Riordan wasn’t sure he completely understood what was happening. Death corruption was incurable according to everything he’d ever learned. A human body and soul couldn’t process all elements of the power gained from shed blood and death. The indigestible bits accumulated and drove death mages mad, regardless of their intentions. Always. Every time.

What was happening inside him broke those rules.

Except, those were only the rules as they applied to humans. Spirits could handle death corruption with nothing more than a disgusting taste and spiritual indigestion before it passed harmlessly out of them, going… somewhere. Into the spirit realm? From the spirit realm to somewhere else through the same sort of small holes that littered the boundary between the physical and the spiritual? The spirit realm bordered several deeper realms.

This was so far outside of Riordan’s paygrade that he’d switched currencies, damn it. Still, the absolute relief that hit him as that blockage of accumulated corruption broke apart and drained floored Riordan. He didn’t understand this shit but he let a glimmer of hope hit him that he might actually survive this night. Not just live through it and need to be put down like a rabid dog later, but actually survive it.

Fragments of memories hit him as the remnants of death left him. A man yelling at a woman, gesturing wildly. Another man bent over a guitar, playing music until he fumbled it and started over again. A group of men and women laughing at a bar as they drank. A feeling of being hit. The unending fatigue and hunger of going days sleeping rough and eating out of trash cans and convenience stores. Terror as a man woke up, lightheaded and hanging upside down from a tree with bleeding wrists and he just couldn’t get free!

Duane’s anger as he saw a man threatening a woman across a field, not knowing it was a trap. Shy, nervous Cole sitting on a concrete box inside a partially constructed building, enjoying the sandwich he made for lunch and some sort of rock music coming from his old ipod.

Daniel, crying in the shadows of a stairwell, feeling just so done. He’d been happy in his journalism class, but the genetics class he’d just left for his major left him drained. He was going to tell his parents he couldn’t do this anymore.

The scraps of dozens of dead passed from Riordan, leaving him gasping at the intimacy of experiencing those fleeting pieces of the ghosts who had become his pack via shared trauma and necessity. A pack that was waiting beyond the Veil to be set free. Or were they already free? Were they safe?

Riordan had never wondered so much about the afterlife before. He couldn’t save these people from death. They were already dead. He couldn’t protect them from whatever came after that, not without locking them in a ghostly half-state that was its own form of hell for most of them. Most people couldn’t handle being adjacent to life without ever being allowed to touch it. The ghosts that chose it often clung to an emotion or unresolved event to the point of insanity or obsession to make up for the isolation of that existence. Riordan couldn’t remember all the details of how it even worked. He’d never thought it would be relevant and he just couldn’t remember.

He felt so angry at himself. What the hell had he been doing with his life when he chose to avoid knowledge because it didn’t fit with the role he played in his pack? Because it scared him to have to hold all those possibilities and expectations in his head and it didn’t even matter anyway? Well, it turns out if someone lives long enough, there’s no way to know what would matter in the end!

Riordan hated being trapped, forced into stillness when he wanted to act, but he couldn’t move until the spirit released him. He should feel grateful. He did feel grateful. But he hated the method and the loss of control that went with it.

The spirit reassured Riordan, soothing him. When did it learn to do that? The tree always felt serene, but in an uncaring “it just is” sort of way. This touch carried the air of a mother soothing a dying child, which wasn’t creepy at all, even if it was heart-wrenchingly sincere. Riordan held onto his anger, but settled, letting the spirit continue its work. Whatever it started had to be finished. Riordan could tell that much from what it was communicating to him.

Inside of his exposed soul, the spirit continued forging new connections, making a system of the mess that Riordan had become. Everything was worked into it. The split cores. His two wells. The connections to the spirit realm and to beyond the Veil. The spirit gateway in his chest. Phenalope’s ghost tattoo. His pack bonds, to the ghosts and to the tree. All of his affinities. His honey badger. His self.

The killing tree ritual that had started Riordan on this path.

Closure. The tree spirit was making closure.

It was all tangled up together on the path Riordan had walked to get here. He’d just been drifting through life, punishing himself and avoiding any future responsibility to anything or anyone more than himself. Then he’d stopped at the wrong place. Or perhaps the right one. He’d been attacked and sacrificed, but Riordan survived.

