The energy hung thick and stagnant in the air, waiting and rotten. Riordan almost shivered despite himself, though Kent didn’t notice given how focused the man was on breathing through the exertion of dragging him through this foul place. That stillness was very wrong. Magic normally flowed in currents like air or tides. One of Riordan’s old teammates said magic was what happened when the world breathed in and out, expelling and recapturing mana that existed in everything. For the pressure of magic to be so dense and still here, in a place of death and blood, could only mean one thing.

Someone was trapping magic as part of a ritual. Given the corpses and murdering kidnappers, it had to be death magic. And a lot of it.

Nothing good came from blood or death spells. That shit was fast power and an even faster way to taint your soul and drive yourself insane.

Even as Riordan perceived the magic, the magic perceived him right back. He felt a hand rise from that pool of energy, drenched in the tar of death magic corruption. Riordan had just enough time to realize it had to be a spirit before the hand that didn’t exist latched onto his own energy and the thing wailed in soul-shredding desperation.

Sensations flashed through Riordan, coming from the connection to that tainted spirit. He drank in sun with his skin, growing tall and strong. His leaves changed color with the seasons, turning vibrant shades of red and yellow in the fall as he prepared to sleep through the winter. His round blue berries budded, ripened, and fell to the ground around his thick trunk. Year after year after year, unhurried, slow to change but gaining in the strength of the earth with every season. Breathing in the air and the sunshine and breathing out magic.

The sunshine blotted out, choked by a presence that twisted the energy around him and pulled at his heart. He dug his roots in deep, trying to resist, but blood soaked into the soil around him, seeping into him, and he lost his grip. Thick black ropes of magic bound his heart and unending pain choked him. His broad, strong branches were burdened with blobs of dangling power like rotten fruit, sickening him even as it filled him. More and more fruit blossomed on his branches and he was sinking, stuck in tar-

The shared vision overwhelmed Riordan’s fragile grip on consciousness. He felt a hysterical urge to laugh as he slid into darkness once more. These humans were going to sacrifice him on a killing tree and he wasn’t even going to be awake to fight it.

Everything ached when the darkness finally retreated, something that Riordan hadn’t been sure would happen again. Riordan’s body dangled awkwardly, his joints overextended and stiff as the rope looped around his ankles dug in painfully. His head throbbed and his ribs stabbed with each shallow breath, but Riordan counted his meager blessings that he was still breathing at all.

The scent of fresh blood warred with the overwhelming stench of death. From the sticky feeling on his arms, Riordan guessed that his kidnappers had slit his wrists before stringing him up from the giant tree. He could feel the magical heart of the tree and he knew it was the same tree from that spirit vision. Its quiet strength struggled to contain the death magic hung around it, anchoring the ritual against the spirit’s will.

Ignoring the dual distractions of his battered body and the sickening magic, Riordan listened hard to his surroundings. Flies buzzed around, mosquitoes too, drawn by rotting flesh and blood. The itching bites on his exposed skin decidedly added insult to injury, though he could hardly tell with how much his skin already crawled from exposure to the tainted air. Wind rustled leaves and birds called in the distance, but no animals aside from insects could be heard nearby, likely driven away by the wrongness of this place. Even scavengers knew better than to eat flesh tainted with this much death magic.

He didn’t hear any breathing either- No, he did hear someone else breathing weakly, along with a faint struggling heartbeat. Riordan pried his dry, sticky eyes open and winced to see young Daniel strung up like so much meat alongside him. Being only human, Daniel’s slit wrists still dripped blood sluggishly down to the muddy ground below. They couldn’t have been cut for that long or Daniel would have been dead already.

The smart thing to do would be to wait until full night and then slip off, giving more time for their captors to vacate the area, his wounds to heal, and for darkness to fall. Daniel didn’t have that long. Hell, Riordan wasn’t sure it mattered what he did for the young man at this point. It was entirely possible that nothing he did would be enough to save him now. Not trying though, not knowing for sure that he’d done everything he could, would haunt Riordan for a damn long time. He had enough regrets without adding one more.

That meant waiting was out. He did one more quick survey of his situation while he worked out a plan of action. The tree was huge, even for a mature blackgum. He guessed it was four or five feet around at the base of its trunk, rising a good hundred or more feet up into the air. Its thick branches spread out horizontally with a rounded umbrella shape overall. Bodies in various states of decay dangled from ropes wrapped around those branches. Most were strung up on the lower branches, but several of the lighter, smaller bodies hung on upper branches to accommodate the sheer quantity.

