“I was only nine at the time,” Ahlgren explained in clipped words. “A bit young to attend formal gatherings, but my father wanted me to get used to the etiquette early and make connections. When the attack hit, everyone was a target, from the youngest to the oldest.”
“How did you keep from getting your affinity stripped?” Quinn asked, curious.
“Location and dumb luck,” Ahlgren replied. “The kids were all off in a side room, making connections under the guise of playing or perhaps playing under the guise of making connections. The tendrils have to travel the distance from the source to the target and they were in a target rich environment. By the time someone figured out how to stop the source, most of the targets in the main hall had been stripped.”
Unconsciously, Ahlgren paused to rub at his right arm, even though his new set of bites were mostly on his legs. “My father was one of the victims. He survived the attack but was no longer a mage.”
“Did his magic ever show signs of recovery? Was the damage complete or could it heal over time?” Quinn asked, slipping into trouble solving mode. “Which death mage made this spell?”
“I don’t know what the long term effects are,” Ahlgren said flatly. “My father committed suicide less than a month later. If anyone else knew more, no one broke the gag order to tell the child of a branch family. By the time I was old enough to be of assistance, secrecy was normal. We simply did not talk about it. I do know that the source the first time was not a circle. It was an enchanted item slipped in with some gifts.”
“A death mage enchanter?” Riordan said, the words slipping out in his surprise. “Why would an enchanter become a death mage?”
“I’m not even sure that the first attack used death magic,” Ahlgren replied grimly, “The details are all different, but the effect is the same. That sensation is seared into me and unmistakable.”
“Anything we should know about cleaning it up?”
Ahlgren shook his head, frustration evident in the set of his mouth. Riordan wondered if the man had perfected a whole language of different frowns. Perhaps so. He didn’t have much to smile about with events like that being so formative to his development. Riordan wasn’t the least bit surprised now that Ahlgren had gone into law enforcement.
Quinn piped up. “The magic in the air. It’s too thick. We can’t leave it like this.”
Riordan looked up, as if that was where the ambient levels of released death magic hung out or perhaps just the answer to it. “How do we fix that?”
“Need something to pull it out of the air.”
“Like what you did with the spell earlier?”
Quinn shook his head. “A spell is a closed system. Ambient levels are not. It’s like the difference between trying to drain a bucket or a fog bank. I need something to condense it down into a more solid form or the magical equivalent of an air filter. Gotta check what Xavier has.”
“And I need to call Heeren and probably the home office,” Ahlgren said, trying to stand. He grunted with the combined pain from his bites and the lingering weakness but, after some wobbling, remained standing. “I’m not sure if the grimoire’s author arrived at that technique independently, as a result of knowing about the first event, or by being related to the original creator. None of the answers are good.”
In his own understated way, Ahlgren was a badass, Riordan realized. A very stoic professional badass that didn’t feel the need to grandstand or be the hero.
“Do we know where the source of that self-destruct spell was?” Riordan asked. “Is there a way to shut it down?”
Ingrid was the one to answer. She pointed to the back of the altar setup. “It’s here!” she told him in a proud sing-song voice.
Quinn tried to stand but only got as far as kneeling before he began to pitch forward. Riordan caught him, drawing the bony man to his chest to keep him from trying again. Quinn glared at him when Riordan didn’t let go.
With a bit of negotiation, Riordan reluctantly supported Quinn as he hobbled over to look at the spell and Quinn reluctantly let him.
Behind the altar looked empty at first until Riordan spotted a small catch to open the back of the altar base. Quinn reached for it and Riordan smacked his hand away with a glare of his own.
“Any spells on the latch, Ingrid?” Riordan asked, doing a visual and physical inspection of his own for mundane traps.
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Ingrid shook her head. Riordan found a little compartment with a needle in it near the latch. He considered ways of disabling it and finally just jammed some modeling clay around a piece of metal, both from the work desks, over the hole. It was also locked, but a flex of enhanced strength snapped that easily enough.
The spell anchor proved to be a mix of a human skull and an array of charms which connected to a power outlet set into the floor under the altar. Quinn studied it for a moment and reached out. Riordan suppressed the urge to smack his hand away again. Disabling death magic was Quinn’s speciality. Riordan had to trust him.
Quinn just pulled the plug out of the outlet. Riordan felt a pop of magic.
“I’ll need Xavier to drain the rest of the energy out of the central charm, but that should break the flow,” Quinn said. “Now we just need to do clean-up.”
“That’s all we were doing in the first place,” Riordan grumbled.
