As they walked out, Adam finally got to do his own introductions. “Thank you for meeting us, Ms. Smith. I am Special Agent Adam Ahlgren. You may call me Agent Ahlgren. This is Special Agent Quinn Morrish. He is our top specialist in these matters, regardless of his unprofessional appearance. Leader Hunt’s information made it sound quite pressing. Any additional intelligence you can provide would be greatly appreciated, as we decided our expedient arrival was of higher importance than preemptive information gathering.”

Maudy blinked at Adam’s stiff formality. She might work for their pack leader in a more direct capacity, probably some sort of security given her strong build, but she was also clearly young and inexperienced. Quinn grinned. That meant maybe she’d join him in being informal.

“Call me Quinn,” he offered in counterpoint to Adam’s desired title.

The parking lot had few vehicles at this hour and Maudy quickly led them to a SUV parked near the front. She unlocked the doors and gestured them inside. Quinn took the back without complaint. Even with his thick-soled knee-high buckle boots, Quinn wasn’t particularly tall. He had skipped the full platform boots since things might get dicey, leaving him with only an extra inch and a half and he still barely scraped five feet, eight inches with that. Adam was six feet tall and had actual muscle mass. He always got the seats with the extra leg room, if it was an option.

At least it meant that Adam hated flying even more than Quinn did.

Zeren and Ingrid joined Quinn in the back seat of the SUV, sitting in the empty seats like it mattered. It really didn’t. It wasn’t like the motion of the car moved them. It just moved him and they were moving in relation to him. Or rather, in relation to their anchor stones, which he was wearing, which worked out effectively the same.

Maudy started up the car and her explanation around the same time. Quinn perked up, leaning forward to hear her properly over the sounds of driving.

“So, I don’t know all of it, but our two shaman apprentices were out with the guy who warned us about the death mage in the first place. They were just supposed to be shopping, but Vera cleared a side trip through Honor. It was just supposed to be a drive through, see if it looked like anybody had tracked Riordan that far yet,” Maudy shook her head at this apparently ill-advised expedition, “They ran into some people, including a death mage. Somehow, Mark got hit by some sort of spell. Lucinda said it was in his blood and trying to get into his mind, but they have him warded to buy time to let the specialist get here. So that’s you, then.”

“Yep, that’s me,” Quinn confirmed, turning this new information over in his mind.

A death mage casting a spell that was trying to affect the mind? Given the “in his blood” comment, it was probably a blood magic spell. Most death mages got both death and blood affinities when they stepped onto that path. Quinn certainly had and he had been bumbling around, completely clueless about magic and fighting for his life.

“Do you know what preceded the spell?” Quinn queried, options forming into a list, “Was there any indication of a command given or trying to pull information from him or any such thing?”

“Lucinda said that they thought the death mage was trying to get Mark to go with her, willingly or not. They figure the spell was meant to make that possible in the middle of a fight.”

“A kidnapping?” Adam interjected, frown deepening. “Were they looking for stronger sacrifices?”

“You’ll have to ask Lucinda,” Maudy shrugged, “Or Riordan, I suppose, though he’s kinda shady. He was an exile, though Mother Bear removed the mark when she decided to save him. You’ll probably get a better answer from Lucinda.”

Quinn tilted his head from side to side, pondering that. So there were two apprentice shaman and an until-recently-exiled shifter who was on the run from the death mages. Was he working with the death mages? That didn’t make sense. The pack leader would have mentioned that in her report. It made sense why the pack was so concerned though, since it was one of their apprentice shaman affected. Most mages only had one affinity, so getting a second affinity was uncommon and prized in any group. Mages with a main affinity and a related composite affinity, as was the case with spirit plus shifter, were more common than mages with two main affinities. That didn’t make them any less prized.

So, in short, they had a lovely mess on their hands. Quinn expected nothing less. Fortunately, he was confident he could remove a combat-cast blood spell without too much trouble. He had learned a lot of tricks for just that sort of thing.

They lapsed into silence for a moment before Maudy asked another question of her own, unable to contain her burning desire for knowledge. “So, how come you dress like that if you are a government agent?”

Quinn snerked, trying to suppress a laugh. “The Department of Magic is still pretty darned secret, even from most of the government. We’d get laughed out of existence if we were publicly recognized. That gives us some more leeway for things like this. In my case, I actually fit in better dressed like this. I look a bit like I’m headed to the funeral as the corpse to be buried if I lay off all the goth clothes and wear a real suit. Goth style is at least common enough in most places to get people to dismiss me as terrible but normal.”

That clearly didn’t make enough sense for her. “But why couldn’t you just stop with the makeup?”

“Because the only makeup I’m wearing is the black lipstick, some white foundation, and a bit of eyeliner,” Quinn replied. “The rest of this is a side effect of not letting my specialty drive me homicidally crazy. And even that makeup is to help hide how dark my blood is getting.”

The effects had built up slowly. For a while there, Quinn had dressed similarly to Adam, all formal. But then he started to get pale and thin and tired and people started suggesting he go to the doctor all the time. People would look at him, do a double take, and then stare out of the corner of their eye, probably playing the game of “is he terminally ill or possessed by the devil” in their heads. And even if the answer to both of those was basically yes, Quinn had hated it. When he dressed goth or emo, people would do the double take and then they would usually look away and pretend he didn’t exist at all. He liked that far better and he was able to get approval to dress like this when he pointed out his job was easier when people ignored him.

