"Well," said Sam, the new secret agent person-minder lady her old secret agent witness-relocation guy had handed her off to, "you don't need a toilet gun in a caravan. There will be latrines, not toilets."

  "Setting aside the fine and ancient philosophical debate about Theseus's Toilet—and if the porcelain defines the toilet or if the real toilet is where the heart finds release—the point still isn't about the presence of toilets, it's about me trying to not get kidnapped with my skivvies around my ankles.

  "I'm no expert in kidnappings—"

  "Well, I am! Depending on the definition, I just got kidnapped for the second and/or fifth time!" She rubbed demonstratively at the small bruise where she had been injected with 'antibiotics' earlier in the week.

  Sam, who was blond, unassuming, and still somehow lovely, gave her a look.

  Shilloh was very much her opposite. She was short, with brown, nearly black hair, a rugby build rather than a distance runner's body, and skin that remained pale even after a month of sun exposure.

  They were hauling a few bags' worth of stuff to the pickup location. Shilloh was used to traveling light and already had pre-prepared go-bags with everything they needed, so they had made great time. Hell, her new agent had even taken her to a nice lunch on the company card. Though, due to recent and traumatic crypto-related reasons, they had avoided the West End Market and gone to a different part of town.

  It had only been a few days since they were introduced, but they were getting more and more comfortable with each other. Though 'comfortable' was a relative term.

  Her trust was, well, flighty, at the moment.

  Shilloh had recently spent a week of hard hunting in the dangerous woods with two men trying to gaslight her. There were also her pre-existing burnout issues plus terrible fights to the death, new friends (which was even scarier then the fights), being drugged, waking up in a basement, and coming upon a massive classified government secret that offered a phenomenal—like 'wolf whistle and cartoon eyes popping out of your head' phenomenal—paycheck.

  The consequences of her magic use made all of it even worse. She had used more magic than she had in years. Honestly, it was more than she had been able to handle. Which meant she had been transformed into something that could handle it by the magic.

  It had been a while since she had to deal with a shift closer to Dryad-dom this significant.

  Her emotions were noticeably bigger. Sensation and perception seemed to be cartwheeling in a weird dance as she grew into all the new, small changes to her body. That included everything from mildly altered vision, an intensely acute awareness of sun on her skin, a potent urge to horde food now that the cold was coming, and a sense of being an awkward, gangly teenager who had just shot up four inches. Though the last was an existential growth spurt in what might have been her soul rather than the knock-knees and pimples sort of growth spurt.

  To be fair, both were traumatic.

  Which might have been what actually brought the two women closer.

  Sam had not just gone through a growth spurt in her soul. However, she had found the experience of negotiating compensation with Shilloh to be just a little…unpleasant.

  "Are you going to ask me to alter hazard pay for the risk of kidnapping?" The pitch of the agent's voice rose, and she subconsciously turned her body away like she was waiting to be lashed with a switch."Because I keep telling you, I don't have the authority for any of these promises. I can only tell you what I've seen others do."

  Shilloh adjusted the big duffel on her shoulder and waved the other woman's concern away. "No. It's just a bad joke. I'm sorry. I don't do tension well. The humor isn't completely voluntary when I'm this stressed."

  "Oh. Okay. As long as we're just messing around."

  They took a few steps in silence.

  "And you were messing around, right?" the blonde added.

  "Yes, I promise."

  "Okay," the silence grew less laden. Sam's shoulders slowly unclenched in a way that made Shilloh feel a little annoyed.

  They had negotiated a contract. It wasn't that big a deal. You'd think no one ever played hardball with her before.

  Sam cleared her throat, "Did you want me to ask about the three to five kidnappings thing so you can tell your jokes?"

  Shilloh immediately perked up, "Yes, please! I want to be mean to Jasque and then segue into telling you about how awful my homecoming date was. It's epic."

  "Oh, if we're talking about bad dates that you couldn't escape from, then I may have been kidnapped a few times too."

  "You show me yours if I show you mine?"

