Quinn blinked, trying to shake off the sensations dogging his every movement and to see the clearing in front of him instead. Spirit stuff sucked. Seriously. Especially when combined with death stuff. His skin crawled in the current atmosphere of the spirit’s clearing. The sun was still shining and the sky was cloudless, yet the shadow of the tree cast a chill over the whole area.

It reminded Quinn of being near the Veil, which shouldn’t have surprised him. The Veil was the forbidden gate to the realms where only the dead were welcome. Being near it felt like the grim reaper was breathing down your neck, waiting for you to slip up so it could gobble you up, soul and all. He couldn’t fully remember walking here through the barrier that Riordan had dragged them through and there was definitely now way Quinn would be able to find his way back without a guide.

Therefore, Quinn needed to shake it off and get to work. Riordan looked increasingly grumpy as he paced the edges of the clearing. Of all of them, he was the only one looking outward instead of inward.

The tree was distracting to most of them. It was just a tree, but also so much more. It was old and large, even for its type, which was likely how a spirit had arisen from it in the first place. Natural spirits tended to come from natural landmarks or items over long periods of time. Or so Quinn understood it. It hardly came up in his usual experiences.

At the base of the tree sat a broken table. It had served as the altar for the cult’s final ritual. The ground around it was disturbed and bits of items littered the area. Their mixed attack group had been more concerned with the cultists once everything was over. The cultists had outnumbered them nearly four to one, making handling them difficult, even when a bunch had run and a few had died.

“Walk me through what I’m looking at here, specialist,” Drika ordered, her eyes glued on the tree and the altar.

Quinn walked closer to it, beckoning for the others to follow. “They had Phenalope as primary caster and Gloria assisting. They had three shifters captive and magically subdued. Two, Billy and Norris, were on either side of the altar. Riordan was tied to the tree. By the time we were in position and able to approach, they had drained some blood from Billy into a bowl in the middle of the altar, surrounded by several other items in set locations. I didn’t get a close look at those before we started disrupting everything. They also had a ritual dagger and used blood on everything.”

The altar cloth was liberally stained with the blood, dark splotches dried into its fabric from multiple sources. Billy’s blood splashed from the bowl. Riordan’s blood dripped from Phenalope’s hands. Phenalope’s blood from when she got her throat slashed. Mixed up and dried over, a map of suffering and malicious intent.

“Was any of it enchanted?” Xavier asked, peering around at the scattered altar items.

Quinn rolled his eyes. “How would I know? Nothing looked particularly fancy and they only used charms instead of enchantments everywhere else. I was a little distracted the last time I was here.”

“Hmm, I suppose so.” Xavier began circling the area, clearly taking in the structure of the residual magic before approaching any closer. “The traces of magic here are… intense.”

“This was the epicenter of the ritual, not to mention where I fought Gloria and near where Frankie fought Helena. The ritual had enough magic in it to start causing reactions in the physical plane once roused. If it hadn’t gotten channeled away before it collapsed, this place would be the center of a magical fallout zone.”

“Explain the channeling again,” Drika ordered.

She was watching Xavier more than anything. Quinn wondered if she was using her magic to piggyback off of his senses. Essence mages like Xavier had the best ability to see the raw nature of magic and its shapes. Mental mages dealt mostly with thoughts, feelings, and other people. Quinn hadn’t seen her casting, but a practiced mage could hide the casting of most low level effects.

“Phenalope had the ritual’s power raised and was beginning to take it into herself when she was killed. That took out the center of the ritual. I’m not sure why it didn’t collapse and kill us all right then, but a moment later, Riordan slipped into her place in the magical structure and took over the ritual. His body was still unconscious and tied to the tree, so bear in mind that what I’m talking about happened in the spirit realm, where there was a reflection of the ritual anchor on the tree spirit. I could only understand the broad strokes from this side.”

Quinn paused, trying to gather his words when he was interrupted by Riordan.

“The tree held the ritual together,” Riordan grumbled, still standing across the clearing from them, but clearly hearing everything because of his shifter senses, “It helped slot me in and funnel everything, which was damned good given how unstable that mountain of power had gotten. Phenalope’s ghost wouldn’t let go until the ritual tore her to shreds. Her death left a hole in the Veil. I shoved the magic through that. It seemed like the option least likely to hurt anyone by accident.”

Quinn had wondered how Riordan had managed to get beyond the Veil from where he was at that moment. Phenalope’s death had opened the way.

