few seconds, he might grow suspicious enough to alert his employers or co-workers and be done with it rather than exploring the warehouse first. It sounded like he was still at least fifty feet from her position.

  The man took five steps closer and then stopped. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He didn’t sound alarmed, but there was a definite note of unease in his voice.

  Bailey had to act. The guy didn’t want to move any deeper into the structure.

  Taking a deep breath, she jumped over the crate and sprinted toward the point where the voice had come from. She aimed to overwhelm him with speed and surprise, and damn well hoped she could take him down before he could make too much noise.

  The second guard was taller and thinner than the first and five or ten years younger, though he was dressed and armed the same way. He stood in place, whipping his head around, and it took a second for him to see the young woman with the brown hair streaming behind her and the muddy boots padding over the floor.

  By the time he had grasped what was happening and reached for his stun-gun, she was on top of him.

  “Fuck!” he gasped as Bailey grabbed his right wrist and pistoned her knee into his stomach. His left fist came up toward her head, but she instinctively ducked it and punched him in the kidney. He squawked in pain.

  She bore him aside, pushing him faster than his legs could support him, and he stumbled toward a mass of metal shelving. Bailey yanked his uniform shirt to keep him from crashing into it—that would be way too loud—and punched him in the face while she was at it. Sputtering, he departed the realm of consciousness.

  Bailey stood up and caught her breath, shaking her right hand. “Not bad,” she complimented herself. They might yet be able to pull this off the stealthy way.

  Then a girl screamed somewhere in the back where Roland was. The sound was low at first, then grew louder and shriller until it echoed through the warehouse. And beyond.

  “God fucking-ass dammit shit!” Bailey snarled. She pivoted and dashed back, her eyes searching for the problem by the time she entered the makeshift corridor formed by the big containers.

  Before she could reach the other side, Roland called, “Good news and bad news. The good news is, the first couple girls are awake.”

  Bailey was pretty sure he hadn’t needed to specifically state that little fact.

  “The bad news,” he went on, “is that they don’t know what’s going on and they’re scared as fuck, and they’ve decided to let everyone know we’re here. Time for Plan B. Do you remember what Plan B was? I don’t.”

  Two men burst into the warehouse from the front and another one through the back, their entrances almost simultaneous. However, the ones up front were moving much faster than the ones in the rear.

  Bailey hesitated for a second, then plunged back into the warehouse’s front half. The girls—their quarry—were in back, but with only one guy coming in that way, she’d have to trust Roland to deal with things. He was a powerful wizard and all.

  And the two up front would be there to flank them any moment.

  Both were dressed, Bailey now saw, in dark brown suits and had well-trimmed beards, just like the buyers they’d encountered in Portland, and the fuckheads in the BMW who’d tried to kick their asses in Salem. One had pulled out an extendable riot baton and was prowling around the edges of the building, looking for signs of trouble.

  The other had grabbed a walkie-talkie. “Code Orange,” he barked. “Get the girls in Number Two and Three to the relay point, pronto!”

  Behind her, she heard the third intruder growling and cursing. The other women joined the first in screaming in fear as Roland engaged the man in combat. She was about to do her part.

  “Hey!” she bellowed, stomping toward them. “Haven’t I seen you ugly dumbasses around somewhere before? And who the fuck says ‘pronto’ anymore?”

  The man with the walkie-talkie lowered the device, baring his teeth as he locked eyes with her. His partner appeared beside him, brandishing his baton, and both moved toward her, spreading out to attack her from the sides.

  The second guy laughed in a nasty, mirthless way. “We know who you are. In fact, we were hoping you’d show up.”

  She drew her lips back from her teeth, hands balled into fists and rage/adrenaline surging through her veins. She thought she wouldn’t even need her wolf form, let alone magic, to take these bastards apart.

  “Let me change your minds,” she offered and attacked.

  * * *

  “Typical.”

  The word dripped out of Agent Townsend’s mouth, sticky and bitter, given his increasing annoyance with the recent upheavals and the cumulative buildup of the stresses of the job.

  Spall was driving, the car doing a good seventeen or eighteen miles per hour above the speed limit. Neither of them was the slightest bit afraid of being pulled over by the local cops.

