Everything happened very quickly before Shilloh lost consciousness.

  Wade was roaring, and it was not human roaring. He was properly bestial in his war cry. She heard the explosive pops when a thorny spear was launched at Jacque’s truck. The Bane swerved almost out of the way, but two tires were still destroyed, as well as the siding on that half of the car.

  Before the truck had time to spin out, the dangerous being she had sensed made its move. All the air in the clearing, even around her, became thicker; it actually slowed the erratic swerving of the hobbled vehicle.

  That was all within what one might expect from a battle going from horribly dangerous and into eldritch dumpster fire territory. What she didn’t expect was that cosmic, overbearing force bearing down on them started pulling in natural energy. The pull was so intense that it formed a cacophonous swirling whirlpool big enough to sink an oil tanker.

  And all that natural power was taken, grasped, and shoved into her.

  That nebulous mix of potency and potential was pressurized into something liquid and crushing, like those water jets that cut metal. Like a firehose attached to an I.V. All of it was sent straight into her.

  Her body and the processes inside it had not been claimed by this creature, but with so much force behind the power, she had no choice but to take the unfiltered energy in. It poured down her throat, up her nose, and drilled through each of her pores like ten thousand needles trying to reach her bones. It was so close, so almost identical to the wavelengths of power that her magic operated in, that she managed to absorb it without immediately rupturing her soul.

  If Shilloh’s skin hadn’t already been green, it absolutely was now. Her hair looked like the canopy of an old-growth forest seen from space. Her eyes became portals to a time before, and her sense of selfhood was profoundly abraded.

  Becoming a dryad was a series of choices and small transformations. She was supposed to slowly give up each percentage of her humanity until she found the balance between dryad and human that matched her. This was as gradual as a bullet to the head.

  In terror, she asked the forest to protect her (also to protect Wade, but mostly her).

  The world answered. Roots made of stone and quartz rose from the ground to enclose the two of them.

  Immediately, the dome around Wade was brushed aside by that cosmic force. It was done with insulting ease. The energy drained away, halting the movement of further earth, and the desultory pieces of quartz that had already risen were smashed by an invisible pane of force.

  She had a vague intuition that life was very unfun for the limb stealers, but that was all she was able to perceive before her legs gave out.

  Sap bled from her eyes, and her back arched painfully. The dome closed around her, leaving Wade out, and her hands flew to her face. It was strange. Through the terror, and overwhelm, and pain, the only thought she had was the old desperate instinct to keep her supernaturally potent blood from hitting the dirt. It would cause damage. It could be the genesis of a plague, an elemental, a race of singing puppets, or who knows what else. The thought was terrifying: she’d never be able to forgive herself if she made a species of talking ventriloquist dummies.

  Turns out she should have been worried about something else.

  Her artificial cave was made with foggy quartz wrapped up in thin lines of stone. It was as if someone had created a monochrome stained glass window with incredibly thin stone seams. But, you know, stone and glass that were the long-dormant fangs of an emergent forest consciousness bent on defending her body and blood.

  The thing she should have been worried about was that it did nothing to protect her mind.

  Shilloh thrashed and clamped hands over her bleeding eyes as she was assailed by knowledge. None of it was knowledge that she could understand while remaining human.

  To know something, you needed context to make it meaningful. Saying a car went fifty floopbars per toggle-bing meant nothing. You needed to understand the speeds of different vehicles, how much distance they could cover, and how that related to your own body’s speed. You also needed to know what cars were. Or movement.

  The information she was getting was big and (probably) profound. But it meant jack shit to her. Beyond being annoying, it hurt her to see these thoughts. It hurt like grief and dementia. It contaminated her memories and threatened her own frame of reference. She could either comprehend something as small as the life she had lived or as profound as what she was being shown. But not both at once.

  It became the strangest battle she had ever fought. She strained desperately to remember her grandmother’s living room, her own dreams for the future, what Maraschino cherries tasted like, and why people had to walk.

  It was decades, if not centuries, of the trial of dryads crammed into a single minute. Keep a mind and body that operated like an individual with a personality, or change into something that operated on geologic scales.

  She blurred her mental eyes and tried as hard as possible to confuse herself about the knowledge being forced onto her and the meaning being whispered by the wind, sky, and underground.

