Riordan nodded, embarrassed by the sappiness but not so cowardly as to walk back his comment. He meant it after all. The ghosts were his pack right now, Daniel especially. Still, he changed the subject. The words that came out of his mouth weren’t the ones he meant to say though.

“I’ve been thinking about looking for my family.”

Daniel froze and then regarded Riordan with a slow tilt of his head. “Family?”

Awkwardly, Riordan shrugged. He leaned back in his chair, staring at the computer without really seeing anything. “I was thinking about it today. My parents both had a lot of siblings, though I barely met my Abba’s side since they were mostly in India. My Ima still had several of her siblings in the pack, though others had moved on or died over time. And I had three older siblings and two younger by the time I left. I fell out of contact with them, partly because of the greater difficulty with casual correspondence at that time period, but mostly because I was being young, stubborn, and selfish.”

He wasn’t sure why he was telling Daniel all of this, except perhaps that he needed to tell someone. It had been stewing in the back of Riordan’s mind all day, mixing under all the feelings stirred up by looking at the reports of their current situation. So many people dead, leaving people behind and probably a lot of them wondering what even happened. And so many people who were making horrible life choices that were going to get themselves killed or at least destroy their previous life when it came to light.

What did he do with any of that? Riordan sighed again, flinging his head back. His dark circles bounced with the motion, reminding him that he needed to find a trimmer at some point soon. He was growing a beard too, which he found he didn’t mind but still needed to be neatened up.

“I’m not sure I’m ready to try and contact any of them,” Riordan admitted. “I fucked up my life pretty badly. If I survive this, things are going to keep changing for a while. Maybe when it’s settled a bit, I’ll be at a place where I feel worthy of being part of my family again.”

“You think they’ll be disappointed in you?” Daniel asked, curious but also looking a bit lost in thought himself.

“Ima will at least,” Riordan replied. He hated the truth of that, but it was what it was. He’d strayed far from what he’d been taught in his youth. “Abba is a lot more laidback. I think he’d get it, but I’m not sure he wouldn’t still be disappointed too. My siblings could go any which way. We were Ima’s first batch of children and she had us in quick succession. We were fairly close in age. People change a lot as they grow up and experience the world. That’s assuming nothing has killed them in the time I’ve been gone. It’s been almost forty years.”

Daniel made a choking noise. “Forty-- Dang it, Riordan, you suck at this! You should contact your mother far more often than that.”

Riordan couldn’t help but laugh, leaning forward again. He felt a bit lighter for sharing this with Daniel, even if he hadn’t made much progress in deciding what to do about any of it. “I am a terrible son, I know. I guess that goes on my list of things that I am that I should change.”

They fell silent again. Riordan gave up pretending he had any notes left to transcribe. They had nothing more useful to do there until they got new information, hopefully when the agents returned later in the day. He wondered if they would be back by dinner time, which was rapidly approaching. It made sense that they would quit after normal business hours since their primary objective that day had been to talk to the law enforcement agencies, but who knows. Maybe they were going to do some stake outs or spying or whatever it was that federal agents did to get information.

“I feel like a terrible son too,” Daniel put in, rubbing a hand through his own shaggy hair. Daniel’s hair wasn’t in danger of growing any longer though. “Like, if I’d just done what they said, I’d still be alive. It wasn’t even that bad. They just wanted me to get a good job and be set for life.”

“Which would have been fine, except that job would have made you miserable,” Riordan said firmly. “Wanting the best for your children includes listening to them, not just projecting your own dreams onto them.”

“Do you think they reported me missing?” Daniel asked. “It’s been about a week now since I left.”

“The agents might find that out on their investigation, but we could always check the internet?” Riordan offered.

That led to Daniel teaching Riordan how to use search engines properly. Apparently there was an art to learning how to type his searches to get actually useful results. Riordan felt clumsy and stupid while they tried different variations, using punctuation to create filters. Daniel consoled him, explaining that learning to search data was an important skill for college students, but a lot of people never learned the trick of it either.

It required entering Daniel’s full name (surrounded by quotation marks), the town he’d run away from, his school, and the word missing to find the report, but once they had, they found themselves looking at a small blurb about Daniel’s last known whereabouts and a request for information.

The picture that accompanied it bothered Riordan the most. He’d seen Daniel while he was living, so he’d at least known the colors that had been leeched away by the gray of ghosthood. The photo on the missing person report was younger, healthier, cleaner, and well groomed. The clean-cut image of an eager college student, one with a broad grin and far fewer tragedies haunting his eyes. Damn those death mages. Damn them all to hell.

“It’s sort of surreal to see that,” Daniel said softly. “Like, I know I’m dead. It sucks, but I’m coming to terms with it and at least I can still do something useful about stopping others from ending up the same way. But they don’t know I’m dead. If it wasn’t for you, they might have never known. At least I’ll be linked to this case when it’s all over now.”

“It can be very weird to realize that life goes on outside of our awareness,” Riordan agreed. He couldn’t take his eyes off of the smiling eyes of that younger, happier Daniel. “By the nature of perception, our view of the world is focused on what is around us. The further something is from us and the life we live, the harder it can be to see it. Sometimes even when it’s right in front of us.”

“Yeah, that’s true. When I was hitchhiking and looking homeless, some people looked past me like I wasn’t there at all. Like my issues just didn’t pierce their worldview or enter into their thoughts in any way.”

Riordan nodded, unsure what more he could say to that without bringing the whole mood crashing the rest of the way to the floor. He’d been both the one ignored and the one ignoring. After all, hadn’t part of his realization about his family been that he’d only ever thought about them in context of himself and his life and his needs? So much of the world just hadn’t mattered when he was struggling day by day to survive or when he was wallowing in his own loss, grief, and self-recrimination.

To make it worse, Riordan knew he had a tendency to assume he knew best how to solve issues when he did become aware of them. How many times had he jumped in half-cocked and fucked something up? He wasn’t sure. It had been better when he had a leader to help curate the things he needed to pay attention to or to fix, but that also made Riordan blind to the larger picture and sent him on a slippery slide into evil actions.

He scrubbed a hand over his face, trying to ward off a new wave of self-recrimination. Blaming himself and wallowing in misery and inaction was just a choice to turn a blind eye to absolutely everything around him, not a real step to being better.

“We’ll let them know what happened as soon as it’s safe to. You know that, right?” Riordan said. “I could even take a trip to let you see them. Except, hopefully by then we’ll have freed everyone from the killing tree and you’ll be able to pass on if you want. I don’t know.”

Man, the idea of seeing the grief that Daniel’s parents would feel gutted Riordan. Even though he knew he’d done what he could to save Daniel, he’d still failed and he would probably always regret that. He wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near as close with Daniel if the man hadn’t died and then haunted him, but his loneliness did not make up for it. And he had to hope that he would have figured out that he could interact with and help the ghosts without Daniel to ease him into it.

Riordan couldn’t change the past. Regret and depression and self-doubt were anchors that dragged him down, tying him as tightly as the stupid ropes of the killing tree. He couldn’t bring himself to step forward in case he messed up again and so he waited and waited until he couldn’t wait anymore and then he leapt in and fucked everything up for everyone. At least that included the people trying to kill him. If Riordan was going to be a menace, he could at least ruin their days too.

Daniel didn’t look any more sure than Riordan. “I’ll think about it. We’ve still got time until this is solved.”

Time. Riordan grimaced, staring at their victim list. The death mage had already changed tactics in the short time since his escape and had killed another person for the ritual, even if he was originally one of her men. Who knows what else she could be getting up to?

“Unfortunately true. I hope things don’t get too much worse before we can stop Phenalope.”