Duane wasn’t at the waterfall when Riordan checked, but some of the other ghosts were there, including one Riordan had recognized as one of Duane’s assistants. He left the cards with him and then tried to decide where he would try his next experiment. With a sigh, Riordan headed back towards his stone circle, not really wanting to go through the center glade again.

As if the bushes had heard his thoughts, Riordan turned a corner and found a path that wasn’t there the last few times he’d come this way. He shivered. Side effects. Even with the safeguards on him, it didn’t protect him from the side effects of previous spells. Still, Riordan took the shortcut and returned to his magical workspace.

When he’d wanted to go to the flipside of the tree space before, Riordan had done it with a simple thought. Then he’d built a wall between the two sides and hadn’t tried since then. The thread that stuck out his chest was in part his pack bond, but it was also a guide thread through the gateway in his chest. It made a loop between the tree spirit’s two halves, however that worked.

Frankie had opened a keyed gateway and had a guide thread. Riordan hadn’t gotten to see all of how that worked when his own gateway had jacked their trip, but he understood the basic concept. What he was less sure of was how his gateway worked. He’d used it to go from the physical realm to the spirit one and back, but the guide thread was for moving between places within the spirit realm.

He pushed back his spiritual clothing to stare at the starry void in the center of him, encircled by a dense garden of vines and ferns and other plants Riordan had no names for, all rooted into his flesh. It looked like it should hurt, but felt like it was just another part of him, the way his hand or eye might be. It felt alive, the stars swirling slowly as he watched and the leaves waving in some undetectable wind. The braided thread of ghostly light went through the center of the void, fading out a few inches from his chest on one end and disappearing into the dark infinity on the other.

He hadn’t thought about it before but the void was contained inside him and the thread went into him instead of through him. Riordan’s back looked like normal flesh now, even if he’d punched the hole all the way through in the initial damage. It made him shiver, remembering how close he’d come to death from that mistake, but also to be reminded of the changes he’d undergone. The flipside of this tree space wasn’t exactly somewhere else. The spirit realm didn’t follow three-dimensional physics, for all that his mind imposed that image on it. The glade he stood in was inside the tree spirit, its internal existence, power and presence.

The flipside was the external effects acting upon the tree spirit.

So all he had to do was follow the thread and flip himself inside out the same way without accidentally mutilating his soul. No big deal. Riordan had such a good track record for it so far.

Riordan was putting off his attempt. He’d just decided he wasn’t going to let himself get away with that, so he needed to just do it. He closed his eyes to shut out the distractions and built the mental image of what he wanted to happen.

He knew where he was currently. He knew where he wanted to go. He knew the guide thread between them. Riordan therefore focused on building the image of himself as a whole thing and making it clear he was going to arrive in the same condition he left in. And that there would be a way back. He wanted to be sure his thread could return him there.

Almost as an afterthought, Riordan added that no one and nothing could use his gateway without his permission. He would be his own key, damn it. If he was stuck with this change in himself, he would own it. The more he thought about that, the stronger that intention became. His gateway wasn’t a breach in the walls of the tree spirit’s inner garden. It was a locked portcullis that wouldn’t be opened from the outside without one hell of a siege.

Once he had those parameters established, Riordan opened his eyes and started doing the hand motions Frankie showed him for opening a gateway. He didn’t understand all of the intention behind the one who’d originally come up with the gestures, but for him, the pattern served as a way of letting the gateway inside him untwist and open, reaching out with those shadowy vines full of stars. It swept over him as he finished the last motion like an ambush and Riordan let it take him.

The terror of the death ritual hit him hard, knocking the breath from his lungs. His feet dropped into the black sticky goop with a dull splash, the viscous liquid reaching up to his mid-calves now instead of just his ankles. Ropes slithered like snakes across his boots. The air resonated with the sound of dripping and bubbling liquid and smelled like rotting corpses.

Immediately, Riordan called on his badger, bringing his spiritual armor forward to the best of his current skill. A badger mask slammed over the top half of his face, filtering the smells and pushing back at the oppressive atmosphere. Fur and leather streamers trailed back from the mask, mixing in with his own hair and continuing down over the high collar of his thick leather jacket. His eyes went pure black, his skin thickened, and his teeth sharpened.

Something was wrong here. The ritual space had always been horrendous, a horror movie haunted isolation of fog in a living swamp, echoing with the sounds of crying and the whisper of ghosts. Now silence weighed heavily on the space, the only noises coming from his own quiet breathing and the roiling movements of the death energy swamp.

The ghosts he’d left behind were gone.

