By the time she had scrambled to her feet, the scene had changed.

  The massive strength of those mossy arms had radically improved the leaf-covered crypto's mobility. The crypto had managed to get all the way behind her and Jasque in a supernaturally fast leap. Rather than Wade standing between it and her, the shark-eyed junior bane now did. Viciously strong mossquade arms slashed, and the pseudo mouths at their ends gnashed teeth.

  Jasque was yelling something, but that was a distant fact that she barely processed. The reeds lined up on him. Wade's magic surged from too far away.

  She almost pulled up her true magic. Only the speed of what happened next stopped her.

  The giant spears launched with vicious speed. Jasque moved forward so smoothly that he seemed like some sort of clockwork display that had been perfectly calibrated and choreographed for this exact set of movements.

  The man fell forward and lashed up with a brutal, rusty machete in his hands where a rifle had been moments before. It sliced through one of the twelve-foot-long tendrils. The weapon rumbled with magic and let out a flash of red light that tasted like sin, torture, blood, and madness. Milky sap sprayed out in a geyser from the severed vine.

  Jasque didn't stop moving, though. He had launched forward and twisted like a corkscrew so his back was to the ground as he leaped under the thing's belly, blade lashing. The bane moved so cleanly that he seemed to be rolling over his shoulder before even touching the ground. He came up on the creature's side, one knee on the ground. But, where he had previously been holding the handle of a cursed machete, he now grasped a double-barrel shotgun.

  He had, somehow, ended up in one of the asymmetric spots around the beast's core with few arms. She didn't think it had been an accident. The dark-haired, dead-eyed man stepped forward with a look of psychotic, violent bliss on his face and extended his arm so that the two barrels were lost in the fern fronds.

  BOOM!BOOM!

  Heat-like flares of burning magnesium flashed, and she could feel it on her face even from yards away. He tossed the gun behind him and leaped backward. It disappeared like the weapon hit an invisible portal. Then something long and straight—moving at the same speed and angle the gun had been—appeared before Jasque and slapped into his hands.

  The man landed with a strange steampunk sword-spear-looking thing. Wade flashed over her head, so much magical strength pumping through his legs that he almost flew.

  The two banes ended up next to each other, the chain spear draped over Wade's neck, his long sword in hand beside Jasque, who wielded a strange combination of brass gears and pipes surrounding a foot-and-a-half curved blade on the end of a too-long handle.

  The creature, quite sensibly, fled.

  It just zipped away. Wade sent a slice of his magical sword after it that traveled through the air like a giant bladed crescent. Fern fronds and mossquade arms fell (as well as two trees). But it was a glancing cut, and the creature was gone in less time than it took for Shilloh to come to her feet, Fraulein growling at her side.

  "Clear?" Wade asked, sword still at the ready.

  "Clear," Jasque confirmed with a nod.

  The two of them quickly moved in a circle, and while checking their perimeter, Wade scented the air. Jasque summoned a few strange-looking magical devices. Without speaking, the black-haired killer went to collect samples from the various cut-off limbs while Wade walked over to her.

  He stowed all his weapons with smooth efficiency, and he gave her a concerned look.

  "It's gone, Shilloh," he said calmly and soothingly. "And this is a big success. That confirms that it killed the mossquade, and we know everything we need for Jasque and I to come back and finish it in a couple days. Can I look at that arm?"

  "What do you mean?" she said, flicking the safety of her rifle back on.

  "That cut?"

  She looked at her arm, and sure enough, she had a gash on her upper arm that was doing a fair bit of bleeding. Now that she had noticed it, the wound throbbed angrily.

  "Oh… Shit."

  "Don't worry, it's not as bad as it looks. The vines sometimes have venom, but their stolen limbs are fine. In fact, they don't even tend to cause infections unless you rub something in it."

  With confidence and firm motions, the bane took a medical kit from his pack and cleaned and covered her wound. He kept up a steady stream of chatter, talking like they were sitting across from each other sipping tea. Though he was clearly trying to soothe her, she felt like the warmth and concern were genuine.

  He didn't notice Papa land on a tree. Nor the way the owl made sure it could keep an eye on both Jasque and Wade from its perch.

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  Finally, when it became apparent that he wouldn't stop chattering, she interrupted, "Wade, I'm not in shock. You can cut it out."

  He looked at her funny.

  "What?" she asked.

  "You're pale, your fingers are shaky, and you have The Look."

  "Well fuck you very much. I said that I wasn't in shock, not that I was immune to healthy terror."

  He glanced at the wound, which was just starting to sting really badly with the fading of the adrenaline, and very clearly decided to drop the inquiry despite being unconvinced.

  Dick. Probably thought he was being so calm and so gracious. She wanted to curse him out again but held back. That anger was not rational and might help him win the argument about her being in shock. Losing an argument seemed oddly important to her at the moment.

