She stared at him and, after a dramatic pause that almost made her scream, Wade finally answered.

  “It’s a mix,” he said with a massive smile. “Converting energy is part of what the mark does. I can use my ability to consciously drive some of the things that are usually baked in. Which means I can convert a small,” he paused as Scotty raised a finger, ”a relatively small amount of energy between any forms the mark already does.”

  “Like?”

  “Heat and ambient magic into something compatible with Were magic. Or it could end up as kinetic.”

  Mind racing, she found her thoughts bouncing off a memory, “But you sent some unfiltered, weird energy into me when we fought the Limb Stealers.”

  Wade grimaced, “Yeah. Sorry again about that. So, that's where the ‘mix’ comes from. I can’t do everything at once—I can only suspend so many limitations at a time—but I can draw on and convert energy into forms that a mark usually couldn’t. It just happens manually and takes a ton of practice. Plus, it has a significant amount of human error thrown in.”

  Scotty bumped her with his elbow. “In the interest of transparency, I should clarify that Wade is profoundly understating things. What he does is a brand new field of magic. He’s discovering it from scratch based on inspiration from wizards, cryptos, mages, and everything else. The dude is not only playing an alien video game that landed on earth, but he’s trying to distill the core principles of advanced human computing so he can teach himself how to hack the game and add new levels.”

  She looked at her new sorta-boyfriend and blinked.

  Wade just smiled and shook his head. “Scotty is just a magic nerd who sees the beauty in everything. Anyone could do it if they just saw the building blocks like I do.”

  Scotty shook his head. “If I lift all the fingers on my hand, does that mean I get to slap him? Never mind, point is that’s a load of steaming horse shit. Remember the laser thing?”

  Wade shifted, uncomfortable. “Yeah, it didn’t work; it was a waste of time.”

  “What about lasers?”

  Scotty narrowed his eyes, “If someone told you that was a waste of time, then they should be shot.”

  Whoa. That was weirdly violent coming from Scotty of all people.

  Before she could comment, her friend turned to her with an exhausted expression on his face. “Give me your honest reaction. What would you say if I came to you after a few months apart and said that I was working on lasers? I’d figured out a way to make magic batteries with Wade’s powers, but failed to make a laser out of it?”

  “I’d say, what the fuck, that sounds incredible. How can his magic even make batteries?”

  Wade tried to answer, but Scotty talked over him, “Our boy decided to do a test. He found the base energy that was easiest for him to convert into everything else. Then, after making a reserve, he tested how quickly it moved across his territory. It was so fast that it wasn’t even perceptible until he used an absolutely massive distance. So, he tried something else and found out that if he constrained the size of the conduit that transferred energy, making the metaphysical pipe narrower, the power waiting to be moved dissipated without his active attention. But the energy in transit stayed with only minor leakage until it reached its destination.”

  She blinked, imagining all of this and feeling an idea itch at the edges of her brain.

  “Next thing he realized is that, magical space has more than three dimensions, so he could layer the impossibly thin conduit over itself a nearly limitless amount. Then, after weeks of testing different movements, metaphorical turns, and other factors affecting the energy and the conduit leakage rate, he ran another test. He ‘narrowed’ the conduit, at certain locations, to see if it slowed movement down. Turns out, only a little, because what Wade?”

  “You’re taking a lot of liberties, I just—”

  “Exactly! Because the magic speeds up when it goes through the narrow conduits. So, our boy looked up some math to see the formula for how this works with moving water through pipes and set up tests with little windmills whose arms had magical material that would interact with he power in motion. He tested rotation speed and found that the formulas weren’t a one-for-one match, though they showed a similar trend. He also noticed that if he converted the magic being moved, it fueled some applications of magic that would usually require willpower to move the magic quickly.”

  Her brain was on fire. This was fascinating. This was the kind of good buzz her brain felt when she was solving a puzzle, but it was cooler because it could end up with things being set on fucking fire! “He converted it into light?”

  “Precisely,” Scotty said, crossing his legs in a very cocky way. “Turns out, there’s slightly more to stable, safe lasers than just making a lot of light come out from a single spot, but I don’t think any reasonable person would call that process easy, intuitive, or a waste of time.”

  “Of course not! Wade,” she said, “that's amazing and so creative. There are people who never even try to tweak their parents' quiche recipe or find new routes to work. What you did was pure science. Did the battery idea end up working?”

