The motel was L-shaped with the office at the end of the longer side, closer to the road, and a second floor accessible by several open-air stairways. A few decorative trees lined the verge between it and the next businesses, but generally the buildings and vehicles provided the real cover. Riordan stuck to the motel, starting on the second floor balcony to give him sight lines and working his way down and around the building. Mid-afternoon on a weekday in summer meant that few people were actively around. Most people were either at work for a bit longer or out doing tourist activities. The motel didn’t have a pool or other such attractions of its own.

Along the way, Riordan noted the easiest entry and exit routes, both for attack and escape. Daniel made a point of poking his head into each of the rooms, letting Riordan know occupancy. In one room, he pulled his head back quickly, looking a mix of embarrassed and disgusted. His only explanation was, “Three people and they are very flexible.”

Since a threesome was not likely an attack, Riordan didn’t request more either, merely moving onto the next room with a nod. And then the next and the next. The motel wasn’t large and Riordan’s prediction about the absence of most occupants proved true, rapidly leading the pair back around to the first floor room at the end of the L which they had been assigned.

Daniel’s assistance made entry to sweep the room much safer. One of the worst moments in clearing a room was always opening the door and entering. If someone was waiting, they could get that split second drop on you before your eyes found them. Entry from unexpected directions was way safer when such options presented themselves. Otherwise, you needed to enter fast and smooth, taking control of the room immediately. Targets got split into immediate threats, intermediate threats, and non-threats based on proximity and attack readiness. Then you just dealt with them. Or died.

Clearing a room with a team was far safer than attempting it alone, especially if you might be outnumbered.

So yes, Riordan was extremely grateful for Daniel. Even if he couldn’t provide physical support, the man’s observant eyes assessed information quickly. He trusted the ghost to see obvious threats and some hidden ones. With practice, Daniel would become even sharper. A pang of loss swept through Riordan. He had no idea how long Daniel would be with him. Either they all got cursed and trapped and drained and practice became impossible, or Riordan ended the killing tree ritual somehow and Daniel could pass on, leaving Riordan behind.

“I don’t see anyone inside,” Daniel reported, his eyes furrowed at Riordan.

Riordan clamped down on his loneliness and worry, giving a competent nod. He always had looked much calmer and badass on the surface than he ever felt. There were reasons he had looked for someone else to guide him in his youth. There was no time for such doubts to bubble up though. “Going in.”

He slid the keycard with gloved hands, hearing the click of the lock disengaging, and then swung the door wide and entered. There was a trick to moving sideways. He walked with his legs moving as if walking forward, no crossing legs and stance steady, but kept his torso twisted to face the room. It took practice to walk that way smoothly and to see his main path of movement well enough out of the corner of his eye as his gaze swept the room.

Nothing moved in the room, which wasn’t surprising after Daniel’s check, but Riordan still methodically cleared all the hiding spots big enough to hide a man and then reached out with his magical sensing for anything smaller and cursed. Still nothing. Riordan’s relief only showed through a slight relaxing of his shoulders.

“Clear,” Riordan informed Daniel, “Watch while I go get Lucinda and Mark.”

The van was parked right there in front of the room, so it wasn’t a long trip. Riordan crossed the distance in several long strides, coming up to Mark’s side of the van. He opened the door, unbuckled Mark, and began wrapping him blanket-style in the tarp.

“Grab your kit and the tool bag. We’ll be back in a moment for the packages,” Riordan informed Lucinda as he carefully lifted a sleeping Mark into his arms like a fragile princess.

Mark was healthy and average sized, not some light twig of a person for all he lacked the mass of someone of Riordan’s height and muscle. Riordan controlled his enhanced strength, boosting it enough to carry Mark smoothly but taking caution not to crush the man either.

He hadn’t used that kind of control in years. Living as a drifter among humans, avoiding attachment and conflict alike, Riordan rarely needed to boost anything. His passive enhancement as a shifter put his abilities beyond human normal. When he had needed to boost for survival, the conflict certainly never lasted long and didn’t particularly require him to care about limiting damage.

Once upon a time, Riordan took pride in being the one on the team who hauled their asses out of trouble. Berko was their entry specialist and scout. She got them in. But Riordan was their exit specialist. He made sure they always had an exit route, usually several, and literally carried his pack out of bad situations on more than one occasion.

Nostalgia swept through him. Riordan felt needed in a way he’d thought lost for the first time in a long time. Like many of the things thrust upon him lately, he did not know how to handle that sensation and set it aside as he carried Mark into the shade of their motel room.

The room had two queen beds with generic patterned comforters that might have been comfortable once, but weren’t now. Riordan moved to the bed further into the space and laid Mark down on the far side of that bed, his feet towards the headboard so that Riordan could dangle the man’s left arm off the edge of the bed again. He had no idea if it was actually helping, but the gesture harmed nothing and could help, which was enough when Riordan already felt helpless.

