"Don't think this means you get to skip training," Jasque said, following behind him as they left the back entrance of city hall.

  "Wouldn't dream of it."

  Wade's arms were full of files and folders. Most of them filled with maps cataloging Were territory. But he had snuck in a few incident reports about S4MH41N attacks. He knew what the bestiaries said, but it wasn't enough to stop his doubts.

  Jasque had been locking the door behind them, but something about Wade's response must have come off wrong. The dark-haired man stopped crouching over the doorknob and stared into his eyes. "Does it look like I'm joking?"

  Wade's shoulder blades tightened, and he dropped his eyes. "No."

  The Slayer stared at him, weighing him like Anubis waiting to pass judgment.

  Finally, after a tense moment where his bodyguard looked at him like he was a stranger rather than his charge, the man nodded and clapped him on the shoulder. "Good. We do need to shore up this mistake. But you fucking up can't be an excuse to stop training. Even subconsciously, we can't teach ourselves to think a mistake entitles us to downtime or other rewards."

  Wade bit his tongue rather than ask what made the other man act like he was a toddler or a spoiled lap dog trying to steal a treat. When was the last time he had asked for a break? How many years had it been since he hadn't gone through the ritual of being offered breaks and saying no to them?

  The retort stayed trapped behind his teeth. That resentment, that feeling, was just another mistake, and the stakes were too high for him to make any more of those.

  They walked back around the building. It was going to be a long night. They needed to review everywhere Shilloh sensed something and try to find similarities to determine what she was picking up on. Then, they would route plan tomorrow's course to test their assumptions.

  As a sense of preemptive exhaustion washed over him, he forced himself to stand even straighter. Jasque was right. He couldn't let himself slack. Not even subconsciously.

  Right as they came onto the main street and started moving towards the car, they heard shouts. The two had worked together for so long that they didn't need to exchange a glance. They went forward in perfect formation, both prepped for a variety of threats. Still, Jasque was the bodyguard, which is why he took the lead and got to keep his hands free of files.

  But, within seconds of seeing what was going on, he stepped back, took the files from Wade, and went back to acting like the less senior bane helping with research.

  A group of people were having a big, messy, drunken argument. There was lots of posturing, puffed-out chests, and yelling. Normally, he wouldn't have cared, but Shilloh's face jumped out to him like she was spotlit on a stage.

  She was yelling at a man much taller than her. He had both hands forward and kept stepping into her space, doughy hands grasping even as she yelled and stumbled backward.

  The oily way her demands slipped off of him, the look of hurt as he did wrong, it hit Wade like a heavyweight's right cross. The man was apologizing, nearly fawning with overwhelming regret. But still not stopping. Instead, he advanced as he apologized. Ignoring her obvious discomfort so he could get close enough to take control.

  It brought a memory to Wade's mind.

  'Just walk away,' said a voice in his memory.

  He was across the street in seconds, not even noticing when he used magic to enhance his speed.

  The man reached out two soft, pleading hands and clamped them on Shilloh's shoulder like manacles. The look on her face tore at the inside of his chest like screeching metal. She was small, with strong shoulders and a smattering of hard-to-notice freckles. Her gorgeous hazel eyes were wide instead of crinkled into little upside-down smiles. Her neck was shrinking instead of stretching into a regal line supporting her lifted chin.

  She was a gorgeous crystal prism that was in the mud instead of hanging out in the sun like it should have been.

  Maybe that close examination and the focus required for his use-philosophical bullshit was why he was the only one who noticed her hand fall to a suspicious bulge of a concealed carry.

  Faster than thought, his own hands were on the man's shoulders. He squeezed down on the asshole, making sure he was short of pain, but that man felt his grip through his muscles and into his bones.

  "What's going on here?" Wade asked, eyes sweeping everyone.

  There was a gaudy woman in tottering heels and uneven eyeliner, an elegant, shorter woman, possibly Hispanic, certainly drunk. Also, a kindly-looking grandmother who was smiling and swaying, one hand buried in a large purse.

  Everyone started talking at once. The only sober people were Shilloh and a man who he recalled as having a very good store for ritual supplies.

  He didn't really need to listen to know his next lines.

  "Ma'am," Wade said, talking to the angry woman with red eyes and a hazy intensity that made him bet she had smoked something illegal before squeezing into her slinky dress. "That sounds like a huge mix-up and very frustrating. But I'm not a police officer. I'm just a blightbane who heard yelling and wanted to help."

  He gave her a cool, professional smile and could all but see the calculation behind her eyes.

  She opened her mouth to say something, and he quickly stepped in and rested a hand on her upper arm, making a very neutral sort of comforting gesture. The type he had been taught to give young blightbanes who needed psychological reassurance before or after an engagement. "I'm sure a resourceful lady like you can still salvage this night. Don't let it go to waste because of a misunderstanding."

  "Ha!" Shilloh laughed," Yeah, 'resourceful.'"

  At the same time, the old woman snorted and muttered the word 'lady' with similar incredulity in her tone.

  "Please, Shilloh," he said, frowning at her, "I'm just trying to calm things down."