  With so much sensory overload, it was a miracle that she was even able to notice when the pressurized flow of energy into her stopped. It happened so abruptly that she could have wept with relief. But there was already too much in her for another feeling. Some part of her begged for help, and she desperately pressed her shirt against her eyes to keep the blood-sap bullshit that was now also leaking from her ears from touching the ground.

  Something tore into her protective quartz globe with a terrible crack. The hands looked humanish, but the jagged stone cut them, and they didn’t bleed. Green-tinted flesh bones and arteries showed under the skin. Still, they were like moist clay dioramas at a museum, empty beyond a thin facsimile. More and more palms slapped onto the milky glass, and they cut themselves into slivers, punching through, grabbing jagged stone, and ripping it back.

  Her impossibly potent blood must have smelled amazing because all of those horrifying, disfigured puppet hands maiming themselves were copies of her own.

  The scream that left her was muffled behind the shirt. There was too much. It was only a small release to not have any more magic force-fed into her veins. At this point, the building was already burning; no reason to clap just because they had stopped adding napalm.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Everything that made Shilloh who she was had been stretched into a thin layer of paper overtop an atomic bomb in mid-explosion. Then someone decided to make her watch fucked-up copies of her hands cripple themselves so something could eat her. How the fuck did you do anything with a situation like that? That was years of therapy she had just witnessed. Not a single coherent thought about what needed to happen came to her.

  But, as luck would have it, she had years of carefully restrained belligerence stored up. Thinking wasn’t necessary. She screamed out all her pent-up rage and lunged forward, swinging her fist with all the power she could summon.

  It was, obviously, much more power than she was used to.

  She missed the false hand she had been aiming for, but a tidal wave of liquid mercury magic still burst from her. Rather than shimmering in a beautiful, holistic rainbow, it glimmered with thousands of small instances of violence reflected on its surface.

  For just a moment, all the trees around them stopped moving. Every leaf stilled, and not a single trunk bowed, no matter how the wind pushed. Animals stilled, mushrooms stopped digesting, rocks waited another moment to fall downhill, and birds waited to flap their wings. They donated that moment to her.

  The globe of quartz and stone in front of her shattered. The resulting chaotic wave of humming air and shrapnel shredded the front of the limb stealer. At least a dozen trees around the clearing died instantly. Some snapped from the wall of force. Others spontaneously froze or quietly gave up their lives because her pull had been too strong and they had given too much.

  She snarled in rage and leaped after the monster. It had made her kill. And goddammit all, if she had already crossed that line, then she would kill something that deserved it and be a murderess in truth.

  She fought past the thrashing vines with a deficit of skill and a surplus of rage. Luckily, power covered a multitude of sins. When she struck, her skin was stone. When her nails moved across entangling vines, they were the sharpest obsidian. When she kicked, it was a falling tree hitting, and when she ripped, it was with the inexorable power of geological movement.

  Half the time, she was only shredding leaves with her strikes, shrugging off dagger-like thorns for no real gain. But when she connected, its internal structure went to pulp. She was forced to grab its vines when it flew away under the power of her fists. Then she pulled it back to punch it again, its stolen limbs thrashing.

  True tears mixed with dripping sap made it impossible to enjoy the retribution. Innocent birds were dropping from the sky because of her. But that grief didn’t stop her; she shredded the creature like a chef mincing herbs.

  It took her a while, especially when it started running. The running pissed her off.

  Still, it was dead in time for her to stare down Wade and Jasque before they arrived to ‘save’ her. She looked around, jaw clenching and unclenching, unsure what to do. The feelings still rushed like a torrent, and she desperately sought details she could use to ground herself. The first thing that struck her was that the banes’ car was oddly whole aside from the initial damage. Also, all the other limb stealers were already dead.

  Shilloh froze, holding the central body of her victim, her hand lifted to hit it again in case it was playing dead. The main body was weirdly fleshly and full of goo. It dropped from her fingers with a plop, but she didn’t remember opening her hand.

  Pain like a car jack slowly prying open a crack in her skull built up. After all that magic and knowledge, she felt too large to be in a body with only two eyes.

  “Wade—?”

