The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  Bailey had just cleared a twisted, pulsating root, more like the body of a huge snake than part of a tree. Her boots landed hard in the spongy blackish matter below it, and water squished up out of the soft earth as she struggled to increase her speed.

  She caught up with Roland, and they bolted toward an elevated spot of land up ahead, barely visible beyond the shifting veils of mist.

  Behind them, the mixture of animal howls and awful demi-human screams grew closer.

  The things that chased them were formed of shadows, deep black in hue, yet they looked solid—phantasmal wraiths made of no earthly matter, given physical form by the arcane power of their dimension. And the alien matter of Bailey’s and Roland’s bodies—or their souls—seemed to draw them. Hungrily.

  The pair reached the slope, thick with dead-looking weeds, which led up to a kind of stony ridge hovering above the bog. Roland stopped and urged Bailey forward, trying to get her up before him, trusting his legs to help him catch up to her in good time.

  She bounded ahead, tugging on his jacket. He had fallen behind.

  “Shit!” she gasped, glancing back from halfway up the slope.

  The phantoms had converged on them too fast, unnaturally fast, and Roland was surrounded on three sides. His eyes bulging in horror, the wizard threw fast punches at the creatures closest to him, and to his surprise, the blows had an effect. His fists left rippling dents in the strange jet-black matter of their bodies, and they moaned and staggered back, buying the young man a precious extra moment.

  He hurtled up the slope, reaching Bailey just as she was about to run back for him, and they helped each other crest the ridge. The mist had grown too thick to see what lay ahead.

  “Uh,” Bailey wheezed, “does this go anywhere, or are we going to be trapped up here?”

  “I don’t know,” Roland shot back. “Better place to fight them off, if nothing else.”

  They stumbled over the mossy stone, and suddenly the fog parted. Only a few feet before them, the ridge ended, and directly below it was a pool of a sticky black substance. Dropping off the ridge from this end would see them both sucked down into the marsh, drowned or worse.

  “Crap,” Roland muttered.

  “You ‘re right about that,” grunted Bailey.

  They turned around to fight, ignoring the cold sinking sensation and their near-certainty that anything they tried against these adversaries would be futile.

  The wraiths, horribly similar to humans but ultimately alien, were crowding up the slope to fan out across the ridge, too fast for their bizarre, almost dreamlike motions. They seemed to operate on pure nightmare logic.

  Faced with these beings, the pair lost control of their conscious thoughts. Regular human cognition was pushed out of their skulls by a powerful cocktail of fear, adrenaline, and animal desperation. There was only the instinctive drive to do whatever it took to fend off their attackers.

  And as the black shapes drifted across the rocks toward them, uncanny calm and focus set in.

  Then Bailey, not thinking about what she did, extended her arms, palms outward, and a few red sparks appeared, followed by an arc of electricity that jumped from her hands to the nearest wraith.

  The creature shrieked, its inky phantasmal flesh shuddering like a disturbed liquid. Its shape grew indistinct as it moved back, trying to escape the current of lightning.

  The red bolt turned on the next wraith to move toward the girl.

  Bailey’s jaw had dropped. Roland was stunned as she smoothly fanned away the horrid creatures with a small yet consistent stream of electricity, halting them or driving them back.

  A few moved toward Roland.

  The wizard raised a hand over his head and then brought it down, fingers extended toward the creatures. Gouts of yellow-green flame flowed from his hands to engulf them, causing them to half-melt. They slunk away even as the crackling fire died.

  The pair did not slacken their pace. Crimson lightning and chartreuse flames forced the wraiths away from them. The things screamed horribly in pain or fear or both. It didn’t seem possible to kill or destroy them, but the elemental magic had enough of an effect that they gave up the attack and fled back the way they’d come.

  Roland stopped hurling fire and shifted the earth, pushing the wraiths along and raising barriers to prevent their easy return. He forced them toward the lowest and soggiest parts of the swamp, and well away from him and Bailey.

