Helena Jones sat silently, thinking hard, while the three agents waited on her answer. She felt… tired. The restraints these people used convinced her far more than anything they said that they were some form of magical authority. Who else has handcuffs and collars that make her magic feel so distant?

Before now, Helena thought that magic was just a tool, something she could take or leave, but now… She thought of the female agent’s words. That it would be cruel for the average person to know of magic without being able to use it. That the hunger for magic made it dangerous.

Helena realized she was ravenous for magic now. When had that happened?

Penny was the one who loved magic the most of the three friends. Helena found her pure wonder at the gift awe-inspiring. Most people did. Penny had that charisma that made people feel things with her. It was why she had been their visionary. Their leader. Their prophet.

Besides, she was the one who had found the grimoire.

Helena had thought the book a macabre joke, but Penny had believed and Gloria had been willing to try. They had already been talking about the possibility of killing some of the worst repeat abusers that the law enforcement did nothing to stop. What difference did it make at that point if it was a murder or a sacrifice?

But, side effects. That explained… much about what happened at the end.

“If you tell me the side effects,” Helena offered slowly, “I will tell you how we learned magic.”

Agent Heeren nodded at that. Helena wondered if she was a mage too. The one in the back leaning on the wall was, looking like a cross between a sexy bad boy and death warmed over. She’d seen him use something to fight Gloria before the shroud of the ritual’s magic became too thick and her own fight took all her attention.

Helena was quickly becoming aware of the depths of her ignorance regarding magic. Obviously, not everyone killed people to get magic. The agent referred to what Helena did as “death magic” and the issue of side effects implies that there is natural magic without side effects, but rarely so.

The shapeshifters in that strange fight certainly lent credence to that concept. And the glowing runed bird controlled by the fragile old woman that none of Helena’s magic had been able to stop effectively.

“As you know, death magic requires the theft of magic from a living being, translating life force into usable mana. This transition is flawed under all known methods, leaving a corruption that builds up in the user. The corruption creates a thirst for more magic, more power, more stolen lives, that is assured to lead to madness eventually. Some death mages retain more intelligence than others in that state, but all of them kill regularly to feed that thirst. Consequences of the corruption include personality changes, physical illness, hallucinations, lack of empathy, and a whole range of other mental and physical issues that result from the body and mind trying to compensate for their new reality.”

The man against the wall snorted. Helena shifted her gaze to him. His silvery eyes seemed to glow for a moment like ghosts do. She wasn’t sure if he was Morrish or Creighton, but Helena suddenly wanted to know his opinion on the matter.

“Penny found a book,” Helena said, “A grimoire of magic.” She pointed at the man. “What do you think about those side effects?”

He looked startled to be addressed directly and glanced at Agent Heeren for direction. The agent waved a hand at him. “It’s alright, Morrish. You may answer.”

Morrish didn’t answer immediately, frozen in some internal calculation. Then he shrugged, relaxing back against the wall, and regarded her with morbid humor. “I think the side effects are a death sentence as lethal and addicting as the worst drugs.”

Helena sucked in a breath. In her youth, Helena had struggled with her identity and happiness, turning to drugs to combat the boredom and loneliness of living a lie in a rural town. She remembered the hit of the heroin she used to numb herself and the way her body and mind decayed under it. Fortunately, she didn’t possess a body or mind particularly inclined to addiction. Once she decided to join the military and met Penny, Helena had broken her addiction easily enough. Even then, withdrawal wrecked her and she found herself craving a hit from time to time, even though it had been decades since she last used it.

She wondered now why she hadn’t recognized the same sensation when it came to wanting to obtain and use magic. Helena kept her uses small and mostly used the blood tricks mentioned in the book, but it made her twitchy when she hadn’t used magic in a while.

Morrish must have seen something in her face because he nodded in understanding.

“You’re a death mage,” Helena stated, pointing at him.

“Yep,” he confirmed, not even trying to deny it, “And I probably have only a year or two left before the magic either kills me directly because the corruption overwhelms my body or someone else has to kill me because the corruption overwhelms my mind. Even knowing that, I can’t stop using magic.”

“That’s what happened to Penny,” Helena said softly, the realization settling into her bones and blood like a stone sinking in water.

“Yes. I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.”

No one had said that to Helena. Penny had been doing terrible things. Helena had been vaguely aware of that, though she didn’t let herself think about it too hard. Penny had been their leader, the one with the grand vision and high ideals. The one who always knew what they should do. Helena’s best friend and the woman she’d quietly loved for too many years. She had known Penny wasn’t acting like herself anymore, was getting increasingly unstable and selfish, but Helena hadn’t wanted to admit it.

Now it all hit her at once and Helena broke down, tears streaming down her face as she crumpled into herself, burying her face in her shackled hands.

After that, Helena held nothing back.

The grimoire had been a gift from someone Penny met at one of the more hardcore activist rallies they had attended. Penny had been on her own when she received it, but she said she had gotten into a conversation with someone there about what really should be done about those abusers who refused to be reformed and kept escaping justice. The stranger had given her the book, saying they didn’t need it anymore and it might offer some new options to Penny. Which had proven true in the end. Fatally so.

Penny never got a name for this chance-met stranger and her description had been brief, calling them androgynous but plain, wearing eye-catching punk clothing that was more memorable than the stranger themself.

The grimoire itself was a strange mix of rituals and spells. Helena remembered thinking that it seemed hooky because it was bound to look all big and theatrical, but the pages were printed like a normal book. It felt weird to have a modern book of magic when compared to the fantasy image of it.

The spells themselves were all over the place in terms of style, materials, and even language, as if pulled from different sources and then compiled, but all of them seemed to work. Helena found some of the spells easier to use than others, as did Gloria and Penny. The interesting bit was that they gravitated towards different spells.