  “Aye,” Spall agreed. “Entirely typical. Just when you think something’s going to turn out different than it always does.”

  Townsend shook his head slowly and sadly. “They always return to the scene of the crime. Or the same general vicinity. And troublemakers make trouble. It’s who they are.”

  The agents had their own methods for tracking the activities of the paranormal community. Ways of determining when the supernaturals were on the move or increasing their powers or acting on the world in some way. They weren’t specific, but they sufficed in terms of alerting them when something changed.

  Then it was just a matter of matching those changes to interesting reports from the mundane world. For example, a quick survey of chatter on the local CB network had turned up a trucker commenting almost lasciviously on a beautiful, beautiful ’79 Pontiac Trans Am painted like the Smokey and the Bandit car, with an Oregon license plate. He reported it heading north toward Seattle from the Tacoma area on the freeway.

  Townsend and Spall had seen the car when they’d observed the brouhaha with the witches in the empty lot. They somehow doubted it was some other vehicle that happened to meet the same description.

  So they’d piled into their own rather impressive ride and made haste to put a stop to whatever the hell it was the girl and her boyfriend were going to do next. Or, if that failed, clean up the mess afterward.

  Spall handled the wheel while Townsend handled the tracking monitor, which could follow any vehicle as long as they had a picture of it, and they’d made sure they had one of the Trans Am. They didn’t know how the monitor worked, but they’d gotten used to the Agency’s advanced gadgets.

  The former asked for an update without taking his gaze from the road. “Coordinates?”

  “The same,” said Townsend. “Looks like they haven’t moved for a good fifteen minutes, maybe longer. Even if they take off again soon, we’ll have closed enough of the distance that they won’t get far.”

  “Good.” Spall gave a short nod. “Getting pretty tired of either hanging back on a leash or waiting for them to fuck something up and having to be on broom and dustpan duty.”

  Townsend gave a small smile. “I concur. And maybe we can sweep up those pricks who are after her while we’re at it or get the regular police on their trail. Close enough.”

  Motorists eyed them with a mixture of aggravation and awe as they passed, leaving the other cars well behind them on the crowded highway. They were probably waiting for the sirens and flashing red and blue lights since the vehicle was obviously fleeing from something.

 
The agents’ current vehicle was a little something special they’d had brought in recently. It was a stillborn ghost from the past—the 1951 General Motors Le Sabre, developed by Harley Earl. It was the concept car that predated the better-known Buick Le Sabre. The original was never developed and sold to the public.

  Rather, the U.S. government had purchased the model and made a few special modifications of its own.

  The one in which Townsend and Spall now sat was fully blacked out, had a hardtop roof, and had been retrofitted with an improved engine and several other interesting gadgets. Most of those weren’t available to average citizens, either.

  Especially the weapons. Even the Russians weren’t aware of some of the firepower the agency had. They probably wouldn’t need to use it today, though.

  Townsend checked his monitor again and found that the Trans Am hadn’t moved from its current location. “Who do you think will throw the first punch?” he mused. “Bailey, or whoever she’s visiting?”

  “Who knows?” Spall shrugged. “Werewolves are predisposed toward violence and antisocial behavior. Attack dogs, basically.”

  They both chuckled.

  “If,” Townsend went on, thinking aloud, “she goes out of her way to cause problems, we might have to look at arresting her. Partially for her own safety, but also to stop any further fuckery from engulfing the region. Things have been messy enough.”

  “Hm, possibly,” retorted Spall, “but if she’s halfway behaving herself, we might consider helping her instead. If she’s tangling with those traffickers again, she’s doing every law enforcement agency in the Northwest a favor by helping expose a ring of criminal kidnappers. Shit-licking asshats like that are a higher priority than one hillbilly girl who’s a little too fond of tussles and her male consort of a wizard who seems to have a couple too many credit cards.”

  Townsend grimaced. “True, but investigating organized crime isn’t in our purview. Our mandate is keeping the worst of this fantasy-RPG horror-comic bullshit from spilling out to where the general public has to see and smell it. We are supposed to leave the heroics to the local cops or the FBI. That doesn’t mean we can’t notify them, though.”