The tension was bad, but Wade’s look was the worst.

  He was so lost, and so horrified, and so scared. He was a little kid, afraid to get excited about a holiday trip to the amusement park because his parents might take it away at any moment.

  She couldn’t blame him. The fear he had built up around this was more than she could imagine. Just regular fear of aging and loss of capability was bad enough. Mortality was fucking terrifying. Add in nearly inevitable murderous psychosis for someone who just wanted to help? That was cruel.

  Shilloh winced. “I mean, unless there’s a way to, like, scry his alternate form—”

  Jasque threw up his hands. “See? There’s no point to any of this! Wade cannot shift while there’s even a small risk of it harming his mental state. I still think her instinct is unreliable enough to make this whole business useless from he start. But even if I snapped my finger and she suddenly became reliable, we cannot rule out the risk of insanity without him making a shift while the risk is still unknown. There is no way to see how many bullets are in the chamber before we play this game of russian roulette. So, obviously, we should just not play. I don’t understand why that's hard to understand. He is too valuable to take any avoidable risks. He has too much good to do,” with a petulant crossing of his arms, the Slayer went back to tapping his foot. “This was a waste of time, and we should all go back to bed.”

  Frost pursed his lips. “That's not necessarily true. The world is weird, and the only thing you need to break a rule is someone with he right dialect of magic or Wild Talent. Shilloh, if we did see Wade’s form, how confident could you be of the generation?”

  She took her eyes away from the heartbreaking expression on Wade’s face and tried to think clearly. “Just on visual inspection? Very confident. Part of the curse is empathy that makes feeding on anyone, or anything, hurt the Cernun Boghe at least a little. The empathy is also, to put it frankly, weaponized, so they’ll fall into the reproduction trap. They are biologically compatible with most like-sized creatures, and if anything in their mental range is in heat, then they’ll be massively impacted. While in control of their faculties, they’ll avoid that—obviously— but if the territory is low…”

  Frost brushed it aside, “I get your meaning. How does that impact identification?”

  “Oh, well, everything after the first generation is a crossbreed and a crypto. They’ll show physical signs of their mixed parentage. After three generations or so, they just start being mongrel, generic forest-guardian type creatures.”

  Wade spoke up, his voice quiet. “Is that why all the texts described them differently?”

  “Yeah,” Shilloh said. “The generations vary a lot, and the magic of the offspring can be changed based on their crypto heritage.”

  “And I’m assuming that you are the sole person who has read the book and can identify what a first generation looks like?”

  Shilloh flushed with anger, “Why yes, Jasque. I am. And I just so happen to know that any half-decent X-ray or medical mage could confirm it, too. Cernun Boghe have what looks like an exposed deer or dragon skull with large branching horns for a head. But all first-generation have vestigial biology from the original body. Including,” she stared directly at the Slayer. “A secondary human skull underneath the exterior one.”

  “Sure,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “Of course.”

  “What more do you want?” She snarled, coming to her feet. It took all her will to not reach out and strangle him. “I am giving you information in advance that can be verified without my presence. I’m fucking pre-registering my predictions so I can be proved wrong. Do you want the book's name? It is called Histor Fel Paramila. Do you want the name of the country, township, and language? I’ll give you whatever you need so you all can do your own research because this isn’t about me. It’s about Wade, and I don’t see how that isn’t penetrating your fucking skull!”

  “Wade is resilient and has only been getting more efficacious at his role regardless of any lingering distress about his condition.”

  “Distress? He’s a human being who lives in fear of dying from violent magical dementia.”

  “All of us risk our lives, and there’s no need to fix something that has only been working better and better.”

  “Jasque,” Frost said, walking over and placing a hand on Wade’s shoulder, “That's enough. There are implications, risks, and self-reproach that we all have to deal with right now. If the terror Wade has lived through was preventable, then I would never forgive myself either. In the end, we did the best we could with the best information we had. Now, however, we have more information. He deserves us doing the best we can with it, not dismissing a potential paradigm shift out of hand. We will validate, investigate, and act on it as is appropriate. As you said, Wade is too important for anything else.”

  The slayer stared at Frost, his body angry but his eyes running calculations. Some deep part of her was disgusted. Those were the eyes of a man who was figuring out what buttons to push to get what he wanted. The looks he occasionally shot at Wade—the man he had lived with for years—weighed and cataloged him without ever pausing to take in the longing, or pausing to flinch away from a pain so vibrant that it all but radiated off the man.

  “Fine. Keep me updated, please. I’m going to keep training for a while longer.”

  That was all Jasque said before turning around and disengaging the defenses so he could leave the tent.

  Wade watched him go, concern and tension clear on his face. But he dragged his eyes away and offered up a weak smile when Frost squeezed his shoulder one last time.

  “Wade, this is so much to take in all at once. You’re not alone in this, though. I am on the case and will wrangle every single brain, wallet, and knee buster I know into making sure we can figure out what’s best for you.”

  “Thank you. I’m not going to get my hopes up until we know more.”

  “If that's what you need. But consider a bit of cautious optimism. There is a very good reason to believe what Shilloh has sensed.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment,” Wade’s eyes went distant, “but it’s the hope that kills you. I’m going to do my best to forget until someone needs me to act.”

