Riordan wanted to object, to claim that everything would heal and he was perfectly fine. The way both Daniel and Mark turned to face him in unison shut that plan down instantly, though he did make a weak attempt. “I’ll be fine once I get a chance to regenerate.”

“Then you won’t mind letting Mark assess you to confirm that,” Daniel asserted, “Since he won’t find anything bad, right?”

Riordan growled but jerked his head away from the tree and its damned hungry web of ropes. Without Phenalope goading them on, they were once more lying still in ambush mode, but Riordan would feel better being away from them if he was going to have to let his guard down enough for this pair of caring, frustrating men to fuss at him. Hopefully they would be satisfied quickly. He was fine, even if he still leaned heavily on Daniel as they walked. That was just fatigue and relief and would pass, as would the other injuries once his magic had a chance to knit him back up.

Mark glanced at the pair of them curiously. “So, you’re Daniel, then? It’s weird to be able to see you.”

Daniel laughed softly, the sound a bit mirthless to Riordan’s increasingly practiced ear. “It’s still weird to me to not be seen. I’ve only been dead a few days.”

“Oh,” Mark said in a small voice, chastised, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t forget that. I’m just so used to thinking of ghosts as abstract concepts, either lingering haunts of some terrible historical event or just some fictional story. I never understood the appeal of horror movies, but some of my friends quite like them, and… I’m sorry.”

Daniel sighed. “It’s not really alright, but I know you don’t mean anything by it. I’m just dealing with some nasty mood swings as I process it. Mostly I can keep that under control by distracting myself with helping out, but yeah, it’s fresh and it hurts and being here is making it so much worse.”

The sweet man that he was, Mark looked at Daniel with concern writ large on his face. His spirit armor didn’t include a mask as Riordan’s did, which could either be an individual variation or a different degree of manifestation, so his expression showed clearly. Even his earlier partial shift had faded off, leaving just an earnest freckled teenager staring at them. “Is there anything I can do to help?” Mark asked, his tone just as seriously sincere.

“Kiss me?” Daniel joked, uncomfortable and off balance and falling back on humor as was his habit.

The suggestion startled Mark, like such a thing had simply never occurred to him. As Daniel moved to wave off the comment as the deflection it was, Mark surprised all of them by leaning close, going up on toes to plant a kiss right on Daniel’s lips. It looked awkward and inexperienced and Riordan thought he heard the clack of teeth on teeth, but he had to admit that it certainly shocked Daniel right out of his low mood.

“Right then,” Mark said nervously as he stepped back. “We should probably examine Riordan and get out of here. This is a creepy place.”

Riordan chuckled at the awkward young men, Mark blushing under his freckles and Daniel gaping at him, but let his spirit armor fade down a few levels. After fighting with it so heavily manifested, there was a sense of loss in letting his partial shift and mantle fade. At the same time, it didn’t feel like his badger was any further from him, for it was always a part of him, inseparable. Whatever else this spirit realm stuff was doing, it was certainly helping Riordan reassess and understand his relationship with his honey badger half much better. It was so easy to think of one’s animal form as some other creature that the shifter swapped places with and then possessed or something. The link was far more complex and close than that, sweetly and reassuringly entangled.

To save them some time, Riordan started listing off the injuries he felt. “My left arm is fucked up. I had to dislocate it twice before I got the rope suppressed enough to get slack to fight with. Nothing is broken, just the spiritual equivalent of over-extended joints and muscles. Her spells were primarily either a compulsion that hurt as I fought it off, like Mark felt earlier, and some sort of blast of decay, which mostly just hurt like hell here since spirits don’t rot. Frankie gave me a safeguard shield earlier that slowed down the spells and let me weaken them before they hit, plus another safeguard actually boosted my ability to resist the compulsions here. I got yanked around and tripped too, but she stuck to spells while I was trying to take her apart more physically. As much as anything here is actually physical.”

“Hmm… Hold out your hand,” Mark said, his professional face a little ruined by the way he stuck the tip of his tongue out as he studied Riordan.

Cautiously, Riordan complied, offering his right hand for Mark’s inspection. The young man gripped his hand and then sent a pulse of energy through Riordan that made his hair stand on end, especially when it reached the top of his head down to his toes and then bounced back. The effect was clearly some sort of diagnostic exam and probably wouldn’t have been quite so weird feeling if the safeguard spell hadn’t slowed it right down too. He shook himself out all over, trying to erase the sensation.

When Mark didn’t say anything right away, just standing there holding Riordan’s hand with an introspective expression, Riordan fought the urge to yank his hand free. He was slowly getting used to Daniel’s company, but most of the time, he couldn’t touch the ghost even if he wanted to. Casual contact like this, even for magical medical analysis, made Riordan’s skin crawl and ramped his paranoia up, both of which happening even faster when combined with the swirling fog filled with soft swamp noises and an aura of fear.

“So,” Riordan interjected to break Mark’s distraction, “Am I going to live, doc?”