  That was as far as he got before the Were picked her up and hustled towards the shack. He was saying something about the defenses, and her poor, abused mind struggled to process his words.

  “What about the big monster?”

  “It must have only hated limb stealers on its territory. Blightbanes fight here all the time. It hasn’t killed any of them.”

  “But it feels—”

  The words trailed away. There were no dangerous feelings left. Or, if there were traces, they were the subtle cues she had been struggling to recognize over the last week. It was like a magic trick; the animosity and diefic sense of control had vanished.

  “Oh,” she breathed.

  “Oh?”

  “You’re right,” she said, feeling the last pieces of excess magic slip out of her body in uncontrolled waves that rustled the forest and subtly disturbed the microscopic life all around them.

  Wade’s arms around her felt very strong and solid. Also, warm. He would be a very nice couch heater if she could get him to hold still for a movie. She started drifting off toward sleep, wondering if heated blankets were still a fire risk.

  Jasque said something about her being a crypto, and fear spiked her heart rate. But Wade snarled back. Literally snarled. That made her feel better. Wade cared; he would protect her.

  Plus, her agent knew what was going on. She had sent him a message, and they had plenty of samples of her hair and other ritually significant items in case they needed to find her. No matter what, people would be here to protect her in a few hours and wrap up whatever mess was left.

  Shilloh had survived.

  That was hard to believe. She had survived. Which, really, was a job and a half well done. She had even stopped Wade from dying.

  That made happy feelings rumble in her chest. She was wondering drunkenly about whether he would relocate with her, and drifting towards sleep when two things happened.

  First, her instincts screamed like antibodies that had just stumbled upon a sample of the Black Death.

  Second, Wade squeezed her painfully tight. “Son of a succubus,” he cursed, “those aren’t supposed to multiply like that, are they?”

  No one answered, and Shilloh clawed sleep away to look over at where the limb stealer she had killed was churning like a cell going through mitosis.

  “Oh no,” she whispered.

  “What did you do?” Jasque asked, disgust and anger simmering in his voice.

  “My blood. Oh God, I jumped it while my eyes were bleeding.”

  “Your blood is making it reproduce?”

  She pushed feebly, and Wade put her down.

  Shilloh’s legs felt weak. And the green in her skin looked like a sickly jaundice rather than a magical bloom. She kept a hand on the Were’s shoulder and pushed herself upright with only a little wobble.

  “Wade, you need to turn back on the defenses and run.”

  “Okay, but why?”

  “One drop of my blood was all the first one got.”

  He looked at her, face inquisitive. Not terribly concerned or rushed. Just curious and waiting for the point.

  Then his eyes darted to the scabbed-over scratch on her arm. From there, he took in the mess of bloody sap that had leaked from her eyes and ears.

  “Oh,” he said. Then he whipped around, the sword reappearing in his hands as all the pieces clicked together. ”One drop of blood multiplied it at least four times. Son of a—”

  He swung his sword with abandon, sending out massive waves of cutting force. Each was massive compared to what he had done before and could have bisected a building. One after another, in a ceaseless churn, Wade hurled magic like an artillery mage trying to burn out.

  Holy hell. Why had he not fought like this from the beginning? Trees, rocks, and the metal of his truck sheared apart effortlessly. And he was only getting faster.

  It made no sense. The man was absolutely wasted on Forsythe. Why was someone who could cut a hill in half only allowed to limp around her piddly fuck town while PAAW did all the work?

  Those thoughts came and immediately leaked out the fissure of pain forming in her skull. At the point where she was forced to sink to her knees, she finally tore her eyes away from the monolith of destruction that stood in front of her and looked at the fruit of his wrath.

  In any sane world, the limb stealer would have been transformed into a pile of mulch able to pass through a fine mesh sieve without difficulty. Instead, each cut spawned a brand-new baby terror. Like cutting off the head of a hydra, but worse.

  “Wade!” Jasque called an unrealistically large sword appearing in his hands. “There’s too many.”

  “No! One drop was five. They shouldn’t make more than a hundred.”

  Jasque didn’t look at her, but his face scrunched up, and he spat out the words, “Did she look like this when that happened? Nothing is consistent about fucking dryads.”

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