The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  Spall made a vague grumbling sound as he passed confused and frightened motorists, then slowed down as he accepted that catching either the SUV or the Trans Am would be pointless until after the chase had ended.

  “Fair enough,” he conceded. “At least one of us remembers the mandate. So, let’s wipe some peoples’ memories. I always get some small consolation out of that.”

  Townsend snorted. “Some days—such as today, for example—I wish I could wipe my own memory and forget all this ridiculous bullshit.”

  Spall clicked his tongue. “You need a vacation too.”

  He pulled a U-turn and drove back the way he’d come to begin their gradual crawl through Seattle, obliterating the common peoples’ fleeting recollections as they went.

  * * *

  Bailey had to hand it to whichever asshole was piloting the black SUV—he was getting the most out of what otherwise looked like a pretty basic and limited vehicle. Practically making the damn thing sing.

  She said as much to Roland, who’d been busy keeping an eye out for dipshits running red lights, cops, pedestrians, and other things they didn’t want to encounter, and possibly trying to keep them away with magic.

  “Uh,” he replied, almost stuttering, “yeah, something like that. Personally, I kind of wish this guy sucked. Car chases aren’t my thing. I’d much rather get into one with someone who is totally incompetent behind the wheel. Playing on easy mode.”

  “Well,” Bailey lamented, “you’re no fun.” They whipped past lights and signs and buildings on both sides. The engine hummed, purred, and roared. Horns honked.

  She didn’t have the time or mental energy to come up with clever insults, though. Remaining on the tail of the Were-cartel vehicle took up most of what she had.

  The driver, she suspected, had been in communication with the three pricks in the Beamer they’d beaten up in the countryside east of Salem. The thought occurred to her mostly because, surprisingly, the SUV was using a lot of the same tactics she’d used to evade the BMW when her role in the chase had been reversed.

  Such as using his vehicle’s greater size and bulk to bully smaller cars out of his way, forcing them back to act as obstacles to Bailey’s pursuit.

  A terrified elderly lady behind the wheel of an old teal Chevy Lumina was suddenly in front of the Trans Am, and Bailey had to hit the brakes and swerve aside to avoid rear-ending her, barely getting in front of a white Ford Explorer in the left lane, which blasted its horn at her furiously.

  “Dammit,” Bailey rasped. “He keeps pulling that shit. What a dick. Not even original. He stole that move from me, I swear. Almost makes me wish we’d killed those fuckin’ guys outside Salem.”

  Roland’s hands clenched and unclenched. “Are you absolutely sure that he’s plagiarizing your tactics? He might just, you know, be doing what makes sense under the circumstances. You can’t really blame him. If I was a bottom-feeding professional kidnapper, I’d do the same thing when I was trying to get away from you.”

  “That’s nice, Roland,” she shot back. “Thanks for the input and all. Why don’t you magically conjure up a construction detour or something that slows him down? Then after we catch him and his buddies, we can have a nice long-ass chat about stuff like that?”

  Inhaling slowly, he said, “I’ll see what I can do. Again, I have to be able to visualize what I’m dealing with, and that’s kinda hard right now. Maybe if you could get closer?”

  She slapped the steering wheel. “The hell do you think I’m trying to do? The whole reason I’m asking you to magic things up is so we can get closer. A lot closer.”

  Seattle traffic reacted to the wild interplay of the two black vehicles with fear and confusion. Cars and trucks, horns bleating like the cries of panicked herd of animals, veered aside for them or froze in place like deer staring into headlights on a wooded country road at night. Bailey just hoped none of them were proactive types who’d call the cops.

  Then again, Roland had already told the group of girls they’d freed to do just that. They might even have thought to mention a black SUV while they were at it.

  The wizard suddenly blinked and tensed, as though something had popped into his head. “Wait. I have an idea,” he began. “Up here on the left—see? These streets.”

  Bailey saw. “Yeah. Way ahead of you.”

