"Okay, Scotty, to be clear. I'm not telling you to break Wade's trust in you or disclose personal information. You shouldn't fall into wild speculation that damages your conscience. I'm just asking you to tell me everything you've ever known about Wade, even if it's a secret, and to tell me exactly what you think is going on in his head in exchange for one hundred dollars and us getting matching friendship tattoos."

  "Well, Shilloh, to be clear, I am absolutely telling you to shove it up your ass. Especially since I'm already doing you a potentially dangerous favor."

  The two of them were outside the small town where they had been partying the night before. Wade was busy, while Birch and Agnes were hungover, leaving the two of them with time to spare.

  Scotty had suggested they look for a crypto in this area that he knew about. One that could be an excellent familiar. It was supposed to be totally different than a unicorn. It had extraordinary healing powers, but was not a unicorn despite sounding a whole hell of a lot like a unicorn with healing powers.

  He also said, if they were lucky, they would find a different horse-looking crypto that sounded remarkably like a Clydesdale battle-unicorn. One that was an absolutely unstoppable murder machine that only developed increasingly unfair powers as it aged.

  He, Jasque, and Wade had already cleared out some unsavory creatures at the request of local banes. To his mind, that meant odds were in their favor for finding something good.

  The pre-exploration culling made her a little uncomfortable. There were endless ways to engage in the process of finding a familiar. All were valid and deeply personal. Some were more spiritual, and others less. But she knew enough to recognize that she had accidentally started down a school of familiar finding that was very reliant on faith and the unfathomable side of magic.

  That style wouldn't have been her first choice, but some part of her felt like it was fate; that there was a reason it had happened.

  People like Scotty, in other words, wizards, tended to lean extremely heavily on the knowable, predictable side of magic. The more extreme even claimed that empiricism and the scientific method would show all things to be predictable and understandable, even magic. It might just require them to find maths and an as of yet undiscovered processing machine to understand it all.

  The culling, the attempt to meddle in outcomes that would turn out right, bothered her. She had been ready to push him and say that he needed to let the process work without strangling it when he had told her the sort of things that the three of them had killed.

  For some reason, this area had experienced a surge of incorporeal spawning crypto of a horrible variety. Several of them slowly degraded and lived for a few months of constant pain, lashing out at all they could. Those were the tame variety. Others were just wrong.

  One in particular would possess quadrupeds and then try to mate with the other quadruped bodies to build progressively more powerful and mutated hosts.

  For all that Shillloh loved nature and respected the oftentimes cruel circle of life, she was one hundred percent on the townspeople's side. If she had found a four-legged, half-mutated snake-deer trying to molest her dog, she also would have done a controlled burn of a few dozen acres of any national forest to make sure that monster never saw the dawn of a new day.

  Dryad or not, environmental advocate or no, if an old chocolate lab with soulful eyes, or an adorably clumsy corgi needed her, Shilloh would knife Gaia herself and leave that leafy bitch's body in an abandoned alley.

  After learning this, they had both said a quick prayer to John Wick, patron saint of dogs and asymmetric consequences, before moving on.

  "Come ooon. Is hunting for healing unicorns ("Not unicorns", he said) really that dangerous?"

  "Real unicorns," he said, nose lifting so that he could look down it at her, "are horrifying, and even if what we're going for is pretty human-friendly, there's no telling what else is out here."

  "While I do agree with you and support your point about vigilance and respect for the power of the wilderness, I also feel the need to discredit said point so we can get back to you telling me what the fuck happened with Wade last night."

  He shook his head and, despite her words, when they heard a suspicious susurrus of leaves, they both transitioned to silent watchfulness.

  The area around this time was significantly more tame than the Croatan. But even if food processors were less dangerous than a wood chipper, that didn't make it a good idea to stick your hand in one.

  This location's energy had an inherent sense of balance to it. One that made her suspect that the spikes of environmental magic that birth spawning cryptos may not be as frequent or extreme here as she had grown used to.

