"No," Shilloh said, barely managing not to shout. But Wade still heard the venom in her tone, and his head swayed back as if struck.

  "Why? It would be a thin nick on the arm, not dragging a sword across your hand or anything dumb like that."

  So. Many. Thoughts.

  The first was an overwhelming trauma-fueled refusal to let anyone use her blood or body for anything. Then, there was the more mundane fear of being found out or causing a plague of murderous cryptos.

  Back when she was first relocated, they told her something about lying. Do not lie if she did not have to. The more lies, the more likely she was to lose track and get caught up in one.

  In a pique of brilliant eloquence, she said, "No."

  Wade waited for more.

  He would have a long wait.

  "I don't get it. It's a little cut and could help us even the playing field."

  He was making a decent point, but, on principle, she refused to build a horde of cryptos dedicated to hunting her down and killing her. Too many dryads went that way.

  "No."

  "Why not, though? This could save lives."

  "We can't use my blood," she growled. "You just need to trust me."

  His mouth pursed in a sour frown, "There are five chasing us, and we can't let you bleed?"

  "Yes!"

  They glared at each other. Hazel clashing with stormy gray. But he just clenched his jaw and said, "Fine. But this will make everything harder. I'm not as confident about picking them off this way, so we’ll have to handle all of them at the safe house."

  "Why not just throw the magic cut-y thing at them?"

  "You don't get it; they have huge leaps and a ranged attack. I need to bait the leap, and hopefully, the ranges line up so I can jump out of the car and get close to just one of them. Without knowing exactly how big the center is, I need to be very precise, and I'm no Navy SEAL; moving vehicles are not good for precision."

  All the danger had brought her magic closer to the surface than usual. Every terror-driven instinct screamed to reach out and grab power, to meet fear with might. She kept flicking between horrible sadness and rage at being put in this position.

  "Then why are you accepting everything! You're being far too trusting about this. You usually have a stick up your ass about saving people at all costs and self-sacrifices; why aren't you pushing?"

  "Do you want me to?"

  "Don't avoid my question."

  He arced an eyebrow at her, "Turn about is fair play. Just be ready to run and take cover once we get there. And remember, cover your eyes."

  Then he started tapping away at his own phone before leaning his head into the cab and giving further directions.

  ~~~

  The drive was quick, bumpy, and subjectively endless.

  By the time they got to the site, the adrenaline had faded. She wanted to curl up in a ball while some competent parental figure handled everything. But she also wanted to punch the universe right in the dick for making her put up with all this bullshit. It was a familiar set of emotions that usually meant she hadn't had coffee and the sun wasn't up yet. But the intensity of the feelings had never been so strong before.

  The car rolled over an invisible boundary, trailing monsters behind it, and she knew she had entered the territory of whatever being had originally caught her attention. And bloody hell, the area looked like the Blightbanes had been going to war.

  The trees around them were largely broken. Pines smashed, shattered trunks dripping sap, and once green boughs turned brown. Craters in the ground where the loam had been blown away revealed veins of classic Carolina clay: orange like a kid's baseball field with red streaks.

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  The dirt trail they jostled along was traversable, but only barely. After only five or ten minutes without asphalt roads, they came to a horrible realization: the limb stealers were faster in the forest.

  A fourth had joined their parade, almost broadsiding the car and knocking them off the road. If not for Nick somehow sensing it and warning them, it would have been their death.

  As it was, they careened down the trail, going dangerously fast and building up a heap of small injuries to the car. Ones that got worse as the dirt trail slowed them and the occasional untrimmed branch shattered on the windshield.

  That was when the creatures started using trees as anchor points to launch themselves. They could swing from trees with their many limbs and use their spears as grappling hooks.

  Wade made a few attempts to use the massive crescents of cutting force from his sword, but, true to his predictions, the effects were minimal. The monsters were moving in three dimensions and often leaped out of the way of the relatively slow attacks. And, the few times he did clip a creature, it took off leaves and mauled some stolen limbs without doing meaningful damage.

  When it was time to dive out of the truck, Shilloh was almost happy. They could not maintain the lead much longer, and she had been forcing herself not to look at how much gas was left in the tank. Whatever dream she'd cooked up of driving in a circle and maybe changing cars until help arrived had long since died.

  Around a bend in the road was a shabby-looking hunting shack in the middle of the battle-scarred ground. It was more of a shed than a house. It had a rickety door and green metal for the roof, which was barely visible through the detritus on top.

  Shilloh sent out her senses, trying to feel for all the promised magical defenses. The only things that came clearly to her were impressions of the nearby wildlife and a feeling of overwhelming murderous capability. Something had shed blood to make this place their own. Though blood involuntarily given, that creature had Marked the space around them with a will and intent capable of even greater heights of violence.

  She tried to tell Wade, but he waved her away. He only had eyes for the four creatures, hands on his sword. He had been cautious with his occasional potshots so that he didn't fell any trees that would fall across the road and stop them from getting back up.

  The bumps and minor side-to-side adjustments almost threw Shilloh from the truck bed. But each time Wade's hand closed on a shoulder or forearm and helped keep her grounded. One time, he ducked a tree limb only to be rocketed into the air by an unseen bump so she could grip the back of his pants and return the favor.

  He was less appreciative about the save, briefly redirecting his glare from the cryptos to her.

  "But better a wedgie than being smeared on the ground; that's what Grandma always said."

  "What?"

  "Yeah," she said, mouth running in a desperate bid to break the tension that was making her chest feel like it never fully expanded when she inhaled, "I thought it was a poop joke until she told me about dangling from a helicopter to set a rock elemental on fire."

  The look on his face was priceless. Shilloh was still cackling with all the force of her shell-shocked nerves when it finally came time for them to jump.

  Kamora gunned the engine. Nick screamed. Birch put both hands on the console, and the Dryad traded a look with Wade.

  The trail leading from the edge of the woods to the shack was a straight shot through the trees. But as soon as you crossed into the open field, it became a horribly winding path. Boulders, trenches, and spikes made it impossible to drive a vehicle straight to the lodging. Kamora was forced to stand on the brakes as soon as they crossed the edges of the tree line.

  It happened just as Wade had planned it. As soon as they entered the field, they needed to make a sharp turn. The truck could take a different trail leading west before looping back to town. Shilloh and Wade would use the turn as an opportunity to bail out.

  But it was a sharp turn, even for a vehicle not moving at speed. Brakes squealed, suspension struggled. The car made horrible sounds of distress as they lost all the speed built up during the last straight away.

  Everyone was pulled towards the driver's side as Kamora somehow kept the tail from spinning out.

  Strong arms wrapped around her shoulders. Shilloh did as instructed and curled herself into a small ball wrapped around the sheathed knife she had been clutching like a good luck talisman. Magic surged, but not her magic.

  He had insisted that he had practiced the bail-out before. But as the (probably stolen) truck shuddered under the G-force bearing down on it, she couldn't help but feel like her body was hurtling toward death.

  The terrible writhing nausea of fear surged before igniting and turning into the fiery-churning a dragon must feel in its stomach before spitting fire.

  Fuck them. Fuck them all. She was going to live and see her dreams done.

  She drew in endurance from the stones, resilience from the trees that survived hurricanes, and strength to keep her neck from losing the battle to whiplash.

  Someone might sense it, especially Nick, who had noticed the ambushing crypto, but she was going to live.

  Then Wade's power pushed to even greater heights. Ones that absolutely screamed through the ether.

  All of her concerns about being detected fell away. Jesus Christ. What was he going to do with all of that?

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