Chapter 15 – Grievances

“There are definitely vampires headed for Winut,” Roy Wilton said.

Alpha Chester grunted. There was a reason that he’d had his people keeping an eye on the Minneapolis nest ever since their first play. It had been obvious that they were not intending to follow the accords, and that GAR wasn’t going to do anything about it. The only surprising thing about the vampire’s actions was that they had waited until now.

“No formal demands, no communication at all. Sounds familiar, really.” Chester shook his head. “Get Jasper,” he ordered, taking out his phone. “I suspect we’ll have the opportunity to use our new acquisition sooner than I thought.”

“Alpha,” Roy said, and left. Chester dialed up Arthur Langley, hearing the phone ring a few times before Arthur picked up.

“We’ve spotted more vampires coming your way,” Chester said without any preamble. “I suspect they’re a little bit piqued since our mutual friend remains evasive.”

“What do you have in mind?” Arthur asked. “Going to come here to camp out?”

“Just swap for a bit,” Chester agreed. “I’ll have Jasper ferry everyone around. You don’t have to worry; we’ll ensure they don’t do anything to Winut. I suspect they’re just after us. Or rather, you.” Chester knew vampires, and how vindictive they were. Winut and the Langleys were the closest things to the redoubtable Mister Brown that Lavigne could hurt.

Somehow the story about how Clara had been taken from the motel had leaked. Unofficially, of course, and figuring out the origin had driven Arthur up the wall, but Chester was pretty sure nobody had actually betrayed them. It was just hard to keep things from fae when they decided they really wanted to snoop.

That meant everyone knew, unofficially, that Mr. Brown ⁠– in addition to whatever compatriots he might have ⁠– had started their spree on Clara’s behalf. For better or worse, mostly worse, that meant there were a lot of people interested in Winut. Unofficially. Already several powerful fae had dropped by to visit their very, very distant relatives in hopes of getting some kind of line on the Ghost.

It really hadn’t taken much foresight to put the other half of the black-market teleport pad in the Winut compound. As he’d been warned, shifters couldn’t actually use them, not like the GAR ones, but a mage could. Or, a crippled mage and a number of mana batteries.

They did still need to use the tokens that temporarily suppressed their resistance to magic, which was annoying, but at least they were going from safehouse to safehouse. That forced vulnerability made using the GAR teleporters untenable for most Alphas except under the most dire of circumstances. Not that any shifter particularly liked that requirement.

“I’ll get everyone together,” Arthur assured him. “We’ll be ready in twenty minutes.”

“Expect me in twenty, then,” Chester said, and hung up. Roy returned with Jasper a few moments later, the tired-eyed mage blinking at Chester.

“Get the Wolfpack together,” he told Roy. “We’ll be leaving in twenty minutes.” Then Chester glanced at Jasper and hitched a thumb in the direction of one particular saferoom. “We’re going to need transportation for a few groups.”

“Yes, sir,” Jasper said, without any enthusiasm. Not that he ever showed any, though he had seemed slightly more alive controlling the teleportation platforms, even if he couldn’t fuel them.

Chester rose and went to find his mate to tell her what was going on. It wasn’t hard; he merely had to follow the scent of fresh-baked cookies. It was a good thing his mate liked baking, because he wasn’t sure how he’d satisfy the Wolfpack’s sweet tooth otherwise.

“Hey, love,” he said, poking his head into the kitchen. “Lavigne is making a move on the Langleys. We’ll be trading places with them for the next few hours, maybe a day. Did you want to come with, or stay here and play host?”

“Hmm.” Lisa pursed her lips. She was almost as deadly as Chester was, able to draw on the same amount of pack magic, but didn’t enjoy fighting all that much. “I’ll stay here. It’s always nice to see the Langleys. Shame it’s always when something awful is happening.”

“We’ll have to have a meetup when all this is done,” Chester said, leaning into the kitchen a little further to steal a kiss before heading back down to the basement. The six other members of the Wolfpack were there, half of them already shifted into their War Forms, with Jasper sitting by the teleport plate watching it charge.

