<< Previous
Horde Thief
Chapter 48
That plan fell apart within a few minutes of making it home. I'd driven, well, not recklessly, but with a purpose that was far more pressing than I'd done so on the way to the school. There'd been more cars pulling into the place's car park as I'd left, and a trail of vaguely familiar vehicles that I remembered from picking up Maggie after classes heading towards it as I'd driven away. A lot of kids sick, then. I just focused on the road and kept driving.
I got Maggie indoors quickly, holding the energy for a shield ready as we crossed to the door – the Munstermobile was too big to use the garage. I didn't think an attack was likely, but in my experience, it paid to expect the worst. Once we were safely inside the wards, I dialled them up to one step below what I liked to think of as my emergency citadel setting, and helped my daughter up to her room. Carried her most of the way, really, and the lack of returning energy did not body well. I grabbed some other gear, infused dust and a fan that I'd not used for a long time. With them, I'd be able to look at Maggie's aura without further use of my Sight. Safer that way, and the fewer irremovable memories of my daughter having the very life sucked out of her soul I had, the better.
It was a subtle and beautiful magic, and Maggie murmured something approving as the lightshow spread across her, showing me again the black threads amidst pulsing life. They weren't spreading as quickly as they'd been doing so at the school, which was good, but they hadn't stopped growing, either. That scared me. There were very few things that could get through my wards, but there were some other precautions I could still take. The Threshold and wards were slowing the process down, maybe something more could stop it? There was a reason I'd had the floor of the room redone before we'd moved in. I reached down, touched the smooth wood around the bed, and willed power into it. The energy surged out of me, not a torrent, but a steady flow, activating to circle of silver that I'd had placed beneath the bed.
The barrier snapped up around us, and I consulted the glowing dust spread across the bed. Here and there, there were flares of life, as Maggie's body took advantage of what had clearly been another drain on the spell's power. But it still wasn't gone, and as I watched, it started to recover the ground it had lost in that moment. I felt suddenly very cold. There were only a handful of magics capable of penetrating a proper Circle, and all of them were terrifying. Blood or residue of a person could do it, but if it was just an attack on Maggie, then why had all the other children been suffering from the same thing? No, it didn't make sense. Something else, then?
Sufficient power technically could, I'd seen it before. One of the Queens of Faerie had once blown straight through a Circle of mine. But that had been done in a domain that was more hers than mine, and the Circle I'd built then had been far cruder than this one. Even then, this was too widespread. A focused attack, that I could understand, but not something hitting so many. Which left only one option, and the one which had scared me most. Some sort of sympathetic thaumaturgy, using a vector I couldn't identify. But I know thaumaturgy, and if you're pulling energy towards a place, there are ways to track it back to the source. I've done it before. I wished for a moment that Little Chicago the Second was complete, but I didn't need it for this.
"Sit tight, sweetie," I told Maggie, pulling up the blanket around her. I'd already asked if she wanted anything, but I was pretty sure she was just too tired. "I'll be right back." I looked to Mouse. "Stay with her, boy," he chuffed, as if that had been the plan anyway, and I walked through the Circle, sealed it behind me with a minor investment of will, and headed down to my lab.
I've always had a gift for tracking spells and Thaumaturgical workings in that sphere. With the sort of output that the spell on Maggie had, using my tools to work out its source should have been easy. I went with the old compass first, to get an idea of where and how far. I'd worked out a way to upgrade it to do the latter, and it had helped sometimes. Not every monster I'd fought had had the decency to be within easy smiting range, and this allowed me to narrow distances down before I went looking.
