A sickness filled the air of the forest clearing. Frankie looked up from where she stood over Helena’s bound and unconscious body to stare towards the tree. The physical bark and leaves of the thing was nearly eclipsed by the rage of magic surrounding it and the glow of the spirit within it. Clouds gathered overhead from a formerly clear sky, killing the last of the twilight glow. Lanterns and flashlights dotted the space, casting strange shadows in the mass of moving bodies. The darkness moved like a living thing, writhing among them, a beast stalking prey.

The leaking magical energy reinforced that impression. Frankie had been locked down in combat with Helena and the berserking cultists, forced to spend too much attention on defense for herself and her team to pull out a definitive win. Then the compulsion driving the majority of the cultists wild turned off again, leaving only a scattered, battered mob. She had capitalized on that to contain her target, but Frankie’s assumption had been that Quinn must be making progress to restore order to the battlefield.

That clearly wasn’t the case.

Frankie nodded to her second on her team to take over guardianship of their defeated death mage. She carefully approached the center of the tree. Winds shoved at her, making footing hard, especially since the winds chilled and sickened. She flared her spirit mantle, spreading her wings to push back against the growing taint on this land. The nausea and despair cut off, though she could feel them pressing against her defenses even as the wind pressed against her body. The magic previously tied up in the ritual inside the spiritual realm was spilling out into the physical realm, manifesting a host of negative effects.

Worse, she could feel that this spillover was minor. The majority of the magic contained within the ritual still swirled and towered, waiting for… something. The structure of it felt different now. Rituals were orderly spells, built up step by step to funnel and control massive amounts of power into a predetermined effect. They felt contained and organized, even when containing enough magic to crush them all. They were balanced.

The power currently hanging about the spirit tree no longer felt ordered, yet it wasn’t crashing down on them all either. Frankie needed to know why.

Pushing through the last foot of gale force winds, Frankie staggered as she popped into the relative calm at the eye of this storm. Her sharp dark eyes took in the scene before her. The altar constructed for this ritual was still upright, but no longer centered. Black blood was spilled all over its white cloth, erasing portions of their magical circles, and all of the elements that had once been placed there were out of place or missing entirely. Frankie saw the metal bowl that had once held the blood laying on the ground nearby, empty and slightly dented. Billy leaned heavily against the side of the altar. His front was covered in blood, but Frankie’s practiced eye determined that his wounds themselves had largely sealed up. His blood was still black with death magic, which likely accounted for his inaction. Frankie knew that man would be swinging punches with the best of them otherwise.

Billy’s younger brother, Ellis, guarded him in bear form, as well as watching over several bodies nearby. Ellis was part of Frankie’s team, but she’d lost track of him in the earlier chaos, aside from seeing him following one of the Warriors towards the center. One of the bodies nearby was that Warrior, Frankie decided. Both the Warrior and the death magic Gloria were unconscious, though neither had been restrained yet. If bears could tie knots, Frankie suspected that wouldn’t be the case, but Ellis clearly felt better equipped for this fight while shifted.

Cursed charms and spell materials littered the ground a bit away from Gloria, so clearly someone had at least searched her. Frankie would have put money on Quinn having been the one to do it, since almost anyone else would have been too at risk from the death magic on those charms.

As for why he had not followed up with restraining her, Frankie would assume that would be the fact he was now panicking and yelling at Norris.

“What were you thinking?” the pale death mage shouted, stumbling around to the other side of the altar and staring from the ground to the tree and back. “Without her, the ritual is going to destabilize and kill all of us!”

No, not from the ground to the tree. Frankie moved closer, cursing her short height as she finally got a proper angle to see what was going on. Quinn was looking from the crumbled body of Phenalope, rich red blood pouring from her cut throat, to the ritual structure that the death mage had been maintaining.

Or perhaps to the man still tied to the tree, a large stab wound bleeding sluggishly in the center of his chest. Frankie peered closer, pushing her shifter senses to determine that Riordan’s heart still beat and he still breathed, even if the first was slow and the second dangerously wet and rattling. The ritual wrapped around him like a shroud to her spiritual perceptions. She hoped that it wouldn’t finish draining him before they could extricate him and his ghosts.

Frankie frowned at that, considering. Quinn was right. Why wasn’t the ritual unraveling further? With its primary caster dead and its secondary caster unconscious and unable to take over, how was the ritual still going? It should have either begun to die down or exploded. The manifestations of power into the physical world made the second more likely, but it wasn’t happening. Why?

“That woman needed killing,” Norris said firmly, unrattled by Quinn’s shouting. The old man wiped some stray drops of blood off of his hands and shuffled over to Gloria and the Warrior. Ellis shot Norris a grateful look as the man began to improvise some restraints out of strips of the altar cloth.

