“Son of a succubus! When did I start being made of glass? Just fucking shoot me, Scotty!”

  “I really don’t think it’s necessary,” Shilloh piped up from off to the side.

  “It’s a principal thing now,” he said, not taking his eyes off his friend.

  “Bryan!” Shilloh called, looking over at the pleasant man who had started supplementing Wade’s security detail now that more banes had arrived at the site. “Can you stop them from being stupid?”

  The fit man in his early thirties looked between the two and sucked his teeth, “Sorry, I do shields. Not miracles.”

  “I could shoot him,” Scotty scowled at his friend.

  “Why would you shoot Bryan!” Wade cried.

  “Yeah, let's not shoot anybody and just—” Shilloh tried to say, before Wade cut her off.

  “Is Bryan your best friend now? Is that why you’ll shoot Bryan when he hasn’t even asked you to?”

  “Holy shit,” the fussy bane said, rolling his eyes. “Are you this childish? It’s not a competition!”

  “Firefly had two-dimensional characters with no real growth, and Mal was a—”

  BOOM! BOOM! Roared Scotty’s gun.

  Faster than thought, Shilloh’s stomach clenched, her fists balled, and she was sprinting at Scotty with her teeth bared even as magic flooded out of her.

  “Huh,” Scotty muttered as she closed the distance. “Neat.”

  She leapt into a tackle, intent on slapping him across the face until he understood how stupid he was being. Instead, he holstered his pistol even as his other hand extended to her forehead.

  “Hip!” he cried like a circus performer. Hand still on her head, he leaped up while he shoved her face down.

  He wasn’t perfect, he wasn’t Jasque, so she still managed to grab his ankles. But that just meant that when she slid across the ground, his knees slammed into her back the whole way.

  “I’m not a sleigh!” she yelled, scrambling to her feet.

  “And I’m fine,” Wade called from across the clearing, poking at two red dots on his tricep with interest.

  They were standing (or lying on the ground in her case), a ten-minute hike from the camp. Scotty had set up some portable wards to both block scrying and perform a couple of other functions. Honestly, it took him forever to set it up, and the magic was too restrictive on her skin. So she had barely paid attention.

  With a flex of his mind, Wade had moved all the plants away from them and cleared a fifteen-foot circle of dirt in their stretch of woods. Even the dirt had been artificially fluffed until it was both firm enough to stand on but also able to absorb impacts. She’d had to counsel him on where exactly to relocate the plants so they had a good chance of surviving the move.

  Then they had started talking about the incursion, Wade’s strengths and weaknesses, and how she would fit into it.

  “Well, first things first,” Scotty said as he calmly removed the rubber bullets from his weapon, slotted in something more lethal, and tucked everything away. He even picked up the spent casing and slipped those into a special fanny pack. “We have confirmed a few critical facts. Wade and Shilloh are close enough that her Wild Talent will protect him. It is also confirmed that the intense rage response will need to be trained out of her if she’s going to be of any use in a battle. Third, we know that just teaching her how to fight won’t be a solution. Everything I taught you went straight out the window, and you went straight to body slam. So we’ll need to handle the emotions themselves, not redirect or channel them into trained responses. It doesn’t look like training can hold up to the anger.”

  Wade walked over, still pointing at his arm, “This is also a pretty substantial reduction in injury. I think you can shoot me a bunch in each training session and I’ll barely get a bruise.”

  Shilloh bolted up to her feet, “No. We are not going to beat the shit out of Wade and act like it’s okay.”

  The two of them shared a look. Both opened their mouth, then checked on each other again. Slowly, Wade spoke. Though Scotty watched him a bit too closely. Which was weird.

  “Shilloh, we all train in martial arts. I get worse bruises dicking around after hours. Injuries aren’t okay, but hurting is part of trying.” his eyes darted to Scotty.

  They kept talking for a good while, and she was grateful. It took a minute for her emotions to cool down enough to recognize their logic. She didn’t stop hating the conclusion, but she did accept it as a shitty part of her new job.

  “And, Shilloh, you’re sure this curse won’t kill me?” Scotty asked, rubbing at his arm where she’d bet a killer bruise was forming.

