The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  “A free-for-all,” he announced. “Nothing too big or flashy—we can’t attract a lot of attention to ourselves up here—but do what you must to win. Within the limits I’ve outlined, then, a contest of power and control.”

  Bailey took a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”

  Roland scratched his head. “This ought to be interesting.” He raised his hands.

  The friendly fight rapidly became almost as chaotic as the battle with the Venatori had been. In the back of her mind, Bailey knew that neither Marcus nor Roland wanted to hurt her, but here on Earth, their powers were unchained to such a degree that it seemed their spells would do too much damage.

  The two Weres and the wizard were soon leaping around the clearing, and occasionally into the trees, hurling small blasts of arcane fury, manipulating the landscape to their advantage, and even attacking one another’s will to fight.

  Bailey realized she still didn’t have much of a conception of the psychological type of magic. The elemental stuff, with its primal directness, somehow made more sense to her, and she found herself subtly increasing the intensity of her attacks to compensate for her lack of subtlety.

  Marcus shot her a hard glance. He knew what she was doing.

  Seeing that, she quailed, then sucked in air and stood up straight. To her surprise, she channeled the shaman’s feelings into a spell.

  On some level, he thinks it’s hopeless, she realized. Let him FEEL that, then!

  For a second, Marcus stumbled, and the bright aura of his power dimmed. She pushed it toward Roland as well. His face showed momentary alarm, and his spells weakened.

  Then Bailey pushed against them with more and stronger blasts of lightning and fire and ice, and they had to work harder, now on the defensive.

  Marcus suddenly raised both hands over his head, and something almost like a miniature sonic boom rattled them as a translucent wave of dark purple light spread across the clearing, neutralizing every magical effect in its radius.

  “Enough!” he boomed. “The session is concluded.”

  Bailey and Roland stopped, lungs heaving and eyes wide.

  Marcus relaxed. “Yes, this is where we must stop for now.” He seemed pensive, and Bailey was impatient for him to say more.

  “What?” she asked. “Did I do well? Did I do something wrong?”

  The shaman rubbed his broad, stubbly chin. “Not exactly. You did quite well, but not in the way I’d hoped. We might even say that you won, but only because you pushed the level of power we all had to employ beyond the limits I’d set.”

  She frowned and willed her shoulders not to slump. Instead, she looked at Roland.

  “Yeah,” the wizard remarked, “I’m going to have to agree with our hobo-like friend on that one. You did technically kick our ass briefly, but I could have made a comeback by using dirty tricks that would have seriously harmed you.”

  Marcus nodded. “And I could have defeated you both, but only by calling upon far greater levels of power than it was wise to unleash. The town would have seen, and perhaps even suffered damage.”

  Bailey’s neck prickled at that. If it was true, Marcus was stronger than she could imagine.

  “Well,” Roland drawled, “I’m not so sure about that.”

  The shaman smiled grimly. “Let’s hope we don’t have to put it to the test. For now, though, we need to focus on Bailey.”

  He turned to her, and she steeled herself for his assessment.

  “You did not fail,” he informed her, “and you have made a great deal of progress, so don’t despair or beat yourself up. But you’re still not all the way there, and we’re running out of time. You did well within the parameters we set, but you’re still a danger to yourself and others. A bomb cannot be partially defused. It’s all or nothing.”

  She nodded slowly. His analogy made sense, yet what he was saying contradicted what Gunney had said yesterday about how the true battle was in the day-to-day stuff, rather than everything riding on one big event.

  “We need,” Marcus went on, “a catalyst to push you through this last barrier. Another pressure test to ingrain the lessons you must learn. I think you’d benefit from one more trip into the Other—an especially threatening part of it.”

  Roland rubbed his eyes. “Somehow I just knew that’s what you were going to say. Can you at least give me some pointers on how to open a door out of the place? I honestly don’t know how to do that.”

