"If we just walk into a bar with those two," said the grey-eyed bane, pointing at her animal friends as they prepared for the day's search," then I think we'll end up being in an old-timey joke."

  Shilloh grunted at him and waved her tumbler of coffee in a way that could have meant anything, though, in this situation, it meant, 'fuck right off until I stop being pissed about the sun rising.'

  Everyone understood it, even Jasque.

  The morning was cold, and she had a thick flannel over a thinner flannel, over a regular tee shirt, and that over a sports bra. Did any of the colors match? No. Would she sweeten her coffee with the blood of anyone who tried to comment on her fashion sense? Absolutely.

  The night before last, Shilloh hadn't been insulted when Kora had called out her fashion. She had been in work clothes, and the annoying tit had looked like someone microwaved a hotdog in clingy tin foil till it burst its casing.

  Barbs like that tended to dig in over time, though. Some part of her wanted to put on nice-looking clothes, maybe a little lip gloss, and prove to herself that she wasn't frumpy.

  Just not in the morning. And not around the two banes. It was very tempting to stay angry at them. But Agnes had made a good point, and Shilloh Methuselah was no coward to shirk from a hard things that was right. She'd give Wade a fair chance. Maybe he had good motives but had put his priorities in the wrong order. That she might be able to forgive.

  Luckily, the two men were distracted by her animal friends and didn't notice the icy way she looked at them.

  "A bobcat and a barn owl walk into a bar," Wade muttered before walking back to his car and packing up a folder full of maps and papers.

  Fraulein had decided to join them after disappearing for thirty hours. She had also decided to be very large and spotted in a way that was vaguely reminiscent of a cheetah. It was a bold fashion choice, but Shilloh's confidence in judging outfits was unusually shaky at the moment.

  Papa had decided to tag along as well. He looked about the same as he always did. A barn owl with a white belly and lovely golden tan highlights that drifted off the edges of his brown back.

  The animals watched her patiently, waiting for entertainment. Or snacks: it was hard to tell.

  Before too long, her coffee had kicked in, and they moved into the forest. The only difference from their first day was that Wade started by showing her the locations they wanted to search. That required a brief talk about route planning before they set off.

  The area was beautiful. It was mostly pines with a green that was both vivid emerald and the deep, soothing green she imagined being in a dark academia office.

  Crisp air, the smell of sap, and the small signs of life around them cooled her temper. Each tuft of fur, tellingly broken glass, nibbled leaf, and brilliant patch of predator-flattened grass that accounted for the thermals of a nearby river moving scent grounded her in nature.

  Along the route, she maintained her exact same ratio of calling out one in eight of the unregistered Were territories they went through. In fact, she got so occupied keeping track of the overall ratio that she almost missed the first piece of truly corrupted forest.

  "Wait," she called.

  They were passing a small creek with lovely reeds and long-limbed trees when she sensed it.

  "It's here."

  The two banes exchanged a glance. Jasque was wearing jeans, a turtle neck, and a backpack, while Wade was decked out in the same sort of kit as before. His pants were a different color, and he had on a loose, long-sleeved SPF shirt: the sort that was supposed to look boxy and ugly. But on him, it fit well. It was tight across the shoulders and chest. As he lifted his arms, bicep and tricep subtly emerged to make taunt planes under the fabric, like a sea monster moving beneath a small swell of water. The rest of the shirt billowed around his stomach in a way that forced her imagination to visualize the long, hidden stretches of flat muscle.

  It was a nice picture to visualize.

  She did not like that she liked that picture. She wanted to not like anything until she had talked with him and squared things away.

  Still, there were some parts of being terminally single that were harder to ignore. All you could do was let them pass by you without giving it too much weight.

  "The energy is different today," she said. As much to distract herself as for any other reason.

  "What do you mean?" asked Jasque.

  "It's hard to explain. I'm not sure there are words for it. It's just a sort of magic thing."

  Truth was, she absolutely had words for it, but not ones she thought her persona would be able to say.

  This claiming that had bothered her was magical. And though everyone claimed things with their own unique nuance, the general idea was to tell the world that you either owned or were part of something larger. If you did that convincingly enough, your influence over the thing you claimed grew.

  She was no expert, but strong examples of the magic let you have extra endurance. Maybe even a minimal amount of telekinesis within your range. Some claimed to light fires with their mind. Sounded fake to her, but she hadn't looked too much into claiming as a field.

  This particular example felt overbearing, titanous, and larger than life. It claimed the space and everything in it. Frequently, it branched off to layer its control in magically strange ways. Not only did it proclaim its power over everything in the space, but also the specific tree, its branches, and the sap inside of it.