By the time they staggered their way to the entryway, De la Fuente had practically turned the place into a fort, magically and physically. One zombie was trapped in the wall, literally wrapped in bands of drywall material. Another zombie lay still on the coffee table in the lounge. De la Fuente rose from where he knelt next to it when they arrived, looking first relieved to see them and then aghast at their collective condition.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Nasty magical trap that escaped the rest of this self-destruct spell,” Riordan summarized. “It’s left us all low on mana and bitten up. Maudy and I will be fine, but these two could use proper medical care.”
“Yes, of course,” De la Fuente replied, coming to assist Maudy with Ahlgren. Maudy didn’t need the help any more than Riordan did, but she looked less physically capable, being shorter and smaller. De la Fuente helped settle Ahlgren in one of the comfortable armchairs. Riordan did the same with Quinn.
Before De la Fuente could get too side-tracked with helping the agents, Riordan redirected him to the more immediate magical issues that only he could do. “We need a way to filter the ambient death magic out of the air until we get it back down to a reasonable level. And a way to dismantle the zombies for good.”
De la Fuente blinked at him. “Ah. Yes.”
“Help him please, Xavier,” Ahlgren said, sounding exhausted. “I’ll call Drika, tell her what’s happened, and see about discrete medical assistance.”
Riordan wasn’t sure if he was the one to be helped since there was no way in hell that Riordan was the correct person here to take point on magical issues, not when his magic was a mess. Then again, he was the least injured, aside from De la Fuente.
“I have the storage containers meant to drain the spells in this building,” De la Fuente said, heading towards the door where a line of enchanted jars sat. “I can try to rig up a condenser, but it will need someone to prime it.”
“I can do that,” Quinn put in. Riordan frowned at him. Quinn rolled his eyes. “It’s my job, Riordan. I know what I’m doing. I can recharge my well out of that first jar while Xavier is getting set up.”
Riordan didn’t want to accept that, but he had to. Any other choice was just an insult to Quinn. He grumbled and turned away to find something more useful to do.
That turned out to be playing muscle for De la Fuente. First Riordan fetched supplies for crafting an energy condenser, which, De la Fuente was quick to tell him, would be terribly inefficient and impractical if the air wasn’t already saturated with death-aligned mana. Then he hauled zombies over to the lounge, stacking them on a tapestry he’d pulled down from the wall to limit the already bizarre forensics of the scene. They would have to fake so much paperwork to make this place look mundane.
Quinn and De la Fuente fell into a technical discussion about the zombie spells that Riordan was torn between wanting to listen to and not wanting to know. He had enough horror for the day and he didn’t want to think about the sentience of zombies whose fluids were smeared all over his clothes.
Instead, Riordan took Ingrid and Zeren and started sweeping the building for anything magical that he could bring to the mages to drain. There weren’t many magical items left after the failsafe spell, so he also collected any interesting physical evidence.
Every time Riordan came through the lounge, he paused to look at Quinn and Ahlgren, watching for any change in their symptoms. To his relief, they appeared to be recovering slowly rather than deteriorating.
Then Ahlgren pulled him aside.
“I’m not telling the others yet, since they need to focus,” Ahlgren said in a low voice, “but Gloria Robinson has disappeared from custody.”
Riordan stared at Ahlgren. “How?”
Ahlgren growled, which was a noise Riordan hadn’t expected from the professional agent. Pain, stress, and the growing list of issues clearly pushed the man to a quiet rage that Riordan would be a fool to underestimate. “I don’t know. Drika briefly stepped out and someone attacked Vergil. He didn’t see it coming, but he’s also an administrator more than a field agent. He’s got a nasty headache and a gap in his memory but otherwise seems healthy. By the time Drika returned, Gloria’s cell was empty and her collar was sitting on the bed. Helena is still in custody, but only heard someone walking in the hall and no scuffle or shouting.”
“Gloria didn’t kill Vergil?” Riordan blurted out. “Not that I would want her to, but she seemed the sort to get revenge and gain power simultaneously.”
“Vergil’s alive, so she clearly didn’t. As to why…”
Then it hit Riordan. “She had help, didn’t she.”
“She would have had to,” Ahlgren confirmed grimly, “Her collar wasn’t damaged, which meant someone removed it properly from the outside. Someone who knew how they worked. I hated it enough when Quinn was suspicious about a leak in our information. Now I know someone in the Department is compromised.”
“On your team?”
“It’s possible that someone from the outside snuck into our base and did this.”
“But you don’t believe that. Or at least, that they worked alone.”
“No, I don’t.”