The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  Marcus waited for the old man to stop speaking. “I understand,” he replied. “But you’re in luck. My most recent attempt to train her took us both into the Other.”

  A few of the younger Juniper bucks looked confused at that, but Estus only shrugged his shoulders and scowled in a solemn way.

  “The Other,” the Juniper shaman muttered. “It has been a long time since I’ve been there, but I know the place, nonetheless. Can you tell me where she is now?”

  They were even more eager to act than he’d hoped.

  “Yes, my friends,” he announced. “Let me show you the way. Of course, I don’t want her harmed, but realistically, I have to warn you that she tends to react very aggressively to people. Be careful—of her, and of the realm beyond.”

  Marcus wondered if Bailey would survive the encounter. He would be watching closely.

  The Junipers waited, antsy and agitated, while Marcus recited the ritualistic chant to open the doorway to the Other. It was not only a matter of creating the portal between worlds, but of ensuring it would take them to the proper location. Ideally, not right on top of where Bailey and Roland currently were, but close enough for the Junipers to find them without much delay.

  Marcus swept his hands before him and the gateway appeared, casting the scrawny trees around it in a haze of deep-purple light.

  Estus grunted. “Thank you. Now, I think it best if you don’t come yourself. It would only confuse her and make her feel betrayed to see you with us. No, let us go by ourselves, and we can claim you had nothing to do with it. Nothing whatsoever.”

  The man probably thought the ominous implications—the veiled threats—in his words were subtle. Marcus found them quite obvious.

  “Of course,” he agreed.

  Estus, taking up his wooden walking staff, shuffled forward and vanished into the portal. Ten of the Juniper bucks followed. The other four had agreed to wait behind in case anything went wrong, or to deliver word to the rest of the pack if needed.

  One of the ones who lingered caught Marcus’s attention.

  “Hey,” he asked, “what happens if she doesn’t listen?”

  The shaman shook his head. “Who knows?” he murmured. “Who knows?”

  * * *

  Light flashed and burst, forming a cornucopia of colors as arcane force assumed different and varied forms that clashed and exploded against each other. Pure magic struggled against manipulated elements, and the elements fought back, although they changed sides with the ebb and flow of the battle.

  Bailey concentrated. Her and Roland’s fight against Shannon, Aida, and Callie had raged across the breadth of the misty hillock and started to work its way down one of the wooded slopes toward the dense forest to the side of the black lake. A constant barrage of lightning, fire, gravity, and kinetic energy had obliterated half the trees, clearing a path as their struggle worked its way downward.

  “Shit!” Roland exclaimed as a trident-like triple arc of blazing lightning bore toward him. He responded by conjuring a wedge-shaped mass of magnetized force that sent one of the three prongs spiraling into the sky and the other two streaking across the ground, raising sparks from the peaty bog pools and burning or blasting trees and thorns where they struck.

  The trio of witches had achieved some kind of mind-meld that was giving them an easier time than they would have had otherwise. In addition to that, there were three of them, compared to two of Bailey and Roland.

  “What are they doing?” Bailey called to the wizard, summoning jets of dark water from the boggy ground to intercept a rippling wave of fire. The elements met halfway and dissolved in a cloud of steam.

  “Coven stuff,” he replied. “I’ll explain it later. We’re fighting one witch with the power of three, not separate individuals.”

  That was what Bailey had been afraid of.

  Shannon’s voice screeched, “Shut up, Roland! She won’t understand anyway!”

  Ignoring her commentary, Bailey tried to form a spear of kinetic force that might penetrate the invisible shield the witches had around them, but she found her strength flagging. All five of them had been operating on almost maximum exertion, and with the Other de-powering them as it did, it took everything they had to produce the moderately powerful effects they delivered.

  By now, the black lake was only a stone’s throw away.

  Bailey noticed it before the others did, perhaps due to being the least-experienced magic-user and therefore the one most easily distracted. The dark waters were stirring. Bubbles rose in places, the normally placid waters grew choppy, and swirling white mist was forming around the edges and clumping over the surface, as it had before the attack of the fog-demons.