Finding the outgoing tracks of the spell wasn't hard. They weren't immensely obvious, but I knew what I was looking, and exactly where it was coming from on this end. Once I had that, I was able to bind the line of the spell to the compass, using the tool to guide me towards where the spell was coming from. The compass clicked and whirred as the needle spun for a moment, then another, and then I realised it wasn't spinning but bouncing between different alignments. What the hell? Towards the centre of town, out towards the lake, there was no logic to it. This had happened before a time or two, when I'd been looking at a long-range curse with multiple targets. The compass had flicked to each target until I could boost the spell's range enough to find its source. But the sheer number of targets that the spell was locking on to…
Sympathetic magic, yes, but on a scale that I'd never thought possible. And this, stars and stones, the spell didn't have enough juice in it right now to get beyond Chicago. I pushed more power into the spell, trying to reach further, and the safety plastic of the compass creaked, the needle blurring in its housing and whipping at liquid around it. That was enough only enough to cover most of the Northern Midwest! There was a sudden grinding sound, and then the compass snapped straight down the middle. Colourless fluid splashed on my hand, and I bit back a curse as I pulled my fingers away from the whirling sawblade of the needle as it went flying into a wall.
This was too big. Far, far too big, and if it had the sort of range that I'd found, it wouldn't just be Maggie and her schoolmates being hit. Whatever the unifying factor was, the vector for this sick spell, it couldn't be related to me, or to magical aptitude. Too many targets for that. There must be thousands of them. Maybe more. I brushed my hands off on my duster, and took a long breath. Someone, somewhere, was using magic to kill thousands. I could probably pull together another tracking spell, work out where they were, but if I did then what? This was bigger than me.
"You have friends, Harry," I growled at myself. "You idiot." I crossed to the phone, pulled a small book from one of my coat's pockets, and dialled the White Council. If this was as big as I thought it was, others would be picking up on it. They'd…look, at the end of the day, I might not like the Council, but they were the only real power that protected humanity from so many threats. And maybe, with the changes that had come, they'd be able to find ways to protect them from more. This though, it the sort of thing they had to react to.
"This is Warden Dresden," I said to the young, male voice on the other end of the line, once codewords had been exchanged. "I need to report a Code Wolf situation."
"One moment sir," the man told me, and I heard voices and shuffling paper on the other end of the line. He found whatever he was looking for. "Would this situation involve widespread drain of lifeforce with no apparent unifying vector in the area around you, extending no less than fifty miles?"
I blinked. "Yes," I said a moment later, recovering myself. "it's extending all the way across the Midwest." How big was this? A moment later I realised I could just ask that question, and did so.
"As far as we can tell, sir?" The younger Warden said. "Global. We're seeing it pop up in every country with enclaves, and several of our tracking specialists have gone missing." He paused, maybe scribbling something on a sheet of paper. "You said all the way across the Midwest?"
"Most of it, at least, and into Canada. My focus fell apart before I could go any further, too many targets." Part of me tried to tell the rest that the White Council knowing about this already was a good thing, that they'd be able to do something, but with several of our tracking specialists missing, I wasn't sure how well that would go. How had that even happened, anyway?
"Captain Luccio is currently briefing the Senior Council, Warden," I was told. "We'll have more information then. Please check in every few hours, and be sure to contact us again if you discover anything more."
"Of course," I replied, and the phone went dead.
I looked down at the receiver, my emotions roiling. Global. That word hung in my head like a salivating monster. That sort of power had to be something more than just a single person, or group of them. But what was it all for? I started punching buttons again. I couldn't find the answer to this, and the White Council was still getting a handle on it, but there was somewhere else I could go. I'd never been truly certain of how capable Viserys had been in his ability to pull knowledge from the air like he did so much else. But even if he couldn't, he had the sort of power that should be able to help my daughter, at least for now. The phone rang twice, then picked up.
"Yes?" Viserys sounded busy, but not stressed.
"It's Harry." I said, then before we could waste time exchanging greetings, continued. "There's something wrong with Maggie. And maybe a lot of other children too. Some sort of life drai-" I heard a clatter as the phone dropped to the floor. "Viserys?"
The doorbell rang. He was in casual clothes when I opened it, but I had no real way of knowing if that had been what he was actually wearing. He gave me one look, straight through me to the sick fear twisting at the back of my mind that I was doing all I could to ignore for now. Then he nodded once, and spoke in that hard, flat voice that I'd only ever heard him use a handful of times.
"Show me."
