Black tendrils from the bloody blade clung to the shallow wound on Mark’s arm, digging in like leeches. His spirit armor seemed to be slowing the invasion but did not prevent it. Riordan growled, prepared to launch another attack of his own, when Mark did something unexpected. He turned his back on the fight.

Lucinda clearly knew what that meant. She dropped to the ground immediately, pushing Riordan down as she went. Mark’s quills rose, flaring out, and his short spirit tail waved in the direction of their attackers. A wave of magic rolled over him and his quills sprayed out from his back in a devastating burst.

Riordan hadn’t known what to expect from quills made entirely of magic, the thin striped spikes glinting in flashes of green and yellow as they flew. Just like their physical counterparts, the spirit quills struck their targets and stuck tight. Unlike their physical counterparts, they then flared with a flash of magic that sent all three of their attackers reeling and yelling, apparently highly disoriented.

Dropping to his knees, Mark grew claws and grabbed the nearest tire of Jimmy’s car. With his extra-enhanced shifter strength, the claws pierced through the worn tires in several places, leaking air as Mark withdrew his hand and stumbled back upright.

“Leaving,” Mark hissed through gritted teeth and then took off at a jog towards the van. He clutched his injured arm to his chest, shadows trailing his wound as he moved.

Rolling to her feet, Lucinda pulled a bottle from the top of her satchel and splashed it over the three attackers. The majority hit Helena and caused the quills to flare again, brighter than before. The woman dropped her knife. In a fit of insane inspiration, Riordan grabbed the handle end of the knife in his mouth, careful to avoid the still-tainted blood on the blade. He didn’t know if seeing the spelled blade would give them a better hint at what it was meant to do to its target, but he wasn’t going to pass up any chances with Mark on the line.

Lucinda was faster than Mark and generally steadier on her feet. By the time Mark had the side door open for Riordan to leap in, she was around the driver’s side and clambering in. Riordan made it inside with a leap, allowing Mark to slam the door shut and slide into the passenger seat before Riordan carefully dropped the blade and shifted back to human.

He grabbed an empty reusable shopping bag from the back of Lucinda’s seat and tossed the blade inside to contain it. Lucinda took that as her sign to get out of there, nearly throwing Riordan into the trunk space with her acceleration. He steadied himself and took stock as he dropped into one of the middle seats. He kept himself turned to watch the parking lot as they pulled away. The three figures were all still standing there, flashing in glints of green and yellow.

When it became clear that Helena and her folks weren’t immediately following and Lucinda turned on the nearest road to get them out of sight, he turned back towards the apprentices.

“So,” Riordan asked carefully, “how fucked are we?”

“Not as much as we could be,” Mark said, his voice tight and panting slightly. His quills had receded but he maintained the spiritual armor aspects, likely to combat the death magic. “My attack scrambles short term memory, disrupts organized spell casting, and marks them for spiritual tracking.”

“And the spell on you?” Lucinda snapped out, glancing at Mark quickly before returning her focus to the road. She was not speeding at this point, not wanting to draw extra attention, but was also taking a different way out of town, heading out past the drive-in theatre.

“Hurts,” Mark replied, “More than that, not sure. Definitely trying to spread.”

Thinking of their last missing member, Riordan touched his pack bond to Daniel. The ghost appeared next to him a moment later, blinking and looking around to try and take in what was going on. He could tell Riordan didn’t have a chance to explain yet, but also sent a sense of reassurance to Riordan that he was fine.

Lucinda rummaged in a pocket before coming up with a cell phone and thrusting it at Riordan. “Call Vera,” she ordered and rattled off her unlock code. “Find out when and where that specialist is supposed to arrive.”

Riordan grimaced. He hated that he had to be the one to break the news to their pack leader, but Lucinda was driving and Mark was focused on suppressing the spell attacking him. That left Riordan by process of elimination and not just because he was the scapegoat. He checked her contacts, found Vera Hunt, and hit call.

“Hello?” Vera answered after a few rings, “What do you need, Cinda?”

“This is actually Riordan speaking,” he started, switching the call to speakerphone, “Lucinda is driving. We went by Honor as we’d planned. I spotted one of the men who originally grabbed me for the killing tree, clearly there looking for me and not alone. Lucinda and I approached under a spirit disguise to get proper looks at them, only one of them turned out to be an active death mage.”

He heard an audible sharp inhalation at that news from Vera’s side of the call, but Riordan continued on, “They called her Helena and I don’t think she’s the main death mage, the one doing the ritual itself. Worse, she spotted Mark and his magic and attacked. We got away and Mark says his spell should have scrambled their memory of the incident, but she hit him with some sort of invasive death magic spell in the fight.”

There was quiet swearing from the other end of the line now. Riordan ended with, “When is that specialist expected to arrive? And is there somewhere we can meet him that isn’t pack lands, just in case the spell is trackable?”

Lucinda startled at that last part and shot Riordan a thoughtful look. She hadn’t considered that possibility but Riordan didn’t want to take more chances than he needed to right now.

Vera answered, “We’d know if the death mage tried to cross the territory border and be able to ward her off.”