  “Roland!” she cried, gesturing toward the lake with her elbow even as she tried to loop into his magic and aid him in pushing the witches back toward a patch of thorns.

  The wizard glanced quickly over his shoulder. “Aw, hell,” he groaned. “We must be waking it up with all this magical diarrhea. That water obviously responds to any attempt to channel the arcane by anyone who’s near it. Thanks a lot, Shannon. Once again, you’ve done a great job of—”

  “What? That’s bullshit!” the sorceress screamed back.

  The earth exploded under Roland’s feet, hurling him into the air, but he “caught” himself and began floating back down, flinging a torrent of small, erratic green missiles at their enemies as he descended.

  With the trio momentarily on the defensive, Bailey looked at the lake again.

  The mist-demons were spawning there. Worse still, it wasn’t only them. Gelatinous black shapes—wraiths—had begun to grow out of the shadows around the periphery of the pool and the dark patches between the nearby trees. It was as though all the malevolent creatures of the Other were being drawn to this spot by the expulsion of so much mana.

  “We’ve got company!” Bailey announced.

  The witches were closer to the lake and their backs were turned toward it, so they didn’t notice the creatures until Bailey and Roland began hastily shuffling away, trying to work back up the ridge.

  Callie pointed at them. “Hey! Get back here! Frickin’ cowards!”

  Bailey scoffed. “You’re the ones who tried to sucker-punch me with a fireball. Fuck off!”

  She caught the glare of Aida, the one who’d thrown the fireball in question. “You’re going to die now,” she stated. “You sent me to the hospital. We’re done playing games with you.”

  That was when the three realized Bailey and Roland weren’t bluffing and something was seriously wrong.

  Shannon looked first. “Holy fuck!” she sputtered. “You two fight off those things. I’ll deal with—”

  Roland hurled a flaming mass of molten earth over her head, causing her to duck. The meteor crashed amidst a cluster of wraiths and mist-demons, scattering the former and vaporizing the latter.

  Bailey looked at him. “Why are you helping them?”

  He grimaced. “Not even they deserve to be killed by these things. Besides, we can deal with the three of them after we get rid of the Other’s little welcoming committee. For now, having five mages against those things is better than two.”

  There was, Bailey had to admit, a certain logic in that. Her opinion of Roland’s judgment only got better when the wraiths all howled in unison, practically freezing her solid with primal fear. Even Shannon’s nails-on-chalkboard voice wasn’t that bad.

  Shannon, for her part, realizing that Roland hadn’t been aiming the meteor spell at her, broke her word to concentrate on the pair and instead spun around, joining her partners in fighting off the hellish swarm that was now bearing down on all of them.

  An awkward and impromptu truce emerged amongst the quintet as they all turned their efforts toward the common enemy. Bailey and Roland, physically farther from each other than they’d like, handled the right and left flank, while the coven held back the center.

  The werewitch tried her freezing spell again, and three of the wraiths near t
he edge of the forest solidified and failed to move. Then Caldoria hit them with a blast of kinetic force, shattering them to pieces.

  The two young women’s eyes locked briefly.

  Callie narrowed her eyes. “Don’t get any ideas or I’ll break your ass next!”

  Bailey just snorted. She’d personally fought Callie at least twice by now and wasn’t about to consider the little blonde loudmouth a friend just because of today’s bizarre circumstances.

  Meanwhile, Roland and Shannon were collaborating in hurling a net made of lightning and fire at some of the mist-demons, destroying most of the ones in its path. Then Roland was distracted from the sorceresses by a sudden ambush of wraiths.

  Aida remained aloof. Bailey had judged her the relatively least-awful of the three, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  As Bailey and Roland focused their efforts on blasting the wraiths which increasingly crawled forth from the surrounding woods, the mist-demons advanced on the trio of witches, their ever-increasing numbers exceeding even the powers of a mind-melded coven.