  “Later,” Marcus intoned. He was already lapsing into the ritual meditation and chant that preceded the opening of a portal.

  Bailey interrupted him only briefly. “Just keep the Venatori out of there, and we can handle it.”

  She wasn’t sure if he heard. A purple doorway opened in front of him, and she wondered what awful locale it might lead to.

  “Come,” he said and stepped through.

  Bailey hesitated. Roland made no move, either. Hating herself for her sudden cowardice, the werewitch strode toward the portal.

  Then it vanished. It was as though someone had slammed a door in her face.

  “What the hell?” she exclaimed. “Marcus! I was on my way, for fuck’s sake. Open it back up so—”

  “You!” a voice jeered.

  The werewitch and the wizard both looked up. Standing on the ridge above them, they expected to see Shannon and Callie, but no. Instead, it was four women dressed in dark leather.

  “Oh, shit,” Roland gasped.

  He’d created a shield around them almost before he knew what he was doing, and it was hardly a moment too soon, because the witches’ first attack had already struck.

  A spear of earth came out of the ground beneath both of them, but Roland had completely enclosed them, so the attempted impalement failed. Instead, it flung the pair, shield and all, through the air as though they were encased in a giant rubber ball.

  “Get them!” a voice screeched. “Kill the girl. Capture the wizard!”

  As they soared between the trees, Bailey caught a glimpse of their attackers and saw that the bun-adorned leader was not among them, though one of the sorceresses appeared to be the assistant Estus had felled yesterday. The other two must have been licking their wounds, which meant there were at least six of them in Oregon.

  “Bailey!” Roland shouted. “Slow our fall! I’ll take care of these assholes.”

  She concentrated on creating air resistance and weakening the pull of gravity, and they floated back toward the earth as Roland unleashed a storm of hail, lightning, and swirling winds on the Venatori quartet.

  Not to be outdone, the witches struck back with huge gouts of flame. Bailey saw with rising horror that they were intentionally trying to start a forest fire, as both an attack and a distraction. It looked like they were succeeding.

  Pines went up in the blaze, and orange flames and black smoke rose toward the sky. Bailey pushed at the edges of the shield, keeping the heat and fumes away from them, but she knew they’d run out of breathable air soon unless they got clear.

  Roland tried to extinguish the fire by summoning a torrential rain across an acre or two of the affected land, but while he did this, the Venatori hit them with a combined blast of force.

  The two rolled back down the hill. Closer to town.

  Roland got hold of a protruding root. “Bailey. Don’t hold anything back. They’re not going to, and we can’t either. We need to overwhelm them if we want to live through this.”

  He slashed his hand through the air and broke open the shield around them, exposing them but also letting oxygen in.

  She was torn, but only for a moment. She sucked in air and then unleashed everything she had.

  * * *

  “That’s it,” Spall barked. “That is just fucking it. I know our function is containment only, but I have had it with those bitches, and those other bitches, and the were-traffickers, and every other fuckhead who keeps forcing us to watch this bullshit town and keep it from being destroyed.”

  Agent Townsend was trying to k
eep his cool, but he had to admit that his partner had pretty much spoken for both of them. He did think Spall’s vacation couldn’t come too soon. Tahiti, maybe?

  Their car was parked at a scenic overlook on a nearby mountain peak. From here, they could see the entirety of the Hearth Valley, including the desolate patch of woods near Greenhearth where a fire had started and multicolored auras strained against one another for supremacy.

  “Don’t do anything hasty,” he chided, “but yeah, the goddamn apocalypse is breaking out down there in broad daylight. Call for backup. We might even have to move in to suppress this.”

  Today Townsend was the one behind the wheel, with Spall in the passenger’s seat manning their mobile console.

  “Oh,” Spall shot back, “we’re moving in, all right. Those people are going to pay for this. I mean, just look at this shit!”

