The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  A purple bolt of lightning struck to his right. He rolled aside as dust and rocks and burning debris rained over him. After his vision cleared, he saw that the deputized citizen he’d just spoken to was gone, and so was that entire section of the roof. All that was left was a smoking boot.

  “Goddammit,” he grated, then turned and started shooting.

  On a more encouraging note, he saw a massive lifted truck—it belonged to one of the South Cliff boys if he recalled—barreling into town at a highly illegal speed. The witches, not expecting counterattack via vehicle, were caught off-guard and the truck plowed into their ranks, sending four or five of them scattering like bowling pins and crushing as many others.

  “Yeeeeehaw!” someone down below screamed. Two Venatori stepped out to blast the truck as it sped to the other side of Main Street, only for three wolves to ambush them and knock them into a wall. Then flames rose and bodies tangled and Browne could see no more.

  “Christ,” he whispered. “There isn’t even ‘law and order’ here anymore. This has turned into a goddamn guerilla war. Bailey, where are you, girl?”

  * * *

  On the street beneath the sheriff’s blasted roof, a group of the invaders near the rear separated from the main formation. They’d elected to perform harrying strikes against the rest of the town to draw the Weres’ defenses away from any type of unified counterassault. There were four of them, all volunteers, commanded by a prematurely balding male witch who wore narrow black spectacles.

  “Um,” he observed, “it looks like some of the yokels are taking refuge in that auto body shop up the hill. Let’s go make them uncomfortable. The Order said to pursue reprisals against local businesses if they resist.”

  “Okay,” his witches agreed. They weren’t overly bright, but they were skilled enough at flinging spells around.

  They marched up the street toward the shop, noting that the proprietor and employees had made a barricade out front consisting of cars and trucks parked end to end.

  The wizard scoffed. “They actually think that will stop us?”

  Drawing on the rudimentary coven-mind he’d established with his followers, he extended his hands and made a motion like opening a cabinet. Two of the cars in the middle of the barricade swung outward, pivoting on a single wheel each and leaving a nice wide space for the quartet to advance through.

  As soon as the witches did, though, they smelled gasoline and saw a guy in a dirty baseball cap duck out and toss a flaming rag onto the ground.

  Eyes widened. “Oh, shit!” one of the females exclaimed. A burning trail ran along the ground with startling speed and nearly engulfed them all. The woman who’d cried out stumbled back and tripped over the hood of a car, clonking her head on the ground and then lying motionless.

  The leader suppressed the flames with a blast of cold, wet vapor while the other two moved around him and collaboratively tossed a sonic boom into the center of the shop. Windows shattered, and concrete and plaster cracked. The roof buckled.

  Then a giant pile of tires that had been heaped atop the building out of sight spilled down toward the trio. The wizard rolled out of the way, but the heavy rubber rings smashed into his subordinates, breaking one’s leg and knocking her out, and burying the other so she lay with her arms trapped under her. Lacking the skill to perform spells without hand motions, she was helpless.

  Enraged, the male witch advanced into the repair bay, where the short, stout man in the cap who’d ignited the gas trail stood.

  Gunney waved. “We were gonna push those tires down on you guys ourselves, like throwing boulders off a medieval battlement in a siege or whatnot, but looks like you beat us to it. Good job.”

  His reply came in the form of a combined bolt of flame and concentrated sound. The old mechanic raised a hubcap, holding it like a shield, which had a couple of strips of paper inscribed with runes glued to the front. The blast vanished harmlessly.

  “So,” the bespectacled wizard sneered, deciding against another direct attack, “you’re the hick grease monkey type who likes vehicles. I bet they’re like your children. How about...”

  The man suddenly pivoted and threw a rippling fireball with a semisolid core of heated rock at a red pickup in the far corner of the lot. The projectile smashed through the window and buried itself under the steering compartment, melting its way into the engine as flames engulfed the frame. They quickly reached the fuel tank.

