Sleep was a definite struggle for Riordan. Laying in that soft bed felt unsettling and unfamiliar. Eventually, he took the blanket, shoved it under the bed, and used the dregs of his personal well to shift into badger form. The makeshift burrow under the bed wasn’t as soft as the sandy dirt outside, but it was warm and quiet and that was enough to finally let him drop off.
Once he was asleep, Riordan found himself once again in the glade. For a minute, he just sat there, staring numbly at the gathering of ghosts. They were aware of him, but most seemed either leery of approaching or didn’t want to bother him. He could only imagine what sort of expression he was making by this point. Riordan missed dreaming. Worse, he was pretty sure that processing the shit he was going through wouldn’t go so well if he didn’t get a reprieve from conscious thought for at least a few hours a day.
Daniel wasn’t there and Riordan could imagine the ghost still sitting comfortably on the bed that Riordan couldn’t sleep in, keeping watch over his unconscious body. Duane was in the glade though and picked his way over to the edge where Riordan was sitting alone once it became clear that no one else was going to cross that divide.
The ghost regarded him warily and opened with, “You look like crap.”
“Thanks. The nearly dying and getting glued back together thing does wonders for the complexion.”
Duane nodded, like that made perfect sense and wasn’t pure sarcasm on Riordan’s part. The ghost gestured loosely towards Riordan’s chest. “So I can see.”
Fuck. Riordan looked down at his spiritual body and stared. No wonder the ghosts were giving him so much space. He had a fucking garden growing where the hole had been. The effect reminded him of something between a terrarium and those horror movies with the metal tentacles that would burrow in and merge with the victim’s flesh. Vines and plants were rooted into him, their leaves and stems spiraling inward towards the center where a glowing string of woven light passed through a starry void before fading out of sight a few inches from his body.
“Uh,” Riordan said dumbly, “That’s-- That’s fucking creepy.”
“Yes. I gather that this isn’t a normal magic thing?” Duane asked, the burly lumberjack sitting down near Riordan, though, Riordan noted, still not within arm’s reach.
“Not in the slightest. This is pure spirit weirdness. Most of us shifters avoid looking too deep into spirit stuff unless we’re shaman, which thankfully I am not.”
“What’s the definition of a shaman then?” Duane stretched, feigning casual. Riordan was interested to note that the man had his flannel shirt back. How did clothes work for ghosts really, when none of it was physical?
“A shaman is just a shifter with an additional magical affinity, one that can be used for active spell casting. That’s almost always spirit magic, but sometimes you’ll get someone with something else or with three or more affinities. They take on the magical tasks for the community.”
“What you did wasn’t active casting?”
Riordan laughed at that, the sound flat and tired. He remembered Frankie’s opinion of the “spells” he’d cast and the old shaman was hardly wrong about his foolishness. “I don’t know what the fuck what I did counts as anymore. I shouldn’t be able to see ghosts or to interact with spirits or get to this place, which has to be part of the spirit plane, but being tied to the ritual dragged me here and linked me to all of you. And once I was here, well, I can already see magic and magic is just sort of all over the place here. It didn’t take much to push it into mimicking things I know spells can be like, but--”
He cut off and pointed at the weird void terrarium in his chest. “There are clearly consequences to that thinking. Most spell casters operate with ordered spells and rituals on the physical plane and steer clear of any of the other planes. I’m beginning to see why.”
“Hmm,” Duane clearly didn’t know what to say to any of that. Daniel had taken to magic with an air of awe and acceptance. Duane struggled more, getting through on sheer practicality about the situation rather than a belief in magic, at least magic and the supernatural as it actually was. It was hard to reject something that had been thrust so strongly into his reality, being a cursed ghost and all, but it clearly made him uncomfortable. The ghost changed the subject.
“I’ve been talking to the folks here about what happened. The guy who has been here the longest died back at the start of last fall. It looked like it was fully summer out there now, so that’s nine or ten months ago, assuming one of those folks who didn’t accept your bond thing wasn’t the actual first. Still, there are some trends I could pick up from talking to them.”
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Duane held up a hand and raised a single finger. “One, all the earliest victims had some sort of history of domestic trouble. Some of these guys should have been jailed for beating their wives, but some of it was way more mild, loud arguments, slamming doors, the sort of thing that counseling or a divorce could fix. Two were even the ones getting abused, though they didn’t want to talk about that much.”
He raised a second finger slowly, continuing, “Two, the group doing this is growing. The earliest ones got hit by two or three masked women, often helped by the target’s romantic partner. At some point, a few masked men mixed in. Later, the men started doing more of it and didn’t always bother with masks.”
A third finger went up. “Which leads to point three. They are escalating. They are grabbing more people from a much larger area at a faster rate. Instead of only targeting domestic offenders, they are also going for people who won’t be quickly missed, like you and Daniel, and victims of opportunity like me. The earliest victims had weeks between them. Now they are averaging one a day, though that’s partly because they’ll grab more than one at a time now. They also have access to things like chloroform which they didn’t use in the early ones.”
