Attempting to turn, Riordan managed to get the gun partially raised before the next blow caught him below the chin. He pulled the trigger, shooting wildly towards his newest attacker. A yell of pain, further back than the impending knees and elbows of his main assailant, let Riordan know he’d hit someone, but it was of little comfort as the gun was kicked out his recoil-loosened grip.

The reprieve of attack required to disarm him let Riordan shore up his stance and defenses. He rocked backwards to brace against the bed and kicked out, managing to catch his attacker in main body mass and send them backwards, buying more space to assess.

At this short distance, Riordan was finally able to identify Helena, the third death mage. He’d pegged her as having military experience of some sort from her stance and their brief confrontation. Her unarmed combat techniques here proved it, sharper and more lethal in the defense of her prophet than in her casual kidnapping attempt in downtown Honor. Context had a way of drawing out ferocity and quelling hesitation.

Behind her, Tom was down on the floor, curled in on himself and bleeding. Riordan’s stray shot had found a target. He couldn’t dwell on whether he regretted that or not right now. Still, a bitter laugh broke free. He was still a killer, it seemed. Just not good enough of one to finish off the target that mattered most.

His eyes met Helena’s for a moment. A sense of recognition passed between them, kindred spirits seeing themselves in the mirror of others. Only Helena was a mirror tarnished and stained with death corruption. His eyes fell to her torso, watching her muscles and observing her stance. Behind him, Riordan could hear Phenalope breathing heavily, her heart racing from pain and shock.

A tension in his opponent was the minute prelude to the next attack. Ruthlessly, Helena lashed out towards Riordan’s injured shoulder. The slug had buried itself painfully in the muscles there. On anyone else, it would have likely punched right through, but Riordan’s shifter traits included a ridiculous level of toughness for a mortal creature, backed by both the physical traits of a normal honey badger and with the reinforcement of shifter magic. As it was, every motion with that arm was agony. He could feel the slug scraping against bone as he wrenched his body to the side, Helena’s kick deflecting off the curve of his shoulder. Riordan swung his good arm up and grabbed her leg, pushing upward in the motion of the kick to unbalance her.

She tried to free herself from his grip as she struggled to rebalance in that overextended position. Riordan made the split second decision to release her. Helena wasn’t likely to be able to force him to release her in a straight challenge of strength, but his hold would also have given her a solid ground to balance against and limited his own avenues of attack. A defensive battle would be a loss here. Riordan was injured and outnumbered. His opponents were both mages, nasty ones, and when they remembered that, Riordan knew he’d be screwed.

Still braced against the bed, Riordan kicked out at the leg Helena still had planted on the ground. She leapt backward, nearly tripping over the lowly moaning Tom just past the doorway. She managed to remain standing though. Riordan pulled his leg back and levered himself off the floor in a flex of thighs and core muscles.

“You’re trained,” Helena said cautiously, slipping into a combat stance and watching him as carefully as he watched her. “Who are you?”

Riordan didn’t answer, stepping forward into combat range and throwing an elbow towards her face. She tried to grab his arm in a hold, but he straightened it, hand going around her neck and pulling her forward, thwarting her attempt to get a solid lock on his arm. He followed up with a knee to her torso, the hit not as solid as he liked as she curved away from him, and a blow to the side of her head with his left fist. That motion caused a fresh spurt of blood from his wound, though he didn’t feel the scraping this time. He thought his regeneration was actively trying to expel the slug from the wound, but the constant strain of the combat was resulting in more damage as the slug rubbed and tore at the inside of his muscles there. He growled loudly to keep the yell of pain inside.

“Don’t kill him yet!” Phenalope shouted, clearly recovering enough from Riordan’s attack to be a factor again. Damn. “His death will make me a god!”

“I know that, Phen!” Helena shouted back, sounding mildly exasperated even as she shook free from Riordan and started a probing exchange of close range strikes with Riordan, neither committing fully to the attack as they looked for an opportunity. “You’ve had me out canvassing the area for this guy. That doesn’t explain why he’s here, combat trained, glowing with weird magic, and recklessly wrecking his arm with that injury as if it didn’t hurt!”

Riordan must seem so odd from their perspective. He had no idea what they thought about magic, given they had been mundane before taking an accelerated path into death magic and cult mentalities. Being a shifter was normal to Riordan. He’d always been one and had grown up around other shifters. They weren’t terribly common compared to the general population, but they were one of the most common subsets of magic-users and Riordan had known how to seek them out. From the outside, a shifter was something of a monster. Tough, strong, fast, and healing quickly, he didn’t even need to partial shift or full shift to be an abnormal threat to a regular person. If he did partial shift, well, there were reasons that lycanthropy was viewed as a curse in most legends. That uncanniness of something mixing human and animal combined with the fact that most shifters didn’t reveal that side of themselves unless they were desperate or insane became a recipe for storybook monsters.

That didn’t even take into account who Riordan was as an individual. Tall, muscular, foreign, he stuck out like a sore thumb here. He was a world-weary drifter, surviving a life that kicked him when he was down. He was a military trained combatant, fighting against his enemies and situation, physically, socially, mentally, magically. He was a mage, one who talked to ghosts and spirits, embodying an entire entrenched legacy of magic and myth that had been denied to these death mages.

