"Shilloh, that's a crypto," the Were said, his gunmetal eyes confused.

  "Oh, fuck right off!" she stormed into his personal space. "That thing had a territory in the middle of the abandoned goddamn woods. Its range didn't include the city, and you were doing everything short of whipping out your dick and pissing on its trees to start a fight."

  "Yes," he said, his voice implying a 'duh' that he was wise enough not to vocalize." If we didn't find it, then someone who couldn't defend themselves would have."

  "We're at least two hours from the edge of town!"

  "Does that mean it's okay if a lost hiker dies?"

  "No one goes out here!"

  "Bull shit," he said, face going stormy and his perfect air of casual confidence burning away. "Forsythe is full of hunters and dumb ass tourists who get lost every week."

  She opened her mouth to reply, but he talked over her, the smell of clean man, sweat, and iron blood hitting her as he leaned in. "And that was its range for now. If it didn't take on new territory and force some other predator closer to us, then the next one that spawned would have had to move towards town."

  "You can't know that! This creature was doing nothing wrong. It was living its life and minding its own borders."

  "It was a crypto!"

  "So are fucking manatees! Everything is here for a reason, Wade. Are you going to start cutting down trees because the trail makes you walk side-to-side too much? You going to start damning up creeks because a heavy rain might make them overflow and wash away someone's prized yard fmingo?"

  "This wasn't a manatee or a tree. Why is it so hard to get? There was a chance that someone would have crossed its path, and this thing is —no, it was—a killer! We do not let people die when we can help it. It's that simple."

  "No, Wade, it's not. There are other lives and other ideals that matter. You don't know if that was spawned with a niche to fill or a purpose."

  "And you don't know if it was."

  "We don't have to know everything; we can respect it anyway."

  Like pouring sawdust on a fire, his face went from annoyed to furious in a single eruption, "How about knowing that it would be my fault if someone came here and died! How about knowing that I would be responsible for every gremlin that fled into Forsyth when its range grew? Because I know for a goddamn fact that I would be the one apologizing to a widow when some hiker with astigmatism didn't see its territory mark and died."

  Off to the side, she saw Jasque turn cool eyes away from her to scan the area around them. He started wandering off to the side, still clearly listening, but giving them a thin fiction of privacy.

  Good, let him run. She wasn't going to shrivel because of some yelling. "That is the same bullshit argument that fucked up our ecosystem before M-day. We were just barely starting to realize how important the big carnivores we had driven off were. They were even reintroducing wolves back to national parks at huge expense. And I mean helicopter levels of expense.

  Now you're doing the exact same thing! Your responsibility is to cull the non-human magical threats. Fair. There are cases where it's needed. Hell, there are even situations where you need to stop things before they get bad. But exactly how likely does a death need to be for you to start pying god with nature? What restraints do you have on pying the hero with all your small-dick-energy toys? Cause I'll tell you, the chances of some random idiot reaching this deep without knowing what they were getting into is slim to fucking none. People do not go this deep into the woods without choosing to risk their lives."

  "That easy for —"

  "Easy! How easy is it for you to assume you know better than nature or people's right to self-determination? We chose to be out here. We chose to enter something else's home. It was pissed. Who wouldn't be? But you decided that your intentional provocation somehow absolved you of responsibility for pinning its corpse to the ground and bragging about murdering it."

  The two stared at each other. Her voice was already going hoarse from all the yelling.

  Maybe his was too, because when he leaned back and crossed his arms he spoke in a rumbling whisper, "It was a monster. And it is easy to treat it like something else right up until you find what's left of a dozen kids behind a grade school. Once you spend some time trying to puzzle pieces of what's left of the bodies together so you can give a kill count to the PTA, you'll understand."

  She refused to back down. Even when she saw Jasque moving towards them, acting like he was going to interrupt, she just pushed deeper into Wade's space and let the adrenaline start pumping again.

  "Does this look like a grade school? Because that sounds a whole hell of a lot like you're trying to use trauma—which I am sorry about for the record—to justify something that isn't reted. Do those things even hunt human children?"

  "Thanks to us, no one in Forsythe will ever find out," he said, the heat bleeding from his face and turning him into the same professional-looking stranger she had seen handing in a giant beaver's body for money. "I won't give them, or bleeding hearts like you, the chance to find out. You don't get it, Ms. Methuseh. Choosing not to act is another way to say that your convenience is more important than other people's lives. It is picking the comfort of your moral uncertainty over someone getting to keep their kid alive."

  The tension that had been building in her back rose to a peak, and she spun around, ripped her gun out of its holster, and pointed it almost seven feet up into the air.

  She squeezed the trigger over and over. Letting her rage and instinct guide her. Jasque, who had been staring at her and the area around her, bsted across the clearing.

  It was too te. The creature shimmered into visibility when her bullets first took it in the thorax and walked their way up to its head. It was green and looked armored in the same way an insect or crab was armored. But behind its humanoid body were two enormous fppy manta ray wings. Though 'wing' may have been the wrong term. They were round, big ovals of skin spreading from its back. They looked like they would snap shut around you like a Venus fly trap. Each was full of stiff hairs that her instincts told her were rigid enough to poke through skin and leave behind poison.

  The whole thing was a lovely forest green, and its face was a skin-covered human skull with a spider's mandibles in the mouth and slug-eye stalks on either side of the temples.

  Shilloh's bullets tore into it, leaving seeping transparent ectopsm-goo leaking out.

  She screamed as she fired. The thing was more than twenty feet from her. But it rocked back, each bullet hitting it like a sledgehammer until the too-tall humanoid with its fly-trapper wings had colpsed backward.

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