His desire to contribute pushed on Riordan and he shifted back to human, still sitting at the head of the bed covered in Quinn’s supplies. His increased bulk looked cramped in the space compared to being curled up as a honey badger, but he didn’t move, both because he didn’t want to knock over Quinn’s neatly sorted piles and because he had some personal space in that corner. Lucinda startled at the reminder of his presence, looking about ready to start her aborted scolding, but Riordan ignored her in favor of talking to Quinn. 

“She had two spells memorized by rote to the point she could quickly cast them in combat,” Riordan started, keeping his voice to a quiet rumble in hopes of not surprising Quinn while he was drawing. “One was a brute force blast, one that would have rotted physical flesh rapidly. The other was a compulsion spell. I’ve also seen evidence that she has mental manipulations enchanted onto statues belonging to some of her followers and the new death mage we encountered opted for a compulsion on Mark as well. So she’s got a leaning for both physical destruction and mental control, which could be what made her choose to mess with the proxy ghost spell after encountering us. At least, I’m assuming she made it recently. I feel like she would have used it sooner otherwise.”

To Riordan’s surprise, it was Agent Ahlgren who answered him and even more, actually agreed with him. The agent was stiff and aloof, mostly sticking to listening unless required by his professional duties. “That is likely. At the rate of escalation currently reported, the death mage begins to find it harder to hold back on using their resources, such as the proxy ghost, while also wanting to hoard them.”

Quinn leaned back, studying his diagram critically. He made a few more adjustments and then set the chalk aside, coming back to the bed to get the next set of supplies. “What else did you learn about her, Riordan?”

Riordan had enough experience to recognize the debrief for what it was, but he appreciated the gentle approach Quinn was taking. Compared to Lucinda’s style of interrogation and disapproval, Quinn’s genuine curiosity combined with the physical and social distance, his attention not focused solely on Riordan and his answers, loosened the barriers enough for Riordan to speak. He tried not to notice Mark grabbing the notepad from his seat on the other bed.

“She introduced herself as Phenalope,” Riordan started, trying to pull out the details from the mess of memories. Being in a combat state always both hyper-focused Riordan on some things while jettisoning other important facts as less important to immediate survival. “It wasn’t her birth name, but she claimed it was her true name now. She hadn’t known about natural mages and I don’t think she understood either the spirit realm or shifters at all, yet she was clearly educated by rote, not inventing spells from scratch. She wanted to use me on her path to godhood. And she was a militant feminist. I can’t tell if her rhetoric was always warped there or if becoming a death mage led to her attitude towards the expendability of men.”

He followed up those observations with as much physical detail about her appearance as he could remember and with bits of her spell casting, piecing together words and gestures into incomplete versions that might reveal their origins. Quinn led the questioning for most of it, allowing Riordan to provide a general sketch of the encounter without judgment or direction, but Lucinda and Ahlgren jumped on him once he finished, forcing Riordan to go over it another two times with a fine-tooth comb as they asked a million questions about little details that meant nothing to Riordan but clearly revealed more about her magical background to the more trained members of the group.

Agent Ahlgren also pulled out as many details about her goals and philosophy as he could, going back to Riordan’s earlier encounters with Phenalope’s group to begin building a picture of the inner and outer circles of the organization and their beliefs. Maudy got in on that questioning, though her focus was more on what their tactics seemed to be more mundanely, which made sense for the security concern. Riordan grew more and more restless as the intense questioning continued, but answered as completely and honestly as he could since this would form the basis for the agents’ investigation into the group.

Throughout it all, Quinn kept working on the proxy ghost. Once he had the diagram set up, he’d begun to burn a selection of the shaman’s herbs mixed with powder from his own kit that made it more smokey, to the point that he disabled the smoke alarm in the room before continuing. Once the smoke rose, he trapped it rather than letting it dissipate. Then he began directing the smoke to different parts of the ghost, letting it mingle with the shadows of the defensive robe. The smoke took on a black sheen as it drained the spell, becoming air-borne death energy contained in the diagram. 

The whole thing made everyone nervous and it was clear none of them were getting more sleep any time soon. Maudy took a break when the discussion shifted again to cover the resources that the Sleeping Bear Pack might be able to provide to the Department of Magic agents as part of their mundane investigations. The guard went upstairs and returned with the rest of the agents’ belongings and then packed up whatever else was in this motel room too, aside from the things Quinn was specifically using. Once the proxy was gone, they were going to check out of the motel early and return to pack lands. The presence of that ghost compromised any security at this location, while hopefully confusing their trail and not endangering anyone.

Hopefully. Riordan was just too tired to plan clearly himself and couldn’t bring himself to care.

