Chapter 43
February in Vermont isn’t really any warmer than January, but I had already learned a great deal about dealing with winter cold.
Jenks covered some as part of our survival training, but because weres and witches have supernatural protections from the elements, he didn’t dwell on it for more than a week of classes.
I ended up learning more about it from the university’s hiking club, which, in addition to organizing hikes, also set up guest lecturers about various wilderness-related topics.
Vesta decided the meetings and lectures were redundant in her case and so I went by myself in my tall, skinny, nerdy glamour.
I used the name Wally for this persona, and it was easy to slip into all manner of clubs and meetings completely unnoticed, which appealed to my hunter side.
“Remember, wet kills in cold weather.” The upperclassman running the hikers’ meeting finished his presentation on hypothermia and emergency shelters.
“If we had the Steward’s daughter with us, we wouldn’t need to worry,” a girl on my left side said to her friend.
“Yeah, she warmed that town right up,” her friend said.
“Of course, according to Casselman, the boyfriend might be hot enough to keep you warm,” the first one said with a giggle.
“Excuse me, are you talking about Lauren Casselman, the reporter?” I asked.
“Yeah, she had an interview with the Steward’s daughter and her beloved,” one of them confirmed. “Just came out on her site.”
“Thanks,” I said, grabbing my tablet. Vesta hadn’t said anything about the reporter.
The girls ignored me and continued their conversation while I searched for Lauren Casselman. Actually, I just turned the thing on and her site popped right up. Ah, Omega. Of course.
The Future Looks Bright
I just sat down with Vesta Maeve Reynolds-O’Carroll and Craig Blackmore in a diner in the middle of Montana during one of the biggest blizzards in modern times.
Like all of you, I saw the abbreviated interview that Brystol Chatterjee had with them, and I saw the footage of their lunch in Lake Placid, New York.
None of that prepared me for the experience of sitting down with them.
The daughter of the Steward of Earth and the White Werewolf is shockingly beautiful, a literal force of nature like a massive wave or an overpowering wind hitting you in the face.
And yet she’s almost blissfully unaware of it.
Accounted as the second most powerful witch on Earth while simultaneously a deadly werewolf, she is ridiculously down to Earth, pun intended.
Newly revealed to the world at the age of eighteen, she has already bonded to the person she has identified as her beloved.
For those of you who don’t follow werewolf mating traditions, a beloved is the equivalent of the Darkkin Chosen—a literal soulmate, a rare and precious thing that many weres search for their whole lives.
Hers showed up at her dorm on her second day of college.
He is one of the first generation of non-Earthborn individuals to roam the cosmos, a son of a witch, born on Golf Alpha One-One-Seven.
He is handsome and rugged, muscled from his planet’s high gravity, but unassuming and yet confident.
Male witches are both rare and accounted weak.
I’ve heard the terms foppish and self-indulgent used to describe them and while I don’t agree that they are all like that, well, Craig Blackmore is something altogether different.
Witty and extremely observant, he smiles easily, cracks dad jokes continually, but underneath it all is this feeling of something from the primitive part of the mind, an instinct of danger.
Sure, we saw him fell a world-class MMA fighter with a punch, but there is something more at play here than that.
I knew that Vesta was powerful—she had literally just called a fire elemental, a being of liquid magma, to warm a town in desperate need, and then was asked to deal with a supernatural killer so dangerous that an anonymous source in the sheriff’s department told me that it worried the God Hammer himself—until he learned that Craig was there.
The worry ended like a switch had been flipped.
They were friendly yet wary—with good reason, I might add. Their first brush with media was not kind to them. Yet they took a chance. I hope they take more.
At that point, Omega suddenly spoke, telling them that they were needed on a call. That’s when it got interesting. Vesta, who at this point hadn’t eaten much, suddenly dove into her food in a hurry.
“We’re going to have to leave in a bit,” Craig said to me.
“You have a car?” I asked him because I hadn’t seen any vehicle other than the sheriff’s when I pulled in.
