The Were Witch Complete Series Omnibus

by Renée Jaggér

  Townsend fired his plasma gun from the rear of the group toward flankers, and Velasquez and Park commanded their squads closer to the front. They caught the remaining demigods in crossfires of burning plasma, which proved too much even for semi-divine beings.

  Sigfred maintained his men’s formation as they slowly advanced, their shields battering aside attackers and their arrows and lances making short work of them thereafter.

  But the enemy still outnumbered them, and it wasn’t over yet.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bailey swung her sword again and again in the delirium of combat. As bodies fell around her, she caught sight of the enemy commander at the same moment that a stray chunk of rock giant smote her to the ground.

  Carl pointed his index finger at the tight formation of Asgardian soldiers, pantomiming the firing of a handgun, and a white-hot explosion like the detonation of a plasma grenade bloomed amidst them. Dead, burning troops fell in all directions, and their smoking weapons and armor clattered to the ground.

  Bailey hurled herself back to her feet, her brain seething with rage. “You son of a bitch!” she howled, tossing Thor’s hammer at him.

  The scion’s eyes widened as he took note of the deadly projectile, and he jumped upward and back, shielding himself from the hammer’s profusion of lightning bolts, though the weapon sought him out despite his efforts to weave away from it.

  Finally he encased it in a sphere of water that shorted out its electrical functions, then froze the water and used a gravity wave to blast it into a side alley.

  By then, Bailey was on top of him. She kicked him in the stomach before he could react to her.

  He grunted loudly and flew back ten feet. She moved in on him with her sword poised, though he recovered quicker than she’d have preferred. He lashed at her with his mace, halting the momentum of her charge. The bludgeon knocked aside her sword, though its blade half-melted the mace, rendering it useless for further attacks.

  He tackled her, forcing her back against a wall and raising his fist to smash her face in. She was faster, ducking under the blow and jabbing him hard in the kidneys, then kicking him in the back of the knee. He stumbled away, narrowly dodging a swipe of her sword.

  Carl picked up a fallen spear by one of the dead Asgardians and swung it at the girl like a quarterstaff. She fought defensively against his first couple swipes, then realized he was slower and weaker than she. He had not powered himself up as she had. He’d been too busy accompanying Fenris on his errands to betray and murder the gods.

  “You,” he asserted, “have no idea what’s in store for you. There’s a lot more going on than simply fighting me.”

  Bailey caught the spear’s shaft in her left hand and split it in two with her sword. Then she brought the pommel of her weapon hard into his face, cracking his jaw and cheekbone and knocking him over.

  She told him, “Yeah, and you’ve never been dead, so you have no idea what’s in store for you, either.”

  She was about to finish the scion off when she saw a mixture of blue and golden light taking shape behind him. She hesitated.

  Carl stood up, oblivious to the illumination at his back. “What,” he grated, though the damage to his bloodied face made speaking difficult, “you want this to be a fair fight, is that it? You could have killed me.”

  “No,” Bailey retorted, looking at him coldly. “I figured I’d let someone else do the deed.”

  Carl spun at the same instant that Balder’s rapier pierced his lower right side and came out of his upper left chest. He spat blood as he looked the god of beauty in the face.

  Balder’s eyes burned with subtle yet intense anger. “You should not have betrayed us, Carl,” he intoned in his soft, pleasant voice. “I treated you as well and fairly as any valued apprentice. Not so with Fenris, who is not as smart as he likes to think. In truth, he was the one who was fooled. You killed none of us. We live on.”

  With a fast, sharp motion, the deity twisted the blade, then pulled it free while throwing Carl to the ground. The scion’s face showed total shock as he stiffened and lay still.

  Balder frowned, looking at the corpse. “I am the god of innocence,” he observed. “I…perhaps should not have done that, but he shot me with a cursed arrow while hiding. Among other things.”

  Bailey shrugged. “I’d call it fair, then. Come on, though. It will be good for troop morale to see you up and around.”

