Riordan plopped his furry little ass on the ground and stared after the retreating men. Holy fuck, he’d done it. He sure as hell wasn’t free and clear yet, but this was the first moment he’d had to breathe and think since Jimmy had brained him in the parking lot hours ago. A small tremor ran up his long body and he shook himself out. If he was in human shape, Riordan was pretty sure he’d be trembling with adrenaline drop right about now.

Everything fucking hurt.

Being a badger helped him not care, but his bones ached. His muscles ached. He thought of Daniel. His soul ached. He’d tried so hard, but it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough. Daniel had needed him and Riordan had failed him utterly.

As much as he wanted to collapse and sleep for a week, he couldn’t yet. He knew that once he let himself really stop, he wasn’t going to move again until the pain of body and soul faded enough not to tear him apart. This place wasn’t safe enough for that. Riordan stood and returned to his small burrow.

Pulling Daniel back out was harder than shoving him inside. His body was already beginning to stiffen. Riordan felt numb as he shifted back to human, all his hurts pressing forward. He draped the shirtless corpse awkwardly over his shoulders and rose. He wasn’t leaving Daniel behind where their murderers would find him.

He detoured long enough to unbury his stolen rifle. He tied its broken straps to his belt at the small of back. It thumped against him as he walked methodically forward. Daniel weighed him down. One foot in front of the other, walking in pitch black. His eyes stayed in partial shift, beady and black and piercing the darkness. Those tremors he’d feared shook his body, but his steps remained steady and careful.

Before dawn, Riordan needed to put more distance between them and the killing tree ritual, between them and the death mage who was harvesting them. He needed to break the trail, preferably more than once. He needed to create a secure place to hide Daniel’s body. And he needed to do all of that before his body reached its limit and he collapsed.

Shifters had a well of personal strength that they drew on for their inhuman abilities. They healed faster, had stronger bodies and senses, and could call forth their animal form. The depth of that well and how fast it refilled varied from shifter to shifter. Shifters with solitary animal forms tended to have stronger personal wells while those with gregarious animals were better at the shifter pack spells that created a shared pool of strength, far beyond what any individual could possess themselves. Riordan’s personal well was deep, even for a honey badger, and he hadn’t drawn from it much lately. Just the basic strengthening and the occasional shift to badger when food or shelter were hard to find in human form.

With his litany of healing injuries, multiple shifts, and extended physical exertion, Riordan’s well ran low inside him, draining lower and lower the longer he pushed himself. He tried to breathe like their team shaman Kwaku had shown him years ago, slowly and with intention. Breathe in down to the bottom of his belly, like trying to pull a string all the way to his pelvic floor, thinking about the magic he felt in the wind and trees and dust around him. Step, step, plodding along as he held it inside him, letting the air and magic become a part of him. Then breathe out just as slow, expelling negative energy from his body and spirit, sending it out into the world to be cleansed and transformed, leaving him hopefully a bit stronger with each breath.

Riordan only managed to hold the pattern for less than a minute before he faltered, the weight on him pressing him down and breaking that tenuous connection to the magic of the world. He tried again, eyes scanning the woods for hard ground or thick carpets of pine needles to lose his tracks. He held the pattern a little longer before losing it this time. His path wandered back and forth. Sometimes he walked backwards in his own steps before jumping off in a new direction. Sometimes he walked in a circle to loop back and went a new direction. He would pause to sweep over his tracks with a pine branch, setting Daniel down and letting his body rest slightly before picking up his burden and carrying on.

The sound of water drew him in after an hour or more of trail muddling. Riordan wasn’t entirely sure he was still heading west towards Lake Michigan. His only solid guide in these strange woods, clouds and leaves hiding the stars, was the sense of connection to the tainted tree behind him. And “away” was a good enough direction for him right now.

The water proved to be a narrow creek, its current deep and slow with a muddy bottom and sharp banks heavy with undergrowth. Riordan picked his way along the edge for a few yards before he found a slope that wasn’t completely choked with plants sure to mark his passage. As it was, he slid on the muddy bank, splashing loudly into the creek. His combat boots immediately filled with water and sank six inches into the silty muck at the bottom.

Riordan just stood there, ass-deep in cool water, corpse across his shoulders, stuck in the mud, staring at the deep marks his slide left in the bank. It was either laugh or cry.

The noise that escaped him was a bit of both, a strange sobbing laugh tearing its way out of his exhausted soul. What the hell had his life become? He’d been in desperate situations before, some even worse than this. Once, he had stared death in the face as his team died around him and accepted he deserved it. In many ways, he had died that day, shedding his past and his self identity like a snake sheds skin and living on, because that was his penance.

But this? This was the shit he’d left behind, coming to haunt and entangle him. He flexed his left arm, muscles pressing against the confinement of the rope still bound there. He’d left behind violence and magic and struggling for his life. He’d left behind the moral questions and the self doubt about whether he was doing the right thing or not. He’d left behind the thrill of the fight, that drive that pushed him to survive and thrive just because someone said he couldn’t, that unrelenting forward momentum of battle high that led to a spiral into utter self destruction.

Riordan was just a drifter now. Rootless. Untethered, unwanted, unnecessary. Exiled. No one in their right mind would ever trust him again.