  Shilloh shrugged, some mean part of her wanting to give a vague answer so he wouldn’t hurt Wade again. “It shouldn’t, but you will absolutely have a small part of the injury you tried to inflict on Wade transferred. And it will spread like a disease.”

  “But only for like an hour or two, right?”

  “So long as you don’t do it again, probably.”

  “Huh,” Scotty said. Then, to her annoyance, rather than thinking back on his choices, he smiled, “neat.”

  Both Wade and Scotty stared at the fussy man’s shoulder where small bruises had formed and were slowly—but perceptibly—spreading like a time-lapse video.

  Bryan was off checking the perimeter, and Shilloh couldn’t do anything but shake her head.

  The last few days had been very hectic for her. There was a lot to learn about the Godkiller program, and she was allowed to learn very little of it. While she was a probationary member of the program, they felt no need to tell her more than exactly what was needed.

  Most of what she needed to know was that the suit and mask were made with a tank’s worth of protection built into them. There were multiple ‘cells’ of Godkillers and their specific support people who worked together.

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  For now, she was a support member; if her powers ever enabled her to kill a large enough threat with minimal assistance, she herself would become a Godkiller. If her abilities made her an indispensable part of a small unit, eliminating threats of that scale, they would be collectively considered a ‘blended Godkiller.’

  All of that was fascinating, but the really interesting part came about as she and Wade warmed up for their first cooperative skill practice.

  “Are we ever going to dish out the details about what fuck Wade’s spooky powers are? Wasn’t that what you promised to get me so far out here in the first place?”

  Scotty looked up and blinked, “No, I said we were going to take Wade out into the woods and shoot him.”

  “Obviously, that's not something I’d be into,” she waved at Scotty’s spreading bruise.

  Both raised an eyebrow at her. Which might have been understandable. It had been too early for her memories to be clear, but she got the impression that her threats had been delivered in a manner that was... emphatic.

  “It doesn’t count. You said that when it was cold, and he had just made me leave my sleeping bag. I’m not responsible for what Morning Shiloh says. That bitch is psychotic.”

  “Yeah,” the smaller bane said, adjusting his glasses nonchalantly and giving her a big wink, “Wish there was something Wade could do to take the edge off Morning Shilloh.”

  “Joke's on you,” she said, crossing her arm to look at Wade. “You read as one of the gal-pals, so that doesn’t embarrass me; it just feels like teaming up on Wade.”

  “Oh!” Scotty said, brightening visibly, “I’m just queer enough to be good with that.” The man perfectly copied her posture, and they both stared down Wade.

  “WhatAboutTheLimitationsOfMyAbilities!” he said, a bit too fast. “How familiar are you with the limits of Were marks?”

  “I learned the basics when I was trying to research how magically claiming things tended to work. Cause, you know, there was a massive monster closing in on Forsythe, who I thought was going to kill us all.”

  He nodded, “Yyyeeeah. Though I will say I stopped responding to ‘Massive Monster’ when I left college and didn’t need to change in public locker rooms anymore.”

  As much as she wished she could have raised an arch and judgmental eyebrow, Shilloh couldn’t help from laughing.

  The big Were grinned and, with a wave of his hand, floated over a fallen tree, split it into four perfect cylinders, and planted them in the ground like a triangle arranged around a central point.

  The three of them sat as he started speaking.

  “I already had a fairly strong mark and a natural proclivity toward that sort of thing even before my Wild Talent manifested.”

  Scotty held up a finger.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  “Just counting off his understatements. We’re working to build back up Wade’s confidence.”

  Shilloh lifted her own finger, “About fucking time! Count me in.”

  The man in question raised his eyes to the heavens in exasperation and kept talking. “Whatever. Bear in mind, this is part supposition and a little bit from people who can analyze talent. Essentially, my wild talent seems to let me temporarily suspend a few limits or overcome a few boundaries. But only my Mark magic. Not all of them at once, not permanently, and not in a ridiculous way.”

  Both of them lifted a finger.

