The man might have been a true oddity, but Vera had far too much experience as a leader to let that throw her off for long. She moved to Frankie’s side, letting her presence be felt without interfering, even if her fingers itched to touch her tiny lover.

“What am I looking at here, shaman?” Vera asked, making it clear she was here in a formal capacity.

“A magical disaster site, is what,” Frankie grumped sharply, her hands and eyes never moving away from her patient, “There’s at least four separate spells on him, one of which is a punishment brand and another is a death magic spell.”

The shaman punctuated that last remark with pointing at a strange black rope knotted up the man’s left arm. Vera leaned forward for a closer look only to have Frankie smack her back with a harmless swat and a grumbled, “Nasty stuff, that. Don’t get close.”

“If he’s a death mage and an exile, why haven’t we killed him yet?”

“Because he’s not the death mage, despite the shit with the other two spells. The spell was cast on him, using his death to power it.”

Vera blinked, trying to make sense of that. She gestured at his clearly alive, if unwell, state, “How does that work with him being alive?”

“Badly,” Frankie snorted. “I’m sure the death mage would be quite grateful if we killed him for them. Which is why I’m doing my best to prevent that, despite the damage that I’m pretty sure he did to his own damn soul. Amateurs have no place working spells!”

Glancing around at the people assembled in the room, Vera stood up straight again. If there was a death mage active in the area, this was a serious issue and needed to be solved quickly. “Do we have any idea where he came from?”

“Um,” Mark began softly, the young man still very nervous speaking in front of authority, his eyes skating over to his fellow apprentice. “He said a few words before he passed out at the border.”

Lucinda, the older and more confident of the pair, took over, her voice neutral as she began listing the known facts. “He touched the border shortly before one this morning, which activated the defenses and summoned the Guardians in response to his exile mark. Mor,” she gestured at one of the Guardians, the more human one who was a spirit of shifters as a concept, “said that he began speaking as soon as the Guardians arrived and that he’d clearly been expecting them. The exile only got out ‘death mage,’ ‘Thompsonville,’ and ‘killing tree’ before he passed out due to serious magical injuries. The Guardians immediately alerted Frankie, who called security to pick him up and woke us before all converging here.”

“Thompsonville is less than an hour drive from here,” Vera frowned.

The Sleeping Bear Pack territory stretched a radius of about 17 miles from the place of power in the dunes, with about half of that territory being lake. They only had around a hundred members with active shifter abilities, three shamans, and then assorted family and friends who weren’t magically active but were aware of magic. For a minor pack, that was quite respectable, but they weren’t large enough to guard more than their own territory actively. With so much empty space and small towns out there, especially with the insular habits of shifters, it wasn’t surprising they might have missed a death mage coming so close. Not surprising, but definitely alarming.

“Worse,” Mark said, “Killing tree is a ritual involving multiple deaths and a spiritual and physical anchor, so this wasn’t just a skirmish between transients.”

Before Vera could ask for more details, the magic Frankie had been working flared and exploded, creating a flash of warmth and a rush of air. The shaman shook out her hands, swearing up a storm and staring at the man like he had done this all to personally offend her. Vera couldn’t stop herself from grabbing Frankie’s hands and checking them for damage. Even after she had assured herself that Frankie was fine, Vera didn’t let go, gently holding the shaman’s hands. Frankie must have felt Vera’s racing pulse because she let her, though her dark eyes remained narrowed in consternation and staring at the man.

“The spells are all a mess,” Frankie complained, “He’s bleeding out from a hole in his soul that goes right through his well. I’d swear there was something threaded through that hole, but no one would be that stupid. I can’t figure out what the spell that caused it was supposed to do because someone included a damn obscuration component in it. Meanwhile, he’s got that death spell sitting waiting to harvest his soul when he dies and his brand is flaring, causing him damage for breaking the terms of his exile. And then there’s his pack bond.”

“Pack bond?” Vera was genuinely surprised at that.

