Maudy insisted on taking Riordan back to pack lands as soon as the worst of the situation at the compound was settled. As much as she believed in helping out with the investigation, her specific charge was Riordan, his safety, and keeping him from causing trouble. She could only bend her definition of that for so long before she got increasingly twitchy.

As soon as they got back to pack lands, Frankie intercepted them.

“Come on, kids,” Frankie commanded, pointing sharply at Riordan and then Maudy, “I am checking you out.”

Maudy grinned. “You already have a girlfriend, elder.”

Frankie smacked Maudy on the shoulder. “None of your sass, girl, or you are getting assigned shit jobs for the next month.”

“I got stuck watching the trouble child. Do you think there’s anything worse than that around here?”

“You want to be stuck watching a single patch of woods with nothing interesting to do?”

“Depends on the patch of woods lately,” Maudy countered, but she still deflated and followed Frankie towards the workshop.

“Sorry for being the shit job,” Riordan told Maudy dryly.

“Don’t be,” Maudy replied brightly, “As shit jobs go, you are at least scenic.”

What did he even say to that? “Thanks?”

“You’re welcome.”

Frankie sat them down in the front room and tossed some herbs in a little portable burning tray set up on the lounge area table. “Breathe this in and show me where you got hurt.”

Riordan knew better than to argue with Frankie. He took a deep breath of the scented smoke and immediately sneezed.

Maudy dodged back to avoid it. “Gross, dude.”

Frankie smacked Maudy again. Apparently growing up around Frankie lessened the impact of her formidable authority. Either that or Maudy just enjoyed poking the bear, er, the bird. She just got pecked in return.

“I only had one bite break skin,” Riordan told Frankie, overriding Maudy’s antics. He gestured at the most healed bite mark on his nose. “I managed to shift, which gave me resistance to bites. The mouths on the spell were plentiful but small.”

Frankie looked at him sharply. “That was the first time you shifted since the ritual.”

Her observation made Riordan uncomfortable. He fidgeted but nodded. “Yeah. It’s damn lucky I managed it. I’m not entirely sure how I did it.”

She snorted at him, supremely unimpressed. “Of course not. You function better under pressure, boy, but you never turn your brain on.”

Riordan submitted to her poking and prodding at his face. She shoved him down into one of the seats since he was over a foot taller than her. If he’d refused, she either would have kneecapped him or grown wings just to prove his height didn’t matter. And then kneecapped him, because Frankie didn’t mess around.

“Hmm… Not poisoned,” Frankie muttered, poking uncomfortably close to Riordan’s eye. “Healing isn’t significantly degraded. Was the drain of healing increased in any way?”

“No, the only drain occurred when the tendril was latched on like a leech,” Riordan explained. “It felt… unpleasant. Like someone was hollowing me out by sticking a straw in my well.”

“One well or both?”

“Both, actually,” Riordan answered, shivering as he remembered the sensation. He hadn’t let himself dwell on it at the time, desperate for time and focus, but the drain had been an internal violation of the worst sort. Riordan didn’t doubt that the spell could have and would have drained his affinities. “That gave me more focus and resistance against the effect, but so did only having the one full bite.”

“Where did the magic go once drained?” Frankie asked, finally releasing Riordan’s face to go grab a notepad. She jotted a few things down before meeting his eyes again.

“Into the circle. I didn’t give it a chance to do much past that. It could have stored it or processed it or passed onto someone, but I don’t know. I broke the circle structure and it started bleeding magic into the air. It was a mix of death magic and the drained affinities, so it hadn’t processed the magic into a different form by the time it hit the circle.”

“Hmm. Did you notice a drop of power to maintain the tendrils?”

“I noticed an increase in the drain when I damaged the circle. It maintained the spell structure with the stolen power.”

Frankie hummed again, longer this time. Then she bustled over to a shelf of herb containers, plucked a few containers, and started mixing something in a small bowl. Then she poured in a clean liquid that smelled strongly of alcohol. She let that sit while grabbing a small cup and a strainer. She poured the mixture through the strainer into the cup and then handed it to Riordan.

The end result smelled like a disgusting experimental cocktail. Then she handed him a bucket.

