"Answer I have. But PRs must you beat," Scotties chirped, as Shilloh ran with him carried piggy-back style behind her.

  She would have cursed, but was quite out of breath. Scotty was a smart dude. Though she was physically capable of running like a dryad, the rules were clear. She needed to limit her usage of power so that her muscles would get stronger. At the end of the run, he would check her heart rate to make sure it had been tough enough, and though she was sure he wouldn't yell at her if she cheated, she also wasn't a pussy little cheater bitch.

  "Close, we are. Final Push."

  "Mama didn't raise no bitch!" she yelled, pushing herself to finish the final stretch sprint like she always did. But this time, she started her sprint farther away than she had during any of their prior weeks of training.

  Scotty whooped, slapping her on the shoulder in evident approval. "Indeed! Bitch your mother did not raise!" her trainer yelled in his best Yoda voice.

  They arrived at the spot where her tent was set up today. It had been put fairly far out for the sake of training. That had pissed off Birch. She was very excited to have 'slumber parties' while they traveled. Agnes found the whole thing amusing and had leaned into the madness for the first few nights. There had been nail polish, shots, and some casual conversation about an ouija board.

  Then Agnes had found a shockingly attractive couple who somehow sensed the deep well of sexual deviance hidden underneath the grandmother's cookie-baking exterior. Ever since she had spent many nights engaged in strange sex-capades.

  Shilloh tried to avoid hearing any details. Birch listened with academic fervor that mixed in with all the jealous angst of a teenager having to share a treasured parent.

  It had put the impish woman in an unpredictable mood. Especially when morning workouts with Scotty gave her an excuse to move her tent away from Birch. Ostensibly, it was so she didn't wake anyone up during their early morning exercise. Really, she just needed to be far enough away to prevent people from seeing her superhuman capabilities.

  "Oye!" her trainer chided as she crossed her imaginary finish line and collapsed forward. "Who stays on the ground!"

  He had managed to perfectly time the dismount, so that he was standing over her and poking a toe in her ribs almost immediately.

  "Corpses!" she replied, hollering the answer as she pushed herself upright. Lying down was a big no-no in battles, she had learned. Hence, the punishment she would get if she didn't pop right back up.

  Scotty said getting to her feet while exhausted had to become second nature. She needed to be able to do it, concussed and one sprint away from a heart attack.

  To that end, the way he punished her would change by the hour. Often, it would be by shooting spitballs into her hair. Other times, he would blow air into her ear. She couldn't explain why, but it was one of the worst feelings she'd ever experienced. It made her nerves feel like they were lines of ants stabbing their tiny little legs into her skin from the inside out.

  With a shudder, she shoved herself back to her feet.

  "Walk it out," the man ordered as he wrote something down in a small pocket-sized notebook.

  She did, muscles burning, her gasps still not bringing her enough air.

  "Do it right!"

  With a groan, she held her arms in the air and walked around while gasping out the melody of the Rocky training montage song.

  "Atta girl," Scotty beamed. "By any chance, do you know why a bobcat is sitting on your folded clothes?"

  "A what?"

  Shilloh felt a surge of adrenaline and raced around her tent, aching muscles completely forgotten. There, sitting on a camping chair where she had neatly folded some clothes, a towel, and her shower bag, was Fraulein.

  Today, she was a small bobcat. One that might actually look like it had cross-bred with a house cat. The elegant beast had knocked her shower bag into the dirt and was calmly loafing on top of her towel and clothes.

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  "Fraulein?"

  The cat looked at her and blinked.

  There was a faint sound, and Shilloh turned around to see her friend and coach slowly resettling the unbuttoned long sleeve he always wore. His hands were half hidden under the fabric in such a way that it would be very hard otherwise see what might be holstered on the back of his belt.

  "Friend of yours?"

  "Yeah, not a familiar, but magical and intelligent. She sorta adopted me."

  The nerdy man just shook his head, "Groovy."

