The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  Browne muttered, “I sure as hell hope so, Bailey.” Though still up to his duties, he hadn’t been quite the same since his injury and Officer Jurgensen’s death.

  Will and the South Cliffs took their leave to help their families and friends with further preparations. They would then catch as much rest and relaxation time as they could.

  The witches they’d conscripted went off to check into a hotel. Bailey recommended one and called ahead to clear them since, at a time like this, a group of out-of-town women would be highly suspicious otherwise.

  Roland took a long, hot shower while Bailey reclined on the couch, trying to unwind.

  Fenris sat across from her. Seemingly deep in thought, he left her to her quiet time but was available if she had questions or concerns.

  Which she did. But she waited till she’d calmed her nerves and pushed the last of the adrenaline out of her system.

  “Fenris,” she opened. “Do you think the worst is yet to come? I do. The Venatori might be insane, but they’re not stupid. They’re going to hit us twice, maybe three times as hard as they did two weeks ago.”

  The deity spread his hands. “Probably, yes. There’s nothing more we can do to undermine their plans. However, this very evening, we struck a major blow against their agenda and greatly improved your stature all over North America.”

  “I suppose that’s true.” Every witch they’d defeated or turned away from aiding the Venatori was one who wouldn’t be coming to Greenhearth.

  He looked into her eyes. “Don’t sell yourself short. What you’ve achieved is of great significance. You’ve shown Weres all over the country that you are a leader of our kind, fit to be a shaman and perhaps something more. Not only one who solves local or regional problems, but national and continental ones. And you can rise further still. That is why I chose you as my candidate for High Shaman, Bailey. You have the potential to become the spiritual leader of all werekind.”

  She blinked. “I don’t know what to say to that, Fenris. I’m flattered, but I’m also exhausted. If we survive the next day or two, let me get back to you.”

  He smiled wistfully. “I believe you’ll survive. But you’re right; you must tend to your home first. The rest can come later. And the storm is brewing.”

  Bailey called her brothers, checking on them and making sure they’d be home to get their sleep. They assured her they would. Then she went out to the pole barn to check on Roland. She’d heard him head out there after his shower.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, knocking on the door.

  “It’s your pole barn, technically,” he pointed out. “Yes, though.”

  She stepped in and stood by his side. The wizard was sitting at the workbench, cutting paper into strips and drawing anti-magic runes on them with a Sharpie. She was glad he’d thought of it since it hadn’t occurred to her.

  She pressed against his shoulder. He paused at his task and raised a hand to place it on her arm, then gave her right breast a squeeze for good measure.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  He tilted his head back to look up at her. “Mostly. I feel like I...miss you, though. We haven’t had much private time together. I thought we’d get some after that battle a couple weeks back, but life had other plans.”

  She stopped herself from cracking a joke about how he was only trying to get back into her panties since he was being heartfelt. Instead, she wrapped her arms around his chest.

  “For what it’s worth, Roland, I’m sorry about that. But like you said, we’ve been busy. That reminds me, the reason I went up to that cabin with Fenris was that I was wiped the fuck out. I needed to decompress, to recover. It had nothing to do with you. Wasn’t avoiding you or anything.”

  A gentle sigh flowed through his body. “That’s good to hear. After we win, let’s take a vacation. We’ll have earned one.”

  “Damn right.” She held onto him, enjoying the few minutes they had together before the need for sleep overcame them.

  Roland looked down at his crude sigil-strips. “I never put much effort into learning these things,” he admitted. “But their value is obvious. When I’m done, we’ll paste them all around the house, and maybe make a quick run to drop a gift pack's worth off with people in town. They sure as hell won’t make us invincible, but they might give us enough of a defensive perimeter to ensure that, if nothing else, you-know-who won’t be able to just drop a giant nuclear explosion on us overnight or sneak into the house and stab us with a plasma knife while we’re sleeping.”

  Bailey kissed the top of his head. “That’s better than nothing. All I can ask for is a fighting chance.”