Riordan tried not to get angry at that passive prejudice about magic, assuming that magic is the answer to anything and non-magic users aren’t real threats. A gun will kill someone just as dead as a spell and often much quicker. Mages were most powerful when given time to prepare ahead of time, which did not pair well with that dismissive arrogance. Shifters were a bit better at reacting, but shifting really only made you better at melee combat or hiding and healing didn’t help much if you were already dead.

Keeping those thoughts to himself, Riordan tried to stick to the facts. “Yes, but she had two ordinary humans with her. The border won’t stop them from following directions to come spy on us or worse. What’s more, having an active tracking spell and scrambled memories is going to make them question a lot of things.”

The silence on the other end of the line was longer this time. Vera was either thinking that through carefully and considering where to send them or she was suppressing the urge to tell him to go fuck himself.

Lucinda broke the stalemate. “Vera, Mark is going to need magical assistance to remove that spell. Either we wait for the specialist and get him treatment as soon as the specialist arrives or Frankie and I will have to wing it. It costs a lot to get a spirit willing to touch death magic and I’m still not sure what the spell is supposed to do besides cause pain.”

“Pain?” Vera echoed.

“Quite a bit,” Mark stated, his voice tight with it. He huffed out a ghost of a laugh. “Hurts worse where it touches spirit magic. Specialist, please?”

That sincere request decided Vera quickly. Whatever other factors Vera might be balancing in her head, she never wanted her pack members to suffer, which was a mark of a good pack leader.

“He’s coming in at the Traverse City airport. I’ll text you the flight information I have and call the Department of Magic to see if they can get here any sooner. I’ll text with updates as I get them as well as a safe location to work magic there once I find one. Keep me informed.”

“Thank you, Pack Leader,” Lucinda said formally. “I’ll head to the airport. It will likely take us an hour to reach there, especially since I need to detour around Honor.”

“Understood,” Vera replied, “Is there anything else you will need?”

Lucinda considered that before saying, “We have some herbal supplies and stones from the shopping, but the only kit we have is my travel one. Check with the specialist for what he will need and perhaps send someone with more supplies? I’m not sure you should send Frankie out of the territory when both Mark and I are indisposed.”

Vera sighed. “Frankie won’t like that, even if she’d also likely agree. Call her for advice at least.”

“I will,” Lucinda assured her, even as she took the next left onto some smaller road. The main road they’d been on had curved from going west to going south not long past Honor, which meant they were heading east again, below Honor. Riordan wondered if they would cross the trail of his original trek to the territory. Logically, they would have to at some point, though he doubted he would recognize any from this perspective.

The call ended and a text arrived a moment later. Riordan quickly read it off for everyone. It was around three in the afternoon now. Their flight wasn’t coming in until almost nine that evening. They had an hour drive and a five hour wait. Riordan glanced at Mark once that sank in. The man looked pale, his freckles showing more starkly than normal, but also determined. He hadn’t dropped his spirit armor yet, not even let it flicker aside from reducing it to the more sustainable form, even though he was clearly in a lot of pain. Yeah, that man would be an amazing shaman one day. He had the will for it, if not the combat reflexes.

First, they just had to make sure nothing worse happened.

Abruptly, Lucinda pulled the van over to the side of the road. It didn’t have a full shoulder before angling into a drainage ditch, but there was also no traffic. Riordan immediately went alert for new threats, but saw nothing obvious. Lucinda was looking at Mark, frowning.

She jerked her head towards the back of the van. “Get in the back, Mark. We’re going to look at the spell, see what we can tell about it and if there is more we can do to slow it or help you.”

Riordan had the middle door on the passenger side open before Mark responded. He hopped out and opened Mark’s door too. The apprentice was slow to move, but finally unclipped his seat belt and swung himself around to get out. Riordan reached out to steady him and Mark leaned into the support heavily as Riordan got him transferred to one of the middle seats.

Meanwhile, Lucinda had opened the other middle door on her side and crawled in. “Let us see the arm, Mark,” she ordered.

With a grimace, Mark straightened his left arm, the thin cut hot and swollen with angry red lines radiating off of it. It looked like a nasty infection rather than the physical manifestation of a magical effect. The shadows crawled under his skin in dark threads, mimicking the infection lines and tracing his veins. The spirit armor flared golden sparks everywhere it contacted the shadows, but the spell kept chipping away at it, slipping further and further into Mark. Green flashes covered everything, both the armor and the death magic.

Riordan blinked. His magical sensing was becoming more acute with his recent changes and practice. He’d always been able to sense these things, been able to see their translucent traces when the concentration was intense enough to warrant that visual interpretation of the sensations. He had always thought it common, but Kwaku informed him once that it was actually a form of synesthesia, one sense triggering a response in another sense and that not every magic user had it to the same sensitivity or clarity, though there did seem to be some consistency on how things translated.

Green was life magic. It showed up in the spirit armor because the shifter affinity was mostly spirit plus life magic, mixing both for the things it did. The flashes inside the death magic weren’t echoes or visual confusion though. The spell was a mix of death and life magic, which was what the blood affinity really was.

“The spell is in his blood,” Riordan blurted out. “She cut herself and used her blood as the cost and anchor and then got that into his blood.”