He had Roy give them the briefing, though there wasn’t that much to it. They just knew that a number of vampires were being convoyed out of Minneapolis and they were headed in the direction of Winut. At this point it was obvious what the destination was; they hadn’t even tried to hide it. But then, they didn’t need to. It wasn’t like it was illegal for them to drive around.

When the time rolled around, the seven of them crowded onto the teleportation plate, only barely fitting, and used their tokens as Jasper sent them off to Winut. The experience was not as good as with the GAR gates — there was a definite jolt, a shock that took a tiny bit of shifter healing to deal with, but nothing that would really threaten even a mundane. As promised, Arthur Langley was waiting on the other side, with most of his immediate family.

“Alpha,” Arthur said, the pack bonds snapping and humming as the two Alphas met. After a moment, Arthur inclined his head, and the magic settled.

“Arthur,” Chester said. “My home is open to you.” Then he smiled. “Lisa’s baking cookies.”

“Well, we sure can’t miss those,” Arthur chuckled. “Come on, everyone.”

The Wolfpack handed off their tokens to the shifters heading the other way, and Chester texted Jasper to bring them through. It took three trips, with Jasper sending the tokens by themselves, but most of the Winut pack went through. The only exceptions were those who weren’t staying at the compound, and had other jobs or housing throughout Winut.

That did mean closing down a number of businesses for the day, but that wasn’t without precedent. The Langley clan was known to have big family gatherings on occasion. For those who knew their true nature, it was even less of a surprise.

The Langley compound had some defenses, mostly in the nature of reinforced walls and doors, since they had to deal with the occasional spats between supernaturals. Even outside of the allowed challenges, Chester and his pack didn’t really trust GAR to protect their interests. Under the circumstances, though, neither Chester nor the rest of his Wolfpack really needed them. They were planning to ambush rather than defend.

The evening turned on toward night as they settled themselves in and waited. All of them were in war-form, crouched and readied with the patience of the hunter. The stars had been out for several hours when a series of figures silently ghosted across the lawn and arranged themselves at windows and doors. Chester watched coldly from his post by the front door, waiting until the vampire suddenly wrenched the wood-veneer steel off its hinges.

Chester pulled on the magic of the pack bond, accelerating his strength and speed far beyond mortal limits. The wall cracked behind him, steel denting from the force of his leap as he tackled the vampire, three-inch claws punching through supernatural flesh. He recognized the face of Zagrev, contorted in pain and fury, but unable to struggle against the power of the Midwest Alpha.

“You!” Zagrev managed to get out, just before Chester’s jaws closed around his head. Shifter magic pushed against vampire magic as he tore off Zagrev’s head, spitting the foul thing out and tossing the rest of the corpse back through the door. There were other noises from the house, banging and splintering and the cries of vampire and shifter alike as combat was joined and subsequently finished.

Through the pack bonds he could tell that the only injury of note was from Tessa, who’d broken her hand on the skull of one of the vamps. She’d not hear the end of that one. Chester fed her extra magic to accelerate the healing process, looking around at the mess he’d made. It was going to take some fixing.

The entire ambush had lasted two seconds at the outside, and had deprived Lavigne of his right-hand man, at the very least. It had been so very simple, but only because they could get there without anyone knowing. Both GAR and Lavigne would have been alerted if Chester had left the compound, let alone gone to Winut, but with the black-market teleportation nobody was any the wiser. They wouldn’t know that Lavigne’s vampires had taken on a wolf rather than a puppy.

He’d have to see if he could get more.

***

When Callum actually made the portal enchantment, he found out why it took so much mana. Or rather, he found that he’d been massively underestimating how much mana teleports took. It was a matter of inefficiencies; it took a lot of ambient mana funneled through a converter into the spatial vis enchantments to mimic what vis normally did. A single teleport took five minutes to charge up in the States, but it only took a few seconds down at his Mexico place. Taking that instantaneous cost and turning it into a constant one meant that yes, indeed, large portals were hard to support.