Daniel arrived to sit next to Riordan, though he nearly fled again when he saw the way the black smoke began to dissolve the proxy ghost next. Riordan stared in fascinated horror, watching the shell of ghostly flesh melt into vapor, the smoke getting blacker and thicker. He wouldn’t have been able to stand it if the ghost had reacted in any way, but Zeren hadn’t been kidding about the completeness of its dehumanization. The proxy merely stood there, unmoving and unconcerned, as its arm fell off and poofed into smoke.

“That is really disturbing,” Daniel whispered to Riordan as the process neared its finish.

Riordan nodded. “It really is.”

Despite their low volume, Quinn apparently heard them. The death magic specialist shot an apologetic glance over at them. “Sorry,” he offered, one eye still on the dissolution of the proxy, “I’m not used to working around other people who can see the effects of that method. It really is the most efficient way, if the target is already beyond pain.”

“And you really need to be efficient,” Riordan replied without thinking, “Because of the way that the death corruption builds up in you.”

Quinn winced and Riordan wished he could take back his words. Rubbing Quinn’s face in the likely-lethal side effects of his life’s calling was unkind and unhelpful, if no less true.

Still, all Quinn said was, “Quite so.” Which just made Riordan feel more like shit.

Even in his fatigue-fogged state, Riordan noticed the way Agent Ahlgren’s frown deepened at the corners, a tightening of his muscles that Riordan was quickly coming to read as displeasure with Quinn. He had to wonder how much Ahlgren understood about everything Quinn did. Obviously he was an expert in death magic too, from the outside perspective of identifying and stopping it, but he obviously couldn’t see the ghosts. It was a rare talent to see ghosts, especially outside of those with death magic. Even those who could gain the ability kept it quiet if they did. The assumption was almost always that they’d gotten the power the easy way.

He wondered if Frankie continued being able to see ghosts after that unintentional jaunt into the tree spirit’s glade. She was old enough and wise enough to be able to appreciate a new ability if it did stick around, but the lack of consent in the matter made her salty. That woman did not need more salt. She was already dry enough to soak up an entire ocean.

Riordan watched the shell of a ghost melt into a puddle of oily black smoke, feeling off-balance and empty. That deep think about his priorities in life was becoming more and more urgent if this was the sort of shit that was going to be normal. Except Riordan couldn’t even be sure about that much. His whole life was up in the air, not the least of which was whether he would survive this experience at all. He kept swinging between confident hope and the equally confident surety that this was going to be the death of him, complete with the acceptance that he wouldn’t mind dying if it served a good purpose.

When the last of the ghost faded into smoke, Quinn stepped forward into his diagram. The black cloying smog immediately rushed him, clinging to his skin like a diaphanous veil, trailing behind every movement. Riordan sat up, highly concerned by this development.

“Quinn…,” he started, unsure what to say without sounding like he thought the man was incompetent or crazy. 

“It’s alright,” Quinn reassured, beginning a series of all-body casting gestures that looked like dancing in slow motion. Riordan couldn’t look away, equal parts enraptured by the strangely beautiful image and horrified at the knowledge of what he was truly looking at. That smoke was mostly composed of melted ghost at this point, plus rancid death energy, radiating a hunger and despair Riordan could feel from his seat on the bed. 

Riordan drew some comfort from the fact that Ahlgren could see the black smoke, yet didn’t seem concerned that it clung to Quinn in such a manner. Across the room, Lucinda looked disgusted, Maudy looked wary, and Mark looked fascinated. Riordan hoped that was just a general extension of the young shaman’s love of knowledge and not a more sinister draw to death arts. He knew he was too tired from the way that his brain spun out images of horrors and disasters, waking nightmares tugging on the edges of his conscious attention.

Fortunately, the smoke seemed to lessen as Quinn moved. Tracking the flow of the magic through the moving, obscuring density of death energy was a challenge, but slowly Riordan saw that the magic was separating and being absorbed by items Quinn wore. The death energy itself was going into a pendant shaped like a bird skull, its empty eyes practically glowing black with the sheer amount of it. A strange gray smoke, likely the vaporized remains of the ghost itself, filtered into a green and red stone set into Quinn’s choker. The death corruption hung in the air, adhered to the physical elements of the smoke, sinking low as it became distilled down to a greasy sludge. Quinn directed the sludge into a glass bottle marked with engraved symbols that flashed with sparks of purple light. It took Riordan a moment to remember that purple was how spatial magic appeared to him, meaning that bottle had likely been charmed or enchanted by Ahlgren to contain and isolate the corruption.

As much of the sludge that made it into the bottle, some still stained Quinn’s skin in patches of black sheen. His movements gained a stiff tension, as if the mage was pushing through syrup with each gesture now. The smoke fought him, not wanting to let Quinn finish cutting it off into its three separate receptacles. Thin threads ran from the small stubborn smear in the air in front of Quinn to each one, quivering as it resisted his spell.

“Zeren,” Quinn gasped out, “Cut the threads.”