Wade sent out a cascade of death. He drew in power through his Mark, and channeled a trickle of it through Walker. But it didn’t help. Shit, he might have actually be helping them based on how many kept spawning.
At the far edge of the clearing the limb stealers grew larger faster than he could cut them down. They were tumorous and disgusting. It was like watching mold under a microscope. Fleshy, sappy limbs grew and built cores that sprouted ferns interspersed with hands, and eyes. Some even grew hairless versions of Shilloh’s head before devolving into a mass of malformed body parts that would do any eldritch terror proud.
Shilloh, the real Shilloh, was not helping. She on her knees hyperventilating and, realistically, was also a massive security risk. Even what he was doing now was too much for his cover to bear.
Her skin was still tinted green, and something about her hair seemed strange. He could have sworn he saw small roots slowly moving through the dark waves. The cornea of her eyes was also shifting like the dappled shadow of ground beneath a tree canopy
There was some hope that she was too overwhelmed to notice the scale of what he was doing. Jasque calling her out had been a shock that left her expression empty and haunted. Which, for someone of her species, was possibly an under-reaction.
Passing out from fatigue was entirely possible too. Her clothes were stretched and torn in a way any Were would recognize. Legs had briefly swelled with strength and popped some of the seams on the sides of her pants, her arms looked toned and powerful in a way the shoulders of her shirt hadn’t been meant to handle. Plus, where her skin touched the ground he could sense a golden matrix of energy moving through her.
That was a lot of magic to handle. And, if her sudden olive skin tone was anything to go by, it was far more than she usually worked with.
Deep in him, something shifted as his own magic senses took in her essence. It stirred as that one of a kind dryad catalyst dripped out of her veins, off her fingers, and sunk into the forrest. He sensed it spread through the land, trickle into his Mark, and a part of him he had worked years to lock behind mental walls roused enough to crack a sleepy eye towards her.
This, he was certain, is why her information had been classified. Dryads had a magic far more wondrous and enduring than a Were. Even now, she breathed in light, and exhaled life. The blood of the world moved through her, and though her people sipped from it to became more, the growth her mere presence kick started overshadowed any amount of power she could consume.
If someone knew what she was, Shilloh would be tied up in the back of a car in minutes.
His attacks gained speed and power, anger sparking just at that thought of her being taken away.
“Wade!” Jasque called, “we need to retreat. That potion will leave you a wreck. The defenses can handle it from here!”
It took too much mental effort to stop. His arms felt tireless and unstoppable. The flowing of power was like the perfect buzz during a night off. It was a lie though. He was far more vulnerable than he felt. He could already see callouses that had been ripped off. He wanted to destroy the invaders, to erase the limb stealers from existence. And his fear that not all of those sentiments came form his human instincts chilled him to the bone.
He squashed the desire to continue using his sword and the ingrained habit of obedience that had him reaching for an empty potions vial prepared for just such an occasion.
“Jasque, confirm. That growth potential is beyond acceptable tolerances.”
“But the potion—”
“No,” he said, refusing to play along with the convienent lie. “Confirm. Their spread potential is beyond acceptable tolerances.”
The other man looked at him and his handsome face went from a strained look of stress into a calm mask. Wade wondered, not for the fist time, if Jasque may not be strange enough among Slayers.
“She’ll see,” his partner said.
“Sam’s already here, maybe she can find Shilloh’s agent.”
“We could just—”
“No. Please confirm we are beyond tolerance, Blightbane.”
That anger had surged again. And this time he knew it was not solely comprised of humane emotions. If Jasque saw this…
Well, Wade would report it all to Jasque and his chain of command anyway. He had decided years ago to die before lying about something compromising him.
But he would see these monsters dead and Shilloh somewhere safe before he opened that particular can of worms.
The Slayer didn’t argue further. Probably because he recalled that, despite being non-human, Shilloh had high potential value to the organization. He was very mathematical about balancing risk and reward.
“Confirmed,” Jasque said.
Wade turned to face the monsters. He didn’t really need a second opinion. But it was best practice and would make any tribunals and investigation he faced for blowing his cover a but easier.
At this point the cryptos were a hedgerow of death. Some had a halo of arms that were Shilloh’s regular skin color. These moved slowly. Others had green tinged skin and nails that looked like the lightest woods. Those moved faster. Others had mutated into various gradients of terror and power.
