Events had rapidly spiraled out of Riordan’s control or understanding. Daniel being there was barely understandable. He had a connection with this ritual, same as Riordan, and had come through Riordan’s gateway somehow. Seeing a man decked out in full shifter spirit mantle, quills spread wide and eyes dark, and a certain toga-wearing patchwork ghost come out of nowhere to help was a bit too much to process quickly.

Fortunately, that same confusion was multiplied for Phenalope. Riordan doubted she even understood where they were in a greater sense, just that she had power here. She probably assumed it was a space created by the ritual or belonging to the dead. Seeing another shifter shaman and the weirdest ghost Riordan had ever heard of joining them in this fray threw her off, making her wary. When Mark and Zeren attacked, her wariness turned to near panic.

Hell, when Zeren attacked, Riordan tried not to panic. The ghost’s strange black stitches unwove along some of the seams in their flesh and they… unfolded. Riordan couldn’t figure out how any of the body parts of that ghostly horror worked as Zeren enlarged into a strange combination of an army of individuals and a single ghastly maw with limbs for teeth and too many eyes. Mark halted, scrambling back from his own ally and staring. Riordan didn’t blame him in the least.

Phenalope fled.

Her body remained where it was, but all the features that were hers blinked out, leaving only that crude ghost form he’d first seen inside the dark robe. Zeren’s grasping teeth latched onto it, pulling it into their strange mouth whole, robe and all. A second later, they spit it out, disgust clear in all the many mismatched eyes. The featureless ghost flopped into the muck, robe falling in its face as it struggled back to its feet and then stood there motionlessly.

“Ugh,” Zeren’s voice was an echoing flat cacophony coming from many throats and highly unsettling, even without the added pressure of the horror space they stood in. “I forget how terrible death magic tastes every single time.”

Riordan looked at the motionless ghost that had embodied Phenalope here, but it lacked even the crude slashes of mouth and eyes it had before. Empty, though who knew for how long. At the sound of a squeak of discomfort, Riordan realized that he was still clutching Daniel in the shelter of his body, spasms of fear and relief causing him to hold too tight, which caused pain to radiate from his damaged left arm even as he crushed his friend. With a conscious act of will, he forced himself to release Daniel and step back, their ropes dragging in the mud but no longer sucking them inward. It took him another second to relax enough to drop his protective aura and even then, he did it mostly because maintaining it would soon become impossible anyway.

Nearby, Mark stared up at the dripping macabre representation of the ritual. “This is what you’ve been dealing with?” he asked, horrified and fascinated in equal measure. His eyes darted to the empty ghost nearby. “I haven’t done much in the spirit realm yet, all of it supervised, but nothing like this… What is that thing?”

“Proxy ghost,” Zeren answered and then they began to recondense. The process looked and sounded even more pleasant than the unfolding, accompanied with groans, wails, and strange squish and sucking noises. They grunted with pain as the black stitches sewed themselves back up again and their simplistic clothing reformed. A new set of mismatched eyes sat on their face now, but the level gaze was all their own regardless.

“What’s that?” Mark asked. 

Riordan was grateful that someone had the capacity to ask. He was both curious and concerned that this information might become critically important, but he was so done after the day and now night he’d just had. His brain worked slowly, slogging through its own mud of fatigue and battle crash, but he tried to attend to Zeren’s answer. Daniel moved to Riordan’s less damaged side, sliding under Riordan’s arm to hold him up. The contact felt strange but Riordan allowed himself the luxury of leaning on someone else, if only for a moment.

“A problem,” Zeren grimaced, the expression decidedly unwelcome on their face. “Proxy ghosts are created via a ritual spell, one of far less power but far more complexity than this killing tree. The mage must create and bind a ghost and then hollow out the essence core of it, setting that aside and leaving a ghostly shell behind. The shell can be used by a death mage to grant them a ghostly body into which they can project their mind, though it appears this mage had projected their whole spirit, which is unusual. It allows them to cast from the proxy as if they were physically there. Since they are there as a ghost only, it’s hard to detect or stop except by someone else with ghost sight. They were invented by a cabal of death mages in Canada which was destroyed seventy years ago.”

“That sounds horrific,” Daniel shuddered, holding a hand to his own ghostly self, possibly imagining being cored like an apple to make just such a puppet.

