Quinn collapsed back against the embrace of the lounge chair and focused on breathing while Xavier went to switch jars again. The chair was one of those modern ones, all boxy and clean lines and uncomfortable edges that dug into his unpadded body, but Quinn couldn’t get himself to care enough to move until he had to. He should have chosen a more comfortable chair in the first place. The furniture in the compound was mismatched and worn, but well maintained and clean. The furniture of people trying hard to make a home on a budget.

Hell of a home. Quinn glanced at the corpse rotting on the coffee table. It messed up the decor, showing the literally rotten underside to the cozy veneer of this place.

His arms itched. Quinn resisted the urge to scratch his bandages. He could see places where blood stained through the gauze, the healing process slowed by his poor physical condition and his inability to take the time for rest.

Seeing his blood turn slowly black over time creeped Quinn out. It also felt inevitable. He constantly shoved corruption into his body to save his spirit. Now he had a hard time keeping on weight, getting warm, and his skin felt weaker. His tainted blood clotted poorly and healing left discolorations or scars even after the skin was whole.

The physical symptoms drove home the terminal nature of Quinn’s relationship with death magic and yet, he still felt it was worth it.

Being tired and in pain made Quinn spacey and maudlin all at once. He’d always envisioned an entirely different life for himself. He’d been an engineering student before a chance encounter with a new death mage, in which Quinn starred as a prospective sacrifice, changed everything. Without that change, Quinn would be happily settled down with a boyfriend, not estranged from his remaining family, and ideally working to develop more efficient and safer mass transportation. He’d always loved trains, from his first wooden train set onwards.

Instead, Quinn took pride in the corpse on the coffee table. For all its horror, it also represented his success in setting a trapped and tortured ghost free to reach the afterlife. His work mattered.

Xavier sat down near Quinn. In one of the more comfortable chairs, Quinn noted jealously. He still couldn’t work up the energy to move.

His work ethic drove Quinn to ask, “Where’s the next jar?”

“All the containers I had prepared are full,” Xavier replied. The man didn’t share the degree of Quinn’s exhaustion, but still appeared strained. They had pushed harder and faster in the clean-up to make up for the unexpected conditions.

Speaking of which… Quinn let his senses flow through the air around him and frowned. “The concentration of death magic in the air still concerns me.”

“Me as well,” Xavier agreed. “I expected this effort to take days if not weeks in order to work through the buildings systematically. Now it’s both wasteful and dangerous here.”

“Very wasteful,” Quinn said bitterly, “especially when you realize that every bit of that death energy around us came from someone’s pain or death.”

A thoughtful expression crossed Xavier’s face as he studied Quinn. “You’re right. I don’t think about it often, since death mages are only a small percentage of the issues I’m called to clean up after. All of your missions relate to death mages though.”

“All of the magical ones. When there aren’t any active issues relating to death mages, I’m split between minor investigations and clean-ups of haunted sites and more mundane investigation efforts. Or, at least I was. They haven’t fielded me on basic missions lately.”

“Why?”

Quinn gestured to himself, immediately regretting the motion when his arm twinged painfully. “I started looking sick. I’m bordering on inhuman in places, especially my blood which also changes my skin tone oddly. My expertise on the human world is not enough to counter out the negative impact of having an investigator that looks like a goth kid playing dress-up and the risks of exposure go up.”

Quinn didn’t admit the other reason out loud. Xavier might not know it and Quinn hadn’t thought much of it, but the honest truth was that Quinn hadn’t lacked for death mage related incidents to be assigned in the last year or so. He had assumed that it was just a matter of the way that the work was being funneled inside the Department, where either their ability to catch the signs of a death mage had gone up, or a change in the number of death mages in the Department available to handle such cases. Departmental death mages were a limited and consumable resource, unfortunately.

Intellectually, Quinn knew there were other death mages that had worked for the Department during his time there. He’d seen them in passing, though the regular agents kept the “specialists” separated to prevent issues with temptation. And then sometimes he’d just never see someone again and their handler would be reassigned. No one ever talked about it, but Quinn knew those mages had hit their limits and were dead.

The fewer death mages the Department had, the faster they burned through the ones they did have. It was a bad cycle.

“Ah, yes, I suppose that would be an issue,” Xavier said, looking uncomfortable.

For both their sakes, Quinn changed the subject. “When will you be able to make more storage containers for the ambient magic?”

“I have a few more almost completed back at the site, assuming they weren’t messed with,” Xavier informed him, clearly happy to have an easier subject to discuss, “I may need to rig up something larger with a faster funnel and filter. Our current methods are too slow in drawing the aligned energy out of the neutral ambient mixture that was already there. Of course, the death energy is also dispersing naturally, both by spreading out over a larger distance and losing saturation and via the natural decay into a non-aligned state in the absence of an aligning force.”

