"That is a lynx," said the wealthy hunter wearing scientifically engineered fabrics designed to make him look outdoorsy while still being utterly and fantastically insuted from all exposure to nature's hardships.

  "Nah, she's just a big 'ole needy kitty."

  "But that tail and those ears?"

  Shilloh shrugged, "She's a short-haired highnder."

  The man was old-ish and traveled with two other graying men. They all sported paunches, tan lines shaped like expensive watches, and each wore fresh from the store hunting clothes bearing a great and unbearable profusion of pockets.

  He looked skeptical and put his hands on his hips in a particurly paternal manner that grated on her nerves. They were standing at the access parking for a trail ending in the deep woods. It was not quite cold enough for wearing jackets, but the clouds and morning frost had started hinting at the cold season's immanence.

  Around them was a canopy of greens and browns. The long, straight spears of pine trees filled the forest and were supplemented by leafier trees that would become stark and barren, while the sticky evergreens swayed their way through the upcoming autumn.

  Shilloh had been working endlessly. It was so early in the morning that it seemed shameful, nearly sinful, to be awake. And it wasn't even the fun kind of sinning. But there wasn't a choice. Money didn't come from thin air. She took every cartography contract she could: small properties, rge expeditions, changing city lines, and keeping track of the puzzlingly mutable nature of forests now that magic let them breathe and spread like a sapient being.

  All she wanted was enough cash to hit her monthly goal while still having enough left over for a few meals out. She would also kill for a meltingly hot shower, ideally one that smelled like fancy goat milk soaps. Instead, she was giving up a Saturday sleep-in and a heap of second-hand books because this was a good season for rich people to go hunting.

  "That can't be a house cat," the old man repeated.

  She smiled bnkly. People had trouble yelling at her when she smiled: she was too small to yell at.

  Inside, she was scowling. Would it be too much to ask for this man to let himself be gas-lit a bit faster so they could get moving? At this rate, they wouldn't catch anything, and her tip would be pitiful.

  A simmering coal of annoyance set itself in her stomach. "Naw," she beamed, unable to stop herself. "She's just like any regur cat. Maybe a bit more robust around the haunches, but aren't we all?" she elbowed him like she imagined a suburban dad at the grill would," Right? Ha! Oh, watch this. Fraulein, sit!"

  Fraulein did not move.

  "Fraulein, come."

  The bobcat actually took a step away from her.

  "Lay down."

  Fraulein licked her shoulder and then went back to moving her ears and tracking. God only knew what invisible things cats stared at.Shilloh nodded and triumphantly turned back to the three men, "See? How much more housecat can you be?"

  "I've never seen a house cat that big," said a different rich man whose name she had forgotten. She thought of him as Floppy, because of his hat and big loose lips.

  The cartographer shrugged again, "Small cats are eaten if you live anywhere near the Croatan Forest. That's why she's here; she'll let us know if we need to run from anything," It was a lie. Fraulein was here because she wanted to be here and because it was too much of a pain to stop her.

  Still, that reason was enough to shut the men up. They were tourists who had come to 'hunt monsters,' and even the hint of danger set their eyes alight. Forsyth saw a lot like them. The Croatan National Forest had a gradual, marshy connection to the ocean. Just being a forest or connecting two biomes made it dangerous enough. Add in how unusually variable North Carolina's climate was throughout the year, and it all added up to one thing. Ever since M-day, they saw an unusual and varied profusion of cryptos.

  By all rights, it should have been an inhospitably dangerous pce to live—an outpost of grizzled pioneers with few modern conveniences. It was the sort of pce where weapons were kept close, rare beasts were harvested, and WIFI was a dream you hoped for your grandkids to achieve.

  Instead, the Post Apocalyptic Association of Weres (PAAW) had been given serious government subsidization to build and re-colonize the area. With their unique magics, especially those reted to ciming territory, Weres were able to fend off a majority of creatures just by their presence. Unless you went out and tried to agitate something particurly vengeful and capable, Forsythe was about as safe as you could get without being insuted by miles of urban infrastructure.

  Already PAAW had moved their official gated communities away from their original construction—now called Old Town—and made a nicer, fancier location closer to the national forests. In a few decades, they would sell their current areas to the city like they had sold Old Town, and the process would repeat itself.

  For Shilloh, it meant that Forsyth had comfortable hotels, the illusion of safety, and easy access to dangerous pursuits. In other words, it was a very profitable pce to be a cartographer and a wilderness guide.

  She turned away from her clients and did a final equipment check. Thinking about Weres and buffer species always gave her mixed feelings. It felt very unfair. Almost like all these unique and diverse people who happened to be in the buffer species were just totems to be traded out and minimally maintained so they would guard the edges of civilization.

