Riordan was out of time and Daniel wouldn’t breathe. His heart wouldn’t beat. He’d lost too much blood, leaving his body unable to sustain itself without medical or magical help Riordan wasn’t capable of providing. His thin body grew colder as evening fell and the ground leeched lingering heat from his flesh.

Riordan paused mid-compression, hands still pressed against Daniel’s chest as he gazed into those vacant eyes. If it weren’t for the flashes of light from the approaching searchers, he would have kept going until his own body failed. Riordan had seen death too often. A few hours ago, this young man was genuinely smiling at a cranky drifter, chatting about his hopes for his future. Now Riordan had to stop CPR if he wanted time to hide Daniel’s body from death mages.

Not that it really mattered. Riordan’s black eyes fell on the rope solidly, magically, knotted around Daniel’s leg. Just like the rope around Riordan’s arm. Power flowed back along the invisible rope that tied Daniel back to that damned tree, his death seeping into the ritual bit by bit as his body eased away from life for good.

Rising to his feet abruptly, Riordan paused, pressing a hand to his aching ribs. Fuck it. They weren’t getting any more from Daniel than this. They weren’t getting his body. Riordan cast around the dark forest for anywhere he could hide a body. Given how the searchers were still generally on his trail, he had to be leaving either a scent or a magical trace. He couldn’t help the magical trace, though he noticed that the connection from Daniel’s body to tree seemed weaker as his death energy drained away. Scent, though…

There weren't any convenient rivers nearby. He’d passed a few pitiful ponds full of duck weed, but he’d just leave a wet trail for someone to follow from whatever side he came out of one of those, not to mention a trail through the duck weed. The most he could do right now was confuse the trail and hope it was enough.

And he could best do that in his other form.

Riordan knelt next to Daniel, straightening out his gangly body. Leaving the body exposed or up a tree meant the dogs could possibly find it and that scavengers definitely would. Putting him underwater would lead to a weird bloated decay, even if it kept him from the worst of the summer heat. Riordan wished he could set up a fire or take Daniel home to that aunt he mentioned near Traverse City. Instead, he was going to settle for burying him. His fingers brushed against the cord of a simple necklace Daniel wore. Riordan tugged it off and tossed it around his own neck as a poor substitute for the body he couldn’t afford to carry.

Shifter magic relied on instinct and intent. Riordan never consciously thought about how he did what he did. It was just part of him. Inside his soul was a place that housed his animal. Riordan called it forth, letting the shift wash over him. In some books he read, drawn from human imagination, the shift ripped the body apart and rearranged it painfully, wrecking clothing. That made sense if the animal side of a shifter was hidden inside their body, Riordan supposed, but since their forms were just different aspects of their souls and magic, it felt more like his human side stepped back from reality and his badger stepped forward.

The world lit up with smells and sounds, all far lower to the ground. Honey badgers were usually the size of a smaller dog, but shifters tended to be larger than their natural counterparts. Riordan stretched his low-slung body and long neck, tail flicking out and claws digging into the loose soil. He was over three feet long, with another eight inches of tail, a white-and-gray strip of fur covering his back from forehead to tail tip and the rest of him a coarse black.

Badgers dig fast. Hell, a badger could make a hole through asphalt in two minutes if needed. Riordan’s long digging claws tore into the side of the hill. He might not be designed as a killing machine like some common shifter animals, but he was tough as hell and more useful outside of fights. A pang of memory hit him of arguing with the Maina twins about how badgers were better than hyenas. He buried those feelings under the flying dirt.

It was damned good that Daniel was thin and Riordan larger than normal for a honey badger because he had a burrow big enough to fit the corpse in a matter of minutes. Even with the sound muffling of the hills, he could hear the clomp of boots nearing. Riordan shifted back to human long enough to move Daniel’s body next to the burrow. He pulled Daniel’s shirt off, already torn and blood stained from his attempts to make bandages earlier. Shifting back to badger once he had the young man staged as best as possible left Riordan growling and shaking his head in irritation. Shifting might not hurt, but it took energy and exhaustion tugged at his battered body, especially since shifting so often was slowing his healing.

With a mental apology, Riordan grabbed Daniel’s shoulder with his sharp teeth and dragged the body into the burrow as deep as possible. He shoved the body into an awkwardly curled pile where he’d made a wider den before racing out of the hole once more. His little legs moved quickly as Riordan dragged Daniel’s shirt all over the area, ripping off scraps and flinging them in inconvenient places all over the hollow. He left animal tracks all over his earlier human trail.

