Achillea eyes him warily, still in beast form. She isn’t attacking, which is a good sign. She’s not even aggressive, which is an even better one.

She seems as confused by that as he is.

Hesitantly, he raises a hand. “Hey.”

Achillea steps toward him, sniffing at him. She cocks her head to the side, then lowers it, pushing her snout into Mordecai’s palm.

Neither of them move. The air is thick between them, words unspoken but understood.

After a moment, she backs away, seemingly embarrassed. Her form starts to shrink as Mordecai lowers his hand. In seconds, it’s no longer a beast standing in front of him, but an orc woman in ragged pants and a torn gambeson.

Achillea sighs heavily, running a hand through her mohawk. She gives him a glare with no heat behind it. “I told you to run.”

Mordecai crosses his arms. “Yeah, you did.”

“I can’t always control myself while transformed. It takes focus. Focus I didn’t have back there. I warned you. You’re lucky.”

“About that,” he points out, “I’m not sure that was luck.”

She raises an eyebrow at him.

“Something when you transformed…the air maybe? Or the magic? Something changed. It felt…familiar.” He pauses, remembering. It was different, but similar. Something he’d never noticed until it was all around him, demanding attention, but even now it’s present, a faint thrum in his senses. “It felt like…me.”

Achillea stares at him blankly for a moment, eyes searching, until her eyes widen in realization. She squeezes them shut again, rubbing at them. “We’re both supernatural creatures. We don’t…” She trails off into a yawn. “Supernatural creatures don’t attack each other. I can’t believe I forgot.”

Mordecai nods. “That makes sense.” The monsters don’t attack him because he’s one of them. And so is Achillea. They aren’t natural enemies like the monsters are to humans.

“You’re taking this a lot better than I expected you to,” she notes dully.

“Oh, I already knew.”

Her head snaps up to look at him. “What?!”

He waves a hand blithely. “I mean, it was kind of obvious. You keep looking up into the sky. You wanted us to get to the border before the end of this week, the night of the full moon. You were checking the phase of the moon, seeing how much time was left. Furthermore,” he continues as Achillea’s jaw falls open, “you haven’t touched anything silver in all the time I’ve known you. Not at the cabin nor in the inn. You never touched your silverware. Plus, the mob back at the cabin all had silver weapons even though they were hunting you, not me.”

Achillea groans, throwing her head back and cursing at the sky. “I thought you hadn’t noticed. I was trying not to be obvious about the silver thing.”

Mordecai shrugs. There are a lot of questions he wants to ask her, but if he starts on her now she’ll clam up. Better to ask the important ones while she’s feeling chatty.

Before he can even get a word out, though, Achillea sways. Mordecai rushes to steady her and gets a good look at the tears in her armor. The gambeson is in tatters, moreso in the back than the front, and the stuffing coming from the tears is dark red.

“Oh, Caxmir, Achillea!” The orc gives him a bleary look as he guides her to rest at the base of a tree. She pulls the garment off and the sight beneath isn’t pretty; the shirt beneath it was originally gray, but it’s slowly being turned black by sluggishly bleeding wounds. Mordecai runs to her discarded armor and grabs her pack, rifling through it anxiously.

He finds what he’s looking for and triumphantly returns to Achillea, bottle in hand. She looks like she would rather bleed out than be fussed over, but she tips her head back willingly to let him pour the potion into her mouth.

Hopefully the elf didn’t dilute it. Maybe he should go get the rest?

“Mordecai.” The sound of his name pulls him back to Earth. He glances over at Achillea, meeting her tired gaze. “I’ll be fine.”

“You sure?” He looks her over. Her wounds are closing faster than he’d expected. The potion must have been good after all. Still, even as the slight pallor of her skin fades, he can see her eyes straining to focus. “You took a pretty hard hit to the head. Maybe you shouldn’t sleep tonight.”

Achillea squints at him as though he’d just told her to fly south for the winter. “You were the one who wanted me to sleep in the first place! The potion—”

“Do they heal concussions?”

“Y—” Her voice cuts off with a strangled noise and for a second Mordecai is alarmed, thinking the potion was poisoned somehow, but Achillea just growls in frustration and closes her eyes, taking a deep breath. When her eyes open again, she looks resigned. “I don’t know,” she admits.

Huh. There must be more to that ‘orcs can’t lie’ deal than just a natural inclination toward honesty. Mordecai files that information away for later.

“In that case, we’d better err on the side of caution.” He stands up, swiveling to check their surroundings. “And the people in the inn might have heard that howl. We should get out of here.”

Achillea’s eyes widen. Apparently she’d forgotten all about the inn. They hadn’t made it far at all; it was just a 5-minute walk away, if that. She pushes herself to her feet and gathers her discarded armor. Mordecai grabs her bag.

They don’t bother keeping to their northward route, simply walking into the forest and vanishing.