At least, Riordan could no longer hear or see them in the thick fog. Cautiously, he made his way closer to the sickly black form of the tree, dripping with long globs of the black ooze. Ropes draped across its branches like spider webs. As he got closer, he spotted movement in those webs. It took his mind a moment to sort out what he was seeing before Riordan found himself sprinting forward, anger lending power to push aside the swamp in front of him.

Up close, he saw more details of the fitfully twitching forms. Thickly cocooned in webs of dark rope, black blood squeezed out of the bodies between the threads and dripped down to join the swamp. Glimpses of flesh showed between the strands of rope, looking desiccated and melted, all features mutilated past recognition. Weak whimpers emerged from ruined throats as the ritual ground down the remaining ghosts for every drop of energy that could be wrung from their death and suffering.

“Fucking hell,” Riordan growled, looking around for any safe way up to reach them. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to free those ghosts or that they’d be sane after this, but he wasn’t leaving without trying.

The tree spirit was large, its thick trunk rising higher than he could reach before branching out horizontally. Bits of light glimmered through the slick coating of dripping fluid, the substance somehow both sticky and oily, clinging to everything but leaving it dirty and hard to grasp. The light of the tree spirit’s heart pulsed strongly in the trunk, obscured behind the thickening goop but brighter than ever wherever it was visible. The branches were leafless here, reaching into the sky like bones.

The slick gunk traveled from the branches along the rope webbing, highlighting the lines in glinting shadow. Some ropes dangled down to his height. Riordan eyed them warily, remembering the way the ropes tried to grab him from under the gunk before and how he could still see them moving from the corner of his eye. He wasn’t sure the suppression of his glowing spiritual armor was enough to keep them from trying to choke and hang him if he was foolish enough to climb them. Still, there didn’t seem to be any other way up the tree. He wasn’t going to be able to get a grip on the tree itself when it was constantly leaking that goop.

Slowly, Riordan did a circle of the tree, observing the ropes and the placement of the cocoons to find the safest one to attempt to reach. When his count of cocoons hit eight, Riordan burst out into vehement swearing. He didn’t think he’d miscounted how many ghosts had remained behind when he made the pack bond. There had been another victim since his escape.

Fury raced through his spirit and Riordan let out a rattling snarl, the sound dampened and dying in the fog of this accursed place. His muscles flexed, pressing out against the confines of the rope still binding his left arm, tied on the outside of his leathery spirit armor. Drawing on his magic to strengthen himself, Riordan leapt into the air, grabbing a hold of the web near one of the wriggling cocoons.

Immediately, the ropes writhed, stretching and shifting to loop around his wrist. Strands dropped free of the web to grab for him. Riordan filled himself with anger and will and fire, creating an image and intention of control.

“Cease!” Riordan growled in Yiddish, pulling from the pack bond and pushing it at the hungry manifestation of the killing tree ritual as a wash of golden light around him. Everywhere his light touched, the fog dissolved, the goop recoiled, and the ropes froze, dropping limp and lifeless like their mundane counterpart.

His casting wasn’t efficient in the least, draining magic rapidly to maintain his small aura of defiance. Riordan hauled himself up onto the web and crawled to the cocoon. Badger claws, even a pissed off honey badger, weren’t meant for cutting, but his will to cut through the spell sharpened them. Even then, removing even a few strands of rope from the encased victim felt like digging through concrete with human fingers. The structure and power of the ritual resisted his freeform attempts, only allowing Riordan to shift the cocoon enough to see the ghost’s face.

As damaged as the revealed flesh was, Riordan didn’t recognize the ghost. It was hard to even tell that the victim was male under the lines of raw bloody wounds criss-crossing his face and even then, Riordan mostly could tell because all of the ghosts so far had been men.

“Damn it,” Riordan hissed, hating how powerless he felt against the force of this damn ritual. It had built up so much power from the dozens of ritualized sacrifices fed into it over the past year, so much inertia to overcome to shift it from its path. Though, clearly the ritual could be modified in some manner, since its cruelty had increased in the last few days.

The ruined mess of a man in front of him moaned at the sound of Riordan’s voice and its tattered lips moved. “Help me,” he whispered, blind and twitching, voice barely more than a croak, “Please, I’m sorry. Help me.”

Something about that voice sounded familiar, but the tortured state of the ghost wrecked his voice too much to tell what about it Riordan was recognizing. Then the ghost shifted slightly and Riordan saw past the damage to the man underneath.

“Fuck. Guess your boss strung you up after all, Jimmy.”