  She glared at him. For just a second there, she had seemed happy to see him. But after that single flash of warmth, she was back to razor blades and ice. Just like she had been earlier that day.

  "I didn't ask for your help," she said.

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

  "Yeah," the roughly foggy-eyed man in a polo said, moving to stand next to her. He also smelled like he had been smoking something illegal. "We were… I mean, yeah, we can work out a little nothing like this on our own."

  Something in Wade, something old, and creaking, and full of wrath stirred. He stiffened, feeling the tingle of a different kind of magic wash up against the barrier he had erected in his mind.

  The short, Hispanic woman in her red blazer said something biting, but he didn't hear what. Every part of him focused on not letting his body language show anything Jasque might notice.

  He tried to calm himself down. This was nothing. Just a sleeper shifting.

  But he still needed to leave anyway.

  "Well," Jasque said, disengaging from a blond woman in very bright clothes who had been talking to him, "if you all have this under control, then Wade and I can head out."

  "Yes," the Were said, reinforcing his mental barrier while trying to imagine what a normal, concerned but calm Blightbane would say. We'll leave you to it. Does everyone have safe rides home?"

  The pudgy man with his expensive, poorly fitted pants was too busy staring at Shilloh to answer. He was very clearly concerned, and his index finger kept idly tracing the large brand logo on his chest.

  "Yeah, Nikko," whined the woman with too much make-up and not enough dress, "do we?"

  Nikko shook his head and looked around. "Oh, yeah. I drove. Do you need a ride home, Shilloh?"

  The one in the slinky dress seethed as Shilloh responded. "No, Nikko, I don't need anything from you."

  "Are you sure? It would be no problem, and we never—"

  "Whoa," the cartographer said, lifting both hands and stopping him. "Let's be clear. I will not ever be getting in a car with you. I will be driving Agnes home and then trying my best to forget this evening. And you. Forever. Are we clear?"

  "I just wanted to —"

  He took a step forward, but she stopped him, "I will be driving myself home. And I will not hear from you. Give me a thumbs up if you understand?"

  The man blinked sweat away from his eyes and hesitantly lifted his thumb, face looking pained.

  "Good. Now sit on that and spin."

  Without looking back, Shilloh steered the giggling old lady away. The rest of her group ended up following her, leaving him alone with the pudgy man whose name he had already forgotten and the shrill woman.

  "You," the man said, dropping his hand and turning to glare at Wade while Jasque did his Jasque-thing and subtly moved to flank the man in case he decided to shoot him, "how do you know Shilloh?"

  "Work," he said, paying more attention to Jasque than the sweaty man.

  "If you hadn't been here, I could have handled things fine."

  With a desperate effort, he focused himself on his customer service act. Some part of him feared that if he spent any more time probing the inside of his mind for that tingling wave of wild power, Jasque would sense it.

  "I'm sorry, sir. I must have misread the situation. Please accept my apologies."

  The pudgy man threw his hands in the air and stalked over to a car that had been idling in the middle of the lane. "Whatever, just keep out of my business." He threw himself in the front seat of his car and switched out of park.

  After several seconds, he leaned across the passenger seat so he could roll down the window. "Kora? Come on, let's go."

  She sniffed and ignored the man to ask the bane a question, "You're close to Shilloh?"

  "I wouldn't say say that."

  "Oh," Jasque said, tone too casual, "You wouldn't, would you?" The man idly tapped at a folder holding S4MH41N fatality records. "Odd, we've booked a lot of time with her in the woods. Haven't we?"

  He tried not to flinch.