  Before they got much further into explaining, a laughing, short, beautiful woman came chortling up to the tent. She was in an outfit that Shilloh would charitably call 'travel pin-up' and accurately call 'low effort slutty.'

  Birch was laughing while wiping the makeup off her face. "You, you, should have seen his face. Ha! I mean it was—Fraulein!"

  The reunion between the large predator and the small eccentric was shockingly affectionate. Well, for a cat.

  Fraulein stood up, rubbed her shoulder against Birch's legs, stared at Scotty for several long seconds before trusting him enough to turn her back and press her shoulder against Shilloh's legs.

  The bossy bitch acted like Shilloh was standing in the wrong spot, and her shoulder just so happened to overlap with the dumb human's personal space. But a quiet rumble belied the lie.

  "Why is Fraulein here?" Birch asked once it was clear that no amount of pspspspsps would move the feline over for pets.

  "Cat," Shilloh answered.

  "How did she get here?"

  "Cat."

  Honestly, she wanted to know too. The Sometimes Bobcat was definitely magic. But she would have sworn Fraulein wasn't so magic as to catch up with a motorcade that was hauling ass cross country.

  Ehh, who cared? That could be her problem when she wasn't covered in sweat and desperately thirsty. With a scratch to Fraulein's shoulder, she retrieved her water and chugged it before turning to Birch.

  "You get him away from camp?" she asked the impish woman.

  "Yup!" she said, going back to getting the last bit of makeup from around her eyes.

  Scotty laughed, and the three of them moved back to the main camp for her favorite part of the day's workouts. As they moved, Birch regaled them about her own morning activities.

  "And, I fucking swear, guys, when he smelled the 'cologne' I got him, he almost busted a molar from clenching his teeth," the little psycho cackled.

  Scotty joined in. She had expected him to be more resistant to the idea of someone fucking with another bane, but when he heard it was Jasque, the usually good-spirited man went all in. He had given them endless details about how Jasque preferred to travel and work out. All the details they would need to ruin Jasque's trip.

  As it turned out, Shilloh's instincts had been correct. The dead-eyed man was an absolute two-faced snake. She had felt a little bad when Scotty said he was a slayer. They were not common, in terms of magic users, and had a very hard load to bear. They were people who, for whatever weird reason, had grown a soul-deep resonance with something in the magical language. The connection was unshakable and impacted their personality with its intensity.

  Shilloh's grandma was a mage. That meant she had spent years and years focusing on a single word in the magical language. Some mages might only have a handful, while wizards like Nick would learn an entire dialect that specialized in something.

  Even for her grandma, though, spending so long meditating and plumbing the depths of a single word had ended up impacting her. Her moods were a bit more delicate; she tended to see the world in terms of how it related to her word, 'combust.' And she had slowly moved from being soothed by the constant presence of candles to having frequent, large bonfires, and eventually having a designated burn bowl on the patio so she could intermittently set things on fire to relax.

  That was nothing compared to the impact magic had on Slayers. They were, as Scotty described it, like people whose souls accidentally formed the shape of a word in the language of magic, completed that circuit, and had become permanently stuck like that. They conduct power and meaning constantly. Which gave them instant, training-free power, great depths of capability, a unique insight into magic, strangely attuned arcane senses, and other serious benefits. It also changed their minds. One and all, they were obsessives who were essentially impossible to corrupt or change.

  That made the idea of teasing Jasque briefly unpalatable. Shilloh was not into mocking someone for a trait they could not control.

  Then Scotty had informed her that plenty of slayers were comparatively well adjusted, and Jasque—though his ability to choose was different from an average person—had absolutely chosen to be more of an asshole over the years. And not in small, harmless ways either.

  Hence Birch's current endeavor. Jasque wanted to act like a fuck-boy. He tried to make sure his horribly chosen cover identity was well-maintained and perfectly presented. Birch was going to test exactly how far he would go to commit to the bit.

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