I coughed, eyes focused squarely at my feet. “It, uh… seemed like a good idea at the time,” I mumbled. “I couldn’t carry the whole thing, so…”

  “By ‘the whole thing’ I assume you mean the corpse that head was attached to?”

  I nodded, and Cassie continued. “Was it dead when you got there, or did you kill it?”

  I lifted my head and met her eyes proudly, a small grin forming on my face without my input. “Oh, I killed it. All me.”

  “Why?”

  That question stopped me dead. “I mean. It was there, it jumped at me. What else was I supposed to do?”

  “Run away? Obviously I didn’t see the rest of it, but the head makes it look huge. You could probably outrun it here, and we could leave.” Cassie spoke flatly, her tone brooking no argument. I barely ever heard her like this, because normally I was chastising her for bad decision making.

  “But I didn’t want to lead it back to you!” I protested. “Besides, I did kill it. Surely that means fighting it was the right decision!” My voice grew a little fainter as I realised exactly what I was arguing for, and Cassie saw right through me.

  “Really? You’re shooting for ‘I can, so I should’? For shame, Lia.” Her tone lightened, and I realised that she was teasing me.

  Thank the gods, she’s over it. Thank the Gods for a friend who also makes bad decisions, serious Cass is terrifying.

  “I wasn’t exactly in the best frame of mind, I’ll admit. Still, I thought it might be valuable.”

  Suddenly Cassie was concerned. “What do you mean? Are you alright?”

  I waved her down. “I’m fine. Not having much vitae was getting to me, like when you get angry after missing a meal. Also, I think that going all-” I put my hands together, before pulling them apart “-stretchy messes with my head a bit. I was definitely more impulsive, that’s for sure.”

  Cassie looked at me like she was examining a particularly dense bit of text. “Maybe you should avoid that form when you’re alone, just for a while.”

  I shrugged. “Fair enough. It feels good when I’m using it, but I can definitely feel the strain now. Besides, I don’t imagine we’ll be apart much for a while.”

  Cassie shot me a confused look. “Wait, but you were talking about being low on lifeforce, right? Won’t you need to top up again?”

  I snorted. “Nah, I’m not a vampire or anything. As long as I don’t have to heal anything, I’m not going to lose it. As far as I can tell I actually make a bit naturally, so we’re probably fine. I just need to make sure not to be inefficient like I was last night, and we’ll be fine.”

  Cassie seemed relieved. “Well I’m glad. Although you could have told me you were going to go off and fight a tree.”

  “It wasn't a tree… I think,” I protested weakly. “I mean, it did bleed a lot.” I gestured at myself.

  “It’s not the only one. I get that you can heal but that,” Cassie waved an arm at my less-than-clean getup, “is at least half your blood. I can tell, it’s a completely different colour.”

  I looked down for a proper examination of myself to see that yes, my blood was a completely different colour to the monster’s. That was not just because the creature had bled a crimson so dark it was almost black, but because my blood was green. Pale green to be more specific, with a hint of yellow in the lighter portions.

  Okay, that’s another mark in the ‘weird head stuff’ column, because I definitely should have noticed that.

  On impulse I unsheathed my sword and made a small cut on my finger, barely hesitating a moment. Sure enough, my blood was exactly as red as it should be.

  “Woah, what was that?” Cassie yelled, getting to her feet. “What, you’re into self-harm now?”

  “Not really. But look, it’s red. That means I even bleed different like that. I wonder why??”

  “Who knows? Just so long as you don’t cut yourself to see, then I’m sure we’ll find out.”

  I looked up. “It was one tiny cut, it’s fine. See?” I lifted my hand to show her I had already healed the cut.

  “That’s not the point. Actually, the fact that you can just heal it away might make it worse. No more cutting yourself. Period.” Cassie glared at me with sudden and unconcealed anger.

  “Okay, sure.” I wasn’t sure why exactly Cassie was being so intense about this, but it didn’t take a genius to know that something about what I had done had really upset her.

  “Promise me.”

  I stopped, before turning and looking her in the eye. “I promise. Unless I absolutely have to in the moment for some reason I will not damage myself for the sake of scientific interest.” I meant it too. I preferred not to break promises, and Cassie knew that.