  “Of course. Leave it to me, then. I’ll make sure we get through this.”

  The Were smiled at the white haired man and stood up, showing himself to be slightly taller, even though his aura was that of a kid looking at their parent.

  “Thank you. If you’re on the case, then there’s nothing that could make me worry.”

  “Perfect. Now!” Frost shuffled over to his chest and rattled through it. “Shilloh, I would like you to walk Wade to his tent. I’ll have someone wake Scotty up, throw him in the showers, and send him your way. I’d prefer for Wade not to be alone today or tomorrow. Too much time for rumination, and too much that you could learn from him. Does that sound acceptable to you?”

  “Of course,” she came to her feet and straightened her outfit. “It’s the least I owe him after all of this.”

  “Wonderful. Now, would you object to my waiting an hour or two before waking Scotty? I think some time sleeping off the booze would help.”

  “Count on me.”

  “That's what I like to hear. It makes all we did today today worth—,” he paused, and one of his eyes twitched. “It makes me glad to have you on our team.”

  The older man stood up with a beaming smile that was just a little crooked. With big, energetic steps, he slapped Wade’s shoulder and shook his hand. “Chin up and make a good impression. Shilloh has reason to celebrate tonight, too.”

  Something passed between the two as they looked at each other. Shilloh had trouble saying what. Frost radiated a default sort of confidence and energy. Wade was too tired for her to read much else from him.

