He stripped the tarp from around Mark carefully, moved the packages to the small one-chair table near the curtained window, and laid the tarp down over the still neatly made bed. The pillows were banished to the other bed, being used to prop up Mark’s torso to elevate his mind circle and heart, just to make the blood magic work harder and to keep their friend comfortable. The room was cool, but not chilly, though Mark was cooler yet. It worried Riordan, since that could be a sign of some negative effect from the curse, but all he could do was untuck the blankets on the bed and loosely drape them over Mark.

He took care not to smudge the circles. The active magic in them made the figures more resilient than most dried paste circles would be, but damage would still add up and make the spell more draining to maintain. Riordan found himself hoping that one day, he’d know enough to be able to do spells like that and the thought absolutely terrified him. When had he decided that active magic was for him? It really, really wasn’t, acting shaman or not.

With everything settled, that just left them with time to kill and nothing to fill it with. Lucinda certainly wasn’t going to want to converse with Riordan and the feeling was mutual. They tolerated each other right now. He had no desire to rock that boat by irritating her.

“Hey,” Daniel asked after a moment, “can you make a note of something before I forget it?”

Riordan was startled by the request, but certainly had no reason to turn it down. “Sure,” he answered and fetched the pencils and paper pad he purchased earlier. “Go ahead.”

Sometimes Daniel’s memory for random facts impressed Riordan. That sense of regret and loss over what Daniel could have been hit him again as Daniel began to describe Jimmy’s vehicle, down to make, model, and plate number, and anything of note obvious through the windows, which wasn’t much. He followed that up with a description of Jimmy and Helena, though those were less detailed since Daniel hadn’t been able to get close to either safely before Riordan told him to run.

He also queried Riordan on Jimmy’s phone call, prompting Riordan to write down his own details before they vanished from memory. That prompting extended to Riordan marking down his own observations on the three people they had encountered. He really wished he knew more about this group. How they presented themselves to the outside world and even to the people not fully in the know would make a difference. Were there only a small core of death mages and goons or was the whole group in on it?

Riordan tried imagining the cheerful Kimberlee ritually murdering someone and doubted it, though people did surprise him sometimes with the lengths they could go to.

When he reached the end of his own useful information, having gone into his inexperienced observations on the magic used on Mark, he got Lucinda’s attention, holding the pad out to her. “You should make notes before you forget anything too. I’m going to try to meditate a bit before Maudy gets here.”

Lucinda startled slightly at being addressed. She seemed to have been either lost in thought or doing her own meditations. He almost thought she was about to object to his request, but Lucinda took the pad in the end, skimming over what was already written before starting to add her own notes.

His meditation breathing thing was getting a bit easier, though Riordan suspected he wasn’t doing it entirely right. He inhaled in the pattern anyway, letting the magic flow into him and sink into his body. His surroundings faded a bit. Under other circumstances, Riordan might have delved in deeper, trying to figure out how this flowed and what could be improved, but he wasn’t willing to be that relaxed and inattentive right now. Still, with the room silent except for breathing and soft occasional scratch of pencil on paper, he felt almost peaceful.

The jerk back to reality at a knock on the door physically hurt, Riordan’s muscles tightening immediately in preparation of fast response. He forced the reaction back down, trying to shake off his stiffness as he cautiously approached the window, tweaking the curtain aside to check who was at the door.

Maudy wasn’t even trying to hide. The solid-looking woman stood there with a backpack over her shoulders and a big plastic storage bin in her arms. The casual way she held it meant the bin was either light or she was strong. Given she served as part of the pack’s security team, the second was far more likely.

Riordan still had Daniel peek around and do a double check before he carefully opened the door for her and ushered her inside. He’d only seen the woman briefly on that first confusing night at Sleeping Bear and even then, mostly just the car ride back to the pack house. She was large, in frame and muscle as well as a bit of healthy pudge. Her brown hair was cut practically short, but not buzzed like his. She favored comfortable clothing, a loose t-shirt and exercise pants, none of which would restrict motion either.

“Come in,” Riordan nodded, shutting the door behind her and pointing to the table. She set the bin down next to their own supplies and unslung her backpack. Lucinda joined them, popping the lid off the bin and beginning to rummage through as a quick inventory.

“I brought a change of clothes for each of you,” Maudy informed them, holding up the backpack. “You’ll want to stay the night here, unless things get really hairy. How’s Mark holding up?”