  "Well then," said Kora," if Shilloh likes you, I think I will take that ride home," She gave him a big smile, and stepped closer to him. "What was your name again, handsome?"

  ~~~

  It took Wade far too long to drop the woman off, get home, review notes, and decide what routes they would take with Shilloh. Then it was training time and they were headed back out to the woods.

  At least they were in his territory at this point. For at least three miles in every direction round him was land that he had claimed with his Mark. That meant Jasque was more willing to slacken his vigilance as a bodyguard. He crushed cryptos rather than stare at him without blinking.

  Which, despite usually hating it, was fair. Both the staring and the caution toward his safety.

  For all that Wade was a Were, he was not terribly good at their magic. In fact, to most of the world he only had a single alternate form. Number of forms was usually a good approximation for how much power a Were had. Of the three types of magic available to Weres, you needed a pretty firm grasp of two in order to gain another form.

  Off the record, he was the one-in-two-hundred Weres able to get a second alternate form. Three might even be possible if he trained for it. But after all the terror and tragedy that came with his second form, he didn't think he'd ever try again.

  Still, on his own territory, he was king. He was mediocre at the enhancement and reduction magics that let him move faster and take hits. He was even worse at the fine control of his Shifting.

  But when it came to using his Mark and claiming something as his own? Wade grinned pessimistically and kept moving. The less said about that, the better. After all, the old pirates had a point when they talked about the ideal number of people to keep a secret.

  He felt the Mark burning deep underground, acting as a conduit so his mind could rove through this patch of land. He pulled power from the rest of the territory with less effort than it took to think. Not enough to lower the temperature or damage trees, but just enough to slow the wind by an imperceptible fraction.

  That power was funneled into a sloppy enhancement that let him run forever without getting tired.

  As he ran, seventy percent of his attention stayed in the earth. He tweaked the endless complex connections of magic, meaning, and energy. For this stretch of the woods, he adjusted that weave into a slightly different texture.

  At the same time, he used another ten percent of his focus to enforce a mandate on the world around him. A blood-crazed Devourer found the earth, pulling it down and freezing it in the sort of cold rarely seen on this side of the atmosphere.

  A Thunder Falcon, an excellent predator of more mischievous cryptos, found its nest suddenly swirling together until it was encased in a thin wooden shell tough enough to turn aside bullets.

  He even lent a brief hand to Jasque, who was wading his way through two more S4MH41Ns. It was nothing much. A subtle touch that pulled water from the ground here, a little increase in air friction there. His partner didn't need much aid.

  Wade even reached out to a clump of unfamiliar plant beasts that appeared to be propagating in bloody soil. They were on the very edge of his territory but seemed to be far from civilization and completely surrounded by the bodies of other cryptos that they had hunted.

  That ten percent, that casual, surface layer of attention, barely noticed them before preparing an explosion of stone from the ground to kill them. But before he did, the image of Shilloh came to mind.

  In his mind, she looked offended, shocked, and disappointed—so disappointed in him that she was still staring at him with eyes like frozen knives hours later.

  He stuttered in his ceaseless run.

  Like a child who had spilled something sticky, he immediately turned around to see if Jasque could see him. But no, the man was too occupied with his personal crusade.

  Still nervous, Wade thought back to the thunder falcon. Jasque would have killed it. But Jasque would also probably end up killing Wade one of these days, too.

  In a very practiced manner, he let his attention glide past that thought and leave it behind. Wade sent his will back into the earth and continued tweaking the way his Mark's weave stretched the ground.

  He did take the time to note a heap of Magloth corpses around the tree creatures. But almost all of his limited brain power revealed the quiet rebellion of releasing the thunder falcon back into the sky.

  He started back up again at a slow jog. Not even blinking as one of the invisible fly trapper cryptos from earlier leaped at him from the trees.

  It tumbled through the air. The beast's arterial spray missed Wade by centimeters as he fell back into the rhythm of his jog. His will sifted through the forest behind him, pulling the blood into soil and hiding the body where no one other than the trees would ever find it.

  He found himself very interested in what Shilloh would say about the falcon, maybe even more interested than in seeing what she was able to sense in the forest.

  NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

  Piracy Notice: If you’re reading this anywhere other than Scribble Hub, Royal Road, or my Patreon then this is pirated. Please let me know by going to the Jeffrey Nix website’s contact area so I can get really annoyed, complain to my cat, have her tell me this never would have happened if I had just gone back for a Ph. D, send a takedown notice, and get back to writing.

  Chessie (AKA Chessica Marshmellow) is a flame-point Siamese. We only found out her breed and that she is probably a multi-hundred-dollar cat a few months after the GF impulsively rescued a neighborhood porch kitty before she had to deal with winter AND being bullied by neighborhood dogs (she just wanted to hold her long enough for us to get her to a no-kill animal shelter. Then there was a slightly crossed-eyed bit of eye contact and cuddling. I got an urgent phone call saying she had a child in her lap, that it was now HER child, and the cuddly little blonde cat was staying forever as her daughter.) Now, Chessie very visibly only likes 3.5 people, detests humans who are standing, and screams if you aren't in your bed or office during petting time. She has itchy skin, so she needs oatmeal baths, sensitive-skin food, and nice treats. She would greatly appreciate your donation.

  -Redford is the sort of dog that just wants to melt into you and be nothing but an affectionate blob, experiencing the maximum skin-to-fur contact possible. If you lie down, he'll army crawl up from your legs so he can get cheek kisses. He loves his big sister Chessie, really wants to play with her, but is afraid. She likes to signal the start of play, then immediately ignore him or hop away. His confusion is unending. So is his destructive potential with toys. The average 'indestructible' toys that the trainers at pet stores suggest will last about three hours. We were slowly working on an old screen door that needed life support to last long enough for us to find something better. He found it propped against the wall during the weekend and started chewing through the bottom because it crumbled real good. Reford has a smooth brain and big heart.

  Bismuth, likes sitting near people and does not like being alone. It stirs her ire and curiosity if she learns there is any volume of space she could fit her head into that had been closed off. Every night before bed, she tries to open my closet, sneak into the basket full of kitchen towels needing washing, or shoves her little black arm under the cracks in doors like soot black tentacle (not scary at all, totally not something that freaks out people using the guest bathroom). She only met her big sister Chessie and little brother Red two weeks ago. I'm training her to boop me on the cheek when I say 'gimme a kiss,' and need nice treats because she gets confused and just tries to shoulder check my face, or go for a handshake. I also need to train her to not run out the garage door when it's opened by making her think the sound of an opening door means she has to wait on the couch for a high value treat.