“Get out from under there,” Lucinda said, exasperated as she peered at the growling badger under the motel bed.

She ignored Mark’s commentary about leaving Riordan alone, prepared to drag Riordan out despite his stressed state. Well, so be it. If she stuck her hand under the bed, Riordan was totally biting her. He was grateful for their help, but that gratitude did not extend to letting her ignore his boundaries. Riordan growled louder, letting the snarling rattling noise of true aggravation enter the sound.

Lucinda might have tried anyway, tired and pissed off and glad to have something to fight, her hands drifting towards her mage kit that sat open nearby, but Mark cut her off, his tone sharp this time. “Lucinda. Leave him. I saw the other side. He likely needs a minute. I can give my report first.”

Even then, Riordan could tell she wanted to argue, her own defenses prickly, but then the shaman glanced at the two federal agents in the room and settled down. They had guests and appearances to keep up, even if the agents were sleep rumpled and Quinn was wearing fleece pajamas that looked odd with the goth accessories that he also wore. That meant this wasn’t just some internal affair of the pack and she had to act as the proper shaman.

Whatever it took to get her to leave him alone. Riordan tucked himself further back in the shadows, letting his growl fade to a softer intermittent rattle. Outside of his dusty sanctuary-- he wasn’t sure the motel had vacuumed deep under the bed in a while-- the others were talking, Mark giving a rundown of the ritual space from his perspective. Everyone was listening to him, Lucinda finding their notebooks from yesterday to record the details.

Everyone except Quinn.

Quinn had moved to the back of the room quietly, slinking away from the gathering that sat clustered around the front bed and table. Zeren stood back there, once more looking as human as they got, the proxy ghost in its robe of shadows standing beside them. That dilemma interested Riordan far more than rehashing his most recent trauma and he slunk closer to that end of his under-bed refuge to watch. Quinn didn’t seem to notice, but Ingrid did and she waved, the expression on her face one of childish glee. Riordan had a sneaking suspicion that she considered his badger form cute, in that way that children had when faced with furry creatures.

Noticing Ingrid’s gesture, Quinn glanced behind him, saw nothing nearby, and then thought to look down. A crooked grin crossed his dark lips and he welcomed Riordan closer with a small jerk of his head. Riordan realized that the darker color of Quinn’s lips wasn’t lipstick currently, but another sign of the death corruption rotting his body from the inside out. That fact did not sit well with Riordan. He thought of how he’d likened death magic corruption to heavy metal poisoning, building up in the body slowly and causing escalating symptoms before ending in death.

It was a strange thing, but Riordan realized that death corruption didn’t usually kill its hosts directly. Instead, it warped the mind and wrecked common sense and self-preservation in any place that those things conflicted with the quest for power. Given that the infection was usually in the mind and spirit, Riordan supposed that such an end could be viewed as the death of the original identity, so it wasn’t that different. Quinn was shoving his corruption into his body almost entirely though and was clearly unwell. The dark circles, pale skin, and malnourished thinness stood out all the more starkly when the man was dressed in blue soft fleece pajamas. A laughing cartoon skeleton emblazoned the front of his shirt, contrasting with the seriousness of the situation.

“It’s definitely based on my original master’s research,” Zeren said flatly, continuing their report to Quinn about the proxy ghost. “He often bragged about his advances in malleability in the resulting ghost shell after his changes in the essence extraction process. The blankness of features demonstrated here shows how thorough this essential removal was, completely erasing even the traces of remembered form, beyond that of human identity generally. That’s far too advanced for a new death mage to have come up with on her own, especially since it’s not her primary focus.”

Quinn opened and closed his mouth a few times, clearly biting back different things he wanted to say to that. He glanced over his shoulder again at the room full of shifters and their excellent hearing and finally pressed his mouth closed tightly. His body language swore quite eloquently, every curse and profanity radiating out of the tense posture of muscle and bone until he fairly vibrated with the effort of holding it inside.

Finally, he said simply, “I see. That’s problematic.”

Zeren nodded, understanding Quinn’s current limitations. After what they said more freely earlier, in the spirit realm, they seemed to have no problem speaking where Riordan could hear though and continued as if Quinn had said more. “It implies teaching, whether via a direct mentor or, more likely, a written tome. If there was a mentor, I feel that this operation should have had better awareness of the magical communities in the area or at least, better awareness of the true capacities and drawbacks of death magic. A tome of spells and rituals would imply someone has more recently compiled selections from the works of modern death mages, some of those works being largely restricted to access by the Department of Magic and their allies.”

The unhappy noise Quinn made was somewhere between a whine and a whimper of pain. Riordan sympathized. Sorting out that kind of mess always became a major headache, both in the practical investigation and even more in navigating the diplomatic minefields of internal accusations. He was torn between wishing he could help out and being glad that isn’t his particular snarl of snakes to untangle. He huffed in annoyance, both at the situation and his own messed-up emotions. Riordan needed to figure out a guiding set of principles to use in this new life and soon or he was going to be pulled in way too many directions at once by his desire to fix things.

