Showering in strange places no longer bothered Riordan. He’d lived rough long enough to be more used to truck stop and campground showers, as well as the occasional hotel or lake, than having his own bathing space. He set his borrowed supplies on a little shelf inside the stall clearly for that purpose and stripped mechanically. His own clothes went on the floor. They were hardly going to get much more dirty at this point.

The shower didn’t take long to warm and had good water pressure. There was a scent and sign of buildup that meant the water was a bit hard with minerals. Riordan stepped under the shower and watched as the water turned brown with sand and caked on mud. When it hit his wrists, small streaks of reddish-brown joined the flow, even though he would have sworn all of his blood had flaked off over the last day. His left arm was worse, the rope clinging to him even now having absorbed his blood and sweat as he’d tried to escape and now it seemed to be releasing it just to remind him that he would never truly outrun it.

No matter how far he’d come, Riordan had still hung on that tree, bleeding out. It owned him.

Tears blended in with the shower water as he stood there, numbly letting it all wash over him. He should try to stop the tears. Should scrub himself down, put on his new gear, and get rest to be ready for the next emergency, grabbing whatever rest he could. But, he couldn’t. Riordan just couldn’t make himself care.

He stood on pack lands, in a pack house, under hospitality. He was no longer an exile, his sentence complete per the will of a pack totem. A pack had saved his life. He wasn’t in immediate threat from the death mage anymore. He had home cooked food, a real hot shower, and a comfortable mattress to sleep on.

Riordan had never felt more alone, not in all his years as an exile.

It was one thing to know that shifters had no desire to mix with him but to never see them, to leave it as an abstract concept. It was another to be welcomed into their territory and then excluded and suspected, kept alive not because he was inherently worth saving but because saving him was the better choice for fighting someone else. That choice reduced Riordan’s existence to that of a thing, a pawn upon a board played by more powerful people, used but not valued.

He’d only met a handful of the pack members. He wasn’t sure he’d be allowed to meet many more than that unless it was necessary or an accident. Riordan wondered what Vera would tell her pack about his presence. Pack leaders sometimes made decisions to hide things that were stressful from those who couldn’t help, but he hoped she would tell her pack about the threat at their borders, especially after the trail he left leading here. Would she tell them he was part of the threat or part of the solution? Or just leave him out entirely, letting him haunt the pack house as invisible as the ghosts?

Fighting and nearly dying made more sense to Riordan than the tangle of emotions surrounding how he felt about his own people. Being born into shifter culture and the world of magic had made him feel so special and elite as a kid. Shifters and mages were chosen to rise above the human condition, but such thinking was pure hubris. Magic didn’t make someone more than human. It just gave them more power to cause damage when they fucked up. To think otherwise was sheer hubris and ignorance.

When all the trappings of privilege and civilization were stripped away, then the real measure of a person became clear. Riordan saw more generosity, in time and money, among the poorest people. Migrants working for less than minimum wage taking time to help people on the side of the road and accepting no thanks or payment. Beggars sharing their wrinkled bills and handfuls of coins to make sure someone else had enough to eat to live. Homeless telling others the safest places to squat, sharing meager blankets, body warmth and kind words when they had nothing else left to give.

Some of the worst people were among the poor as well, hardened by desperation and oppression until they were angry and didn’t care who they hurt to get what they felt was their due. However, even that felt way more honest than the temperate indifference of the well-off and privileged. The people in their nice cars with the Jesus stickers on the back who drove past hitchhikers and stranded motorists. People who lived in nice houses and called the police to get homeless tents torn down because they were unsightly and made them nervous, like that mild emotional discomfort obviously outweighed the physical and emotional needs of a whole group of people struggling just to survive. People with money for leisure and luxury walking past beggars in the city like they are invisible.

The casual manner in which people could reduce the value of another human to nothing, without any regret or struggle at all, was cruelty. Standing among shifters, Riordan felt that sting like little paper cuts on his skin.

Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe they would get to know him and welcome him in truth. Maybe he was overreacting based on a pattern of rejection and self-defense that had kept him alive for his long exile.

Riordan just couldn’t trust them to not hurt him any more than they trusted him to not hurt them, only he was worried about the emotional scars they could leave and they were worried about the physical ones he could leave.

The water of the shower was growing colder, stirring Riordan into motion. Cold showers didn’t bother him, but they weren’t as relaxing and Riordan was just so tired, mentally, emotionally, and magically. The toiletries included a bar of soap and little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, all labeled as unscented but smelling of small amounts of powdery iris root and the fats and chemicals that made them. He rubbed the shampoo through his buzzed black hair, feeling how it was already starting to grow out a bit and curl at the ends. It took three shampooings before it rinsed clear. Riordan tossed some conditioner on his hair and let it sit while he scrubbed harshly at his skin with the bar of soap. The water turned brown again as he dislodged even more of the swamp and forest from his skin.

He watched the dirty water swirl around the drain, feeling emptied of so much besides fatigue and the constant crushing loneliness. Even having a pack of ghosts didn’t make that feeling go away entirely. He touched that magical connection to his pack absently.

