Riordan was pissed off.

He’d started this fight that way, but now he was furious to the point of pure rage. That sheer focus of emotion helped push back the pain and fatigue and let him continue his counterattack. He was going to rip Phenalope’s fucking head off if it was the last thing he did.

Another one of her stupid fucking spells came at him, slowing as it reached the safeguard shield around Riordan. He swung his free right arm, lit up with the flare of his own suppressive aura, and batted it back towards her. His left arm hung limp at his side, no longer wrenched upwards but still entangled with the rope webbing and heavily strained from his earlier efforts. Riordan had used the same trick he’d done to suppress the webbing earlier to make it loose enough to fight, but the pack well was draining into that glittering aura at a worrying pace and his personal well wasn’t far behind.

Phenalope possessed a distinct terrain advantage in this place. The ritual was hers and its manifestation knew that. Riordan was its fodder, not its master. There was no question about which of them had to deal with sucking mud, hidden tripping ropes, and an oppressive aura of terror.

For all that, the fight was not as one-sided as Phenalope might have expected. She had all the earmarks of a book-taught mage, someone who had learned a handful of spells by rote and practiced them to some degree of mastery. Her arsenal was limited and less flexible, but effective.

Riordan, meanwhile, was winging it. He stuck to physical attacks bolstered by the suppressive aura as much as possible, to conserve on additional casting, but he’d managed to slip in a few other effects under the barrage. The safeguard spells all contributed to his continued existence. The bolstered strength of his spirit against spiritual communication pushed back against the compulsions of both this space and her spells. The limiter kept Riordan from blowing all his power in one big gesture that might miss entirely and would probably turn him into a toad or something afterwards. The slowing shield bought him time to react to her attacks. Unfortunately, her own shielding robe kept his own attacks from landing significant damage in a single blow either.

What he most needed was just a large enough gap in the combat to be able to open his gateway and escape without letting her breach it. Given how rapid fire her most common spells were, he hadn’t gotten enough time and distance to risk it yet, leaving him wavering on which was more costly: letting her breach his gateway now or delivering his spirit into her captivity here, perhaps to be pried open at some later date. Perhaps just to be drained dry while his body lay comatose elsewhere.

The fight wasn’t hopeless though. He might be burning through magic faster, but her well was more finite. Riordan recovered magic more quickly in the spirit realm where everything was swimming in magic, especially with all the lingering buildup of their cast spells. Phenalope, as a death mage, only recovered magic with new sacrifices. It must be highly ironic that she was fighting in a place literally dripping with death energy and being unable to access it without the completion of the ritual. Riordan imagined it felt something like slowly dying of thirst in the middle of a lake.

Good. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving person.

That left him with a nasty battle of attrition to win. Riordan dodged one of her pain blasts, sliding in the muck. The urge to full shift into his badger filled him, but he wasn’t sure how that would work in the realm and he had no desire to go swimming in death, which he would be without the height afforded him by his human size. He’d gotten some of the muck in his mouth as it was in the mad scramble and tried desperately not to think about any possible repercussions of that. He launched at her again, making sure to close the distance between them to prevent her from casting anything larger than she already was. The rope around his arm dragged at him painfully but did not slow him.

Phenalope had been initially pleased at his strength and resistance, but he caught glimpses of fear in her eyes now, though it was mostly buried under the righteous anger and greed that were fed by the corruption on her soul. Riordan laughed, the sound harsh and growling, “Poor little murderer. Not so much fun when your prey fights back?”

“It will only make it that much more satisfying when I have you kneeling at my feet, begging to serve me,” Phenalope replied back, creating distance again as the swamp parted for her. “You are bound and injured. I can see you are tiring. You will fall to me.”

“What? To worship before you as you ascend to your rightful place as a goddess of womanhood and murder? You are no Kali, destroying the evil to save the innocent.”

“I will be! I shall transcend mortality and bring justice. Bloody justice, if necessary.”