  I wonder if that’s part of the whole fey thing? More to look into.

  Cassie stared at me for a moment before sagging. “Thanks, Lia,” she said softly.

  “You okay?” I asked. I couldn’t help but wonder why this was so important to her, but even I could recognise that now wasn’t the time to ask.

  Cassie gave a small nod, before lifting her gaze back to me with a weak grin tugging at her lips. “Come on, we should get a move on so I can stop being the serious one here. That’s meant to be your job.”

  I shook my head. “Not yet. I would like to know if I carried this head through the woods for no reason, or if we could maybe get something valuable from it. Plus, I really need a change of clothes. Not sure if you noticed but these,” I gestured at my bloodied and cut up travelling clothes, “are kind of done for.”

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  Cassie let out a small laugh. “I’ll get looking then, although I can only do so much based on just a head. Just let me get the bestiary and I’ll go hide behind that massive tree.” She pointed and I saw an oak that was obscenely wide. I shrugged at her suggestion and she ran over to our bags to find the bestiary before hiding just as she said.

  After quickly peeling myself out of my ruined clothes a cast a critical eye over them. The trousers were fine besides the bloodstains, but my shirt was well and truly a goner, boasting a huge tear over my shoulder where the creature had clawed me. I winced as I realised my shoulder must have been in a similar state.

  Casting the ruined garb aside, I quickly redressed in a shirt/trouser combo that was almost exactly the same. Suffice to say that the clothes I had brought were very practical, and that besides the leathers I tended to wear for hunting they were also very similar. While I was myself still covered in blood and dirt, there wasn’t all that much I could do about that. Now cleanly dressed, I called out to Cassie that it was okay for her to come out and watched as she trudged out from behind the tree, collapsing heavily against the trunk when she was in view.

  “Why do you look so upset?” I asked.

  “I was really hoping to find the monster before you were ready, but alas. There are simply too many weird tree-shaped monsters.”

  I wandered over and sat next to her, peering over her shoulder to a page of the bestiary that discussed a sort of living plant. “I already said, it wasn’t a plant. It had bark for camouflage, I think. Trust me, all meat on the inside.”

  Cassie shot me a look. “Seriously, could you sound more creepy?” She shook her head before turning back to the index. She quickly located the section about our area, before asking me for my description of the monster. She narrowed it down to a list of three, and showed me the page for each of them.

  First was the Tree Hugger. Tree Huggers were herbivorous monsters that attached themselves to magical flora and fed on the magic in them. They were known to be fiercely territorial with just about any other living source of magic that approached their plant, and could be anywhere from cat sized to tree sized. However, when I saw the illustration of one I saw that it was in fact closer to a worm than a cat, with two spiky limbs that could be used for offence, but they were primarily used for rooting themselves against larger flora.

  Moving on, the second potential monster was the Bark Hound. Bark Hounds were predators that were known to stalk most heavily wooded areas. They were pack hunters, and supposedly around the size of a regular wolf. They were also actually more like eusocial insects than mammals, despite the name. I knocked these off the list before I even looked at the illustration, but I kept reading because it was interesting. I turned out that these things were actually really helpful, because they tended to act as a deterrent to a lot of other magical creatures, since as monsters they were hunting for mana more than meat.

  Finally we had a Gloom Stalker. These guys were ambush predators, typically nocturnal and quite famous for being tricky to spot. Their favourite tactic was apparently to disguise themselves as a log and leap out at their prey when they passed closely enough. It only took a glance at the illustration to know that this was what I had been attacked by.

  I guess I must have disturbed it while it slept. I’m pretty sure there was a log in that clearing.

  I continued reading, passing over recommended hunting techniques for luring them out during the day (which I had done accidentally) or disturbing their hunting patterns to frustrate them. Apparently they were known to be fairly smart, which made sense considering it had actively changed its plan of attack after it kept missing. At the end I saw the ‘For the mercenaries’ section, which listed all of the valuable parts of the monster.

  While I had missed most of them (heart, claws, liver etc.) I did bring back both of its fangs, each of which were almost as long as my forearm. Unfortunately the method the book provided included several days of boiling the bones, which we didn’t really have the time for.