  He dropped his head, but she could still see the corners of his mouth twitch with a suppressed smile. “Yeah. It’s not quite a fractal or a perfect closed loop, but I found a few ways to make the transfer take so long that I can store energy for a decently long time when I’m getting ready for a fight. Helps me avoid draining the ecosystem or fucking up the weather.”

  She shook her head, a big grin growing across her face.

  Scotty just nodded in a fond, mildly exasperated way. “Wade is, literally, without peers. We can’t compare him to anyone to prove how brilliant he is, but I suspect that not many people would have been able to make a godkiller out of his powers. Because you were right, Shilloh. He can do all sorts of weird shit to the magic in general, but the steps it takes to make a serious Godkiller Stern-sized attacks require him to discover and then manually execute the sort of stuff most people’s magic does for them.”

  “Can you make magical shapes, or try to shift energy into the language of magic?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. I’m still a Were. No matter how much I have the shapes and patterns explained to me, it always lacks something.”

  “However,” Scotty said with a pleased smirk, “he is perfectly capable of channeling insane amounts of power into enchantments. They just need to be made by someone who can build strong enough to handle what he puts out.”

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  “True,” Wade said with a smile. “Scotty made all of my enchanted weapons.”

  “Really?”

  “Hell yeah, I did!”

  “Fuck. That chain spear must have been insanely complicated. It was always a step ahead and saw everything.”

  “Cici?” the enchanter smiled. “Yeah. She’s really special. The stuff Wade supercharges needs constant maintenance, even if you over-engineer to hell and back. To make something complex like that took forever.”

  Wade nodded, “Most people can’t even make me one-off weapons. Scotty comes to almost every incursion I go to. Walker,” he tapped his hand against the long sword with its plain hilt, “stays with me the whole time, and he builds me a specially tailored arsenal of disposable toys for the big threats. Means I always have the right tool without having to learn and practice the conversion for everything.”

  “Shilloh actually helped with the newest one,” Scotty said, literally jumping to his feet with the sudden burst of energy that overcame him as he talked about his craft. “She helped me harvest materials from a crypto possessing a spider. I don’t think it’ll be done marinating in time, but once I make a power converter, you’ll be able to stab a bitch right in the soul.”

  They chit-chatted for a bit about spiders, the great failed familiar hunt, and all sorts of things. Bryan dropped in, added a few of his own war stories, but returned to checking the premier since he didn’t have a sensory extension like Jasque.

  “Actually,” Scotty said, looking at her with interest. “If you wanted, we could try to figure out a power converter so Wade could supercharge your Dryad magic. I know it didn’t work with the Limb Stealers, but it should be possible.”

  Shilloh grimaced, “I think it would be better if we didn’t.”

  “Why not? If you hit hard enough, especially with the constrained surface area of a human fist, there are all sorts of things you can do. Even at the Godkiller level.”

  “Well, that's not exactly how Dryad power works. Volume of magic doesn’t always equal potency of effect. Also, the way we work means that using more power has permanent effects.”

  Wade frowned, “Like every time you use magic, there’s a cost?”

  “No. I mean, sorta. We’re born almost entirely human, just with the ability to connect to nature. And, not sure if you’ve noticed, but there’s a shit load of power in nature.”

  Wade nodded, his gaze glazed. He was clearly recalling something that left him awestricken and overwhelmed with insignificance, making her think he might actually know what she meant. At least more than any other human she talked to.

  “So,” she continued, “Volume of available power isn’t a huge issue. The problem is our capacity to channel it. To make a complex, and spiritually significant experience, simple: humans cannot handle that type of power. Pretty much not at all. So, each time we use power, our upper limit for what we can channel, sense, and then draw on is raised. To raise that limit, we become less human and more dryad because, like I said, humans can’t do it. Though some of us describe it differently, they might say it’s burning away a bit of your humanness to reveal the dryad. Or to let it grow into the gaps you break in your nature. Honestly, it’s weird and hard to describe.”

  “So super charging you would…?”

  “Shove me through months or years of transitions in moments.”

  He nodded, expression thoughtful. “What does becoming more dryad look like? I mean, in practice, what makes someone more or less dryad?” Scotty asked.

  She leaned back, “See, that's the million-dollar question. I was a late bloomer—that's why I was still human enough to slip my way out of The Vault before the rest of the more transitioned dryads. I asked that exact same question all the time and never got a very good answer. There are metaphors and such, but it only really makes sense when you can feel it.”