He ran, but this time it was a retreat rather than the fleeing he’d done before. Riordan had failed to save Daniel. Then he’d met his ghost. Seeing Daniel as still a person after death, Riordan couldn’t turn a blind eye anymore. He’d made a pack on a promise to protect them and save them. He’d nearly killed himself in the process, messing around in the spirit realm.

The shifters who should have hated him for being an exile saved Riordan instead. At least, they gave Riordan a chance to prove he was worth saving in front of Mother Bear. That greater spirit had seen him and judged him, transforming Riordan from exiled shifter to novice shaman. Then there were all the people Riordan met along the way as he tried to understand and stop the killing tree ritual. There were the ghosts like Daniel and Duane and Cole and all the ones that Riordan just never made the time to talk to outside of the investigation but who relied on him as their shaman without even knowing what that meant.

Then there was the Sleeping Bear pack. Vera and Riordan would likely never be friends, but he respected her. Frankie and her apprentices showed Riordan what it meant to be a shaman, both the parts that appealed to him and the parts that repelled him. Norris took care of all of them while the security team like Maudy and Billy balanced living normal everyday lives with putting those same lives on the line when shit hit the fan.

Even the cultists were shaping Riordan, whether he liked it or not. Phenalope -Penny- had left her mark on Riordan in a literal way, along with being one of the main catalysts for the ritual and Riordan’s recent struggles. Jimmy was more directly responsible, having been the one to choose Riordan for this and hit him hard enough that Riordan couldn’t escape before it was too late. Riordan wanted to hate Jimmy, but he’d also seen how wrecked his ghost has become. Helena and Gloria likely planned the attacks that lured Riordan out and more directly, Helena had stopped Riordan from killing Phenlope before she raised the ritual’s power.

And Quinn. Both of the agents had been godsends in the middle of this clusterfuck, even if the issue ended up being bigger than two people could unravel and stop before it got out of control, no matter how talented. But Quinn had shown Riordan a different side of death magic. Hell, he’d shown Riordan a different side of magic in general. He’d never considered learning to cast that efficiently and precisely. Riordan could spare the power most times since he just needed time to recover and wasn’t doing anything big enough to use up significant parts of his well at once. That might change as he became a shaman properly. Quinn’s example showed him that there was a different way to cast and different way to think about the victims and effects of death magic.

More than that, Quinn had made Riordan consider the importance of knowledge keeping. As technology advanced, oral traditions, preserved by a single person or a small group, seemed inefficient compared to books and databases. With oral traditions though, the knowledge of what the magic was and how to use it also came tightly entwined with the warnings and ethics of its usage. With the knowledge of the costs, but of also the worth of those costs sometimes. Riordan thought of how Zeren and Ingrid followed Quinn by choice. He had saved them.

Riordan hadn’t expected to get lost in his thoughts at a time like this, but it was unavoidable. The fragmented memories of the dead had stirred up his own memories and the tree spirit had touched the connections inside him. Connections between places within and without of himself, between himself and other people and places.

Slowly, the spirit eased back from its work inside Riordan, allowing his soul to seal back up again. Riordan touched his chest where his physical heart would be. He was whole. The death corruption no longer contaminated, having drained to where it really belonged, hopefully returning to the ghosts that had lost those bits. He was still himself, at his heart. Still a fighter and survivor.

Riordan was also changed. He had no words for how he felt. The spirit had taken his damaged, jumbled parts, pulled them out and torn them apart, and then put them all back in again more neatly. Riordan had no doubt he’d be untangling the complications from this moment for the rest of his long life.

“Thank you,” he whispered in the calm around him.

He stood in a glade in the spirit realm next to the largest tree he’d ever seen. One that held microcosms on its spreading branches, winking between gem-like leaves and ghostly berries, draped in a web of silver braids and surrounded by nebulous light. A dense wilderness maze spread out around the tree. Something about the way the plants grew and the ground was shaped reminded Riordan of a blanket of new plant life over an abandoned graveyard. Compared to the desolate, oppressive swamp of the ritual, the change was drastic and overwhelmingly positive, if unsettling.

He could feel the spirit’s pleasure at his gratitude and at the changes. It had become anew and it had made him anew, two alike but different, learning from each other. It would be watching. Riordan chose not to ponder the significance of having a greater spirit so individually invested in him and his future.

Instead, he turned to the tear in the Veil, still held open if slowly shrinking, and stepped through to make sure his pack was safe. And to say goodbye.