  He flourished his hand out the side window toward the bizarre fireworks display. The light show was accompanied by all manner of crashes and booms. Everyone in town must have been aware of it by now, and some people in nearby communities were probably wondering what the hell was happening.

  Despite his bold words, Spall went back to his device to contact reinforcements. They had allies who could be relied upon to provide the sort of paramilitary support this situation required. Allies who mostly understood what was going on—and even if they didn’t, they’d signed confidentiality waivers and could be memory-wiped later to be safe.

  Townsend wondered how the hell they’d handle this if they did have to intervene. It was beyond anything either of them had dealt with in their long and storied careers.

  Spall threw up his hands. “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he hissed. “We’re being jammed!”

  “Jammed?” Townsend sputtered. “By technology, or…”

  “Magic,” snapped Spall. “Would’ve detected it if it was anything natural. The Venatori know we’re here and are trying to keep us out of it. That’s the only explanation.”

  Townsend’s mind raced. If that were the case, a phone call wouldn’t work either. They might have to retreat and call for help from another town. Or even from Greenhearth, though that would risk exposure.

  He said as much, but his partner cut him off in the middle of his comment.

  “No!” Spall raged. “This is it. I’m ending this crap right here and now!”

  He meant it. Before Townsend could stop him, he grabbed the arcanoplasm accelerator from its place behind the passenger’s seat and bolted out the side door of the car, running down the mountainside toward the site of the battle.

  “Spall!” Townsend shouted. ‘Spall! You imbecile! What are you doing? You’re going to get yourself killed!”

  It was no use. The agent kept running, moving fast for a man in middle age, and soon vanishing between the trees.

  Townsend punched the dashboard hard enough to rattle the bones in his hand. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “This is the last thing we need right now.”

  His partner had at least left the mobile device. Townsend propped it up on his center console and zoomed it out. It still displayed the sorcerous battle, but also the surrounding woods, so he would see when Spall arrived at the fray.

  Then the agent started his car’s engine and drove back down the winding road that would take him to Greenhearth. He had no choice now but to find a working phone within the village.

  For all his driving skill, the road was so treacherous that he had to go far slower than he wanted, at the risk of plummeting off the side of the goddamn mountain. That would do nothing to improve the situation. He was about two-thirds of the way to the town when the miniaturized figure of Spall appeared at the edge of the device’s screen.

  Spall fired the accelerator the instant he came into view. It was an alien-looking weapon about the length of a man’s forearm, a cylinder of bright chrome with red tubes running down it. Most of them hooked into its magazine or fuel tank, a small canister filled with arcanoplasm—the pure, distilled essence of magic. It was among the Agency’s most powerful and closely guarded secrets.

  A beam of whitish-magenta light like some death ray in an old sci-fi flick burst from the weapon and struck the Venatori witch at the far left of the quartet. She screamed only briefly as her body changed to a black silhouette within an ovoid mass of white flame, and then she winked out of existence, leaving behind only a tiny wisp of ash.

  Spall did not bother trying to place his shots carefully, but simply kept the trigger depressed and moved the beam on to the next witch. By now, the sorceresses had noticed his presence and begun to try to resist or deflect the attack.

  They were too late for the second woman, though. The half-baked shield they summoned only slowed the beam. It struck her at perhaps a quarter of its full force and speed, granting her a slower, more painful death than her partner. She howled as pink and white flames consumed her, then her blackened skeleton toppled to the ground.

  By then the shield was complete, and the magenta beam refracted off its surface in a hundred directions, starting more small fires throughout the woods.

  Townsend almost put his fist through the windshield. “Dammit, Spall! What the fuck are you thinking?”

  The remaining witches had been forced to divide their attention, the one closer to Spall having shifted her efforts toward him while the other one kept up the battle against Bailey and Roland. With the element of surprise gone, one Venatori was too much for a human agent, even one with an arcanoplasm accelerator.