  “Oh, shit!” Shannon cried, desperation in her voice. “Fall back. We need to get the hell out of—”

  A wraith rose from the ground right next to her and she stumbled over her feet, crashing into Aida, who went sprawling into the mud toward the lake—and the mist creatures.

  Before anyone could act, the tall, dark-haired witch was surrounded by the hideous beings, who enveloped her in their smoky white limbs and jaws. She wailed horribly, her magical abilities failing as the demons carried her back toward the black water.

  “Aida!” Callie shouted and tossed a mass of ice toward the creatures. It struck two in the rear of the cluster, converting some of their vapor to solid form and slowing them badly, but six more moved in to take their place.

  Everyone else was pressed down by others of the horrid entities, wraiths and mist-demons alike, and could only watch and listen with nauseated shock as Aida was dragged into the lake, the fog-creatures pulling her under the surface of the black water. It seemed to rise to grasp at her. Dark fluid bubbled, and the woman vanished.

  “No,” Shannon gasped. “Oh, no. Oh, fuck. Jesus, Callie, we need to get out of here!”

  “No shit!” Caldoria sputtered.

  Roland, his face drawn with remorse for what had happened to Aida, conjured a rain of fiery droplets behind the remaining two witches, which dispersed the mist creatures in its path and allowed the women to hustle the rest of the way up the slope to join the pair.

  For a moment, there was silence and a reprieve from combat.

  The four looked at each other, their lungs heaving and brows glistening with cold sweat. Bailey wondered if she should kill them both right now while they were weak and not expecting it. No one would ever find the bodies here. Then she and Roland would be free of ever having to worry about these bitches again.

  No, she told herself. Absolutely, positively no. I am not a murderer.

  “So,” Roland said to his pursuers, “looks like you finally—”

  “Hold that thought,” Shannon declared. Some of her customary arrogance was back. “This isn’t over. But yeah, now isn’t the time, so have a nice fucking day.”

  She and Callie turned and ran.

  Bailey and Roland watched them, stupefied. Their forms grew smaller—it was almost unbelievable how fast they’d managed to bolt—and they disappeared into the trees, moving in the opposite direction of the dreaded lake.

  The werewitch and the wizard turned back toward the pool.

  To their relief, they saw that the mist-demons had given up. A lot of them had been destroyed or banished, and the ones who remained were sinking back into the dark water. Perhaps, Bailey wondered, their hunger had been sated by whatever it was they’d done to Aida. She shuddered and tried not to think about it.

  That left only a relatively small group of wraiths, which even now were struggling up the slope.

  “Well,” murmured Roland, “I think we’ve almost won at this point.”

  “Almost, yeah,” Bailey agreed.

  Working together, they engaged the remaining wraiths. It didn’t take long. Holding the high ground as they did, fighting a much smaller number of adversaries, and freed from having to worry about the witches backstabbing them at any moment, they were able to concentrate on creating a broad field of static electricity that reduced most of the wraiths to steaming black puddles. The few who remained fled, moaning and howling, into the woods to hide in the shadows that had spawned them.

  Bailey bent over, resting her hands on her buckled knees, trying not to fall to the ground. “Gods,” she panted. “I don’t know if any of what we just did meets Marcus’s definition of ‘progress,’ but I think we just earned a goddamn all-expenses-paid vacation.”

  Roland, leaning against a mossy boulder, tried to laugh, but mostly just wheezed. “Yeah, I like the sound of that. Somewhere warm and peaceful and extremely boring.”

  They didn’t speak for a few minutes while they tried to calm their minds and re-energize their bodies. Aida’s hideous fate—whatever it was—hung heavy, but neither wanted to discuss it.

  There was still the matter of the other two.

  “I wonder,” Bailey mused, “if they know how to get out of here. I’m thinking maybe they used a portal of Marcus’s to get in.”

  Roland spread his hands. “I don’t know. Shannon’s actually pretty talented, and the other two aren’t slouches either. Not on my level, of course, but I could see them being able to open a portal. In any event, they’re gone for now.”