“Can you sense any other witnesses?” He said, mostly so the record would show he had asked before going rouge.
“No.”
“Good.”
“Hardly,” Jasque said with a frown directed at the dryad slowly losing her chlorophyll color as she gaped between them.
Shilloh bristled at his glare, “If either of you sons of bitches try to harvest me I’ll—”
Wade reached out through a Mark that had been reinforced by a Wild Talent, years of training, a curse that was even now stirring, and a willingness to test his assumptions rather than blindly believing in the orthodoxy.
Though other people just called what he was about to do ’genius.’ He didn’t like those people.
Two disguises he had woven shattered. The first was a shell over all the nearby land he had claimed that perfectly described a stretch of Unmarked wildness to magical senses. The flaws in that shell were what Shilloh had picked up on. The second was the weak Mark that his persona used. It was the mediocre arcane signature any Were would sense if they examined his home and perfectly matched his cover.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The Wade Raslow of Forsythe was common and a subpar Were. He used expensive weapons to compensate for not Enhancing or Negating well. His Shifting was decent but not prodigious. His Mark was solid, and an experienced eye might even say it showed natural talent, but not the robustness to force change on the world.
That was not who he needed to be right now. In this moment, he was the Wade who moved town-to-town weaving his workings. He gave up sleep, and friends, and pride, and safety every day to prepare the field and start fighting battles years before the enemy ever arrived.
With a simple flex of will he froze the air around the limb stealers. What had been a pleasant breeze turned into a dome as impenetrable as missile proof glass.
There was a more efficient way to do his next step, but he was not quite able to separate oxygen from nitrogen; at least not at this site. Instead he pressurized the gases in the dome. Air flowed in, and nothing came out.
It caused some pain for the Cryptos. Green tinted human limbs writhed and the limb stealers shrieked. Their copied capillaries popped and blood spurted with the sudden change. Shilloh’s stolen semblance disappeared, returning the creatures to fern filled lumps that were immune to air pressure.
Desperately, they struck at the dome with spears and abilities Shilloh’s blood had awoken in them. It did nothing.
After a few second he stopped pressuring air and gathered motion. Small rumbles from the ground, the strike of spears, and every movement that tried to stir the gasses of the dome were devoured. All pulled through his Mark—which proclaimed him owner of the very concept of the space they inhabited—to be placed in reservoirs and etheric constructs whose one-of-a-kind design would have made any engineer or advanced wizardry student froth at the mouth.
A small shift was all it took. He packed the stolen energy dense, reminded the world (forcefully) that kinetic energy was in fact thermal energy in a different outfit, and let it loose inside the pressurized air of his dome.
He had first gotten this idea when someone told him why people weren’t allowed to smoke in hospitals, especially near pressurized tanks might hold pure oxygen.
Jasque stood next to him and covered his eyes when the entirely invisible shield turned into a dome of solid light, lit from within. It rapidly shifted from blinding white to familiar flaming orange and then emptiness.
Ash, smoke, and atomized dirt floated in the dome. The ground at their feet had shaken some, a small percentage of the vibrations having snuck though his grip.
Behind him, Shilloh’s threats had stopped. Or, more accurately. She had started staring at him with wide-mouthed horror.
Wade let the dome fall. His will gripped the smoke and condensed it into a lump of carbon that broke into many small chunks. Those threw themselves to the trees Shilloh had killed.
Hopefully the nutrients would encourage new growth. The thin mist of Dryad empowered limb stealer ash was so charged with power that gorgeous sun flowers were shooting up wherever it touched the ground.
Wade took a moment to soak that in. Herbs and sunflowers, ehh? He liked it. Certainly a different tableau than what he usually left behind.
It was inordinately hard to look at Shilloh. He didn’t want her to stop challenging him and laughing with him.
He turned his body, but couldn’t lift his eyes to meet hers. “Let’s see to your injuries.”
He wanted to ask if she had called for help already. But asking that question to an isolated and injured woman while two armed men approached her seemed like it could read pretty badly.
She took a deep breath, the tendons of her neck tightening. Her expression was a carefully curated calm blankness and he prepared for her to start screaming at him.
“You were the big bad the whole time?” her voice was oddly flat. He tried not to wince. Shilloh was not a flat person.
“Yes.”
“You were what claimed the land I was sensing?”
“Yes.”
“You could have found and stopped the limb stealers anytime.”