  * * *

  Fenris stood before the throne of Odin, supervising the ritual. They’d begun the ceremonial magic that would open the way to the next stage of reality, leaving the old world behind in ruins.

  Six of his half-god trainees had volunteered to be chained up and used as conduits. They writhed on the ground under the stresses of the dark and potent arcane energies being employed.

  “Fear not,” he assured them. “When the ordeal is over, you will share in the power that is made available by the cracking asunder of Asgard.”

  For the moment, though, their role was to function as grounding agents. The forces of darkness the wolf-father was required to channel created surges of excess and harmful magic that could have consumed and killed him. His chained disciples absorbed enough of it to allow Fenris to continue his incantation.

  He raised his arms, speaking words so old that the gods didn’t know from where or when they’d originated. Visions flashed before his eyes, a primordial string of universes being born and then dying. One door closed. Another opened.

  Still the perilous energies swirled and grew in intensity. The throne room was charged with them. The act of diverting the penumbra surges failed to kill his acolytes since they were all part-divine beings, but they would be weak and depleted of magic for quite some time.

  But they ought not be necessary. There were only two things left to do.

  A pair of disciples, the only ones left in the chamber who weren’t acting as conduits, approached Fenris as he reached the ritual’s climax. As per his instructions, they lowered him to his knees, wrapped him in chains near the center of the floor atop the central sigil of the occult pattern he’d drawn earlier and beside the crude sacrificial altar, and put a gag over his mouth.

  Thus, at the moment the buildup of dark energies reached its peak, ready to be released with the final offering, he took on the role of the hapless prisoner.

  His acolytes faded back to stand against the walls and wait. Fenris stared at the chamber’s doorway, which was still open, thanks to Tyr’s intrusion. The trap was ready to be sprung.

  The girl would come, he knew. He’d trained her himself. In a way, he was proud of her.

  * * *

  Bailey paused around the corner, leaning against the corridor’s wall in the brief lull and examining the handful of allies she’d brought with her into the keep.

  Roland was there, of course. So was Russell, always the most ferocious fighter among her brothers. Agent Park, who was probably the best man with a gun amongst the feds. A squad of eight Asgardian troops allocated by Sigfred, and of all people, Shannon DiGrezza, who still pretended to look annoyed at “having” to be here, but who had thus far proven her desire to make amends.

  “Okay,” Bailey whispered, as the sounds of battle raged outside, “he’s going to be in the throne room. From what Loki said, that’s where the ritual to end the world has to be conducted. It’s down this hall and around another corner. There might be more resistance...”

  Shannon made a sharp “uh” sound in her throat. “Great. Why am I here, anyway?”

  Roland covered his mouth to stifle a bark of laughter. “You alone can answer that question, I believe.”

  “Shut up, Roland,” she snapped.

  Russell glared at her to silence her, and Bailey waved a hand in Roland’s face to encourage him to do likewise. Park smirked but didn’t comment.

  They’d had to separate from the rest of their allies due to an unexpected wrinkle in the plan. After overcoming Fenris’ forces in the palace courtyard, a portal
had opened in the sky above a high tower and more monsters had streamed in, firing down at them. Others had charged down to harass the Earthling-Asgardian task force.

  Balder had told Bailey to go on ahead with a small, hand-picked group while he assumed command of the rest and kept the monstrous host busy.

  The werewitch had chosen her team, breached the doors of the keep, and moved in for what she knew would be the last thing they had to do.

  Mere seconds after they moved out with Bailey out in front, a force of about a dozen foes appeared around the corner. “Get them!” the girl barked, trusting Roland to shield her as she summoned waves of fire and ice within the hall’s narrow confines.

  The new opposition consisted of more treacherous demigod-trainees as well as a smattering of hybrid monsters unlike anything Bailey had seen before. One took the form of a bronze-furred wolf and charged them, barking and drooling madly.

  The demigods blocked Bailey’s magical attacks as the wolf advanced. It bowled past her with surprising speed and made for Roland.

