Quinn left off trying to convince Riordan into being his student for the moment. Honestly, Riordan wasn’t even sure if the Department would approve such education without a hell of a lot of strings that neither Riordan nor Quinn would want. For now, it could percolate with the rest of his possible futures, both as its own path and as an addendum. At least it gave clarity to some of his options.

With a tap of the gem on his collar, Zeren and Daniel both reappeared. Daniel looked a bit dazed, but shook it off quickly, a broad smile on his face. The smile faded off when he took in how serious Riordan and Quinn looked.

“What’s up?” Daniel asked, moving over to Riordan’s side.

Riordan gave a nod towards Quinn. “He’s heading out now to do more scouting. Zeren will be busy and I didn’t want you to get caught up in it all. Too many unknowns for a beginner ghost.”

“Beginner ghost,” Daniel repeated with an amused snort. “What? Am I going to be leveling up in ghost as I go along?”

Riordan was vaguely aware of this as terminology from games, but wasn’t sure how to respond. In his silence, Quinn beat him to the punch. “Don’t we all level up in what we are, just by the experience of existing?”

“Great. So when I’m a 15th level Ghost, I’ll be able to do all the cool stuff,” Daniel responded with a small laugh.

“Depending on the leveling scale, perhaps. I mean, level 15 is drastically different between D&D and a JPRG, for example.”

Quinn seemed to go deep into thought at that. Daniel batted at him playfully, clearly without intention to hit him at all, laughing harder. “Get out of here, nerd. And come back safe.” He glanced over at Zeren. “Make sure he comes back safe.”

Quinn’s objections that he could take care of himself was lost under Zeren’s simple nod and, “Understood. I shall do so.”

Grumbling, Quinn ushered his ghost out the door, heading off towards the task at hand. Riordan could pick out “No respect around here” in amongst the other mutterings, but knew Quinn didn’t really mean it. He was flippant, but not angry.

That left Riordan and Daniel alone again with a new stack of papers to enter. Quinn’s visit left Riordan feeling both more grounded and more unsettled all at once. Needing a diversion, Riordan glanced over at Daniel, asking, “So, what was it like inside a ghost gem?”

“Weird,” Daniel answered immediately, “And I don’t know if that is because of ghost gems in general or because it’s Zeren’s ghost gem in specific. That ghost is odd.”

That was a bit of an understatement. Zeren was an abomination created by a mad scientist of a death mage but they were also surprisingly moral. Riordan would have called them a good person, but wasn’t sure person was the right term sometimes. People might have been more accurate. Their name wasn’t like anything he’d heard before. Riordan assumed it was a designation granted to the kludge personality arisen from the composite ghosts that had gone into Zeren, but he couldn’t be sure. Getting a straight answer from either Zeren or Quinn on the matter was likewise chancy.

Daniel continued, taking a stab at trying to describe the ghost gem. “It’s less of a space and more of a state of mind, I think. Like, I was in a solid object and it felt like that. Space implies an emptiness that could be filled and it wasn’t like that. It was more like the structure of the inside of the gem had been altered to be a comfortable, restful place to exist, but only if you were a monster ghost who found the echoing screams of many voices to be relaxing. Everything bent in on itself oddly. I can’t describe it properly.”

Riordan tried to imagine that sensation Daniel was describing and came uncomfortably close with his semi-repressed memories of piercing the illusion of the spirit realm. Space and relation of objects and boundaries were important mental niceties to maintain for sanity when in a realm that no longer did so automatically. Zeren was already nonlinear in composition, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that their home wasn’t either. A more normal ghost like Daniel would probably have a representative space that more closely resembled the physical plane.

The whole thing made Riordan’s head hurt, though Daniel seemed to have found the experience fascinating, if disorienting. He shook his head, reaching to pick up Quinn’s papers and leaf through them.

“What’s all this?” Daniel asked, peering over Riordan’s shoulders.

Ah, that was right. Daniel had been off visiting when Quinn had handed them over. Riordan held them up for his friend to see a little clearer. “It’s data from the agents’ work today. Looks like a mix of more missing person data from various organizations and hand written notes on addresses and persons associated with the Daughters. We should cross reference this with the website and more searching. See if we can add any data.”

