Riordan heard the agents come in after midnight. They had a long day of surveillance and scouting, especially after having to wait for the summer sun to set. He went out on the porch of the workshop long enough to see all three of them get out of the SUV and head inside, looking tired but otherwise fine. He’d been too keyed up to sleep while they were out and even hours of looking at stones hadn’t put him to sleep. Riordan had switched to browsing some of the other books on Frankie’s shelves, mostly books on herbs, rocks, symbology, religion, and occultism, written in terms that could be safe for mundanes. Since he found the books in the open on shelves in her front room, Riordan wasn’t surprised. Frankie must have more advanced texts, but they weren’t going to be lying around in the open.

He should go to bed himself, now that his worries were relieved, but Riordan wasn’t sure his mind was ready to wind down like that. Even if he had been reading books about stones and plants for hours. He was surprised at how much he’d been enjoying it and again at how much he was managing to retain. He’d quizzed himself on Frankie’s box of stones every hour or so, looking up his answers to see how well he was remembering. Of course, it could easily fade if he didn’t practice regularly, which was probably both why apprentice training lasted so long and why Frankie had these materials so easily at hand for a refresher.

Riordan sighed, flopping back down into the overstuffed armchair again. He really didn’t want to go to bed for no rational reason. Perhaps it was just the way time felt when he was stuck in a holding pattern. The anticipation built up. Stress built up. He wanted to be doing something, anything, to fix the issue, even when he knew that at that moment in time, the most productive thing Riordan could do was sleep and be well rested. Or at least as well rested as he got. Even with jumping out of the spirit space into his sleeping body, Riordan knew his sleep was poor. He couldn’t tell if that was a side effect of all the magical bonds fucking with him or just another symptom of the same anxieties currently keeping him staring aimlessly at the ceiling.

Worse, he knew he could fall asleep if he tried. Riordan had developed that skill years ago, the ability to fall asleep quickly almost anywhere, just for the sake of survival. He just… didn’t want to. He flipped through the pages of the book again, though he wasn’t really reading anything. Instead, Riordan grounded himself on the feeling of the paper slipping between his fingers. It had a glossy finish because of all the photos in there. Whatever paper this was was designed to show off color and preserve it over time. Technology was amazing in the littlest of places sometimes. Color photography had been around in some form long before Riordan was born, but he’d still watched the photographs become more detailed, with richer colors, and easier to take and develop and share. A book like this would have likely had a few grainy pictures, most in black and white except for a few colorful center pages, and a decent number of drawings or just descriptions.

His mind was wandering. It was definitely time for bed. Riordan really didn’t want to go back to his lonely, awkward guest room and pretend like he felt at home there. He was much more comfortable here. Yet, he also knew he would make people worry if he wasn’t where they expected. A momentary struggle persisted in his brain, resulting in a compromise.

Riordan scrounged up some scrap paper and wrote two notes. One he took back to pack house, leaving in the kitchen for Norris to find, letting the old man know that Riordan was out in Frankie’s workshop and not to worry. The other note went on the coffee table in Frankie’s lounge, tri-folded to stand up stably.

It said, “Honey badger sleeping under table. Disturb at your own risk,” with an arrow pointing down.

Because if he was going to sleep better, Riordan knew it was time to try sleeping as a badger again. It would make it harder for him to summon his spirit mantle on the other side, but Riordan was way more comfortable in that shape. He felt safer and simpler and more capable of handling whatever bothered him. He needed that right now.

In fact, when Riordan shifted, he heaved a sigh of such relief that he knew he’d not spent enough time in that form lately. Shifters didn’t have to shift, but it itched at them. There was a reason that aquatic shifters moved near lakes and oceans pretty quickly. With his more animal side forward, his anxiety fell back to a quiet, unconcerning background buzz, an issue for his human side to ponder at a later time. Right now, all he needed was security and sleep.

For security, he did what he hadn’t thought to when he was all human-shaped and sniffed around the room for anything odd or hidden, quickly discovering that a number of the dried herbs Frankie had hanging about or in jars made him sneeze. He barely kept himself from knocking the offending jars over, both because he had no desire to take on Frankie, even as a perpetually grumpy and unworried badger, and because then things would stink more in the room. The herbal scents weren’t bad, just plant-y and strong. At a distance, they were even kinda soothing, though not as much as being out in the woods would be. That would be a bit much for his allies though, if Riordan went to sleep on some random patch of dirt, burrowed deep into the ground.

Besides, he’d already written his notes and badger paws were not good for writing new ones.

