“Wake up! Please, wake up!”

Quinn blinked groggily, the last vestiges of dreaming clinging to him. It had been a good dream for once too. Something involving licking ice cream off of hard chocolate-colored muscled abs. Delicious, on more than one level, and highly inappropriate and it had no bearing on why someone would be yelling at him. Well, Adam would yell at him if Adam was the sort to yell. But he wasn’t. So who was yelling?

“Come on… Is he always this hard to wake?”

“No. Sometimes he is worse.”

Zeren’s familiar flat voice cut through Quinn’s sleep fog and he sat up, staring around the darkened motel room. The sun had set at some point. Adam snored softly in the other bed. And three ghosts hovered around Quinn’s bed in various states of distress, glowing softly to his magical sight.

Daniel, the ghost who was haunting the shifters, was in a state of outright panic, though he seemed to be trying to hold himself together. Zeren radiated concern loudly in the subtle tensions of their form and the increased activity inside their body. Ingrid was the calmest, but she was still looking between the other two ghosts and Quinn like she was watching a tennis match. Which, if they had lobbed a ball into Quinn’s court, it had just smacked him in the head and bounced off towards the fence.

“What’s going on?” he croaked, voice still thick with sleep. His body didn’t handle interrupted sleep well anymore, especially on top of jet lag. Quinn already felt a headache coming on.

“Something’s wrong with Riordan,” Daniel said. “I think he’s in trouble.”

Last Quinn had known, Riordan was getting ready to go sleep in the motel room just below him. And Daniel hadn’t come to bother him before now, so it must have happened more recently. Dumbly, Quinn strained his ears to see if he heard trouble, but there still wasn’t anything more than the soft snoring. “In his sleep?” Quinn asked, confused. “Was there an attack?”

“Riordan goes to that other place when he sleeps. The spirit realm. He rescued a bunch of us ghosts from the killing tree ritual there. Not all the way, of course,” Daniel explained, kicking out a leg wrapped in the same sort of magical rope Quinn had seen on Riordan, “but he made us a safe place. I started feeling a large draw on the pack bond while Riordan was sleeping. He’s the only one who knows how to use that, so I went to the other side to check on him. Only, Duane said that Riordan had gone to look at the ritual place again and hadn’t returned. And the draw of power has spiked again and isn’t stopping.”

“Oh, that’s not good,” Quinn said, rolling out of bed to find his pants. He was dressed in fleece pajama pants and shirt, since he always ran cold even in summer, and still wore his bracelets and even his collar. He’d gotten so used to them that they didn’t bother him anymore, but the rest of his mage kit was mostly in his pants’ pockets.

“What’s not good?” Adam’s voice cut through the darkness of the room, followed shortly by a flare of light as Adam turned on one of the lamps.

“According to Daniel, Riordan may be in magical distress related to the original killing tree ritual,” Quinn explained, waving a hand to what must have looked like empty air to the agent. “He woke me because I’m the only one here who can hear him. I am not sure if I am better suited to aid or if their shaman are. Apparently the ritual has a reflection in the spirit realm and Riordan goes there in his sleep. Regardless, I am needed to translate for Daniel and to wake the shaman.”

Technically, Adam could go all grumpy what-I-says-goes federal agent on Quinn, denying him the chance to run off and be actually useful, even though being useful was what made all the costs of his trade worthwhile. Quinn may not have chosen this calling intentionally, but it was his now and he’d fight anyone who thought he should just stand back when he was able to help. Fortunately in this instance, Adam just swung out of bed himself, quickly dressing. When they were in the field, the agent always slept in his slacks and dress shirt, in case they had to move quickly, forgoing comfort for efficiency. Whatever Quinn might think of Adam as a person, he was a good agent.

Quinn himself bundled his own shed clothes into his arms, grabbed his backpack, and scampered out barefoot to get downstairs quickly. The streetlight in the parking lot cast dim lighting over the balcony and stairs, enough that he wasn’t going to break his neck in the dark. He wished the glow of the ghosts reflected onto material objects. As it was, they were useless as glow sticks and actually ruined his night vision when he looked at them too much. Highly inconvenient, but it wasn’t like he was going to take time to cast filter spells to not be able to see the ghosts for the time it took to get downstairs.