  “Well,” he murmured, “I’m not sure that’s good enough for me, personally. How about, since I promised we’d spend some quality time together when this is all over, you promise to kick the ever-loving crap out of those bitches tomorrow?”

  “Fair enough,” she conceded, then set her jaw in determination. “I promise.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Wake up!” Jacob’s voice bellowed. “Bailey! Get up!”

  She sprang from her bed, stunned by how quickly consciousness returned. Around 2 a.m., she’d passed out, half-fearing she’d fall into a coma or something, but it had been a light, fitful repose. She’d slept in her clothes with her boots beside her bed, aware that it might come to this. Her clock read 6:34. She was fully awake.

  “I’m up! Where the hell they at?” she shouted, stuffing her feet into her boots.

  Her brother’s steps pounded down the hall, and he flung open her bedroom door. Normally he went out of his way to respect her privacy, so she had little doubt that the worst had happened.

  His drawn, tense face confirmed her suspicions.

  “They’re everywhere,” he panted. “They surrounded the town. A third of them are heading right here, right now. The rest are already tangling with the patrols. We need to move.”

  The girl had never seen Jacob like this, and fear for him almost paralyzed her. Then she banished it and stood up. She’d known what was coming.

  “Where’s everyone else?” she asked. “And how many of them are there?”

  She rushed out into the hall, Jacob mere steps ahead of her. He turned his head back to answer.

  “Everyone’s in the living room. Roland made a shield. There’s probably,” he gulped, “about a hundred coming for us.”

  A hundred? She tried not to blurt it out loud since she didn’t want to make anyone more nervous than they were. And he said that’s only a third of the total force. Fenris and all other gods, give us strength!

  In the living room, Kurt and Russell stood braced for combat beside Roland, who was sweating under the strain of shielding the house. The wizard reported on the situation before Bailey could ask.

  “Those anti-magic party streamers have helped a little. Neutralized a few attacks, caused a handful of our guests to shoot blanks, but they’re probably destroying them as we speak. And since I’m not as well recovered as I thought,” he gasped, “I can’t protect us from getting roasted in here forever. We ought to get out in the open.”

  As he spoke, multicolored blasts of magic exploded against the shield around them, and Bailey could feel ill-omened powers trying to bypass the barrier and manifest beneath their feet. She turned her arcane will toward them and shoved them away.

  She motioned for them to move toward the back door. “I second Roland’s plan. You three, stay inside our shields until we say otherwise. I don’t doubt the courage or toughness of any of you, but this is magic versus magic, and charging them all would be suicide.”

  Her brothers concurred although Russell struggled mightily against the urge to pounce through the wall and crush the skull of the first witch he saw.

  Bailey sensed Roland’s shield and took on half the burden of sustaining it. The wizard looked sick and strung-out. He might have been well enough to leave the hospital, but he needed a week’s bed rest. A battle of this magnitude was beyond his current abilitie
s.

  Kurt spoke up as they hustled toward the rear of the house.

  “It’s weird,” he remarked, “some of them stepped out of portals in midair like normal witches, but some of them showed up in cars. Mind equals blown. I haven’t seen a single one ride in on a broomstick, though.”

  Jacob responded instantly with “Shut up, Kurt,” though it didn’t have much force behind it.

  Bailey inquired, “Did you guys see how many of them were obvious Venatori and how many weren’t? Leather uniforms as opposed to normal clothes.”

  Roland squinted. “Don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”

  They spilled out the door into the backyard and came face to face with a skirmish line of at least thirty women, with more in small groups on the hill, on the rooftops of other houses, or out on the residential street that led to their neighborhood. Bailey was glad they’d told their neighbors to sleep with friends on the other side of town. She’d known the hammer would fall hardest here.

  She also saw that less than half their adversaries were Venatori unless the Order’s minions were now dressing incognito. But she doubted it. The huge size of the assault force was mostly due to unaffiliated American witches they’d duped into helping them.