“Drink that and if you need to throw up, do it in the bucket.” Frankie ordered. Then she went to begin prodding at Maudy. The guardswoman had stripped down enough to show off her more numerous bites, which were largely on her limbs since her moose fur had protected her torso.

“Your bedside manner needs some work,” Riordan grumbled, but he didn’t consider ignoring the order.

The mixture tasted how it smelled. Riordan breathed out after drinking to keep from choking on the alcohol fumes. It burned going down and left a heat in his belly.

The potion burned even more coming back up. Riordan dry heaved, barely getting the bucket in position before vomiting. The herbal alcohol taste of the mixture morphed into a taste of tar, bile, and blood.

Riordan stared down into the bucket. He’d thrown up black gunk. What was that?

“Frankie?” he asked shakily.

She came over, took the bucket, and examined its contents with a dismissive sniff. “Don’t be dramatic, Riordan. Cleansing potions always find something to expel. You either had some contamination from the spell or built up toxins from everything else you’ve been through.”

“They suck,” Maudy agreed. “They work though. You’ll feel crappy for half an hour and then feel better than you were before.”

“Vera wants to talk to you,” Frankie told Riordan, shoving his vomit bucket on the table. “Take a few more deep breaths and then go see her. Maudy can fill me in on the general events. I will get specifics from you later.”

Riordan had no doubt of that. Still, he would have preferred to throw up more black gunk than talk to Vera.

Vera Hunt dominated the small space of her office. For a rosy cheeked grandmother, she had the air of a hardass when she was dealing with Riordan. She probably was more than a grandmother at this point. Great-great-grandmother or beyond, probably. Unless she’d delayed or her descendants had delayed, as long-lived shifters could be prone to.

“Riordan,” Vera greeted. “I hear you had some trouble on your outing today.”

“The Department has issues,” Riordan complained, dropping into one of her uncomfortable chairs for visitors. “God save me from internal politics and the corruption that comes with it.”

“Care to explain?” Vera asked, raising a brow.

“Not really, but I’ll try.” He tapped his fingers against the armrest of his chair, looking for words. “Quinn already mentioned that he suspected an information leak from the Department, in regards to some of the death magic techniques he’d turned over to their secure records vault. It was possible the information could have leaked from somewhere else or been independently developed.”

“But now that’s not possible?” Vera prompted.

Riordan shrugged. “Maybe for some of it, but they got the grimoire that the death mages were using. Quinn wasn’t allowed to look at it, but Ahlgren confirmed some of the other techniques looked familiar from previous cases they had worked together. The spells used at the compound were definitely too advanced to be rapidly developed by a death mage, whether these ones or another one working off of rumors.”

“I’d really like to examine that grimoire.” Vera muttered. “Along with Frankie. It would be good to know what I could find lying around the edges of my territory in the future. Especially if that is not the only copy.”

“Ah,” Riordan blinked, horrified at that image to the point that he forgot what he’d been about to say. “You really think there are more grimoires out there?”

“From the minimal information the Department shared, it was provided to Phenalope by a stranger at a rally and was printed and bound like a modern book. If I was trying to get a patsy to try fancy techniques for me, I would have stayed more involved and guided them, all while trying to keep the experiment quiet. If I was trying to sew chaos and see what arose from it, I’d create and spread more books. I also wouldn’t care if it got loud and messy, since the individual death mages are expendable.”

“What sort of experiment are you running in this scenario?” Riordan asked. Vera fell into the mindset of dastardly villains too easily.

It was Vera’s turn to drum her fingers in thought, though she did it against the edge of her desk. “There are too many options to be certain, but the most likely ones that occur to me with our current information are these. First, this could be a terrorist action against the magical community or perhaps against our ability to maintain secrecy. This could even be targeted at discrediting the Department specifically. Second, this is a science experiment regarding some aspect of death magic and they seeded the grimoires to a large sample size to look at results. I’d need to see more of the sample to guess what they were studying. Third, this is some misguided attempt to popularize death magic or at least render it common. They could be trying to hide a couple favored death mages in the haystack, but it would have to be a large haystack to balance out the increased response against death magic threats.”

“Confusion to the enemy?” Riordan muttered and then shook his head. “I’m glad I’m not the one who has to figure out who or what is behind all of this.”

Vera cackled at him when he said that. “Don’t tempt fate, Riordan.”