The other motel room was quiet and dark when he approached, though Quinn thought he saw a flicker of motion at the corner of the curtained window, a thought that bore out a moment later when Maudy opened the front door before Quinn could do more than free a hand to knock.

“Quinn?” the sturdy woman asked softly, clearly trying not to wake the sleepers inside. “What’s going on?”

“Hi, Maudy,” Quinn flashed her a quick reassuring smile. “I need to see if I can wake Riordan. His ghost friend thinks something might be wrong. Agent Ahlgren-- Ah, there he is.”

Indeed, Adam joined them at the door and after a brief hesitation, Maudy let them both inside. She did not, however, speak any louder nor make any motion to wake the shaman yet. Pity. Quinn would have to press for that, he suspected.

“Everything’s been quiet down here. He’s not made any noise or anything, even,” Maudy explained, confused at the fuss even as she pointed out where the strange cursed dusky shifter apparently had gone to sleep, wrapped in a tarp like a body waiting for disposal. Quinn banished that ill-fortuned simile from his mind.

“Right. I’ll just take a look then.”

Zeren and Ingrid had preceded Quinn into that corner of the motel room and were examining Riordan already when Quinn joined them. Even in sleep, the man was tense, his breathing even but somehow not restful. There were no particular signs of physical distress, however, no racing heart or moaning or thrashing. No, indeed, the shifter was unnaturally still. That wasn’t sleep. That was unconsciousness, disconnected and deeper than some restorative retreat of the mind.

Worse were the magical signs. The physical rope tied so strangely around Riordan’s arm hadn’t changed appearance. It wasn’t even making some great magical hullabaloo like some death magic spells were known too, waving around tendrils of magic like a baby with a rattle. The magic that entwined it seemed denser though, little barbs of shadow hooking painfully into some esoteric intangible part of the man. His soul or spirit or however that worked. Quinn had never worked out what to call an embodied ghost since his work largely dealt with them after that point. People, he guessed. They were all people.

In addition to the changes on the rope, the ambient magic around the unconscious man swirled as if being slowly drained down a funnel. Most mages weren’t practiced enough with their sight to notice that sort of movement, unattached to either an organized spell or a gifted individual. In truth, everything had magic in it, from the air to every material object, but the magical senses would be blinded if it perceived that all the time everywhere and generally just noticed the places where magic exceeded the normal levels.

As it was, Quinn’s trained eyes could see more than most but not enough to be useful, especially if the main event was here but not here, tied to the man who laid before him but also to a physical place some distance south of them, which admittedly Quinn would love to be observing currently but alas, that wasn’t going to be happening. Fortunately, he had a true expert with him, one crafted for just such a task by hands far crueler than his.

“Ingrid, I’m seeing movement in the magic, but not enough to know what’s going on. What can you tell me?”

Ingrid scooched closer, her fluffy skirts spreading out as she crouched beside Quinn to study Riordan. The little ghost had come through her traumatic blinding and death with surprising cheer, but she was still a child. Her years outnumbered that of her form now, but not by enough for her to be out of her teens, and her experiences after death were largely limited to what she could receive and observe by following around Quinn with the acerbic Zeren as her primary friend. Man, no one should ever give Quinn children. He’d basically been raising Ingrid as a feral ghostly gremlin, fed on dry humor and voyeurism.

A lance of longing went through Quinn before he let it pass as a mere lingering regret. Once upon his time, his dreams for his life included a husband and children, but those times were years gone now, buried under the great weight of inevitable death. It was a masochistic task to long for a future when he had none. No, Ingrid would have to be the only child he raised, as botched a job as any unprepared parent but with the best of intentions at least.

His meandering thoughts were thankfully yanked back to the present dilemma by Ingrid’s high soft voice. “He’s gone beyond his gateway, twice over. The way is sealed to all outside of his pack, their braided bond the guide thread into oblivion. There, he is bound and tormented. Though, not yet, subdued. He’s fighting back and will continue to do so to the end of his strength.”

She turned her empty eyes towards Quinn. “He’s nowhere near as good at this as you, Quinny. He’s wasting magic all over the place. I don’t think he’s going to win without help.”

“Shoot,” Quinn muttered, thinking hard at that assessment. He cast his gaze at the beds, the occupants still sleeping soundly despite the invasion after the long day they had. Well, needs must and all. “Can you wake the shaman? I’m going to need advice on spirit realm combat and quickly or we’re probably going to lose him.”