Part of him wanted to try untangling the spell now, just him and Lucinda. Spirit magic could do a lot and had some overlap with death magic in what it could affect. He’d never heard of a spirit that succumbed to death corruption, though as he was seeing with the killing tree, death magic was unpleasant for them to touch and could harm them. There had to be a reason for all of it, but Riordan didn’t dare guess on anything involving the corruption and get it wrong.

Lucinda made a second trip to the van for the packages while Riordan was lost in his mental distraction and he kicked himself for losing focus, even if he was getting Mark settled. Daniel and Lucinda were keeping watch too, but that didn’t excuse him from vigilance either.

Riordan watched as Lucinda closed the door, setting the safety chain. She set the packages on the other bed and looked physically drained as the sense of escape and safety settled in, taking some of the weight of running for their lives off her shoulders. He knew that feeling, having felt it so keenly on his run to the territory border, but just as then, safety is a temporary illusion. Riordan knew he’d be struggling with relaxing vigilance again, not that his hypervigilance had ever truly left. Too many years of trauma and living rough, though he slept like the dead with the current effects on him. He was grateful for Daniel watching over his body during those times.

“Have you heard anything further from Vera about magical equipment or the specialist?” Riordan asked after a moment of relieved silence, broken only by the sound of three people breathing.

The pull of the magical circles on his well continued slow and steady, soft like the leak of air from an air mattress overnight. They weren’t going to be dangerously drained before the specialist got there, but Riordan thought he might want to do more meditation to increase his magical intake or he’d be useless to help with more. He kept having to spend more magic just when he was finally starting to recover and he’d started lower than Lucinda. He wasn’t sure if the disguise spell from earlier left her better or worse off than him actually, when he thought about it. Riordan wasn’t skilled enough with magic sensing to tell how full someone’s well was, though he’d heard of people who could do that.

Lucinda pulled out her phone, nodding slightly, “Vera has Maudy on the way with supplies that Frankie gathered for us. We have a good set of herbs, if in low quantities, from the herbal sampler package, so most of what Maudy is bringing is tools and foci. Hopefully the specialist can use the same stuff as we do or has their own kit. I haven’t worked with non-shifter mages often.”

“It would depend on their affinities and tradition,” Riordan replied. He hadn’t dealt with mages since his mercenary days, even if they didn’t avoid exiled shifters the same way. Mage families tended to view outsiders as assets or pawns and he wasn’t willing to sell himself into that for some illusion of comfort. Unaffiliated mages were as varied as any other group of humans, for good and bad. There were more general mages than shifters, which made sense when considering that being a shifter was just one of the many affinity options out there.

His answer surprised Lucinda. Or perhaps it was just that he had an answer. She tilted her head to the side, studying him. “How so?”

“Like we were talking about earlier with spell language, magic is about intention,” Riordan tried to explain, “Some mage traditions recognize that more than others. The ones who are taught to be rigid unconsciously apply intention to supporting that rigidity. They tend to have more consistent effects, but only if they do everything in a particular way with particular tools. Without those, they just can’t do the effect at all, because they’ve trained their magic to act that way.”

He considered their situation. Riordan literally knew nothing about the Department of Magic except what he’d heard since coming to the Sleeping Bear Pack. He tried to extrapolate based on what he knew about mages, bureaucratic departments, and the requirements for doing field work.

“At a guess,” Riordan figured out loud for the benefit of both Lucinda and Daniel, “the specialist is likely to be more flexible. As someone dealing with unknown and varied death magic situations, they would have to be able to create new spells to solve the problems they found. They might have some stock spells, but I imagine they would have anything they couldn’t substitute out in their own kit. The other agent could go either way, being either a consistent magical backup or a flexible troubleshooter.”

“That’s a relief then,” Lucinda admitted, sitting down on the other side of the bed from Mark. She watched him, brow faintly furrowed with perpetual worry. “I’m in favor of a specialist who can adapt, for Mark’s sake.”

Riordan was still too wired to sit down himself, so he leaned against the wall near the bedside. He also kept his eyes on Mark as he talked, taking hope from the way the man slept rather peacefully, only reacting softly when the spell made another futile attempt to breach his mind shield.

“I wonder what sort of person becomes a specialist in death magic?” Riordan thought aloud, his eyes leaving Mark briefly to flicker to Daniel instead.

“Someone who hates death mages, I’d assume,” Lucinda responded. “Otherwise, why would they choose to work in the Department of Magic, dealing with death magic related incidents?”

“Hmm, possibly. People can be complex. I guess there’s no point in guessing. They’ll be here in a few hours,” Riordan sighed.

“We’ll send Maudy out for dinner when she gets here,” Lucinda started planning. “I suggest we cover the other bed in the tarp now, in preparation for whatever is needed. And we’ll want to conserve our magic as much as possible.”

“Sounds good,” Riordan replied, pushing himself back into action.