Even summer-warmed, the water chilled Riordan’s skin, plastering his pants to his body. Daniel’s limbs dangled, falling beneath the surface rhythmically as Riordan forced himself to move again. He shrugged Daniel’s corpse further up his shoulders before leaning forward towards the bank. He scooped water up to flow down over the marks he left, smoothing them with a palm to help them vanish back into the mud faster. It took a few minutes, but he managed to make the new divot look weathered and old, covering it with some of the sticks and leaves that washed up along the banks.

He was filthy by this point and strangely, wading through the creek made that worse instead of better. Mud and plant bits stuck to his damp skin and clothes. Mosquitoes buzzed about, nipping at his bare arms, even as more sensible creatures hid until he and his noise had passed. Riordan waded for what felt like forever and was probably closer to half an hour until the creek started getting wider and deeper and the ground around shifted to reeds and swamp. He needed to get out and find higher, drier ground to dig another burrow.

A rill split off from the creek, turning into pure mud but shallower than the steep creek banks. His thighs ached from fighting the water and mud for so long, chilled and stiff even as they burned from overuse. He wasn’t sure he could lift his legs high enough to climb the banks, even though the sucking mud of the rill wasn’t much better. Riordan stuck to the deepest part, only up to his calves compared to the waist deep creek. He pushed past the plants that leaned out over the water, competing for sunshine that wasn’t there. With how thick and mucky everything was, he began to despair of finding a clean and easy exit.

Another one of the rolling dune hills saved him. The hill butted up against the rill, making it curve but providing dry ground mostly covered in grasses. Riordan hauled himself up out of the water. His legs gave out and he faceplanted against the ground. It felt way too good to not be moving, even if his stop was a bit abrupt. Daniel’s body slid down his back, threatening to tumble all the way into the muddy water. Riordan grabbed it and groaned deeply. Almost there, but not quite. Not yet.

He levered himself off the ground, managing a crawl up the hill while dragging Daniel. The soil was sandy but had mixed with the wet rot of the swamp over time, creating solid ground around the middle that wasn’t too wet or too weak. Riordan stared at it in a daze as he let the body settle next to him. He needed to shift and dig, but that sounded like an impossible task. He was scraping the bottom of his well, pushing his body far past what a human in his condition would have survived. Calling his badger forward felt like stretching for something just past the scrape of his fingertips.

Moments like these determined the quality of a man. Qusay, his old team leader, had waxed passionate about it. If you strip away all supplies, all supports, and thrust a person into a life-threatening situation alone, how do they handle it? Riordan had seen men become beasts and he’d seen them become wrecks. Rarely, he saw them become heroes. Riordan just felt numb and past caring. Past pain and fear and anger and just… there.

Without conscious thought, Riordan began to breathe deep. He’d lost the pattern completely miles back, but here in this stillness, kneeling on soft ground with the dead beside him and the trees sheltering him, he fell into it again. In through his nose down to the roots of his being. Hold it. Treasure it. Feel the air fill his lungs, the oxygen fill his blood, the magic fill his well. Exhale. Let go of thought and pain and regret and all the tangled mess in his head and his breaking heart.

His well of power rose slowly. His body drained the magic hungrily even as Riordan let more flow into and through him. He sunk deeper into the breathing and the magic. The darkness faded away. His eyes were closed but Riordan saw the world around him in swirls of magic made of sounds and colors that didn’t have physical equivalents. His body glowed gently, the center of a funnel made of his breath, whirling faster and faster. The rainbow played across his skin, lighting up his dusky skin into a golden warmth. Free and gentle and-

A shriek cut through Riordan’s meditation, radiating along a black thread tied to his soul and knocking him out of that place of magic he’d fallen into. He physically pitched forward in response to the metaphysical shock, panting heavily.

Riordan had never been a mage or a shaman. He wasn’t sure what the hell had just happened, but he could feel that it had given him enough strength for one last shift tonight. Riordan threw himself into the shift, calling his badger before he lost the chance.

The world grew bigger as his body got smaller and Riordan shook himself with a grumpy hiss, snapping at empty air. The thrum of defiance that filled him gave Riordan the push to get digging. He was going to dig a nice, dry, deep burrow and he was going to hide a body in it. And then he was going to dig another one and go the fuck to sleep.

Dirt flew as he set to his task, ripping the ground apart with his strong claws. His body complained at yet more labor, but he leaned into that feeling here, embracing the positive effort of shaping the earth to his will. He kicked the dirt out behind him as he disappeared into the hill, taking out all his anger and fear on the destructive, constructive task. Deeper and deeper, angled down and then back upward near the end, opening into a larger space that would hopefully stay dry and cool.

Because this was going to be Daniel’s grave, possibly permanently if Riordan wasn’t able to come back.

Hauling the stiff corpse into the den by dragging with his teeth or shoving with his whole body was an exercise in frustration. Riordan felt like a failure for each new scratch and bite on the cold flesh, never mind that it hardly mattered to Daniel himself anymore. The dead probably didn’t care about their bodies. It just mattered to the living because they saw themselves in the care of each corpse, mixed with their grief for the lost. And it might matter to the death mages to have his body and that wasn’t happening if Riordan could help it.

After more wiggling and shoving and getting personal with a corpse than Riordan cared to consider, he had Daniel buried deep in the burrow. He stared at the hole in the ground for a moment and then collapsed the tunnel leading in, sealing the makeshift tomb.

His own burrow was made with far less care. Riordan didn’t have the energy to give a fuck anymore. He went around the hill a bit, picked a random spot, and dug straight in. He barely even bothered to widen the den part enough to curl his long body into a furry ball and pass out.