  Shilloh had not initially noticed all those layers because the spell hadn't been on her frequency. Where her magic was liquid mercy shining with gauzy rainbow highlights, this was purely theoretical with no body or texture. It was magic of the head, not the hearth. Hard to feel in an intuitive way. And her magic was very intuitive. The two didn't intersect easily.

  Plus, it hadn't cut any existing ties in a way that would leave noticeable damage. It had dug into the ground like a mycelial network and spread, taking without changing. The trees still belong to the forest, the earth was still of the earth. But, if the will behind this network called, it would briefly supersede all other claims, including the ones reality dictated.

  That was what she had originally sensed. The problem was that today, it had changed frequencies.

  What cues she had learned to look for were gone. It was the damnedest thing.

  She had learned to ignore the white noise, the him of life and magic. Only the occasional break in the pattern. A tiny point here, another drum lit off slightly off-beat while playing its own song. Over the day, she had got better and better at picking it out.

  Then it had changed. Today, the 'rhythm' was right. But the drum's sound was a little off. It was metal and military rather than soft, like the sound of real leather on a hand drum.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Obviously, there was more to it than that, but any more details would make the metaphor fail.

  More importantly, she had noticed something a regular human could not sense. To describe it would be to out herself.

  So, as they pushed her for details, she remained vague.

  "I don't know what to say. It's like that thing about trying to describe green to a person with no sight. My gut says it's wrong, but in a way that's invisible but recognizable," she lied. "All I can say is that it's not pushing against the same things it was yesterday, but it is still jostling like a big guy on a too-full bus."

  Wade frowned, "You're really sensitive to magic, aren't you?"

  Shilloh shrugged, "Not in a useful way. I've always thought I might have a half-formed wild talent. One with lots of limitations and not much oomph."

  "Okay," he said, chewing the inside of his lip," do you think you might have missed anything now that it's changed? Do we need to circle back?"

  She sighed, "Yeah, sorry. But I think we do. I'll try not to get tunnel vision this time."

  And so it went. They trekked in circles, and she found two new varieties of the same exact thing.

  "This is nuts," she said, crouched down with her fingers touching dirt. "Magic like this is strong. Probably really complicated, too. How could anything have this many signatures? Just doing this should be hard enough."

  She had meant the question to be rhetorical, but Wade answered anyway. "I have a theory."

  "Feel free to share. Cause this is sort of freaking me out."

  "If I'm right, then this is something that's rarely seen. More wisdom from old timers than books stuff."

  She nodded and waved him on. In both her lives, she had believed that there were multiple ways to learn and know something, so this didn't bother her.

  "Alright," he continued, "sometimes a hive or collective has the equivalent of a wild talent. They get a spell or ability, right? But each individual in the collective will have enough uniqueness in their soul, or body, or whatever that a slightly different signature shows up for the same phenomena."

  "Yup," Jasque agreed, stepping forward with an unsettling quietness. "I knew this one vet, grizzled beard, scarred up old dude with tattoos. He had seen a Bone Terror that had grown large enough to have drones made out of bird remains. Anyway, it had this really weird ability to spit compounds so basic that they burned like acid."

  "Holy shit."

  "Yeah, but the point is, each of these drones did it a little different. It was all sticky, like wet baking soda, but the drones spit different colors. The old dude swore to me that one of them even smelled like his mother's favorite detergent brand. But," Jasque smiled, "I'm pretty sure the man had never touched detergent in his life."

  Jasque went on a charming and charismatic tirade about the awfulness of the man's smell. The creativity he used in describing the scent should have been hilarious. But it felt practiced to Shilloh. A bit too polished in the way he paused for build-up and always used the perfect word.

  She waited until he was done, not having laughed, and turned to Wade, "You agree?"

  "About stinky Stan? Never met him, but I definitely smelled him."

  She scowled, "Come on. Game face, boys. I'm sure this is a very funny routine that gets you all sorts of chuckles at the bar, but let's focus. Does this look like a hive-mind situation?"

  They stared at her, taken aback by her calling them out on their song and dance. Then Wade gave a pained smile. He was opening his mouth to speak—probably to deny that their silly story was rehearsed—but Jasque interrupted. His face was much less animated than during the tale.

  "It's fine, Wade. She is perceptive and doesn't need hand-holding. Yes, Shilloh. It looks like a collective. We started suspecting it when we saw how much area was claimed. If this magic is as strong as you say, then it's either one being that's profoundly out of our league or a big group of bite-sized cryptos. This degree of variation points to the latter option."

  Papa, who had ditched them an hour ago, alighted on a nearby branch and looked off to the side. Shilloh ignored the owl, but Wade wouldn't.