“What? Oh, yes,” Mark dropped his hold on Riordan and let him put more space between them. Riordan even pulled away from Daniel, both because he was feeling more stable on his feet as he recovered from the intensity of the fight and because he really needed the space.

Mark continued, “Spiritual injuries are, as you’ve experienced before, complicated. They don’t always heal normally on their own. This is another place that shifters have an advantage, fortunately, since our magic consists mainly of passive effects and the affinity is a combination of life and spirit magics. The passive effects include an increased resiliency and, yes, recovery of the spirit. It is harder to alter a shifter’s spirit without their permission, conscious or unconscious, which is part of why those spells you mentioned didn’t have more effect on you. Your mind would have had a harder time resisting those compulsions, but your spirit is tough and wouldn’t bend. Likewise, it wouldn’t decay.”

He ran a hand over his quills, his lips quirking up at the edges. “You actually probably hurt your left arm more than needed though, because your mind told you how much that would have hurt a physical body and you allowed that same degree of damage. You’ll recover slowly but steadily, so long as you have the energy for it. Which means a lot of rest and mana recovery stuff for the next few days. Sorry.”

That wasn’t likely to happen if the last few days were anything for Riordan to judge by. He raised an eyebrow, looking skeptical, but Daniel cut in. “I’ll sit on him as much as possible. Hopefully he can rest while the agents look into the death mages.”

Riordan winced, both at the thought of the death mages and the idea he’d have to sit it out on the sidelines like some fragile-- Riordan realized his immediate urges for comparisons for the sort of things that were fragile and protected were all female, like damsels or princesses, and grimaced. For all her insanity, Phenalope wasn’t wrong about the entrenched diminution of women and their struggles. After all, he was just thinking about how hard it was going to be to sit aside and wait while someone else did something dangerous and men expected women to do that all the time.

Though he could just imagine how well it would go if someone told Frankie or Vera to stay on the sidelines, completely uninvolved in dangerous things. He liked his balls right where they were, thanks.

“Are we done here, then?” Daniel asked, his gaze flicking around the swamp around them, lingering on the rope-entangled dripping skeletal tree that sat at the heart of the ritual and was also their refuge.

“Almost,” Riordan affirmed, “We need Zeren to suggest how to move that proxy and I need to at least try to drag the remaining ghosts out of here.”

“Ghosts?” Daniel looked around again, as if he’d somehow overlooked some other person just standing out there beside them. It was possible in the fog, actually, but either way, the ghost didn’t look up into the ropes to see where they actually were. “Come to think of it, what happened to them? Several stayed behind.”

On impulse, Riordan reached out and covered Daniel’s eyes. His voice was quiet but firm when he explained, “I really don’t want you to see it. There are some things you can’t unsee. You don’t need that.”

Daniel stiffened, first at the contact and then at the implications of Riordan’s words. “Oh,” he whispered on an exhale. “It’s bad.”

“It’s bad. I’d rather you left before I try to help them. I know you would do everything you could to help, but--”

“But I’ve got enough horrors in my head already and you worry about me,” Daniel finished when Riordan couldn’t. The young man smiled a bit sadly. “Why do you have to be so sweet and protective now? I can’t insist when you are like this.”

No one called Riordan sweet, but damn it, somehow Daniel brought that out in him. It was because Riordan actually considered the ghost his friend, really and truly. He had people he’d gotten along with throughout the years, even some he’d gone out of his way to help just because they deserved better, but he hadn’t let anyone close since he’d lost his team. The loss had scarred him inside too badly, a mess of betrayal, self-doubt, grief, and isolation at the same time as Riordan lost his entire social support network and culture. Daniel had slipped in under his guard like no living person could have.

So yes, Riordan was going to protect him. Just like Daniel had come here to support him, despite being obviously scared shitless and having no way to really fight back if things had gone really wrong. Whatever he’d brought with him had allowed their reinforcements to arrive, but Daniel had jumped into danger for Riordan and in those precarious seconds, he’d been prepared to stand on his own, all for Riordan’s sake.

“Please go back to the glade?” Riordan requested again.

Daniel groaned, throwing his head back in annoyed capitulation. “Fine. Open the gateway for me and I’ll go. It was really hard to figure out how to follow the pack bond to you to get here, though at least I’d done that enough going from the other tree out to the real world. I’m not going to try to figure out how to hop back.”

Riordan couldn’t help the small smile that crossed his lips at that complaint, Daniel sounding more himself again. “Fair enough.”

Using his left arm hurt, but at least it was usable now. Riordan opened the gate in the formal manner, making it clear in his intention that he was opening the gate to the much nicer flipside of the space and only Daniel was going through. He didn’t want to accidentally transport himself or Mark. The gateway unfurled from his chest, spreading starry darkness through the fog to envelop Daniel and remove him from this mess. Riordan tried not to think about how lonely he felt when his friend disappeared from sight, but at least he was safe.