I’d followed the ley lines in every direction I could reach, opening windows carefully and checking each one. The drag showed up again in Europe, at three sites in North America, two in South America. Levon’s documented anomalies, Grimley’s crystal recordings, my portal readings—they kept landing on the same number, no matter how I approached it. There were seventeen confirmed sites.
That was the picture I’d been sitting with for two weeks. I hadn’t yet figured out what it meant, not fully. I just knew the wellspring network wasn’t healthy. It went well beyond Wickem, and Levon had been watching this far longer than any of them.
And then came Raven.
I’d stayed up all night after it happened.
Whatever had taken hold of Raven wasn’t the same as what they’d done to me. My corruption had been chemical—blood magic compounds, injected, brute-force rewiring of my portal control. They’d wanted my power without my judgment attached. What happened to Raven was something else: quieter, more patient, infiltration rather than invasion. Something had gotten in through a crack and grown from there.
He hadn’t stumbled across her. He’d chosen her—studied her, assessed her. And corrupted her at exactly the moment she could do the most damage.
We needed to find her before that damage became permanent.
So I’d done what I was good at. I’d traced her.
The corruption magic had pulled her from the library, but she hadn’t gone far, just to the edge of campus. I opened a portal window there and followed it. Her trail was faint but readable. Corrupted magic has a specific texture, and whatever had hold of Raven left marks on the dimensional space she moved through. I tracked it across campus, out through the main gates, and down the mountain.
Denver. Straight line east, no hesitation, no stops.
And then nothing.
I pushed the window harder, trying to find the thread on the other side. Nothing. Either she’d gone mundane—car, plane, untraceable—or someone had portaled her from Denver using a method clean enough not to leave a signature I could follow. Either way, I’d hit a wall.
I closed the window and sat back.
Marigold was going to ask me if I’d found anything. I was going to have to tell her I’d lost the trail.
I looked at the map.
The map had been abstract for three weeks. Numbers and colors and lines connecting data points I understood individually but hadn’t assembled into a story. Seventeen corrupted wellsprings. Matching Levon’s anomaly records almost exactly. The same oily drag in the ley line energy, over and over, every direction I looked.
I’d been thinking of it as a pattern. Something to decode.
I looked at it now, after spending two hours trying to trace a girl who’d been corrupted through means I didn’t fully understand, and I finally heard what it was saying.
Raven’s corruption wasn’t blood magic. It wasn’t direct contact. She’d been corrupted slowly, over months, without anyone touching her. Without anyone getting close.
Through the ley lines.
I went back to Levon’s records and found the section I’d flagged but not fully processed, buried three-quarters in. His documentation showed how the corruption spread between wellsprings. It didn’t move through agents. It didn’t require physical injection. It moved through the ley line network itself. Corrupted wellspring energy flowed into connected wellsprings, contaminating the local magical field and then flowing into anyone who drew on that field regularly—slow, invisible, and untraceable, unless you knew what texture to feel for.
Most people never developed full corruption. The exposure was too small. But someone already magically sensitive, emotionally isolated, positioned near a high-traffic ley line node…
Raven had been downstream from a corrupted wellspring. She hadn’t been targeted with a specific method. She’d been targeted by where she was. The corruption had simply been in the water she was drinking from, magically speaking, and the master had known that, had chosen her because of it, had waited until the slow contamination had made her usable.
I stood up very slowly from the table and looked at the seventeen red markers on my map.
Seventeen corrupted wellsprings. Seventeen contaminated nodes in the ley line network. Each one pushed corrupted energy into the magical field of every city, every school, every magical community built around it.
Seventeen Ravens-in-waiting or more.
The pattern that had seemed random three weeks ago suddenly wasn’t. These weren’t isolated incidents. They were nodes, deliberately chosen positions to maximize contaminated energy flow across the entire network.
The timing had been the last piece. Levon’s records showed the anomalies but not when they’d started. Grimley’s documentation predated the coordinated strike. But Alstone’s monitoring logs had timestamps: seventeen wellsprings, disrupted within a three-hour window last November, not gradual spread, not opportunistic infection.
The corruption was coordinated and simultaneous across six continents.
He was poisoning the water supply of the magical world.