Even small ones weren’t really possible if both sides were in the US. He’d need to either site them closer to a portal world, or have a feeder portal like GAR used. If he was handling them himself, he could hold both sides open regardless of the mana level, so it wasn’t like it was useless in other places. Just slower. It also let him push his perceptions through the portal, so he could teleport things or people, which was potentially better than making an enormous teleportation plate.

Little portal anchors would be easier to hide than a plate, but they would take longer to charge enough to open initially and he’d have to spend more vis to keep them open. Considering his limited amount of enchanting material, he’d have to decide on his approach sooner rather than later. For the moment he needed at least two pairs of portals, one for the generator and one for general testing, something that was a long and tedious process. Even if he didn’t have much else to do, it was an effort.

On the other hand, at least he didn’t have to reinvent the wheel when it came to his portal power device. People had done extensive hypothetical calculations online, for a variety of options. There were some crazy designs out there, but he really wanted something with essentially no maintenance.

Unfortunately, it required moving parts. It wasn’t like a solar panel where it could all be solid state. He was exploiting gravity, and that meant something, somewhere was falling. In the end he decided to just go with a water column and a small turbine generator. All that stuff he could buy practically off the shelf, which made putting together a perpetual motion machine that much easier.

All of that equipment came from metal shops and their associates, who were rapidly becoming his best friends. There was a lot of overlap among skilled tradesman and finding someone who could provide him a small generator and a storage bank was really not that hard. Of course, normally the setup for a hydro turbine involved a lot of engineering to deal with the water flow, but since Callum was cheating he could manage it fairly easily himself.

The only thing he really needed customized was a couple stands for the portal pair, some adjustable tripod kind of thing so he could lock the two sections of pipe together. He tested the final apparatus in the back yard of the trailer house, out of sight of the road. The pipe was tall enough to project over the top of the trailer anyway, but since there was nobody around he felt like a quick run-through wouldn’t hurt.

Despite the column being infinite, the water had only the length of the pipe as the head before passing through the turbine, so to some extent that was the total amount of energy he could extract from it. Except, of course, that the turbine didn’t stop the water completely dead, so there was some residual carryover until all the forces balanced. He was actually a little worried that the eternal water pipe might overspeed and break the apparatus, but when he finished testing it, he found he was worried for nothing. Water wasn’t frictionless and neither was the turbine, so while the energy was infinite it didn’t happen all at once.

He filled it by forming a portal between the pipe and the bottom of a barrel full of industrial-purified water, letting water in and air out at the same time. The goal was to have no air at all, just water, and he was pretty sure he could get very close. When he did it for real he’d have to be far more careful to ensure there weren’t air bubbles continually falling upward, but for the test it did well enough. Watching it charge the capacitor pack was surreal and quietly amazing, even if he had to hold the portal pair open himself rather than letting the ambient mana do it.

Then he had to disassemble it all because there was no need for it at the trailer. It’d have to come with him to the cave, to be set up once the bunker house was done. There were instructions for maintenance and lubrication that he’d have to deal with, but only eventually. Industrial equipment was pretty hardy.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

Flush with success, he decided he’d call up Lucy and see how she was getting on. He’d been a little busy with shuttling things back and forth for the past few days and while the folks at the machine shop were nice enough, they were still strangers. Laboring in complete isolation, he found he tended to get a lot more stressed and twitchy than things really called for.

“Hey, big man!” Lucy said, picking up right away. That was a rarity of late, though it was the weekend, and wearing on toward Thanksgiving. “Anything shaking down there?”

“Actually a bit, yeah. Nothing exciting like the vacation trips I’ve been on, but a few personal projects are coming along.” He was never sure exactly how much he should tell her. Obviously she knew his real identity and some of his capabilities, but at the same time the more he told her the more she could give away. Likely not willingly, but two people couldn’t keep a secret.

“Ooh? Anything fun? Anything sexy?”