Daniel’s squawk of surprise made Riordan spin to face the non-shower part of the stall, nearly slipping on the wet tiles in his current uncoordinated state. He stared at the ghost. The ghost covered his face with both hands and turned away.

“You’re naked. Why are you naked?” Daniel asked, aggrieved.

Riordan blinked and looked down at himself and then over at the rapidly cooling shower water. It seemed obvious to him, but he spoke anyway. “I needed a shower.”

“Why would you think of me in the shower?” Daniel peeked back over his shoulder at Riordan and looked away again, blushing darkly on his grayscale body. “Close the curtain already!”

Shaking his head at his companion’s strange shyness, Riordan obliged and then went back to scrubbing himself down quickly. The water was already cold now and mildly unpleasant and he wanted out of it soon.

“So, why were you thinking about me?” Daniel asked after a minute.

Riordan struggled with what to say, if anything at all. Daniel had gotten under his skin though, easing into friendship, which was terrifying and exhilarating all at once. He knew Daniel wouldn’t judge him for having feelings that extended beyond anger and determination.

“I was feeling lonely,” Riordan admitted softly.

“Well, shit,” Daniel groaned, “I can’t tease you about that. How am I supposed to make quips about you trying to tempt me with your hot muscles if you are being all honest and vulnerable?”

To his surprise, Riordan laughed softly, the corners of his mouth twitching up despite how drained he still felt. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll find a way. You are resourceful like that.”

“That’s me, scrappy and optimistic.” Daniel let the joking tone drop from his voice as he continued, “Seriously though, what can I do to help?”

That offer lanced right through Riordan’s patched and battered soul, poignant in its sincerity. Daniel had lost everything recently and was struggling too. Riordan had seen it in the way the ghost had bowed out of the earlier interrogation when rehashing the details became too much. And yet, he still found the desire to give just a little more to someone like Riordan.

“This,” Riordan answered, his voice thick with emotion. His tears threatened to start again, but he suppressed them ruthlessly, not ready to be seen that stripped bare, especially after dealing with spirits doing just that to him. “Being here like this. Not being alone.”

“I can do that, dude. Though I think it would be kinder to me if you put on clothes soon if we’re going to be hanging out. You might not be into guys or ghosts but you are still damn delicious eye candy and I feel like a jerk for thinking that when you really need a friend.”

Riordan had never had anyone call him eye candy to his face before, not even in shared shower rooms. He had never given such things much thought one way or the other and his pissy attitude kept most people away, no matter how he might appear to other people. Still, it was no hardship to meet Daniel’s request. He shut the water off after one last rinse and then toweled off and dressed still behind the curtain. He could have shooed Daniel out of the stall, but he liked having the other man close by right now. It made the world feel a little less heavy, even if just for now.

The borrowed clothing was a pair of boxers, a large pair of drawstring sweatpants, and an equally large long-sleeved t-shirt. Riordan skipped the boxers, never liking borrowing underclothes from anyone, but the rest was comfy enough, if gray and bland with silhouettes of the state of Michigan printed on them. He padded out of the shower and gathered up his dirty clothes, wrapping them in the damp towel, before grabbing the last of the toiletries and heading to the sink area to brush his teeth.

Daniel followed after him, hopping up to sit on the counter next to the sink Riordan was using. He started talking, his relaxed attitude making it clear that Riordan wasn’t required to engage if he wasn’t up to it. “This place isn’t what I was expecting. When I heard that magic was real and so were shifters, I was expecting something out of one of those cheesy gay romances I used to read. And sure, there’s some of that, with the border magic and spirits and shaman, but then the leader is some stern old grandmother who needs more coffee to deal with the paperwork you brought and not some macho alpha type ruling via might, solving everything in one-on-one duels to the death.”

“They aren’t automatically the good guys, though they seem normal enough aside from being dickish to you at times. The death mage is the bad guy, right? I mean, they got their goons to murder us and those guys just did it like it was annoyance, not a moral issue. And then there’s the other ghosts…”

Daniel trailed off and then sighed, shaking his head. “Duane has been talking to them, gathering info for you and the other people out here. I’ve been helping but, some of those guys, man, they are skeevy. Like, I can tell they are hiding specifics or some of them outright admitted to being bullies or assholes to someone. The guy Duane had seen get beat after hitting that woman, he said it wasn’t the first time he’d hit her, like he didn’t see what the big deal was. Most of them are fine, just guys in the wrong place at the wrong time, ones who didn’t seem like they would be missed right away, lured out by what seemed like a woman harmlessly flirting or jumped by people.”

Riordan finished up brushing his teeth and was packing up again when Daniel added, “Why do people have to be so fucked up? It’s not like the stories, is it. No good and evil and knowing who deserves what is coming to them.”

Bracing his hands against the edge of the counter, Riordan let his head fall forward, loose and tense all at once. “No, it’s not like a story.”

“It’s fucked up, man.”

They stood there with that truth, letting it fill the space between them. It just was. After a few seconds, Daniel jumped off the counter and headed towards the door, gesturing for Riordan to follow. “Come on, Riordan. Let’s get you to bed. Hopefully you can get some actual sleep this time.”