  "But what about our hunt?"

  "Now that we know what we're dealing with, we're more than halfway done. You help us map out its territory so we can plan our strike. Then Jasque and I will clean house and give you your part of the reward."

  She looked at him like he was dumb, "But that wasn't what claimed the territory."

  Wade froze. "What do you mean?"

  She was about to repeat herself when she realized that she had no human way of knowing that. Some nerve in her twitched from the base of her heels in a straight line up to her throat. "I mean, we weren't even on claimed land when it attacked. That probably wasn't the thing that was doing it."

  Wade tried to give her a grin. But she remembered the moment he had looked at her, sunlight illuminating his eyes like back-lit stained glass: this was not that smile.

  "Of course it was," he lied." The real name is in some language I don't speak, but a Limb Stealer like that could have stolen all sorts of weird abilities from other cryptos and caused the mess you picked up on."

  "We didn't see any limbs that could do that."

  "Common misconception," he said, keeping his eyes down, pretending like he was focusing on repacking his med kit. "The visible limbs aren't the only things they've consumed and copied."

  Jasque ghosted out of the bushes sporting a backpack he hadn't been wearing before with thick rolls made out of a tarp duct taped to the top section just behind his shoulders. "Limb Stealers are also very mutable. Even without stealing limbs. I wouldn't be shocked if it developed that ability in a freak mutation."

  She tried to keep herself contained. Tried to sound curious and nothing more.

  "Is it a hive creature?"

  "They can split off when they get big enough or fed enough. We'll confirm with these samples," Jasque tilted his head back to indicate the tarp-wrapped bundle on his back, "and be able to tell how old it is. There's a formula you can use to determine how many times they could have split."

  Her stomach churned.

  "I don't know. It didn't feel right."

  Wade's eyes narrowed fractionally, and he exchanged a look with Jasque.

  Then those stormy eyes met hers. The Were stood to his feet with the grace and poise of a killer. His posture straightened, and that unconscious sense of power and confidence lifted his shoulders as if to say he owned the air he breathed and the earth supporting his feet.

  That fake smile came out again, and he patted her on her unwounded shoulder. "It's just the adrenaline fading," he said, holding her gaze a bit too long. "That creature is one whose territory you sensed."

  Her stomach fell.

  Well, it fell until it landed in an abrasive, burning, hot sandstorm of anger.

  "You're certain?" she asked.

  "Absolutely," he lied to her. "You're probably just feeling really tired, right?"

  That pig-headed, mud fucking, gaslighting son of a bitch.

  But she didn't say that out loud. She just made vague noises of agreement and kept her expression clear.

  She knew, in the way that her people knew things, that she had found the mossquades' killer. But the buzzing in her teeth and quaking in her bones also told her that it absolutely was not what had been claiming territory.

  For all its might and terror, there was something deep, conceptual, impartial, and nuanced about the magic she had sensed in her forest. And those words did not describe a mere Limb Stealer.

  Wade knew it, too. And he was lying to her.

  Her eyes flicked to Jasque, and she recalled how he had fought and moved.

  There was no way that man was a junior bane that Wade was teaching. There was also how he weighed her with his dead eyes. How Wade had kept seeking approval in the other man's bearing when he spoke.

  Something was not right.

  She looked around her and marked the area in her mind. She even reached out to Papa, risking some real magic to make sure he would also know how to get back here.

  "Hey," she grinned sheepishly at Jasque, "I'm sorry to be the wimp and call it in early, but Wade might have been right. I am a little shaky. Want to head in a little early?'

  "Are you feeling faint?" Wade asked, concern lowering his brows.

  Oh, she was feeling faintly like stabbing him with a fucking tent stake.

  "No," she couldn't bear to fake a smile, so she dropped her eyes. I mean, we already hit our one obligatory incident of extreme violence for the hike, right?"

  "Yeah," his eyes flicked to Jasque, and he paused. But after a micropause to gather his courage, he looked back at her. "You know limb stealers aren't one of the decent Cryptos, right? They're one of the spawned kinds that just consumes."

  Seeing his concern and fear that she might judge him sent a new surge of anger through her. She stopped herself from glaring at Jasque.

  "Yeah?" mumbled, almost choking on the false meekness," Why don't you tell me about them while we head back?"

  The tension left Wade's shoulders, and he gave her a real smile. One that lit him up. She focused on that. Not how Jasque was probably staring daggers into her back.

  Too bad he didn't know that Papa and Fraulein were returning the favor.

  Routes home appeared in her mind almost without effort as a plan solidified. The three of them would get to town, they would say their goodbyes, and they would continue to gaslight her. But she did not like being treated like an idiot. No one—and she meant no one—could keep her from finding the truth if it was hidden in the woods.

  She'd come back without any humans to slow her down, and she would find out exactly what was happening. Whether they wanted her to or not.

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