  A Venatori overseer pointed. “There! Kill her!”

  All the casters attacked at once, and the air seemed to turn to a solid wall of magic. But Bailey increased the strength of her and Roland’s mutual shield and expanded it in a dome around them, pushing the deadly waves back toward their sources. The front line of witches, composed entirely of lay volunteers, scrambled backward.

  “You Americans,” Bailey shouted, channeling her voice beyond her shield, “are being lied to. The wizard I supposedly attacked is my goddamn boyfriend, and he’s right here. The Venatori set it up to make me look bad. Last night, I spared a bunch of you who surrendered and even convinced a few to join us. Stop attacking us, and I promise we can live in peace.”

  The commander shrieked, “Don’t listen to her! It is a ruse to make you drop your guard. Fight! Do not betray your own kind!”

  No witches fled or defected, but Bailey’s speech seemed to have undermined their confidence. Their attacks wavered, and the werewitch and the wizard began to strike at them with flanking shots of elemental power and unusual debilitating spells—confusion, sleepiness, the illusion of being paralyzed. A third of the lesser casters collapsed or ran away, none dead, but some incapacitated or unconscious.

  Then a posse of Weres crested the ridge behind the yard, emerging from the woods already shifted into beast form and foaming at the mouth with bellicose fury. The Venatori commander tried to get a portion of the other witches to join her in dividing their attention, but the large group wasn’t disciplined enough to pull it off right away.

  “You imbeciles!” the commander cursed them. She hurled a multi-pronged mass of plasma at the advancing wolves.

  Bailey conjured a moving shield that swept across the hill’s base like a rolling wave. It caught the plasma bolts and twisted them aside, then passed onward so the werewolves could run freely into the fray. The Venatori leader pointed at one Were, causing him to explode into smoking pieces, but the others pounced on her and ripped her apart.

  The werewitch shouted again, “Only kill the Venatori! Only the ones in leather suits! We take the rest alive.”

  Russell grunted. “Does this mean we can fight now?”

  “Yes,” Bailey replied.

  Her brothers leapt, changing from two-legged to four-legged creatures in transit. Bailey blocked the clumsy attacks of their panicking adversaries as the Nordins piled into them, knocking some out and pinning others to the ground.

  Bailey then focused her magical wrath on the two remaining Venatori. One she had only to throw off-balance with a concussive blast, and the wolves from the hill finished her off.

  The other matched her in a duel of lightning, fire, and ice until the sorceress overexerted herself and needed to pause to refuel. By then, the wolves had subdued most of her allies, and bereft of help, she could not defend against so many foes at once. Bailey took her head off with a blade-thin sheet of concentrated kinetic energy.

  The only witches remaining were the small clusters on the neighbors’ roofs and a group out in the street on the other side of the house who’d held back from the main scuffle and only offered auxiliary channeling support.

  Bailey motioned to the ones at ground level. “Get them! But remember, spare the ones who aren’t Venatori.”

  Her wolves moved to obey her orders while she concentrated on the casters atop the houses. There were perhaps a dozen volunteers, along with three more Order overseers. She noticed that oddly, two of the Americans were men. The Venatori were overlooking their usual matriarchal imperative, then, to try to bring all of witchkind, male and female, to bear against lycanthropes.

  Chaos reigned. Bailey manipulated magic as though bailing water out of the ocean with the world’s biggest bucket, her body functioning on automatic as the forces of the arcane worked through her, using her tired physical form as a conduit. She barely comprehended the details.

  All at once, it was over. Every Venatori who’d assaulted her house lay dead. Despite Bailey’s best efforts to spare them, three of the other witches had also perished, but most still lived, injured, rendered senseless, or having surrendered.

  Four Weres had died. Bailey gave thanks that none of them were her brothers, but it pained her to lose any of her people.

  Roland was on the verge of collapse. Bailey put her arm under his shoulder and bore him toward the house while her wolves watched the prisoners.