Riordan snuffled his way under the coffee table, pausing long enough to drag a throw blanket and some decorative pillows under there with him to make a mock den. It still took a bit of fluffing and circling before he was satisfied and then he plunked down and shut his eyes to go to sleep.

The spirit realm felt qualitatively different when Riordan went to sleep as a badger, he realized. He hadn’t noticed before, but he was getting enough experience not clouded with other disastrous changes to start feeling the differences. Riordan wasn’t dressed in his badger outfit when he arrived, stuck in those stupid Michigan tourist sweats with the void spinning endlessly in the center of his chest visible through them. His badger felt both closer and further away. He let himself sit in the center of his stone maze for a while, just meditating on those sensations without trying to change anything, before he finally opened the gateway back to his body.

Riordan slipped into deeper sleep with a badger noise of contentment.

He woke slowly to a new smell, one that was very pleasant and sent his nose twitching. Riordan scooched forward towards the edge of his makeshift den before even opening his eyes, merely following his nose. A sound and the smell of other people made him pause and come fully awake, peering out from under the table with more caution. Mark was sitting quietly in a chair across the room, reading. The open door to Frankie’s stone workspace was partially open and he could make out Frankie’s lecturing voice and what he thought was Lucinda’s smell. More relevantly, Norris was straightening up from a crouch nearby with a groan, a hand pressing to his back with that expression that his body was betraying him by getting old.

A plate of fresh honeycomb sat on a dish on the floor in front of Norris, not far from the “entrance” to Riordan’s den. That was enough to break the last of Riordan’s inhibitions. Out of everyone in the pack, Riordan trusted Norris not to poison him. If the old man had an issue with Riordan, he’d come at him straight on, honest and blunt. And hell, maybe he’d win. For all the stiffness and aches of his aging body, Norris was still an old shifter and therefore knew how to scrap with the best of them.

Riordan pounced on the offering, messily digging into the treat. He tore at it gently, opening up the waxy cells to his tongue as he settled in for a true treat. Honey badgers had gotten their name from their tendency to go eat honey straight from the hive, getting stung hundreds of times if that’s what it took to secure their food. It wasn’t quite as good without the bee larvae in it, but Riordan was still quite satisfied. Fortunately, neither Mark nor Norris was foolish enough to interfere with Riordan and his meal once he’d started. He was absently surprised that Norris stuck around, given how busy he was, but considered it less important than breakfast.

By the time he was chewing on the licked-clean beeswax, Riordan finally turned his attention to the men who were both watching him now.

“Feeling better?” Norris asked calmly, as if feeding honey to badgers was just any other morning.

Riordan huffed and batted his wad of wax around playfully. A corner of his mind warned him that he was probably going to get in trouble for the sticky patch on the floor around the honey plate, but he didn’t care right now.

As if Riordan had replied in words, Norris smiled and nodded. “Good. I’ll get you more breakfast in a bit. Before that,” the old man leaned over the arm of the chair he’d settled in and came up with a wire pet brush, “I believe we should do something about the dirt you keep tracking everywhere.”

Nope. Riordan tried to scramble backwards under the table, but apparently Norris had expected as much and grabbed a handful of Riordan’s fur. With the thick fur and loose skin of a honey badger, whipping around to bite Norris would have been nothing, but it was Norris. The man had treated Riordan well. He still whipped his head around on instinct, but stopped short of biting, emitting a distressed growl. He knew that it would be better if his animal form was clean enough to leave less traces, but this was undignified!

“Come on, lad,” Norris gave a surprisingly gentle tug towards the front door. “Let’s get it over with. You aren’t as large as a bear, but your fur is thicker. I’m not sure how long it will take.”

Riordan’s paws scrabbled at the floor as he made his unwillingness clear, but unless he wanted to actually fight back and risk hurting Norris over a reasonable request, he was fucked. Even an old shifter had no problem lifting a thirty pound badger with one hand if they put a bit of effort in. Riordan looked back towards the room as Norris opened the door, considering his escape routes, only to see Mark watching them. The young man’s expression was torn between shock, concern, and amusement. Riordan growled again and the amusement fell away, but the other emotions remained as Norris deposited Riordan successfully on the porch.

The door swung shut, cutting Mark off from view. A second later, Daniel appeared nearby, likely in response to Riordan’s own volatile emotional state.

“Riordan, what--” the ghost cut off, staring, as Norris ran the wire brush through Riordan’s fur for the first time. “Oh my! He got you.”

Sure, sure, Riordan thought at his friend, sitting like a lump next to Norris on the porch and radiating unwillingness from every pore. Laugh it up.