  The Croatan was a stalemate of different biomes. Ones that received reinforcement, or surrendered ground with every whim of tide and seasons. It was long stretches that endured constant miniature cataclysms because of the peculiar variability in temperature and season in that region. Hurricanes tore through the forests, summer heats went high enough to make the very air feel inhospitable, and it vacillated between near freezing and shorts-weather in the course of a single day.

  Here, things were different. They were entering the mountainous region. She wasn't sure why, and the detour had pissed off Birch, but Shilloh found herself loving it. For all that the weather could be dramatically different on one side of a mountain range than the other, the altitude and slope were such strong factors that they overshadowed everything else. Nothing here went above the tree line, but everything felt like the mountains, no matter where you were.

  Landmarks rose in the great, blue-hazed distance. Scale became confusing, so close to the grandeur around them. Hills hid everything. They made each hundred meters feel contained, enveloped, hidden, and hugged by the weight of geology.

  You would disappear in trees that blanketed you with life and quietude, only to catch glimpses through the cover of things so vast and gorgeous that it felt like peeking out from a snow globe set on God's shelf.

  That pervasive 'mountains' feel meant a lot in terms of encouraging harmonious magic. Though, to be honest, that was not a rule. Just how it worked right here, right now, and to the limits of her still too-human mind.

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  Some mountains felt very variable and dangerous. Ranges existed every bit as dangerous as the Croatan. Such things were not for mortals to predict.

  Shilloh took all of this in as they moved forward, following deer trails far from any marker set out for casual hikers.

  They saw the occasional magical creature, most of them magical versions of already existing animals, but the sense of harmony remained.

  The pollen-sized fairies and green-eyed creatures that looked like cats, but were very much not cats, felt just as embedded in the ecosystem as the squirrels and scarlet tanagers. She'd bet good money that those cryptos were not spawned, or at least, that they also mated and had proper lifecycles in addition to spawning.

  When they passed a particularly scenic overview, the two of them sat and drank from their water bottles. Letting the protective mental bubbles and constant low-level awareness that was required around other people dissolve. For that moment, there was no possibility of overwhelming sounds to gird against, no courtesy to conform to, and no possibility of anything judgmental observing them.

  The lines between 'I' and 'nature' fuzzed, and the two sighed with contentment.

  "Shilloh," Scotty eventually said, his voice a bit dull from their prolonged silence. "You know you're my friend, right?"

  "Yeah. I do."

  "You sure? Cause I don't mean a drinking buddy, or a pal at a conference. Your happiness means something to me, and even though we haven't gotten to know a ton about each other, if you told me you needed help, I would drive the hours it took to help you. Even if it was something small like moving or feeling alone."

  Fuck. She felt the same way too. But you didn't just say stuff like that. Holy mother of mercy, she was torn between joy at hearing her own feelings returned and wanting to throw herself off a cliff so she wouldn't need to worry that she was making a face and it would hurt his feelings about her feelings.

  She had to say something smart and emotionally intelligent.

  "Have you ever farted in the shower after soaping your ass and wondered if it made bubbles?"

  Even the goddamn bugs paused and stared at her.

  "…Shilloh?"

  "Yes, Scotty?"

  "Stop reading my mind. I planned on talking about that on the way back?"

  "Wait, really?"

  "No! I'm not some emotionally incoherent pervert who wants to sniff their own fart bubbles."

  "I do not want—"

  "A DEGENERATE who wants to wear their stank fume like an old-school metal scuba helmet!"

  She buried her face in her hands while he laughed at her.

  "Oh, wow," he said, rubbing at his eyes. "That was great. I'm still not letting you off the hook on the feelings stuff, but that was great."

  She glared at him, and he mimed something that looked like pulling an apple from his back pocket and trying to shove the whole thing in his mouth.

  After she had thrown a few twigs at him, he kept talking, thereby preventing her from defending herself and diving off a cliff.

  "Anyhow, I say all that about you being my friend, so you know that I really feel for you. Genuinely. Even the specter of rejection is painful. Vulnerability is, well… fucking awful. And I wish you didn't have to go through it."

  "Amen."

  The two picked up their water bottles and clinked. After a long sip, Scotty took a long moment to think before speaking. "You found your other self, right?"