  The air crackled and a small shockwave went across the lot as the truck exploded, turning end over end and coming to rest as a burning, smoky husk at the other end of the gravel.

  “See?” said the wizard, glaring at the mechanic. “That’s what happens when you get in our way.”

  Gunney burst out laughing, his hands clamping over his belly. “Oh, my God! You don’t understand. That’s Bob Holmwell’s truck. I hate that dickhead. Oh, man.” He paused to catch his breath. “Hell, I was hoping he’d suffer some kinda collateral damage during this shitshow.”

  The sorcerer’s face scrunched in indignation, and he turned toward Gunney’s pickup. “Then we’ll just have to–”

  The mechanic whacked him in the back of the head with a rusty muffler. Making a strange gobbling noise, the man pitched into a pile of tires and lay unconscious in a heap among them.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Gunney muttered. “Whatever you say, pal. You’d think I’d never seen a truck explode before.”

  * * *

  “Fuck.” Townsend stood, glowering at the light show and fighting going on in the little town in the valley below them. “They started the party without us. Was hoping the Order would take longer to get their shit together. Move in immediately!”

  His lieutenants barked, “Yes, sir!” and scrambled to their positions. Walkie-talkies crackled as someone told the helicopters to deploy and engage. The few men not already sitting in their fleet of armored trucks and Jeeps piled back in, then the entire Northwestern complement of the Agency’s might descended upon Greenhearth.

  In Townsend’s opinion, the helicopters flew in too soon. By attacking ahead of the ground force, they announced their arrival before a coordinated strike could smash the witches into the dirt. But with the whole middle of the town going up in flames and what looked like hundreds of spellcasters swarming around, there was no time to waste. The defenders would be overwhelmed without immediate relief.

  Townsend rode in one of the largest and most powerful vehicles they possessed—a repurposed Armored Personnel Carrier they’d requisitioned from the military. Two men manned a rotating turret on top, armed with mounted arcanoplasm cannons.

  As the enemy came within range, Townsend realized they had a problem. He’d issued a recommendation to the sheriff to order all locals to stay in their homes once fighting broke out. That way, anyone on the streets, even if dressed in civvies, could be assumed to be a Venatori lackey.

  But it looked like the sheriff’s order had been ignored. Clusters of people struggled all over, and moving at speed, the agents couldn’t tell the witches from the normal people.

  “Dammit,” he cursed.

  Through the comm system linking the entire fleet, he ordered, “Concentrate our fire mainly on the obvious Venatori. Avoid lethal force against anyone who appears to be a civilian unless they threaten us. I repeat, only shoot to kill the Venatori or active hostiles.”

  Then the clusterfuck began. He had eighty men with him, spread among two dozen vehicles, and with the proven effectiveness of their arcanoplasm throwers and static-field grenades, they wrought massive havoc on the Order’s troops. But the town had descended into disorganized street-to-street skirmishing as the Venatori rained fire and death on any buildings or people they could.

  “Sir,” a junior agent said over the comm, “Weres coming in from the west.”

  A fleet of wolves stormed the right flank of the sorceresses’ battalion. Six or seven of them died almost immediately in the brutal counterattack, but they dropped as many witches, and with that section of
the formation trapped between Weres and agents, it was quickly ground to a pulp.

  In the sky, the Agency’s choppers swept overhead again, magenta beams streaking down to burn through the enemy. To Townsend’s fury, they seemed to be all but ignoring his order to avoid non-Venatori casualties and were simply blasting into any group that looked like it was casting spells.

  But before an entire aggregation of plainclothes witches could be incinerated, someone blocked the arcanoplasm beams with a magical shield.

  “Wait!” a voice cried. “Stop! This doesn’t have to happen. You’re being lied to, and I can prove it!”

  Townsend blinked. He leaned out the side of his vehicle, despite the danger, to get a better look.

  “It’s Bailey.”

  * * *

  Bailey raised her arms as the violence stalled around her; she magnified her voice so it echoed over the valley.