Once the shirt was distributed, it was time for the final piece. Riordan was glad there weren’t witnesses for this. Sometimes his human side got grumpy about animal practicality. He went back to where he’d done CPR with Daniel since that would be the strongest scent spot and where his trail went from running to hiding. With a flex of internal muscles near his anus, Riordan emptied his scent glands all over the ground in one giant stink bomb fit to rival a skunk.

With that done, he scurried back to the burrow and wriggled inside, waiting to see if anyone was foolish enough to reach into a wild animal den.

Less than a minute later, the first of his pursuers crested the small hill. Flashlights swept over the forest, casting eerie shadows that seemed to move like living things with every twitch of the beam. The sky had faded to a deep night blue speckled with stars in the places where it could be seen between the towering pines. Riordan scooted deeper into his burrow, his tail swishing against the hidden corpse and his beady eyes trained on the man leading the hunt with a mean-looking dog.

The dog clearly had a scent as it scrambled down the hill at the end of its leash, following the line where Riordan had tumbled down so recently. He could tell when it hit his scent mark though. The dog slowed, growled, sneezed, and then buried its nose against the ground with a whine. Riordan couldn’t help that little internal trill of pleasure at its distress, given it was hunting him. He really did not like being hunted.

“What the hell?” the dog’s handler muttered, stepping closer. Then the man held a hand up to cover his own nose. “Fuck. What’s that smell?”

The next closest man, this one tall, broad, and more winded than the hunter, tromped up beside him and them backed away. “Skunk?” he asked in a low rumble.

“Must be,” the hunter backed away as well, pulling his dog out of the scent before handing the leash to the giant one. “Take Duke and circle around. See if you can spot anything or if Duke can get anything after this junk. I’m going to have to take a closer look and try to find the trail past this the old fashioned way.”

“Better you than me,” Giant rumbled, taking the leash and clucking at Duke the dog to follow him as he headed back up the hill a bit and then circled out and down. His flashlight swept over the ground as he walked.

Meanwhile, the hunter pulled a rag out of a pocket to hold over his mouth and nose before slowly moving forward. His light made a much smaller circle as he studied the disturbed ground. Riordan couldn’t tell what the hunter made of the tracks they left. His fall had flattened undergrowth and there was an imprint from where he’d pressed Daniel into the ground during CPR. There were also scattered animal tracks all over that area. His paw prints were similar to skunk, he thought, but definitely not the same and probably larger than expected. Plus his digging claws had left strange gouges in the dirt as he’d scurried about at high speeds, aiming for maximum confusion.

Whatever the hunter was seeing, he stared at the area for several minutes in silence, only to be interrupted when Giant called up to him from lower down the hill, “Tom, come look at this!”

The hunter, Tom, stood from his crouch and carefully picked his way out of the stinky zone and down to where Giant was shining his light. Tom bent down and came up with a scrap of fabric, holding it with the same rag he’d been using to cover his face. Riordan recognized it as one of the scattered pieces of Daniel’s shirt.

“What do you make of it?” Giant asked.

Tom grunted. “I’m not magic, Darren. It’s torn fabric and it hasn’t been out here long, but it’s not like Kent or Jimmy told me what the latest sacrifices were wearing before they somehow botched it up.”

Giant shifted his weight nervously, sweeping his light over the dark forest around them. This far from human civilization, the darkness was deep and seemed to press back against the light. “Are you sure they botched it?” Darren whispered, still loud enough for Riordan’s exceptional hearing.

“We have two cut ropes, no fresh bodies hanging from the tree, and boot prints running away. If that doesn’t sound botched to you, I don’t know what to call it.” Tom’s tone was clearly disgruntled as he studied the fabric scrap. “The boss isn’t going to be pleased if she has to spend her magic tracking down survivors after we’ve gotten this far.”

“There was all that blood under the tree, Tom,” Darren replied, starting to search the ground again even as he kept voicing his concerns. “How does someone survive all that?”

“Hmm…,” Tom hummed absently before casting his gaze back up to Riordan’s muddled trail. “I’m not sure they both did. Only one set of boot prints, despite the two missing bodies. Prints were clear and deep, which implies heavy. Kent said they had picked up two drifters today. One was a thin twig of a guy. The other was heavy and muscled and apparently tough to keep down. It certainly wasn’t the twig carrying the big guy, but I saw signs of someone laying on the ground up there and someone else kneeling next to them. Two people, one set of tracks.”

“Where did they go then?”

“That’s…a really good question.”