  The thought was familiar, but it didn't stop her from getting the tourists on the trail. Unjustness aside, she still needed money, and her clients needed a trip worth tipping for. These men had big new guns and enough money for individually enchanted bullets. If those bullets scored a hit, then the tip could put her into the green.

  Today, she was guiding them towards a powerful predator that just so happened to have three taxidermy-ready heads—not three heads like Cerberus, but more like a chimera.

  A mossquade was a Sasquatch-looking thing with stringy moss for fur, four arms, and two of their hands repced by small brightly colored heads that looked like prey animals. The exact form of the bait heads could vary wildly. The mossquades themselves were massively powerful and resilient, but only when the sun's rising or setting changed the horizon's color. The rest of the day, they hid themselves in dens dug underneath tree roots, waiting for the ever-cycling twists of magic to put them closer to the top of the food chain.

  Shilloh had thoughts about the mossquade. To her, they seemed like brash, somewhat tragic creatures who went from coward to bully in a very unbecoming way. Still, they kept to their ranges and killed the biggest, most dangerous things around them while they were strong, which meant they were useful enough. But they were motivated by hunger and a constant fear that something would find them while they were weak. It was sad, but the fear could make them dangerous to humans.

  "Do you think we came at a good time?" Floppy asked.

  Shilloh, who had been scanning the woods and tracking the gradual change in pnts, shook her head. "Hard to say. No one predicted this surge. Hell, we still don't know what magical current or confluence of stars caused them to start spawning here."

  "But there will still be plenty of them, right?"

  God, she hoped not. They had already caused some strange and unhealthy ripples through the forest ecosystem. Rangers supported by Forsythe's Blightbanes—who were just called Banes by everyone other than angsty teenagers and fantasy novels that loved stupid names— spotted a mossquade surge a month ago. They had done what you did when a popution needed culling and the forest service needed money: they sold hunting permits.

  "My contact in city hall hasn't heard anything about closing permit applications. So the popution should still be rge."

  "Nice. Hey, Norm," he called to one of his friends," these aren't like the quicksilver things from before, right? They'll stay whole well enough to get stuffed?"

  "Of all the times I've taken you out, we only had something melt once! I don't get why you won't let it go!"

  The men proceeded to make an obscene joke about when and why he had said that to his wife, and Shilloh did her best to tune them out. That didn't work, so she did the mental math and tried to figure out how much she was probably making per minute. Each time they ughed uproariously about wanting to stuff Norm's secretary rather than a mossquade, she imagined being handed her minute-by-minute pay in cash. All she needed to do was stay quiet and keep walking.

  "Well, how about this? You stuff my secretary, I stuff your wife, and Ricky can go stuff himself full of wasabi like that one time he thought the oriental restaurant was serving guacamole! HA!"

  The ughter startled away birds and squirrels around them. Her eyes almost started twitching. She wasn't being paid enough. So she started doing the math on tips and tried to figure out how much they needed to tip her for it to be worth her not ducking behind a tree and leaving them in the woods.

  The problem with math was that it didn't give her answers that indulged her annoyance. Annoying or not, this whole thing was a golden opportunity. It was rare to have a massively intimidating and powerful creature that was also vulnerable and stationary. It was a vanity hunter's wet dream. They could stuff a mossquade and talk about how dangerous it was without mentioning that you had shot it from far away during noon when it was sleeping.

  She was making cash hand over fist with each group. It was tough, but she could do one a day, just so long as she didn't leave any of them to die and ruin her reputation. Plus, the exercise was justified; they actually did need to cull the mossquade.

  "I think you want me to be offended," Norm bantered back to some comment she had already forgotten. "But that might be the only way to get my wife to stop nagging. AM I RIGHT?"

  Shilloh gave up on math. She wasn't getting paid enough, no matter what it said. So she imagined telling this story far in the future when Operation Rich-Bitch-Savior had come to pass. That wasn't as hard of a pill to swallow.

  They moved through the forests and only diverged from the common trails when Shilloh had no other choice. Off-trail meant she had to stop being surly and start being alert. Just because the really bad stuff stayed back from Forsythe didn't mean the dregs couldn't kill you. She moved them along deer trails and wove in and out of zones she knew to be cimed by Weres. None of that had been updated on local maps, so it wasn't official PAAW expansion, but she knew.

  Even as she listened for unusual changes in the bird song, noted the subtle shifts of topography and heat that changed the direction in which their scents were being carried, and made sure her charges were following in her footsteps exactly, she rehearsed excuses for why she had picked this route.

  After all, a human shouldn't be able to sense these Were's territories like she had.

  It was strange, though. The longer they went on, the more uncomfortable she got. Fraulein picked up on the mood and stuck close.Soon, they left the area where any Weres had cimed territory using their Marks. That should have meant a shift in the tenor of the forest. Mundane predators were being joined by cryptos driven off by the Weres' cims. The angle of flowers would subtly change from the pull generated subconsciously at the center of the territory, and ant's lines would wind differently.