  “I’ll take a shitty metaphor if you’re game.”

  She grinned, “Fair, but first,” she looked at where Wade had a very troubled expression on his face. “Yes, you forcibly accelerated my transition. Please don’t do it again. At least not until we talk out a signal or pre-plan the situations where it’s cool. For now, though, it’s not a big deal. I was going to do it myself in the next couple of years. It’s just that going that fast was weird.” She smiled at him and winked to let him know she wasn’t upset. “Don’t repeat this, but it felt like my soul went through a growth spurt. And if you think physical puberty was weird, wait until your soul’s voice cracks with the petrichor undertones of an eastern wind. It’s way worse than getting armpit hair.”

  Wade lost some tension, but his brow didn’t uncrease. They’d talk more about it later. For now, his concerns had been dulled, so she turned her attention to Scotty.

  “The answer to your question also explains why we shouldn’t do a power converter. Dryads are hyper individual in how our magic grows. I’m a very forest-y dryad, but that's not a hard rule. Some people use names like naiad to make a (sort of bullshit) category system, but your dryad connection can be more focused on rivers, the ocean, a type of forest, or even more specific things. Shit, I’m pretty sure we’ll even end up with urban dryads who connect with the stone in asphalt and the micro weather systems of a city. My magic will, inevitably, be changing a lot. So will the way my dryad-dom manifests. It all depends on what magic I take in and how I use it. I have no idea what having someone else’s mix of power injected into me would do.”

  “Okay, that is both fair and deeply fascinating. Expect me to ask more later. But, just to help me wrap my head around this, are there more or less common ways the transition manifests?”

  “Yeah. You can sense more, your range increases, and your aging slows. Some people’s bodies will grow dense, change colors, or take on animal traits. There’s also a mental shift, probably a lot like what Wade does. You start thinking differently.”

  At that, Wade perked up, “Yeah? What’s it like for you?”

  “Time perception is a big one. My great-aunt could hyperfocus for literal days, not sleeping or eating, and think a few minutes had passed if she snapped out of it when the sun was in the same position. There are also things that start feeling gross that were normal before. The smell of decay? Doesn’t trigger my gag reflex anymore. But there are certain cryptos that upset the ecosystem whose smell makes me want to puke.”

  He nodded with a thoughtful expression. “We should try a shifter game. We’ll pick three different walks, randomly go on one while drawing on the mind of an alternate form, and see if the other person can understand our description from that point of view well enough to guess which one we went on.”

  Some tension she hadn’t known she was carrying unclenched. First Birch and now these two; her friends were making a discussion she had thought would lead to her death into fun evenings and date plans.

  She really had the best friends. In fact…

  “Well,” Scotty said, ”even if I don’t make a converter until you and Wade have talked out the pros and cons, I can still make you something like Cici or Marie.”

  “Marie?

  “I don’t have her now, but she’s the shorter Ox-Tailed Saber I carried around a lot on the caravan.”

  Shilloh frowned.

  “The short, pretty Chinese sword.”

  “Oh!” she said, waving her hands int he vague shape of a sword and swiping the imaginary blade around, “the one that looked all ‘whoosh.’”

  “That's the one,” Wade said, clearly on the edge of a laugh. “She and Cici are made for protecting me from other humans. Walker is more about fighting cryptos.”

  “Okay,” she said, slapping her hands against her legs so loud that Bryan peeked his head around from the other side of a tree to check on them in their little clearing, “I’ve been wondering about that. Why all the secrecy, bodyguards, and coded messages? You’re Godkiller. You stop the unstoppable monsters that want to destroy us. I can’t imagine why any person would even want to fuck with you instead of throwing you a parade. And that's setting aside the whole issue of how anyone even could.”

  Wade and Scotty exchanged a glance.

  “I really wish Thresher was here to explain this,” Wade said with a sigh. “Alright, well, first off, Godkillers have absolutely been assassinated. And not just by foreign governments hoping to fuck our country over. I stopped looking at the reports, but, Scotty, would it be fair to say that we avoid some sort of kidnapping attempt at least once a quarter?”

  “Oh, yeah. That might be an understatement, actually. People are dumb.”

  Shilloh blinked. Who the fuck was that dumb? And, even more troubling, how could a regular person even be capable of killing someone like Wade?

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