Well, that was answer enough for what her goal for this stagnant pool of power was. Of all of Frankie’s predictions, he wasn’t sure if he liked the idea of one super-powered death mage better or worse than an army of normal ones. Better, he thought, for the potential containment issue. If that one could be handled, it would be done, as opposed to a small group of them trying to hunt some unknown number of death mages fleeing in all directions. Riordan was perversely grateful for the tendency of death mages to hoard power.

Phenalope wasn’t done with her speech though. Her madness faded down again, giving Riordan glimpses of the charisma she had to bring to bear under more normal circumstances. “Justice has failed women for ages. When our politicians are male, making laws that favor men, and our police are male, dismissing issues in favor of men, and our judges are male, ruling in the favor of our abusers and rapists, then women must take justice into their own hands, together.”

She swept her hands out wide, preparing to launch into some further impassion treatise. Riordan took advantage of the opportunity to get another punch in, landing hard on her sternum. She staggered back, the grimace on her face showing that it hurt even if he doubted it did much real damage.

“Don’t you care?” she challenged him, fury of her own flashing in her eyes. “You might be a man, but you aren’t white. You must know what it is like to have everyone treat you with suspicion, to have everything be your fault. Perhaps it’s not being told that you wore the wrong clothes or married the wrong man and therefore deserved whatever happened to you, but I bet you don’t look at a cop car driving past and feel safety.”

“You would have a better argument if you weren’t killing people who didn’t deserve it,” Riordan laughed at her. “I’ve been a dark-skinned homeless man for years. Cops don’t like me. But it wasn’t the patriarchy or racists that tried to lynch me. I was just a convenient target. Because at some point, it stopped being about those goals you are mentioning and became all about power, didn’t it. All about your power and your ego. And you talk shit about me.”

Riordan thought Phenalope would rage and rant at him again but she didn’t. Instead, she looked strangely thoughtful, her hazel eyes boring into him. Her expression bordered in hunger still, desiring something in him that Riordan didn’t want to give her, even if he wasn’t sure what she was looking for. She began to speak again, but unexpected motion interrupted them.

Shadow tendrils reached out of Riordan’s chest, disgorging Daniel into the space between Riordan and Phenlope. Everyone froze at this development, clearly surprised. Daniel looked absolutely terrified but also determined. He moved first, not even really pausing to take in his surroundings before he twisted a glowing something that he held and tossed it out into the fog, outside of the reach of the dripping tree and its branches. Black blood splashed out from the motion, flowing once more from his slit wrists.

That broke Phenalope out of her shock and she scowled, clearly upset to be disturbed when she was making progress on her fight with Riordan. She whipped her hands through the motions for her blasting spell, launching it straight at Daniel. Several ropes trailed out from the ghost like a marionette doll, leading back to the tree and reminding him how at risk Daniel was here. What on earth had possessed him to come here? Didn’t he know it wasn’t safe?

There wasn’t time to get Daniel out of the way without shoving him into the muck to be bound by the writhing ropes. Riordan grabbed him instead, pulling him close and sheltering him against the incoming spell with his own body. Pain lanced through him as the spell impacted. Even slowed and weakened, it stung like a bitch and Riordan snarled in pain, muscles twitching in response but never faltering in his protection of his friend.

Terror still raced through him. Riordan had barely been able to keep up the pressure on Phenalope as it was, largely by toughing out the damage. If he was defending Daniel at the same time, Riordan would lose ground, taking more hits and being unable to attack freely. They were going to lose and when they did, Daniel was going to end up in one of those fucking rope cocoons, being tortured to insanity and drained of everything that made him who he was.

“Why?” Riordan croaked softly, choking on memories of lost friends and the terror of being helpless to stop it again.

To his surprise, Daniel offered a shaky smile, even as another spell hit Riordan, making his aura flare and rocking his body with pain. “We weren’t going to leave you to do this alone.”

In the fog where Daniel had thrown something, a glowing orb pulsed and two more people stepped out of nowhere to join the fray.