  "Deal."

  ~~~

  The sky was whispering grey, and they were entering the unpredictable North Carolina days where intense cold would come at unpredictable intervals, freezing your morning, only to flee and leave everyone sweltering in the evening.

  A slew of vehicles, some gas-powered, some magic-powered, and some horse-drawn, were all gathered up, and a few hundred people were moving boxes and cargo around.

  The two of them were chatting companionably when Shilloh decided to showcase her wit, tact, and extreme employability to the person who had just delivered her the offer for an absurdly well-paying job.

  "Fuck a duck," she said, pointing at a short, brown haired, impish woman in the pickup area. "Birch! Why are you here?"

  "We're road tripping together," Agnes said, walking up from behind the impish woman who had so shocked Shilloh.

  They were in a nice, but not central part of town that was closest to the big roads. It had more litter than average, but no one minded, as it was mostly a set of warehouses, barbed wire fences, and extra-wide roads.

  The four women, one pale, one blonde, one short, and one looking like Plato's ideal for a wholesome grandmother, stood in a small cobbled square that gave the impression of being used for famers markets or, as was the case today, a place for caravan's worth of people to meet up.

  Sam and Shilloh had just reached a section that the signs for 'paid passengers' had directed them to.

  "You two are both traveling with this caravan? Today?"

  Birch looked her up and down, a calm expression slowly faded into a glower. "Yes. I mean, I would have told you, but I assumed you were BEING FUCKING KIDNAPED SINCE YOU NEVER CALLED ME!"

  Shilloh flinched back, "I texted."

  'You texted. Well then, excuse the ever-loving fuck out of me! Maybe I should apologize. After frantically fleeing for our lives, and you bailing out of a moving vehicle, I had forgotten that protocol listed proper responses as texting, postcards, and sticks with ogham script!"

  Birch had a point. In fact, the silent treatment was something that Shilloh had felt bad enough about that she had been working hard not to think about.

  But lying made her feel like her stomach was full of car exhaust. Finding friends willing to do what they had done for her was something that would shock, awe, and shake any person. For someone with her secrets and trust issues, it had been a lot to process.

  Which wasn't good. As shown by the fact that her emotional lexicon reached a dead end at the phrase 'a lot' when trying to encompass the world-shattering onslaught of feelings she was ignoring.

  All of this illustrated why she had just back-burnered the whole thing to focus on packing, negotiation, and a potential new career.

  …and why she reacted the way she did to a literally ride-or-die, life-saving friend's justified yelling.

  "When did you suck the King of the World's Dick and get given the right to judge me! Fuck you, Birch. It was awful for all of us, and I've been goddamn busy."

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The two glared at each other for several long seconds.

  "Fraulein thinks you're a dumb bitch," hissed Birch.

  "If you were a fairy tale, you'd be Rumple Foreskin."

  The standoff lasted a few more seconds until the two of them collapsed into a massive hug. Shilloh's apologies poured out of her at the same time Birch said she was so glad to see her.

  Finally, they stepped apart and stared at each other, hands still on each other's shoulders.

  "The fairy tale thing was a good line," Birch said with a teary-eyed nod.

  "Thanks, I was gonna call you Duchess Dick Sucker, but…"

  "Rumple Foreskin was better," her friend said in a soft voice.

  "Yeah."

  "Yeah."

  Shilloh tried to think of what to say next. Not a thought stirred inside her skull. She was still too shocked to have seen two of the big reasons she didn't want to leave Forsythe. "I, uh, got a job offer."

  "Job offer," Birch's eyes narrowed. "From who? Her?"

  Sam smiled and stepped forward with hand outstretched to shake. "Nah, I'm just a new acquaintance passing through. Decided to see her off since it was on the way. I'm Sam, by the way."

  "Birch," said the short woman, emotional vulnerability already retreating beneath her usual shawl of charisma and weaponized eccentricity. "But you may also know me from my Guinness World Records in—"

  "No!" Shilloh interrupted. "Sam is a new friend and we're being nice to her.

  "I am being nice, or she would have been—"

  "No creative threats. They're very much not being nice, and there are better ways to express concerns and annoyance. Isn't that right, Agnes?"

  "Oh, absolutely. Though I will say there are also better ways to communicate with your dear concerned friends after a crisis."