He was also trying to kill them with his bare hands, if he could.

“The Goddess delivered him to me!” Phenalope called to Helena, ignoring most of her concerns over Riordan in favor of her obsession. “He is a worthy sacrifice.”

“Not helpful,” Helena muttered.

The pair had an interesting dynamic of loving fondness mixed with annoyance. Helena’s exasperation and the conversation gave Riordan a chance. He landed a solid punch to her solar plexus, getting past her guard in that momentary inattention. She sputtered and coughed, gagging as she went to her knees. He followed it up with a punch to her jaw that sent her sprawling. He moved to stomp her, to keep her down, when the familiar sound of quick cast chanting behind him made Riordan abort the attack and whirl towards Phenalope.

The magical blast hit him square in the chest before he’d managed to close the distance to the mage. Riordan screamed, body seizing up in a fresh wave of pain.

In the spirit realm, he’d had Frankie’s spells boosting him and his own magic had benefited from the environment while Phenalope’s had suffered with the lack of physical body to anchor her effects. He hadn’t been a ghost or a spirit and death magic hadn’t had as much power over a living soul as a dead one. Here, his blood burned in his veins, his heart racing hard enough to beat out of his chest in its fury. The effect hit hard and fast, not slowed here by his safeguards, but also didn’t last. The spell, cast quickly and without much power behind it, was more akin to being hit with a magical stun gun in this realm.

In a combat like this, even a spell that only lasted strongly for a second or two and then left Riordan’s body trembling and his muscles twitching sporadically, his breath and attention scattered to the four winds, was enough to wreck him. Riordan lost his chance to press his attack. He staggered, managing to stay standing through the pain by sheer force of will. He took another step closer before Phenalope hit him with the spell again.

She was weakened too. Riordan could tell. She wore a bra and a pair of jeans since he’d interrupted her in the middle of changing clothes. The stab wound to her abdomen pumped out blood that soaked into her jeans down to her thigh. The slash to her side and on each forearm were shallower, bleeding more sluggishly. Blackness clotted up along the injuries, a magical effect to slow the bleeding that looked like rot in her wounds.

Weakened or not, her spells still packed a punch. Riordan growled, leaning into his badger as he convulsed in the initial blast and then forced himself forward again. Something in him scared Phenalope. He could see it in the way her hands shook and her voice trembled, slowing her next casting. He imagined very few people took a blast of that and kept coming, much less two. Much less becoming wilder and less human with each second of pain. His eyes had turned black like his badger. His teeth had sharpened. His skin thickened, his hair growing coarser and streaked with a stripe of gray.

The third spell barely slowed him. Between his partial shift and the way he was growing accustomed to the pain, it didn’t stagger him for more than a second. Now he was too close for her to cast again. Riordan’s good hand shot forward and latched around her throat. He wished for claws meant for ripping and tearing instead of digging. As it was, the points of his nails still dug into her throat as he squeezed, trying to crush her throat. His world narrowed to this task, ignoring his bleeding shoulder, misfiring nerves, and twitching muscles.

That hyperfocus meant he missed Helena’s approach. A blade stabbed against his back, almost stopped by his thickened skin before it pierced through, stabbing shallowly into him. She threw her weight behind the knife, shoving it deeper. It scraped against his ribs and then into his lung. Riordan coughed, feeling that pressure in his chest as one lung began to fill with blood. Refusing to release his hold on Phenalope, Riordan lashed out with his left arm, not giving a fuck as he sent a spray of his own blood across the room in the swing.

Helena let go of the knife still embedded in Riordan’s back and dropped below his swing. Then she yelled out a series of harsh words filled with the weight of magic and pointed at Riordan, commanding in English at the end, “Sleep!”

At once, Riordan’s muscles went lax and he swayed. Damn. The knife. She’d used the knife to create a blood link, like she’d done with Mark. He tried to push back against the effect, but still felt his grip on Phenalope slacken. The death mage sucked in a large breath of air in a pained inhalation. Still alive. No, he couldn’t come this close just to fail. He refused. Riordan growled, releasing her unwillingly to reach over his shoulder to the shotgun wound, digging his fingers in. The intense pain chased off the lethargy from her command. His fingertips brushed the shotgun slug, already pushed towards the mouth of the wound by his healing, and yanked it out to toss to the floor.

Helena retreated, clearly intimidated by that show of pure hardcore masochism. Or perhaps only in part because of intimidation. She went to her knees by Tom, the man no longer moaning, and planted both hands in his spilled blood. Death magic whirled from him to her in a rush, a black swirl of oily stolen strength. Behind them, the main room of the cabin burned.

Riordan took in that tableau. A tall and sturdy woman, her brown eyes blazing in fury, bruises already forming on her jaw, sinking her hands in the warm blood of a dying man, both of them covered in spatters of Riordan’s blood, all backlit by the slowly growing house fire.

The sight stayed with him as her spell hit him, a pure blast of power commanding him to sleep. Riordan dropped like a stone, his body losing its grip on the partial shift and softening into his battered human form. As the world faded out, Riordan heard Helena, panting, ask, “What the hell is he made of?”