“It is. The cabals libraries were burned, but at least one student escaped and went on to specialize in crafting with ghosts. That student created me, before Quinn finally stopped him. That proxy ghost is too refined. It’s based on my creator’s work.”

“Who would he have shared that work with?” Riordan asked, finally catching his breath enough to contribute to the conversation. His experience kept him professional and focused even as he tried to wrestle with the idea that Zeren had been created by a death mage, even though that should have been obvious. Riordan really didn’t want to contemplate the sheer amount of suffering that had gone into making that monster, though Zeren had turned out surprisingly sane despite what were clearly the remnants of way too many ghosts literally condensed down and swimming inside their human-shaped body.

Zeren turned to look at him, their eyes deep with dangerous thoughts. “That’s just the problem. No one. He worked alone. The only people who would have access to his work are the investigators who seized it after his termination or someone who has stolen from those same investigators. There is a leak somewhere.”

That was the definition of a serious problem. If the top investigators and troubleshooters for dealing with death mages had a leak bad enough that forbidden techniques were getting out to random death mages, then something very serious was going on. Riordan shuddered at how bad that could get if left unchecked, especially if there was governmental corruption going on at some level of the problem. Or at least a lack of oversight on some essential weakness someone was exploiting.

“Can I trust the agents here?” Riordan asked.

“You can trust Quinn,” Zeren immediately reassured, sincerity flashing in their eyes and bleeding through their voice, even under the flatness that seemed imposed on them. “I am always with him. He is and has always been dedicated to the end of the misuse of death magic. He has not spread it, by either purpose or accident, though I don’t know what happens when it passes beyond his control. I would not think Agent Ahlgren the sort to do so either, but I cannot vouch for him as I can for Quinn.”

“That’s better than nothing,” Riordan sighed. He staggered away from the tree towards where Mark and Zeren stood with the proxy, Daniel supporting him as they moved. “What can we do about it? I don’t like the idea that Phenalope can just pop in and zap people from ghost space and however talented he is, I doubt Quinn can guard a whole pack at once without some serious setup time.”

“Indeed. It needs to be dismantled,” Zeren nodded, gesturing towards the ghost dispassionately. “I may not do so without Quinn’s direct order.”

“He keeps you as a slave?” Daniel gaped, shocked on behalf of his strange fellow ghost.

Zeren immediately quashed that line of reasoning. Riordan was beginning to see the depth of loyalty the expressionless monster held for Quinn. “Obedience was part of my creation. He could not remove it without damaging me further, so he has merely worked out the best set of orders that he can to allow me my freedom. There are limitations, both magically and imposed by the Department for the greater safety. This is one of them.”

Mark moved closer to the proxy ghost, the death muck grumpily sliding off his spiritual armor. Riordan truly saw what Frankie had meant about shaman having a distinct advantage in the spirit realm due to their animal spirit. He would never have been able to craft the armor he wore without it, especially not so easily and naturally. Mark was young and had little experience in the spirit realm by his own admission but wore the armor with that same natural ease, even if his set sported those nasty quills Riordan had seen used so effectively earlier. Riordan wondered what unknown benefits he might be able to draw out of his spirit mantle in this realm if only he better understood how his other half worked spiritually.

“Can we dismantle it somehow, then?” Mark asked, slowly circling the thing with that quiet air of thought he so often exuded. “If you give directions, I know I’d be willing to try, even if my personal well hasn’t fully recovered.”

Zeren didn’t look fully convinced in the capabilities of the two apprentice shaman available to them. Daniel was even less helpful in that regard, for all that he was acclimating to the oppressive aura and starting to follow everything very closely. Riordan thought he might be better at this than Mark on some levels, but he was still a wreck and happy to let Mark take a stab first.

“First, the protective coating must be removed. It is greatly weakened, which I assume is from Riordan’s earlier conflict. I don’t know how you might safely remove death magic without becoming contaminated,” Zeren cautioned, “It might be better to contain it and bring it to Quinn to manage.”

As much as Riordan wanted to argue and just deal with the proxy right now, he knew Zeren was right. His pride wasn’t worth risking any of them getting corrupted and there were other options available to them. He grunted his unhappy assent. “How should we transport it then? I don’t want that thing anywhere near my gateway.”

The ghost grew thoughtful at that. “Let me ponder a moment. Your friends can check your health while I think.”