Page 113 of Shroom for Improvement

I replaced my slide with the one containing Claude’s sample. “My lab buddy at Remy Uni is a werewolf. His area of expertise is dendrology. Trees,” I clarified, because Claude had pulled his eyebrows into knots. I sighed. There was no way toexpand on this without relying heavily on stereotypes. “Because, you know... dogs, sticks, bark? Anyway, his answer to pretty much every problem is pee.‘I pissed on it, so it’s mine. Have you tried pissing on it?’That kind of thing.”

Claude still looked confused, and I regretted my tangent.

“That was a roundabout way to say this, in fact, is all very normal conversation for me.”

He observed me quietly. His head tilted to the side, his bottom lip puckered where he chewed on the inside. “What’s your friend’s name?” he asked, eventually.

“Mash. Uh, Mash Cassidy.”

He looked up as though recalling something. “Sounds familiar... I’ve seen it on one of your papers, I think.”

The thought caught me off guard. I’d written a couple of papers with Mash, on the relationship of trees and plants with mycelium. Written a few books too.

“Oh! Oh, I remember seeing his picture now.Oh,”Claude said. His final “Oh” was resigned, but before I questioned him on it, he cradled the eyepiece of the microscope and peered inside. “Oh, my gods!”

I practically pushed him out of the way to look myself. “Holy shit,” I whispered.

Whereas my slide represented a typical sample for a fae of my type, age, and health level, Claude’s was anything but. Mine showed a smattering of glamour particles, like freckles on sun-kissed shoulders or stars in the night’s sky. Claude’s was more like the whole “can’t see the forest for the trees” kind of thing. There were so many specks of glamour it almost appeared as one homogeneous shining particle.

“You. You are the magic,” I said, my voice soft. Reverent.

But how to get the magic from Claude into the ley lines...

I mean, there was one obvious answer. Could it be that easy? That crude?

I thought about the flowers growing out of Claude’s butt. The one that drained from his bathroom, not his actual butt.

“Claude, um, bit of a personal question, but do you pee in the shower?”

He jolted back, an affronted look on his face. “Ew, no, I would never.”

Damn, he couldn’t lie.

“Why would you ask that?” His tone was more curious than offended.

I blew out a breath. Okay, here goes. “You know how I said there is so much goodness contained within our... fluids? It’s evident your pee is especially magically potent. I’m wondering if the ritual might be, uh...” Why was I having trouble saying it? We’d been talking about pee for at least an hour, and I’d told him before—in depth—about how much I loved pee.

“Piss on the ley lines?” he guessed.

“Yeah,” I said, turning my face from his and scratching at my suddenly very itchy neck. I couldn’t read Claude’s expression, but I’d hazard a guess it was disgusted.

“Jenny?” He waited for Jenny to answer. “It says, ‘No, gods no.’”

For some reason, that made my cheeks heat even more. “Okay, well, at least we can cross that off the list. But... I just need to think of how to get the magic out of you and into the ley lines.”

“We already know,” he said, placing his hand on my bicep. “The lightning.”

Maybe. Maybe it had been the lightning all along.

It made sense. Thunderstorms and mushrooms had been affiliated for centuries, millennia even.

Maybe I needed to trust Claude’s instincts.

“I think you might be right.” I took off my gloves and tossed them into the bin.

Claude reached forward and ran his thumb over the crease between my brows. “Jenny would have told us if it wasn’t, right?”

I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t speak.

---