“Sorry to burst your bubble. I’m really wishing I’d been permitted to read their grimoire to understand everything that they had extra access to.” Quinn shot a glare at Ahlgren, even as he moved to make sure there weren’t magical traps on or just past the door in the hallway.

Ahlgren didn’t even look at Quinn, having pulled his small scrying mirror from his kit. “You are dangerous enough without a new list of spells to study.” His rote tone of voice lacked conviction.

Quinn grumbled, “I’m getting the feeling the spells wouldn’t be new to me, but how would I know if I can’t read it?”

Despite Quinn’s complaints, Riordan thought his heart wasn’t in it. In all likelihood, it had been Heeren that banned their death magic specialist from reading the death magic book, because she really didn’t like death mages. Ahlgren lacked authority, though his opinion was likely respected in regards to Quinn. He wondered how often the man used that social capital. Likely, not often. He seemed like the sort to wait for the really important things.

Given the current situation, Riordan wondered if Ahlgren would be pushing for that decision to be reassessed after this incident. It really would have helped if their death magic specialist had concrete knowledge of the capabilities of the mages they were cleaning up after.

“You guys found their grimoire?” Riordan asked, remembering what Quinn had mentioned about the oddities in the spells contained within that book and their suspicions about a leak in the Department’s safe storage of confiscated death magic books.

“Yes, we--”

“Incoming,” Ahlgren calmly reported, shoving his mirror in a pocket and taking up a firing stance aimed at the door. Its hinges indicated it would open towards them. “Ms. Smith, please prepare to open the door on my order. Quinn, Riordan, combat positions.”

None of them questioned his right to direct their little team. This wasn’t the time for posturing. Riordan wished his animal form had combat claws like some did. He enjoyed his digging claws, but they weren’t the most useful at moments like this. Worse, he wasn’t sure he could maintain a partial shift during combat in his current internal situation.

It was worth a try. Shifting was in his blood. He wouldn’t get better if he gave up. Riordan reached for his badger inside him, missed, and growled. It took another three attempts to even establish a proper connection with it, by which point, Maudy was opening the door.

Riordan barely managed to pull the tough skin of a honey badger forward as a partial shift before Ahlgren started shooting and the first--yes, those were fucking zombies--came barrelling towards them, completely unbothered by the expert shots piercing its skull.

Okay, so headshots weren’t the answer to zombies. Riordan felt lied to. Thanks, modern media tropes.

So Riordan resorted to old school tactics and tackled that bitch to the ground before it could try gnawing on Ahlgren.

Let it be known that tackling zombies was disgusting. It… squished. And smeared bits on Riordan, which really made him regret short sleeves all of a sudden. Its hip joints made a weird popping, tearing noise as Riordan slammed it into the ground with his full body weight. He glanced down and saw the sag in its pants that showed its left leg had detached from its torso.

Then it kicked him. With that leg. The one that wasn’t attached. Motherfucker. No wonder head shots didn’t help.

“How do I stop a zombie, Quinn?!” Riordan called out, shifting his grip to grab its forehead to hold it away from him because the fucking zombie was getting bitey. He hoped bites spreading infection was also wrong as a trope.

Quinn was glancing between the zombie Riordan was wrestling with, the pair of ghosts flanking him, and something or somethings further down the hall. “Depends on the zombie,” Quinn… babbled, which wasn’t the most reassuring behavior but the mage was also pulling charms out of his many pockets and gesturing his ghosts forward.

“These zombies?” Riordan prompted.

“These are…,” Quinn paused to reference what looked like a piece of polished bone in his hand, “are sophisticated. We need to sever the connection between their ghosts and their corpses.”

Riordan’s disgust morphed into sheer horror. “There are ghosts in these? Sentient human ghosts?”

Of course, getting distracted mid-fight was bad. Another one of the zombies dashed through the door and jumped on top of Riordan with as much gentleness as Riordan had used against its buddy. That knocked Riordan’s hold loose and the first zombie happily began chewing on Riordan’s forearm.

Fortunately the bite strength of a human, even one whose jaw was held together with magic and not muscle, did not exceed the capacity of Riordan’s enhanced skin. The teeth clamped down, found itself unable to puncture Riordan’s thick skin, and then tried to chew. The looseness of his skin, a defensive trait of honey badgers, meant that his skin just shifted right along with the bite, making it mildly annoying instead of any sort of dangerous.