The way she was glancing at Mark’s still form showed she wasn’t nearly as unaffected and professional as she pretended. With time, Riordan suspected Maudy would get there, but she was clearly young too. It was interesting that it was the elders and the young of the pack who chose to deal with him. The middle-aged ones would watch him out of the corner of their eye but otherwise not acknowledge him. Too old to be impetuous and too young to know how to handle him? Or just too settled to want to deal with uncomfortable things?

Whatever the reason, Riordan appreciated Maudy’s presence. “We have him shielded and asleep to keep him stable and out of pain. Whatever the spell is, it’s trying to reach his mind, but can’t get through the shields. Will you be doing a food run for us? Both Lucinda and I could stand to eat a lot to help recover from casting.”

“Yeah, of course,” Maudy confirmed. “I’ll hit a grocery store for stuff for snacking and breakfast and some restaurant for dinner. Any food restrictions I should know about?”

“I haven’t eaten kosher in ages,” Riordan replied, “and no allergies, but I tend to avoid pork and shellfish if possible.”

“Kosher?” Maudy responded with that innocent tactlessness of the inexperienced, “Isn’t that a Jewish thing?”

“Yes, and I was born in Israel. Just because my skin is darker from my Abba’s side of the family doesn’t make me Muslim. He was Hindi before he married my ima and converted,” Riordan explained with more patience than he expected. Normally fighting the casual assumptions about his identity by the ignorant or bigoted made him rage, but the combination of Maudy’s listening stance and the desire to speak of anything normal made it palatatble. “Not that there is anything wrong with Islam. I’ve seen some true acts of faith from those who practice it, a real reverence for one’s place in the greater world.”

“Huh, that’s…,” Maudy apparently couldn’t find the right word to describe her thoughts on his religious background since she just shrugged. “No pork and shellfish. I can do that much at least. I’ll be back soon.”

The pack enforcer gave a really loose salute as a farewell and slipped back out of the motel room. Riordan did the door chain up again and then turned towards Lucinda. He still had no desire to talk with her, but he was curious about the supplies Maudy had brought. He joined her near the little table.

“Do we have everything we’ll need now?” he asked.

“Unless the specialist is particularly esoteric, yes,” Lucinda confirmed. She had begun re-packing the larger bin, rearranging the space to include their loose purchases from earlier, though the package of herbal sampler stayed in its own box.

He couldn’t get a proper look into the bin, but with her moving things around, he saw a variety of bowls and plates with fancy patterns, carved stones, incense, and candles. Magic could get complicated quickly once the caster started trying to restrict the effect into a repeatable form. Fortunately, most spells could be done with words and gestures and maybe a foci of some sort. The popularization of wands as a thing in the modern world again pleased some classic mage families, Riordan was sure.

Silence fell again and Riordan sighed, heading back to his resting spot. He’d commandeered the uncomfortable chair that went with the table and set it near Mark, with a clear view of the door and front window. He would be able to grab Mark and pull him into cover on the floor between the bed and wall and then keep going, in the unlikely case that trouble burst in guns blazing.

Riordan wished he had a gun.

Sadly, he hadn’t practiced with one in twenty years and the middle of an emergency wasn’t the time to try to learn the more modern ones. At least Sleeping Bear Pack was more likely to own guns than other packs, just from the hunting culture of the region. Too many mages and shifters dismissed guns as inferior up until they got shot. Riordan viewed them as another tool, one that could be enhanced or stopped with the right application of magic but stronger and faster than most casters.

It was a moot point anyway. He settled back into a light meditation, staying that way until Maudy returned with two bags of groceries and another bag filled with containers of cheap American Chinese food. The two women talked a bit while they ate, all innocuous pack gossip that Riordan had no hope of untangling. He tuned them out, waiting for their help to arrive. He just needed to hold himself together for that long and then maybe he could hand this over to the feds.

Maudy left to go pick up the agents when it got close to the time and the silence became more oppressive in the room. Lucinda got a text when they were on the way, along with a cryptic comment that the specialist was not what Maudy expected. When Lucinda queried for more details, Maudy didn’t respond, likely because she was driving, which sent the shaman into an angry funk at the lack of useful information.

They weren’t far from the airport in this motel and Maudy’s SUV pulled up again not long later. Both Riordan and Lucinda were on edge. Riordan stayed near Mark, sledgehammer in hand though not brandished aggressively. Lucinda herself waited by the door to let them in after Maudy knocked, hiding her own tension behind that stoic professional air of hers.

Having more freedom, Daniel floated to the front of the room and stuck his head through the curtained window to peek. He reared back immediately, yelping in surprise.

“What the hell is that?”