  Bailey nodded. “Wait! If you’re better than they are, how come you can’t open a portal?”

  He scrunched his face in irritation. “You’re good with cars, right? Can you fix a lawnmower?”

  “Uh,” she replied, “I’ve never done it, but I, uh, probably could.”

  “Exactly,” he stated. “I probably could too, but why risk screwing it up when Marcus has things covered?”

  She scowled but conceded the point. “Where is Marcus, anyway? Normally, he’s got our back.”

  It occurred to her that she missed him. He’d done so much for them. He was a good man.

  Chapter Ten

  The three women, clad head to toe in leather, stepped through the midnight-purple doorway and into the misty wastes of the Other.

  Lavonne smiled. She could already smell the magical trail left by the American witches who wanted Roland for themselves.

  It seemed less obvious to her two companions; though powerful and intelligent, they weren’t on Lavonne’s level. She was glad she’d led this final thrust of the expedition, leaving her assistant Savina in charge of the remaining two witches at the motel. Some of them would need to remain behind in the mortal world, after all, to keep up pretenses. And it never hurt to have backup soldiers on hand, in case there was an emergency.

  “They are close,” Lavonne stated. “They’ve been moving, and it seems we opened the door just as they were passing this point. But they have not gone far. They fled that way.”

  She pointed toward a depression in the earth, where, despite the lower elevation, it looked dry, thanks to the ground mostly consisting of moss-covered rock rather than the usual weeds, mud, and peat.

  The other two tilted their heads, acknowledging the duty that lay before them. Lavonne touched their shoulders and they quickly formed a basic coven, combining powers and consciousness for a better unity of action and more coherent use of their collective magical abilities.

  They took off at a brisk trot across the flat swampy ground toward a rocky outcropping that separated the marsh from the rocky valley. There was a natural pathway leading down into the depression, and on either side of it were shallow, festering pools of dank water from which thorny trees grew, their branches reaching out like twisted claws.

  No sooner had they stepped between the pools than a pack of wraiths ambushed them. Or two packs working in unison, about twenty on each side.

  Lavonne walke
d in the center and her disciples strode at her flanks, acting as her right and left arms. The left made a gesture, and the wraiths to that side exploded before a sheet of flame that engulfed almost all of them, consuming the last few a second or two later. Only a thin sheet of smoking black slime remained where they’d been. The trees, too, had been burned down to nubs protruding from the now-steaming water.

  The right, meanwhile, with a flick of the arm, called down a storm of lightning bolts that struck amidst the wraiths on that side, vaporizing the ones hit directly and sending out leaping arcs of electricity to dissolve the others. The bolts knocked over any trees in the way, while the water sparked from having been thoroughly electrocuted.

  They walked on, having barely been slowed by the feeble attack.

  As they started to descend into the small rocky hollow, orb creatures like floating gelatinous heads rose before them from a crevasse in the ground. The things drooled and gibbered and extended long barbed tongues toward the advancing trio of women.

  Lavonne raised both hands, pulling strength from the witches to either side, and struck the creatures with a frontal assault of kinetic force mixed with powerful acid. The telekinetic portion doubled as a shield to keep the corrosive liquid from splashing back toward its casters.

  The head-things moaned as they flew back and then toppled to the ground, mostly dissolved by the acid. By the time the witches walked past them, there was almost nothing remaining but a few foul-smelling patches of liquid.

  No other creatures emerged to challenge them as they trekked toward their target. The Other was a place of paradox. Large displays of magic attracted its strange denizens, yet similar displays could drive them off. For now, it seemed the sentience of the realm had learned its lesson.

  Lavonne, of course, had learned a useful lesson of her own long ago—namely, how to exert complete, perfect control over the arcane, regardless of circumstances. Channeling in the Other was more difficult than in the mortal world, but by no means impossible. It simply required a different mindset and a different way of allocating one’s energies.