  “So, who’s carrying the head?” I asked, only half joking.

  Cassie gave me a look, before flipping the page wordlessly. I saw that there was a secondary technique for tooth removal if the creature had been killed recently. Essentially, it involved sticking something thin between the tooth and the jaw and levering the tooth out, slowly widening the gap between tooth and bone until it could just be pulled out.

  I looked at Cassie and shrugged. “What are we gonna use, though?”

  Cassie just coughed and looked at me pointedly.

  “What?” I asked.

  Cassie just sighed, muttering something like “of course not” under her breath. “Lia, you can change the shape of your body, yes?”

  “Yeah, why?” This was definitely a departure. “Oh, right. Can I do that?”

  Cassie shrugged. “I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to. I mean, I assume whatever you shift into has be at least kind of biological, but just something long and thin should be fine, right?”

  “Huh. I never really thought of it. I kind of assumed it was just people shaped stuff, but I guess I did just come back from being a lanky inhuman monstrosity, so fair’s fair.”

  I focused, picturing one of my fingers as being long, thin and unyielding. After a moment of concentration I opened my eyes to… nothing.

  Oh. That’s a bit disappointing. Ooh, hold on. Maybe I need to be more specific.

  Every time I had shifted in the past, I had known exactly what I wanted, and most of the time I’d had experience with whatever I was changing. This time I was just imagining a series of traits and trying to apply them to my body, without a true image or desire of what I wanted my body to be.

  I closed my eyes again and began with the same intent. This time though I specifically pictured my finger as being covered in a hard chitin, with a joint at the top to allow me some dexterity but a single solid length beyond that. With this specificity my magic actually had an avenue through which to fulfil my commands. This time I could feel my mana wrapping around the digit, moulding it and hardening it. The process, much less familiar than swapping minor humanoid features, took longer than usual. Still, after several seconds of concentration, and one minor change to the length when I accidentally made my finger almost a foot long, my implement was done.

  My new digit was alabaster white, gleaming in the sun and coming to rounded end. It was about three inches longer than my regular finger, and was wide and flat at the end. After probably too long marvelling at my new finger, I lifted the head onto my lap upside down and motioned to Cassie, who held the jaw open.

  After taking a moment to brace myself against the memory of this creature trying to kill me, I stuck my finger into its mouth. After a moment to reposition my hand I jammed my finger into the edge of the fang, taking another moment to press my finger right against the tooth before sliding it into the tiny gap. Or I tried to, anyway. I reshaped my finger to be even thinner, before trying again. This time it slid in with a bit of resistance, and I began to wiggle.

  Slowly, after repositioning my finger around the socket of tooth several times and wiggling until it began to give, the fang began to come loose. Eventually Cassie gripped it with her other hand and pulled, but seemingly couldn’t pull it free. I heard her curse under her breath before she cast a spell and sparks began to fly from around the tooth. Before I could ask what she was doing the tooth flew from its socket with a crack, coming to a halt a couple of feet a way in mid-air. A second passed in silence before the tooth dropped into Cassie’s waiting hand.

  I continued to stare for a moment, before shrugging at Cassie’s triumphant smile and repeating the process on the other tooth. This one was faster, and before long Cassie was wrapping both teeth in a spare shirt and placing them gently in the bag we had gotten from Laon.

  I picked up the head, before putting it back down again in confusion. “What are we doing with this?”

  “Oh, I’ve got that!” Cassie called from by the bags, before muttering and waving her hand. I watched as the head got the same treatment as the badger from this morning, flying into the trees to never be seen again.

  “Huh. That really is the solution to all of your problems, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve only done it twice,” Cassie grumbled, but I could see the smile on her face.

  “Fair enough. Three times though, and you’ll get a reputation.”

  Cassie scoffed, which I had a suspicion was just to disguise a laugh. She walked over to me and offered me the larger bag. “Come on, we’re even further behind schedule now.”

  “Oh no, not the schedule!” I lamented, but all the same I shouldered my pack and set off towards the road. She wasn’t wrong, we were already behind before all of this. We had a long way to go yet.

  can learn this precision eventually, and are known to have some of the best wide-range healing magic simply due to the sheer amount of vitae they can hold and control at once.