  Shilloh winced. She shot a covert look at the secret agent. Sam was doing a good job of seeming confused and in over her head. Which sucked, she was hoping to get some help explaining things without blowing the other woman's cover.

  The facade was too perfect, though. It offered no subtle hints or clandestine winks that could be noticed by an observant person. Still, she could have sworn there was a subtle aura of schadenfreude around the women.

  But that was fine. They'd had a briefing about what stories to tell and what information could be shared.

  "That's…" Shilloh sighed, "That's fair, Agnes. Pretty much what happened was that I helped Wade out. They killed the things like he said he would. But I somehow got a job offer from the Blightbanes because of how I handled myself. Part of the offer includes an NDA about what all happened and the job I'm going to interview for. I'm sorry. I should have told everyone. But it was really weird, and is going fast, and it seemed like it would be emotional—like overwhelmingly emotional—to tell everyone. So it got shoved into a mental box with all the other stuff I didn't know how to deal with."

  "Understandable, Deary," said Agnes. She still looking like a sketch artist's perfect rendition of a grandmother. She was solid and huggable. She always had glasses hanging around her neck on a brightly beaded necklace that looked atrocious. She had two modes: a turtle-neck and pearls, or a cheap, tourist-shop printed tee-shirt paired with a massive purse full of tissue and hard candies.

  "But," the older woman continued, asserting herself with a sort of loving unyieldingness, "understandable is not the same thing as a good excuse. Not wanting to break hard news is how a commune I stayed in for a few years ended up with gonorrhea spreading like the common cold. Lord have mercy, but I suspect even the February outbreak of pubic lice felt the burn when they went tinkle."

  Sam's mouth dropped open.

  Agnes saw her expression and nodded wisely, "I know, I know. Forgive me the potty humor. But really, you would think that in a civilized world, everyone would have converted to the gospel of dental dams. But you'de be surprised! I managed to avoid it back then. To this day, you won't catch me without protection." She reached into her purse and pulled out two dental dams as well as silicone and non-silicone condoms in several sizes. Her quick draw unsettled the balance in her purse, and something that looked like lipstick fell to the ground in a shower of used condom wrappers. The thing started buzzing with depraved intensity. When Agnes bent to pick it up, a leather mask meant to cover the whole head also fell out of the purse. It had zippers for the eyes and mouth.

  "I don't…" Sam blinked. "Should just… I can't. Can I just?" she pointed over her shoulder, but Agnes waved her off.

  "Oh, no need, but thank you for the offer. I'll clean them myself if any grit got in."

  Shilloh watched the blond spy with jaded empathy. She remembered that first time Agnes had happened to her.

  "Why do you have a vibrator in your purse?" She asked, involuntarily voicing the question that every single part of herself did not want to know the answer to.

  "I should think that's obvious: it doesn't have a flared base. Everyone knows that without a flared base, you could lose it in a very unfortunate manner that requires an ER visit. So, purse it is."

  The dryad blinked a few too many times. Before she could pour bleach in her ears and hope it would scrub the mental images from her mind, Birch interjected.

  "You can ask her more about that later. How far are you going, Shilloh?"

  "Not as far as that old deviant."

  "That's a 'well-experienced' deviant, thank you very much," Anges corrected with a stern tone. Then her mouth quirked and she dropped a hand to her purse, "Unless you feel like crossing wits and fencing?"

  “NO notthebuttplug!” Shilloh screamed, all the words merging together as she covered her eyes.

  In a terrible act of cosmic cruelty, she had managed to yell that at the exact moment the square around them went silent.

  Anges laughed kindly. Birch cackled cruelly. Shilloh's cheeks flared, and her brain short-circuited.

  The embarrassment blinded her until almost two minutes later when the three women had towed her off to a corner, put her luggage at her feet, and somehow placed a cup of water in her hands while she muttered about needing to burn down her house—or the city—to make sure no one ever traced that horrible moment back to her.

  "Yeah," Sam said, ignoring her for Birch, "Like I was saying, I'm just an old friend of Wade's from school. I was in town for work. Shilloh and I hit it off, so I figured I'd walk her over here while I was heading out."

  Sam was leaving? That made the dryad's spine go taut. She still had many, many questions. Like, what the fuck was up with Wade? Despite his insane magic, he acted like he was a bit player visiting an actual big shot. Did that mean he wasn't that powerful? Did it mean she was going to meet some absurd monster of a spellcaster?