Riordan was damned glad his partial shift held. If he lost it, he wouldn’t be able to get it back up unless he got a good five or ten seconds, perhaps worse given his agitation, which was an eternity mid-fight.

The tackling zombie clawed at him, mostly managing to knock the air from his lungs. And then Maudy was there, kicking the damned thing in the torso and sending it rolling off of him.

“So,” Riordan grunted out, pinning his first zombie again and prying its teeth from his arm, “we can’t destroy their brains to kill them and we can’t disassemble them to render them more harmless. What are our options?”

“Lock them in a room,” Ahlgren said, prying open one of the small doors nearby. It actually proved to be a pantry closet of some sort. Good enough.

Riordan wrestled the zombie up with him as he stood, grateful for shifter strength to maintain control. And honestly grateful the thing wasn’t falling apart completely despite the damage he was doing, because otherwise he’d never have been able to maintain a hold on it. As it was, Riordan tried really hard not to think about what his hands were sinking into beneath its stained clothing.

Maudy wasn’t faring as well with her zombie, which meant it would be good if he got rid of his enough to help her quickly. She had the strength and some combat skills, but clearly wasn’t handling the visceral shock of wrestling a rotting corpse.

Riordan shoved his zombie forward. It staggered into the closet, tripping over-- not thin air, but a spatial distortion, Riordan realized as he spotted Ahlgren completing a quick series of one-handed spell gestures. Ahlgren might not be the strongest mage, but he used his magic well.

As Riordan went to help Maudy, doing his best not to think too hard about the situation or the gunk that now clung to both of them, Quinn stuck what looked like bits of bone just inside the pantry doorway. He waved to the pair of shifters who dragged the second zombie over and tossed it inside. It knocked the first zombie, which had been rising to its feet, back to the ground.

In a trickle of magic, Quinn activated whatever it was in those bone charms and then slammed the door.

“That will hold them for now. We need to find the main spell and disable it.”

“Will that stop them?”

Quinn hesitated before answering, which Riordan did not like. “Yes and no. They should return to being dormant then.”

“But we’ll still have an unknown number of indestructible zombies lying around.”

“They can be destroyed,” Quinn objected. “I can unravel their magic with enough time. So can Xavier.”

“And in a fight?” Riordan challenged.

“...Blast them with enough magic and hope for the best?”

They stared at each other for a moment before the sound of zombies slamming up against the inside of the pantry startled them. Riordan tensed, ready to tackle them again if the door broke, but it didn’t even twitch. Quinn’s spell was holding.

“Great,” Riordan muttered, “Four mages and our best tactics are nuke it or punch it.”

Maudy slapped him on the back, trying to look confident despite the green tinge to her face. “I guess we’re going old school then.”

They proceeded through the hall cautiously, Riordan and Maudy taking point now. Or, really, Ingrid was taking point and Riordan kept a careful eye on all her warnings. The team swept the offices, realizing the magic was partially running along the electric lines. Ahlgren took the time to unplug every computer in case something could be salvaged from them later.

Quinn set up one of the large bathrooms with a one-way zombie ward, giving Riordan and Maudy some place to chuck the persistent undead when they attacked. Riordan tried really hard not to think too closely about who those corpses had been before being used this way. Had they been collected for this purpose or was it a strange form of parsimony? Like, if life gives you corpses, might as well make some zombies?

Riordan also really hoped that Quinn was wrong about ghosts having been used to make the zombies. They lacked independent or sentient thought. Perhaps they also lacked consciousness. Hopefully they lacked consciousness.

Damn it, how could anyone feel like this was a justified tactic? Death mages like this were why Riordan feared to use the death magic inside him, even if it didn’t corrupt him. He’d tied the concepts together for so long and all the stories about death mages focused on the evil things they did. Well, almost. There were a few cautionary tales of people turning to death magic with good intentions, doing some good things with it in the early stages, and then it got to the part with all their evil deeds once the corruption took hold.

The zombies attacked them if they spotted the team, but seemed largely tasked with destroying physical records. On one hand, the escalating destruction of potential evidence clearly grated on Ahlgren, visible in the set of his mouth and a muscle that twitched near one eye, but on the other, it meant the zombies hadn’t left the building yet. Riordan kept getting images of him chasing shambling zombies across the countryside in plain view.

By the time the team found where the zombies first emerged, Riordan desperately longed for a shower and a change of clothes. There was no point though.

They had a secret basement to explore.