“And what happened next?” Drika asked, turning so her piercing gaze was on Riordan instead of Xavier or Quinn. She blinked and narrowed her eyes like she was peering through fog.

“Spirit stuff,” Riordan said shortly.

Wow. Quinn had never seen an expression that intense on Drika’s face. She was so affronted, like she couldn’t understand how someone wouldn’t give her a proper explanation when asked.

Riordan held up a hand to stem off the storm brewing inside her. “I’m not just being flippant. I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with a spirit, but fuck, greater spirits are different. There isn’t words for what happened next and I certainly didn’t consciously ask for any of it. But the spirit took my soul and did something and drained the death corruption left behind from channeling the ritual right out of me. Everything I know says that should be impossible and I lack the training to hazard a real guess.”

“You weren’t a shaman before this, right?” Xavier piped up, his expression far more curious than judging.

“Nope. Just a shifter. But when greater spirits give you gifts, you don’t say no. You take it and you figure out what the hell you are meant to do with it,” Riordan explained with a sigh. “I’m still working on that second half.”

Drika grumbled, clearly less than thrilled with Riordan’s inability to answer her questions fully, “I can see why Vergil dislikes the shifter approach to magic.”

Quinn would have liked to see Drika do better if suddenly tossed into situations like Riordan had just gone through. Well, no, not literally. She would have just been dead. There was something to be said for the shifter approach. They had a culture of magic built around spirits and what was the point in trying to make hard rules for entities that would just ignore it?

Riordan didn’t reply to Drika’s comment, but Quinn thought he heard it anyway and was being the Riordan version of diplomatic. Which is to say, he didn’t say what he was likely thinking and no one got punched.

“What more do you guys need to do here?” Riordan asked. “I want to finish what I came here to do.”

“We need to make sure this place doesn’t have lingering dangers,” Adam spoke up. He got extra quiet whenever there were other agents around, likely because he could focus on his primary task of watching Quinn with the backup around, but when he did speak, Quinn listened.

Riordan just growled and went back to studying the outside of the clearing. Mark joined him and began talking to him too quietly for Quinn’s human ears to hear at this distance. Maudy stood between the pair and the agents, looking as stern as she could.

Quinn felt oddly excluded. Not part of the shifters. Not really part of the agents either.

Still, he had a job to do. Quinn liked the magical parts of his job, even if they often came with tragedy. He joined Xavier and looked over the scattered objects. They were things like little goddess statues and an incense burner made out of ivory or bone. Creepy stuff, though Quinn had no room to talk. He had bone and sinew charms in his own pockets.

“How much of a mess is it?” Quinn asked.

“You were right about the charms,” Xavier replied. “They had something complex but crudely done on the items, probably as part of the ritual. It’s been broken, so it’s just lingering scraps of magic now, but that’s still impressive for a death mage cabal. Were any of them formally trained before they became death mages?”

Quinn shrugged. “We didn’t get that far into the investigation. I honestly don’t know enough about the backgrounds of our three death mages to know, but they seemed like ordinary women who jumped into the deep end of death magic really quickly. Which begs the question of how they got their spells then.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for anything that looks like it would hold a spell record. I hope we don’t have a sneaky death mage going around training apprentices.”

Quinn wouldn’t have thought that a possibility until this case. Something about this felt off, differing from the typical progression of a death mage in his experience. And he was about as much an expert on death mages as anyone in North America.

Death magic wasn’t hard, though it did require the correct combination of sacrifice and desire and, for those who didn’t already possess magic, a medium to bridge the gap between the caster and the released power. This normally took the form of a ritual or chant or sometimes an object like a knife. Mages had it even easier, just needing to reach out and grab the death magic that was released and manipulate it, their own magic becoming the bridge between the sacrifice and the desire.

That meant the barrier to entry was fairly low. Quinn knew that reducing the number of death mages was one argument for hiding the existence of magic, because not believing in magic was one of the best ways of keeping amoral people from taking that route.

And once someone was a death mage, then they were usually starting from scratch, unless they were part of a rare coven or had an equally rare mentor or were a mage of another sort before learning death magic. Death mages weren’t the most selfless and communal sorts. That meant a slow ramp up in most cases.

These three women, normal humans with no mentor in sight, had jumped right in the deep end, working off of the research of previous death mages. How had that happened?

“I really hope that isn’t the case, some death mage mastermind going all supervillain,” Quinn said softly, “But whatever is going on, I’m pretty sure it’s bigger than just this cult.”