The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  Roland sighed. “Well, this is just fantastic. So much for averting all-out war.”

  Marcus turned around. With his next comment, he somehow answered both Roland’s quip and Bailey’s unspoken thoughts.

  “As we’d feared, things will escalate, but if we tread carefully, we might be able to prevent the worst. It’s important that we don’t reveal my identity. If it becomes known that I’ve directly involved myself, it could start a battle of divinities, with the witch-gods taking sides against me and the whole Earth becoming a battlefield for vastly powerful forces. Or the Venatori might start looking for the means to kill a god. I would not put it past them.”

  Bailey reeled in shock. What Fenris had just described was an end-of-the-world scenario. Not to mention, he’d implied that he could be killed.

  Roland rubbed his eyes. “Okay, so what do we do now?”

  “Return to Greenhearth,” said Marcus, “and continue your training there. The Other makes some things easier or clearer, but it’s not required. There’s no way we can avoid confrontations with the Venatori, but we can win. Furthermore, we can win in a way that won’t involve splitting the planet asunder.”

  * * *

  Once back in the mortal world, Marcus took his leave, wandering off into the forest to make preparations. The pair watched him go, Bailey wishing he’d stick around to advise her and Roland wondering what he was up to.

  She sighed. “Let’s go home. Looks like we managed to get here around dinner time again.”

  “Truly, we are blessed,” Roland drawled. “I think Russell might have to make his coffee even stronger than usual, though. If he overdoes it, we’ll have committed suicide before the Venatori can kill us.”

  When they arrived back at the Nordin household, a familiar though not overly welcome black car was parked in the driveway.

  Roland frowned. “Uh-oh. Someone must have planted a microphone in the Other. I wonder if the Agency can do that now? Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “The hell do they want now?” Bailey wondered. “Probably going to remind us again to stop defending ourselves when psychotic assholes jump out and attack us for no fucking reason.”

  Then she remembered all the work Agent Townsend had done after the battle in the woods to keep a lid on things and protect them from repercussions. Also, Spall had given his life fighting the witches.

  “Shit,” the girl muttered, trying not to flush with shame.

  Inside the house, they found her three brothers sitting down to a dinner of home-grilled hamburgers and coleslaw, with Agent Townsend seated in the vacant place where their dad would have been, had he still lived at the house.

  “Hello, Nordin,” the agent greeted them. “I’m sure you’re thrilled to see me. The good news is that you’re not in trouble. At least, not from us.”

  Bailey nodded hello to her brothers, then sat down and helped herself to some food. “We know damn well we’re in trouble from certain other groups,” she commented.

  “Correct.” Townsend had a black binder resting on the table under his hand. She had no doubt that he’d open it at some point, and she dreaded what might be within.

  “Wait,” Roland protested. “Did anyone make coffee?”

  Russell scoffed. “Of course. We already drank it.”

  Nodding, the wizard requested a moment’s delay while he refueled. He brought a steaming mug out for Bailey as well, then the agent began his briefing.

  “The Venatori,” he explained, hands folded before him and face grim but not unkind, “have come back in a big way.”

  Bailey wasn’t surprised. “Fuckin’ hell. We kinda hoped it’d take them, I dunno, a month or two so we could prepare.”

  Jacob snorted. “How do you prepare for crap like that? They practically leveled a mountainside last time they showed up, not to mention the detour to murder that old shaman down south.”

  Kurt tried to come up with an amusing remark but couldn’t find anything funny about the situation.

  “Well,” Townsend continued, “they’re here now, and they’re headed this way. A group of them landed somewhere in the Puget Sound and have been working their way southeast, wiping out Were communities as they go. This is serious shit. As near as the Agency and I can tell, they’re trying to annihilate the PNW lycanthrope community, if not your entire species.”

  Hearing the word “annihilate,” Bailey suddenly connected the dots. She recalled what Nick had said in the diner just before he’d attacked.