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  “Of course,” the Were said with a tired grin.

  ~~~

  The two of them walked slowly back to Wade’s tent.

  One particular feeling that Shilloh always relished was the strange sensation that came from a day so full of life lived that it started confusing her internal clock.

  The events of this morning, the early wake-up, the nerves, the battle paint, the professional outfit. All of it felt like it had been at least a day ago or more. Her breakfast already felt distant and faded in her memory.

  She had done so much.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Wade asked.

  “I’m doing that thing where I’m listing all the things that happened today like a mantra.”

  “Worried you’ll forget?”

  “A little. Any one of these is a full day's worth of processing. The interview, the negotiation, and definitely the salary. Then we also add in the secret and the, well, ‘unique’ secret-keeping methods, and it’s enough to leave you numb.”

  “Yeah. That one takes some time to get used to.”

  “Plus the implications of it.”

  “Which ones?”

  “That there are levels to this. Levels that go went higher than I thought.”

  Wade smiled. He seemed tired, so it wasn’t the vibrant face-changing beam she had grown to look forward to, but it did add a spark back into his eyes. “If you stick around long enough, you may get to bump into one of them. They’re doing wild stuff. Fantasy novel level weirdness.”

  “Weirder than the magic-bond of a chess game?”

  “Mine was a Rubik’s Cube.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, he solved it faster.”

  “Wild,” she said, putting her hands in her pockets and letting the spool of strangeness that was her day play in front of her eyes.

  It was a measure of how long, shocking, and colored by booze her day had been that it took her a minute to remember why she and Wade had first left the tent together to talk about his alleged condition.

  Shilloh cleared her throat. “And on top of that, I also started dating someone too.”

  Wade stopped walking.

  “You okay?” she asked, some of that rejection from the ice cream parlor trying to slip into her stomach and curdle it like lemon juice into a gallon of milk.

  “Just deciding how severe my shock and if I’m the kind of nerd whose going to start hyperventilating because of a pretty girl.”

  “Uh. Thank you? I guess.”

  He waved it off. “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, we both have some fucked up trauma. We can do a double date with both our therapists. It’ll be great.”

  “And my… health condition?”

  “We’re avoiding thinking about that.”

  “Give me like thirty seconds, and we’ll go back to, what was it you said?” He made some fairly frenetic jazz hands. “Repressing.”

  She found herself smiling, and the answer felt easy. Obviously, she was okay with it. But, out of respect for the moment, she took some extra time to really look at what was going on in her head.

  Wade was not a Whisperer. She knew that. Was it possible she was wrong? Technically. But the intuition rarely misfired. More often than not, the false positives came from confusing the mundane feeling of certainty with the magical feeling of certainty. They were very similar, and a dryad was at particular risk of misidentification after progressing further from their human forms. All their feelings were bigger, so even the mild confidence that you remembered an argument correctly could come across as rock-solid certainty.

  Still, there was no frenetic edge of denial in her heart. No churning stomach and terror like she was talking herself out of a fear of heights now that she knew she had to walk by a cliff’s edge. If she were trying to convince herself that Wade was safe to be with when her heart knew it wasn’t, things would feel different.

  Sure, lack of guilt was not a ringing endorsement and there still left a margin of error. The subconscious occasionally sent out strong, not terribly well-vetted conclusions. That was extra true for dryads. Just because she felt confident didn’t guarantee she was right.

  Knowing how much this mattered to Wade, she put in one final effort, a last interrogation of her own psyche to make sure she was not dangling false hope in front of him.

  If it were a false positive motivated by mundane factors, how would that feel?

  The answer came to her immediately. She’d feel the sort of wavering confidence that used anxiety to move your mind away from introspection. She would want to argue, to gather circumstantial proof to assuage the fear that this was the end of something that could have been wonderful.

  All she felt was a specific sort of exhaustion. One that was telling her something very clearly.

  It said, ‘Eat a goddamn burger and go to sleep!’

  It also said, ‘Bitch just go on a date and see! Jesus Christ on a Kaiser roll, I’m too fucking tired for your anxiety.’

  That... well, that was not evidence she would share with others (those were very much inside thoughts), but it was strong proof in her book. Magic fuckery and gradual loss of humanity or no, the desire to eat and sleep was one hundred percent her, no tampering needed.

  “I’m sure. Also, it’s not like we’re getting married. No need to psyche ourselves out.”

  He blinked.

  “Though we are exclusive. Don’t make me cut you.”

  The Were’s head wobbled minutely. “Did you just threaten me?”

  “Pretty much.”

  The two of them started walking again. Hesitantly, Wade reached out and grabbed her hand.

  Her heart beat wildly. Some inner middle school girl was freaking out while desperately telling her to play it cool. No matter how many times she had fucked and undressed another person, there was always something special about handholding.

  Wade spoke, his eyes not looking at her.

  “So, what you’re saying right now is we are… dating?”

  “Ah. I guess.”

  “Does that mean we can make out?”

  Some insane part of her wanted to go low and tackle him off the side of the road in a fit of desperate fervor. Mostly for the joke, but also…

  She jerked her head into a nod.

  Wade suddenly spun to her, put one hand around her waist and the other on the back of her head, and kissed her with all the intensity of a dying man getting his last wish.

  She gasped, her hands instinctively fisting in his hair as she returned the kiss, and he kept moving her back. In three of his big steps, she felt the arm around her waist tighten, press hard against the flat stretch of his torso, and then lift her into he air and put her ass down on a picnic bench.

  The fingers in her hair loosened, and both of his hands moved to gently cup her face, his lips losing their frenzy so they could move with a slow, intimate, and tender intensity.

  The surprise had been like a cold fog inside her; in that moment, she learned that the fog had been made with fine droplets of condensed lighter fluid. Fire lit in her lower stomach, as electric hunger raced up past the hollow of her throat, stretching her neck forward.

  Her hands tightened on his head, and she leaned into him, nipping at his lip and pushing the pace back to the insanity-sprint it had started at. Her whole body was a magnet that couldn’t be pulled away from him. The involuntary arch of her back pressed her against his muscles so that she could feel the spastic gasp of air he lost to her sudden intensity. His chest tightened in like he was made of liquid metal, slowly contracting, before loosening as his clawed hands dragged down her back.

  Time got, for lack of a better word, melty after that.

  When the two of them finally separated, she blinked and had to remember where she was.

  Wade wasn’t much better. Though rather than dazed, he looked at her like he was ready to kill anyone who tried to keep him back from her.

  A light hand on his chest kept him back through. Every part of him was leaning forward, straining against itself, but none of that strain translated to her hand. While she struggled to breathe (and quietly ran a tongue across her lower lip to see if it had started swelling), he treated her gentle touch like an immovable barrier.

  “I can’t— we can’t have sex tonight,” she made herself say. “Too much happened.”

  Wade looked at her with his steel eyes hot enough to leave a brand. “Of course,” was all he said, voice mild in a terrible attempt to distract from the frenzied hunger in his gaze. He moved her hand off his chest so he could press a kiss to her fingers. “Whatever feels right.”

  Shit. That was romantic. Fuck, she liked that. Why were boundaries hot when she was trying to make things less hot? This was a terrible time to find and explore a fetish for mutually respectful and responsible sexual communication.

  “Aren’t you supposed to push back?” she said, injecting levity into her tone. “How else am I going to get my vengeance now that it’s finally my turn to tell you no, and that you have to wait if you don’t visibly suffer?”

  Wade smiled, though his eyes kept their piercing gaze locked on her. “I’d never push. Especially not when you’re being kind, considerate, and looking out for me. I like that about you.”

  She spluttered something incoherent. Though some (lying bitches) might have claimed it involved the phrase, ‘I’ll look out for your mom.’ She hadn’t said that, though, and no one would ever be able to prove it in a court of law.

  Wade just smiled and once again lifted her fingers to his lips.

  “Plus,” he murmured. “You only said ‘sex,’ right?”

  Her mouth went dry. There were lots of sexy things two consenting adults could do that weren't sex. All of them were playing behind her eyes, and she had to clear her throat to dispel its sudden dryness. “I, uh, I do believe that may have been what I said.”

  “We talking hetero sex, or the lesbian definition of sex?”

  “The, uh, first?”

  “Good,” he said, his smile growing wide and predatory. “Better our first time for that be right than rushed.”

  At the word ‘rushed’, he leapt forward, scooped her up in his arms, and started sprinting towards his tent. “Luckily,” he said, Were magic flaring around him in a prodigious waste of power so he could move them at super human speeds, “there’s lots of other things we can rush.”

  With a grunt, he hoisted her up so her hips rested on his shoulders and her torso fell over his back. Shilloh laughed and smacked his ass, urging him onto even greater heights of supernatural speed.

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