The two of them raced to the scene with Wade behind the wheel. She felt like she was supposed to object, maybe have some sort of bad bitch moment where she refused to let anyone drive her car. But, honestly, fuck that. This was scary, and tense, and she didn't love driving or her old-ass car in the first place.

  Neither of them knew what was happening for the first two minutes. It was all tense silence and static over the speakers. Then the radio started working. It was more reliable than cells and computers, but that wasn't saying too much. Anything with fine circuitry was susceptible to atmospheric magic doing unpredictable things that would fry delicate wiring.

  This radio was bulky enough to have reinforced circuits or a magic Faraday cage or whatever bullshit helped them hear some news. Before they were even partway there, they knew it was multiple limb stealers. When she realized what they were driving towards, Shilloh promised herself she wouldn't ever mock Wade again for hauling a huge backpack full of weapons and equipment around with him all the time.

  It had been in the back seat while they ate, and she was tempted to go through it and find something to make her feel safe.

  "You have anything I can use to cut vines? I can't remember if my axe is still in the trunk," she asked.

  "Depends, you going to use it to get to the shelter?"

  She didn't snap at him, but she wanted to.

  Deep breath. This was his job, and he had to cover his bases just as much as she did when she led hunting groups. "Yes. I will guide any children or elderly I see. If the incident is indoors, then I will stand as close as I safely can to the door with the other able-bodied people. If someone reaches me who needs help, we will run together. I will not go more than three steps away from my egress point, not even to help someone."

  The words came out by rote. At the end, she bit her tongue and, in a very forgiving manner; didn't even add a cutting comment about how all those things were textbook. That most people had been drilled on it since elementary school.

  The urge to snap was real, but not due to offense. Honestly, she was scared—terrified, really—which was probably why the acid crawling up her throat wanted to transmute itself into vitriol and barbs. Rude though it may have been, at least snapping back would have helped her stop feeling so helpless.

  Had this been in the Croatan, it would have been different. Dyrads like her were creatures of the forest. Using her abilities in a city took extra finesse. Nature was inescapable and everywhere, but she had tuned herself to the tree-filled nature more than any of the other sorts.

  The pause after her recitation felt like it had lasted forever, but Wade just nodded. "I might have a big knife in my bag. But it's a throwaway for poking and dissecting things that may melt a good knife. So you can't make fun of how tacky it is."

  "Why do you think people would judge you for your knives?"

  "I… I almost don't know how to understand those words." he shot her a smile and winked, "How can you not? What is a man without a knife?"

  She was supposed to laugh and banter. She could tell what her role was and how it was supposed to help her fight the panic.

  "It's a knife," she said, voice cracking out of her mouth without an ounce of playfulness behind it."Who cares as long as I can use it."

  There was a beat of silence; Wade's hands moved towards the radio before aborting and tapping a nervous rhythm on the steering wheel.

  "Hey, Shilloh."

  "What?"

  "Don't worry too much. We've got this. This isn't even the first time this month I've run like this to handle a crypto. This probably feels extra scary to you because you don't know how many false alarms there are. Also, even if something did happen, the shelter is close. You can get there, no problem. Hell, you can easily push on to the Blightbane office or my place if you need to."

  "I don't know where you live."

  "Huh," Wade said, then he turned and flashed her another grin, "then, when this is over, we should find a time to hang out. Then you will know. In case of emergency or whatever."

  "Or whatever?"

  "Or whatever," he nodded in assent. "It will be nice. I'll pick the music, you'll make fun of that one spot I thought was a perfect place for herbs and is now one seven-foot stretch of mint. I can even bring Scotty over from the office. He's the biggest nerd I've ever met, but he's a good guy. You'll love him. He's hilarious."

  In her mind, she asked if they could save the flirting for after they escaped serious and imminent peril. But out loud, her voice said, "Deal."

  "Deal," he grinned.

  It was a beautiful moment. A sweet moment, really.

  Shame if a building sense of awkwardness and vulnerability made her, oh, I don't know, ruin it.

  "… Also, if this mother fucking vine-y bitch ends up wrecking my comfy joggers, then I'm giving it an Agent Orange enema."