  It stayed exactly the same.

  She moved the rifle from her back to her hands. Nothing, and she meant nothing, should stay the same in a forest. Not at this scale.Every tree was a biome with a microclimate, and each moss was a forest if you looked under magnification. The simple presence of Fraulein should have shifted the delicate bance of the world for a few dozen yards around them.

  But it didn't.

  "Water break," she called to the men who had stopped talking half an hour ago and fallen into the hypnotic rhythm of a sustained hike.They took seats, and she tried to nail down exactly what was wrong. With a frown of concentration, she bent down and dug her hands into the soil. The men around her were not magical in the slightest. Knowing that she took a risk.

  She imagined sending out roots, then vivified the mental image with power that felt like opalescent mercury. The roots spread and let her plug into the forest around her, to hear the slow conversation of trees and feel the endless ripple of life. Instantly, her body felt stronger, and her mind cleared like she had taken a nap.

  Then chemicals and death hit her magical senses like the sounds of raindrops on the side of a tent.

  Death was nearby. But not the normal deaths in a biome. This was a dense group of deaths that did not belong in a banced ecosystem. And then there was something else. It was careful, hidden, and deep. She was so profoundly and deeply nestled inside the forest and the space that she only noticed it on a few wavelengths of magic that most humans would never sense.

  Those frequencies were usually a subtle aura that spoke of personless-personality and overpping ownership. It whispered about lives lived and died that sunk into the ground and fed descendants thousands of years removed. It was the hidden name of the forest. The orchestra of experience that gave each piece of the forest an emergent sense of life.

  Something about it here tasted strange. Like tap water that had been over-filtered. She listened closer, zoomed in on that wavelength, and heard—

  MINE!Shilloh scrambled backward in a terrified crab walk, dragging her runsack on the ground.

  A primal part of her cmped her throat shut and stopped her from screaming lest It hear her.

  Power she usually kept hidden stirred in her breast. The leaves for acres around them shifted slightly. Like thousands of eyes flicking a look at her.

  If her clients weren't magic blind, she might have had to abandon them or take drastic action. Instead, they cried out when they saw her fall and helped lift her to her feet. They stared, asked what was wrong, and only betedly realized that they might want to turn their guns toward the forest around them.

  Shilloh didn't pay attention to them. Instead, she locked down her ragged breath and felt a ferocious sense of righteous anger shove her fear to the side.

  "Quiet."

  They didn't listen. Instead, they called out useless questions to each other.

  "Quiet," she ordered.

  Two kept talking.

  "Shut it!" she finally snarled. They snapped their mouths shut. Fear and offense fought for dominance behind their eyes. She kept talking, not giving a damn about their feelings. She should be sainted for not sprinting without a backward gnce the second she sense that… thing. "I need you all to be quiet and to follow exactly two feet behind me. Fingers off your goddamn triggers, and safeties on. This is still a forest. Squirrels and badgers are still going to hop through the bushes, and I do not want you to accidentally shoot me when they startle you. Understood?"

  Floppy turned to her, "But what about—"

  She wanted to grab his ear like a child and drag him away. Instead, she leaned into his personal space until she could smell cigars and bug spray. "This is the Croatan. And something is not right. Understood?"

  He gulped, "Yes."

  With sure feet, she navigated them to where she had sensed the death. It was a risk, but at this point, she needed information so she could decide if she needed to evacuate and leave her cottage behind. Fraulein followed along. Keeping close, but not looking particurly scared. She had probably not sensed— No, of course, she could sense it. The power was too pervasive. And it was deep, damn near conceptual. That was exactly the sort of thing that an animal, let alone a cat, would pick up on.

  Despite it all, Fraulien was alert but not scared. That was important. It should help soothe her. It did not. Very few things currently free of The Vault could do magic so deep and profound. Still, she didn't need to jump to the worst-case scenario right away.

  Within a minute, they stepped into a small clearing. A huge tree was next to a small creek, the perfect habitat for the mossquade to set up ambushes.

  And, around the creak, were the mauled bodies of nearly seven of the huge creatures. Two sets of adults and three juveniles. Worse, based on the number of flies and the smell, Shilloh would bet her bottom dolr that they had been killed early in the morning. Sometime during the golden rays of dawn when they were most powerful.

  "Well, shit," she mumbled.

  NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning nguage models.

  Piracy Notice: If you’re reading this anywhere other than Scribble hub, Royal Road, or my Patreon then this is pirated. Please let me know by going to the Jeffrey Nix website’s contact area so I can get really annoyed, compin to my cat, have her tell me this never would have happened if I had just gone back for a Ph. D, send a takedown notice, and get back to writing.