  The werewitch maintained her electrical arc, meanwhile, until the last of the phantoms was gone.

  Then it was over, and they stood, breathing in the cool, fetid air, before slumping almost in unison against a rock near the rear of the mossy shelf. No sounds disturbed them save the occasional howl, now far distant.

  Time passed, maybe as much as an hour. Here in the Other, where the laws of nature seemed warped, it was difficult to judge. The wizard and the werewitch did not speak to each other at first, simply relishing the sound of each other’s heartbeats since it meant that both of them were still alive.

  At some point, they’d clasped hands, their forearms pressed together, but Bailey couldn’t recall when—not that it mattered.

  Roland broke the silence. “Okay,” he breathed, “I think we need to talk about what just happened. And why, and how, and all those other questions. My brain is working properly again, and it needs to understand this shit.”

  Bailey looked at him and nodded. “I don’t think it’s meant to be understood,” she suggested, “but I’m all for talking about it. As long as those things, or something even worse, don’t hear us and decide to come back.”

  “Fair enough.” The wizard sat up straight and ran a hand through his lank and sweaty golden hair.

  “For starters, I think the main thing we both want to know is why the hell our magic didn’t work in the beginning. I’ve never had that happen to me. At least, not since I came into my own and learned all the basics. So it must have something to do with this place specifically.”

  “Aye,” Bailey concurred. “I’m a lot less experienced than you, but something wasn’t right for me either. At first, anyway. But then it did work, and it was, I don’t know, different. Like the rules of how it happens are ass-backward here.”

  Roland’s eyes grew distant. “Yes. Once we knew what we had to do—fight them off or else—it was like everything calmed down. Not only us, but the place somehow started to make sense and play fair. And then our magic was weaker than usual, but easier to control. Yours in particular. You managed to summon just enough lightning to get rid of those things, but without overdoing it.”

  Slowly, she nodded. “Yeah, that’s exactly right. I don’t…shit. I don’t understand what could have caused that, but I guess it’s a good thing. Saved our asses, and if I can figure out why it happened, it might be the key to using my magic properly.”

  “Yes. Based on past experience, it was sort of like being young again and not having my powers fully developed, but having enough of a grounding in how to use them that I was able to get the job done. We summoned less but used it better. In the past, power has never been an issue for either of us, yet here, that’s the problem. But our control has improved. Our flexibility. Yours more than mine, though I suppose I learned something too.”

  The girl used her elbow as leverage to hoist herself to her feet, surprised at how tired she felt after all that running at top speed.

  “Well,” she remarked, “obviously we did something right. Just a matter of figuring out what now, not to mention finding a way out of this damn place.”

  Roland stretched his lanky limbs, then he rose too.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Getting out of here is important, but I can’t imagine Marcus would let us step through unless there was an escape route within reach.”

  The wizard frowned, then, as his thoughts raced ahead, he said, “And after we get back, there’s still the matter of Shannon and Aida and Callie trying to make our lives miserable yet again, and the Venatori. I don’t know
what the hell we’re going to do about them.”

  Bailey snorted. “I don’t have a goddamn clue at this point. Fight back. Run away if we have to. Ask them politely, if all else fails, to leave us the fuck alone, maybe? But,” she took Roland’s hand, “whatever happens, we’ll face it together. We’ve made a pretty good team so far, right?”

  She smiled when she saw something within him melt. To her surprise, he drew her into a hug, his arms around her shoulders and her head snuggling into his upper chest and neck.

  He patted her back. “I’ll agree to that. I doubt either of us would still be around without the other. Either we’d both be dead, or you’d be in jail, and I’d be strapped to a wall with tubes hooked up to my balls or something. Sorry, not a mental image either of us wants right now, but you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah.” She chuckled. “I do.”

  They let each other go and stood normally again, though perhaps a few inches closer.