If nothing else, it would soak up more of the time until dinner and then the time after that until the agents were back safely. Riordan really wasn’t made for sitting at home and waiting. The data crunching was important work and likely would have been sourced to either one of the shaman or some overworked Department peon if Riordan wasn’t around. Or hell, maybe Vera had an office staff that she felt was qualified to be involved. Riordan was taking over someone’s office after all, even if it didn’t look like it saw that much use.

The only upside to data crunching was watching the patterns come together. It was a morbid upside, given he was getting a broader and broader picture of their crimes, both against those they murdered and those that they manipulated. Riordan found himself stuck on a picture from one of the websites of women laughing together. They were a mix of ages, though there was no one that Riordan would have called actually old in it, sharing joy over cooking. The picture showed a bit of a communal kitchen in the background. It lacked personal touches, but had symbols of femininity and motivational sayings barely visible along one wall. He wondered how many of those women had been hurt by someone they trusted.

And how they would ever recover once it was clear that they had been betrayed once again.

Riordan split the document on the cult into three. One was still a list of known and suspected members, which he was able to add quite a few names to from Quinn’s research and from the websites. The social media page he found for the Daughters was particularly helpful there. Even if the information shared was very surface level, he could get a sense for which accounts belonged to cult members and which were just curious or attended a class or two with them. Several accounts were locked behind privacy walls, likely to keep abusers away. The other two documents were a summary of the philosophy, methods, and magical resources of the cult as well as a list of physical assets and addresses.

He was no computer specialist and neither was Daniel, for all that he was way better than Riordan. They were only finding public information and got as much as they did because they knew where to target their searches and what was potentially useful. Riordan finally printed out a map of the county and the surrounding counties and began putting in dots for the known addresses and where the known victims had been grabbed. It felt like a grade-school project, if the school was trying to teach someone how to track murders. He wasn’t sure it was actually useful, but each dot he added made Riordan feel the scope of what they were dealing with just that bit more.

Norris interrupted for dinner before Riordan was finished with his arts and crafts time. He blushed, a little embarrassed at his use of time to make a probably useless visual representation. The embarrassment only got worse when Norris complimented him on the map like a grandfather should. Riordan was quick to set it aside and follow Norris down for dinner.

To his surprise, the only people joining him in the little dining room that night were Norris, Mark, and Frankie. Frankie took one look at Riordan, watched the way he scanned the room even though he knew the agents wouldn’t be back yet, and snorted.

“You look like a man who needs a distraction,” she said bluntly.

For Frankie, Riordan didn’t even try to lie. “Why? You got one?”

She snorted in a distinctly unladylike fashion and pointed her fork in his direction. “Just you wait. I’ll get you set up after dinner.”

And so it proved. Frankie led Riordan off to her workshop, stopping in the front room to settle him on one of the fat comfortable chairs in front of a coffee table. A second later, she plunked an equally fat book and a plastic case of stones in front of him.

“The reason we use material components in spells is partly because it helps us get a consistent result. The other is that everything has its own bits of magic in it. Non-living things tend to have untyped magic, like what you find ambiently, but they also have resonances that make it easier to align certain effects.” Frankie explained shortly. “Any damn fool can toss around bucket loads of power and hope something happens. A real shaman knows how to do the same thing with a thimble full. Step one for that is knowledge.”

Frankie rapped her knuckles against the book, which turned out to be an encyclopedia of various geological structures and their magical uses. “I’ve got this damn thing memorized by now. Any apprentice that graduates under me will have read it cover to cover and memorized the most common ones minimum.” She pointed at the box of stones, each stone tucked into a separate labeled compartment. “Start with those. There will be a quiz.”

Riordan stared at the thick tome, suddenly getting insight into why shaman remained apprentices for so many damn years when magic didn’t seem so complicated. Lucinda probably could be a shaman in her own right by this point, but she was trying to become a shaman of Frankie’s caliber, not just some two-bit conjuror. She and Mark had taken a package of random herbs and stones and had known what to go looking for to ground their casting and what to use when their first choices weren’t available.

Groaning, Riordan realized he was going to have to go back to school if he wanted to do more than view every problem as a nail just because all he had was a hammer. It had been over forty years since he had last been in school. He hadn’t much liked it then, a stir crazy young man who thought he had the world at his feet. He hadn’t thought he’d have any need of learning.

Well, Riordan had need of knowledge now. He opened the book and got started.