Maudy must have heard the urgency underlying his otherwise calm tone, because she sprang into action, rousing first Lucinda and then, more slowly, Mark. Lucinda woke easily enough, but Mark apparently was known to be a heavy sleeper even under better circumstances. Quinn didn’t hear whatever quick summary of the situation Maudy provided Lucinda, but the shaman shook off sleep quickly and joined them beside Riordan.

“What’s this about spirit combat?” the woman asked, peering carefully at Riordan. Quinn wondered what additional layers of information her specialty afforded her compared to his, but took comfort in the fact that Ingrid probably saw more than both of them put together and she was on his side.

Quinn gave her a quick rundown of the limited information he’d gathered before asking, “What do you know about his connection to the spirit realm?”

“He is anchored in the spirit realm via a combination of the connection to the ritual and a more direct connection to the tree spirit that the killing tree ritual is based around. He can’t go anywhere else in the spirit realm because of that, which is good since he ends up there in his sleep. Head Shaman Frankie showed him how to exit so he could actually get some real sleep. I don’t know what he was thinking by not just doing so.” Lucinda’s voice was both very academic and thick with disapproval. She clearly did not think highly of her fellow shaman, despite the man having assisted her in the earlier shielding admirably from everything Quinn had seen.

Then again, Lucinda was rather like Adam in her preferred approach to problems and Riordan seemed to be a bit of a loose cannon. Quinn wouldn’t quite call him a lone player since he did assist in casting and knew how to cooperate with teams, but he did not submit to other authority just because it was an authority. Riordan seemed to respect skill over rank, though he also seemed to like both Mark and Daniel well enough. Quinn hadn’t seen enough of the man to know for sure.

Speaking of Adam, the agent looked far too fascinated to hear Riordan had some sort of spiritual gateway linked to him. Ingrid had informed Zeren and Quinn about that earlier, before they’d gone to bed, but Quinn had kept it to himself as no one’s business unless it became relevant. Like now. As much as he agreed with the Department of Magic’s goals, he disapproved of some of their heavy handed methodology, especially in regards to the appropriation of unusual mages without strong backing.

“Why doesn’t matter,” Quinn added, catching both Lucinda and Adam with a look. Assigning blame was never helpful mid-crisis. “He seems to be trapped and fighting something. Daniel says Riordan went to check on the ritual space and Ingrid says that his personal gateway is locked to anyone except his pack. That means Daniel is the only one who can go in that way. So either we have to send any assistance attached to him or we have to find another way to locate the ritual space on the spirit plane. Assuming you’d go, of course?”

Quinn had addressed that last to Daniel. The young man startled and then nodded, his worried expression morphing into fierce determination. “Of course. He wouldn’t leave me behind. I’m not going to just abandon him either.”

“Perhaps a combination of effects,” Lucinda considered. “If Daniel could deliver a spiritual marker, then finding the location becomes infinitely easier. I could try to open another gateway and hold it open, marking it. Then someone could go in to help. Who and how they would be able to get close enough to sense the marker gets more complicated.”

“Entangle the markers,” Adam put in, startling everyone. It was easy to forget that the stern-faced agent wasn’t just there to be diplomatic and glower. He was a mage in his own right, one whose affinity was spatial. “It’s far easier to ignore intervening space between yourself and a target than it is to carefully plot a path between two points with unknown obstacles in the way. If you don’t know the trick of it, I’m used to modifying existing spells cast by other people for that purpose.”

“That’s really cool,” Mark joined them, trying to stifle a yawn as he focused. “I think I caught most of them, but it’ll take a moment for my brain to come online enough to be useful.”

Quinn was relieved to have someone who was more laidback join the discussion. He was having to be succinct as he acted as translator and both Adam and Lucinda were very solution focused and direct and that was really good and annoying all at once. They were way too much alike, once he got past the differences from their different disciplines and organizations. He could totally imagine the pair of them procreating and making two point five children who were just as precise and formal as them.

“Right,” he said, pulling his mind back on track. “Sounds plausible. Make and entangle markers. Send Daniel into the gateway with one of them. Open a gateway somewhere else and hold it open, lit up with the other entangled marker. And then somehow put together a group capable of safe movement and combat in the spirit realm.”

Quinn swept his eyes over the gathering. Three ghosts, two shaman, a spatial mage, a shifter. And him.

“Who do we send?”