  “Goddammit,” she burst out. “They’re behind all of it, aren’t they? The apprentice shaman who jumped us mentioned that. The Venatori killed those Weres up in Washington, then spread the rumor that we fuckin’ did it!”

  She pounded the table with her fist, causing forks to jump and mugs and plates to rattle.

  Townsend’s frown deepened. “I’m not aware of any rumors. I’ve been kinda busy dealing with all the mass murders to be tracking wolf-gossip, but otherwise, yes. Four massacres in as many days. There’s no way my organization can completely shut down public knowledge or discussion of something of that magnitude unless martial law is declared. The powers that be aren’t willing to go that far yet.”

  He looked down, inhaled, and opened the binder. Bailey steeled herself.

  “I have photos of the incidents in question. I’m only showing you these to prove what I’ve said, and so you’re aware of the danger involved. This is war-zone stuff.” He paused. “I apologize for doing this at dinner, but there isn’t any time to waste.”

  Roland swallowed a mouthful of ground beef. “Let’s just get it over with.”

  Townsend pulled out a stack of eight-by-eleven-inch printed photographs. He tossed the first one into the center of the table, oriented toward Bailey but there for anyone else to see as well.

  “That,” the man explained, “is what they did shortly after they landed at an all-Were trailer park up near the Capitol State Forest and the Mima Mounds in Washington.”

  The photo depicted a settlement that looked like it had been hit with multiple fragmentation bombs. Ravaged, blood-splattered people lay everywhere, and a couple of leather-clad women were visible in the background.

  His voice low and thick with disgust, Townsend went on, “I arrived at the scene just after they finished killing everyone—men, women, children. Unfortunately, I was outnumbered and had no idea they’d planned to do this. These are the pictures I took right before they piled up all the corpses and burned down the whole place.”

  He added the next photo, showing the scorched earth and a pile of blackened bones. A column of dark smoke rose from the pyre into the sky.

  Roland slowly swung his head from side to side. “Oh, my God. What have we gotten ourselves into? And what are they thinking? Even for the Venatori, this is…”

  His voice trailed off, lacking the right words.

  Bailey and her brothers just stared.

  Agent Townsend moved on to similar scenes of carnage farther downstate, near Mount St. Helens, and a third massacre over the Oregon state line, not far from Mt. Hood. In each case, the modus operandi was the same. Ambush the community. Murder everyone with overwhelming force. Pile up the bodies and burn everything.

  Bailey looked into the eyes of the agent, which, as usual, were covered by dark lenses. “Why didn’t you stop them?” she asked. There was an undertone of anger, but mostly she found herself mourning the senseless waste of life.

  Townsend frowned. “We tried. I noted the direction they were headed after the first massacre, but then they disappeared from the radar. They’re using highly advanced cloaking magic. I have the regular cops keeping an eye out for anyone matching their description, and I’m trying to bring the full brunt of the Agency to bear on this. But for now, we can’t track them the way we normally would. There are small lycanthrope packs that have apparently escaped our records, so we can’t just post guards, either.”

  “Unfortunately,” Roland commented, “I can believe that. The anti-tracking spell
thing. It’s rumored that the Venatori have top-level shit in their vaults, in addition to most of their individual sorceresses being prodigiously talented.”

  The Nordins were still gazing at the photos when Townsend showed them a video on a small laptop-like device he’d brought that replayed the last moments of the first attack. Elemental magic leapt across the screen and Weres flew through the air, then howled and died.

  Jacob closed his eyes. “We didn’t know them, that pack. But they look like they could be our neighbors.”

  Townsend closed the laptop. “If I have my way,” he assured them, “we’ll have men—armed men, with experience dealing with the supernatural—in your town preparing to repel them. There’s little doubt they’re headed this way, and it’s likely they’ll arrive soon. My superiors agree with my conclusions but haven’t approved the mission yet. I expect to hear back from them by tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Bailey murmured. “That’d definitely help. And I got most of the local packs behind me. We made nice with the South Cliffs, plus the Junipers and the Whitcombs and the Shashkas farther downstate. And the Eastmoors since—”

  She cut herself off, swallowed and coughed, then resumed, “Since the last fight with the Venatori.”