“Yes, she did,” Quinn replied, though his attention remained on the ritual. His fingers twitched as if they wanted to reach for something but he was restraining himself. “If we had gotten to her before she could raise the ritual, it would have been perfect. Now we’re all going to die because that power has no center and is going to spin out of control. I’d try to center it myself, but I don’t have permission! And anyone who tries is damned likely to end up thoroughly corrupted!”

That would explain why Quinn did not receive permission. Frankie could see why Agent Ahlgren would prefer not to let the intelligent young man ascend as a demigod of death. She suspected that between all of them, they might have been able to kill him, but only if he stayed to fight. Quinn seemed like the type to retreat, build his strength, and then cause true trouble.

She trusted Quinn on his assessment of the risks regarding the corruption, but Frankie thought he was missing something in his panic. She picked her ways over to where Quinn stood and smacked him on his shoulder. Frankie would have gone for the back of the young man’s head, her preference for sorting out unruly apprentices, but he was too damned tall.

“Calm down, boy,” Frankie grumbled at Quinn, raising her voice to be heard over the wind, “Panic won’t help anything.”

Quinn jumped when she hit him, one hand going to a charm on his belt before his mind caught up and identified her as not a threat. His eyes went from wide and panicked to glaring. Frankie marked it as an improvement in their current situation.

“What part of ‘the ritual is about to explode and there’s nothing we can do to stop it’ isn’t panic-inducing?” Quinn groused back, though he remained calmer.

“The part where the ritual should have already started to explode and hasn’t yet,” Frankie replied. “Now tell me why.”

“What?” Quinn whirled back to the tree and then to the swirl of magic and wind around them, a look of dawning realization on his face. “You’re right. It’s leaking but it’s holding. What’s holding it together? The ritual structure is hopelessly shattered.”

Frankie followed her own advice and studied the magical activity around her. It felt like trying to understand the outside of a whirlpool by standing inside of it. Only her nature as a bird, able to rise above such chaos on a spiritual level, gave Frankie a proper perspective to understand.

“The tree spirit is guiding the power,” Frankie assessed, following the strands of spiritual magic that had begun to thread their way through the pillar of death magic, balancing it. “That’s very bizarre. There is no reason for a tree to get involved in this, even if it is the anchor. The fallout might damage its physical tree, but just because a storm might topple it doesn’t mean a tree will try to stop the storm.”

Quinn froze at her words. Then he shivered all over and began rapidly pulling things out of his pockets. He considered a few things before settling on a white powder that Frankie suspected was made of crushed bone. He poured a bit on his hand and hastily blew on it before the wind ripped it away. A ghostly glow began to spread through the swirl of power. It circled them once, twice, and then was sucked down a funnel that led towards the base of the tree.

To the man tied to the tree.

Quinn cursed softly. “Spirits can move in unusual ways when interacting with shaman. What the hell is he thinking? Didn’t he know this would happen? I don’t want to have to do this!”

Frankie wasn’t entirely sure what Quinn was referring to, but had enough to infer and confirm a few things herself. Namely, she tracked the spirit threads as they connected to Riordan and saw that they were indeed funneling the ritual into the unconscious and bleeding shaman. Riordan had taken over as center of the ritual.

Peering closer, Frankie began to tease out details from the shroud of power growing stronger and stronger around Riordan. The death magic wrapped around him, beginning to drape over his body like clothing. Inside his body, the death corruption spread outwards from his well like an infection. Frankie was fascinated and horrified in turns. Death corruption usually accumulated like lead poisoning, washing up in the body in little bits that just never left. This rapid spread looked more like ice growing across glass, only much faster.

Quinn pulled a knife off the altar, one already coated in blood and possibly already used to deal death. He spoke so softly that Frankie almost didn’t hear him over the wind and lingering shouts of combat beyond. His eyes were fixed on the dark-skinned shaman before them, increasingly resplendent in rich royal robes of death magic.

“I wanted to save you, not kill you.”

Frankie reached out, laying a hand over Quinn’s where he clutched the weapon. “Wait,” she told him. “In the short time I have known him, Riordan has proven he has a knack for doing the improbable with spirit magic. Give him a chance.”

The look Quinn shot her was incredulous but also hopeful. “What could he possibly do at this point? He’s already becoming corrupted.”

A strange light flared on Riordan’s right shoulder, visible even through his shadowy garments. A silver flower bloomed on his skin like a tattoo, vines, leaves, berries and smaller flowers growing out from there to trace down his arm and up his neck. It pulsed with an internal light. In the center of his chest, an image of his gateway unfurled, overlaying itself upon Riordan’s physical body. The stars in that void spun slowly, galaxies and nebulae rotating peacefully. The plants that anchored into Riordan’s spirit around the hole waved slowly in a breeze that did not match the roaring winds around them.

Frankie’s eyebrows shot up, unable to identify the cause of the new tattoos or why his gateway was open. Her grin was audible in her voice as she said, “I don’t know, but I think he’s going to surprise us.”