The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus
Page 40
Bailey stared at him, curiosity momentarily overwhelming her pain and worry for Roland. “You’re him,” she said dumbly. “The guy Gunney mentioned.”
The man nodded. “My name is Marcus. Your sheriff is coming, I see. He’ll be here any moment. I spoke to him already, but I also promised him I would wait to see you until he, Gunney, and your brothers had talked to you. I’ll have to leave momentarily.”
“Wait,” Bailey panted.
Roland, trying to be plucky despite how ravaged he was, raised a finger. “Uh, did you see all that? You ever seen a Were who can, well…” He sniffled and wiped blood from his face. Bailey didn’t pounce on him and hug him, fearing she’d hurt him worse.
“Yes,” Marcus responded. “It’s not unheard of. We shamans have magic too, and we are very familiar with Weres whose ability to change is delayed.”
The girl stared at him, trying to see his face, but most of it was covered by a hood. “You really know what’s happening to me? You have actual answers, not just bullshit platitudes? I can get those from anyone over forty. Hell!”
She shrugged in embarrassment, wincing when a deep bruise in her shoulder made itself known.
“You have the potential,” Marcus went on, “to be something far greater than you know. But you’ll need help. No one can do it alone. It will be up to you; you will have to be the one to make the decision to start down the path toward becoming a true protector of your people. What you’ve been doing lately is, in a way, the first step.”
He meant rescuing the kidnapped Were girls, she realized. She suddenly was bursting with questions.
But headlights appeared down the road, and police flashers along with them as the sheriff’s car bore toward the three. Marcus, she noted, was standing in such a position that the approaching vehicle would have to be almost right on top of them to see him since the dusk had turned almost entirely to night.
Marcus glanced toward the car. “I have to go now. I promised everyone that I would wait for you to come to me. So, please,” he held up a hand, “don’t tell anyone about our meeting tonight. But if you decide to take the next step, I’ll be waiting.”
He extended his hand again.
Bailey placed hers within it. “I’ll come. Thanks for, uh, helping us off the ground.” She tried to laugh at her own joke, but her chest hurt too much.
He handed her her clothes, then, without further words, the shaman slipped back into the woods and vanished, making almost no sound.
Roland coughed and then spat. She hoped he wasn’t spitting up blood and hadn’t just lost a tooth.
“Well,” he said, his voice a groan despite his best efforts, “that was quite an entrance. I think we need a fucking ambulance more than a shaman, though.”
After slipping her clothes on—painfully—Bailey put an arm around his waist and helped him toward the police car as it stopped. From behind the windshield, Sheriff Browne stared at them, his face grim with concern.
* * *
Above the site of the brawl, a high-tech drone was perched in a tree, its camera angled downward and streaming all it saw back to the two men who sat in a parked car on the other side of the hill.
Townsend was closer to the screen since Spall was still behind the wheel.
“Fuck me,” he said. “Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ!”
“That,” muttered Spall, “just about sums it up, yeah.”
Townsend kept typing notes into his pad, supplying pertinent commentary to be attached to the recorded video feed. “A goddamn werewolf who can do magic? There’s something you don’t see every day. What the fuck do you even call that? A witchwolf? A wolfmage?”
Spall shrugged. “Werewitch? I personally like the ring of that one , even if what it mostly rings of is more work for us. Christ.”
His partner shook his head and pinched his nose. “Great. Just fucking great. As if her flowering potential for summoning a metric fuck-ton of shitstorms wasn’t massive enough.”
Just thinking about it, he was depressed, and found himself fantasizing about strong liquor.
Spall puffed air out of his nostrils. “Massive. Absolutely massive. What do you suppose the odds are that she’s going to bring the Ten Goddamn Plagues of paperwork and general mayhem down upon us? I mean, even beyond what we just witnessed.”
Townsend threw up his hands. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t bet against that in Vegas, I’ll say that much. The odds of us getting handed more work are usually pretty damn good.”
The other agent glanced into the distance as night fell heavily upon the mountains. “How long has it been, anyway? Since the last time a female werewolf was born with powers like this. I’m blanking out. Today has drained half the knowledge right out of my head.”
Glancing toward the village, Townsend muttered, “I don’t know. It’s not unprecedented, but it’s not common, either. Nature—or supernature in these cases—doesn’t usually imbalance itself by concentrating too much power in one place. As with witches, it’s usually the males who have the weaker powers, so they’re more likely to get them. Balances things out.”
“I see,” said Spall. “If that’s the case—and she’s strong even by the standards of a rare breed—then the hillbilly wolf could be even more powerful and dangerous than we thought. Fuck.”
Though it pained him to do so, Townsend nodded. “Affirmative.”
Spall put his head in his hands. “Seriously, what do you think our chances of vacation are?”
Note from Renée
You made it! Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end of this, my second book!
So, in our last episode, you learned about my love for coffee. Funny story: My sister just got back from Bali, and someone over there took her to a high-end coffee bar and fed her something called “Kopi Luwak.”