  “For now,” said Roland, “I’d say we ought to explore a bit more. Find a place that looks and feels right to rest and keep training. That’s what we have to do, I suspect—‘level up,’ like video game characters grinding for experience points in an RPG. Something like that.”

  Bailey shoved him lightly. “Dork. I mean, it’s a good analogy, but it’s more like we’re upgrading our ride. Lifted tires, subwoofers, bigger engine—all that good stuff.”

  He shrugged. “If you say so. What are ‘subwoofers,’ though?”

  She gaped at him in shock.

  “I’m kidding,” he protested, raising his hands. “Juuuuust kidding. They’re those horrible…things people get installed so that they can vibrate the asphalt at intersections while showing off whatever is currently on their playlist. I’d rather level up my RPG character, personally.”

  Bailey sighed. “Maybe I was wrong, and there isn’t hope for you, after all. Anyway, let’s get down off this damn rock.”

  Carefully, but not wasting time either, they worked their way down the slope back to the mostly solid part of the bog, and spent a moment surveying the strange landscape, watching the eerie purplish sky through the curtains of mist and trying to make out any distinguishing features.

  It seemed almost as though the landscape was shifting around the horizon, but it might just have been an optical illusion created by the ever-changing fog.

  Roland sighed. “Uh, that way, maybe? Looks slightly less terrible than the other ways. More dry ground, at least.”

  “Seconded,” said Bailey. “And I think I can see…I don’t know, a hill or something off in the distance over there? Maybe even a building. That might be a bad thing, but at least it’s not just the same featureless Dagobah-type shit.”

  The wizard eyed her in an askew way. “Dagobah? Who’s the dork now? Though yeah, it does kind of look like that place.”

  Bailey slapped a hand to her face. “Fuck. That idiot Kevin back at the shop must be rubbing off on me.”

  Deciding to keep quiet until they reached their destination, they set off across the bog. The mist thickened around them.

  * * *

  This time Townsend did the driving, while Spall rode shotgun and handled tracking and the logistical stuff. It wasn’t a fair trade, as far as he was concerned.

  “This place has to be one of the worst locations for driving I’ve ever seen or even heard of,” he grumbled.

  Spall was focused on his mobile device and did not look up or reply, but sort of chuckled under his breath in empathy.

  “And,” Townsend went on, “I used to work in Pennsylvania. Do you have any goddamn idea how shitty Pennsylvania’s roads are? I wouldn’t be surprised if Peru and Kyrgyzstan are better than that crap.”

  Spall shrugged his shoulders. “That’s mountains for you. The road seems to be in decent condition. It’s just the route.”

  There were no easy, direct routes east from Greenhearth into the Oregon High Desert on the other side of the Cascades, just a bizarre patchwork of winding paths that looked like they saw one, maybe two drivers per day, if that.

  The witches—the other witches—might be gone by the time the agents reached them.

  As if sensing his partner’s thoughts, Spall offered a report on the situation. “We’ve still got them. Unless they’re onto us and have used a dummy signal, they should be right up ahead. They’ve been there awhile. Must have stopped to recharge the batteries up their asses or however it is they power their magic.”

  “Good,” Townsend replied. “I’m getting pretty tired of this fuckery.”

  They were coming into flatter country, where the roads made more sense, although the night was so dark that the going was still slow. Nonetheless, at a crossroads just ahead was the unmistakable bulk of an SUV parked beside the road.

  “That’s it,” Spall stated.

  Townsend parked about two hundred feet away. Both agents checked for their weapons before they climbed out of the car. They were not authorized to kill paranormals except in the direst of circumstances, but they had ways of protecting themselves that were more than sufficient.

  Townsend cracked his neck as they walked toward the vehicle. “This ought to be good. Been a while since we’ve had to deal with the Venatori.”

  Halfway to their goal, the SUV’s headlights snapped on, flooding the barren plain with light and illuminating the two suited men. They kept walking. A light within the vehicle came on too, disclosing two women in strange leather outfits.