  She’d almost said, “Since Fenris ordered them to follow me as their shaman,” but she’d stopped just in time.

  “Excellent,” Townsend remarked. “We don’t want a full-scale war between witches and werewolves on American soil, but these people are trying to start one, whether we want it or not. It’s up to us to stop it from going any further, and we will.”

  He stood abruptly, and Bailey sensed that for all the man’s seeming unflappability, he was deeply furious and still grieving for his partner, Agent Spall.

  “Right.” Russell grunted and clenched his massive hands into fists.

  Jacob nodded to the agent. “Keep in touch. Bailey’s not someone you pick a fight with if you expect to win, but we can use all the help we can get.”

  Townsend strode toward the door to let himself out. “You’ll get as much as I can manage. Be careful.” He closed the door behind him and was gone.

  Letting out a long sigh, Bailey bent over the table and covered her face with her hands. “Pretty sure things are going to get worse before they get better,” she muttered.

  Kurt raised a finger. “No murder charges being pressed, though. There wasn’t a body, no one said anything, and it seems like the Whitcomb Creek pack dealt with things by themselves. There’s an APB out for ‘a gang of suspicious young men’ for busting up the diner, but that’s it. That’s conveniently vague, isn’t it?”

  “I guess,” Bailey answered him. “Don’t know how much longer before the damn FBI shuts down this entire town and interrogates every man, woman, and child. Do you really think they’d all keep quiet, facing something like that?”

  Roland made a sour face. “That’s why the Agency exists. Not the FBI, the other Agency.” He gestured toward the door Townsend had just left through. “Much as I hate to say it, I think at this point, we need to have a little faith in them.”

  “Faith.” Bailey sighed. “I’d rather rely on something a little more solid, but I guess you can’t go through life expecting everything to be guaranteed.”

  Jacob put a big hand over hers. “Right. And you’re not alone. Remember that.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Bailey returned to her job at the auto repair shop for the first time in far too long. She hadn’t seen or heard from Marcus, and after the fiasco at the Bristling Elk, she felt like she ought to be seen doing normal things and helping the townsfolk. Not to mention, it would put her mind at ease to just work on cars again.

  “The hell?” she exclaimed, staring in horror at the tires on a sky-blue 2005 Ford Taurus. “Those things are balder than Patrick Stewart after dipping his head in a vat of acid mixed with Nair. Didn’t this guy say he was driving up a snowy-ass mountain to go skiing?”

  Gunney’s sigh of exasperation was audible even over the clanking and drilling from elsewhere in the shop. “Yep. He didn’t ask us to check them, neither.”

  The girl shook her head. “Well, I’m gonna tell him when he shows up again, complete with a ‘don’t say we didn’t warn you’ disclaimer if he doesn’t get the damn things replaced before his vacation.”

  Kevin’s voice echoed out of the pit. “Good job looking out, Bailey. Here I was, thinking you’re the Han Solo ‘I’m only in it for me’ type, but you’re being all Mother Teresa now.”

  Her head snapped toward the subterranean depths. “Kevin, was that supposed to be some sort of real commentary on recent events or an excuse to make another lame Star Wars joke?”

  “Lame Star Wars joke,” he replied. “I don’t do serious commentary. You know that.”

  “True,” she conceded and got back to work.

  The day passed uneventfully, which almost made her feel like she’d accomplished something. She kept expecting her phone to ring with news of a witch invasion mounting in the hills, or someone’s mother to rush up and say her sons were killed in a slaughter of Weres out in the fields, or Agent Townsend to drop by to inform her that the Department of Homeland Security wanted to talk to her. She’d almost forgotten that normalcy was still possible.

  They finished with the customers’ vehicles around four, and Gunney let Kevin and Gary and Emily go home if they wanted to, which they did. Then he wheeled the Camaro back into one of the bays.

