In the end, Riordan, Mark, and Maudy were accompanied by everyone except the sheriff and Agent Vergil Creighton, who turned out to be the team’s administrator. He had stayed behind to complete handover of the scene and to make their own documentation. Riordan wasn’t sure what that would include. Vergil was as snooty as a mage, but Riordan had picked up that he was only human. Maybe he had something to help him check for magical traces. They traveled with an enchanter, after all.
Or maybe it was entirely mundane documentation and Riordan needed to get over his bias towards the superiority of magic all over again.
Whatever. It didn’t matter. What did matter was trying to trace his trail to find where he’d hidden Daniel’s body. A trail that was old from a path he’d run in the dark, while being pursued and healing from injuries that would have killed a non-shifter. That started in a place where a major battle had taken place and multiple people had run away from.
“Ugh,” Riordan muttered, trying to get his bearings from near the cabin and failing. “I’m sorry. This should have been easier.”
“Would it be easier if you started from the tree?” Agent Heeren asked. “From my understanding of the reports, you fled from there with this person after you both were kidnapped and hung on the tree to die.”
“Maybe,” Riordan said, still thinking, “but maybe not. We made a mess of that area in the fight. Well, it’s worth checking, anyway.”
Something passed between the agents at that, shared in glances. Riordan wasn’t sure. They seemed content to let him set the pace. Riordan angled off into the woods to cover the relatively short distance between the cabin and the tree.
Memories swept over him. The anger and pain at being attacked, kidnapped, and left to die in such a manner, wrists slashed and hung upside down to bleed out like slaughterhouse meat. Daniel had still been barely breathing at that point, though in retrospect, Riordan knew it was too late for him already by that point. Blood loss had been severe and his body was shutting down.
He’d fallen and something had alerted the members of the cult who stayed in the cabin. It hadn’t taken long for them to follow, two men and a dog. Riordan wondered what had happened to Duke the dog. His owner, Tom, was dead. Riordan had killed him by accident while trying to kill Phenalope. He couldn’t say he was sorry. Tom had been a nasty piece of work. He’d joined the cult not because he believed in any of its religious tenets or liked the lifestyle or anything. No, he’d joined for the dark magic underside.
It was all a mess. Human nature could be so good or so bad, but mostly people were some shade of gray, good in some places, bad in others, and all just muddling through.
Riordan heaved a sigh. The air felt heavy and thick around him. He wondered if it was going to rain, except it didn’t smell like rain. It felt… solemn.
He paused and actually looked around himself. The tree spirit’s glade in the spirit realm had changed after its ascension, but Riordan hadn’t really thought much about the physical side of the tree changing. After all, most greater spirits felt no need to concern themselves with their physical side. The Sleeping Bear Dunes were a national lakeshore, for crying out loud, with the main dune and two islands representing the three bears from the legend that empowered Mother Bear being visible to the public.
And sure, people were restricted in direct access, but that was to prevent damage to the dune ecosystem and the delicate plants that prevented erosion.
Something was different here though. It wasn’t physical, but it wasn’t purely spiritual either. Riordan was reminded of the overgrown graveyard maze that shielded and hid the tree spirit in its realm. He could feel the maze laid over reality now, muddling the senses.
Riordan looked back to the people following him and saw that they had fallen behind, frustration and confusion writ clear on their faces. He went back to them.
“Ack,” Maudy squeaked as Riordan approached, waving an indignant finger at him. “Don’t jump out of nowhere like that.”
“Mark, what’s going on?” Riordan asked cautiously.
“There is an effect on this area that makes people walk around the tree,” Mark explained. “I thought we mentioned it to you.”
He ran a hand over his face, trying to remember. “Gods, you might have. I’ve been something of a mess since I woke up after everything. If you did, I probably assumed you meant the spirit’s maze on the other side.”
“Maze on the other side?” Quinn piped up, reminding Riordan of their agent contingent. Agent Heeren shot Quinn a look. Riordan thought she would have preferred to blend into the background and let Riordan talk without filters. Indeed, it was odd that they had slipped from his mind even this much.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Nope, he wasn’t going down that rabbit hole of professional paranoia at the moment.
“When the tree became a greater spirit, it upgraded the defenses I’d set up around it and integrated it into its new identity. It doesn’t want to be bothered by more people trying to use it for things,” Riordan explained, “I’d made a forest and hedge-maze thing to hide it and to provide privacy for the ghosts tied to it. It repurposed those.”
“The spirit realm is weird,” Quinn said, shaking his head. “How does any of that result in people being unable to approach the tree here?”