  “Not in an immediately ridiculous way, sorry. Most of the time, I’m pulling from my hidden alternate form,” he said, body language briefly going stiff like he was reflexively stopping himself from letting any emotions out. “Which lets me understand the way I need to flex my mind and magical perceptions so I’m able to apply that mark to more esoteric pieces of the world. In theory, anyone could use their mark to influence the magical substrate of their territory; most humans just can’t twist their minds into the weird perspective needed to notice those things, let alone act.”

  “So what, everyone had the video game console, but only you have the disk needed to play this game?”

  “More like I plug in a video game from an extra-dimensional alien. Most people would just see a black screen with barely noticeable static, but my alternate forms help me translate it into something that makes sense.”

  “Makes sense,” she nodded. “Magic has layers and dialects. A lot of dryad magic is limited by your ability to find those layers and learn how to tap into them.”

  ”Exactly. It’s there for anyone, but not everyone knows how to reveal those layers, let alone how to interact with it. My alternate form lets me find it, then I use my Wild Talent to let me overlap more and more layers of accumulated work than the magic is supposed to be able to. I can ignore the maximum limit most weres are constrained by.”

  A small crease formed between her brows, but Shilloh nodded her head. “I think I get it. It’s like layering paint. If we assume most people can only put on a few coats of the same color, then it will just look and perform like regular paint. But if you were to get access to a bunch of colors and unlimited ability to add new layers, you could build inches or feet of paint until it had changed the shape of the object you initially put it on.”

  He clapped his hands and pointed at her, “Yes. That is a great metaphor. Most people use watercolors on thin paper. I’m sculpting with Fordite, one layer of airbrush at a time.”

  “Got it,” she said. “But here’s the thing. Most Weres gain awareness of their territory. They subconsciously draw on it, gaining better stamina and slightly increased healing. They can even influence the natural energies a bit. But that looks like weeds tending to wilt, and antagonistic magic being bled away and weakened subtly over time. That does not look like what you do.”

  Wade nodded with a grin. “True, but do you know what some stronger Weres can do in their territory?”

  “Their grass stays green longer, and they have perfect situational awareness?”

  “Yes, but what I wanted to point out was minor telekinesis.”

  “So you just have, what? Super, molecular telekinesis?”

  Wade shook his head with a grin. “No. See, even then, there’s a trick to it. At its core, manipulating a marked territory is gaining knowledge, taking ambient energy, and directing ambient energy.”

  He leaned back, arms opening wide, about to make a big point, but Scotty shushed him.

  “Wait, look at her face. Let her cook.”

  She almost didn’t notice. Her mind was going a million miles an hour. “How big was your territory in Forsyth?” she asked.

  A pleased expression came to Wade’s face; it was a big, geeky smile that lit him up and filled his eyes with life. “Hundreds of acres. Once I get going, I can reinvest energy from nearby claimed land to help me build the magic infrastructure for more territory.”

  She shivered, imagining the exponential cascade. “Terrifying.”

  Scotty brought up his other hand and held a third finger on it.

  She smacked him, “Yeah, yeah. Understatement. Fuck off. But, here’s the thing I keep wondering about; you could set this tree trunk on fire with your ability, right?”

  They both looked at the one in the middle of their triangle, and he nodded his head. “Yeah. I was going to use it as a visual aide, but I think you’re about to figure it out all on your own.”

  “Thanks. Here's the question I keep coming back to: Do you do that by converting other forms of energy into thermal energy? Or do you have only a limited number of energy types you can affect and transition between? Which means you would light this up by, I don’t know, converting kinetic to radiation. But you’d intentionally make the conversation sloppy so that it leaks power as heat, and you use the ‘accidental’ byproduct to set the fire. Or! Are you just having to shift heat from one place to another?”

  “Ohh,” Scotty laughed, rubbing his hands together. “You were made for this, Shilloh! Those are good questions.”

  She waved him off, too caught up in the puzzle to think about anything else. Depending on the answer, it could imply massive limits to what he could do. It would also—terrifyingly—mean that everything she had observed was a side effect, and that he was required to move energy orders of magnitude greater than anything he wanted to accomplish.

  Shilloh leaned forward in her seat, eyes focused like a laser.

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