  “Where are the witches who joined me? Tell them! Tell them that I never attacked Roland. I’m dating him, for fuck’s sake. The Venatori kidnapped him and set the whole thing up to turn you against me! Don’t do this, or everyone is going to die!”

  She thought she saw the quartet of sorceresses who’d defected to their side over by the sheriff’s station, but it was difficult to say with the streets thronged with people and choked with smoking wreckage.

  Someone, presumably a Venatori overseer, took a cheap shot at her with a curved lightning bolt, but the werewitch caught it and tossed it back into the sky. As had happened at her house, it looked like some of the volunteers were half-convinced, but the fighting would start again at any minute. It was still raging in the far corners of town.

  Then another voice spoke, magnified like hers, and a slender figure appeared on the roof of the bank.

  “Hi, remember me?” said Roland’s voice. “You might remember me as the guy in the scry-video tied to the post in the barn.”

  Bailey’s eyes bulged. “Roland! Dammit!” She choked on her words. She’d wanted to tell him he shouldn’t be here, given his weakened condition, but that would just make it look like he was about to validate the Venatori’s account while she was trying to suppress him from speaking.

  “I wanted to say,” he went on, his voice filling the streets, “that yes, Bailey and I are an item, and I definitely wasn’t relying on our friends in the leather jumpsuits to save me from my girlfriend. More like the other way around. That was setup, and any witch who’s here because she thinks Bailey is out to get us has been duped. The real enemy is the Venatori, who started annihilating Weres a month ago and are now in PR damage-control mode.”

  The werewitch expected the Order’s troops to try to assassinate him at any moment, but they didn’t, perhaps because they didn’t want to be seen attacking a fellow member of witchkind.

  With the doubt and confusion that Roland’s presence had sowed, the invading force’s unity cracked asunder while the Venatori screamed at their conscripts to attack. Instead, the Weres and agents pressed their advantage.

  “Spare the regular witches!” Bailey ordered as her allies tore into the casters. “Only kill the Venatori!”

  The Order’s pawns scattered or surrendered en masse, and with an abrupt rush of triumph, Bailey realized they were going to win. The cult’s plan had failed.

  However, they had a backup. A barely-perceptible noise, supersonic and riding vibrations of the arcane as much as mortal sound, rippled through the air. Bailey felt it more than she heard it, and it occurred to her that it was an alarm that could reach through time and space.

  Portals opened throughout the town. Leather-clad witches streamed out, hurling blasts of death at the swarming Weres, at the Agency’s trucks and choppers, and at the town’s deputies and defensive militia. But not, Bailey saw, at the masses of non-Order sorcerers and sorceresses who’d given up.

  They’re still trying to work the angle that they’re the protectors of witchkind, Bailey surmised. We have no choice but to stomp them so we can debrief their patsies later. But the number of the Venatori in the fight just damn near doubled.

  She was about to plunge into the melee when Roland drifted down to her side from his perch.

  “What,” she shouted, “the hell do you think you’re doing risking yourself like this?”

  “Oh,” he quipped, “helping you. And I’m about to take another risk that will finish the whole battle.”

  He looked terrible; his wounds were raw again, as though his recovery were backtracking, and there were dark circles under his eyes. She was about to forbid him or beg him if she had to, but he spoke first.

  “Trust me. It’s chancy, but we’re all risking ourselves anyway. Time to fight fire with fire. And if this doesn’t work, I love you. Remember that.”

  Before she could stop him, he’d dashed into the middle of the roiling violence along Main Street, augmenting his speed through magic, shoving combatants aside by surrounding himself with kinetic force.

  He was making a beeline toward an objective, and Bailey saw what it was—the apparent overall commander of the Venatori assault, who was none other than the stocky Eastern European battleax who’d presided over his torture at the barn.

  Bailey ran behind him, fending off blasts from enraged witches and returning fire when she could, but never slowing down.

