That was more power than she thought a regular person could summon up. Even pulling from the environment through a Mark, no were should be able to get all of that in a single go.

  But the man was a bane. He was, to some schools of thought, a battle mage. She had just assumed he relied on skill and enchanted weapons. Throwing around power like this felt like something she would have heard about.

  Luckily, the power was —in some ways—not too far from her own. There were common roots in nature and the organic, but something about it tasted strange. Not quite artificial, but definitely something that had been altered. Like the difference between a natural apple and one that had been selectively bred.The chance of her being detected by anyone other than Wade himself was low.

  To her shock, the power of a Were Enhancement cloaked Wade like a shroud. She had expected him to use it to negate the entire truck. But it folded around him in a sloppy wrap. The single enhancement he used to leap from the car was more than she would expect most mages to put in a full-on fireball. Yet he threw all that power around without a second thought.

  There was something else strange about it. Something about how the power acted a few inches past his skin. But everything happened in the blink of an eye, and she didn't have time to see what was giving her the impression of being off.

  Wade held her to him with one arm. Her right shoulder was tucked into his armpit, and the warm length of his arm arched behind the nape of her neck, dipped under her arm, and clasped the back of her legs. She felt compressed and all but glued to him, like a football player using his whole body to retain the ball. Wade grasped the truck's anchor point on the right side of the bed. He pulled to counter the centripetal force tilting bed. Then he planted both feet and leaped.

  They accelerated so fast that the leg not completely wrapped in Wade's arm was tugged out of the fetal position and extended completely behind them, flapping in the wind. Even with her own powers subtly reinforcing her, the G-force was so potent that both legs would have been forced to full extension if not for the callused hand gripping her hamstring and keeping her in a tight ball.

  They soared up with dizzying power and towards the center of the property. With her head tucked down, she saw how the force of Wade's jump had shoved half of their getaway car down. The entire back of the truck jumped as its shock absorbers rebounded.

  It swerved, started to fishtail, but somehow regained its traction and raced off.

  Hot damn. What did Kamora do for work? If it wasn't as some sort of race car driver, then her talents were wasted.

  Shilloh's thoughts lost cohesion immediately after that. Likely because it was hard to hear them over the sound of her internal screaming.

  The two of them were at least twenty or thirty feet in the air, and her hands scrabbled for something to hold. Though she would deny it to the day she died, she might—might—have reached up and hooked her nails along the side of Wade's mouth and nose.

  "Son of a succubus!" he shouted, ripping her hands away and summoning another surge of magic.

  Shilloh didn't fight his grip on her hands. But she did scream. Weres universally found the magic of negating far harder than enhancing. It took perceptivity, improvisation, acute control, and an exact understanding of how much power to spend.

  Wade had warned her that he wasn't the best at it. And, as such, she had been advised to not say anything so that she wouldn't bite through her tongue if they landed harder than expected.

  She screamed but—as a seasoned woman of adventure— maintained her tongue inside her teeth while simultaneously bellowing in bowel-emptying terror.

  That didn't sound like something to brag about, but was actually quite difficult.

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  The negation punched out from him, just not how she expected it. Rather than their speed tapering off like a braking car, the air just felt thicker. They decelerated and she found herself completely unable to intuit where they would land. The calculation her brain made kept jolting and needing to reboot as the laws of physics formed an unreliable connection with their experience of inertia and velocity. It was horribly disorienting.

  At the very end, she had a horrified certainty that they were going to crash land in a tench that was the perfect depth to catch Wade's lower legs and break his knees, but, somehow, the normal arc of physics was stymied a final time. They barely went over the trench and smashed into a freshly excavated pile of dirt and clay—presumably from the trenches digging—on its other side.

  Wade's boots punched into the dirt, and she could feel muscles like steel cords pressed against her butt. Then, his left knee buckled. They crumpled forward into a roll. He squeezed her, and the back of his shoulder smashed the ground. They skipped, caught on the lip of another trench, and wound up rolling across the ground in a series of inarticulate grunts.

  With a final wheeze, she came to a stop, lying on top of him with a knife handle jabbing into her ribs.

  She tried to get up, and one of her ankles screamed in protest

  "Fuck fuckedy fuck FUCK!"

  Wade slowly pushed himself to his feet, carefully testing each limb. "Seconded," he groaned.

  "Did I ask for sass!"

  "Did I ask to be yelled at by the bait?"

  With a heave, the dryad came to her feet, though she favored the injured leg. "I'm not bait!"

  The big Were smiled at her, already having positioned himself between the monsters' direction and her.

  He was not too much taller than Shilloh, but his loose shirt had been ripped along the back. There was a cut underneath, just starting to bleed. It began under his shoulder blade and went down along his ribs. Through the ruined shirt, she saw muscles move under his skin. Long, powerful shadows branched out from the smooth trench made by muscles along either side of his spine.

  From her angle, his cheekbones stood out, and the line of his jaw seemed more prominent above a stretch of thick neck. His eyes were pale ice—but not in the romantic blue-white of icicles in animated Christmas moves; these were shining glass distorting an overcast sky.

  "Not bait," he said, weirdly calm, almost playful despite the danger, "of course. A snack?"

  "Not a snack! Why are you being weird?"

  "Not a snack? A feast then." He smiled a bit wider, a touch of something wild shifting behind his eyes.

  Before it could transmute the restrained man into something else, he froze. The sound of their pursuers had just become audible. The wildness in his gaze was locked down by gunmetal resolve.

  "Get to the building. Cover your head and close your eyes." Two strong hands closed her shoulders, and he gave them a reassuring squeeze. "We made it. I've got it under control now."

  Maybe the immediacy of death was doing that thing where it made you want to feel alive but holy shit. She was feeling a sudden overwhelming urge to wrap both legs around his waist, steal a kiss, and bite on one of his lips until he growled.

  It was a desperate struggle, but she caged away all her intrusive thoughts and said the first thing that came to mind.

  "Shut up. Also, your Mom is a feast." Smooth Shilloh. Real smooth.

  Wade bellowed with laughter, head thrown back.

  "Oh shit. Whoa. Already working on the battle banter. I need to take you on more monster hunts. Jasque is usually grim and always tells me how many people will die if I mess up. This is way better."

  "Hell no," she said, not sure if she was snarling or smiling. "Get a sidekick and ruin someone else's ankle."

  "Rude."

  She started limping to the shack. She might have cursed. She may have said something about feasting on his Mom unless he shut up. It was hard to say. A lot was happening, and there was a ticking clock counting the seconds until a small hored of monsters arrived.

  Any other time, she would have called her destination a tetanus factory or murder shack. Today, it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

  Shilloh had just pulled open the door when she heard the sounds of branches breaking and knew the four pursuers had made it to the clearing.

  Instead of throwing herself through the door and covering her eyes, she turned to see Wade. Blood slowly spread across the back of his shirt as he faced all four of them. He let the sword in his hand dip, his fingers reaching out to dance across some invisible control panel activating the magical defenses.

  NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

  Piracy Notice: If you’re reading this anywhere other than Scribble Hub, Royal Road, or my Patreon then this is pirated. Please let me know by going to the Jeffrey Nix website’s contact area so I can get really annoyed, complain to my cat, have her tell me this never would have happened if I had just gone back for a Ph. D, send a takedown notice, and get back to writing.

  just go home and call it a finished. Wonder what the other 4.5 chapters in book 1 will be about? Probably just everyone getting therapy and deciding to study for accounting certifications so their lives are less dangerous.