  The wizard had been focused on defending against a swirl of plasma spears, and his eyes bulged as the beast pounced at him. Then a fuchsia blast of energy knocked it into the wall.

  Roland sighed in relief. “Thanks,” he told Shannon, who looked away, then he conjured a sword-like protrusion of silver. The wolf-creature pounced at him again, but this time he fell back and skewered it through the throat, killing it and hurling it aside.

  One of the hybrid monsters, a cross between a frost troll and a lizard, bounded ahead and tangled with Russell, but the towering young Were slammed its head into the ceiling and then ripped its guts out.

  Park laid down a barrage of plasma fireballs that blew through the trainees’ arcane shield and melted one of them into a mass of atoms. The others panicked as Bailey sprang into their midst, but it was short-lived since they all died within five seconds.

  One of the half-gods tried to flee into the throne room, its entryway oddly doorless. Bailey threw her sword and it hit him in the back, launching him ahead and pinning him against the far wall, where he hung lifeless.

  Her friends moved up behind her, but as she stepped over the threshold into the chamber, an opaque blackish-purple barrier slammed shut behind her, blocking them off.

  Shit, Bailey thought.

  She had to trust that they’d be okay. Her business lay ahead.

  Fenris knelt in the middle of the floor, chained and gagged, an unexpectedly pitiful sight. Eight humanoid figures in hooded robes hovered around the periphery of the room, but they made no move to speak or act, and Bailey let them be for now. The room pulsed and throbbed with a vague, dim light and a subsonic buzzing that the girl recognized as an incredible well of divine power.

  She crept to the side of the wolf-father, her erstwhile mentor, forgetting that she no longer had her sword, and looked at him.

  What the hell? This has to be a trick, but Loki and Balder never mentioned anything about it.

  “Fenris,” she said, “are you...okay?”

  The wolf-god groaned and raised his head. His dark eyes gleamed faintly within his hood. Bailey reached out and removed the gag from his mouth.

  “Bailey,” he began, “free me from these shackles. The worst of what I feared has come to pass.”

  Grimacing, she broke the chains with her bare hands, and he slowly rose to his feet, moving as though he were weak and exhausted from long imprisonment.

  She asked him, “What happened?”

  He shook his head, the motion slow and regretful. “The other gods have betrayed me, and all of us.” He flexed his hands. “They feel we’ve grown too unruly and are insufficiently grateful to them for their wise leadership.”

  The bitterness was thick in his tone. “They’ve secretly stirred up all this trouble, intending to sacrifice me according to the ancient prophecy of Ragnarök and bring about the end of the world. Their long lives have driven them mad, and they’d rather end it all than deal with the imperfections of their followers. I tried to raise a few who might fight against them, but they cruelly destroyed them with their mercenary army of traitors and monsters.”

  “Goddamn!” Bailey exclaimed. “I had no idea.”

  Keeping up the act was difficult, mostly in that she could scarcely believe he would lie in such a shameless fashion, but also because it was so hard to believe. It rekindled both her doubt in her course of action and her hope that he might be innocent after all.

  What if Loki was the one who set us up? He’s a devious prankster and was always kind of a supercilious prick, to be honest. But there’s the holographic footage. The confessions. I know they were real. I accepted it, and I’m kidding myself by trying to deny it. Dammit, Fenris, why did you do this? I wanted to—

  The wolf-father cut off her ruminations with his coughed-out exhortation. “Please, help me. We may be able to stop it if we act without delay.”

  “Okay,” she responded. “How?”

  He glanced around the chamber, which seemed darker than Bailey remembered it. “We must enact a counter-ritual together. Two gods will split the difference of the unleashed energies; neither of us will perish, and that will confound the prophecy. Stand there.” He gestured to the spot on the central red sigil where he’d been chained a moment ago.

  The girl took her place as instructed.

  “Good.” Fenris stood beside her. “We can ward each other for protection if any of the remaining deities try to intervene.”

