"Wait. Aren't we setting an ambush?" Shilloh asked.

  Wade was standing on a fallen tree trunk a few feet above the ground. It and its neighbor had both been broken at a point about six feet off the ground and fallen.

  She and Jasque were just a few yards behind him by the jagged stumps, leaning out from behind cover with their rifles. Though, the small cartographer was the only one who had left the car with one. At this point, it was obvious that the bane had some way of teleporting or summoning weapons to his hands.

  "Nah," Wade said, walking on the log like it was solid ground. And his eyes were focused just a few yards to the left of where the two tree tops had fallen. "We just need to get a view of what we're dealing with and come back with the right gear. Ambushes are more committed. This is reconnaissance."

  "Isn't reconnaissance done with stealth and at a distance."

  He gave her a brief angelic grin, "The forest isn't on fire, and no one has used explosives."

  Jasque grunted, "Sounds pretty fucking stealthy to me."

  Their third member spoke as he took out a stick of blue chalk and made two marks on the fallen tree. Shilloh was not to fire her weapon until the crypto was between those two lines. Any further out, and it wasn't worth the ammo, considering her accuracy. Any closer in and she needed to be running away since Wade would be moving forward to engage it.

  She tried to swallow, but the sheer dryness of her mouth almost made it hurt.

  The suspense was murder on her nerves. Sure, Shilloh could hold still to hunt any day of the week. She could keep perfectly in place for hours if need be. But this was different. She had only brought a bolt action rifle, while Wade seemed to have two of everything. Two guns, two knives, plus a spear and a sword. It was hard to see his kit, and not wonder if she was underprepared. Also, how quickly could she even reload this rifle's clip? Was that slow enough to be a liability?

  Questions raced through her mind as her hands fidgeted with the rifle handle. No grip felt good enough. Nothing felt good enough when your life was on the line. There was always a little pinch on the skin, a little too much sweat. And she had really seriously started to wonder how bad it would need to be before she used her magic. And not the passive abilities she had been leaning on thus far. When should she say 'fuck it' and use the real stuff that would blow her cover?

  Obviously, being brave and not breaking cover was ideal. But when did brave turn stupid? When should she cut her losses and hit with everything she had?

  The thoughts kept pouring until Jasque called out that the thing was about to arrive.

  And when she saw it, her world narrowed. Her mouth didn't get less dry, but her mind felt less claustrophobic. 'What Ifs' were hard on the nerves (and bladder). Seeing something and just having to react was easier. Her attention was suddenly and overwhelmingly occupied by the creature and the blue chalk lines. Nothing else entered her mind.

  The crypto looked like an irregular ball the size of an office desk but completely covered in fern fronds. The foliage was so thick that it was impossible to say what was in the middle. It had deer legs sticking out of it in three hundred and sixty degrees. It also had what looked like two long reed pipes sticking out of the leafy mass, like antennae. Except they rotated around the center sphere, always pointing toward the humans as it moved.

  The two reeds locked onto Wade, and they went from seeming like antennae to suddenly looking very much like the dual barrels of a warship preparing to fire.

  Before she had time to concisely process any details, Jasque was firing his own hunting rifle, and she saw the thing's center of mass twitch. That didn't stop it, though. The two reed-like barrels fired. Dual thorny spears as thick around as her wrist launched out. Looking at them, she knew in that weird way she sometimes knew things, that there was a sort of hydraulic pressure involved: almost like a cone snail. She also knew that the thorns sticking out from the body of the long spears, each as long as Fraulein's teeth, were magical.

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  The spears lanced forward, ends never making it out of the barrels, and far longer than should have been possible. Wade brought out his chain spear, and it whirled of its own accord to knock them aside. Even though the tips pounded into trees and dirt, the ends were still in the reeds despite being almost thirty feet away from the points.

  The Were transformed his weapon from whirling chain links into a long-bladed spear and jumped forward.

  Shilloh, guns still pointed uselessly at the ground, was yelling at him before she knew why.

  Whatever strange hydrostatic pressure the creature used to propel its projectiles relaxed. The thirty-foot-long thorny spears transformed into thorn-studded vines. They began retracting so quickly that they whipped around in an impossible-to-track whirlwind of magically sharp stabbing points.

  Wade was trapped. He was halfway through, leaping forward to stab his spear between those two river-reed-looking protrusions. With the sudden tornado of whippings points, that was good as standing in the creature's mouth.

  In that moment, it became as obvious to her as the sun and moon that Wade was a good guy. He was a genuinely decent person who tried very hard to help people. Sure, he had taken some emotional beatings to do so, but he ended up having a very sweet, fun personality. It was just hidden inside a gunmetal cold veneer.

  In other words, Shilloh needed to do something. But she froze, pulled in a dozen different directions.

  Did she draw power from the forest and attack with no thoughts for secrecy? Fire her gun even though the monster wasn't inside the chalk lines? Jasque hadn't stopped shooting the entire time. But she didn't have his skill. For her part, Fraulein had retreated behind Shilloh and very obviously wanted them both to flee.

  Save Wade, or keep her cover? That was the question.

  In the end, it didn't matter. All the tension drained from Wade's arms, even as his eyes locked onto the monster with all the predatory finality of a raptor spotting a fish.

  The spear whirled and whipped. The Were's grip was steel, his eyes a storm, and his arms completely limp as he let the enchanted weapon move in an impossible blur to protect him.

  Thrashing green vines met whirling silver. One of the thorns caught on his loose shirt and ripped. But his stomach bowed out of the way even as his arms briefly tightened, taking control to send the spear's head to chop three-fourths of the way through the vine. At the same time, the weapon's enchantment sent the butt of the spear spinning to guard his back from a strike she couldn't even see.

  Everything happened impossibly fast. And Wade spun through it all. He let himself whirl like a ballroom dancer being led by a spear. Only for the briefest moments did he exert any influence, and always to do some small injury to his opponent.

  In seconds, Jasque fired four more times, and Wade danced through death unscathed. One of the creature's deer legs started bleeding, and a bullet exploded through a hoof.

  Finally, the thorny vines had retreated completely back into the reed. But the creature didn't scream, which was strange.

  Instead, it threw itself backward. With not all the legs being symmetrical around its leafy body, it rolled backward more than ran.

  Wade's spear stopped moving the second he was safe. The completely loose limbs he had maintained left him crumpling into a crouch as the enchantment stopped tugging him around. But rather than land in a heap, he fell into a sprinter's ready stance. Their Were surged with wild animalistic magic, eyes intent on the crypto.

  He rocketed forward faster than any Olympic athlete, and the monster responded. All those strangle-flexing hoofs and legs retreated back into the creature's fern-fronded depths, and familiar, long, mossy arms took their place. Some ended in long clawed hands, others bearing the facilities of small prey animals' heads.

  "Mossquade!" she shouted, involuntarily slipping the faintest trace of magic into her voice.

  The other humans didn't seem to react, but she felt the animals around them flee or dig deep into hiding. In the distance, she knew Papa had taken to the air, racing towards them.

  At the same time, her lynx dove at her, knocking her completely on her ass.

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