Quinn was never very good at sitting still at the best of times. This was not the best of times. No, things decidedly sucked at the moment. He had one job: stopping death mages. Sometimes they got the drop on him, but not often. And not this quickly or badly. Usually it just resulted in forcing the final confrontation sooner rather than later and he’d kick their butts. He wasn’t used to dealing with death mages who had an urgent priority that actually trumped hiding from or stopping him. Well, sometimes they were trying to finish whatever it was that they had actively been in the middle of when he interrupted, but this was an extended determination to do that. Persistence was not a virtue he admired in his enemies.

He noticed he was clenching his fist again and forced his muscles to relax. Quinn laid the paper he was holding on the ground next to him and tried to smooth out the new set of crinkles. He wasn’t sure why he bothered. The little paper airplane had served its purpose already. It was just paper now. At the border, they had wrapped up the clean up in record time. Quinn had cut some corners on efficiency in favor of speed. It left him feeling gross and cross, but that was still better than feeling like a chess piece lured out of position, leaving the king unprotected. Frankie and Billy had been peeled off to deal with an attack on pack members in the town of Empire, deep within the border of the territory.

And then Vera had contacted Lucinda with the bad news that Billy had been magically compromised and had taken Riordan captive.

Quinn felt that failure intensely. It was his job to catch problems like this. It had to have happened during the scouting run, the spell either too weak at that point or already really well hidden or both. Ingrid had immediately gone back to rest. He hadn’t insisted she check for any trouble on their escape vehicle or its driver. His own sensing talents weren’t on the same level as hers and were clearly insufficient to catch that hidden compulsion. Vera’s messages said it had been undetectable until Billy was cut, his blood black and writhing with magic.

Riordan had chosen to place himself into Billy’s care and therefore the hands of their enemies. He was forcing the confrontation before it became a battle of attrition or before the death mages decided to stage a magical massacre to power up before wiping the floor with them. Riordan had asked for them to follow, trusting that they would be there to back him up before the death mages truly won.

That trust made sitting on his hands, waiting for everything to get in position, all the more impossible. Quinn got up and paced. Adam glanced his way, but made no comment before turning his attention back to the surveillance setup he was running. This area was covered in magical obfuscations that made unauthorized approach of the region difficult and just showed empty woods to magical spells looking through it. Adam’s spatial magic meant he could scry inside the barrier without the interference. His surveillance box was a weird mix of magical and technological, runed mirrors and handcrafted paper slotted in between computer screens and communication relays. Everything was miniaturized for transportability and a pain to set up, but an absolute necessity to set up a joint mission like this.

They had taken over a wooded copse on top of a rise, hidden mundanely by the trees. One of the pack security team dressed to blend into the woods stayed near the edge, partway up one of the trees, doing mundane surveillance with binoculars. Quinn glanced at Ingrid again, but he refrained from asking her to deep scan everyone for hidden spells. Again. He’d already had her check more than once at this point. Ingrid didn’t mind. She treated this as another adventure, sticking to Zeren’s side. Nothing perturbed Zeren much, at least on the surface, and their calm kept Ingrid calm as well.

In fact, the only person in their group just as anxious as Quinn, if not moreso, was Daniel. The young ghost wasn’t pacing, but he was practically vibrating, one hand pressed to his chest. He muttered to himself occasionally, a reminder that he could still feel Riordan. That Riordan was still alive. That the worst hadn’t come to pass. Yet.

Yeah, Quinn hated waiting.

“How much longer do we have to wait?” Daniel asked. He crossed his arms across his chest as if cold, his leg tapping rapidly against the air in barely contained agitation. “They could be doing anything--”

“Not anything,” Quinn said, as much to himself as to Daniel, though he stopped his pacing to face the anxious ghost, “They are prepping for a ritual at the site of the killing tree. Their efforts were somewhat delayed by putting out a fire at a nearby cabin, which had to be Riordan’s work. We’ve also spotted a third death mage in the surveillance, identified as Gloria, their master of ceremony. She’s been handling preparations while Helena and Phenalope have been sitting on their hostages. We’ve confirmed that Riordan, Billy, and Norris are all in their hands at this point.”

“So why are we waiting?” Daniel asked again, gesturing broadly, “Those are our friends down there, just waiting to be slaughtered like holiday dinner. Why aren’t we helping them?”