It took Riordan’s tired brain to absorb the real meaning of those facts. It really boiled down to something simple and horrible. “The corruption must be getting bad,” Riordan breathed, letting that thought settle and see if it fit. “They had discernment and caution at first, but the more they did this, the more they wanted to do it more, to get that rush of power. Death mage spiral at its finest. It’s not going to be long before they stop trying to hide at all, believing they are above all consequences.”
“What’s that going to mean for all of us?” Duane asked, his worry overriding his hesitation towards Riordan enough to make the man lean forward into their shared space.
“I’m not really sure,” Riordan admitted with frustration. He ran a hand through his short hair, almost wishing it was long enough for him to pull, just to have a physical outlet for the emotional distress boiling through him. “This isn’t my thing. I’m a shifter, sure, which means I know far more than a human about magic stuff, but I’m just a grunt. I am happy being that. I picked up stuff that was important to my job at the time, but I avoided learning too much more than that about magic as a whole. I never wanted to be a mage or a planner or a leader of any damn sort. I just--”
Riordan had just wanted to go out and do some good, following a leader he could get behind. He’d wanted to strike out on his own, independent of his family, and make a difference in the world. The faceless stupidity of military group command had frustrated his young self, which had led him to the mercenaries and a team leader he had trusted. And continued to trust, blind to how the man had changed over the time they worked together, up until it was all too obvious that Qusay was no longer the man who Riordan had chosen to follow and he’d lost everything.
Now, all these victims were turning to him for help because he was the only person who could see them, the only one who could explain the hell they were in and offer hope, even if both his explanations and hope were threadbare things. On the other side, the shifters were happy to reduce him to an inconvenient pawn, too useful to release but too flawed to use. He had all these expectations on him that he wanted to fulfill and no power to actually do so.
Part of him just wanted to run from all of it. To give up and just apologize for being a useless waste of space. To make it clear that he couldn’t meet any of their expectations and they should just write him off. If he abdicated all agency and chose failure for his own part up front, then he could get past the inevitable part where he disappointed them all and then fade back into obscurity.
However, that choice felt like more of a lie than normal. When push had come to shove, he’d risen to the challenge and gotten away from the death mage and her group with next to no resources. He hadn’t done it alone, but another shifter might have failed because they accepted it was impossible, because they knew that working with ghosts and spirits was insanity and not helpful anyway. Riordan could make those sorts of choices, the ones that tested the impossible and found it just to be implausible and stupid instead. He was willing to risk himself doing the dumb shit that might work or might get him killed, especially if that was what gave them an edge over the death mage.
He was too tired to make sense of everything he was feeling at that moment, too wrung out from everything he’d been through, but Riordan had a feeling that fighting for the right to help was a fight worth winning.
“The shifters are bringing in some experts on death mages,” Riordan said, trying to give Duane information to help with the flagging morale in the ghosts, “They are also starting to scout out her followers and their operations. Once I’m awake again, I’d love it if you could help me relay the information you gathered from all of the victims so that they can use it in their investigations. I appreciate the work you’ve been doing here, both in learning this stuff and in handling the others. I’m sure this experience has been rough on all of you and I’ve been stretched too thin to help with any of that.”
Duane straightened up at Riordan’s words, almost as if Riordan’s acknowledgement and gratitude meant something to him. “Of course. I’ll be glad to help with that. You’ve been doing a lot and with the--,” he gestured at Riordan’s fucked-up chest again, “No one is wondering why you aren’t doing more. It’ll be good to have something to do.”
That was kind of Duane to say, but Riordan felt like he should be doing way more than he actually was. If he was doing everything he could, surely there would be more of a solution coming, right? There wasn’t much he could do with that feeling until he swept his eyes around the glade, taking in the way everyone was on edge. They were all clustered in the open, trapped between a creepy intelligent tree made of light and a wall of trees and brambles they couldn’t escape.
The wall might have been built to keep them safe, but they were still trapped in this refuge and would be for however long it took to make leaving safe for them. Riordan wasn’t comfortable with inviting more of them to haunt him directly, intruding on his privacy and space. It might be selfish, but he just couldn’t handle having that many new people hanging around him and spying on his every move. Privacy was something that was important when struggling with difficult emotions, to have that choice of bringing someone into their vulnerability rather than having their vulnerability on open display or having to keep up appearances while crumbling inside.
“Are any of you able to shape things in this place?” Riordan asked, curious.
Duane shook his head. “Most of us aren’t dumb enough to even try, not after seeing what happened with you. The few who did try couldn’t get a handle on it. No idea if it’s possible for one of us to make changes, but probably best if we didn’t. Messing around too much here is clearly dangerous.”
Riordan couldn’t help but laugh at that. Look at him being a role model for good behavior. Just don’t do what Riordan does and they should be fine, right?
“Alright,” Riordan said, mind made up, “Go warn them not to freak out. I’m going to try to break up the space a bit here so people can have privacy.”