  Wade laughed. Shilloh told him it wasn't a joke. He laughed harder.

  ~~~

  Other first responders had gotten there before them. That was an absolute blessing in the dryad's book, but it made Wade emanate an aura of protective fury. He didn't like that this was dangerous enough for police to be here or the fact that police barely trained in crypto combat were at risk.

  The day was just entering the slow evening yawns stage. The time when photographers would be packing up their cameras, and Shilloh should be looking for a drink.

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  All around the West End market, she could see police officers ushering fleeing civilians away. No one was rubbernecking. Forsyth wasn't the town where danger was fun. It was a town where practical people could live safe lives, and the unwary were pulled through sewer drains while walking their dogs.

  Still, various beat-up cars were parked in very illegal ways all around the market. All of them were sturdy, muddy affairs. An astute woman would intuit that they belonged to Banes based on a variety of factors. For instance, Shilloh's well-honed powers of deduction picked up on subtle cues like Blightbane bumper stickers and the imprint of a goat hoof on the hood of a car (but if goat hoof prints were three times larger and surrounded by a pox-like outbreak of rust).

  In a situation like this, everyone who was certified to help in crypto emergencies mobilized. The average police officer's job was just to support order and guide panicked civilians. SWAT or special officers cleared for heavier weapons stood guard with powerful assault rifles and shotguns. They stood sentinel facing the scene as firefighters, paramedics, and beat cops administered first aid while ushering everyone to shelters.

  Theoretically, a city should have its own Crypto response unit. But they were expensive, and for all that Forsythe was growing, they were still very much a frontier town trying to establish themselves.

  As a result, everyone above a certain Blightbane certification level rushed to assist. Below that level were civilians like herself. Though—because of her job and the associated crypto risks—she had a higher-than-average certification level, and most of that training was preventative. Which meant very little right now. Knowing the emergency numbers to call and the acronyms for making a house secure wasn't going to cut it.

  Thorny vines whipped from behind the building, and the sound of shattering glass made her flinch into her seat.

  Despite that, they were out of the car in no time and crouched behind the truck's bed. The sack of gear Wade carried around yielded her a comically large bowie knife. One big enough to chop firewood with. He also had, and Shilloh thought it was a joke, mother fucking grenades that he laced onto his harness.

  "No making fun of the knife," he said to her with a strained smile.

  "Heh, yeah. Ummm. Will your stripper charm strip those grenades off their levers, too?"

  "No. It's completely safe."

  "I know. That was dumb. I'm sorry. It was a joke."

  Behind them came an eerie screech, one she remembered from the woods not even three days ago.

  "Honestly," he said, glancing up from his equipment bag like he was waiting for an ambush, "that was a great first attempt at battle banter."

  "Really."

  "No, I prefer knock-knock jokes."

  Despite herself, she snorted. If she had to be in this situation, she was glad Wade was with her. Intuitively, she was certain that Jasque would not have been nearly as comforting.

  After arranging a few more pieces of equipment, they moved out. Wade leaped from behind the car, checked his cell one last time, got no signal, and started jogging toward the sound of screams.

  Shilloh held the sheathed machete pretending to be a bowie knife in one hand and ran towards a clump of kids who looked to be no older than ten. They were helping someone who appeared to be their grandma limp away from the building.

  The elderly woman was wearing a light blue jacket, had graying hair, and had her hands braced on the shoulders of the two tallest boys. The others mostly just crowded in and yelled to hurry up.

  "Ma'am," Shilloh called, running up and moving to get her arm around the woman's back. Let me help you to the shelter."

  They had taken precisely four steps when She heard Wade yell.

  "Shilloh!"

  Something about his voice was odd. Like the pitch of it was changing. It made her think of the Doppler effect—

  For a second, her brain decided to focus entirely on the smell of fresh soap, clothes left in a drawer long enough to have a pleasantly woody-musty smell, and the indefinable scent of a healthy man.

  Then she snapped back to reality and the painful realization that someone had tackled her. And that someone was Wade Maslow

  He let go of her mid-step and spun back to the threat faster than she could blink. Shilloh, unfortunately, was not magically enhancing her speed, and the laws of physics still held sway. She continued moving forward with all the speed a sprinting, magically enhanced Were could impart. She slammed into the ground, rolled, bounced, and barely kept a grip on the knife as her ribs screamed with pain.

  Children were screaming. Where she had been standing a moment before, a limb stealer tore apart the grandmotherly woman in the blue jacket.

  This was Forsythe, so the children had scattered rather than stay and be killed. But they were howling out anguished tears even as they sprinted away from the old woman's corpse. Two brave police officers dashed in to grab as many as they could and sprinted away with children held in their arms.

  The rest of the nearby officers had brought assault riffles to bear but held their fire because of how close Wade was: you never knew if a Bane had speed enhancements that would move them through the line of fire faster than you could stop squeezing the trigger.

  The limb stealer that had killed the woman looked somewhat similar to the one from before. But with one horrifying difference; the appendages sprouting from the mass of ferns that was its core were all human—or at least near human—arms. They pushed out with radial symmetry. Some held the beast aloft with palms flat on the earth. Others extended slightly longer than they should have and yanked at the old woman's body, trying to rip the skin off her legs like they thought there was something hidden inside the body.

  Make no mistake, that was all bad. What was worse was that these arms had a faint green tint.

  From one angle, the arms had a normal, if pale, skin tone. From another angle, they had a fainter, more pale, irish-green undertone.

  More importantly, all of those arms were very clearly Shilloh's arms.

  There was a particular spot where a big freckle and a scar came together to look exactly like a shooting star by the crease of all its green-tinted elbows. She knew that shooting star. Remembered getting the scar in high school.

  A litany of details assailed her mind as the monster savaged that poor dead woman. She recognized it, literally, like the back of her own hand.

  But that morphic skin color that shifted like a butterfly's wings wasn't something Forsythe had ever seen. Hell, it was something Shilloh had only seen in her other life when she had been surrounded by mature, full-blooded dryads.

  The wound on her upper arm from the first fight with the limb stealer throbbed, and she had a horrible suspicion. What happened when the plant monster, who stole power from others, got access to one of nature's most potent multipurpose magical catalysts?

  Wade snarled and leaped forward, magic long sword severing several copies of her own arms. The sight should have been terribly unsettling, but it didn't bother her. She was too busy looking back to where at least three more Limb Stealers shrieked through stolen mouths, hand raising to the wound on her arm.

  The shock kept her calm for just a second. Just enough for her to conclude that her blood caused the beast to multiply and for her to note that the wind had shifted. The breeze was now coming from directly behind her and carrying her scent towards West End Market.

  The creature Wade was fighting suddenly ignored his attack, happily losing mass to circle around him and come towards her.

  Whatever thin filament of calm Shilloh has been dangling from snapped. Her stomach dropped; she cursed, tightened her fist on the massive knife, turned tail, and ran.

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