“What can you tell me about the person who reported the death mages?” Adam asked, interrupting their lovely journey into fashion advice.

“Riordan?” Maudy asked, though it sounded more like she was asking herself and thinking. “He showed up just after midnight, maybe closer to 1 AM, two nights ago. Our Spirit Guardians stopped him at the border because of his exile mark. He told them something about a death mage and had some sort of death spell on him, so the Guardians alerted me, since I was on the security shift, and woke the Head Shaman. The shaman wanted to talk to him, so I picked him up and brought him to her work space. He was unconscious by that point and felt… really weird. Frankie said he was bleeding magic.”

Adam blinked, which was almost as good as jumping in surprise for that stoic-faced man. “Bleeding magic?”

Quinn admitted he was curious too. Physical injuries didn’t cause people to lose magic, except in the manner of shifters or other life casters spending magic faster to regenerate. Magical injuries didn’t cause that in most cases either. At most, magical damage would cause inabilities to draw in or circulate magic, or possibly empty the well so they just had no energy to cast with. But to be actively pouring magic around like an open wound? That sounded--

“He had a hole in his spirit, with some sort of weird spell threaded through it, part pack bond and part spirit and part who knows. It wasn’t caused by the death spell. That was in this weird black rope we couldn’t get off his arm. Frankie said he’d probably done it to himself, especially with the rest of the recent spirit magic stuff all over him, but I couldn’t tell you how or why. Anyway, Mother Bear fixed the hole and removed his exile mark. He woke up afterwards and told us that he’d been sacrificed as part of a killing tree ritual, but lived and now a death mage was after him?”

Maudy sounded unsure about that last part, but Quinn didn’t care. He sucked in a breath hard and let it out in a hiss. That was… If this shifter was really sacrificed and survived, then oh yeah, that death mage would want him. They would want him so hard.

Those sorts of incidents became critical flaws in rituals, which could be incredibly disastrous when dealing with the level of power already contained in that spell. The reports that had filtered to them had missed that detail somehow. He was sure that it was getting processed somewhere and would catch up to them. That was the problem with rushing to get assets on the ground, especially with how small and overworked the Department still was.

It sounded like Riordan would be a more extended project to unsort, but if he could pull that thread, Quinn might have a rare backdoor into the ritual. Fighting the death mage would get a whole lot easier if they didn’t have the ritual to crack into. It would also likely be the last straw to crazy town for them, so Quinn didn’t want to jump the gun too much there.

Still, Quinn was definitely looking forward to meeting Riordan. That was a puzzle worth the challenge.

Any further conversation became a moot as Maudy turned into a motel parking lot. Adam did a quick quiz on what they were specifically walking into, which was apparently going to be a normal motel room with two conscious people and one unconscious one and what they hoped were enough magical supplies to enable Quinn to peel that blood spell off. The conscious people were alert and wary, given the situation. Maudy said that Riordan looked ready to fight her each time she’d arrived.

That made Quinn pause as he was getting out of the SUV and look back at Maudy. “Ah, did you warn them about me?”

Before he could get a clear answer, a ghost stuck its head through the motel window. The bit Quinn could see of the young man looked normal enough. Quinn, Zeren, and Ingrid did not. The ghost pulled back with a yelp, clearly unsure and scared about what he’d seen.

Just peachy.

“There’s a ghost in there?” Quinn said, half statement of fact, half question to Maudy.

The guard paused, standing in front of the motel door with a hand raised to knock. “Oh. There are really ghosts? Riordan talks to empty air sometimes.”

Riordan talks to empty air. Maudy just dropped that like it wasn’t a huge problem. Because it was bad enough when a shifter saw his magic type and taint. If this already-on-guard shifter saw a death mage and then saw Zeren and Ingrid on top of it…

The door yanked open in front of Maudy and Quinn found himself staring at a tall, dark-skinned, scowling hunk of a man. A black t-shirt stretched across his muscular chest and cargo pants outlined his flexing thighs. His black hair was short, growing out from a buzz cut and just starting to curl slightly at the ends, and black stubble outlined a strong jaw. A jaw tight with tension, even as his eyes flashed with determined anger.

Oh yeah, he should be going for his badge. Hot men who looked like they could break Quinn over one knee tended to short circuit his brain a bit.

Fortunately, both Maudy and Adam were closer and stepped in the way. Adam had his badge out, which the man who had to be Riordan glanced at before bringing his eyes back to Quinn. And by the little flickers of his gaze, to Zeren and Ingrid. Quinn felt frozen in place, unsure what to say to explain anything.

Zeren broke this stalemate, dryly commenting, “Oh look, Quinn. He’s got a stellar ass and muscles for days. Just your type.”

And Riordan twitched at that, clearly hearing it. Quinn buried his face in his hands. Great, now he was going to get beat up for perving on the straight guy on top of being a death mage with creepy ghost friends.

Thanks, Zeren.