“Brought her brother’s whip,” Craig said, pointing outside. A Bludgeon-class war drone hovered over the parking lot. It hadn’t been there a second ago.
“Brother?” I asked. I had never heard of a brother.
“Hyperintelligent, super nerdy, ultimate tech bro, ultimate finance bro, intergalactic badass?” he said. Vesta almost choked on her food.
“Omega?” I asked.
“That’s him. We used his ride ’cause I couldn’t get a bush buggy through the gate portal and Vesta just ports everywhere. I gotta bum rides off them.”
“You use a lot of old slang,” I said.
“Well, everything I know about Earth, and I know a lot…” he said as Vesta almost snorted a gulp of water out her nose, “I learned from video and movies. All the new stuff sucks. Real Partners of Whiskey Tango and that kind of crap.”
“You’re just jealous they don’t have a Bushwives of Greenacres,” Vesta said, her mouth and air passages now clear.
“They tried, but the production crew couldn’t deal with the gravity. Swollen ankles? Boo hoo.”
“I’m so sorry, Lauren. He doesn’t get out much,” Vesta apologized.
I glanced at the sheriff, and she was watching us like a hawk. Watching him like a hawk. A shiver of fear went down my spine.
“Ah, you call Omega brother?” I asked Vesta.
“Because I am her brother,” Omega said from my own nano. “If her father is my father, then she is my sister.”
“See,” Craig said as I reeled from the surreal sentence, the hair on my neck standing up.
“What’s the matter?” Vesta asked me.
“She’s afraid—of me, mostly. Also maybe weirded out by the idea that your brother is the silicon kid,” Craig said, somehow reading my mind.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” Vesta said to me. “He’s just a space punk.”
“Cosmic punk maybe, but not space,” he said, picking up his fork and eyeing her last bites of chicken parm.
“Craig is correct. He is not a space anything, but he does hail from another planet, so he might qualify as an intergalactic vagabond,” Omega said.
“Oh, look who’s getting snarky lately,” Craig said, stabbing for the chicken. Vesta’s hand blurred too fast to see, yet somehow the male witch ended up with the morsel on his fork.
“Are you really afraid of this?” Vesta said, waving a hand at her beloved boyfriend. He went to eat the chicken, but the small bite of meat lifted off the fork and hovered over to her mouth.
“Don’t chide her, Vee. Her instincts are telling her that I’m dangerous, and instincts should be honed, not blunted,” he said with an agreeable nod my way. Vesta looked at him, then me, frowning a bit sadly.
“Um, it’s not that…” I started to say, but he waved me off.
“Millions of years of natural selection have resulted in you,” he said, leaning back.
“Your brain is constantly scanning for danger even when you aren’t aware of any.
It picks up tiny, hidden cues that the conscious mind misses.
Yours has picked up that something is not quite right about me, that while I smile and laugh, there is an edge to me that smells of a potential for violence, maybe.
It is right. I am dangerous. Not to you…
in this moment or even in general. But faced with a threat to me or particularly to her, I will respond.
Now, what your brain does not know, cannot know, is that I’m working on those hair triggers.
Retraining them, as it were. See, I too am a product of the same evolution, but my early, formative years were on a frontier planet, neck deep in deadly predators.
A place where hesitation kills. But I’m not there now, so I am reprogramming them.
Still hair trigger, but maybe not quite so… final.”
“Wow, the full lecture,” Vesta said to him. Changing her voice to imitate a condescending male, she started to pontificate. “The human species has weakened over time in this modern age, and the result is soft, squishy, maladapted incompetent individuals.”
“I don’t sound like that and I never said those words,” he complained.
“We’re boring you. And I’m afraid we do have to go catch a call, but you have been very easygoing on us and we thank you,” Vesta said to me.
He sighed a huge sigh and then turned to me with a broad smile. Hard to remember the danger thing when he flashes those white teeth. Say what you want, but Vesta did not choose ugly. “Thank you and sorry for being… well, me. I’ll pay the check.”