“Fast enough to matter?” Quinn asked. He suspected he knew the answer.

Xavier shrugged. “It’ll help, but no, the saturation will remain too high at this location for longer than I consider wise. There are too many items that are magically and emotionally resonant here. It’s essentially a powder keg with a handful of fuses sticking out of it. All it will take is a spark to manifest a haunting or a curse. Once manifested, such energies resist being unraveled, as I’m sure you are well aware.”

“Yeah, I’ve had to unravel my fair share of them anyway. I basically beat them with a magic stick until it cracks enough for me to get a grip on draining it.” Quinn was exaggerating, but not by as much as he might have wished. Hauntings became closed self-sustaining loops under the right conditions, which necessitated finding some access into that loop, whether by resonance or by force.

That meant they had to be careful of any changes in the environment. In fact, no one should be allowed near here, including them, now that their useful work had momentarily concluded.

“Do you know where Adam went?” Quin asked, not quite prepared to move despite knowing it would soon be required.

“Outside, I believe,” Xavier stated. He followed up his words by standing and striding over to a window. “Yes, he’s still talking on his phone out there.”

The fact that Adam had his eyes off Quinn this long while Quinn was dealing with an active clean-up was a sign of how shaken the whole incident had left him. Quinn didn’t have a natural affinity, so he wasn’t sure he entirely understood. He’d been normal before and, yeah, becoming normal again would suck. In his case, Quinn doubted he’d stay normal for long since the corruption had been untouched and his power hunger would have driven him to restore his magic, likely by the ritual sacrifice of some of his own blood.

Other affinities are not so easily restored and most had them from birth. Quinn understood why the loss shattered Adam’s father to the point of suicide, though his heart broke for little Adam, traumatized and then bereft.

The bites on Quinn’s arms itched again. He dug his fingers into the stiff fabric of his armchair. No scratching. Fatigue lent inertia to his resistance and the itches receded again. Quinn wished they had a medical mage on hand to check over the wounds, but very few deigned to join the Department and were often kept for life-threatening issues or diplomatic endeavors. Quinn would have to suck it up and cope.

“We should--” Quinn began, intending to begin the practical exodus from this location, when he was interrupted by Zeren appearing in front of him.

“Quinn, the roots are moving,” they said flatly.

“What?” Quinn asked, staring at his ghostly friend and blinking until the words and their means sank in. “Fuck!”

He shoved against his chair, rapidly switching from lassitude to urgency, and nearly fell on his face when his body protested the sudden motion. Xavier managed to catch and steady Quinn before he did more than pitch forward. Quinn nodded thanks to Xavier and straightened more slowly as he asked Zeren, “What are the roots doing?”

“They seem to be growing directly into the workroom. Ingrid says that they sped up drastically not long after Riordan left the building, though she can’t be sure of cause and effect,” Zeren reported. They also reached out and manifested their hand physically in order to support Quinn. He’d made a point of recharging the ghost after the earlier drain. Indeed, Zeren possessed more energy than normal, since they had been desperate to pull the ambient levels down and needed somewhere to funnel it.

“We need to go to the basement,” Quinn told Xavier. “The tree spirit is acting.”

“Doing what?” Xavier asked, concern warring with surprise.

“I have no idea yet, hence needing to go see.”

“Of course. One moment.”

Xavier took a second to lean out the door and gesture urgently for Adam. Quinn started shuffling towards the basement with Zeren’s help. He’d stiffened up while sitting, so he moved slowly and steadily. Adam and Xavier joined him in the hallway. Xavier lent a hand to Quinn again since Adam limped from his own bites.

They were certainly not the crew Quinn would have fielded for this, but being a member of the perpetually understaffed Department of Magic meant learning to make do and hope for the best. That didn’t stop Quinn from cursing quietly on the way down the stairs. His bites were mainly on his arms and torso, but his knees felt weak from fatigue and general enervation after the day they’d had.

Once downstairs, Ingrid joined them.

“The roots are going fast now,” she told Quinn, gesturing to convey rapid wiggly motion. “They want to reach the workroom.”

“Are you certain they are aimed at the workroom?” Quinn asked.

“Oh yes,” Ingrid confirmed, “and I think they just arrived.”

As she said that, Quinn felt the ambient death magic in the air shift and move, pouring into the basement like a funnel. As soon as it reached the workroom, the power swirled and vanished into… somewhere. The roots, presumably.

“Oh, fuck,” Quinn whispered, “that can’t be good.”