He wiggled his hand in a ’sorta’ gesture. “Only if I was looking for them while they stepped into my territory.”
His clarification was soundly ignored. “You chose not to stop them,”
“I got rid of all but one or two so we could extend the search and have a good resolution. I needed more time to find out how you were able to sense my Mark. Correcting those mistakes is a matter of national security.”
The words national security tasted like poison. He hated when this happened. Hated them slowly replacing who he was with what he could do. This was when people started flinching and trying not to offend him.
A long blink was all the tell he had before Shilloh’s careful calm collapsed. “You son of a bitch!
Wait what?
“I’ll kick your ass so hard that the shrapnel from your prostate will lobotomize you!”
“You’re not—”
“Fuck you! Do you realize how stressful this whole thing has been!”
“You’re not afraid?”
Before she could reply Jasque stepped up with a medical kit in his hands and a set of syringes sealed inside plastic, “Fight later. Are you allergic to any of these antibiotics.”
She barely glanced at the man, and he could both see and sense how the magic of the land around them was suddenly pulled into her, the stalks of grass plastering themselves to skin that mimicked their green. “Thank you, Jasque. I am not allergic to any antibiotics.”
“No reactions?”
“I said no!”
The Slayer took out an alcohol swab and swiped a patch of her arm clean, completely unswayed, “How should I know if penicillin will act as an herbicide and kill you.”
Shilloh’s wrath turned around to him, “I’m a human!”
He rather pointedly did not answer her, though his eyes went to the slowly spreading green spreading up from her legs. Shilloh glared at Jasque.
Damn. Not being yelled at had been nice. But he couldn’t have her staring at the other Bane.
Wade cleared his throat, saying something that never helped “Its just standard operating procedure. I’m sure you understand.”
“Oh, you’re sure, are you? Well, I’m tired, and hurt, and green, and pissed off. So I’m sure that you need to tell me exactly what the hell is going on. Are you even a Were, or was that a lie too.”
“I’m just a Were.”
“Ha! Just Were my bark-covered ass. Weres can’t do that.”
She was glaring between him and Jasque, which was no good. He needed at least her attention if he couldn’t have her calmness.
“It’s just advanced use of a mark.”
The sputtering incoherent mixture of yelling and obscenity was hard to make heads or tails of.
“Theoretically,” he interjected, “anyone could build up to this. You just need a couple rare skills.”
“Bullshit, the crap you pulled doing this,” she waved at her bleeding eyes and face, letting Jasque take the arm grudgingly while she stared down Wade, “isn’t possible for a Were.”
He frowned, “I did that?”
“Yes! You almost cooked my brain and turned me into a glorified tree!”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I thought you need some extra— Fuck. I really am sorry, I was just trying to boost your energy and help.”
“Help! If you ever try to help me, or sell me dog shit like this again I swear on your mother’s grave I will—”
Jasque stood up, put himself between them, and backed Wade away. The man’s eyes never left Shilloh. In his hand was an emptied syringe. One that was larger and significantly different than the antibiotics he had originally taken from their first aid pack.
Shilloh had been too angry to notice the subtle sort of mystic static when he had swapped what was in his hands. The change had been smooth, efficient, and perfectly timed. Just like everything he did. Including knocking a large rock out the air. Shilloh had thrown it at them before the sedatives took hold.
After a slow count of five Jasque said, “Confirm?”
Wade didn’t let himself sigh. That lack of professionalism would just get him chewed out. He just felt through his mark and checked the beat of her heart against his earth, the movement of his air into her lungs, and even those strange flows of energy she drew on.
“She’s out,” he confirmed.
Without even nodding Jasque stepped aside and tried his phone. Both of them had activated beacons disguised as dog tags as soon as they decided the limb stealers rate of propagation made elimination a higher priority than secrecy.
Still, Sam would still appreciate a call if the towers allowed. It would help her coordinate the pick up and getting bonds capable of holding an angry dryad.
The thought of how Shilloh would react when she woke up in magical handcuffs crossed his mind and Wade couldn’t do anything but shake his head.
There was an awful sucking fire of displeasure in his heart. It tried to eat him up and pull his shoulders down to his belly.
With rigorous self discipline he turned himself away from the anticipation of loss. Instead, he moved Shilloh into the recovery position and triple checked for witnesses before smoothing away the signs of battle from the land.
The less loose ends they had by this evening the better.
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