  She accelerated to seventy-five or so to get ahead of a lawn care truck, passing it on the right and then veering back in front of it and then swerving to the left, probably causing the unfortunate lawn care professional to have a minor heart palpitation but putting her on a side street that ran parallel to the main drag.

  The black SUV, now ahead and to her right, was still visible since the street ran parallel to the main drag and was separated from it only by a couple of hundred feet and a line of modest-sized buildings.

  “Be careful,” said Roland. “Lots of pedestrians here. But if you can get ahead fast enough—”

  “Right,” she shot back. “Cut them off again, only this time it works.”

  He shrugged. “That’s the idea. Oh, watch out for Man Bun there. He looks like he’s about to— Whoa!”

  Bailey saw the man step out into the road and she jerked the steering wheel back and forth quickly, narrowly fishtailing around the startled bun-headed individual before picking her speed back up.

  “God,” Roland snarled. “Fucking jaywalkers. Truly the scum of the earth.”

  Ignoring her makeshift boyfriend’s strange sense of priorities, Bailey gunned it down the trendy commercial street, running a couple of red and yellow lights, and soon finding she was slightly ahead of her target. The SUV’s driver had gotten himself held back by two slow-moving trucks, one in each lane.

  Bailey turned sharply right down a street that intersected the highway. She immediately grasped that because of the trucks, she couldn’t pull ahead of the SUV since her opponent would just turn onto a side street, with her now blocked by the same trucks from the opposite direction. She’d have to try to hit them from the side and force them off the road or onto a different route that would slow them down.

  She let off on the gas, therefore, and burst back onto the main street just in time for her front right corner to narrowly miss the left corner of the SUV’s rear bumper.

  “Shit!” she snarled.

  Roland pointed. “That truck’s about to turn off. After that, we can either try to accelerate ahead of them or try the old ‘head them off at the pass’ trick again. Your choice. I’ll see if I can flatten their tire. When they’re not going too fast, anyway, so they don’t roll over into a ditch or anything.”

  “Do so,” said Bailey. She took a deep breath, and her foot again forced its way closer to the floor.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Amazingly, their strategy was starting to work.

  Bailey grinned. “Hell, yes. The bastard’s panicking. He should have known better than to tangle with a country girl behind the wheel of this fuckin’ thing.”

  “Yeah,” Roland acceded, “probably.”

  They’d accelerated to the point of almost forcing the SUV driver to attempt a hasty and stupid maneuver, only to encounter another semi that slowed them down. Fortunately, another close parallel street had emerged, and now, once more, they were gaining on their quarry from the side, ready to cut him off at just the right time.

  Bailey’s sensitive ears picked up something she didn’t want to hear, though. Sirens. And it sounded like they were getting closer.

  She reported it to Roland, who heard them himself a couple of seconds later than she did.

  “They’re not necessarily coming for us,” he pointed out. “I mean, they probably are. Yeah. But we can’t be entirely certain of that.”

  “You’re not helping,” she muttered.

  Trying to ignore the possibility of having to outrun the police and chasing down the kidnappers at the same time, she instead looked for a vantage point from which to deal with her friend in the SUV.

  And she fo
und one—a short street where the highway bore closer to her current side-avenue. And if she timed it just right…

  She glanced at Roland. “Hold on.”

  He winced. “I don’t like the sound of—”

  His comment turned to a gulp as the girl spun the wheels sideways down the little avenue, coming out just in front of the SUV with almost no warning. His only options were to try to brake his way hard into a gas station parking lot and risk hitting one of the pumps or turn down another perpendicular street into a relatively empty residential area.

  The driver chose the latter. But he’d had to do it so fast, and with a higher-profile vehicle than Bailey’s, that his two tires on the side lifted off the asphalt and he almost tipped over. The SUV’s brakes squealed, and the Trans Am came up right behind it.

  “We almost got ‘em,” Bailey panted. “Fuckers. They’re not getting away this time.”