  "Yup. I lived in a sorta-village sort-town that was mostly dryad and very into preserving traditional dryad types of art."

  He nodded, "That means you grew up in two places, and I suspect that both of them are having a little bit of culture clash with how Wade grew up."

  "Sooooo," she said, "what you're saying is everything is fine and I don't need to worry or talk about how it makes me feel?"

  He ignored her weak attempt at humor. "All I'm saying is that he went from a pretty conservative place to being surrounded by very thoughtful and intentional people who became his role models. My dude naturally wants to be go-with-the-flow; he's predisposed for it, but he's worked really hard to be more of a thinker. That led him to neglect, if not outright prune, all the parts of his life that would let him practice responding to a sudden bit of interpersonal vulnerability."

  "So it's him, not me? And we should never talk about any of this again?"

  Scotty laughed, "No. What I'm saying is you spooked him. Our boy is skittish and out of practice."

  "I mean, that's fair, I guess, but what am I supposed to do about it? I'm not going to hunt anyone down. I will never beg for anyone's attention or approval. Grandma would burn my eyebrows off if I even thought about it."

  "Of course not. Just be ready for him to come in having overthought stuff. Be patient and maybe think about what you want and what you're willing to do. Otherwise, you'll both be figuring it out on the fly and doing that annoying thing where you're constantly thinking out loud, then apologizing for a half-formed thought coming out wrong. Then, taking back things you were brainstorming out loud, but they'll actually linger in the other person's mind forever like a poltergeist."

  "You're making this sound like a lot of work just to have a drunken make-out session."

  "Yeah—but ignoring the fact that you obviously don't want to just make-out with him—that's the whole thing, isn't it? You see what the other has to offer and what it'll cost. If what they need is hard for you, not something you can do gracefully, or just not worth what they offer, then you bow out and have saved yourself a bunch of time. That's what dating is. It's just like your upcoming job interview, right?"

  She was about to berate him for making that comparison. Workaholic or not, she didn't think of making out as an interview when she saw something bright in the distance.

  "What the fuck," she started getting to her feet, only to find Scotty already up, weapon drawn, and scanning the surroundings.

  "What?"

  "You see the bright purple?"

  In seconds, he had a monocular out and was scanning the underbrush below them. Before he spotted it, she heard a very unique sound. It wanted to be a humming roar mixed with a thunderous crack, but it fell short; like a child's high-pitched voice failing to roar with a grown man's fury.

  "Holy shit," Shilloh said, heart thumping, lips curling, and joy rising like a wave of fizzing soda up her back." I think that's a juvenile Wingin."

  The sound came again, and Scotty shoved the monocular in her hand, having her sight along his extended arm.

  In the far distance, a being came into view. It was small and cute. A puffy, round little fluff ball made of purple down, with all the juvenile features of a baby bear, but with a distinctly monkeyish look about the limbs and tail. Plus, most importantly, wings. Wings that slowly transitioned from a lizard green, into purple from the base of the shoulder blades out.

  The baby was trapped a few feet off the ground. The only hint about what had snared it was a clump of leaves that had stuck along a nearly invisible length of sticky web.

  Those tiny wings flapped desperately, making a loud cracking sound. Then they stretched taut and vibrated like the diaphragm of a speaker.

  "Oh shit," Shilloh said, taking her eyes from the device and scanning the air around them. "That's a fucking juvenile Wingin. We need to move. Now."

  "Wingin'? That looks like a Randal's Beast."

  "Doesn't matter," Shilloh said. Tightening her backpack, checking her weapons, and eyeing the mulch slope that had been below their feet while they took in the view. "That could grow into an amazing familiar, and if the mature members of its flock come running, we might end up having this entire stretch of forest fucked to hell and back."

  She was about to sit down and butt-surf her way down the hill, but Scotty had been talking to her about bane strategies and how they moved through dangerous territory.

  Though it pained her to wait, she turned around, held out a fist, and asked, "You with me?"

  Rather than speak the bane, with his perfectly organized backpack and meticulously arranged gear, he rapped his knuckles against hers, and they slid down the hill together.

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