Quinn felt that plea deep inside. Those three were in danger because Quinn hadn’t been cautious enough, allowing this group of death mages to get the drop on the locals. He’d been rushed and on the off foot this whole time, playing catch-up to try and understand a situation that was rapidly developing into a sheer mess. One death mage reported had proven to be three and even that was still not a certainty, since they had hardly seen every member of the cult.

The mages in question used advanced tactics usually reserved for those death mages who did research in secrecy. The researcher type of death mages, consumed by a desire for knowledge as power, usually limited their killings. They kidnapped vulnerable people over large distances and long times, but only in small numbers at once and seldom had much of a support group. Sometimes a cabal of death mages would arise, all working together towards a goal, but the additional demands of multiple death mages almost always led to their discovery over time.

The more power hungry death mages usually relied on more brute force methods, making up for their lack of efficiency in sheer quantity of death. Those ones were nasty, but not subtle. They burned bright and fast, spurring rapid responses from the locals. They were more likely to have mundane lackeys, people to feed their ego and enable their slaughters, but less likely to share power with other death mages in their territory.

It was understandable then, that Quinn hadn’t expected a group of death mages characterizing both types and with far more knowledge than such young mages should be able to possess. More than that, Quinn and Adam were increasingly sure that someone had been obfuscating the number of disappearances in the area. The local law enforcement had been helpful in their investigation, but hadn’t taken the missing persons seriously. There was nothing to link the targets at first glance. The earlier targets had been linked to domestic violence situations. Their victims, desperate for aid that wasn’t coming strongly enough under current laws or that they felt helpless to reach out for, helped cover up many of those disappearances. The later kidnappings focused on vulnerable populations, largely homeless and migrants. They went after the poor and isolated rather than people with homes and families nearby to kick up a fuss. They didn’t even go after the tourists, not wanting to draw outside attention to the region.

Many of those people had no one to miss them, but even so, the number that did get reported was still disturbingly high and should not have been missed or ignored so easily. Quinn didn’t like this at all.

“We are going to help them,” Quinn promised Daniel quietly, “However, we’re only going to get one shot at this. Riordan bought us time and knocked them off balance. You can see it in the way they are having to double and triple check their preparations. They are having trouble focusing. The best time to hit them is mid-ritual. All the principles will have to be present and will be distracted. The primary caster will also have to lower most of her internal defenses when readying to accept the influx of power. That creates opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable. They’ve gone to the trouble of hiding the bodies that had been hanging from the tree. That means they will be bringing in members of the cult who aren’t aware of the extent of their violence. That should create division in their ranks if we can get them to show their true colors.”

All of that was true, but it felt like excuses in the face of this wait. Quinn didn’t tell Daniel that from the glances they’d gotten of the hostages, Riordan was injured and under a heavy spell to keep him unconscious. Billy had been standing like an empty puppet. Only Norris had seemed fine. In fact, Quinn would bet that the wily elder had only been captured because he allowed it, much like Riordan, and was currently encouraging his captors to see him as only a fragile old man. It made him a bit of a wild card in their preparations, but an intelligent and experienced one.

Quinn hated all these variables, nonetheless. He was only human. And as proven, when he missed something or messed up, things could get bad fast.

“Start casting your buffs, Agent Morrish,” Adam interrupted, not looking away from his array of screens. “The enemy is beginning to gather by the tree.”

His hands flashed over the tiny keyboard in his setup as Adam sent off alerts to the other team leaders in their makeshift troop. They were currently at the edge of the innermost barriers, the ones most sensitive to intruders. That meant they still had to cross the intervening space as rapidly as possible in that short window between the ritual starting, and thus the casters being tied up and unable to abort to stop the attack, and the ritual being completed.

They definitely did not want to let the ritual become complete. Quinn wasn’t confident about slaying a god.

“Are you ready?” Quinn asked Daniel, rummaging through his kit for the ingredients for his last minute buffs, mostly short term effects that metabolized in his blood if cast too soon.

“Is anyone ever really ready for something like this?” Daniel replied, his gaze staring off towards the killing tree and its gathering crowd, barely visible as a faint glow in the quiet darkening woods. “All we can do is fight anyway. He taught me that.”

Quinn nodded. “Then let’s fight.”