Riordan scrambled in the dirt, pushing himself up. It took three tries to get to his knees and he panted harshly. His knife lay a few feet away, but the first thing Riordan had to deal with was his shoulder. He grabbed his left wrist, ignoring the strangely warm rope once he was sure it wasn’t going to move more, and pulled the whole arm straight forward.

Riordan muffled another yell behind gritted teeth as the joint popped back into position with a fresh flood of pain and a scrape of bone on bone. Relief flooded as the sharp pain faded into the ache of overstrained ligaments and muscles. His healing would take care of that eventually. Once he’d healed up from all the other worse injuries. All the activity had flaked the drying blood off his arms, but the angry red lines still traced up his wrists.

That reminded Riordan of Daniel once more and he scooped up his knife as he turned. He had planned to cut Daniel down while he was still up the branch and lower him down. The clingy rope had clearly canned that plan. Fortunately, their kidnappers had been lazy after dragging them all the way out here and Daniel wasn’t much further off the ground than was needed for his hands to dangle freely below his head. Unfortunately, that still added another two feet or more to his height. His body was going to hate him for this, even if his heart pushed him on.

Riordan backed up and then ran a few steps before leaping up. He caught the rope with his left arm just above Daniel’s feet, nearly re-dislocating it. He slashed the rope with the knife in his other hand, severing it in just two swings. They both tumbled to the ground, Riordan using the swing from his jump to land just past Daniel rather than on top of him.

He took another moment to pull himself together as his body screamed in pain from his growing list of aches, strained muscles and cracked bones. The shouts from earlier were coming closer, combined with the noise of a barking dog. Fucking hell. It really was too much to hope that anyone staying close enough to this tree to have heard him wouldn’t be involved in this shit. He was running out of time fast.

Riordan spared another quick moment to cut strips off of Daniel’s shirt to wrap his wrists tight and fast, ignoring the way the cut rope wriggled its way around Daniel’s legs. The knife went back into its hidden boot sheath. The man breathed shallowly and his heart beat erratically. Riordan had a narrow window to get him to a hospital and he had no fucking clue where he was. They’d been just north of Cadillac when they had been grabbed and it couldn’t have been more than two or three hours since this nightmare started, judging from the lingering glow of twilight visible in the sky through the trees. This whole area was small towns with large spaces of woods and rolling dune hills in between. Between being unsure how long he’d been unconscious between his scraps of memory and not knowing how far the kidnappers drove before switching to dragging them, that was still a lot of possibilities with no real landmarks.

Kneeling, Riordan hauled Daniel into a fireman’s carry over his shoulders and stood. He stumbled a few steps as he got the man settled. A quick look at the bits of sky helped Riordan judge rough directions. The shouts were closing in from the east, which just solidified what he already knew he had to do. He’d stayed away from shores of Lake Michigan for a reason, but just because he wasn’t welcome doesn’t mean that wasn’t where he needed to go.

He took off at a slow jog, wincing at how much even that pace jostled Daniel. Behind him, Riordan felt the tree spirit watching him. The rope on his arm felt like a brand. He hoped it was the noise he made and not the magic that alerted the searchers. People he could outrun, outsmart, or outfight, as needed. Magic, not so much. He never had an affinity that could be used for actual spells and didn’t know much more than he’d picked up running missions with his old team or from dealing with the occasional shaman.

The ground shifted under his feet as he ran. Michigan soil ran to sandy, especially as you got closer to the lakes and their dunes. He tried to avoid the stretches of knee-high ferns, sticking closer to the dense trees. Dodging tree roots sucked, but the fern stems snapped when stepped on and left a clear trail. His body ached, lungs burning as sweat rose on his skin. Even with the sun going down, the air remained hot but mercifully not too humid. The breeze came from the side and a bit to the front as he ran. Not ideal with the dogs he could hear barking behind him.

Shadows grew deeper as the sun sunk lower and Riordan avoided the clearings. His eyes shifted, turning pure black even as the shadows pulled back. He needed some way to break the trail. If he was alone… Daniel groaned weakly from where he dangled across Riordan’s shoulders. Riordan tightened his grip and soldiered on. He wasn’t going to let go of the young man until there was no choice or chance.

The pursuit behind him slowed as they hit the darker forest. Riordan could pick out bits of words and the flicker of faint flashlight beams when he hit the top of a ridge. He paused long enough to catch his breath, trying to get a count for what he was running from. In the distance, he could see the distinctive crown of the giant blackgum tree, light flashing off its leaves briefly as someone tilted a light up from below it. That certainly solidified the idea that these people were involved in the death magic in some way.