Cursing softly to himself, Riordan ignored the sharp stab of his ribs as he flexed his core and started his body swinging on the end of its rope. The thick branch above creaked as he moved, building momentum until he was able to tighten his abs and grab the rope above his feet in one fluid motion.

The swinging turned Riordan’s stomach. He paused to breathe deeply, muscles clenched tight, fighting down the urge to puke. His biceps bulged as he braced himself against the pivot point of his bound ankles. He took one more deep steadying breath of the foul air and burst into motion, climbing the rope he hung from hand over hand until he came in reach of the branch. The bark bit into the bare skin of his blood-stained arms as Riordan wrapped his arms around the branch and swung his body up and over.

He landed stomach-down and clenched hard with his arms and thighs to stabilize himself as he vomited bile. The puke ran down the curve of the tree branch and dripped down to the ground, a good twenty feet below. Fuck, that sucked. Riordan was damn glad that his ribs were only cracked, not broken, because that stunt would have gotten him a pierced lung otherwise.

While he recovered from that burst, Riordan surveyed the area from this new position. A ladder lay on the ground on the other side of the tree and a plastic tool chest sat near the edge of the small clearing surrounding the blackgum tree. Its dense foliage kept the undergrowth low around it, probably backed up on a magical level by the earth’s investment in the tree’s spirit. More ropes dangled from the branches, both bearing bodies and slung over the branches waiting for their macabre fruit.

His climb had been fast but the creak of rope and wood that accompanied it would have stood out from the ambient noise. Indeed, the animal noises he’d heard earlier were quieted now, despite how active the long summer twilight should be. Riordan didn’t hear any human noises in response and breathed a small sigh of relief. If there were any human guards around this site, they were either currently far enough away or not particularly observant.

His ankles were still bound in the rope, which was the next thing Riordan had to tackle. He inched down the branch until he was able to wedge himself against the crook of the branch and trunk. A quick survey of his pockets showed they’d been emptied of everything, from wallet to pocket lint. His pack was long gone. If his kidnappers were smart, they would have grabbed it when they grabbed him and then dumped it somewhere far away, like a trash heap or a dumpster another town over. If they were dumb, they either left it at the gas station where they’d grabbed Riordan or they had stashed it somewhere to keep. Riordan wasn’t going to bet on what kind of dumb they were tonight. His luck was coming up shit so far.

One bit of luck still held though. They had missed his boot blade when they’d taken his stuff. Riordan pulled the knife out of its hidden sheath, grateful for those bits of professional and practical paranoia that still clung to him. The rope was a sturdy cheap black nylon. His body weight had cinched the knots tight. The knots had been crap in the first place, a mess of half hitches and then a tangle that might have been an attempt at something more secure. Riordan began sawing at the thick mess of rope between his ankles.

His knife was sharp- Riordan kept good care of his tools- but not serrated. He cursed quietly under his breath as he made headway on getting free. He did not have time for this shit, not with Daniel dying below him and crazy death mages lurking around somewhere. He needed his legs free though, because he had a feeling that he was going to have a hell of a run ahead of him. The last few fibers gave way and Riordan tugged his ankles apart, bursting free of the rope.

Immediately, the quiescent magic lunged at him. The rope animated, wrapping around one of his legs and pulling him closer to the tree branch. The motion knocked Riordan off balance. He had a half second to decide between wrestling a wriggling rope on a branch or a twenty foot fall.

“Ah hell,” Riordan muttered, yanking the rope off his leg with his left hand before it could get full purchase or knot itself or something. It tangled around his fingers even as Riordan shoved off the trunk. He tucked his body as best he could with the rope crawling up his left arm. He hung on with his left hand, but the force of his falling body still dislocated his shoulder when he hit the end of the rope with a sickening pop.

A muffled cry of pain ripped out of Riordan’s throat as he swung by his dislocated left arm. The pain nearly blinded him, even as he arched up to cut the rope just above his entangled hand. The sharp blade cut through the single taut rope far more smoothly than the earlier mess of knots. Riordan fell the rest of the way to the ground, landing in a crumpled pile in the bloody dirt.

The world spun and even Riordan’s tough body quailed under the abuse he was putting it through. He lay still, panting with his cheek pressed into the sandy ground, trying to use the smell of dirt and grass to overwhelm the corpse reek enough to recover. Hell, the smell of fresh blood wasn’t so bad, when summer corpses were the other option. He could feel the severed segment of rope crawling up his arm, wrapping from wrist to shoulder and knotting itself in place before falling still.

In this distance, someone was shouting.