Kimberlee had closed the sliding door when she left, but hadn’t bothered to lock it. Most people in these rural sorts of places only locked up if they were going to be gone for a long time and sometimes not even then. Standing up on his back legs, Riordan put a paw through the handle and threw his weight behind it, pushing the door open slightly. From there, he stuck his head and shoulders into the new gap and wiggled until the door opened enough to let Riordan inside.

 

The presence of death magic this close to the killing tree had to be related. He couldn’t tell what the spell on the statues was supposed to do, much less how someone would go about unraveling it on a magical level. That left only one tactic really.

 

Riordan slammed into the end table holding the mother statue, sending the table and everything on it flying. The sturdy bronze dented the wooden floor, but took no real damage itself. A glass bowl full of shiny marbles and one of the other smaller figurines shattered, scattering shards and marbles over the floor. Moving the statue out of alignment with the others weakened the lines around the statues though and Riordan saw Daniel make a long, slow blink, still very out of it but rousing.

 

He knocked over the next little table, the crone statue sliding across the floor with a puff of feathers and spilled sand to go with it. The spell structure in the room wavered. The maiden had a vase of flowers that splattered satisfyingly onto the ground, water puddling to seep into the rug slowly. The warrior crashed down hard, two different ornamental knives and another smashed figurine as company.

 

The spell strands in the air twisted and then winked out, leaving fragments in the air for a moment like smudges on a glass pane. The shadows still played across the surfaces of the statues, somehow moving even as they maintained their patterns. Daniel snapped back to himself with a gasp, rocketing away through the sliding doors and out onto the porch. He stared back at the living room with a mix of confusion and horror.

 

You okay? Riordan thought at Daniel carefully.

 

Daniel shook himself and forced his eyes over to meet Riordan’s own. “Yeah,” the ghost said softly. He cleared his throat and then continued at a more normal volume. “Sorry. What is that?”

 

More bad magic. I tried to warn you to be careful before you ran off, since death magic can see and touch ghosts. Riordan looked around as he talked, searching for something to use to safely damage or move the statues. He wasn’t sure what touching those things would do to him. Possibly nothing, since the hapless Kimberlee seemed fine, but possibly any number of nasty insidious things. His experience with enchanted objects was basically nill. It wasn’t really a thing for shifters.

 

When combined with the criteria of being usable by a badger, Riordan didn’t see anything that would work properly. He’d have to shift to handle it and then shift back to cause more animal mayhem to hide his meddling under too much damage to notice.

 

“Sorry,” Daniel apologized again. He looked contrite and still wouldn’t come back inside the house, though talking through the open door was fine, especially since it wasn’t like either of them were using regular voices. “I guess, I was hoping for a distraction and to show that being a ghost could be useful. I didn’t want to think about what it means that magic is real. I have a lot to learn.”

 

Riordan let his human side step forward before responding and then winced, having forgotten that he’d been covered in mud when he’d shifted last. The same magic that let him preserve his clothing also preserved the mud in pristine mucky gloriousness. He’d have to cause one hell of a mess to hide his traces for sure.

 

His voice sounded rough when he spoke, “I need to learn a lot more too. This stuff ain’t shifter magic and I’m mostly working on random bits of knowledge mixed with rumor and stories.”

 

As soon as Riordan switched to human form, the shadow threads around the statues twitched and reached towards him. They had almost no range without their formation, but that definitely made him doubt that they were benign towards humans, even if Kimberlee didn’t show any outward effects from her exposure.

 

With proper hands, Riordan grabbed oven mitts to keep from leaving prints and then one of the fireplace tongs. He also untied the rifle from his belt, setting it on the table for now rather than having it dangling and potentially getting in the way. He contemplated his options and decided to try different things with the four different statues. For the first one, he picked it up with the tongs and then headed for the door.

 

“Coming through,” Riordan warned and Daniel happily moved aside. Riordan watched for changes in the statue as it was moved further away from the set, noticing that the shadow lines became tighter to it and more stationary until they ceased to move at all about a hundred feet from the house. For now, he just left that one there as a control.

 

On returning, Riordan stopped on the porch to look more closely at Daniel. The ghost had already been pale and translucent, but now he was full-on see-through and looked exhausted. A thrill of fear ran through Riordan. He had no idea how to treat an injured or sick ghost. Could they even recover without help? He remembered how fuzzy some of the other ghosts had been and took some comfort in the fact that all of Daniel’s features were still sharp, just faded.

 

“How are you feeling?” Riordan asked gruffly.

 

“Honestly? Not great,” Daniel ran a hand through his messy hair with a grimace. “I feel drained and nauseous and like, can ghosts even throw up?”

 

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Riordan answered honestly. He didn’t think ghosts ate anything, but they also mimicked many behaviors from when they had a physical body, so he could see it going either way. “Just… rest and try to see if it starts to get better. I need to deal with this and we need to get out of here before the owner returns.”