  “That thing again?” Bailey smirked. “Well, I’ll stick around to make sure you don’t screw up the restoration of such a beautiful vehicle.”

  The mechanic snorted. He doffed his baseball cap and let his sweaty hair breathe for a moment. “You should talk. You’re lucky I let you so much as touch a car of that caliber, Miss I Almost Wrecked Gunney’s Trans Am.”

  “Bullshit,” she shot back, grinning openly. “It didn’t have a scratch on it.”

  He shook his head. “Pure luck. There ain’t no goddamn reason it shouldn’t have been damaged, with you driving like a maniac all over fuckin’ Seattle.”

  “Suuuuure…” She picked up a sander.

  They got to work without bothering to consult about what needed to be done since it was obvious. First, the rest of the paint had to come off. Gradually it did as they sanded the dull stuff off by hand, leaving it ready for a fresh new coat. But first, there was the engine to deal with.

  As they worked, Bailey found herself talking about her latest concerns, and as usual, she found she could count on Gunney to hear her out.

  “…and the visions I’ve been getting since all this started!” she explained. “They’ve been bad for the most part, but it was nothing like this. Just the reality of it. The thought that that monster was me. Or that it could be me if I make the wrong choices. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.”

  The aging man nodded gently to show he’d heard as they finished the paint removal. “It doesn’t sound pleasant, I’ll grant you that,” he murmured.

  “Yeah. And honestly, one of the worst parts is thinking about what happened at the Elk, not to mention what happened with you just recently, being taken hostage by those fucking witches, dragged out into the woods, and threatened. I don’t think I could bear to see that again, Gunney. You or anyone else I care about in this town.”

  The mechanic gave her a sad grimace, swiftly followed by a sardonic chuckle. “Don’t worry about me, Bailey. I’m too stubborn to die. They’d have to stop my head from crawling back here, using my teeth to pull myself along, before this damn car is done. Not to mention there’s the Trans Am. Nobody fucks with that thing until I give them permission.”

  “Good point,” the werewitch acknowledged. “Maybe next time the Venatori show up, I’ll warn them about you and your classic cars. Might scare ‘em off.”

  “Eh,” he responded, “they seem kinda dense. Might just provoke them to try something. Anyway, instead of worrying about me, let’s worry about you. It’s prett
y obvious that all this stress is taking a toll. I think a lot of that is because you’re thinking too far ahead and then trying to take on everything at once.”

  Bailey furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”

  By now, they’d removed the last of the paint and disassembled the whole front, removing the grill. It made it easier to attack the engine.

  “See,” he said, “there’s all kinds of fuckin’ shit we’re gonna have to do with this car. It’ll be a long time before it’s in prime condition. But at the moment, are we trying to do every single one of those tasks? Nope. Just the ones that need to be dealt with first.”

  For the moment, that meant taking out the old engine, putting in a new one, which it looked like Gunney had done some custom work on, and mating it to the transmission.

  As the work went on and silence set back in, the old man stretched out the metaphor, continuing to explain his reasoning in his oddly comforting way.

  “With most things,” he went on, “it’s only the details that are different. Those can be important, yeah, but the big-picture stuff is surprisingly similar from one thing to another. That’s why a lot of older people know how to deal with life, even if their experience is narrower than you might think. They’ve been able to generalize their knowledge.”

  They started to lower the engine back into the car with a hook, and Bailey considered the old man’s words. He certainly wasn’t a were-shaman, but he’d been around the block many times nonetheless, and she trusted what he had to say.

  “When you think about it, leading a group of wolves as their shaman or whatever isn’t that different from running an auto shop or working on an individual car. You’ve already got some of the sort of experience you’ll need. There are a million possible problems. Think of how many parts a vehicle has, and how any one of them could go bad on you and might need replacing.”

  She wished he hadn’t said that since it wasn’t like she needed to be reminded.