He stood up, reaching for his nano bracelet, but the sheriff was standing almost as fast.
“The town has got your tab,” she said. That threw him off.
He blinked and froze, but Vesta put a hand on his arm and thanked the sheriff.
They left, still chattering between themselves and occasionally Omega, the AI who calls her sister.
They stepped casually into the war drone, and it lifted smoothly and silently, up into the swirling snow.
I commented on what an interesting couple they were to the sheriff. She snorted. “Killed a wendigo like it was a cockroach. Interesting indeed.”
The next morning when I awoke, the news was out that the storm was over and somehow the avalanche-blocked pass into town was completely clear.
I drove through that pass, and the wall of snow was twenty feet high, glassed over with a thick layer of crystal-clear ice.
Nobody knew how it got like that, but actually, we all did know.
A couple of college kids did it. Freshmen who were likely already back in their dorm in Vermont.
While most kids their age are looking for a party, they traveled across the country to warm up a town in danger and to kill off a supernatural monster that makes Chris Gordon wary. The Steward is going nowhere soon, but when and if he does, the next gen are looking pretty good.
The article ended and I sat for a minute thinking about how she had perceived us, the impression we left.
“Pretty good, right?” the closest of the two girls asked me.
“Yeah. Interesting stuff.”
“And they go here,” she said. “Take classes right on this campus.”
“Kid in my dorm says that Craig is in his Econ class,” the other girl said. “He uses some kind of illusion to move around. How cool is that?”
“You’re saying he could be in this very building and we wouldn’t know it?” I asked.
“Exactly. Makes you think, right?” the first girl said as she packed up her stuff.
“Well, it makes me think that cool stuff aside, they’re just people,” I said.
They both turned to me, faces going blank. Uh-oh.
“What?” they asked.
“They’re people. Eat, sleep, burp, and fart people.”
Now they looked aghast. I said what?
“They’re superhumans,” girl one said.
“And she’s a witch werewolf hybrid.”
“Yes, the cool stuff. But I mean, they still are from base stock people and act like people and do people things.”
“That’s absurd,” girl two said.
“Did the guy you know who has one of them in his Econ class say if starlight shone out his ass, or was he kinda normal?”
“You’re being crude intentionally,” girl one said.
“No, just humanizing them instead of dehumanizing them.”
“Farting?” girl two asked, disgusted.
I tickled Vesta once and she farted by accident. Hilarious. Human.
“I bet you two even do it, right?”
“You’re disgusting. Come on, Beth,” girl one said.
Beth gave me a glare and walked out.
“Struck out, huh?” a voice said. I turned and found the presenter looking at me with a knowing grin.
“They were talking about some people, and I tried to humanize those people and they didn’t like it,” I said.
“The famous freshmen, right?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“I saw her about a week ago. I was near the Arcane building, and she was entering it with some other girls. Georgous.”
“Yup, but my point was that they’re still people. With people kind of problems.”
“That they solve with magic,” he said.
“Some. Some not.”
He looked at me, head tilted. “You know them,” he said. Not a question.
“I do.”
“You go to Arcane?”
“I do.”
“Werewolf?” he asked, tentative.
“No. Witch stock,” I said.
“Why attend this talk? Can’t you just witch stuff up if you get into trouble?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not. I can get a fire going always, but I need tourniquets for stopping blood, need splints if someone breaks a leg, and I’m not super familiar with winter survival, so your talk was good.”
“From the South?”
“From warmer than here. I understand hypothermia, but not frostbite, below zero survival, and northern alpine shelter building.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding. Then he thought of something. “Say, Golf Alpha doesn’t have winter, does it?”
“Has a wet, cold season but no snow, no freezing, icy weather. Forty Fahrenheit is about the coldest we get,” I said.
He froze up at the word we. Looked at me carefully, my skinny arms in particular. “So your friends use illusions?”
“They do,” I admitted.
“Could look like anyone?”
“Pretty much.”
“Hmm. Well, it was nice to meet you. Hope you got something out of my talk.”
“I sure did,” I said.