  Spall grunted. “There were supposed to be four of them. Either the other two are hiding in the trunk, or they’ve split up.”

  “Of-fucking-course,” Townsend replied.

  The woman behind the wheel, a tall brunette with her hair in a bun, rolled down her window. “Who are you,” she demanded, “and what are you doing here?”

  “That’s supposed to be our line,” Townsend replied.

  Spall smirked. “We were just about to ask you the same thing, only in your case, the word ‘here’ means ‘in the United States.’ You have your passports on hand, ladies?”

  Scowling, the passenger dug around in the glovebox and produced the documents in question. Townsend gave them a cursory look-see and handed them back.

  “Right,” he said. “Now, let’s cut the shit before it even starts. We know who you are, and you probably know who we are—the organization that monitors supernatural activity. Might we ask what your business in Oregon is?”

  Both witches smiled, their faces extending slowly in a way that would have chilled anyone not familiar with their kind.

  “Yes,” responded the driver, “you may ask, and we will tell you in no uncertain terms. Our Order has decided that Bailey Nordin represents a threat to our existence, and we have come to remove that threat. We mean to take her out. That is our business, and your organization would do well not to interfere.”

  Spall nodded. “Refreshing candor. Thanks for not wasting our time with lies. Not that we’re very surprised by the truth.”

  Townsend grimaced. “Interference is our business, ma’am, to some extent, although we are not the police. And at this point, all you’ve done is make a vague threat. We’re here to prevent the public from learning about the paranormal, not to dispense or enforce conventional justice, even with regards to attempted murder. Therefore, whether we interfere is a matter of whether you force us to. Understood?”

  The witch rolled her eyes in an arrogant expression of disdain. “You are saying that we must do the job quietly? Do you think we desire to attract undue attention, either? That is part of why we’ve come.”

  Townsend didn’t like the thought of that girl being killed, and he doubted Spall did either, but given how much was at stake, and how much trouble she’d been involved in…

  Spall sniffed. “Quietly, or not at all. If things get out of hand, we will have no choice but to intervene, and on Bailey’s behalf. You are guests in our country right now. No one likes foreigners prowling around and instigating problems.”

&nb
sp; “Yes,” Townsend confirmed. “For all her reckless sloppiness, the Nordin girl isn’t the one precipitating the conflicts. If your activities create a mess, that makes you the bigger threat, and the one that needs to be expelled.”

  Both pairs were still, then, staring each other down, unspeaking.

  The lead witch broke the silence. “We are professionals,” she asserted. “There will be no mess.”

  The agents nodded.

  “Very well,” said Spall. “Don’t make us warn you again.”

  The Venatori driver smiled. “Don’t make us angry.” The disdain was gone from her demeanor now. She was simply informing a fellow professional of the reality of the situation.

  Townsend and Spall turned and walked back to their vehicle. Townsend started the car and sat in place for a while as the witches set off down the road—west, toward Greenhearth.

  Spall watched them go. “Think they’ll fuck it up? For that matter, do they know where Bailey is?”

  “I don’t know.” Townsend shrugged. “But if they do find her and we have to step in? Well, at least we finally have ourselves some worthy opponents.”

  Chapter Four

  From where Bailey had stood at the base of the ridge where they’d had their first confrontation with the wraiths, it had looked like the hill was only a mile or so away at most. Yet somehow, as they bore toward it, it never seemed to get any closer.

  “What,” Roland muttered, “is that thing? I’m starting to wonder if it’s really a mountain and it’s, like, half the world away, only it looks closer because this place is even more humid and foggy than Seattle is.”

  “Could be,” Bailey admitted grudgingly. “Or maybe it’s like one of those stupid dreams where the hall keeps getting longer as you run toward the door or whatever. Hell if I know. This place makes even less sense than Seattle does.”

  “Har-har,” Roland grumbled. “Anyway, if we don’t make any progress in, say, fifteen minutes, I say we stop and practice where we are. I’m having trouble guessing how long we’ve been in here.”