Mark spoke up this time, which Riordan was grateful for. Despite his recent intense exposure to the spirit realm, Riordan had minimal training and education on it. Mark, despite being an early apprentice and not supposed to go into the spirit realm, certainly not without supervision, at least had a much more solid foundational body of knowledge.
“The spirit plane and material plane constantly leak energy between them,” Mark explained, “This is the basis of natural energy transfer and a key element to spirit magic, since spirits can enter the material realm through the many tiny holes between planes almost anywhere. With such a strong magical event that occurred on both sides of the dimensional barrier and a greater spirit as an anchor, bleed-through is almost inevitable. In fact, the effect could even be an intentional extension of the spirit’s desire to be left alone.”
“Which is why I got further, isn’t it,” Riordan said, feeling strangely resigned. He was tired of spirit bullshit, but also knew that there was no escaping it. “Because I’m welcome. And you all knew that already, which is why I’m here.”
Mark fidgeted slightly. “We didn’t know it for sure,” he started before catching Riordan’s expression and ending with, “but yeah, we suspected as much. The pack leader was hoping you might be able to lead the agents to the ritual site so that they could clear it of potential future threats. Frankie was less thrilled with the idea.”
Riordan snorted. “Well, I guess that explains how I got permission to do this today.”
He looked around at the gathered group and sighed. He didn’t really want to do this, but they were going to bother him until he tried it. And with logical reasons too.
“Fine, let’s go. I’m not going to try getting anyone their own permission, but I might be able to find the way.”
The “might” part of that came largely from Riordan’s inability to use active magic at the moment. Or well, it wasn’t a complete inability, but he wasn’t going to show this lot just how much of a struggle it was to find and use his magic for even the simplest things right now.
Riordan would have to see if he could do this with just his passive senses. It wasn’t like he couldn’t feel the damn maze all around them now that he was looking.
He reached back and grabbed Quinn’s hand. Of all of those present, Quinn was the one Riordan objected to being in his personal space bubble the least, though Mark wasn’t bad either.
Quinn looked down to where they were holding hands. “My,” he quipped, “So forward.”
Riordan rolled his eyes. “I’m using physical connection to hopefully make guiding easier, jerk. Grab someone else before I just go alone.”
That got everyone moving and they were soon arranged in a cluster-line thing with everyone holding onto each other like elementary school students. Riordan tried not to feel as dumb as this had to look and began walking forward again.
For Riordan, the air was thick and solemn, that peaceful heavy feeling of a cemetery that is being reclaimed by the earth. It made him just want to lay down on the pine needles and sleep forever, knowing the earth would cradle him as he returned to it. It was a mildly unsettling feeling if he feared his mortality more, but not unpleasant. The earth was patient and would wait until he was ready to come to it.
Whatever the group behind him felt had to be far less pleasant.
Quinn crossed the boundary and his breath hitched, eyes widening and he glanced around as if surrounded by ghosts. Except not actual ghosts, because both Quinn and Riordan could see those and there weren’t any. His expression was nonetheless haunted.
Mark ended up looking tired and spacey. Maudy kept jumping at shadows. Agent Heeren pursued her lips tightly, gaze locked forward as if determined not to look at her surroundings. Agent De la Fuente was tracing the movement of something only visible to him, looking entranced. He nearly dropped his grip on the group, in fact, except that Agent Ahlgren grabbed him more tightly, dragging him along. Ahlgren was walking with his eyes closed, Riordan noted, likely grounding himself on the physical connections and relying on his spatial magic to walk without tripping.
The forest itself looked normal. Just a patch of Michigan woods in the afternoon, neat rows of pine from the old lumber days broken up with the patches of native deciduous forest slowly re-integrating. The pine needles and sand softened their steps.
And yet Riordan felt the need to take care with each step he took, as if there was some distinct difference between different patches of reddish-brown dead needles. Reaching inside himself, Riordan tapped his connection to the spirit. Of all the parts of his inner self, that one was still easy to reach as the spirit gateway keyed to the tree and its glade sat at the center of him and hadn’t moved.
The connection was no longer a silvery braid of a pack bond, but it was a sense of connection, an anchor or a compass. It pulled Riordan in a direction.
Riordan would always be able to find his way back to where this all began. Because in many ways, Riordan had died on that tree, only to be reborn into a new life, a new purpose. He still wasn’t sure what that purpose would look like, but it certainly wouldn’t be aimless drifting, not with these new bonds to anchor him.
And then they were through, standing in the messed up forest clearing, the center dominated by a large blackgum tree, its thick branches spread wide across its domain.