The pulling sensation faded, though the rope tying Riordan’s left wrist to the skeletal shadow tree was taut, stretching his arm out before him even as it began to pulse with the sickly not-light of active death magic. All around him, Riordan could see the ropes leading to the other ghosts pulsing as well, like radar pings sent out from the tree to all the bound souls and then bouncing back again.

In fact, exactly like that. This had to be a locating spell using the killing tree ritual as a focus.

“Riordan?” Daniel’s quavering voice drew Riordan’s attention to his left. Both Daniel and Duane stood there, their bonds back to wrapping them as it had before he’d pulled them out and pulsing with the same spell.

“The death mage is tracking us,” Riordan snarled, jerking his arm harshly against the pull of the rope and its spell, “She’ll know where I am now.”

“How close are you to that shifter community?” Duane asked.

Riordan glared at him, growling. Duane interrupted him before Riordan could work up a proper paranoid fury. “Daniel explained things to me. What he knew, anyway.”

That made sense and saved Riordan from making a choice about it, gaining him another potential ally. He still hated everything about it, but managed to get out through gritted teeth, “I’m maybe a mile from their border. If I can get out of this fast enough, I should be able to make it before they can reach me.”

“What can we do to help?” Daniel quickly asked.

“Watch my back and let me focus.”

Riordan didn’t see if either of the ghosts nodded before he turned his attention back to the rope and the magical bond it represented. He already knew he didn’t have the ability to sever the bond, so anything relying on that was out. If he couldn’t remove the connection, then he needed to hide the bond so it couldn’t be used, hide himself so he couldn’t be found, disrupt the tracking spell so it stopped working, or counterattack.

Normally counterattack would be out of his reach. The killing tree ritual used the spirit of that blackgum tree as an intermediary, tying both caster and victims to the spirit rather than each other directly, which would mean most counterattacks would only hit the spirit. The spirit was as much a victim as Riordan and the ghosts so that didn’t sit well with him as an option. However, the tracking spell came from the death mage directly, pinging from her down the ropes to all of them and then back to her. It made a path.

Riordan wasn’t entirely sure what he could do with that. The spell had tightened the bonds, pulling all of those affected into this space and holding them there. So stopping the tracking spell would probably let Riordan break out of here and wake up, assuming it loosened the bonds again. He wasn’t sure if breaking the spell would prevent the death mage from just recasting it and pulling them right back in. Even if she couldn’t do it again right away, she would likely do it again as soon as she was able if she hadn’t caught him by then.

So how did Riordan shut down the spell, prevent the death mage from making immediate action against him, and set up defenses to prevent this from happening again in the future? He was the most important one to protect at this moment in time, since he was the only one able to operate in the physical world. If the death mage was to be stopped, someone with actual authority, experience, or whatever it was that made them competent and qualified would need to be informed. Riordan was barely surviving and that wasn’t a guarantee, especially since the death mage clearly had a direct line to him via the bond.

Which was another concern. If that connection remained available for her to channel spells along, she could potentially figure out a way to just kill him remotely, bypassing any exterior defenses to attack his souls directly. He had to close that back door if he was ever going to defend himself. Riordan did not plan on going down without a fight.

What did he have to work with? There was the rope bond itself, both his and that of the other victims. A host of angry ghosts. The tree spirit and its peaceful glade. A sickly goop of stagnant death energy clinging to the outer shell of the spirit. His own willpower. The spiritual nature of this space meant that it responded to will, which could be fueled further by his own personal well of power. The death mage had the stability and structure of ritual and spells on her side, making those effects hard to directly remove or break.

However, he could move and twist it without directly going up against the power of the ritual. Riordan wasn’t sure how he knew this, except that it came from his ability to sense magic. Even without conscious thought, Riordan was always perceiving the magical forces around him and noticing how they moved and flowed. It was like becoming aware of someone staring at you even if you heard and saw nothing directly, an unconscious conglomeration of perception.

The death mage wasn’t going to let him do that without a fight. Riordan’s will was strong in the times when he chose to bring it to bear, but his personal well of power wasn’t even half full. He had no idea how much power the death mage had accumulated outside of the killing tree ritual or if she could call on the power stored inside the ritual before it was completed. He would need more power, both to overcome her and to set up something that she couldn’t just knock over.

There were three sources of power potentially available to Riordan: the ghosts, the spirit, and the death gunk. He really did not want to touch the last one, since the chance that he would become a death mage himself using that was high, with all the attendant problems. The other two options presented complications in how to access that energy. He couldn’t just ask them to do a thing alongside him, especially since he didn’t think any of them sensed magic before they died and he had no idea if the way ghosts and spirits interacted with magic resembled that of a mage. He needed them to combine their energy into a single well that Riordan could then draw on to make an effect with enough power and unity.

A strange tingle shot through him as Riordan realized he knew how to do that. That was exactly what a pack bond did. He’d never heard of a shifter trying to do a pack bond with a human or a mage before, much less a ghost or a spirit, but he knew what a pack bond was and how it felt to have one. It may have been years since he’d been part of it, but there was still a place in his soul that outright hungered for that connection.