  All she had been told was that she was being considered for emergency defense programs. There was a range of potential roles she could fill, and no matter what, they could give her a good salary. The exact ones she would be offered depended on what the higher-ups thought she was a good fit for.

  A month or more of travel, gnawed at by profound insecurity about her future, did not sound fun.

  "You're leaving?" she asked, trying not to crush the water in her hand.

  "Well, yeah. It was great to meet you, but I'm not headed north. Don't worry, though. You'll do fine."

  Before Shilloh could protest further, Birch was very unsubtly encouraging the agent to leave and resting a possessive hand on Shilloh's shoulder.

  There was no way to fight it without looking weird.

  "Bye, Shilloh!" Sam waved after a few more minutes, "Give Wade my best!"

  "Wade?" Agnes wiggled her eyebrows. "That's the boy who caused you so much strife with his branch breaking, isn't it?"

  "I'm not sure I'd say it quite like that."

  "Oh? Then how would you describe it?" Birch said, hands on hips. "Because I went through a lot of trouble to totally-not-steal-a-car for your sake, and it's pretty fucking shitty of him to try baiting you away when I already called dibs. You're not allowed to move."

  "I never said I was moving."

  "No, you just said you're going on a massively annoying caravan trip because of a job offer. Even if it's just for orientation or training, that usually means travel or relocation is part of the work."

  Shilloh just shrugged and dropped her eyes since she probably would need to move.

  "Are you going to blame the NDA for not answering that, too?"

  "Can I?"

  "No. Normal NDAs aren't that restrictive. If you didn't read yours, then trust me."

  Before she could say anything else, Birch held up her hand. The short, impish woman made a production of shaking out her legs, taking deep breaths, and gently slapping herself on the face. At the same time, Shilloh looked on with bafflement, and Agnes pulled out needles and began knitting something.

  "Alright, Shilloh, Boo, Bubby, my Wumple Duffikens. I," Birch paused, "forgive you."

  "Okay. But I didn't apologize about that."

  "No! Praise me not for my overwhelming generosity. Your warm gaze and overflowing praise are too much already. Just tell me how long you're going to be with the caravan, and I'll accept your thanks."

  Shilloh decided to repeat an old classic: shrug and look at the ground..

  "Well," Birches tone came out a little strained," I'm going to be traveling for at least four weeks. Will you leave before me?"

  "I don't know."

  "Agnes is going to leave us at New Vultun, just tell me if you'll at least stay with us long enough to see her off."

  "I don't remember the name of the stop, just that there's lots of secondary travel after the caravan. But I think there are four or more weeks where we might overlap."

  "Well then. Let's get your bags. We'll help you stow them and make sure you're situated with us."

  "I don't think—"

  "Don't bother thanking me," Birch said, grabbing the lightest of Shilloh's bags and offering her arm to Agnes, "I know the man who runs the caravan, and he owes me a favor."

  "Really, though, I need to stay with Wade and Jasque so I can learn and prep for the interview."

  "Honey, let's compromise. You have four weeks, and we have so much to catch up on: you'll have girl time with Agnes and me."

  "And?"

  "And what?"

  "You said it was a compromise. Where's my half of the compromise?"

  "It's me sharing my time with Agnes."

  Agnes swatted playfully at Birch's arm, "I swear, Candy, you don't need to butter me up. I already told you that I would pass on my tricks. There's no time for a proper mentorship, and the knots will take a little, but training your body to stretch that way is how you really take things to the next level."

  Shilloh blinked again and felt a flicker of annoyance build up in her stomach. "That is not a fair compromise. I don't want anything to do with your weird hero worship and sex-capades apprenticeship. I—"

  "You are absolutely right!" Birch spun around, her smile turning sharp. "It's not fair. Not when I'm just now knowing you're safe."

  Shilloh glowered and felt her fists ball up. Birch just kept going.

  "But you will make it up to me later. Like I said, we have four whole weeks. I'll make sure we're right next to each other the whole time. I am positive that you will be able to tell me all about what happened and let me check a copy of this NDA for you. You're already forgiven, but then we'll be even."

  "What if I don't want to let you look?"

  "You will. Four weeks is a long time."

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