  Spall took cover behind trees as the witch threw spirals of kinetic force laced with what looked like radioactive fire at him. Most of the trees he tried to hide behind disintegrated into burning chunks. He took potshots with his weapon, but the beams just bounced off the witches’ shield.

  “No,” Townsend breathed. He pressed down on the gas, even as his car threatened to swing off the edge of the mountain road. “Goddammit, no.”

  Finally, the sorceress caught one of the arcanoplasm beams. “See how you like it,” she taunted in a thick Swedish accent. Then she threw it back.

  Spall had tried to duck and roll, but his foe was good at leading her target. The magenta beam struck him in the center of the back. He let out a sharp, gasping groan, then his body vaporized. Flecks of ash wafted in the air.

  Townsend stopped the car. There was no place to pull over; he simply blocked the lane, unable to drive or do much of anything else for the moment.

  After a moment, he regained control of himself, although his hands were still trembling and he was seeing red.

  All of them, he thought. Just like Spall said. The Venatori, the DiGrezza gang, the were-traffickers, and even Roland and Bailey. She and the swishy wizard weren’t to blame, but if they’d never gotten involved, things would be different.

  Thanks to them, his partner of fourteen years—and his best friend—was dead. There wasn’t even enough left of him to bury. The ashes were already scattered.

  “They’ll pay,” Townsend snarled. He was mainly talking about the Venatori, although his crude emotions wanted everyone to pay right now. “One way or another. They’re going down.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Bailey had lost track of time. The fight had gone on long enough that she was having trouble remembering anything else that had happened before it started.

  “Eat this!” she bellowed and hurled a crude but intimidating mass of fire and lava at the nearer of the two witches.

  The Venatori caught it and tossed it back, adding burning tree trunks to the mass of death. They had all been pushed past the point of coherent strategy and could only trade blow for blow, desperately trying to neutralize one another through brute force.

  Bailey seized the fireball again and whipped it around, throwing it like a curveball back at the sorceress.

  “Hey!” Roland called. “Get rid of that thing before it—”

  The witch had thrown it back again, but she detonated it halfway, shielding herself at the same time. The concussive force of the expl
osion created a shockwave that knocked Bailey and Roland off their feet.

  The other witch, who’d been having an invisible duel of psych magic with Roland, moved in for the kill.

  “No!” Bailey cried, swiping her arm and creating a thick wall of ice in front of them. A bolt of lightning struck it from the other side, shattering it, but the solid water absorbed the electricity before it could impact its intended targets.

  Roland gasped. “This is getting us nowhere. I think that agent guy killed the two smarter ones, so now we’re in a slugfest with the workhorses. We need to either figure out a clever way of beating them or get the hell out of here.”

  In the moment of respite they’d earned, Bailey glanced around. She could see a cluster of people watching them by the drugstore.

  It was only early afternoon, and the Venatori had driven them to an exposed area, away from the sheltered spot Marcus had chosen for practice. The entire battle was occurring in plain view of the general public.

  There was no time to consider the public relations stuff, though, because a storm of spinning magical blades was raining down on them, leaving hazy colored streaks behind them as they clove through tree branches on their way to their targets.

  Bailey deflected about half of them with a crude kinetic spell, while Roland gathered up the other half, quickly melting them with an infusion of heat. He formed them into a metal wall that he sent slowly toward the witches.

  While the Venatori were busy with that, the pair climbed into a denser part of the forest higher on the mountain.

  “We have the high ground,” Roland gloated. “Wasn’t that in a movie or something?”

  “Don’t remind me,” Bailey shuddered, thinking of Kevin.

  Then a huge bolt of lightning struck the mountain—not the point where they stood, but up near the peak. Dirt, snow, and rock exploded, and an avalanche streamed toward them.

  “Oh, fuck!” Roland exclaimed. “Hold my hand.”

  Bailey, alarmed not only at the prospect of imminent death, but also that the invaders were causing so much damage to her local environment, took the wizard’s hand, hoping he had something in mind.