  Roland shouted at the Hungarian witch and waved his arms, and the werewitch grasped that he was casting a spell. It was subtle and beyond her immediate comprehension.

  “Wait!” she cried out. “Roland, what are you doing?”

  “Hey!” he bellowed, heedless of her, and the Hungarian caught sight of him, her face twisted in a cruel mask of anger and frustrated malevolence. “We have unfinished business, you and I!”

  Then Bailey understood why he was being so reckless and what sort of magic he’d just worked. He was casting a scry-broadcast of his own. Many of the lay-sorceresses along the street had put hands to their heads as though they were seeing or hearing things from afar, and undoubtedly there were other witches across America and the world who were tuning in as well.

  Madame Pataky stepped toward him. “Yes,” she snarled, “we do. But it is finished now.”

  A spiraling bolt of heated, accelerated particles leapt from the witch’s hands with such speed that it seemed to streak down the entire road in a nanosecond.

  But Bailey saw only part of it, and in that small snapshot, her world ended. The part she saw went straight through Roland’s torso, raising a misting spray of his blood, then sent him toppling to the asphalt.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Screams went around the square as the wizard fell, and some of them formed coherent words. “Why’d she do that? He’s one of us!” queried a female voice with an American accent.

  Bailey was in motion, closing the distance between her and Roland faster than she would have thought possible. Madame Pataky fired another blast, but she deflected it with an offhand motion.

  Three other non-Order witches knelt over the wizard’s body. His mouth was moving, so he wasn’t dead yet.

  Bailey stalled for a split second. “Help him!” she cried to the women, then she was darting toward the perpetrator.

  The battle slowed, then melted away as she drove toward the Hungarian, unable to think of anything except stopping the Venatori’s commander from hurting Roland more or hurting anyone else ever again. Weres moved in to corral the volunteer casters who’d surrendered. The Agency’s men vaporized those witches who still fought.

  Madame Pataky’s heavy face was set in an arrogant expression of triumph. She crossed her hands in front of her chest, and Bailey was assailed by six diagonal streams of plasma from multiple directions. She leapt over two and blocked the rest, and then she was within killing distance.

  The commander hit her with a sonic-concussive force that drove the werewitch back, her legs flopping and her ears popping, but she maintained a shield even while stunned so that Pataky’s lightning strike dissipated before it could fry her.

 
; “You think,” the Venatori Madame shouted, “you are so smart and brave. But everything you have done here will be meaningless when you die like the traitor wizard.”

  Bailey landed on her feet and tried to encase the sorceress in ice. Pataky stopped it before it reached her flesh, but it created enough of a delay for her to send her mind out into the cosmic depths, seeking any advice the shamanic spirits might give her.

  As her Weres shifted back to human form and unaffiliated witches begged for mercy or apologized for their mistakes, one simple sentence declared itself in Bailey’s mind.

  You are all of us.

  At first, she worried that it was too vague to be of any use, but then it gave her an idea.

  The Venatori commander fired another bolt of accelerated matter. Bailey flash-stepped aside, wincing as it put a hole through a sandwich shop’s walls, and then thought of how she’d succeeded at shifting into a smaller wolf form, one which would be more maneuverable and do less damage to her clothing.

  If I can do that, she thought, I can do other things, too.

  She changed into a wolf, forcing the process to happen in the space of a heartbeat, leapt with augmented speed, changed back, then shifted again.

  Madame Pataky spun in a circle, seeking a target. She tried simply blanketing the whole area around her with flames, but Bailey jumped over them, and rather than give her position away with a localized shield, summoned freezing rain to descend on the same broad swath of street.

  The werewitch was back in motion, cloaking herself, moving at incredible speed, and shifting back and forth as rapidly as she could. The Hungarian’s head whipped around in confusion and rising fear. It was as though she were being assaulted by an entire pack of phantom werewolves, their images flashing around her.

  “Stop,” she grated. “No! Stand and fight.”