Exiles were rare. Shifter justice tended to either go for some sort of rehabilitation and service to the community or just straight execution. Unrepentant criminal magical types were too dangerous to let run loose most times, since desperation and greed could lead them to do truly horrific things in the name of power or revenge. Exile was reserved for those who were deemed not a threat but unworthy of the pack guiding their redemption. For shifters, that denial was even worse since no one would pack bond with an exile, often leading them to waste away or commit suicide before they could ever earn forgiveness. Why would an exile have a pack bond? And how?

“He’s got something that is unmistakably a pack bond spell, except it has more death magic in it than shifter, plus a strong thread of spirit magic. What’s weirder is that despite the death magic in the bond, it isn’t full of death corruption the way the other death spell is,” Frankie threw her hands up in the air as if asking the world for more patience, “which should be impossible, but that hasn’t stopped any of the rest of the mess on this bastard, so why not?!”

“If he’s got a pack, where is it?”

“Right here,” Frankie said with annoyance, taking her hands back in order to gesture broadly over the man. “The bonds all lead--”

She cut off, her head whipping around to stare at the Guardians who had been standing in the corner silently this whole time. “You did not just say that,” she admonished them, shaking a finger at the bird-like Hrr.

When more explanation was not forthcoming, Vera rolled her eyes. Frankie preferred the company of spirits to people most days and sometimes forgot that most of the people in the room couldn’t understand spirit-speech. “Say what, love?” Vera prompted.

“Ghosts. Bah,” Frankie dismissed this without expounding before changing the subject. She spun her wheeled stool around so she was facing Vera head on. “I can’t fix this.”

“I thought you said his death would help the death mage.” Vera could tell she wasn’t the only one in the room who was hanging on Frankie’s words by this point. The woman was cantankerous and pulling sense from her could be like pulling teeth and just as likely to get you bit, but she had been the head shaman for the pack for over a hundred years now. She’d seen and fixed more magical problems than the rest of them put together. That was particularly impressive when the "rest of them" included two apprentice shaman and two people with pack leader experience, even if Norris had retired from leading before he and Vera moved to the Sleeping Bear Pack.

“It will,” Frankie fumed, “but his spells are holding the wound open. I use the term ‘spell’ very loosely here because those effects are closer to spirit magic as done by a mentally incompetent three year old. Which is why I need you to make a call as pack leader.”

That was rare enough that Vera pressed a hand to Frankie’s head to see if the earlier magical explosion had done damage after all. Frankie waved her away, fondly exasperated at Vera’s theatrics, and actually explained, “I want to submit him to Mother Bear. That’s my advice as pack shaman. She might ignore him or hell, might eat him, but she might also save him. A pack spirit interceding like that for him would definitely remove the exile mark, which makes it your call. One which you have to make fast or it all becomes a moot point.”

Indeed, the damnable man on the table had grown rather gray under his dark skin and was groaning softly. The ambient magic in the room practically hummed, speaking to the depth of his personal well that was spilling all over. Vera regarded his mark, tapping into the information contained within it. It was the oldest such mark she’d seen, nearly twenty years since it had been placed, though she hardly had many to compare it to. A symbol appeared that stood for the pack who had placed it, Harper’s Ferry, and another for the crime, whose intention translated as “pack crime, execution stayed.”

That was vague, but on purpose. Whatever the crime was, it had been committed by the man’s pack and he had been involved enough to be considered at fault, but not to the degree of execution like the leaders of his pack. With a shock, Vera realized who this man must be, given the combination of time and location.

It had been before she and Norris had come to Sleeping Bear and caused an outrage in the packs of the area. She didn’t know the details, but someone had hired a pack of mercenary shifters to attack the Harper’s Ferry pack, ending in a showdown at their school with hostages involved. It had been a stalemate until one of the mercenaries turned on his own pack to save the kids held hostage.

Her expression twisted as Vera struggled with the emotions flowing through her. Her initial impulse considered such actions unforgivable, yet even Harper’s Ferry had opted for exile rather than execution. He’d been loose as an exile for nearly twenty years and Vera had never heard of any trouble from him during that time, nor did she see the stain of death magic corruption on his soul, despite the mess on him making such a thing easy. And he’d chosen to come here, his words ones of warning rather than requests for personal aid.

With a sigh, Vera centered herself, letting go of the anger and disgust. She would probably never like this man, but she knew what her decision had to be.

“Give him to Mother Bear.”