So, she comes prancing into my house, fresh from her relaxing vacation and all tanned, and tells me about this wonderful, smooth coffee nirvana she had in Bali. It didn’t even need cream or sugar, she informed me breathlessly. But at $25 an espresso shot, she didn’t drink much of it over there. She did bring a small bag (very small) back for me, complaining as she handed it over about how expensive it was.
So, being a writer, I did my research. The first entry is from Wikipedia, which you can find here. Upshot is, Kopi Luwak, or civet cat coffee, was first discovered when the seventeenth-century Dutch occupied Java and Bali and used the native population as labor. We won’t get into how they did that. The intrepid traders wanted to break the Arab monopoly on the coffee trade, so they imported arabica trees, which grew like weeds, and Bob’s your uncle.
The islanders were not allowed to drink this precious stuff. Oh, no, it was for export only. But they had the last laugh because another native population processed the coffee berries and gifted them with results, and they wound up with the finest-tasting coffee of all. How, you ask?
Well, another native, the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), took care of it for them. You see, Kopi Luwak is what you get after the civet cat, um, digests and excretes the beans. It’s all explained the wiki article, so I won’t repeat it here. Oh, they washed them off and roasted them, but the idea still has a high ick factor.
I looked at the bag, looked at Keurig with the pod I brew use any coffee in, looked at the grinder, looked at the bag again. Then I put my big-author panties on, ground some beans, and brewed myself a cup. It was for research, right?
You know what? She was right! Smoothest coffee I’ve ever tasted. Sigh—also the most expensive, currently going for up to $600 a pound for the wild-gathered stuff in the US. I enjoyed the hell out of it, though! If you ever get a chance, try it.
So, now that I need coffee (again, had a cup already this morning), I’m going to hop in my car and head over to
I hope you enjoyed Bailey’s and Roland’s second adventure, or series t
hereof. Those two can’t be trusted in a car. Well, Bailey can’t. Many more to come! And if you get a moment, drop me a review, please. Those are the lifeblood of any writer. We appreciate you!
Until next time,
Renée
Too Much Magic
Were Witch Book 3
Chapter One
“I was a ticking time bomb all these years,” the girl said, her eyes growing distant, the cool, damp breeze blowing a lock of her brown hair across her face. “On some level, everyone knew about it—even me, and even my brothers. In general, the way you just know certain things about the world.”
Two men were with her, and they stood on the damp greensward, watching her and listening to her words. One was about the same age, twenty-something, and the other was at least a score of years her senior, almost as old as her father.
The young woman sighed, slowly shaking her head as she stared into the shadows between the pines. “But who knew it would be magic? My own damn magic, for that matter. The fistfights and arguments I used to get into all the time were nothing compared to this. I guess I’m finally starting to appreciate what the hell people mean when they talk about self-control and how important it is.”
The younger man, blond and slender, shrugged. “Better late than never.”
He still wore some bandages and had residual scars on his face. Though he had healed from his recent severe beating with almost unnatural speed and efficiency, he still was not a hundred percent recovered. His handsomeness was obvious, despite having been partially ravaged.
The other man just nodded with an unhurried, deliberate motion, and the girl went on.
“Now,” she concluded, the muscles along the rim of her jaw tightening, “my only option is to learn to use my powers. Get the training and discipline so I don’t level half the town, kill someone when I didn’t need to, shit like that. I need to reach the point where I only blow up at the right people, and then only when I have no other option.”
The bigger, older man took a step forward. He had a hood pulled over his craggy head, and the bulky coat hanging from his broad shoulders hid most of his tall frame from sight.
“Yes,” he stated. “Just having that first realization that you must learn is an important step. Perhaps the most important. But the learning…that’s the hard part, Bailey.”
She grunted. “Yeah, yeah I know. Or I guess I will know. Let’s get started, then. I’ve probably wasted enough time yakking.”
The younger guy snorted and tried to cover it up, regaining his composure and forcing his face back into a calm, semi-dignified smug smile. “Well, at least you have self-awareness. That’s an encouraging sign.”
She glared at him, although she was trying not to smile. “Shut up, Roland. Smarmy Seattle prick with your big words.” She playfully punched him on the arm.
“Ow,” he complained and rubbed his bicep in mock pain.
The older man ignored this little exchange. “You’re right. And both of you could benefit from my instruction, I think. Let us begin.”
The trio had decamped to a fallow field overgrown with tall green grass that lay on a mostly derelict tract of farmland owned by Bailey’s family. The farmhouse still stood. She and her brothers came by to clean it up occasionally, but otherwise, it was abandoned.
The property was only accessible by a single dirt road through the forested hills, which even some people who lived in the town of Greenhearth didn’t know about and had never driven down. The Hearth Valley kept its secrets after all these years.
No one would bother them today.
They began with movement and breathing exercises, which almost reminded Bailey of Tai Chi, while the older shaman, a man known as Marcus, expounded on his theories and philosophy about the arcane.