  “Fuck,” he sputtered, rolling his head and blinking his eyes. “Was I always this weak? Did I catch a bug from a contaminated needle at the hospital or something?”

  She kissed his cheek as she led him indoors to the couch. “You were tortured half to death and probably convinced everyone, including yourself and the doctors, that you were recovering faster than nature intended. You’ve done enough. Sit the rest of this one out. It’s me they want, and I need to save the rest of the town.”

  She laid him down, gave his hand a final squeeze, and plunged back out onto the battlefield that had once been her yard.

  “Jacob. Kurt,” she called. “Stay here. Protect Roland, not to mention our house. Russell, come with me. I know you would anyway. We’re going down Main Street to collect the other Weres and join up with Sheriff Browne and anyone else willing to help, to launch a coordinated counterattack. We’ve got to at least hold them off ‘til the fuckin’ Agency shows up. They should be here already, but oh, well. Same strategy. Spare the dupes, but kill anyone wearing leather. Let’s go.”

  She put a hand on the shoulders of the eldest and youngest of her brothers, while the hulking shape of the middle followed her and her remaining allies protected their flanks. At her command, everyone in human form shifted, and a platoon of wolves bounded with desperate speed through the northwest subdivision toward the center of town.

  Flames were rising on Main Street.

  * * *

  Sheriff Browne refused to be caught like a rat in a trap again. Last time that had happened, Jurgensen had paid with his life, and he still couldn’t walk unsupported. The irony was that his station was meant to be secure, but it was designed and built to withstand criminals or rioters. Not an army of witches.

  So he’d posted men on the roof of the station and on the roofs of the surrounding buildings and had them keeping watch all night, rotating shifts and drilling them in the protocol of how to react when the Venatori’s sword stroke came.

  It happened just after dawn, five minutes after Browne had woken up on the cot he’d dragged into the station.

  Alarms went off, and men barked and shouted through walkie-talkies. Gunshots pierced the peaceful air, answered by bizarre whooshing and crackling sounds that could only be expulsions of magic. Feet stamped, bodies fell, car tires squealed, and wolves howled.

  Browne grabb
ed his rifle. Slinging it over his shoulder, he hobbled toward the ladder and started to climb. Despite his leg injury and the fact that he could stand to lose fifty or sixty pounds, he ascended, and the reports coming through his radio indicated that two of his men still held the station’s roof. He emerged to find them lying on their bellies, taking potshots into the center of the street. The ridiculous paper strips the Seattle kid had gifted them with last night were still intact around the edge of the building.

  One of the men looked over his shoulder. “Sheriff. They showed up in a big way. Multiple carloads, plus a bunch stepped out of portals and shit. I’d estimate two hundred storming the middle of town, maybe more, and others are bearing northwest. Probably going after Bailey.

  The sheriff scanned the village quickly before he dropped painfully to his knees and crawled over to join the men. The streets were swarming with hostile figures, and the sky blazed with magic. Mostly women, of course, but the Venatori seemed to have relaxed their hiring policies since maybe ten percent of the invading force was composed of men. On the plus side, the lackeys seemed to outnumber the Order members.

  Browne unslung his rifle and fired a trio of well-placed shots over the rim. Two witches by the hardware store dropped to the asphalt.

  During a lull in the noise, he asked, “What’s the word on the Men in Black? Where are the wolves?”

  “No word on the former,” the nearer deputy responded, “but the wolves are already doing their thing. Look.”

  Squinting over the edge of the roof, the sheriff saw brownish shapes dashing out of the woods or from alleys and side streets to fling themselves berserker-like into the lines of the casters. Others encircled the main formation and skirmished with or distracted them while their comrades ganged up on major targets, prioritizing the European officers in their strange leather uniforms.

  Browne shook his head and reloaded his rifle. “Not doing too badly so far, but you know the bitches have something up their sleeve. And with that many of them, if the Feds don’t show up pronto, we could–”