 

“Right. Resting. I can do that.” Daniel floated up to sit on the railing, one knee tucked up under his chin. “I’ll try not to cause any more trouble.”

 

“Hey,” Riordan interjected sharply, surprising himself with the intensity of his reaction as he cut Daniel off, “If I don’t get to blame myself for this shit, neither do you. We’re both way out of our depths here and reeling.”

 

His vehemence startled Daniel, but there was no doubting Riordan’s sincerity at least. The ghost nodded in agreement, his wide eyes fixed on Riordan. A faint blush hid against the dusky tone of Riordan’s cheeks as he turned and went back through the sliding door without another word.

 

The next statue went into the fire inside the stove. The embers were nice and hot, glowing under the burning logs. Riordan shoved the statue in there and closed the stove door again to concentrate the heat. He’d check on it in a bit.

 

He grabbed a fire poker for the next experiment. Riordan knocked a statue into the corner to keep it from rolling without needing to touch it. Bronze was a fairly soft metal, especially when compared to an iron poker. Especially with his enhanced strength, scoring deep marks into the surface of the statue went fairly smoothly. He tried disrupting the shadow lines with the gouges.

 

At first, the shadow lines continued as if the statue hadn’t been damaged, tracing through empty air over the marks. As he made more and more of them though, the lines began to vibrate and shift, as if trying to route around the damage while also needing to stay in position. Riordan watched in fascination as the magical agitation increased, flipping the statue to get to more lines to disrupt.

 

“Riordan!” Daniel called out a warning, even as he flew towards Riordan. “Cover!”

 

The order was unclear but some old half-remembered instincts kicked in at that word and Riordan threw himself over the back of the couch, hitting the cushions and then rolling to the floor. When the statue he’d been carving up exploded a second later, that saved him. The bronze shrapnel imbedded itself in the couch, floor, ceiling, and wall. Cracks littered the double-paned glass of the nearest sliding door, though it didn’t shatter.

 

Black energy ripped out of the remains of the statue with a shriek, lashing out around it in a small magical explosion to reflect the physical one. Fortunately, both Daniel and Riordan remained far enough away to not be affected by the burst before it dissipated. A weird stench of burnt metal and rot lingered in the air.

 

Burnt metal. Riordan rolled to his feet and ran to the stove, flinging it open with a mitted hand, worried he’d see another statue on the verge of explosion, with the added issue of whether the stove could handle it or would concentrate it. The statue in the fire wasn’t vibrating like the other one though. It melted slowly, its form dragging the magic with it as it liquified. It seemed to be bleeding the spell off in hisses of foul energy rather than trying to hold itself together to the point of catastrophic failure.

 

On the downside, because he hadn’t put the statue inside anything when he shoved it in the fire, the melting bronze was also stifling the fire as it slumped and spread. Part of him wanted to shove another statue in there before the whole fire went out, but they had been made to work together. The idea of the spells interacting as they melted together into one blob was horrifying. Riordan closed the stove door.

 

He leaned against the wall, letting out a deep exhale and surveying the damage. So much for making it look like an animal had gotten in. Well, he might as well lean into it at this point. Grabbing one of the ornamental daggers in his mitted hand, Riordan tried not to feel utterly ridiculous as he carved a crappy impression of a tree with stick figure bodies hanging from it into the wall. He finished with the word KARMA in all caps above it. He had no idea if Kimberlee was involved in the killings directly, but the message would probably make it where it needed to go.

 

The end result looked just as ridiculous as he feared, but Riordan shrugged and stuck the knife into the wall near the picture. It would do. He looked at the remaining intact statue in the room.

 

With the only other intact statue out in the yard, this one too had gone quiescent. In a fit of inspiration, he used the tongs to shove it into the pot of steaming water on the top of the stove. He wasn’t sure that was hot enough to melt it, but it was probably worth a try. He was running out of time and risking another explosion would be less than ideal.

 

He put the tongs and poker away before tossing the oven mitts into the stove fire. The statue inside continued melting smoothly, pooling off to one side. He grabbed the purloined rifle off the table before heading onto the porch. Wading through the creek had drenched it. He’d been too tired to care at the time. He needed to either clean it or toss it. After a quick inspection, he thought it should be able to shoot, though misfire or jamming chance increased.

 

The magazine held five rounds and felt full. Riordan shouldered the rifle, lining up his shot. The bang echoed off the hills, startling any nearby birds into flight, followed by a quieter ting as the bullet hit bronze out in the yard. He breathed in and out, emptying his lungs and steadying his hands. He fired four more times in quick succession.

 

About the time the fourth bullet hit the statue, Riordan could hear it vibrating, even from a hundred feet away. He hit the porch as it exploded, just in case any shrapnel made it that far. He didn’t hear any hit nearby, but a quick glance showed that Daniel had also wisely taken cover, finally going back inside to put the glass doors between him and the explosion.

 

Tying the rifle back to his belt for now, Riordan gestured Daniel closer with a jerk of his head. “Let’s go.”

 

He started down the stairs, trusting Daniel to follow him.