  As the driver struggled to keep the vehicle from rolling over, Bailey shot ahead, turned, and blocked the road with her car. Her guts curdled at the thought of the SUV trying to ram her—not only possibly injuring or killing her, but worse, damaging the Trans Am in the process. But…

  The SUV advanced slowly, gaining speed. Then Roland’s hand shot out toward it, and a loud bang sounded in the air as its front left tire popped.

  “Oops,” the wizard remarked.

  Squealing and shaking, the bigger vehicle rumbled to a halt.

  Bailey took a long, slow breath. “All right, then. I’m thinking fisticuffs and belt-fu again. What about you?”

  Roland ran a hand through his hair. “Sounds great. As long as they don’t, you know, have guns or something.”

  She nodded, remembering the stun gun she’d briefly taken from the rent-a-cop back in the warehouse; sometime during the fight, she’d dropped the damn thing. No use crying over spilled milk, though.

  Both she and the wizard stepped out of the vehicle, standing in the afternoon sun as the front doors of the SUV slowly opened.

  Bailey flexed her hands. “Well, thank the gods these idiots had the decency to stop, at least. If they’d T-boned us into oblivion, the Trans Am would be bound for the great beyond, and then Gunney would have my ass.”

  “Really?” Roland queried. “Lucky him.”

  The comment went over Bailey’s head. Although she was tired and sore from the earlier fight, she felt like she still had plenty of ass-kicking ability left in her. She hadn’t used up the day’s supply yet.

  The wizard gave her a nudge. “Let’s try to get this over with quickly. Those sirens are about the same volume, so they’re not, you know, going in some other direction.”

  “Yeah,” Bailey agreed.

  “I do have a couple ideas,” Roland went on. “All this fighting lately has been stimulating my creative impulses toward, like, really cool types of sorcery that shouldn’t even attract undue attention. Just follow my lead.”

  She nodded.

  They could hear whimpers and terrified protests from the captured women who were presumably stuffed into the back of the vehicle since the driver and his shotgun rider stepped out on either side. It didn’t look like they had any more of their guys with them.

  Bailey tried not to smirk. Only two. Still, they needed to whip their asses in a hurry. She just hoped Roland’s mysterious plan would go off without a hitch.

  The closer of the two men—both dressed in dark brown suits, natch—growled at them. “I don’t know who the fuck you two think you are, but you’re about to find out that you ain’t up to the task.” He cracked his knuckles.

  Roland smiled pleasantly. “Take your best shot.” His left hand, held near his waist, twisted in an odd gesture.

  The driver lunged at him. Bailey started to move on the other guy but halted in shock. The first Were had moved forward so fast it looked like something had blasted him forward from behind, or that he was being pulled by a giant vacuum cleaner.

  “Whoops!” Roland exclaimed as the man’s eyes bulged in alarm. The wizard pivoted, grabbed the Were’s coat, and tripped him at the ankle. “Looks like you overextended yourself! Gosh, maybe you shouldn’t have taken your best shot, after all. Your second-best, maybe.”

  Snarling, the man toppled into a ditch.

  Bailey and the other guy were within kicking distance and only a step away from fist range. The man raised a knee as if preparing to kick her in the stomach, then launched a side hook at her head.

  She’d seen it coming, though, and ducked. She watched in wonder as the man spun three hundred and sixty degrees. He, too, had overextended himself—a lot.

  “What the fuck?” he exclaimed.

  Bailey saw her chance and took it. She jumped into the air and thrust both legs out at the man, double-kicking him just above the hip. He squawked and crumpled, rolling over in a tangle of flailing limbs.

  By now, the first guy was back on his feet and coming for them. His bluster had lost its edge when he realized he wasn’t up against a pair of useless chumps, but he was even angrier. He charged the pair, clawing with both massive arms, weaving back and forth with terrible speed.