“Magic is tied to belief,” Agent Heeren explained, “Did those spells match more closely with how you thought magic should work?”

“Yes,” Helena decided after a moment. “I tended towards the looser spells, the ones that worked with blood and intention. I didn’t have the patience for the bigger rituals and I wanted something I could use to give me an edge in a conflict. Gloria liked setting up patterns and objects and longer term effects. She did a lot of little things that built up until everything was wrapped in webs of magic. And Penny…”

Helena swallowed hard and then continued, “Penny preferred the big rituals and really showy magic. She worked best with an audience. But she also practiced a few smaller spells until she had them down cold, even if they weren’t her preferred style.”

Past that, Helena described the Daughters of the Divine Feminine. She hadn’t really considered them a cult, but in retrospect, the label made sense. It had started as a community to help survivors of domestic and other abuse band together for strength and recovery. Spirituality had been part of that recovery at first, finding new meaning and pride in their more vulnerable emotions and traits. They mostly attracted female members since they had strong feminist roots and were run by three women, but they did get men too.

Some of the men were victims themselves, either abused by a romantic partner of either gender or some other relative or acquaintance. Others wanted to help protect and nurture others and found strength in getting in touch with their feminine side.

And some were just goons. Helena hadn’t been best pleased about that, recruiting people who didn’t share their ideals, but Gloria had made a good case about not wanting to risk their members on some of the harsher tasks that would be poor for their souls and Penny had backed her up.

If the tasks were that harmful or different from their ideals, then they shouldn’t have been doing them, Helena saw now, but she hadn’t been able to make the argument then.

Not when the result of those tasks was fresh sacrifices for their magic addiction.

She hadn’t dealt with that as much. Her primary concern was in keeping everyone safe. Gloria may have liaised with the local organizations and law enforcement on behalf of their non-profit charity, but Helena taught self-defense and personal empowerment. She created the Warriors for them, teaching women to take back their lives. She managed security for their physical and digital presence. She worked with Gloria to make magical defenses.

She covered the trails of their crimes. When someone slipped up, it was Helena’s job to fix it. Because if she didn’t, then all the vulnerable members of the cult would be at risk and Penny would be blamed.

That led her to trying to find their missing sacrifice. He was the moment everything had gone wrong. They found out later that his name was Riordan and that he had magic of his own. Penny thought he was a gift sent from the goddess.

Helena thought he was a different sort of divine sending. Retribution, probably. They had earned it, straying so far from everything they had meant to be.

She’d been sent to track him after he’d somehow cast off Penny’s tracking spell, cutting her off from direct access to most of the killing tree ritual in the process. She’d run into another group investigating as she later realized. The details of the encounter were blurry after she’d gotten hit with some sort of glowing spike or quill. The rest of the people with her hadn’t remembered anything, losing about twenty minutes of memory.

They’d run into the strange magical border not long after that and Helena had first understood that magic was both more real and more active in the world than she had ever imagined.

Of the three of them, Helena had the most acute ability to sense magic in others and in the world in general, likely because of her inclination towards more physical and instinctive magic. She’d known that crossing that boundary would inform someone, though she had no idea who or what could have set up such a large spell.

Penny had confirmed that Riordan was working with other mages now, having encountered him in some sort of magical dream world through one of her magical experiments. The likelihood of him sheltering behind that boundary was high. Penny wanted him badly, utterly convinced he was the key to finishing the killing tree ritual properly and ascending to godhood. She had begged Helena to obtain him for her.

So Helena decided to try luring him out.

Their first bit of good luck had been finding the mage waiting in a vehicle near their main compound. She’d been able to subdue him with a surprise attack and a joint working of nasty blood magic between her and Gloria. He’d been charged with bringing Riordan to them at the best opportunity, a magical sleeper agent.

Then Helena equipped a team of her Warriors with some magic-detecting equipment and sent them to search the few small towns inside the boundary in hopes of finding the people behind it, all while creating a magical explosion at the boundary to see what happened and hopefully distract people.

A small team of magical powerhouses had shown up. Helena had been using another magic detector and the size of those signatures had made her choose not to engage. Her other team got a captive, which was brought to her. Her sleeper agent got Riordan, who was brought to Penny.

And then Penny nearly got murdered by Riordan. Helena had barely arrived in time to stop that. The man fought with the skill of a soldier and the fierceness of a cornered animal. It took one of their goons dying and Helena hitting Riordan with a suppression spell made from that death to put him down. She’d tried to argue Penny out of using him as a sacrifice, but Penny insisted.

Helena wasn’t sure if she wished things had gone differently. The end result of attempting the ritual was… confusing. She honestly didn’t know how it ended, having been rendered unconscious partway through. The strange mages who attacked and captured them had hardly been forthcoming with information.

And then she ended up here, with these agents.

Emptied out of her story, Helena felt… relieved. She hadn’t realized how much the burden of her actions had weighed on her. She’d been sliding down a slope right along with her friends and it took Penny sliding down to the bottom to even see it. She had no idea what would come next, but surely it had to be better than what would have happened if they all continued to fall.

“What happens to the Daughters of the Divine Feminine?” Helena asked, still worried about her charges. “Most of them had no knowledge of what we really did to get magic.”

“We’re working with the local authorities to sort out individual involvements and charges. Most of them will be processed into services to help with recovering from cult life and their past abuse. Others will face charges. It’s too early in the investigation to tell exactly how it will go, especially since we are still settling on the best spin to cover up the magical aspects,” Agent Heeren answered vaguely.

“Please, I want the world to remember Penny as she was, not how she ended up.”

“That’s possible. We just need the grimoire first.”

Helena startled. “You don’t have it? Gloria had it with her before the ritual.”