“Magic,” he said in his deep, gravelly voice, “is no different from any other thing in the universe. It is not separate from us, or from nature. It is woven into the fabric of reality and into our beings. You must always remember that if you are to master it.”
He showed her ways of subtly channeling force, of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling the flow of magic in the earth and air around them. By now, she’d learned to recognize the odd tingling when someone was casting a spell, and all around her, it seemed, was the essence of the world’s power.
Roland followed along, looking skeptical but keeping his mouth shut. His view of magic was more scientific, Bailey felt. She wondered if that was why she’d been having trouble thus far.
Marcus’ way felt more intuitive to her. Like her, he was a lycanthrope, a different sub-species of the supernatural. She grasped that the magic of werewolves was different from that of wizards and witches, even if it drew upon the same sources.
Her teacher paused. “Now, let us try a few basic acts of will, elemental manipulation and ways of moving that exceed what would normally be possible.”
Over the course of the next hour, he showed them how to leap fifty or sixty feet into the air, drawing upon the energies of the earth to launch himself, then riding wind currents and pushing away gravity to soar, almost float, slowly across the breadth of the field. He landed gently on the far side.
Bailey and Roland both tried to emulate him, but neither quite succeeded.
Roland went first. He rose perhaps thirty feet, then floated down about halfway across the field.
“Didn’t want to overdo it,” he explained, grinning sheepishly. “We’ll work on greater distances next, I suppose.”
Then it was Bailey’s turn. She took a deep breath and jumped straight up into the sky.
“Whoa!” Roland exclaimed as she shot up at least a hundred feet, wind whipping her brown hair around.
Then she sailed far past the edge of the field, hurtling toward the wooded slopes of the surrounding hills. The exhilaration of what she’d done turned to fear, and she fell.
Marcus and Roland were already running toward her point of impact.
The wizard shouted, “I’ll catch her! I should at least be able to guide her into a tree or something.”
“No!” Marcus snapped. “She must do this on her own.”
Bailey’s head reeled, and her limbs flailed in the air as the sky’s currents of wind buffeted them. Her stomach clenched, sending waves of nausea and vertigo through her as the trees rose to meet her. She’d have to either catch one or find a way to slow down, or she’d splatter herself on the hill.
“Bailey!” Marcus called up. “Feel the earth’s pull and resist it. Push it back. Feel the cushion of air beneath you. You dictate the speed of your descent.”
It sounded too simplistic, too obvious to work, but Bailey tried her best, and it did work. Thrusting down with her hands, she somehow perceived gravity’s power weakening, and it was as though she slipped down through a mass of cotton. She no longer fell but drifted to the earth.
Still, she landed hard enough that her legs rattled with pain, and she toppled over in the grass and mud.
Roland was beside her at once. “Are you okay? Goddamn, you scared us for a second there.”
She took his arm and rose to her feet. “Uh, mostly, I think. Yeah. I’m kind of dizzy.”
They stood there while she regained her bearings. Marcus slowly walked up.
“Both of you,” he began, “have great potential, but you have the opposite problem in terms of controlling it.”
He hardly needed to elaborate on what that meant, since they both knew. Roland was too cautious, and Bailey too reckless.
They moved on to basic elemental combat. Roland already had significant experience in it, but he went through the motions anyway, conjuring an impressive green-and-yellow fireball and hurling it at Marcus, who blocked it with a shield of combined air and water that dissipated the flames into steam.
“Now,” the shaman intoned, “Bailey. Throw a bolt of lightning at me.”
Her skin crawled. “I tried that before, and it never worked until it needed to. When it did, it was like I couldn’t stop.�
�� She’d almost killed half the Weres who’d attacked them on the edge of town a week ago.
Marcus nodded. “Do what you can. Imagine that—no, don’t imagine. Know that I am threatening you and Roland. If you cannot summon a lightning bolt, I will, and I’ll throw it at you.”
Roland squinted. The girl knew his moods well enough by now to guess that he was concerned about the wisdom of Marcus’s methods, even if he understood the ideas behind them.
Forty feet across the grass from them, the older man spread his hands, and deep violet sparks of electricity leapt from his palms. “Do it, Bailey. You have thirty seconds before I strike.”
Something in his voice suggested that he wasn’t kidding.
She raised her hands, remembering what both the shaman and the wizard had told her and thinking back to the terrible brawl. She pretended that Marcus had been the one responsible for siccing the pack of thugs on them and that he would do even worse now.
The bluish-purple glow around his hands grew in strength, and the air buzzed with electricity.
Bailey felt it—the electromagnetism and the way it was tied to the currents of air and deposits of metal around her. She thought of all the threats she and Roland had faced since they’d met, and everything they had been through.
And it happened.
“No!” she cried, and a huge blazing torrent of lightning, glowing a strange crimson color, arced from her hands toward Marcus.
He somehow caught the blast, tangling it with electrical currents of his own, and jagged bolts of red and violet jumped through the air in all directions, striking earth and trees and kicking up sparks and smoke where they landed.
“Enough,” Marcus growled.