  Bailey fell back, blocking some of his frenzied blows, while Roland stepped aside and made a shoving motion at the air a yard or so from the man’s side.

  The Were’s next punch, an uppercut, missed Bailey’s face and instead took him a solid three feet toward the heavens; his feet even left the ground.

  “Whoa!” he shouted.

  As he started to fall back toward her, Bailey saw his chin moving into the path of the uppercut she’d just begun to throw. With a final turn of the hips to give the blow more power, she slammed her fist into his jaw right as he crashed into it.

  Bone crunched and the man screamed as he flew backward, spitting up blood, and then twitching on the ground. She’d cracked his jaw well enough that when he woke up, he’d be eating his dinner through a straw for a while.

  Behind her, the other guy and Roland were toe to toe again, and the wizard had pulled off his belt. The girl turned to see the leather strap coil around the man’s knee as Roland pulled sharply back and upward, throwing the man into a goose-stepping stumble.

  Then Roland shoved the guy back hard and he fell, his head clonking against the wheel enclosure of the SUV. He drooled on himself, and the wizard grabbed his ankles to pull him clear and deposit him next to his partner.

  “Inertia,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Seeing you throw guys around made me realize what a potent force it is. Help a man move forward a bit more than he plans to, and suddenly everything goes in the shitter.”

  “Ha.” Bailey rubbed a nasty bruise forming on her forearm. “Come on, though. Gotta check on those girls.”

  There were four of them crammed into the backseat and a fifth in the back, mostly rustics, though one looked like she might be from a wealthy city family. The women were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five.

  “Thank you,” said the oldest of them, speaking for the group. “Did you find the other girls too?”

  Bailey realized it was a loaded question, but Roland replied, “Yes, we saved a dozen back at the warehouse.”

  “There’s more,” said one of the younger girls. “Five or six. I think they took them in another SUV before they piled us into this one.”

  The wizard frowned. “Shit.”

  The sirens were closer.

  Bailey turned to her partner, about to speak, but he had moved on to the next step. Close to panic by his standards, Roland pulled out the map scrap and fixed his eyes on it. She wanted to prod him but bit her lip; he was obviously doing magic shit of some sort and would need to concentrate.

  Seconds later, a faint greenish glow emerged from the map and he lowered it, locking eyes with Bailey.

  “Got it,” he panted, and his voice was fierce. He was as committed to stopping these pricks as she was now. “Back in the car. We can still cut them off.”

  He swung toward the passenger’s side of the Trans Am as Bailey
turned to the girls.

  “Take this SUV, if you can drive, to the nearest police station,” she told them. “Or just wait here for the police to show up, I guess. You’re gonna be okay. These guys are down for the count.”

  She gestured at the two fallen Weres, then jumped back into Gunney’s car and brought the engine back to life. In moments they were heading back down the highway, bearing south and west.

  Bailey caught the wizard’s attention while he re-studied the map. “Where we going, exactly?”

  “I’m not sure where they’re going,” he commented, “since right now they’re still slightly south of us on Federal Way, headed due west. They’ll run right into Puget Sound if they keep going, so my guess is they’re taking the scenic route down to Tacoma. They’re already near the edge of the map, so if they keep going, we won’t be able to track them.”

  Bailey picked up the speed, and took the next right down a well-traveled side street to the west, passing cars when she could.

  “Therefore,” Roland continued, “the best-case scenario is that they’re just trying to throw us off, and then they double back up into the city proper. I’ll let you know if the dot moves back in the other direction, but it wouldn’t fucking surprise me if they’re headed for the bridge over the Sound and are going to try to vanish on the Peninsula.”

  Gritting her teeth, Bailey ran first a yellow light, then another that had just turned red, ignoring the honk of protest from someone who had to brake to avoid hitting her.

  “Shortcuts?” she suggested. “You’re the one with the map.”

  “Right.” He got to work. “Take a left up here, then the next right. It’ll save, oh, I dunno, thirty seconds? Every little bit counts.”