Of course, that meant Riordan had to convince a bunch of ghosts and possibly a spirit to trust him to help when he sucked with people and was completely winging it.

Riordan opened his eyes and pushed back at the world. With a flex of will and intention, he reached out to all of the ghosts at once. He willed them to his frequency of existence, drawing their attention as he did so. Fifty or more people - all men, Riordan realized absently- were suddenly staring straight at him, wrapped in pulsing ropes. Even the most catatonic had been roused by the tracking spell.

Space was an illusion here, he reminded himself. All of them could hear him clearly so long as he remembered that. Riordan’s voice was gruff and angry, but he preferred that to quavering with the nerves racing through his belly.

“If you want to fight back against the fuckers that killed us and trapped us here, I know how,” Riordan growled with far more confidence than he felt. He needed them to buy into this, especially in a place where belief was so close to reality. “I have a plan to pull us out of their reach and buy us time to come up with a permanent solution.”

Riordan paused, unsure how to continue. Duane stepped forward, his stance determined as always. “What do you need from us?”

“Everyone is born with magic in them,” Riordan explained, “Most people just can’t see and use it. I know how to pool magic between a willing group and then channel that into group defenses. I need your permission to create that pool with all of you.”

Riordan’s claim stretched the truth. Pack bonds were part of shifter magic, but the group defenses were usually handled by the shaman, since they had practice with intentional spell working. Still, he’d been part of those spells, had felt their shape as it pulled from him through the bond. If they had been in the real world, he’d have been lost on how to build that shape, but here he could just will it into existence and hope.

“Well, I’m in, of course,” Daniel smiled broadly as he spoke, the expression in defiance of their situation, “You haven’t steered me wrong yet, you know a ton more about this stuff than any of us, and what do I have to lose by trying, right?”

“That’s the spirit,” Duane nodded, backing him up.

That was enough to shift a fair chunk of the ghosts in his favor. Riordan could feel their willingness as an open pathway before him, even without the words and nods that came with. The rest were a mix of fear, confusion, and anger. A few of the ghosts were lashing out at him in some sort of macho man dominance attempt, either to mask fear or to gain power, Riordan couldn’t quite tell.

He didn’t have time for that bullshit. A better man might have tried to persuade them or at least kept the moral high ground. Riordan wasn’t a better man. He met them at their level.

“Silence!” Riordan roared, pulling from his experience being an animal even if access to his badger was cut off here. “I am not wasting time debating this with you! You don’t want my help? Fine. Fuck off! I need help to do this, but not all of you and I’m not dragging you into this kicking and screaming if you aren’t willing. And if you get in my way, I do not have time to play nice. I have a death mage to fight, damn it!”

Around him, energy surged in response to his fury and determination. Ropes surged from under the muck, lashing out around them. Before the ghosts could fall into panic, Riordan seized on the pathways opened by their willingness and began to weave the pack bond.

Between shifters, a pack bond started as a handshake of magic, both sides reaching out for the other. These ghosts didn’t know how to reach out, so Riordan had to use the invisible pathways he sensed to reach inside them and grope around for that bit of magic that would become their connection to the pack well. It felt about as pleasant and easy as reaching into a person’s guts, slick with blood, and carefully yanking their intestines out. Every bond he grabbed was slippery and living, wriggling in his mental and magical hold. He felt like a bully doing this, but tried to take comfort in the fact that it wouldn’t have been possible at all if they weren’t willing on some level.

Once he had as many as he thought he could hold, Riordan began weaving the well. Some archaic traditions believed that the pack bond was housed in the strongest shifter in the pack and that person naturally became the leader, wielding power through strength alone. In truth, the well existed in a space between the pack members, suspended on a spider web of connections. He wasn’t just connecting the ghosts to him as a leader, but to every one of them to each other. Each member of the pack was the center of their own web and the well was the center of all of the pack webs, or perhaps it was the webs themselves, vibrant and flowing as magic should be.

That image overwhelmed Riordan and manifested itself. Gossamer webs of light began to trace around the space, drawing a magical pattern in the air from soul to soul to soul. He reached out and grabbed more connections, drawing more and more of the ghosts into the web. Only the most stubborn were excluded by the time Riordan couldn’t sense anyone further to draw in. The bond hummed in the air, fragile and unfinished.

Riordan shoved down a moment of panic as he realized he wasn’t sure how to finish it without it all just falling apart. He was currently holding the whole thing together with his will. He cast about with his magical sensing, blindly searching for that center point or anchor or whatever it was that was missing from making this permanent.

The black energy and ropes reached for him, offering themselves to Riordan. He could use them to make permanent bonds, keyed to his will like the gossamer threads he currently held. It would be easy and expedient and would give them all the strength they needed to fight back. All it would take would be to reach out and draw it into the well he was weaving. Even though Riordan knew it was a horrible idea, he could feel himself stretched so thin holding it all together. Surely, maybe, if it was the only way…