“Well,” Quinn sighed, running a bony hand through his shaggy hair, “I guess I’ll have to settle for studying this quickly as I take it apart. It’s too dangerous to let it stay intact for longer than strictly necessary.”

“What is?” Agent Ahlgren called out from across the room. Riordan would have sworn that the man couldn’t have heard Quinn’s quiet mutterings from that far, not with the nearer conversation to Ahlgren overpowering it, but then again, he’d figured out that the spatial magic for the entangled beacons must have come from Ahlgren. Distance meant less to such mages and spying on Quinn seemed to be a high priority for Ahlgren.

“Our lovely death mage that Riordan so charmingly encountered in his dreams was using a proxy ghost construct. Zeren transported it back to this realm so that I can disassemble it before the mage has a chance to use it for spying or remote casting.” Quinn explained, his voice sing-songy and just this side of mocking with the strong note of frustration running through it. His frustration did not appear directed at Ahlgren, but the agent still pursued his lips in displeasure before excusing himself from the conversation near Mark to join Quinn.

Ahlgren froze midstep, eyes darting around the nothingness Quinn was staring at. “There’s a proxy of an enemy death mage here and you didn’t say anything?”

“Zeren had it suppressed until just a moment ago, the death mage in question fled from the proxy after a nasty fight less than thirty minutes ago, I just need to set up to take it apart, and I’m telling you now,” Quinn rattled off, exasperation redirecting towards his handler as he turned to march over to the bin of magical supplies on the table everyone else was blocking. “I know how to do this, even if I wasn’t expecting these tactics from a death mage who appeared to be focusing on ritual sacrifice.”

Quinn reached the front of the room, but Lucinda and Maudy blocked his access to the bin. Maudy helpfully grabbed the bin to pass to him. It looked light as a feather in her hands but Quinn’s grip dipped distinctly as he took it with a small grunt. Still, he nodded thanks to her and went to the further bed, shoving Lucinda’s blankets aside to begin sorting through the supplies. Riordan scampered out from under the bed so he could see what was happening on top of it, even going as far as scrambling up to the top of the bed with a wriggling jump and some mild clawing of the mattress that left minor damage. Quinn glanced at him, flashing a quick smile before gesturing for where Riordan could watch without getting in the way. Riordan appreciated both the distance and the inclusion.

“Why would the ritual sacrifice thing make it less likely for the mage to use a ghost?” Mark asked, all set to be a sponge for more information.

“Different focuses,” Quinn explained while making neat piles of supplies. He kept glancing up periodically to look at the proxy ghost, but Zeren and Ingrid stayed beside it too, keeping a far better watch on it. Riordan was pretty sure nothing was getting past that pair when they were on active duty. “Ritual sacrifice focuses on drawing out the power released by the death of the body. You can think of it as overlapping with life or material magic, extracting power via the decomposition and transformation of a physical phenomena, though that’s not really a great comparison. It’s also a destructive process rather than a constructive one. Most mages like that tend to go for brute force, channeling all that power towards some effect.”

Apparently satisfied with his initial sorting, Quinn moved to the corner with the ghosts. He grabbed Riordan’s tarp, laying it out on the floor there. None of the ghosts seemed much bothered to have Quinn flapping the sheet through them as he straightened it out. He futzed with it a bit before he was satisfied with the placement. He returned to grab a stick of chalk, carefully outlining a complex magical diagram on the tarp, centered on the proxy ghost. The diagram clearly had different parts that performed different functions, all linked together with a series of lines and words. Riordan was impressed at Quinn’s ability to freehand the diagram accurately and neatly, only stopping to erase and redraw a few times, and even more impressed when he started speaking again while still drawing.

“Anyway, working with ghosts is more esoteric than most death mages deal with unless they started with a desire to talk to someone dead,” Quinn continued his mini-lecture as he worked, “After all, most death mages didn’t get into the field because they wanted to deal with death but because they wanted magical power of any sort and that was their option. Most of the ones who actually care about what happens to the dead after they are used as a power source had a goal that included resurrection or communication with the dead. Grieving people are an unfortunately vulnerable population in regards to people who start down the path of death magic.”

A sad wistful expression crossed Quinn’s face, clearly linked to some unspoken memory, whether a general regret about the consequences of grief or something regarding a specific death mage in his past. “But I’m getting off topic. The point is that death mages who focus on ghosts have methods that overlap more with spirit or mind magic usually, much more subtle effects. It also tends to be more focused on manipulation rather than destruction and is less of a brute force approach. So when I heard that the death mage here was doing a mass murder ritual for power extraction, my preliminary profile suggested someone who was using death magic primarily as a source of power for other goals and prioritized brute force, if with enough finesse to not have gotten caught yet.”

The discussion had drawn Riordan in enough that he had lost his initial sense of being overwhelmed, his mind switching to turning over the puzzle of the death mage in his head. Phenalope was evil, no doubts about that, but he wasn’t sure she had started that way and it definitely wasn’t all that she was. Riordan needed to make that clear to Quinn, to have it factored into that profiling whirling through his intelligent mind.