From the way Jimmy and Kent had talked, they didn’t seem to know about magic themselves, at least not really. They hadn’t felt like mages either, whether natural born or a death mage. Their boss though, whoever it was who set up that macabre ritual, they knew about magic. As a death mage, they could either be all theoretical knowledge until the harvest of power finished or they could have used some of their victims to give themselves a smaller pool of personal mana to work with while they finish the larger working. That was the thing about death mages: all of their magic was stolen.

Riordan wished he knew more about death mages. They were both common and rare. Any idiot could manage to stumble on the power available from a death and channel it into some effect. He’d seen it happen on battlefields, though it was harder without a ritual effect from what he knew. Most of the energy was wasted. It still led some people to go down a path of bloodlust and power, sometimes without even understanding what was happening. People who could feel magic already wouldn’t draw from the death energy accidentally, but regular humans didn’t have that protection. They also had a harder time reaching out for the energy or war would have reduced the world to corrupted death mages ages ago.

The rare death mages were those who knew what they were doing. The ones who had studied rituals and spells and knew how to substitute death energy to fuel complex magical spells. The vision shared by the tree spirit showed enough skill to overwhelm and bind a powerful spirit to the core of a major spell. Riordan couldn’t fight a mage like that, especially not when already bound to their spell.

Rope might bind his body, but that was just the physical manifestation of a magical effect. The further he got from the tree, the more Riordan was aware of the black connection forged between his spirit and that killing tree. No matter how far he ran, he still hung from its boughs.

Riordan shook his head to clear those thoughts. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about that currently, so he pushed it out of his mind. Sweat trickled down the side of his face, threatening to sting his eyes. He raised a hand to swipe it away and missed spotting the root before he tripped over it. His tired body refused to correct balance fast enough, especially as Daniel began to slide from his shoulders. Riordan went down hard. He yanked Daniel forward to his chest as he fell, wrapping around the smaller man as much as he could as they rolled down the rest of the hill.

They came to a stop when Riordan slammed into a tree, re-breaking his cracked ribs on that side. He nearly bit his tongue as he clenched his teeth against another cry of pain. Fortunately, for some really crappy definitions of fortunate, his ability to react to pain was going numb with overload after the day he’d had. Riordan breathed through the new rush of pain, holding still to give his healing a chance to stabilize his ribs.

In the stillness, Riordan heard only his own racing heart and panting breaths. It took a second for that silence to pierce his fatigue, but as soon as it did, Riordan rolled to his knees, clutching Daniel tightly to his chest.

“No, no, no,” he muttered in a desperate mantra as he laid the young man out on the loam and pressed his ear to his chest, as if it was his hearing that was at fault for the lack of heartbeat. “No, damn it!”

Riordan hadn’t attempted CPR in ages, but he dredged up what he could of that old training. He found the place where the ribs joined together on Daniel’s bony chest, moving up enough that he hopefully wouldn’t snap the small bone at the base of the breastbone. He’d broken that before and it had pierced a lung. He never forgot about it after that.

Overlapping his hands, Riordan began to press in a rhythm that he thought seemed like a heartbeat, about one a second or a bit faster. Actually, since he was feeling his own racing heart, he was definitely going faster. How hard was too hard to press? Or not hard enough? Human bodies were fragile but it hardly mattered if Daniel’s heart refused to beat.

He tried to count compressions, but he couldn’t focus. Time felt warped. Every second passed slowly, inescapably, and Riordan breathed slower as if that would slow down time itself. He didn’t know if he’d been doing this long enough or too long, but he paused to tilt Daniel’s head back, pinching his nose as Riordan sealed his mouth with his own. Daniel’s lips tasted faintly of cigarettes and chloroform. Riordan breathed the air from his lungs into Daniel’s, feeling the expansion of his chest with each forceful exhale. The air flowed out weakly each time Riordan pulled back to inhale, lacking the motion of a living body.

Three deep breaths and Riordan went back to compressions. Air in the lungs wasn’t much help if blood wasn’t circulating to make use of it. The makeshift bandages on Daniel’s wrists were sticky with blood the young man couldn’t afford to lose. His heart stayed silent.

Riordan did another round of breaths, feeling a growing chill to Daniel’s skin. His ears caught an echo of indistinguishable voices bouncing off the hills around their current hollow. Pursuit was getting closer. Daniel didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

Riordan went back to compressions. His battered body screamed quietly in the back of his mind at the continuous motion. If he was human like Daniel, then Riordan knew he would have been dead too.

Dead. Daniel was dead.