  Remaining? Bailey thought. He’s aware, then, that some of them are dead. Or so he thinks.

  The wolf-god raised his big, callused hands. “Stand still and wait. Thank you, Bailey. Thank you for everything.”

  As he unleashed his magic upon her, there was a tiny, barely-perceptible change in his expression—a cruel and savage twist at the corner of his mouth.

  The goddess of Weres and witches caught the surge of his power, the amalgamation of the dark, destructive energies he’d built up here. She stopped it, blocked it, precluded it. Red and blue sparks and flames erupted between them as her divine might resisted his.

  “Thank you,” she yelled back, “for taking your place, you mean? For putting up with more lies than I can count? For dying so you can do every fucking thing you just accused everyone else of doing?”

  The magical impact of her resistance was such that Fenris stumbled back a step. He blinked and gawked, and as the magic threatened to spiral out of control, he diverted it in the form of a dark-purplish bolt that struck the chamber’s wall near the ceiling and produced smoke and debris from the impact.

  Bailey stepped forward. “I know everything, Fenris, and I mean everything. You were the one who set this up. You only trained me, raised me up, freed me, so you could put me up as a sacrifice and get to be king of whatever comes after the end of days. Carl helped you, and he’s dead for his trouble. The monsters you duped were defeated. And there’s something else I know that you don’t: you can’t win.”

  Fenris recovered from his initial shock and stood up straight, towering over her, his eyes lost in the darkness beneath his hood. His mouth was once again grim and unfeeling.

  “Perhaps you do know, but you were born a mortal, and you will do what every mortal must. Die.”

  The man was gone, and the beast attacked.

  A monster the size of a house bore down on the girl, its fur bristling and its fangs and claws moving in for the kill. Its eyes glimmered with psychotic fury. The low animal cunning it had relied upon was cast aside and only the creature remained, reverting to its natural tendency toward pure, mindless destruction.

  The girl shifted to meet him. She grew instantly to the same size as her opponent, confronting him for the first time as a beast of matched and equivalent power. Their forelegs lashed at one another; their foaming jaws snapped at eye and throat and belly. Awful snarls and howls filled the chamber.

  As they locked together, wrestling and thrashing, ripping and clawing, another battle took place co
nterminously with the physical one. Their magical wills clashed, striving against one another, with neither able to win a clear advantage.

  Levels of arcane and divine force that could have sundered or repaired whole worlds smote and crackled. Fenris attacked the werewitch with all the wild energies he possessed and the primordial powers of destruction he’d invoked.

  The girl retaliated with the knowledge and might of the other gods and with the things she’d learned from them or from the many peoples of the universe. Everything from the subtle elemental lore of the frost trolls to Coyote’s instruction in the finer arts of hand-to-hand combat returned to aid her.

  The noise and furor of their battle echoed and shook the walls. It was likely obvious in its terrible wrath to anyone in the floating palace.

  Fenris growled in both physical and mental forms, “Aid me!”

  The eight disciples advanced from the walls brandishing daggers and swords, ready to wound and distract Bailey to ensure their master’s victory, but their magic had been drained, and they were slow.

  Columns of light came down through the ceiling and struck places on the floor ahead of where the acolytes moved, and the gods of the council appeared in the flesh.

  The disciples gasped. Fenris, catching sight of them out of the corner of his bulging yellow eyes, howled in rage and bit down on Bailey’s neck as she kicked his legs and groin and clawed his chest.

  The deities easily overpowered the weakened demigods, binding them with powerful magic and thrusting them aside.

  The two giant beasts, both gods of wolves, separated and circled each other, their teeth and claws bloody.

  Like I said, Bailey asserted, speaking with her mind rather than her voice, I had a surprise waiting. Loki and I set you up, returning the favor. You and Carl killed their illusions, not the real things. They all live, even Thor. He and I sent the World Serpent back to hell. Destiny itself has been changed, and the end of the world is canceled.