  "Hey, not to be presumptuous, but it seems like your familiar wants us to go where he's pointing."

  "Ignore him," she said, not bothering to say that he wasn't her familiar.

  "Aww," Jasque said, giving a much more genuine, knife-edged grin, "but what if Timmy is stuck down a well."

  "Fine, then you follow him. I don't trust that dick."

  No one knew how to respond. She quietly hoped that Jasque would follow Papa and be led to a field full of drake poop or something. Then, she would at least have time to talk to Wade without an audience.

  She was still pissed at him, and she was only getting more annoyed with the pair. It was just something about the situation that didn't feel right. Again, it was all instinct, but the performative vibe made every word out of their mouths feel condescending.

  "No, thank you." Jasque finally said. "I don't think I will."

  Her less generous side wanted to call him a good boy for listening to instructions, but she took the generous route. Her grandma had always said that politeness cost you nothing and could buy kingdoms.

  "He's a little asshole," she said, tapping her backpack and signaling Papa to perch there. "I have no idea what his deal is, but the little dude loves messing with people. That's how he got his name."

  "Papa?" Wade asked.

  "Yup. Back when I was fixing my place up, he would fly by and eat all the rodents my car scared away. He started dropping some by me. Which I thought was him being kind and trying to feed me. Then his aim improved, and he started dropping them on top of me," she said, reaching back to scratch at the barn owl in question as he alighted on the back of her pack.

  "Before long, he was grabbing tools, stealing food, and the whole nine yards. The more pissed I got, and the harder I tried to set up traps or drive him off, the more he stuck around. So, eventually, I decided to trick him back. I started saying 'thank you'. I built him a big old birdhouse and brought him food like I want him to stay around."

  "And that worked?"

  "Yes, now I'm too boring, and he mostly does his own thing. Occasionally, he'll follow me around, though."

  "Then why did you bring him?"

  "I didn't. He jumped in my car to mess with me, and I just rolled with it. There's no other way to handle him. He'll get bored and fly off soon."

  Wade looked at the owl, and a lopsided grin spread across his face. With the dappled sunlight through the canopy and beautiful surroundings, he looked amazing—not in a sexy, panty-dropper way. Amazing in a more substantial, 'real person' way. It was the difference between a packet of candy from the store versus a dense buttery, carb-heavy meal that would warm your belly and keep you full the whole night.

  Goddam her and the heat in her stomach too. When had her hormones decided to start acting up? She thought the bite-ability thing had been just been sleep deprivation.

  "And how did this all end up with the name 'Papa?'"

  "Well," she said, dropping her eyes and trying to remember that she was pissed off at the bane, "he's a real motherfucker. But he's part of the family. So, what's a member of the family who's allowed to be a mother fucker?"

  It took a second to process, but as soon as it did, Wade stopped walking and started laughing. It was a very full, deep laugh—not booming or obnoxious, but one that threw his head back and made his body shake.

  "Oh, wow," he said, beaming at Papa, "I get it. Your dad is the one who's usually allowed to fuck your mother. So a sanctioned motherfucker is usually your—"

  "Papa," the two said in unison. She smiled, and he laughed again.

  It just came out of her then. No tact or waiting for the right moment. For that brief second of shared laughter, Wade felt like a friend she had known for a long time. Long enough that you were allowed to cut to the chase where it would otherwise be rude.

  "Wade, I wanted to talk about two days ago. I have very strong feelings about how to be ethical when you're in nature. I don't think I'm wrong, but I also think I might have jumped right to biting your head off without really hearing your side. I'm sorry about that. My temper is a problem I have been working on, and it was unfair of me to lose control of it in such an aggressive, holier-than-thou way meant to hurt you."

  Then Wade did something she did not expect. He froze halfway through, stepping over a rotted tree trunk. After a second of visibly gathering himself, he turned around and marched right up to her.

  He kept the usual sort of thoughtless confidence about him, the same burning intensity in his eyes. The one that sometimes glimmered behind humor and sometimes shot out like a pneumatic spike meant to kill animals in a charnel house before butchering them. But he looked in her eyes, and she could see that he was struggling with his words.

  "I owe you an apology too. I think I had some good points. And I do think a bane in the field has some responsibilities that are different from a regular hiker or hunter." Here he paused, his eyes flickering to the ground before he forced them back up to hers." But still, I also think I was wrong. I'm just not sure exactly why."

  Hark yonder screaming bell, was that her bullshit alarm ringing, or had she just developed tinnitus?

  "You're apologizing," she said with dangerous precision," but you're not sure why?"

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